/lit/ - Literature

>>14464004
This inevitably leads to the teaching about the predestination of some to salvation, for others however to eternal perdition, a teaching, to which Bl. Augustine had already inclined and which Calvin took to its conclusion. God in thus having created man, predestined him to eternal perdition, since He knows the consequences of freedom, He knows, what a man will choose. A man has received his freedom from God, he does not possess it of himself and this freedom is wholly set within the grip of God, wholly determined by Him, i.e. ultimately, it is fictitious. God awaits a response from the creature to His call, so that the creature should love God and dwell in a godly life, but ultimately it is that God is awaiting an answer from Himself, He plays Himself a game, since He Himself endows the freedom and He knows Himself the consequences of this freedom, for Him it is clearly apparent. The problem of Ivan Karamazov is posited at greater depth and carries over into eternity. The matter involves not merely the tears of a child in the temporal earthly life, but about the torments both temporal and eternal of an enormous quantity of living beings, having received the fatal gift of freedom from God, knowing, what this gift signifies and to what it will lead. The soteriology of the traditional theological systems can readily be interpreted, as an unseemly correction by God of a mistake created by Him and assuming the form of a criminal penal process. The rational kataphatic theology, in its cosmology and anthropology having forgotten about God in Trinity, having forgotten about Christ, about the God of Love and Sacrifice and having relegated the mystery of the Christian Revelation to the part concerning Redemption, and not concerning the world-creation, cannot as such rise about this Divine Comedy and only therein but builds a fictitious theodicy. The theological teaching about the freedom of the will bears a pedagogical, moral-juridical character and does not penetrate down into the primal foundations of the mystery of freedom. All that is necessary is that there should be someone to punish. And in such a sort of outlook, the apophatic and the kataphatic get all hopelessly jumbled together.

>>13501037
Read Berdyaev. Seriously, read Berdyaev. Start with Slavery and Freedom.