Episode 4: The Phone Call
(You may want to read Episode 1, Episode 2 and Episode 3 to learn the back story.)
As we pick up the story, I am just waking on the Thursday morning after I attended an evening Bible study with my sister at her church. During the study, I had a short discussion with the teacher over the reason God put the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden. The teacher had disagreed with me strongly, calling my view that God planned from the beginning for humankind to fall “twisted theology.” But it had been a short discussion and I hadn’t pushed my point much. I assumed, as I left, that the discussion was over.
But I was wrong. I woke Thursday morning to the sounds of the phone ringing. My sister took the phone call, and I could tell it was from the teacher of the previous night’s study. I could also tell he was at least animated, if not agitated, and he wanted to continue the discussion.
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Now there’s nothing I like better than a good theological argument. And by argument, I don’t mean quarrel, but a discussion where I have to defend what I believe to be true. In this case, however, I had mixed feelings. Who God is and how he acts in the world is such a critical subject that the debate can get heated very quickly. I didn’t know this teacher well, so I didn’t know what to expect.
It was arranged, in the end, that this man and his wife would come to my sister’s home for supper the next Sunday. Sunday afternoon as I cut up vegies for roasting, I thought about the best way to defend my position.
I reran Wednesday night’s short discussion in my mind and decided that I wanted to defend, first of all, the premises on which my original statement that God had planned the fall was based—that even before God created, he planned for redemption to be the focus of the history of creation. I suspected, and it was confirmed later by my father, that the teacher had been influenced by John Sanders’ version of open theism, since John Sanders lived and taught nearby for many years. So I decided that I wanted to give a scriptural defense, since I had a hunch that while the teacher and I had striking philosophical and theological differences, we both considered scripture to be our ultimate authority.
I’d given a bit of scriptural defense of my premise already when I’d argued that since Christ was ordained to be the Redeemer before the foundation of the world, God must have planned for humankind to sin. The response had been that perhaps Christ had been chosen as Redeemer in case people fell, not because God planned for the fall. What I needed this time round, then, was scripture that places God’s whole plan of salvation firmly back in eternity, that doesn’t give any wiggle room for it to be a contingency plan.
Come back tomorrow to find out what scripture I chose to use to undergird my argument. In the meantime, you are encouraged to guess what scripture I used or tell me what scripture you’d have used to argue for or against my premise.
Update: Story concludes here.