The Choice of Men in an Eternal Plan.

Those who read God’s Actuality is Love’s Possibility no doubt have noticed the difficulty in understanding a plan that exists before time and outside of it. God’s plan falls outside our capacity to think about action because these things we (humans) experience in time. God’s infinite nature and omniscience complicate matters for us. In the following account, we will see how different the creation story is when understood from our temporal perspective rather than God’s infinite one. This is perhaps also a more familiar understanding of the rendition of creation in the book of Genesis.

Before, we noted that our sin could not have affected God’s plan. God knew before the creation of time itself that he would have to offer his only begotten in our place. That he created anyway is the expression of his nature as love. The underlying praise in that position is one that perhaps may have gone under-emphasized, that is, that despite our fall, God’s plan was always to pour out his love to inferior beings through the death and resurrection of Christ. To love outside of time is to be love, as God is love.

We are hardly qualified to speak of those things, as we noted. However, the consequences of Adam’s sin are clearly in the human domain. And here, we must admit that the former position (as described in “God’s Actuality”) must give way to the description given here, as it is a direct extrapolation from Biblical text should complications arise. The question is, how do we reconcile the two views?

To preserve God’s nature as omniscient and omnipresent, we must admit premise number one.

1. Adam’s sin could not derail God’s plan.

That proposition must be compatible with the heinous nature of sin and must not allow for the possibility that God’s plan condoned or otherwise required men to sin–premise two.

2. Adams’s sin corrupted what could have been the spiritual life of men with God as he proposed to Adam in the beginning.

In the previous publication ("God's Actuality"), premise number one was presented in the most drastic manner possible because we must acknowledge that our sinful nature could not have stopped God from sharing himself as he intended. Premise two wants to make clear that premise one does not mean that men are living according to God’s plan since God’s knowledge of sin does not imply his approval of it. Premise two intends to show that the consequences of sin were the destruction of the blissful yet hypothetical state of existence had humans remained loyal to God.

As Adam’s spiritual life would have consisted in remaining united and bound to his Maker, so estrangement from him was the death of his soul.*

The sin of Adam had one significant effect that takes place over time. This change is expressed in the course of Adam’s descendants–the now sinful human race. The consequences of sin are temporal as we are temporal. Human generations require time; God does not. The effects of sin were not placed on God or his plan but on Adam and his descendants.

Therefore, the only explanation that can be given of the expression “in Adam all died,” is, that he by sinning, not only brought disaster and ruin upon himself, but also plunged our nature into like destruction[.]*

What humans manage to do through sin is prolong the suffering, the experience of spiritual death, if you will, that came into the world through Adam’s sin. What could have been was destroyed by Adam, but what could have been was never capable of changing God’s plan to love his creation. The intent of God’s Actuality is Love’s Possibility was to bring to light the consequences of our temporality. So by it, we are only capable of choosing to love and never of loving without end. To further elucidate the point on sin, it would serve us right to remember that no matter what or how we interpret or try to understand God’s nature, his love, omniscience, omnipotence, presence, etc. We must not charge God with responsibility for our sin, nor should we be so arrogant as to believe that we caused God to call an audible concerning his eternal plan to share himself forever.

John Calvin issues a similar warning. In book second chapter one [1], sec 10, he states,

Let us have done, then, with those who dare to inscribe the name of God on their vices, because we say that men are born vicious. The divine workmanship, which they ought to look for in the nature of Adam, when still entire and uncorrupted, they absurdly expect to find in their depravity.*

Here we see, as above, that premise one and two must be in harmony with our understanding of who was affected by sin and what was the nature of that effect. In the same section of his Institutes, Calvin mocks the notion that we can dare demand that God should have worked more ardently in preventing the fall of Adam. Calvin responds by saying that the issue relates to the “mystery of predestination.” The only thing we can do with this is to remember that this article and the previously mentioned article are both a result of that very mystery and God’s complex nature.

*All References to Calvin's work are found within the page range noted in footnote 1.

[1] Calvin, J., & Beveridge, H. (2008). Book Second Chapter one. In Institutes of the christian religion (pp. 149–154). essay, Hendrickson Publishers.