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"Process theology" is what Alfred North Whitehead called it a hundred years ago. Today, it's called "open theism". The fact that Schoenheit doesn't read anything except his own stuff becomes obvious when we look at what others have written about open theism. Their thinking and writing is much less ham-handed than Schoenheit's. As far as I can see from Schoenheit's writing, he doesn't even have a name for the idea he's putting forward. There is plenty of discussion going on about this in the wider world, and Schoenheit doesn't even seem to be aware of it. It's called "open" theism because it supposedly opens up the future and God's knowledge of it. In actuality, it crams God into the box of human experience. The conventional view of time is as a one-dimensional line arcing through a three dimensional space. God knows the future because he sees the whole, one-dimensional line. Open theism sees time in the past as a one-dimensional line arcing through three-dimensional space, but in the future, the line branches of in many possible directions. The distinction between NOW and any other place in time is that NOW is where all possibilities reduce to one. The problem is, objective reality has demonstrated that time is not a one-dimensional line, branching or otherwise. Time is one of the components of a four-dimensional "solid". Time extends in all directions (not just forward and backward) through the "solid", just as do components in the x, y, and z axes. We don't see this at the human scale and at human speeds, but it has to be calculated for (using 4-D vector math) or global positioning satellites wouldn't work. Your Garmin couldn't tell you where to get off if all these obsolete notions of time were true. If God is every WHERE... then he also has to be every WHEN. The question of whether or not we can travel faster than the speed of light is very glamorous, because it makes for some very good science-fiction stories, but it's not the meat and potatoes of relativistic reckoning of time. Love, Steve

Lots of good fun on this thread! I used to take the things John Schoenheit wrote seriously. I respect his scope of knowledge and his desire to go to the Word of God, but after receiving a little bit of training in actual, professional scholarship, I can't help but feel sorry for John, and all the rest of them. Wierwille did not teach us how to read what the Bible says. He taught us his system, which made the Bible say what HE wanted it to say, that it is okay to sin as long as you don't become sin-conscious. Grace enables us to sin as long as we don't pay any attention to the fact that we are sinning. Do you guys know what the word "delude" means? It comes from the Latin deludere, which means "to play off" or "to play away." To say that a person has been deluded means that the person "has been played" because he has believed a lie. Wierwille deluded us ALL for a time. Schoenheit's problem is that he has never recognized how he was played, and he continues to play other people the same way he was played. He's not doing it maliciously, he's doing it arrogantly. Real scholars don't take a position, cherry-pick a few proof verses to support their position, and then ignore all the verses that don't agree with their presumption. Real scholars write exegesis, which is the art of reading a meaning out from within the text instead of reading foreign meanings into it. To write exegesis, one takes a piece of scripture (sometimes called a "pericope" per-ICK-uh- pee) and then applies literary, form, textual, redaction, source and social/historical criticisms to the passage. After that, a scholar may or may not discuss intertextuality, how the pericope affects or is affected by other passages. We had to write four exegesis papers in the course of working on a masters degree (which I wasn't able to complete because of health reasons, but I did successfully write my four exegesis papers). Our papers covered pericopes of about 6 to 8 verses, and had to be 13 pages long, no more and no less. It was a jarring experience to read Schoenheit's FAQ "Does God know every future event in human history?" I wrote a paper like that once, and my professor said he didn't even know how to go about grading it! TLC, you asked, "That sounds to me about as much like a straw man argument as anything I might have every heard. Seriously? God's view is as limited as man's? What knucklehead with even half a functioning brain could ever "invent" or propose such a lunatic "theology"?" Schoenheit wrote in the piece you referenced, "Once upon a time (biblically: 'in the beginning'), when God was all by Himself, He sovereignly chose to relate to mankind as His Word subsequently declares He does, that is, in a 'linear' relationship, experiencing time passing with us. His perspective is definitely far beyond our own ('With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day— 2 Pet. 3:8), that is, He sees the big picture that we as temporal beings cannot, but He makes it clear that He relates to us according to how we see time." What Schoenheit is waltzing around here is his sentence "[God] sovereignly chose to relate to mankind...in a “linear” relationship, experiencing time passing with us." Schoenheit is saying here that God deliberately decided to experience time the same way human beings do. He COULD HAVE decided to experience time the way people outside of STFI think he does, but God decided to limit his perspective to man's, and therefore, does not know what's going to happen before it transpires. Notice how Schoenheit says "a 'linear' relationship, experiencing time passing with us." A person's experience of time is not a one-dimensional line. It is a zero-dimensional, instantaneous NOW. Because God designed us to remember things, time seems to us to be linear, but it is not. God could just as easily, if it had suited his purposes, designed us to experience more than one NOW at a time, but we have to experience time as NOW, or we could not make decisions, that is, we could not exercise agency. A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. It's not a matter of predestination or free-will, it's a matter of mutual agency. God has agency, that is, he is free to do, and responsible for what he does. it is from agency that the sense of self springs. God made Adam and Eve both in his image, that is, he gave them both agency, the freedom to do, and responsibility for what is done. Not absolute agency, like God's own, but limited agency. No person is free to dictate the circumstances in which they find themselves, but every person is free to decide how they will respond in those circumstances. That's why it's called responsibility. As we pass through life, we can chose to align our agencies with God's, just like with speaking in tongues. We have to speak, to exercise our agencies, in order for the Holy Spirit to exercise its agency, to give the utterance. It is a matter of MUTUAL agency. Jesus exercised mutual agency with God when he said, "not my will, but yours be done" and voluntarily went onto the cross. God designed us the way he did so that we could exercise mutual agency with him (he/she/it, whatever...) in CREATING creation! The 4-D space-time continuum IS Creation, and we get to he'p make it happen! Schoenheit equates "in the beginning" with "once upon a time." That just ain't so... the Biblical equivalent of "once upon a time" is ''and it came to pass that..." "In the beginning" means "first of all..." It is not a reference to time, it is a reference to priority. The sense of "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" is "The first thing we have to consider is that Elohim created the heaven and the earth." This was in contra-distinction to the "Enuma Elish," which said that the heaven and earth were never created, but Marduk gave them the form they now have. Schoenheit wrote, "[God] chose to relate to mankind as His Word subsequently declares He does, that is, in a 'linear' relationship, experiencing time passing with us." What does Schoenheit mean by "as His Word subsequently declares He does"? Does he mean there is a verse somewhere in the Bible that says God experiences time passing with us? If there is, why doesn't he cite it? If there isn't, then why is Schoenheit implying that there is? To convince people he knows what he's talking about, even though he doesn't actually? It's dishonest scholarship, something Schoenheit learned while he was being played by Wierwille. Schoenheit went on to write, "[God] sees the big picture that we as temporal beings cannot, but He makes it clear that He relates to us according to how we see time." Schoenheit admits that God sees time in a way that we temporal beings cannot, but, in contrast, relates to us according to how we see time. Yes, it's true that God can relate to us the way we see time. He designed us that way. But there is no logical or textual reason to draw the conclusion that God doesn't know the end from the beginning. In fact, the text reads, "...I am God and there is no one like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done..." (Isaiah 46:9b&10) MRAP, I don't know if you're reading this, but if you are, I hope it gives you some insight into Schoenheit's REV! More about the 4-D space-time continuum along a different vector! Love, Steve

Up until Einstein's Theory of Relativity, people thought of time as something that happened in an absolute (free from imperfection) three-dimensional space. Time appears to move forward in a 3-D space. Einstein's theory conceived of space and time as being four dimension's of a relativistic space-time continuum. It's not easy to describe such a thing accurately except with mathematics, but I like to think of it as a loaf of bread whose four ingredients are the x-axis, the y-axis, the z-axis and time. If you move around in the loaf of bread, you move in time as well as in the three axes. Process theology was originally invented in the early 1900s by Alfred North Whitehead. Process theology says that God's point of view in time is as limited as man's, that is, God created objective reality without knowing how anything was going to turn out. When John, John, and Mark were writing "Don't Blame God" they rediscovered process theology. I don't think they plagiarized it. None of them read enough to "honestly" plagiarize something so complex. Also, if they HAD read Whitehead, they wouldn't have expressed their theology in such sophomoric ways. John, John, and Mark said that God couldn't have foreseen the existence of evil, otherwise, God would be responsible for evil and people could blame him for it. However, there were deterministic factors so fine that people couldn't see them, but God could use them to tell that soldiers were going to dice for Jesus's cloak a thousand years before it happened. If that were the case, there would be no room for human beings to make any decisions at all. John, John, and Mark had me, along with several others, proof read the galleys for "Don't Blame God." They didn't take my critique seriously. Since we live in a relativistic space-time continuum, if God is everywhere, then he also has to be everyWHEN. God sees all throughout the loaf. God's point of view is not limited to man's. God could not have created objective reality without knowing that evil would come to exist. John, John and Mark did not end up with a blameless God; they ended up with an IRRESPOSIBLE God. Now-a-days, we think of cause coming before effect in time, since that's the way we see it. But it's not the "flow" of time that is limited, what's limited is our perspective within time. God necessarily limited our point of view of time to a single, instantaneous NOW so that we could make genuine decisions, so that we could have free will within the 4-D loaf. But God designed the loaf so that everything would turn out all right at the end, and everyone who wants to cooperate with him can cooperate, and those who don't want to cooperate don't have to cooperate. God built teleological (from the end) cause into the 4-D loaf. The way God wants things to end exerts causes backward through time as well as forward from the beginning. When I look back on my 67 years, I see how the way God wanted me to be NOW caused certain things to happen BACK THEN (and how I have survived certain death on three different occasions). I will bet Don't Worry Be Happy could say as much. I hope this helps, TLC. Thanks for asking! Love, Steve