by InterestedOne 7 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
I'm at the beginning of the "Chronology" section of the Insight books. In the second paragraph, it says:
We are assured that his purposes for the future are certain of execution at the predetermined time, right down to the day and hour designated.
Does that mean JW's believe in fate or predestination?
Yes and No.
Hey peacefulpete.
Did you mean yes to fate & no to predestination? I was putting the two in the same general category. Or, did you mean their doctrine says yes & no to the matter? I recall my JW friend saying one reason JW's don't believe in astrology, apart from their association of it with spiritism, is that they don't believe in fate. Then when I read this "Chronology" section in the Insight books, it sounded like it was expressing the idea of fate to me - that certain things are predetermined to happen ahead of time.
Basically, God knows when Armageddon will get here but no guarantees on who is going to make it through. Like a bus schedule. The bus will get to its stop at 10:00am but that doesn't mean you'll make it on time.
I see. So some things are predetermined and others are not? Does that mean they are saying fate is true for some things and not for others? Or do they avoid using the word fate altogether?
They do not believe in predestination. God has his appointed time for certain things.
What always overrides any idea is that we have been given our own free will to make our own choices. The concept can make your head spin.
God knows all and can see into the future, he is all powerful.
This would then mean that he would know what our destiny is, that is, what choices we have made. I was told that this could certainly be the case but unlikely that he would chose to do so on an individual basis. As he is all powerful he is able to keep this information from himself.
I meant yes and no because they do and don't. Not clear? yep. They do accept the prescience of their god and accept that in individual cases he can and does know their fate (eg. Jeremiah, samson and others). It is also believed that the 144k are a predestined group (but individuals might or might not be). They seem to dismiss that theologians and philosophers have for centuries struggled to reconcile prescience with free will by offering a rather simplistic solution drawing from a 20th century notion of a fixed linear 4th dimension. They suggest that his ability of foreknowledge comes to him only when he wishes to know, kinda like peeking into a Christmas gift box. However this god hates spoilers and enjoys waiting and watching. This limits their deity to foreknowledge about matters he anticipates needing to have foreknowledge about. This kind of god might well be caught off guard because he chose not to know, humans would call this willful ignorance. And ultimately they have not eliminated the issues of predestination, they simply have asseted it while limiting their god's knowledge of it.
To be fair the WT reflects the confusion that comes from attempting to reconcile the views of different Bible writers, some of whom definatively assert God had all their lives "down in writing" prior to birth while others insisted that they could "choose life".
