In my previous post, I gave a brief philosophical outline of the necessarily nuanced approach one must take when considering the nature, and reality of freedom. The reason for doing so is to respond to the difficulties often incurred when thinking through difficult doctrines lines predestination or election. As humans, we are usually opposed to restrictions on our freedom, even if we can agree intellectually with a legal requirement for instance, such as stopping at a red light, we can often find ourselves instinctively compelled toward rebellion at the thought of our autonomy and persona authority being overridden. And so we can find it particularly difficult to yield our consent to paradoxical realities presented in the Bible. The doctrine of predestination, for instance, jars with our sense of free will, in particular, and makes us uneasy in the knowledge that if some of predestined to salvation, others are necessarily predestined to not salvation. We struggle to reconcile ...