Dr. Woodring is definitely blessed by God for coming up with analogies on the spot that work very well to get his point across.
Since we discussed Calvinism last week, we discussed Arminianism today. He explained some of the questions we had regarding imputed righteousness and other such stuff and than he began to talk about tension theology.
Ya see, he explained that all of these were methods of resolving the tension between free will and God's providence as both are presented in the Bible and that neither is all right. Dr. Woodring puts his vote in for tension not necessarily being a bad thing to have within Christian, biblical doctrine but rather, a good thing. He said that tension can be good in relationships. Conflict is not good, but tension is good. It was a nice distinction.
Than he gave two analogies in class today. One is hard to explain because it requires drawing a picture. The other I can explain here and has to do with the idea of discovering God. If God were a rainbow and the rainbow was behind a mountain that we were walking towards, we would slowly gain a better perspective of that rainbow as we got closer--could see more colors, or from different angles although you could never see all of it with all the colors. I came up with my own similar analogy: trying to discover EVERYTHING about God is like trying to come up with every digit of pi. You can get a clearer, more accurate estimation of pi as you get more digits and work through the steps. However, you'll never be able to find every single digit of pi.
I'll try to post some more thoughts later from class. For now, I must be ready for bed so as to be ready for a lovely and short Wednesday--with presentation in stats.
Posted by Anna at February 18, 2004 12:16 AM