Accounting for basic texts: James White debating open theist John Sanders

Sometimes bad theological ideas cannot negotiate basic texts.  The following is a good example of that.

Free Will

The greatest and sweetest liberty is, 

when we have no liberty to sin at all,

when we cannot sin.

Richard Sibbes

Stripping God of his deity

Exhaustive foreknowledge of all future events is a perfection in God.  To deny it as the Socinians and open theists have done does not advance our understanding of God but destroys it.

Augustine said, that "to confess that God exists, and at the same time to deny that he has foreknowledge of future things, is the most manifest folly...For one who is not prescient of all future things is not God."

The Puritan Stephen Charnock, in evaluating the implications of the denial of God's exhaustive foreknowledge of the future free acts of his creatures, and underlining Augustine's remarks, said that in the book of Isaiah “God submits the being of his deity to this trial” and that “If God foreknows not the secret motions of man's will, how can he foretell them? If we strip him of the perfection of prescience, why should we believe a word of Scripture predictions? All the credit of the word of God is torn up by the roots.”