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effort?
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Scripture teaches that God permits evil, yet he is also wholly opposed to sin.
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We are
also told that God loves all people and wants none to perish, and yet God hates sinners who are
called the children of wrath.
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With regard to salvation, Scripture teaches that God chooses
those who come to life, and yet humans must themselves believe in Christ to be saved.
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Similarly, God has foreordained all that happens, yet human prayer moves God to act in certain
ways so that God and humans genuinely interact in time.
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And while God knows and has
planned the future, normal, adult humans are free agents who form their own plans, intentions,
and actions, for which they are held responsible, without in any way being divinely constrained
or coerced.
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In all these cases, our understanding is faced with paradox.
God's nature, particularly his infinity, and his relation to the creation pose problems for
the LONC. But do the problems presented above consist of contradictories or contraries and so
are incoherent (or absurd)? Classic Christians have argued they are merely mysteries (that is,
veridical paradoxes), fundamentally rational and meaningful (since God understands, affirms,
and reveals all the pieces of these puzzles). Admittedly, persons holding to different sides of
these paradoxes have periodically "squared off," validating one side of the paradox at the cost of
its "opposite." But the greatest teachers of the Classic tradition have generally sought to
preserve the unity of revealed truth.
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Historic Christianity and Concurrences
Over the centuries concurrences in Scripture and in theological reflection have pushed
Christians to acknowledge the limitations of human reason to adequately address such problems.
For most of the classical and medieval periods, the paradoxical quality of many of these features
of the Christian faith were appreciated, but not highlighted as much as in the post-Reformation