one another. This too ignores contemporary work on paradox.
"apparently contradictory" for at least a while (and some are still unresolved), and time must pass between the
recognition of paradoxes and their resolution. In fact, their future resolution depends on the hope that one can be
found. One need not be necessarily irrational to hold out for a resolution one day, whether in this age, or as Packer
and others suggest, in the age to come. Perhaps the real problem for Sanders (among others) is ethical: he is not
patient enough. Perhaps the most virtuous response to two lines of substantial evidence/argument for now is a
humble acceptance of both of them until they are constructively resolved in a way that preserves both truths.
therefore no genuine contradictions for God. So Sanders' accusation of unintelligibility simply amounts to a straw
man. Packer's position would be unintelligible if he believed that genuine contradictions exist for God too, or that
we could not assert anything meaningful about God. But why is it necessarily unintelligible to be agnostic about the
reconciliation of two sets of arguments? Sanders is criticizing those who insist on submitting to Scripture whatever
it says, and so are unwilling to allow our present finite understanding to overturn clear lines of evidence/argument.
This is no more irrational than the child who believes that Christ died on the cross for her sins, even though she does
not understand the logic behind the substitutionary atonement. Indeed, perhaps the Christian faith involves just the
sort of submissive acceptance of transcendent truth that one finds in a child.
the world of Jo. 3:16 does not refer to all individual humans (since Christ did not die for all of them), but to the
world of Gentiles, so as to make clear the gospel's application to non-Jews. Gill is as logically consistent as the
Open Theists. Both, however, have to distort or obscure passages that do not fit into their rigidly logical scheme.
repeatedly reads into his opponents conclusions they would reject. Cf. p.212, where he suggests that when a woman
is raped and dismembered, those who hold to meticulous providence believe that God wanted that to happen, without
qualification. Yet, as he surely knows, reformed Christians have long sought to safeguard both God's holiness and
his love for sinners with language like "the two wills of God" and "permission". Such language has problems, but
Sanders is guilty of the grossest of distortions when he represents that the position of meticulous providence entails
that God wants women raped. But rather than accuse him of deliberate misrepresentation, we should understand his
interpretation is justified, even required, given the lens of his simplistic system.
1959); The Language and Thought of the Child, M. Gabain, trans. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1926); Barbel
Indhelder and Jean Piaget, The Growth of Logical Thinking, Anne Parsons and Stanley Milgram, trans. (New York:
Basic Books, 1958).
same processes are evident at every stage or that domain-specific learning demonstrates non-universal mental
structures. Nevertheless, many developmentalists accept the notion of stages of cognitive development since each
stage is characterized by an identifiable level of complexity that appears to be qualitatively different from earlier
ones. See ch. 1 in Patricia H. Miller, Theories of Developmental Psychology, 3rd ed. (New York: W.H. Freeman,
1993).
Even by the college years, only about 50% of college students give consistent evidence of using formal logic (at
least as understood and assessed by Piaget). E.T. Pascarelli and P.T. Terenzini, How College Affects Students, (San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991).