"8. Show that as respects the eternal plan of an omniscient and omnipotent Creator, foreknowledge is equivalent to foreordination.
God possessing infinite foreknowledge and power, existed alone from eternity; and in time, self-prompted, began to create in an absolute vacuum. Whatever limiting causes or conditions afterwards exist were first intentionally brought into being by himself, with perfect foreknowledge of their nature, relations, and results. If God then foreseeing that if he created a certain free agent and placed him in certain relations he would freely act in a certain way, and yet with that knowledge proceeded to create that very free agent and put him in precisely those positions, God would, in so doing, obviously predetermine the certain futurition of the act foreseen" (A.A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, p. 203).
And:
"Yet God's permissive decree does truly determine the certain futurition of the act; because God knowing certainly that the man in question would in the given circumstances so act, did place that very man in precisely those circumstances that he should so act" (A.A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, p. 210).
God-hater Vincent Cheung makes this keen observation in response to the two aforecited Hodge quotes:
"This is exactly how many Arminians and Open Theists explain God's sovereignty, that God exercises his 'sovereignty' over men merely by placing them in certain situations in which God foreknows how they would think and act, rather than directly acting upon their minds to determine their thoughts and actions. What Hodge says here is not just inconsistent Calvinism – it is not Calvinism or Christianity at all" (Vincent Cheung, The Author of Sin, p. 39; italics Cheung's).
IT IS consistent Calvinism. Cheung is simply wrong on that point. But Cheung is right that Hodge's views are NOT Christianity at all.
