Follow-up & God and Christian Scholarship

My friends and I haven't had the chance to continue the conversation since Thur - although, we have the rest of the year, so no doubt we will. In the same vein as the last post though, here is something that I've come across:

"Omniscient deities don't make choices (since they already know every outcome in advance)." - Deepak Chopra from "On Faith" series hosted by Newsweek/Washington Post

I follow this seres of posts from different religious/philosophical thinkers (includes N.T. Wright, Cal Thomas, Brian McLaren, Chuck Colson, etc.). This week's question to all the contributors was about the role of God in voting in a presidential election. The comment above from Chopra reminded me so much of what my friends said the other night. There seems to be this idea that since God knows the future, he's locked into whatever is going to happen - with no change possible. Now, in one aspect this is true - for God does not change, but throughout Scripture we see testimonies of people influencing God - Moses & Aaron, for example, continually petitioning God to preserve the Israelites. It seems to me that God, being outside of time, knows the future as he knows now, but I don't see how this locks him into the future - for God does not necessarily live in a linear, cause-and-effect closed world, as we do.

Eh, this is already long enough. In the future I'll post on Christian scholarship. I spent some time this morning reading Blaise Pascal and he has a lot to say on it. As well, I'm reading a collection of essays entitled The Two Tasks of the Christian Scholar: Redeeming the Soul, Redeeming the Mind (thanks mom!) which centers around a speech given by Charles Malik in 1980 at Wheaton's Billy Graham Institute. Really good stuff, for the most part, so I'll try to construct a post to share on it in the near future.