I'm off to Florida today, but thought I would post part of an email question I received from Benjamin Roberts yesterday:
"An acquaintance of mine has recently turned Calvinist and in my longing for unity I shared that I think I might be a compatibilist. Not long after this he wrote me and told me that I was just a calvinist with a different name. The small amount I've read on compatibilism led me to the conclusion that Scripture teaches God's sovereignty and also man's free will and that they aren't mutually exclusive. But I fear my understanding may have been too limited and I may have made an error in calling myself this."
First, some definitions:
compatibilism--The idea that free will and determinism are compatible. Usually free will is defined as the freedom to act here rather than true freedom to will. In other words, I am not coerced to keep typing. But the question of whether forces inside the chemistry of my brain are forcing me in effect to keep typing.
Some compatibilists would say that it makes no sense to say that I might not act in accordance with my beliefs and convictions, for example. If I were fully free, I might make a different decision with exactly the same conditions internally and externally. This position is sometimes called soft determinism.
Incompatibilism--The idea that free will and determinism are not compatible.
Libertarianism (in this context)--The idea that I am free not only to act but to will as well.
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It seems to me that compatibilism is very "compatible" with Calvinism in most of its forms. So a Calvinist might say that since we are all totally depraved, we all freely act in conjunction with our nature. No one coerces me to sin but I have a sin nature.
I suppose orthodoxy takes a somewhat compatibilist approach to God's nature as well. God freely acts in accordance with His nature, but could not do otherwise, could not lie, for example, for He would never want to lie.
My sense of God's sovereignty has led me to wonder if God is not truly free if this is the case, so I pose that God binds himself to His "nature" in this universe, but theoretically might choose another nature in another creation.
I am also open to the possibility that determinism and full free will might be compatible within God, outside this creation. They seem incompatible within this creation.
I personally like John Wesley's conjecture about free will and salvation the best (put here in my own terms). At points in our lives, God empowers our true free will to the point where we can make "ex nihilo" decisions whether to accept or not to accept His grace. If we make the right choices to the right degree, He empowers us to choose the good (or perhaps "changes our nature") while still being able to choose the bad.
I doubt that we have full free will on every issue, however, and there is probably more truth than we would like to admit to something called hard incompatibilism--the idea that with quantum randomness, neither free will nor determinism makes sense.
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5 comments:
I must admit that I did not know that such a label existed, but I'm not surprised. I would very much tend to describe myself then as a compatibilist. I do believe that there have been moments in my life, maybe more than I know, in which I have been compelled to act or to decide in a manner favorable to the overall will for my life.
I also know that the Lord has granted me free will to decide at other moments where my obedience was to be. Interesting topic!
I've seen many compatibilists give the following argument to justify their Calvinism, when really the argument ought to make them Arminian:
1) Compatibilism is true
2) This means that God knows all possible actions we would make in all possible situations as our actions inevitably result from the internal and external situations we are placed in.
3) Thus God, by his setting of the initial preconditions of history, his performance of specific acts within history affects who is saved, but creating or not creating the conditions whereby they will come to a saving faith.
In other words, God by organizing history according to the foreknowledge (which he has as a result of compatibilistic human will) can controls history. This argument has been cited to me by more than one calvinist as a supposed proof of predestination and calvinism.
But the thing is, it actually proves Arminianism. Predestination through foreknowledge is the standard Arminian doctrine. Whereas the Calvinist doctrine of the need for regeneration specifies clearly that no amount of organizing of external historical events is sufficient for God to bring people to faith, rather they come to faith only by the explicit supernatural internal action of the holy spirit inside specific people's mind to regenerate them and bring them to faith. The idea that God uses his exhaustive foreknowledge to see, and through seeing, control who will come to faith and who will not, is thus Arminianism not Calvinism.
By the by, I'm an open view theist myself. Though I'm undecided about which of determinism or libertarian free will are true (because there can be no empirical evidence either way).
As a head's up, Andrew. If you're planning to teach at an evangelical college some day--especially in OT--I'd keep that open theism comment to myself. For some reason I haven't quite figured out, Christian colleges seem to confuse process theology with open theism and it becomes a negative when looking for a job.
I'm not an open theist--I'm an old fashioned scholastic on that one. But Christian colleges don't seem to get that you have to be conservative to be an open theist, the result of a literalistic reading of God in the OT.
Ken, I'm a liberal rather than evangelical. (Though since my interest is in the theology of the early Christians that distinction tends to not matter so much, since the focus is on what they believed not on what I do. In fact I often feel there's great exegetical advantage to being a liberal because I don't feel compelled to agree with the beliefs I'm studying and hence I can attempt to do accurate exegesis and determine authorial intent without my own biases about what I want to believe or want the text to say coming into play.)
I take it your use of "literalistic" has somewhat negative connotations? :p I would of course claim that's it's simply a case of taking into account the obvious authorial intent of the writers and not allowing modern biases to stop us taking their words as they clearly meant them... but that's an argument for another day.
I sometimes use literalistic in a negative way :-) ...
but I don't think I meant it that way in that comment. What I meant of course is that open theism tends to take language of God "changing his mind" or "being sorry He made humanity" literally. Of course neither can be literal language if God is omniscient.
Best wishes in your future!
As a general comment to the blog, I am not having regular access to the internet these days, so some posts in the works may be a tad delayed.
I'm sure no one's life is ruined! :-)
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