It's been about a month since I finally finished blogging on Wayne Grudem's chapter 12 on God's "mental" and "moral" attributes. You can see all of my blogging on Grudem up to this point on this webpage and I've published my edited review of his material on God's word in both print and Kindle form. I hope to do the same for his material on the other sections of the book and then the whole thing together.
So to continue this five year mission...
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D. Attributes of Purpose
14 Will
Summary
Grudem discusses God's will in five pages, with three headings. His first heading is "God's will in general." He runs through a number of Scriptures that speak of God's will as the "final authority or most ultimate reason for everything that happens" (211). He sees God's will as a continual activity. All the events in our lives are subject to God's will. It can also be God's will for us to suffer.
The second section makes distinctions between different kinds of will in God. The first is a distinction between God's "necessary" will and God's "free" will. For Grudem, "God's necessary will includes everything he must will according to his own nature" (213). "God cannot choose to be different than he is or to cease to exist."
By contrast, for Grudem "God's free will includes all things that God decided to will but had no necessity to will according to his nature" (213). God did not have to create the universe. God did not have to redeem the universe. For Grudem, these were totally free decisions on God's part.
The other set of distinctions Grudem makes in this section are between God's "secret" will and God's "revealed" will. God's revealed will "is sometimes also called God's will of precept or will of command" (213). This is God's will "concerning what we should do or what God commands us to do."
By contrast, God's secret will refers to "his hidden decrees by which he governs the universe and determines everything that will happen" (213). We find these things out after they happen. They are not revealed ahead of time.
For Grudem, God's secret will includes the fact that God has chosen to hide the gospel from some people, the fact that God has only has mercy on those he chooses (Rom. 9:18). These are things we had best not pry into (215). "There is danger" in ascribing evil events to the will of God, even though to Grudem this is a biblical understanding. Despite how this understanding of God's secret will sounds, "we must never understand it to imply that we are freed from responsibility for evil, or that God is ever to be blamed for sin" (216).
Evaluation
1. Directive versus Permissive will
As a Calvinist, the big distinction in Grudem's sense of God's will is between God's secret and revealed will. He implies that God's "secret will" is difficult to reconcile with his revealed will.
For Arminians such as myself, a better distinction is between God's directive will and God's permissive will. Because Grudem ultimately believes that God's secret will determines everything that happens, he does not allow for any action to be willed apart from God's specific direction. That is to say, all will for Grudem is God's directive will.
However, as an Arminian, I believe that God has afforded his creation the freedom to disobey his will. When a human being does evil, it must be that God allows it because God is the ultimate authority over everything that happens in the world. But this is not God's directive will, as it is for Grudem. Grudem must warn his readers not to blame God for sin or free themselves from responsibility for sin. The Arminian does not need to worry because we believe such actions are not a matter of God's secret direction.
We will see something similar when we get to Grudem's discussion of God's providence (chap. 16). I do not believe that God directly causes all the suffering in the world. Rather, God has afforded both to humans a freedom of will that often leads to suffering. Similarly, God allows natural laws to play out in ways that can result in catastrophes. Why he does so is somewhat of a mystery for Arminians, just as God's secret will is for Calvinists.
But the Calvinist implicitly gives God full responsibility for such things, while the Arminian distances such events from God. The Arminian considers these things a matter of God's "permissive" will, things he allows for some greater reason. They remain part of God's direct intention for the Calvinist.
2. God's free will
It is deeply ironic that the Calvinist tradition, so bent on the sovereignty of God, is tremendously concerned to make it clear that there are certain things God is not free to do. This perhaps betrays that theologians like Grudem are really more concerned to maintain a certain sense of the order of the world than they truly are to ascribe true sovereignty to God. Nevertheless, the position that says God does not act at variance with his character is fully orthodox.
I would prefer to say, however, that God does not choose to act at variance with his revealed character. That is to say, we only know God as he has revealed himself in this universe. We have no point of reference to say what God literally is like outside of it. It is true that God does not act at variance with his revealed character as a God of love. But it seems best to me to say that God freely acts in this way, not that God himself is somehow a slave to some (inherited?) nature.
God is whom he has chosen to be in this universe. In this way God is free both in relation to what Grudem calls God's free will and in relation to what Grudem calls God's necessary will.
3. God's "secret knowledge"
I have already mentioned above that the Calvinist sense of God's "secret will" is based on a "deterministic" view of everything that happens in the world. How is it that in revelation God considers us morally responsible for our choices yet in other Scriptures seems to claim responsibility for hardening some people's hearts? How can God not tempt people with evil (Jas. 1:13) and yet send an evil spirit into Saul (1 Sam. 16:14)? How can God want everyone to be saved (1 Tim. 2:4; 2 Pet. 3:9) and yet most not be saved (Matt. 7:14)?
The Calvinist answer is God's "secret will" and his "hidden decrees," notions that Grudem will play out more fully in his chapter 16. God portrays himself one way on the surface but another in hiding. Congress passes one law into legislation but the President makes secret notes of legal disagreement on the side and then secretly violates those laws. It is thus no surprise that Grudem wants to place verses like 1 Timothy 2:4 and 2 Peter 3:9, which say that God prefers everyone to be saved, into God's revealed will... so he can violate them in his secret will.
A more coherent approach is the Arminian distinction between God's directive and permissive will. God prefers all people to be saved but allows people to choose differently. There is still nuancing that needs to be done--the Bible has both language of predestination and free will. The interpreter's choice is which set should be taken more poetically and which set more literally.
The Arminian must also see God has having "secret knowledge" that leads him not to intervene. He sees a bigger picture than we do. But at least in this perspective, God's will remains constant in character. He doesn't take away with his secret hand what he gives with his revealed hand. He simply acts on knowledge we cannot fully see or understand.
Showing posts with label free will. Show all posts
Showing posts with label free will. Show all posts
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Sunday, March 09, 2008
Free or Fated 2
10.3 Hobbes and Determinism
The news strip Calvin and Hobbes was not randomly named. John Calvin (1509-64) and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) lived at about the same time, a period when the scientific revolution was just beginning. And it is probably no coincidence that both were determinists who believed that certain aspects of the future were already decided by forces beyond our control. Despite the significant differences between these two thinkers, they both are good examples of the Zeitgeist of their time--the "spirit of the age."
Thomas Hobbes lived at the beginning of the Baroque period of history, for many a pessimistic time in Europe's history. It was the time of the Thirty Years War (1608-48) that decimated Germany and Austria. It was the time of the English Civil War, involving the unprecedented execution of the English king (1649) and the harsh rule of the Puritan Oliver Cromwell for a time.
It was also the time of Shakespeare, whose lines sometimes capture the spirit of the age. In As You Like It, Jaques says,
"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts."
The lines have a clear sense of fatalism to them. We do not write our "script" in life. We merely read the lines and play the role that the world has already assigned to us.
MacBeth has the same feel:
"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour across the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
With the rise of scientific explanation, people had a greater and greater sense that the world was a big machine. God may have created the machine, but people more and more thought of things happening because of natural laws rather than because of divine intervention. The world is like a pool table. God "broke" with His divine cue stick and now the balls are in motion. If you knew the math and physics, you could predict exactly where all the balls would end up.
Thomas Hobbes is a good example of this type of thinker from this time period. He was a materialist who rejected Descartes dualism of soul and body (see chap. *). Since the world is only matter, what happens in the world is strictly a matter of the laws of cause and effect. If we knew everything about that matter and all the laws that govern it, we could predict everything that would happen from now until the universe goes cold.
For Hobbes, freedom is not the ability to want what you want to want. For Hobbes our wants are strictly a product of the math. Freedom is the ability to do what we desire, freedom to act according to our desires rather than the freedom to determine our desires.
10.4 Calvin and Arminius
The fatalistic Zeitgeist of the 1500's and 1600's also expressed itself in the theology of John Calvin. Calvinists are various Christian groups today that are the heirs of his theology in one respect or another, including Reformed and Presbyterian traditions. To a lesser degree, Calvin's thought has had a significant influence on other traditions like the Baptist, Anglican, and Methodist traditions.
John Calvin largely took up and developed the thinking of Augustine (400's). According to Calvin, humanity was completely "depraved" as a result of Adam's sin in the Garden of Evil. No human is capable of doing any good at all in his or her own power. As a result, if anyone is to be saved, Calvin suggested, God must choose them. Going to heaven was thus entirely a matter of God's "election."
Calvin thus believed that the only people who will be saved are those that God has determined to be saved. God in his complete control of the universe has arbitrarily (at least from our perspective) chosen to elect some to be saved. The others are of course already damned, so God does not determine their fate--it is already determined by Adam's choice.
Calvin's thinking was later summarized by his opponents with the letters TULIP:
Total depravity--No human can do any good in his or her own power.
Unconditional election--God has chosen who will be saved with us playing no part in it at all.
Limited atonement--Christ only died for those God has chosen, not for everyone.
Irresistable grace--If God has chosen you, you are chosen; there's nothing you can do about it.
Perseverence of the saints--If you are chosen, you will make it.
By the time of Hobbes, Calvin's "single" predestination had become "double predestination," where God not only actively determined who would be saved but who would be damned as well. Today some "hyper-Calvinists" even believe God dictated that Satan and Adam would sin as well.
Not everyone within Calvin's Reformed tradition agreed fully with the way he worked out his theology. Jakobus Arminius in particular (1560-1609), in Holland, objected to the idea that God's "election" of those who would be saved did not involve any human element at all. He suggested that God predestined those who would be saved because He foreknew, knew ahead of time, what their free will choices would be.
Arminius' view raises a philosophical issue we have already mentioned--the question of whether God's foreknowledge of what will happen implies determinism. The argument usually advanced by Calvinists is that if God knows what I will do, then I can't possibly do anything other than what God knows. But if I must do what God knows, then I am not free to do anything else. Many Calvinists thus argue that God's omniscience and free will are incompatible. We cannot have free will if God is all knowing. <1>
However, this argument seems seriously flawed. For example, let us say that you are present at a football game that you video to watch with your friends later. When you watch the game later with your friends, you might be able to predict everything that happens in the game. But certainly your foreknowledge of what will happen does not determine what will happen on the video.
If God in someway is outside time, as Christian philosophers like Boethius (400's) and Aquinas (1200's) have suggested, then it is possible that He knows the future because He has already seen it. What seems to be foreknowledge from our perspective amounts to past knowledge on God's part. In any case, it does not follow that knowledge equals determinism. We are not in a position to say how God knows what God knows.
At the same time, the argument that God is outside time does not eliminate the idea that God might gain knowledge at some point, namely, at the point that He created the universe. Luis de Molina (1526-1600) was a Spanish Jesuit who wrestled with the issue of God's foreknowledge and human free will at the same time that these others were. He introduced some important distinctions into the discussion that contemporary philosophers like Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig have adopted.
Molinism, the approach to God's knowledge started by Molina, is best known for its belief in what it calls middle knowledge. According to Molina, God has three kinds of knowledge. His first type of knowledge is His knowledge of what must be true. His third kind of knowledge is His knowledge of what will happen depending on how He acts in the world. Middle knowledge is his knowledge of what will happen depending on human will.
Middle knowledge thus amounts to God knowing every possible thing that might happen. If God is outside of time, however, His knowledge of what could happen is also knowledge of what will actually happen in this universe. <2> When God creates time and the universe, He comes to know everything that will happen without determining it.
Of course, after we have had this entire discussion, we must admit that we have no real way of knowing how knowledge works for God. God may have ways of knowing that do not imply determinism, ways that we could not possibly comprehend.
John Wesley (1703-91) built further on Arminius' objections to Calvinism. His theology is sometimes called Wesleyan-Arminian theology. Like Calvin, Arminius, and Augustine, Wesley agreed that humans were totally depraved and could do no good in their own power. However, like Arminius, he denied that God elected humans unconditionally, with no element of human will involved.
The difference was that Calvin viewed God's election somewhat like an "on-off" switch. Either God turned the light on or He left it off. If God turned His grace on, you would be saved. If God did not, you would remain damned.
For Wesley, on the other hand, God at some point turned the lights up for everyone so that they could choose or reject His grace. In other words, Wesley believed that God offered everyone the opportunity to be saved. It was entirely God's power that made this choice possible, but God offered it to everyone, not just to a few He has arbitrarily chosen.
The issue of predestination is alive and well today. It largely follows the lines laid down in the debates of the 1500's and 1600's. "Five point" Calvinism is currently experiencing somewhat of a revival, including even some hyper-Calvinist forms we have mentioned. At the same time, Arminianism has enjoyed a prominence among some of the most significant Christian philosophers of recent times. Certainly this book leans far more in its direction than in the other.
<1> Which is of course the basis for Open Theism. As we mentioned earlier in the chapter, Open Theism limits God's foreknowledge so that humans can have free will.
<2> It is of course possible, if Leibniz is wrong about God only being able to create the best possible world, that God also knows what will happen in other possible universes as well, where human will makes other possible choices.
The news strip Calvin and Hobbes was not randomly named. John Calvin (1509-64) and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) lived at about the same time, a period when the scientific revolution was just beginning. And it is probably no coincidence that both were determinists who believed that certain aspects of the future were already decided by forces beyond our control. Despite the significant differences between these two thinkers, they both are good examples of the Zeitgeist of their time--the "spirit of the age."
Thomas Hobbes lived at the beginning of the Baroque period of history, for many a pessimistic time in Europe's history. It was the time of the Thirty Years War (1608-48) that decimated Germany and Austria. It was the time of the English Civil War, involving the unprecedented execution of the English king (1649) and the harsh rule of the Puritan Oliver Cromwell for a time.
It was also the time of Shakespeare, whose lines sometimes capture the spirit of the age. In As You Like It, Jaques says,
"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts."
The lines have a clear sense of fatalism to them. We do not write our "script" in life. We merely read the lines and play the role that the world has already assigned to us.
MacBeth has the same feel:
"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour across the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
With the rise of scientific explanation, people had a greater and greater sense that the world was a big machine. God may have created the machine, but people more and more thought of things happening because of natural laws rather than because of divine intervention. The world is like a pool table. God "broke" with His divine cue stick and now the balls are in motion. If you knew the math and physics, you could predict exactly where all the balls would end up.
Thomas Hobbes is a good example of this type of thinker from this time period. He was a materialist who rejected Descartes dualism of soul and body (see chap. *). Since the world is only matter, what happens in the world is strictly a matter of the laws of cause and effect. If we knew everything about that matter and all the laws that govern it, we could predict everything that would happen from now until the universe goes cold.
For Hobbes, freedom is not the ability to want what you want to want. For Hobbes our wants are strictly a product of the math. Freedom is the ability to do what we desire, freedom to act according to our desires rather than the freedom to determine our desires.
10.4 Calvin and Arminius
The fatalistic Zeitgeist of the 1500's and 1600's also expressed itself in the theology of John Calvin. Calvinists are various Christian groups today that are the heirs of his theology in one respect or another, including Reformed and Presbyterian traditions. To a lesser degree, Calvin's thought has had a significant influence on other traditions like the Baptist, Anglican, and Methodist traditions.
John Calvin largely took up and developed the thinking of Augustine (400's). According to Calvin, humanity was completely "depraved" as a result of Adam's sin in the Garden of Evil. No human is capable of doing any good at all in his or her own power. As a result, if anyone is to be saved, Calvin suggested, God must choose them. Going to heaven was thus entirely a matter of God's "election."
Calvin thus believed that the only people who will be saved are those that God has determined to be saved. God in his complete control of the universe has arbitrarily (at least from our perspective) chosen to elect some to be saved. The others are of course already damned, so God does not determine their fate--it is already determined by Adam's choice.
Calvin's thinking was later summarized by his opponents with the letters TULIP:
Total depravity--No human can do any good in his or her own power.
Unconditional election--God has chosen who will be saved with us playing no part in it at all.
Limited atonement--Christ only died for those God has chosen, not for everyone.
Irresistable grace--If God has chosen you, you are chosen; there's nothing you can do about it.
Perseverence of the saints--If you are chosen, you will make it.
By the time of Hobbes, Calvin's "single" predestination had become "double predestination," where God not only actively determined who would be saved but who would be damned as well. Today some "hyper-Calvinists" even believe God dictated that Satan and Adam would sin as well.
Not everyone within Calvin's Reformed tradition agreed fully with the way he worked out his theology. Jakobus Arminius in particular (1560-1609), in Holland, objected to the idea that God's "election" of those who would be saved did not involve any human element at all. He suggested that God predestined those who would be saved because He foreknew, knew ahead of time, what their free will choices would be.
Arminius' view raises a philosophical issue we have already mentioned--the question of whether God's foreknowledge of what will happen implies determinism. The argument usually advanced by Calvinists is that if God knows what I will do, then I can't possibly do anything other than what God knows. But if I must do what God knows, then I am not free to do anything else. Many Calvinists thus argue that God's omniscience and free will are incompatible. We cannot have free will if God is all knowing. <1>
However, this argument seems seriously flawed. For example, let us say that you are present at a football game that you video to watch with your friends later. When you watch the game later with your friends, you might be able to predict everything that happens in the game. But certainly your foreknowledge of what will happen does not determine what will happen on the video.
If God in someway is outside time, as Christian philosophers like Boethius (400's) and Aquinas (1200's) have suggested, then it is possible that He knows the future because He has already seen it. What seems to be foreknowledge from our perspective amounts to past knowledge on God's part. In any case, it does not follow that knowledge equals determinism. We are not in a position to say how God knows what God knows.
At the same time, the argument that God is outside time does not eliminate the idea that God might gain knowledge at some point, namely, at the point that He created the universe. Luis de Molina (1526-1600) was a Spanish Jesuit who wrestled with the issue of God's foreknowledge and human free will at the same time that these others were. He introduced some important distinctions into the discussion that contemporary philosophers like Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig have adopted.
Molinism, the approach to God's knowledge started by Molina, is best known for its belief in what it calls middle knowledge. According to Molina, God has three kinds of knowledge. His first type of knowledge is His knowledge of what must be true. His third kind of knowledge is His knowledge of what will happen depending on how He acts in the world. Middle knowledge is his knowledge of what will happen depending on human will.
Middle knowledge thus amounts to God knowing every possible thing that might happen. If God is outside of time, however, His knowledge of what could happen is also knowledge of what will actually happen in this universe. <2> When God creates time and the universe, He comes to know everything that will happen without determining it.
Of course, after we have had this entire discussion, we must admit that we have no real way of knowing how knowledge works for God. God may have ways of knowing that do not imply determinism, ways that we could not possibly comprehend.
John Wesley (1703-91) built further on Arminius' objections to Calvinism. His theology is sometimes called Wesleyan-Arminian theology. Like Calvin, Arminius, and Augustine, Wesley agreed that humans were totally depraved and could do no good in their own power. However, like Arminius, he denied that God elected humans unconditionally, with no element of human will involved.
The difference was that Calvin viewed God's election somewhat like an "on-off" switch. Either God turned the light on or He left it off. If God turned His grace on, you would be saved. If God did not, you would remain damned.
For Wesley, on the other hand, God at some point turned the lights up for everyone so that they could choose or reject His grace. In other words, Wesley believed that God offered everyone the opportunity to be saved. It was entirely God's power that made this choice possible, but God offered it to everyone, not just to a few He has arbitrarily chosen.
The issue of predestination is alive and well today. It largely follows the lines laid down in the debates of the 1500's and 1600's. "Five point" Calvinism is currently experiencing somewhat of a revival, including even some hyper-Calvinist forms we have mentioned. At the same time, Arminianism has enjoyed a prominence among some of the most significant Christian philosophers of recent times. Certainly this book leans far more in its direction than in the other.
<1> Which is of course the basis for Open Theism. As we mentioned earlier in the chapter, Open Theism limits God's foreknowledge so that humans can have free will.
<2> It is of course possible, if Leibniz is wrong about God only being able to create the best possible world, that God also knows what will happen in other possible universes as well, where human will makes other possible choices.
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
A Question on Free Will
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.
_________________
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.
"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.
_________________
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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