Predestination
Predestination has become a controversial theological topic, despite the fact that the term is relatively rare in the New Testament. The controversy usually revolves around questions such as: what exactly is predestined? Does predestination mean that everything that happens in the universe is pre-determined, decided and controlled by God? Did God deliberately select and destine some individuals for salvation and some for destruction before the creation of the world? The aim of this brief word study is to consider how the term should be understood in its biblical context, and therefore how it would have been understood by the earliest Christians.
Definition
The word predestination only appears 6 times in the whole of the New Testament, and not once in the Old Testament [although the related word orizw (horizo) does appear 21 times in the Greek version of the Old Testament]. It translates the Greek word ‘pro-horizo’ (proorizw), which is made up of the prefix ‘pro-‘ (equivalent to our ‘pre-‘, meaning ‘before’), and ‘horizo’ (orizw), from which we derive our English word ‘horizon’. ‘Horizo’ in Greek has a range of meanings such us ‘to define’, ‘to set the limits or boundaries of a thing’, and therefore ‘to determine, fix or set’ [these definitions are based on the BDAG Greek Lexicon of the New Testament, which cites a word’s occurrences in classical Greek literature as well its particular usage in the New Testament as its basis for translation]. A horizon is a helpful visual aid for us to understand the meaning of the word: it is a line of definition, a boundary line, a broad limit, a demarcation. It is not something narrow, individual and constricting, but a horizon or a boundary—something that has definition and limits, but is nonetheless broad and expansive and can encompass a great deal. A line is drawn to define and explain both what our destiny is and what it isn’t. ‘Predestination’ is therefore a reasonable English translation, and is only made problematic by the fact that people read all kinds of different pre-conceived ideas into the concept of ‘destiny’. ‘Predestination’ is simply ‘pre-horizon-ing’: the setting of a definition, a boundary, a destiny beforehand.
Use in the New Testament
So much for the word itself—but what does the Bible say? Of the six New Testament occurrences of the word, two refer to the crucifixion of Jesus (Acts 4:28; 1 Corinthians 2:7). Most Christians will not be surprised to read that when it came to the central salvific event for the whole of human history, God had thought about it beforehand and had a plan. The remaining four are all about the church—the destiny of believers in Christ (Romans 8:29,30; 1 Corinthians 2:7; Ephesians 1:5; 1:11). Let’s look at each of these four examples in turn:
Romans 8:29 and 30
“Those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son…”.
Who and what is it talking about?
These verses tell us the destiny we are given beforehand: to be conformed to the image of God’s Son. As far as what we are predestined for is concerned, we have the answer. But does this verse tell us anything about who is predestined? If we read it in its context, yes it does: the whole of chapter 8–right from the very first verse—is concerned with ‘those who are in Christ Jesus’ (Romans 8:1). In Romans 8:29, what does God know beforehand about those in Christ? That they will need the Spirit’s help in their weakness (8:26), and that despite knowing their weakness God has given them a glorious calling and destiny (v29), and He will indeed work with them in every situation in order to achieve that good purpose (v28).
This is the indication from the immediate context of Romans 8, but even if we are determined to push this idea of foreknowledge back pre-creation, it still tells us nothing about God selecting particular individuals to be in or out of the body of Christ. God would have looked ahead from before creation at His glorious plan for humanity and ‘foreknown’ that there would be a community of people in Christ being conformed to His own image—this was His express purpose and intention in creating, and therefore the existence and character of such a people was both ‘predestined’ and ‘foreknown’.
These verses say nothing about who will be in Christ and who won’t, or about certain individuals being predestined for salvation or otherwise. Paul is simply talking to those who are in Christ and telling them what their destiny is.
Ephesians 1:5 and 11
5. He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will”
What does ‘adopted as sons’ mean?
Here again we see that predestination is to do with sonship. But a new term is introduced: the ‘adoption’ as sons. ‘Adoption’ is a somewhat unhelpful translation of a Greek word that means something very different to what we mean by ‘adoption’ in English. The word in Greek is literally ‘son-placing’, and as far as the New Testament is concerned, it speaks of an event that is in the future, not in the past (Romans 8:18-25, particularly v23).
We think of adoption as being at the beginning of the Christian life–the popular idea of being ‘adopted into God’s family’–but we are not in fact adopted into God’s family, we are born into God’s family, born of the Spirit (eg John 1:13, 3:5, 1 John 5:1). This is a wonderful truth, as is ‘son-placing’, which speaks of the future revealing of the sons of God (Rom 8:18). It is based on the Jewish idea of a son coming of age and receiving his inheritance and the rights, privileges and responsibilities that come with it. [For a thorough biblical study of this theme, see G. H. Lang ‘Firstborn Sons, their Rights and Risks’.] This ties in exactly with verse 11 of Ephesians 1:
“11. . . . also we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to His purpose who works all things after the counsel of His will”
In Christ we have become heirs to an inheritance (Galatians 4:7), a concept which is also linked with adoption and predestination in Romans 8 (Romans 8:16-17, 23, 29). Ephesians 1 and Romans 8 are speaking of the same process of being predestined to be conformed to the image of the Son of God, one day to be revealed as sons of God, when we will come into the fullness of our inheritance. This will be our ‘adoption’ or ‘placing as sons’.
Conclusion
The teaching of the New Testament regarding predestination is therefore clear and consistent. Before creation God had a plan in mind for humanity—that in our union with Christ we would become conformed to the image of God’s Son. This is the limit, the definition, the destiny that God has given humanity beforehand—not to be some other kind of creature, or to develop some other kind of character, nor to live for some other destiny or purpose—but together in the body of Christ to be conformed to the character and maturity of Jesus the Son, one day to receive with Him and in Him the fullness of our inheritance as sons of God.
So why all the fuss?
To think through the implications of our understanding of predestination, see my blog article: ‘Predestination: what’s all the fuss about?’ To read about all these issues in much greater depth and to see more of the evidence behind these ideas, see ‘God’s Strategy in Human History: Volume 1 – God’s Path to Victory (chapter 16) and Volume 2 – Reconsidering Key Biblical Ideas (chapter 5), available to buy in the shop.
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I come from a reformed position and had a friend share this on Facebook/Twitter – would you mind if I engaged with your views in the comments here? It’s a thoughtful article, but there are certainly areas where I would want to push back a bit.
I don’t just want to troll or anything, so if you’d rather not engage then feel free to ignore me!
Hi James, thanks for your message – yes of course, it would be good to hear your thoughts. We are always happy to have a discussion, and certainly won’t ignore you!
Bl
Joe
Great, thank you! Firstly, it’s great that we can both rejoice in our good God and his good plan, and that it will be brought to completion. Predestination is a good word, and we agree on a lot of what the concept entails – it’s the meticulousness of it that seems to be the main issue, and that banks on a lot more than just a few word definitions – it’s how we see the whole narrative coming together, and how grace works, why God allows Israel to suffer, who causes it and in what ways etc.
On the subject of meticulousness, then, could I ask you for a bit more detail on how you approach the passage in Acts?
I appreciate that you could affirm the reformed view of this particular passage and view it as a rare exception, or take any number of other interpretations going, but I wanted to see if I could find out how you deal with a passage where specific named individuals are described as having done what God had predestined?
Hi James, thanks for your comments and for offering them in such a constructive way. Good question, and yes–it definitely needs more than a brief blog article to understand predestination fully and how it fits into the whole sweep of God’s narrative. So the Acts passage (4:27-8, 2:23 also relevant):
Fundamentally, it was destined before the foundation of the world that if everything went wrong (sin), Jesus would suffer and die for the sins of the world to redeem mankind. This is what I assume most evangelicals would agree on (except maybe the ‘if’!).
Very simply though regarding Acts 4:27-8: if we are very careful about the words used, we can see that it is WHAT these individuals would do that is predestined, rather than the details of WHO exactly would do it and HOW they would do it (excuse the capitals–I’m not shouting, I just can’t make it do italics!). It does not say ‘Herod and Pontius Pilate and the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel were predestined to be gathered together’, it just says ‘they were gathered together’, a simple statement of the events as they happened. WHAT they did was the thing that was predestined: the crucifixion of Jesus.
We might want to infer that the details of individuals involved and precisely what they did and how they did it were all predestined, but we would have to do this on the basis of speculation or theological/biblical arguments brought in from elsewhere, as these verses don’t actually say it.
I loved your ‘I’m not shouting, honest!’ disclaimer. Totally get your point, and it makes sense. I find it less intuitive than the reformed reading, largely because it fits with my broader understanding of the flow of scripture etc.
I think it matters that they were gathered *to do* what God had planned, rather than they were gathered, *and did* what God had planned, but that certainly isn’t enough on its own to establish a view contrary to Biblical teaching (so it’s all well and good if it fits, but to say it doesn’t fit on the basis of a preposition is probably a bit presumptuous).
It is interesting to see that you think conditionality extends as far as you do – I’ve always wondered how different world views see how a conditional response fits with foreknowledge, and I would love to hear how you conceive of that relationship, but obviously that’s too much to go into in a comments section, plus it takes us away from exegesis – at least of the passages in question.
I was going to go straight on to the next passage, but I might pause here to see if you do have any thoughts, or possibly a link if you have written on that last topic elsewhere?
My Greek is almost non-existent, by the way – if you tell me that the distinction I see between *to do* and *and did* in ποιῆσαι is untranslatable then I’ll take your word for it. It seems like the infinitive tense used could be seen to lean my way, but not even close to definitively. If that’s the case, let me know and then ignore that second paragraph.
And now I wish I hadn’t written that last post, because even pretending to have thought about tenses makes other possible oversights that might impugn my reading look even sillier. Should have just gone with ‘almost all translations…’ or something to that effect. I don’t know Greek. I have parsed texts. That makes for a dangerously stupid mix at times!
Hi Jamie–no you’re alright, it is a straightforward infinitive so ‘to do’ in English is the correct translation, and it’s worth checking. Again though, I think that all the ‘to do’ does is to state the events as they happened: they were gathered together to try Jesus and ultimately get Him crucified, this was the purpose and result of their co-operation. It’s just a description of what happened rather than any comment on predestination.
Interestingly, according to the gospels neither Herod nor Pilate seemed to have an agenda to get Jesus crucified–they both come across as somewhat ambivalent, and puzzled by Jesus (although Herod didn’t hesitate to have him beaten, Lk 23). The Jews though certainly had a malicious agenda.
Lk 23:12 tells us that Herod and Pilate became friends through the process of trying Jesus, so from their point of view Acts 4:27 is just a repetition of the same statement, by the same author (Luke). That the ‘gentiles’ are included as well presumably refers to the fact that it was the Romans who crucified Jesus, and is reminiscent of Ps 2.
To go a step beyond what these verses alone are saying to the bigger picture, I’ll just offer the suggestion that if anyone was actively ‘gathering together’ these groups and individuals ‘against Your [God’s] Holy Servant Jesus’, it is more likely to be Satan than God. Cf for instance the spiritual energy behind Judas’ part in the conspiracy: ‘…Satan then entered into him…’ (Jn 13:27/Lk 22:3, just prior to his act of betrayal).
Ps, I will definitely respond about conditionality etc when I next get a moment
First off, thanks for being so courteous in the light of my flapping!
I have no problem with the idea that Herod & Pilate were trying to pass the buck. My point isn’t that I think it was their intent to crucify Jesus, nor to argue that it wasn’t Satan’s intent – I can readily believe that it was. Over all of that, though, I believe that it was God’s plan. Somewhat like Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers. They intended it for evil, but God intended it for good.
The way you’ve interpreted the passage still leads me to think that we agree on the big idea that God can accomplish his work through people that intend something quite different, but of course we differ on the process – how God works with other agencies to get to the result he desires.
I gather that Roger Forster’s analogy (which I assume you would agree with) was to look at it like a game of chess, where both sides make their decisions independently but based on the other, and God is good enough at the game that he is able to ensure he gets his desired outcome without being directly responsible for the ‘bad moves’ of his opponent.
My view would be more like God working as a storyteller. C.S. Lewis is not guilty of the White Witches sins. He intends them altogether differently from the way she does, to accomplish his plans for the greater story. She might intend something for evil, but Lewis intends it for good.
Anywho, onto Romans 8 – very briefly at first. It seems that your focus is on saying that those who are in Christ are predestined, in that order. He’s addressing them, and so it follows.
Now this is tricky, because on that level, I agree, but again it’s part of a whole system of thought, and the result is that I think we’d mean something different by the same phrase.
I’ll give you my abridged paraphrase for how I read the flow of Romans 8. It starts off going back and forth from vv 9-10, then goes forwards – random thoughts/reflections are in brackets:
You either have the spirit or you don’t. Those who do have the spirit are not in the flesh, and as such will not set their minds on the flesh. Without the spirit we cannot please God (and we know that saving faith pleases God).
God has given us the spirit of adoption as sons, and if we are sons, then we are heirs (I think the order given here is important in addressing your view of son-placing in Ephesians). If sons then heirs – heirs to what? The restoration of all that is broken, the new birth of creation through resurrection.
But now we’re broken while we wait – what comfort do we have now? The spirit we’ve spoken of intercedes for you, and all will work out for the good – you’ll see. For he’s known and predestined you. He’s called and justified you. He has glorified you. You don’t know it yet, but it is accomplished.
So if that’s the case, what can stand against us? If our salvation is accomplished, nothing can take it from us. If our salvation is secured that much, we won’t lose saving faith because of famine, persecution, or death. God has won us.
Hi Jamie
Hope you don’t mind if I weigh in…
The big picture of God here is the important question. How does God go about getting his will done in this universe? Is it through unilateral control or is it through loving influence? Is free will really an illusion or do we have genuine ‘say so’ in this world?
You mentioned about Joseph saying that his brothers intended harm towards him, but God “meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20). Does that mean that God wanted Joseph to be sold into the slave-trade, falsely imprisoned for attempted assault and then left there languishing for years? Or rather, was it that God knew he could use the brothers’ evil actions and use them to bring about good? As Paul says, “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.” (Romans 8:28) If we love God , we know that he will work together with us for good in whatever situation we are in.
You’ve summed up Roger Forster’s chess analogy really well!
My problem with your storyteller analogy is that it doesn’t reflect the world that we live in (or at least what it feels like to live in this world). In the Narnia stories, all the characters and events entirely emerge out of the remarkable mind of C.S. Lewis. The White Witch doesn’t have a life of her own – she is just the literary extension of Lewis’ imagination. But in this world, human being have genuine free-will. The Lord has made us, but we are given the power to make decisions ourselves, ones which the Lord may or may not like.
Now, I guess it boils down to whether God is ordaining everything that happens in the universe. I would argue that he doesn’t. Maybe that would be a fruitful topic of discussion?
Blessings
Tim
Hi Tim,
It’s great to hear your thoughts.
It seems to me that we have two different concepts of what free will is.
Your view being that a choice is free if it is free from decisive influence, so if a given factor or person made your choice inevitable it is no longer free.
My view is that a choice is free if it is in line with your desires, and not forced against your nature.
The key advantage of your view is that it avoids the problem of God intending an action that is evil in the heart/mind of the agent involved. The key disadvantage, to my mind, is that it renders choices arbitrary. If you can’t say finally and decisively that ‘I did this *because*…’, and give a reason why that choice was made, those choices lose significance, but if you can say why you took an action – because it is in line with your nature, your intentions and desires, then it is no longer free in that way.
While certainly our power to choose and to act is much more real than the White Witch, God’s ability to accomplish his will through us is far more artful and real than C.S. Lewis.
I think passages like that in Psalm 139, where in God’s book are written all the days of our lives, the days that *he formed* for us, it seems to me that the analogy of an author is one that fits the way God interacts with nature.
Going back to Genesis 50, I would say that when the brothers intended *it* for evil, and God intended *it* for good, they are at least in some sense intending the same thing.
Now, we both want to avoid the idea that their intent was identical across the board, but I think we both want to affirm that this was the means by which God accomplished the plans he’d revealed through Joseph’s dreams, so we’re still on the same broad scale – that God can accomplish his plans, even through our sinful actions.
If the question is whether God can specifically intend a sin be performed, then regardless of how indirect it is, I can’t see a way of avoiding the charge with the crucifixion of Jesus. How can that be carried out sinlessly by humans? It seems to me that at least that plan depended on sin being involved. That along with the broader idea that God created a world where he would allow free will and sin take place where he could have chosen not to create it implies to me that God must have some responsibility for the existence of Sin, and if we’re to avoid impugning His character, we must affirm that God does have some view that it is better that a world with sin exist than that no world exists.
My view says that all sin is supervised, and only allowed if it accomplishes a greater good (God works all things (not just the consequences of things) according to the council of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace).
It seems that your view has to affirm that God is happy to allow sin that is, in and of itself, hopeless, purposeless and arbitrary, which I find harder to fit with the Biblical narrative than my view.
Another example like Genesis 50 but perhaps more specific is Isaiah 10:5-7. God raises up and sends Assyria to punish Israel, Assyria wants to hurt Israel but not to honour God. The Assyrians intended it for evil, but God intended it for good.
My point on free will might have been a bit esoteric.
I think my culpability is routed in the fact that the way I act is inevitable, because it is a true reflection of who I am under those circumstances.
If, however, nothing in me drives me *decisively* towards a given action, then how could it be fair to blame me for it 5 minutes later? I could have acted entirely differently if I was presented with the exact same circumstances again. It wasn’t a true expression of who I am, because it could have been otherwise just as easily.
Hi Jamie
Good to discuss with you.
I guess there are two issues here:
1. Which philosophically and experientially makes the most sense of the universe: a libertarian or compatibilist view of free-will?
2. Which is a ‘better’ (i.e. makes the most sense of all the evidence) way of interpreting the bible?
Big questions.
Perhaps let’s start with the first…
My understanding of free will is that we, as human beings, have genuine say-so and responsibility for the decisions that we make. God is love and he wants to be in relationship with people who freely choose to love him back. We are, of course, influenced by all kinds of factors from within and without, and are constrained or unhindered by previous decisions or ourselves or others. But ultimately we are morally culpable for the choices we make. The righteous are those who have chosen goodness and turned away from evil, and the wicked are the opposite. Character is formed by the decisions we make, so in the end we get ‘stuck’ in our decisions – either for good or evil. But whilst we are on this earth, there is always the possibility for us to choose to change.
Now you state that “a choice is free if it is in line with your desires, and not forced against your nature.” The problem is, this doesn’t really sound very free! Can we only do what our desires are and only follow our nature? But in my experience, there have been times when I’ve chosen to do something, even though it went against my ‘nature’ (e.g. doing something in the face of fear).
Now if we look at the life of Jesus, it makes the most sense if we understand that people had free will to choose or reject him. Some people chose to follow him and change their minds (repent), and some didn’t. But the cause for people’s acceptance or rejection of Jesus is inside peoples’ hearts, rather than determined by something else.
Does that make sense?
Now you mentioned Psalm 139 as an example of God being the ‘author’ of our lives. If we look at the sweep of scripture, there is so much of the Lord continually holding out his hands to humanity, calling them to turn from wickedness and instead choose righteousness. But if God is in fact ‘authoring’ this wickedness, why does he keep telling us to repent? To me, this does not make sense and so we need to look closely at the Psalm passage to see if we are interpreting this in the best way.
In the context of verse 16 (“And in Your book were all written
The days that were ordained for me“), it is talking about the process of how an unborn child grows in its mother’s womb. It would make more sense that David is just marvelling that God has ordained in his book the number of days that gestation lasts (i.e. 9 months), rather than that God knows exactly which day you will die and so if someone dies young from a violent accident or murder or some terrible illness then this is what God had planned all along. The first interpretation praises God for the wonder of his creation, whereas the other makes him responsible for all kinds of terrible evils in the world.
Turning to the crucifixion, does God need to have ordained all the evil actions involved (e.g. scribes and pharisees, Judas, Pilate etc.) in order to achieve his plan? The Lord’s plan was that he would decisively defeat evil through goodness by Jesus surrendering his life on the cross and then receive it back in resurrection. If we look back through biblical history, there is a very good precedence for the righteous being persecuted and even killed by the wicked. Throughout the gospels, Jesus was under the threat of death for most of his ministry and it seems that God’s supernatural intervention was needed to keep Jesus alive more than orchestrate the crucifixion.
I do agree that God takes ultimate responsibility for the existence of sin: he’s the one who made the world that at least had the potential for evil, and so he’s the one who will in the end put it all right. But we (and spiritual powers, e.g. the devil) create evil when we sin, much like I can create darkness by blocking out the light.
You are also correct (in my humble opinion..) in affirming that it’s better that there is a world where sin exists than no world exists at all. I would want to add that this is because God’s creating a world full of beings who have freely chosen to love him. And in order for this to happen, there has to be the potential for beings to choose to hate God.
I would question your idea that all sin is ‘supervised’ and only allowed if it accomplishes a greater good. At a macro level, I kind of agree: God is keeping this whole universe going, sin included, and ‘allows’ all the sin and evil because that is the price to allow true freedom and love to exist. But I would rather say that God is opposed to all evil, wickedness and sin and is working all the time against evil, partnering with anyone who will love him and will work with him in loving righteousness and hating wickedness.
The end result of this is that there is sin and evil that is hopeless, purposeless and arbitrary. But I would rather have a God who is all good, who is light and has no darkness in him at all, rather than one who is orchestrating some of the horrific and horrendous atrocities that are happening in this world just so we can take some comfort in saying that “God is in control”. Hopeless, purposeless and arbitrary evil can happen to believers too, but if we keep on loving God, he can work in those situations to bring about his good purpose. The cross of Jesus speaks to this: the most senseless and awful murder of the most righteous man who has ever lived can be turned around to bring the most complete victory over evil.
I did try to express this in my previous post, but was rather quick with it. I believe our choices are real, true, profound, genuine choices. I don’t think a libertarian view offers choices that are ‘more real’ than those I make in my every day life and understand on complementarian premises.
In terms of how true our decisions are, we both have the same data to work with. I know what went through my mind as I chose my socks, and accept responsibility for my choice. It was my choice, after all.
None of that is in question.
The way I expressed making choices in line with our desires and nature is something I should have explained further, as it can make everything sound so impulsive and minimal.
We do often choose things that we don’t desire as an end in itself. But if someone chose to make a monumental sacrifice for God and my neighbour, the reason I think that is good and commendable is because it shows they desire to please God and care for their neighbour.
Choosing not to eat a desirable steak while on a diet expresses the strength of the desire to lose weight.
Multiple desires can exist simultaneously, but I think the one that will win out is the one that seems most pleasant to accomplish the goal you find most pleasant. That might involve giving your life in place of another, public speaking despite nerves, or… well, literally anything we might choose.
If you chose to do something that you didn’t desire to accomplish a goal you didn’t desire, I would genuinely consider that to be insanity. The desire is what makes the choice meaningful. It reflects something of you.
And of course we can always change, too. My desires prior to my conversion were almost completely different after I experienced salvation, and so my choices followed suit.
I do believe that the reason we accept or reject Jesus is in our hearts, too – though of course that strengthens the idea that choices are driven by our nature as persons rather than arbitrary. But I certainly don’t think influences outside myself are irrelevant. I think God can incline my heart towards someone, or bring to mind thoughts and desires that help me seek the good, and I believe he can refrain from doing so to accomplish a greater good as well.
The Ezekiel passage you quote can be read pretty much identically by either of us, but I think it’s likely that we disagree on Luke 7:30.
I think you’d agree that God has different purposes/wills/desires that operate at different levels (so to give a specific example I think you could accept, his purpose in giving us free will goes against his purpose that we refrain from sin, because their are corollaries of the former that make it a greater good – the ability to choose to love God).
I think on Luke 7:30, we could both agree that God’s purpose in the teaching of repentance is that people should repent, and we could both agree that this does not happen universally because God has a greater intent, but I think we would disagree on what that was – libertarian free will in your view, the desire to reveal his maximal glory through the full display of his attributes on my view. Neither of those views are in this text, of course. They’re drawn from elsewhere.
I find your view of Psalm 139 rather odd, frankly. If you take it to mean that God created the Psalmist without knowing what will happen to him, but fortunately he had an ordinary gestation period… Well, I don’t see it. How is a pregnancy that could go wrong in any number of unplanned ways reflective of what the Psalmist has said in the same Psalm about God being already present in the future, about God knowing his every words before he says them and… Well, even the specific verses we’re looking at in their own right. God is preparing the days for the author while he’s an unborn child, not preparing the days for the general state of an unborn child that this may or may not hold true for depending on whether they make it to birth, etc.
Regarding which is preferable, you’ve expressed a desire for a God that would allow despicable evils that are individually devoid of hope and meaning for the sake of free will, over a God who would only allow those evils if they worked to accomplish a greater good. I simply don’t understand that view, nor can I work out how to square it with a Bible where it’s almost a cliche for someone who is suffering to cry out to God to ask him why he is doing it, and God never seems to disagree, or where God identifies himself as the one who wounds or kills as a vital part of his description of his own divinity:
Deuteronomy 32:39:
“‘See now that I, even I, am he,
and there is no god beside me;
I kill and I make alive;
I wound and I heal;
and there is none that can deliver out of my hand.”
Just noticed I said complementarian instead of compatiblistic. Oops!
Wow, there are now so many threads to this discussion! Romans 8, Psalm 139, Genesis 50, free will, conditionality, adoption, Isaiah 10, Deuteronomy 32!
It’s hard to know what would be helpful to add in at this stage. I can’t imagine that anyone else would read down as far as this(!), but still happy to continue the conversation for our own benefit. However, I’m thinking that a couple of blog articles on specific aspects/passages might be helpful to focus the discussion and make it more accessible, as it’s very hard to respond to 20 things at once and to argue a ‘big picture’ view without going into specifics. To be continued…!
Ok, so brief thoughts on Rom 8 and free will decisions:
I don’t think there’s a lot to differ with in your summary of Rom 8, except to be clear that adoption and glorification are future events in Paul’s teaching. v18: ‘the glory that is *to be* revealed’; v19 ‘creation *waits* eagerly for the revealing’; v21 ‘creation itself also *will be* set free…into the freedom of the glory of the children of God…’; v23 ‘we ourselves groan…*waiting* eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body’. This all speaks of our future resurrection and coming into inheritance.
On free will decisions, I don’t think the discussions about desires can avoid the problems of determinism. So we make a decision according to the overriding desire-where did that desire come from? Our nature/make-up. Where did our nature come from? Our experiences? Our genes? Our parents? The sin of our parents? Where did their nature and following decisions come from? As we follow the chain of causes back and back any decision or any desire is just the inevitable result of what has gone before: we become no more than a deterministic machine, a computer that just produces the results of whatever was programmed into it in the first place. All our thoughts, desires and decisions are no more than the inevitable results of the conditions we were born into, which are no more than the inevitable results of what went before.
This kind of determinism has been a part of various philosophies and worldviews over the centuries, and certainly represents Dawkin’s view of humanity and that of Islam. I don’t think, however, that it represents a Hebrew worldview, or what it means to be ‘made in the image’ of a relational God. When it comes to eternal Father, Son and Holy Spirit, love and relationship is the ultimate goal, and determinism doesn’t offer much in the way of authentic relationship.
Hi Jon,
I can happily agree with your point on Romans 8. I was making a point on adoption being a present reality (which I maintain) but I neglected to point out that it is still not complete here. It’s one of those now-and-not-yet things, I think.
My talk of desires leading our decision making is tied to my belief that God determines all things. I wasn’t trying to duck that. Just explaining that people seem to assume a determined choice is by definition not a free choice, without necessarily realising there are varying concepts of freedom in the market. Compatiblism seems the most biblical model for understanding how our freedom relates to God’s sovereignty.
I believe that Pharaoh hardened his own heart. I believe that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. I believe Satan drove David to carry out a census. I believe God drove David to carry out a census. The fact that God did these things does not nullify the fact that Pharaoh and Satan did these things, nor vice versa.
I don’t see why determined, inevitable, unavoidable actions cannot be made freely and willingly, because I don’t think freedom is what the libertarian position says it is. If your computer analogy is just a way of affirming that we do what has been intended then I’ll accept the analogy – it’s less open to discussions of character than the equally deterministic analogy I provided with my reference to C.S. Lewis.
I think every relationship I have is determined by God, and I profoundly love my wife. My love is willing, but it’s grounded in who I am and who my wife is. God cannot help but love his creation because that’s who he is. That doesn’t lessen his love. In the eternal state, I think that it’s a certainty that we will not sin again because our natures will be such that we wouldn’t desire to do so. Both of those ideas seem to go against premises central to defences of libertarian freedom as a necessity for true relationships.
My relationship is real in my mind, as is my relationship with God. If you’re going to say determinism isn’t relational or that libertarian freedom is superior in this regard, you need to explain why. It feels to me like you’re begging the question.
Hi Jamie
For me, saying that a free decision can also be determined is like saying that a tripod can have four legs. We might be able to say the words, but that doesn’t mean it’s possible.
For a decision to be free it is a logical contradiction for it to also be determined. I can determine that a computer program performs a certain task, but the computer cannot be said to be free. I may be able to so manipulate and emotionally control another person that I can determine their actions, but to the degree that their actions are determined, they are not free.
Conversely, if I want someone to freely love me, I have to not control or force them to do so. Control/force/determinism are all contrary and in opposition to freedom and love.
We can’t just say “God can” in front of a logical contradiction and make it true!
Are you able to give an analogy of how God can determine my free-will decisions?
For example, I may choose to eat too many Easter eggs, thus choosing to give into the temptation of my flesh. Now if God had determined that this is what would happen, then any sense that I am free to make the choice is a complete illusion. If God has decided that I do one thing, in what way am I truly free to choose another?
If compatibilist free will is just determinism by another name (free choices are actually just actions in line with our nature), then there isn’t a problem. But libertarian free will is another matter…
Blessings
Again, you’re assuming freedom means that the contrary remains equally possible to assert the choices that you actually make are meaningful, without explaining it. If all you’re asserting from the computer analogy is that it does what it was intended to do, then I would agree with that point, but say that obviously the introduction of intent, personhood, desires, contemplation etc do make this world different from a computer simulation. We are looking at the same world. We go through similar thought processes and considerations when we make our choices on either side of this debate. We know and experience the same things. Please don’t assume I’m removing anything like that from my consideration.
My choice is free if I’m able to choose what I want to do. On Calvinism, I am. My definition of choice is an engagement of the mind, will and desires towards an action. I have that.
Compatiblism asserts that I chose the things that I have done, I am choosing what I write now, and I will choose to do what I do in future.
It denies the possibility of the contrary put forward by proponents of libertarian free will: that I was free to do the things I did not do, I am free to do the things I’m not doing and I will be free to do the things that I won’t do. I don’t see that any of those add anything of meaning to the definition of choice. I don’t just mean that they don’t add anything I’m worried about, but that the idea seems genuinely meaningless to me.
To assert that a choice must be undetermined for it to be free is just that: an assertion. You need to explain why the ability to do what will not be done is required in order to make the actualised choices more real.
If it’s that they could both genuinely happen, you’re denying divine foreknowledge. If it’s that the genuine in all respects possibility of sin must be real in order for love to be real, you’re denying the eternal state and nature of God in any form I can comprehend. If you’re saying the possibility of doing the contrary is required for justice, then it would seem clearly unjust to punish someone for past actions that they can no longer change. I just don’t see what libertarianism brings to the table that helps us understand anything.
Very interesting stuff!
I was pondering last night about what it could even mean for God to determine my every action. Does that mean that he micro-manages every decision? Is it rather that, because all my decisions innevitably result out of my desires/’nature’, he just has to wind up the universe and watch it go?
It’s interesting that you say that God has to love because it’s his nature to. Does that mean all of God’s actions are basically determined too? It sounds like you end up with a universe where no no one is truly free!
I think you are on the money when you end up considering the nature of divine foreknowledge. If we have genuine free-will decisions (I.e. we could have chosen otherwise), this opens up a future that is partly unknowable. God knows everything that can be known, including all the gazillions of possibilities of what we might do, but he cannot know what we will do until we do it! We all create the future as we decide and act (God included). God is genuinely free, as are we. Freedom is required for love and relationship to exist, and freedom requires a (at least partly) indeterminate future.
Which I assume brings me firmly into the ‘heretic’ camp?
Blessings in Jesus
“It’s interesting that you say that God has to love because it’s his nature to. Does that mean all of God’s actions are basically determined too? It sounds like you end up with a universe where no no one is truly free!”
THERE IS MORE THAN ONE IDEA OF WHAT FREEDOM IS!
That CAPS was meant to be shouting, by the way, because I keep saying that we’re free, but that Freedom doesn’t have to mean what you think it means. There are diverse understandings of what it means to have free will.
Someone who says Calvinists reject the notion of free will is simply mistaken. We disagree on what free will is.
For you to keep saying that we must be able to choose otherwise for a decision to be free, without explaining why you think other models are less plausible etc is just infuriating.
If you can explain what’s wrong with my argument beyond trying to simply defining it out of existence, I’d be grateful.
Regarding the question on micro-management, that’s fiddly to get into in a comment, but the big idea isn’t that he *directly* causes everything, but nothing happens outside of his plan. He knew what socks I would choose as a result of my location, proximity to clean socks, temperament and mood and could change any number of circumstances to make me choose differently if he desired. He sustained my socks existence, and mine, etc.
He takes responsibility for my choice and could put forward the reasons I chose them better than I could, because he is conscious of a million factors I am unaware of that drive my decision.
That’s a brief meditation on how my system of thought shaped by my exegetical conclusions applies to my choice of socks.
God is inimately involved and responsible for everything that occurs within his creation, but his causation might be direct or indirect.
Hi
I’m sorry that you are finding this conversation so infuriating! I will do my best to try and explain…
“It denies the possibility of the contrary put forward by proponents of libertarian free will: that I was free to do the things I did not do, I am free to do the things I’m not doing and I will be free to do the things that I won’t do.”
May I alter this slightly?
Past choices are now determined because they are now fixed. I can’t change them. However, future choices still remain undetermined. I haven’t yet decided them so they are still open. As we move through time, we transform the uncertain future into an uncertain past.
It appears that you hold to two options for any event – it will or will not happen. I would add a third: might/might not. The future contains indeterminate events but the past does not.
So…
I was free to do the things I might have done. I am free to choose do the things I might do and I will be free to do the things that I might do in the future.
Am I making sense?
Your infuriating brother in Christ
Sorry for my rant. It was just the “so you don’t think we’re free, then?” thing!
I think your tone has been wonderful – just a misunderstanding that we couldn’t seem to get past.
I am happy that God could have a knowledge of what might happen under different circumstances – if our inclinations/environment (and a million other things) were different. I think Bruce Ware’s book “God’s Greater Glory” is superb in how it looks at God’s certain and contingent knowledge.
I do believe that God is aware of the future as an established reality (and that God is in the future as much as he is in the present and the past), so I believe what C. S. Lewis said about God knowing what we will have for breakfast tomorrow.
Obviously he was wrong when he said “everyone who believes in God believes he knows what we will have for breakfast tomorrow”, but no one in history seemed to have conceived of open theism as far as we know, so it seems mean to hold that against him!
“I do believe that God is aware of the future as an established reality (and that God is in the future as much as he is in the present and the past), so I believe what C. S. Lewis said about God knowing what we will have for breakfast tomorrow.”
To be clear, I don’t mean he was in the past and will be in the future but that he inhabits all time simultaneously. “Before Abraham was, *I AM*”, “If I go to the grave, *you are* there”, etc.
The “God is outside time” thing. It’s a handy theological construct, but is pretty much impossible to image what it means. Does God experience reality sequentially? Can he genuinely interact with humanity, responding to and initiating action?
If we look at the narrative flow of the bible, it would be very strange to emerge with a view that God is ‘outside time’. Instead, God is all the time engaging with and responding to humans within time. He makes the world, over a sequence of seven days. He is sad that he has made humanity because they haven’t turned out how he had hopes. He talks with people, sharing about what he plans to do next (e.g. Abraham and Sodom & Gomorrah). And then we’ve got the incarnation, where God takes on a body and then keeps it through resurrection. There is now a man in glory, whereas there wasn’t before!
This is also that God can have a genuine relationship with us.
“Before Abraham was, I AM” I think is talking about how Jesus existed before Abraham, not that God exists beyond time.
Now obviously, God’s relationship with time is different to ours: “a thousand years is like a day and a day is like a thousand years”. But notice it’s not “time is meaningless to God as he’s outside time”.
Going back to ‘freedom’, I would define it as to do with possibilities. At the moment, I could choose A or I could choose B. But until I make that choice, there is no way of knowing which one I will take. Obviously there are probabilities and trends etc, but there is still that indeterminacy.
The problem that saying that decisions are just the outworkings of all the influencing factors we have (desire/temperament/environment), is that it sounds like the ultimate cause for any decision is beyond the control of someone. Jesus says that evil comes from within, from our hearts (Mark 7?). He posits the root cause as coming from us. It’s not arbitrary because it’s chosen, but it’s not determined because it’s in the end a free choice.
Will try and post something better later!
All of your points about God working in time don’t seem to refute the idea that he is in all places in time. Just that he relates to us in time, which is what you’d expect. God is non-finite, we’re finite. Plus I think the point of the universe is to reveal God’s glory through a story.
The only potential issue is God being disappointed with man at the fall – if God knew and planned it, how does it make sense for him to be disappointed? At which point I would say that was part of the plan for the fall. Jesus is the lamb who was slain before the foundation of the world to rescue people from their sin and restore them to God. The separation is part of the story he is telling of his glory. It’s a narrative with light and dark contained within it. Sin truly grieves God, but it is permitted to accomplish his plans.
Regarding your reading of ‘Before Abraham was, I AM’, I don’t see why he should preserve the present-continuing tense if his point is that Before Abraham was, He was. I think (rather uncontroversially) that he’s recalling the divine name – the sheer, constant IS-ness of God.
Saying that we’re evil because our hearts are evil seems to me to reinforce my point. Jesus affirms that the way we act is a reflection of who we are, and without restoration, that is a big problem. We’re slaves to sin.
It’s not right to affirm it’s beyond our control, or that it’s under our control. It *is* our control.
My last paragraph wasn’t terribly clear. My view is that our actions are under our determination. Our determination will be based on who we are. We are the cause willingly of our choices and actions.
Obviously I believe that God is the ultimate cause of all history, and retains an intimate involvement with it, but explaining what makes us who we are is nonsensical if you take our actions out of the equation.
I’m just trying to get away from the idea that I’m promoting an impersonal determination. It is totally personal.
God isn’t controlling us like puppets who have no desires or inclinations, drive or will. God is a much better author than that.
Do check out the latest post which is an interview with Roger Forster about the book ‘God’s Strategy in Human History’!
Ok, a couple of things…
If we say that our choices come from either our nature (who we are) or from the nurture we receive (our environment), both of these end up as determinism. Both are definitely factors: we genetically inherit all sorts of inclinations and are hugely shaped by our environment and upbringing. But if that is all our choices emerge from, we aren’t truly responsible for our actions, and nor is anyone else because they are just products of nature+nurture too.
D
I agree we end up with determinism, and that nature+nurture (and God, and satan, and environment, and timing, and a million other factors) make our choices certain, but I deny that removes responsibility because we still choose to do them willingly. We act that way because we want to, because of who we are as a result of all of those factors.
Am I understanding your thinking about determinism correctly? The choices we make are the result of our own nature and the environment we are in (all external factors), and are thusly entirely predictable.
In what way do we have any responsibility though? I am not questioning whether you think we are responsible for our decisions (clearly you think we are), but rather how it is possible for us to be responsible for our decisions in a determined universe. If a murder only ended up that way because of their upbringing (abuse etc) and because of their environment (poverty), can we blame them for murdering if it was entirely certain that they would ‘choose’ that?
SURELY responsibility requires the ability to choose something else? If our choices are certain, in what way COULD we have chosen something else?
And SURELY the whole point of teaching and preaching in the Bible is to exhort us to make good choices rather than evil ones? Choices have consequences, and the whole point of consequences is to teach us to make better choices next time.
“If it is disagreeable in your sight to serve the Lord, choose for yourselves today whom you will serve: whether the gods which your fathers served which were beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” (Joshua 24:15)
If all of the choices of the children of Israel were already determined at this point, then isn’t Joshua wasting his breath? If it is already certain what they will choose, why bother trying to make them choose something else?
I know that you keep telling me that our choice are BOTH determined AND freely chosen, but this just sounds like (at the best) having your cake and eating it and (at worst) like a flat contradiction.
I think the issue boils down to your definition of ‘free’. Is a free choice one where you are free to act according to your own (determined) motives? That sounds like freedom is to do with the ability to do what you want – therefore a millionaire is more ‘free’ that someone in prison, because they have the power to ‘do’ more.
But the issue of free will is a moral one. It’s about making the choice between right and wrong. When faced with a temptation, do I choose to give in to it, or do I choose to flee? When I have an enemy, do I choose to hate them or love them? Our character (who we ‘are’), is made up of the sum of all those little decisions. If I’ve always chosen hate rather than love throughout my life, it will be easier to keep on choosing hate and hard to make a loving choice.
God hadn’t ‘made’ these people evil, but these people had ended up evil due to the choices THEY had made.
Hi again.
No, they aren’t all external factors. I act a certain towards external factors when I make a choice because of who I am internally (likes, dislikes, goals, confidence, tiredness, hunger, health, etc) which is, in turn, the result of external factors that led me to make prior choices, nurture, genes etc, and God reigns over the whole shebang.
He can shape my character by making certain factors present that would affect previous decisions, or by inclining my attention towards certain factors etc.
I’m responsible because my decisions really are a reflection of who I am. They aren’t random things that could go either way they are real, authentic expressions of my nature – out of the heart, our actions come.
We could have chosen something else if we desired something else more, but we don’t. The point of compatiblism is that we do what we desire most (properly defined so you don’t reduce this to mere instinct, as I’ve laid out above previously).
Joshua is not wasting his breath. God can use the words of others to shape our desires/fears/inclinations and the way we approach them – you must have some experience of this, surely?
After the point on Joshua, I can agree with everything you’ve said and say it fits compatiblism if understood the way I’ve laid it out above.
The question is, can we shape our own character?
If my actions ultimately arise from my nature, what if I don’t like my nature? What if I look at Jesus and want to be like him (kind, loving etc.) but look at myself and see selfishness and hate? Can I change?
If I’m responsible because my decisions really are a reflection of who I am, where does the ‘me’ come from? If it comes from my nature/DNA etc., how I am truly to blame when I didn’t have any say over that? (we can’t choose our parents) If it comes from our nurture (upbringing etc.), how am I responsible if I’m just the product of my environment?
In order to be responsible, there needs to be a bit of us that is undetermined. We get to shape it, one way or the other. And if we choose one way, we receive praise from the Lord. And if we shape it another, we deserve condemnation. Which way we will choose in unknowable until we choose.
Otherwise, we are no more responsible (ultimately) for our actions than animals.
[sorry, tapped ‘post’!]
Down the middle is the little sliver called our will. It’s a bit like the rudder of a ship – it can’t change what the ship is like (nature) or the conditions of the sea (nurture) but it can choose a direction.
So when Jesus says that evil originates out of our hearts, I think this is what he’s talking about. If our hearts are evil, that is not something that was forced upon us (nurture) nor impelled from within (nature), but something we have chosen.
Now with compatibilism, to me it just sounds like having your cake and eating it. We are free and choose our choices but actually God is the author and has chosen them for us.
I’m happy to say that we can work with God (co-authors as it were), but only if my contribution is genuine and distinct from the Lord’s.
In all of this, my ultimate confusion is understanding what determinism adds as a way of understanding the life I live. If every decision I make was actually decided by God, what if I turn out as a murderer? Was that God’s plan for me? And what if some awful catastrophe happens to me? Is that all part of God’s good design?
Maybe I need to write me that blog post on Job!
Blessings
I’m not sure why you think we choose our hearts?
In terms of whether someone ending up as a murderer is part of God’s plan, I would say yes, and point to Judas as an example, the one destined for destruction, whom Jesus knew would betray him. Then I’d point to God saying that he will harden Pharoah’s heart, then Pharaoh hardening his own heart and then God hardening his heart as an explicitly compatiblistic example of that.
Again, it’s important to affirm that God didn’t directly make them that way, but I think he authored history such that they would be that way, in accordance with his plans.
That’s not removing responsibility from God for things playing out the way that they do – I think he happily claims it. But it’s saying the way he causes/allows those things matters.
In terms of what it looks like, obviously it will mostly like quite similar to your life now. I think the biggest difference is hope.
We believe that literally *everything* matters to God, and that he works all things according to the counsel of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace.
If we get disheartened in evangelism, we can know that literally anyone can be saved because God can make it so. We can look at Paul getting ready to give up in Corinth, when God says he should stay because he has people in that city.
I don’t think that’s just saying people he loves (as if to guilt Paul into it), or that he’s playing with averages (there are probably people who’ll repent) but real actual people. It says elsewhere in Acts that while many rejected Paul’s message, those who were appointed to eternal life believed. I find that incredibly reassuring.
When we’re suffering, we can look at prayer for healing, but if that keeps failing, we still have the reassurance of Paul’s thorn in the flesh – that even that is deliberately kept there to teach Paul that God’s grace is sufficient to cover him even through that.
This is a short video (under 5 mins, I think?) put out by a pastor in Texas when he discovered that he had a brain tumour. I think hearing how he processes that news will give you an idea of this: https://youtu.be/SMerKVKssQU
It’s a personal testimony rather than a sermon, but that’s probably the best way of showing what it’s like when the rubber hits the road.
Can I ask how you would deal with a passage like 2 Timothy 2:25-26:
“[the LORDs servant should correct] his opponents with gentleness. *God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth*, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will.”
What do you think it means when it says that God might grant someone repentance?
If we don’t choose our hearts, who does? Our character is the sum of all the little choices that we make, either in the direction of righteousness or the direction of wickedness. As we choose the good, we draw upon God’s energising/working, but if we choose evil, we are letting the energising/working of Satan in us.
Now with Pharoah, it says six times that he hardened his own heart before it ever says that the Lord hardened his heart. And the word for harden is ‘strengthen’, which is a neutral word. So the Lord is strengthening Pharoah’s heart so he sticks with his decision, in order that the Lord can then get his people out of Egypt and into the promised land.
With Judas, this is how Jesus talks about it:
Mark 14:21
For the Son of Man is to go just as it is written of Him; but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been good for that man if he had not been born.”
The Lord knew that Jesus would be betrayed by someone, but it was Judas’ choices that meant it was him. If Judas hadn’t done it, Satan would have stirred up someone else to destroy the Son of God.
I think Jesus assumes the opposit order to you regarding character/heart – we are corrupt, so we act corruptly, rather than we act corruptly so we are corrupt. I think both of us would agree that there’s something of a cycle of reinforcement, but the actual order Jesus emphasises seems to be the opposite of yours.
The first reference to the hardening of Pharoah’s heart is from God in Exodus 4:21. The order I gave was correct, and I think we’re meant to have that promise in mind when Pharaoh hardens he is heart a few chapters later.
Your view of Mark 14:21 simply reads like wild speculation to me. I can’t see a biblical argument to tackle, so I’ll leave it for now.
The discussion seems to have moved to two basis issues:
1. What is meant by (human) freewill?
2. Does God determine everything that happens?
The “libertarian” view of freewill asserts that in some circumstances we have a genuine freedom to make a moral choice and what we decide is not predetermined by God. Earlier in the thread our brother Jamie wrote:
“If you can’t say finally and decisively that “I did this *because*…’ and give a reason why that choice was made, those choices lose significance, but if you can say you took an action -because it is in line with your nature, your intentions and desires, then it is no longer free in that way”
There are three key issues here. First is the idea that a genuine freedom must mean that the choice is “arbitrary”. Often “arbitrary” means a kind of chance, and this is the opposite of what freewill means because it is a conscious choice. Also, of course past choices can affect our settled mindset, and of course most people continue to make choices rationally and in line with these unless they experience a radical conversion and choose to change direction entirely.
Secondly, it makes a distinction between “me” and “my nature”. If the two actually mean the same thing then to asked whether “I” am compelled by “my nature” is meaningless because it sees the “I” as a kind of passive traveller.
The third issue, is whether “my nature” has been predetermined by God to be good or evil in its final choices. In other words, has God predetermined which particular humans will have a nature that rejects salvation, and which other particular humans will have a different nature that accepts it? The Reformed version of compatibilist freewill effectively says “yes”. It assumes God designed us to be born sinners and that it is our nature to remain depraved unless he chooses to intervene and (against our then will) alter our nature to a new one which leaves us unable other than to be Christians. God’s choice of who to affect in this way is a free choice – so presumably is “arbitrary” by the argument above that anything without an antecedent cause is arbitrary. Compatibilist freewill means that what we choose is because of the nature God has chosen to give us (good or bad), and is “free” only in the sense that our choices are not EXTERNALLY compelled. This means, of course, that a dog has compatibilist freewill in exactly the same way as a human. So does a tapeworm or a mosquito. Each acts “freely” according to its own nature without external compulsion. This is why “libertarian freewillers” like myself say that this supposed “compatibilist freewill” is not freewill at all.
The other major question is whether God, in Jamie’s words, “determines all things”. The usual Reformed position (which Jamie hints at in places) is that God has different levels of will. Now we agree that God may sometimes have desires which may conflict in the sense that he cannot have both of them fulfilled. But this does not help in Jamie’s view of ‘ Luke 7:30. This plainly says that the Pharisees had “rejected God’s plan for themselves”, but Jamie says of this verse:
“God’s purpose in teaching repentance is that people should repent, and we could both agree that this does not happen universally because God has a greater intent, but I think that we would disagree on what that was – libertarian freewill in your view, the desire to reveal his maximal glory through the full display of his attributes in my view.”
There are Some basic problems with this suggestion here. The verse does not say that preaching is so that “people (ie some people) should repent”. It says that THEY have rejected his plans FOR THEMSELVES. Not merely that he had plans that some other people would repent, but that it was his plans for them. And on the Reformed premise he could easily make them repent in the same way he did for eg Peter and John. Now if he really had intentionally created their evil natures so that he could roast them eternally to show his “glory”, I cannot see any sense at all in which it could be said that they had rejected his plans for them. But if (as I believe) what Scripture means by “them” is beings with libertarian freewill, then to force “them” to repent would not be a plan being fulfilled for “them”, rather it would be to replace them with some newly supernaturally created beings each with a deterministic Christian nature.
Ultimately, as Jamie rightly says, God bears the responsibility for allowing sin to enter his creation, because he created spiritual and physical beings with freewill. He decided that the eternity of love thus enabled for freely choosing beings was worth the temporary existence of evil which will at some point be totally destroyed. But this does not mean that he determined that sin should occur.
Would it really be “glorious” for a God to show autocratic power to purposely create beings preprogrammed to act in such a way that he could then have an excuse to make them suffer forever? Well to me it seems a strange idea of “glory” in the context of the teaching of Jesus. God’s glory is not the glory of heathen tyrants (Matthew 20:25 etc). The real “glory” of God is when Jesus is lifted up on the cross (John 17:1 etc) and God takes no pleasure in having to judge the wicked but would rather that the wicked repented (Ezekiel 33:11).
At one point our brother Jamie speaks of the “flow of Scripture”. But anyone reading the Bible without the philosophical input introduced by Augustine would surely get the impression that God continually pleads with sinners to repent and continually urges Christians to choose to walk in the right way through the power of the Spirit? This really is what God wants, and when (as too often) it does not happen then he is upset. God is powerful, and God acts, but he is not a divine puppet-master and does not always get what he wants.
On this, it is always interesting to ask someone with a Reformed viewpoint: “Since you became a Christian has there been any sin in your life?” Presumably the answer would be “Yes.” So the next question is “Was it God’s will and plan for you to sin in that way – did he determine that you would do this?” To answer “Yes” to this question would seem very odd, but if he determines everything then what else could the answer be?
Finally just to mention that in our book we look at Romans 8:28 in volume 1 page 25etc. The only plausible translation is the margin of the NIV (for eg the main NIV text misses out the Greek word “together” altogether):
“And we know that in all things God works together with those who love him to bring about what is good – with those who have been called according to his purpose.’
Just as our spirits and the Holy Spirit have been working together in prayer, this verse is not a call to a smug passivity whilst God determines everything, but a call to cooperate with him to bring good into both good and bad situations.
I could comment further on open theism but will leave it with these issues at present.
With best wishes in Christ to anyone reading this
Paul Marston
“There are three key issues here. First is the idea that a genuine freedom must mean that the choice is “arbitrary”. Often “arbitrary” means a kind of chance, and this is the opposite of what freewill means because it is a conscious choice. Also, of course past choices can affect our settled mindset, and of course most people continue to make choices rationally and in line with these unless they experience a radical conversion and choose to change direction entirely.”
Regarding your three objections:
1. You say that ‘chosen’ and ‘arbitrary’ are by definition opposed to one another. I’d agree, because I think choices are made based on factors that prevent them being arbitrary, but once all those factors are understood make those choices certain. If no combination of factors ultimately result in your choice, then another factor is decisive, which seems to be sheer will on the libertarian view as far as I can tell. That renders the choice arbitrary, because it is there specifically to say that non-arbitrary factors are insufficient.
2. I’m not trying to make a distinction between me and my nature. I’m saying that we decide things based on who we are – we are a certain way, so we behave that way. The point is to make clear that ‘I’ do things – it’s an agency driven view, every bit as much as libertarianism.
3. God’s choices are not arbitrary, because he acts in accordance with his nature. He works all things according to the counsel of his will. God’s existing a se puts him in a different bracket to us contingent creatures. Also, Calvinism does not assert that our will is altered against our will. He knows how we are. He doesn’t need to be brutish to accomplish his will in us.
I don’t understand your point about the dog and the tapeworm. Yes, their behaviour is in line with their nature under God’s sovereignty, but obviously they aren’t contemplative/emotional/spiritual etc in the way we are. I don’t even know that I could say that a tapeworm had a will at all, but if it did, it would be quite different.
“It says that THEY have rejected his plans FOR THEMSELVES.”
I didn’t know that’s what was being pointed out from the verse before, but obviously I could say ‘of course!’ to this, because I believe we do choose things for ourselves, as I’ve been repeating on a loop since I got here. I think that is *compatible* with God’s meticulous sovereignty, hence *compatiblism*.
My other point about God having different kinds of will/plan addresses the other point, and you’ve already agreed with that so I won’t belabour the point. Suffice it to say that on one level, it is God’s will that every person, everywhere repents. That’s His will for them. On another level, he has predestined some and passed over others on my view or he has given us libertarian free will.
Just to be clear, God doesn’t replace our will. I’ve never said anything like that.
You ask if it would be glorious for the world that exists now and all the wonder, delight, glory and sadness to be here because God was actively involved in accomplishing his purposes, interacting with every molecule in every moment to reveal more of himself, and propose a world where he’s a bit less concerned about who gets saved – at least not to the point where he does anything decisive about it – because he thinks it’s better that they be their own independent decision units.
I agree that “anyone reading the Bible without the philosophical input introduced by Augustine would surely get the impression that God continually pleads with sinners to repent and continually urges Christians to choose to walk in the right way through the power of the Spirit”, but would say the same follows for those who do accept his insights too. Calvinists agree with that.
“God is powerful, and God acts, but he is not a divine puppet-master” agreed, “and does not always get what he wants.” Obviously on one level I agree and on another I very much disagree.
Someone avoiding chocolate while on a diet could be said not to get what they want, if you mean their desires and moods etc, but they would be getting what they want if you were talking about their plans, and when the plan is fully accomplished they will be pleased that they held the course.
““Since you became a Christian has there been any sin in your life?” – “Yes.”
“Was it God’s will and plan for you to sin in that way – did he determine that you would do this?” – “Yes, but not by direct causes and only as they are in accord with his purposes.”
I think it’s cute that you would say the only plausible translation is the one that no translation committee finds most plausible, but one lists as the second variant reading. It’s quite obviously it’s not the *only* plausible reading.
Thanks for the response. As you addressed me in the second person Jamie I will do the same, but noting as before that CAPITALS do not mean shouting but a lack of italics. This is not a personal issue. So here are some comments.
On the first point, the problem is that you are only willing to accept as “factors” things other than “freewill”. But to us, “freewill” is itself the cause. It is an irreducible basic reality which God has and which he gave us because we alone are in his image. Usually “chance” means that it is undersigned and without any cause, but this is the opposite of a freewill choice which by definition is purposive. Now we could, of course, be mistaken in believing in a reality called “freewill”, and it could be that everything that ever happens is predetermined. But, as Christian philosophers like Roger Trigg have explored, this is not our everyday experience, and it also leads to some theological issues in regard to the nature of God.
In what you label as point 3, you claim that Calvinism does not assert that our will is altered against our will. Now you may not believe this, but it is clear that this is effectively the Reformed position. Total depravity means that we literally have nothing good in us to respond to God. So as eg one Reformed website puts it:
“Calvinism also maintains that because of our fallen nature we are born again not by our own will but God’s will (John 1:12-13); God grants that we believe (Phil. 1:29); faith is the work of God (John 6:28-29); God appoints people to believe (Acts 13:48); and God predestines (Eph. 1:1-11; Rom. 8:29; 9:9-23).”
Now we all know that when the gospel is preached, some react in repentance and faith and so do not. What causes this difference? Those of our persuasion believe that no one can save themselves, but they do have the freewill to accept or reject God’s offer. The Calvinist view is that their nature is totally corrupt, and that only if God decides that they will repent will they do so. He has predestined some to repent and left the others (or in double predestination predestined them also) to be unrepentant and judged. Calvinism does exactly say that “our will is altered against our will”. You repeatedly deny it, but it is very clear in Augustine and his followers that this is precisely what they do say. Maybe you do not entirely follow them.
Now the dog has compatibilist freewill. All the definitions I have seen on compatibilist freewill is that it is a choice made without any external compulsion. Whether the entity doing so is emotional, reflective etc is incidental and many compatibilists (and there are secular as well as Christian ones) see this is purely epiphenomenal. If we have only compatibilist freewill then we are deterministic, just as a dog is, and our experience of it in conscious or other form is incidental. For the dog or for us, the decision of whether eg to be hostile or friendly is predetermined, it could not be other than it is but flows from the predetermined nature of the animal – which in the Reformed version of compatibilism was designed and willed to be like that by God.
You did not really address my point about Luke 7:30. The verse does not simply say that they chose something; it says that in doing so they “rejected God’s plan for them”. If God’s plan is always done then this would be impossible. The point I made before is that it was not just that God had a plan that some would respond and some not, and that they were part of his plan for those selected not to respond. His plan for THEM was to repent, and they rejected that plan for THEM.
You do not really address my point about the supposed two wills, so I will try to rephrase it. OK so we agree that “it is God’s will that every person, everywhere repents”. Now if they were created as freewill beings, then for God to make them repent against their wills would be to change their natures. It would not really be THEM repenting at all, but being replaced by something else. So the reason he does not do this is not because he has some other conflicting will, but it is all part of the SAME will that THEY should repent and come to a knowledge of the truth. But your Reformed position DOES have two distinct and conflicting divine wills. God wants them to repent, and he could make them repent by using the same operation he uses to predestine others to have faith, but he also wants to show off his power by making t some suffer horribly forever. Having made them so that they cannot but stay in sin, he wants to show what a powerful God he is by making them suffer when he could save them And, you say, he actually has no choice in the matter, because what he does is dictated to him by his nature.
Let’s think more about why some people repent and some do not. Jack and Jill die as repentant believing Christians, whilst John and Kate as unrepentant sinners. God says that he would have liked them all to repent. The reason, Calvinists believe, that Jack and Jill repented was that God had predestined them to do so. The reason he left the other two to suffer in hell was to “show his glory” in making them suffer. So why did he choose Jack and Jill but not John and Kate? Was it “arbitrary”? If it was “according to his nature” then presumably there must have been something different in Jack and Jill? But then how could it be “all of grace” as Reformed people often love to say? What decided him on the PERCENTAGE to predestine? Could he not have “shown his glory” by using just a small percentage to make suffer? Did he “love” John and Kate, as presumably they were part of “the world” God loved? If you had two children, would you hope that one of them was bad so that you could “show your authority” by punishing them severely? I must admit that I find this whole view of the God of Jesus just hard to fathom. The classic Christian view, held for the first four centuries, was that God’s gift of libertarian freewill was part of being made in the image of God, and that he really does want everyone to repent and is sorry to have to punish some of them if they don’t.
Your chocolate analogy is not convincing. I did not design the world in which eating chocolate would be bad for me, it was given to me, and part of that “given” was that the pleasure of eating chocolate cannot be had together with the pleasure of being fit. But God designed the whole system within which he operates.
The sin in your and my life remains an issue. You say that God’s will and plan were that I should sin “but not by direct causes and only as they are in accord with his purposes.” What are “direct causes”? Surely there are just “causes” as God directs everything? Could God stop it? If so why does he not? Is it somehow to show his justice? But how odd for Paul to plead with Christians to choose to walk in a Christian way if actually only God could make them do it. And if it was part of his will and plan for me to sin, then surely if I do so I am following his will and plan for me? But I thought that sin was doing something against God’s will and plan? How is sin to be defined? Is it doing something against what God SAYS he wants even if in fact he wants something else?
Finally Romans 8:28. The translation in the NIV margin is not based on any “variant reading”, in the Greek text, and its right translation is the central issue. The main NIV translation simply omits the “together” which is a part of the Greek sunergei and which is there in all the ancient texts. Why it did so is a mystery, but surely this cannot be the correct translation if it has to miss out a term, and to me that means it is “implausible”. I am not necessarily intimidated by “translation committees” who often copy each other, but the RSV translation committee did render it: “In everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.” This is essentially the same as the NIV margin. The NEB also has a translation with a similar meaning. Whether it is “cute” for us to give carefully reasoned analysis over several pages to argue that the NIV margin, RSV and to a degree the NEB are right and other translations implausible, is for readers to judge. But I do wonder from your comment, brother, if you have actually read our book “God’s Strategy in Human History” on the basis of which this thread started? If not I would urge you to prayerfully read it, looking at the whole picture it seeks to present of how God works. Obviously I cannot, in a thread, reproduce all the careful analyses in our book, especially in the more technical volume 2.
At stake is not some peripheral issue, but the very nature of God. Did Jesus really die for the sins of a world God loved, and does God really want everyone to repent rather than perish?
All good wishes
Paul Marston
Thanks for your response.
You agree with me that “a freewill choice which [is] by definition … purposive.” The problem is that you remove the considerations that make that purpose anything but arbitrary. The purpose which finally drives us isn’t allowed to be decided decisively by who we are, what we think is right etc, because if it does we’re unable to affirm libertarianism, so we have to assume there’s this extra ‘thing’ there, which is ultimately not decided by anything within us or outside of us. That is, by definition, arbitrary – I checked a few dictionaries to ensure I wasn’t abusing the term.
In response to my claim that God doesn’t change our will against our will, you provide several quotes from reformed websites that you believe refute my claim – the problem here is that they are discussing ultimate causes. Like the Biblical writers they want to affirm that we become sons of God ‘not by the will of man, but by God’, but the reformed view isn’t that this means God defies or ignores our will but directs it. The reason I desire God and place my trust in God is because God has won me over, despite how my will would drive me without his grace. That doesn’t mean he has defied my will. My will is under God’s sovereignty, both directly and because everything that shapes it is under his sovereignty. I absolutely affirm irresistible grace, but anyone who claimed that meant salvation was against our will simply doesn’t understand what’s being said (or is using hyperbole).
You say that: “The Calvinist view is that their nature is totally corrupt, and that only if God decides that they will repent will they do so. He has predestined some to repent and left the others (or in double predestination predestined them also) to be unrepentant and judged. Calvinism does exactly say that “our will is altered against our will”.”
I agree with all but the last sentence. Our will is directed so that it is not against our will. Our will is other than it was previously, but that’s what happens when you are brought to realise that you were wrong. God woos us, so that we follow him willingly.
We agree that my view leaves our choices as determined as anything else in nature. We disagree on whether that means that our wills are the same as dogs. It’s the same in the respect being discussed, but I think that our will is a meaningful reflection of who we are, and I think God’s image-bearers differ from dogs in the way they make decisions in many, many ways.
On Luke 7:30, we both agree that the Pharisees rejected God’s plan for them on one level. We disagree on whether that’s referring to God’s secret or revealed will. I think he’s talking about his revealed will for them.
Did the people who killed Jesus reject God’s plans or fulfil them? It’s a false dichotomy. Yes to both. Did the Pharisees in Luke 7:30 reject Gods plan for them? Yes. Does that refute the idea that God has plans for them that they are fulfilling in the same actions? Absolutely not.
The two wills can be in conflict, like the person on a diet looking at a chocolate bar has two wills in conflict. His will is inclined towards the chocolate bar in love, yet his plans are such that a greater good will be accomplished by passing over it, so he wills for the greater good.
You reject this model because you assume I’m explaining why chocolate exists, rather than how God can have contrary desires, which is to misunderstand the analogy. If you want an analogy that deals with how it can be good for God to allow evil at all, then I would probably go back to the author analogy. Creation is God’s story of light overcoming darkness. Take the darkness out of the story and it ceases to be a story. The darkness accomplishes a good that could not exist without it. But honestly if pressed, I’d say this area is shrouded in mystery. I believe God has morally sufficient purposes for allowing evil, and that simply allowing us to choose arbitrarily whether we love God or not is not good enough. Our love should mean something. It should be the result of something.
The reason the percentage of people saved is such as it is is decided on the most good and right grounds that can exist – the counsel of God’s will – who God is. That is not arbitrary.
In the example you give, that doesn’t mean that his decision is based on something different in Jack and Jill (as if they could boast), but according to God’s own nature and purpose.
I think that the rejection of the Biblical model of determinism was rejected by parts of the early church for a time is because it was put alongside fatalism put forward by Greek philosophy. Quite naturally, they knew that scripture wouldn’t allow for fatalism, but they went off somewhat overzealously in the other direction. Certainly not unanimously – there are many people who seem to have a good grasp of election before Augustine, but Augustine helped to fit it into a more consistent system of thought.
If Jesus was crucified because God says to the Romans: ‘sin!’, that’s God directly causing it. If God intends the crucifixion of his son, but allows it to occur as the result of conflicts that he knows infallibly will occur etc, that assumes secondary causation. God intended it, made it inevitable, is responsible for it occurring, but is not responsible directly for the sinful desires that provoked it. I think that’s the same with all of my sins.
Our sins are terrible because they are things performed by responsible agents, but even as a given sin wreaks havoc there is hope because God was sovereign over it. We can be like the Psalmists and the prophets who knew all of their sufferings went through God’s hands, so we can still praise him.
It is acting against God’s revealed will, but with that said his secret will ensures that even we are not without hope.
Apologies for the confusion – variant reading should have said variant translation, not textual variant. I have critical texts and textual commentaries on hand.
The most common translation is that “God works all things together for the good of those who love him” so to suggest that another translation is the only possible translation is, on the face of it, absurd. For what it’s worth, a prefer the ESV/NASB to the NIV.
The RSV says ‘for those’, not ‘with those’, which means it is in line with what the NIV, ESV, ASV, KJV, NET, HCSB, NAB, NASB, NLT, NKJV, Tyndale, Wycliffe, The Voice and The Hawai’i Pidgin English Bible say. That’s every translation I own, except The Message which I grant does seem to agree with you. I grant that overstates the case considering that most of those are quite deliberately part of the authorised tradition, and even those trying to avoid it cannot avoid having an interpretive bias shaped by their world-view, but if the case were overwhelmingly strong that the translation is wrong, you’d expect that to make more of an impact.
I haven’t read your book. While everyone I know that has read it has already held your view, it really has been the go-to resource for them, so I certainly owe it to them to read it.
I agree that this is an important issue, and that our understanding of the character of God is defined in part by how we understand this issue from scripture, and I do want to ensure I’m reading the text faithfully.
But I would certainly hope that you would investigate the reformed doctrine further, as it’s clear that you misunderstand our view on some pretty central issues.
Been thinking further about the idea of our decisions flowing from ‘who we are’.
If you had a pet tiger, and then it turned round and mauled you when it became an adult, we wouldn’t be surprised. The tiger is making decisions out of its nature. We can say that the tiger is responsible for the mauling (I mean, no one else did it), but we can’t really blame it. The tiger is only doing what is in its ‘nature’.
The problem with human beings is that we don’t just have a ‘nature’. We are body, soul and spirit. Our bodies are just flesh – with all sorts of desires that aren’t necessarily bad (sex drive) but need to be used appropriately. We also have a spirit, where the Lord took the dust of the earth and breathed into it and made a living soul. The spirit is the bit of us that communes with God and tells us right or wrong (conscience). Our soul is the will+emotions+mind – the ‘me’ part.
Now, the thing is, we can either live according to the flesh (sin) or we can live according to the spirit (righteousness). But we have to decide which one we’re going to live by.
I remember the first time I sinned (as far as I can remember): I was playing with a sharp knife, aged 6 or something, and I cut my hand. Not wanting to own up to this, I then decided to chop up some paper with scissors so I could then say that I had cut my hand using scissors (which would have been fine) rather than what actually happened (using the forbidden knife). Lies and deception.
Was this choice just in line with my ‘nature’? Or was I choosing to live by my flesh (self preservation, not wanting to be found out) rather than my spirit (telling the truth, owning up to my mistake)?
The spirit wages war against the flesh. It’s not a given what we will choose, because our choices matter.
Hi Tim,
Important distinction between us and the tiger: the tiger doesn’t have a contemplative nature. It doesn’t weigh things up, move towards long term goals, etc. Humans think through their decisions.
When I say nature, I’m not equating that to flesh. I mean ‘the way they are’.
I would say that you were acting according to the flesh if I was describing what part of your nature was driving that decision. You wanted to avoid blame more than you wanted to accept responsibility.
I believe that without God’s grace, our nature will always seek to gratify the flesh. With the spirit of God I dwelling us, our nature changes, though not to the degree that it will in the intermediate state or the resurrection.
Our choices matter because they reflect our nature. If they didn’t represent our nature, it wouldn’t be fair to be blamed for them.
“The question is, can we shape our own character?”
The answer is yes.
“If my actions ultimately arise from my nature, what if I don’t like my nature? What if I look at Jesus and want to be like him (kind, loving etc.) but look at myself and see selfishness and hate? Can I change?”
If you didn’t like your nature in any sense, it would not be your nature. You can certainly be conflicted, but you would not sin unless you wanted to sin. My sin as a Christian is grievous to me, because in the moment of my sin, I’m aware that I’m fulfilling a desire that isn’t Godly instead of fulfilling myself in God and a proper relationship with his gifts. In the moment of my failure, my desire for God is weaker than my desire for the flesh. Thanks be to God that he has done what the law weakened by the flesh could not do, by condemning sin in Christ rather than destroying me. But yeah – if I truly hated my sin with all of my being all of the time, I would be sinless. My hatred for sin is generally present during sin, but suppressed, played down, disregarded.
As I’ve said before, your nature isn’t purely biological. You are the product of your decisions, God’s work in your life, your environment… All the things that you would affirm that make up who you are as a person (ignoring a specific present or future decision), I think I would agree with.
“In order to be responsible, there needs to be a bit of us that is undetermined.”
As I’ve stated, I think that’s precisely what destroys responsibility. Saying there’s a bit of you that makes decisions that could swing any number of ways without any decisive cause or reason, and that we take responsibility for wherever this arbitrary part of us decides to blow, independently of whether it reflects who we are or what we’re like? THAT seems more destructive to responsibility than anything.
“What were your reasons for that decision?” Every decision emerges out of considerations within the soul: reasonings of the mind, affections of the emotion and desires of the will.
My contention is that decisions are not the inevitable outworkings of our ‘nature’. It is not certain what we will choose until we have done so. The responsibility lies in the decisions that we do choose. If I am faced with a temptation, there would be reasons for giving in as well as for resisting. But I get to choose which one. The one that I choose may well make sense, but it would not be determined. It would be free.
So whether a decision makes sense or not, whether it aligns with your intentions or not, whether it reflects your personality or not, whether you would repeat your choice under identical circumstances or not – all of that is ultimately not part of a consideration of what responsibility necessarily entails.
Cold, hard, meaningless choices, ultimately reflective of nothing – our wills are ultimately random number generators. God’s creation is a lottery machine. We can try to make sense of it with narratives where our decisions mean something, but ultimately we’re just kidding ourselves.
We’ll still be judged for it. God is fascinated to know which numbers will come out that he will lay his affections upon throughout eternity, and which shall be disposed of, but the result doesn’t have any real value in and of itself.
All of life’s cruelties and triumphs, all of it’s suffering and rejoicing, is the result of capricious wills, bouncing and flopping around.
Hi Jamie
“God woos us, so that we follow him willingly.”
I agree! God is love and he loves the universe along, calling humanity to follow him but never forcing us.
But what if we don’t want to follow Jesus? Can God ‘make’ us follow him? The Lord’s working in the world is powerful and significant, but I would argue that it never overrides our free will. The Lord desires that all our saved, and is loving and drawing all men to himself, but not everyone wants to be drawn. And in the end, because God is love, he allows people to say ‘no’ to him. The reason that not everyone is saved in evangelism is determined by God: but that is because God has determined that he wants to save humans, and for us to be human we have to have the free choice to say yes OR no.
You’re sounding less and less reformed by the minute!
Blessings
Tim
‘If we don’t love God, can he make us follow him?’
My answer is yes, by wooing us over. That’s how every single person is saved. ‘No one seeks after God, not even one’ – till God does something about it.
You think it sounds less reformed, but I put it to you that you’ve simply not understood the reformed position.
If our salvation was ultimately decided on nothing higher than us, even if it is something as petty and meaningless as an unfettered will, it would still give us grounds to boast (going against Ephesians 2).
If you’re like any arminian apologist I’ve heard, you get around that by saying something like ‘the choice was so small because God’s done so much, it’s really not worth claiming credit for…’ But still agree that for whatever reason, you handled God’s prevenient grace better than those who reject God.
That seems to do violence to Ephesians 2, it does violence to God’s grace, it does violence to human responsibility and it does violence to our wills. There seems to be no area that isn’t diminished by that teaching – though certainly if you have a more sensible argument I’d be glad to hear it.
What do you do with the idea that if your salvation is ultimately grounded in you, that something about you on some level is better than those who reject God, thus giving you grounds to boast and diminishing God’s grace in a way that Ephesians 2 seems to prohibit?
I am not saying that we ‘save ourselves’, in that we decided to follow Jesus entirely unprompted. The Lord is always wooing, loving and acting first towards us. He so loved the world that he gave his son. But the amazing, remarkable and wonderful thing is that we get to decide if we respond, if we accept the invitation. Peter tells the crowd “Be saved from this perverse generation!” (Acts 2:40) Jesus tells parables about the ruler inviting people to his feast, which were rejected by some.
There is no grounds to boast for saying “yes” to the Lord’s offer of salvation. I cannot boast about the fact that I said “yes” to an invite to attend a garden party with the queen. I might boast about the fact I got invited at all, but this does’t compare with salvation because EVERYONE is invite. Jesus died for ALL!
You are saying that our decisions flow out of our ‘nature’, out of ‘who we are’. But does that mean that, if you say “yes” to Jesus, it flowed out of ‘something’ in you? That there was something special about you for saying yes, as opposed to someone else who said no? The argument levelled against me applies to anyone who allows room for human decision!
“But still agree that for whatever reason, you handled God’s prevenient grace better than those who reject God.”
But in your understanding, the same applies! If our decisions certainly flow out of our nature, there must be something better about your nature for saying “yes” to God rather than someone else who said “no”.
If we do wrong, there will be distress – we are to blame. If we do good, the Lord will give glory and honour to us! The Lord takes delight in the righteousness of his servants. “Consider my servant Job…” There is nothing better about our ‘nature’, but there is something commendable about the decision we have made.
However, if God is entirely responsible for who gets saved, why does’t he save everyone? If he could save everyone, why doesn’t he? It sounds like a monster who creates someone he knows he will torment forever in hell because he knows/has decided they will reject him.
The problem with your understanding of free will is that it does seem to allow room for boasting.
If our salvation was ultimately decided on nothing higher than us, even if it is something as petty and meaningless as an unfettered will, it would still give us grounds to boast (going against Ephesians 2).
If you’re like any arminian apologist I’ve heard, you get around that by saying something like ‘the choice was so small because God’s done so much, it’s really not worth claiming credit for…’
That seems to do violence to Ephesians 2, it does violence to God’s grace, it does violence to human responsibility and it does violence to our wills. There seems to be no area that isn’t diminished by that teaching – though certainly if you have a more sensible argument I’d be glad to hear it.
What do you do with the idea that if your salvation is ultimately grounded in you, that something about you on some level is better than those who reject God, thus giving you grounds to boast and diminishing God’s grace in a way that Ephesians 2 seems to prohibit?
What is the gift of God? The ‘saving faith’? Or is it rather the saving, which happens through faith? It is always law+works vs grace+faith. Paul’s argument is that we are saved by trusting in Jesus, rather than through following the external works of the law (circumcision, food laws etc.).
Blessings
Tim
I don’t think it is amazing unless the reason you say ‘yes’ to following Jesus is because you actually want to – that there are reasons why you do it that drive you. If the decision isn’t driven by love, if it’s just ‘maybe yes, maybe no, I know what I want but let’s see what my will does’ then it’s meaningless.
If you take everything you’ve said about the invitation and your reply, and say that it’s like this for a reason – that God and I are truly operating on the same page not just at the level that I happen to have said ‘yes’ but that my whole being was behind that decision, you have compatiblism. The invitation becomes far more meaningful.
Oh, and Calvinists reject prevenient grace. We affirm common grace, but we insist that salvo doc grace is always effectual, and that it’s unconditional – not based on anything in us- so we aren’t in the same position of saying that something in us is what separates us from those who reject Christ, except that which God has infallibly worked into us as a result of his grace towards us.
I agree! I follow Jesus because I want to. You are following Jesus because you want to.
Going back to the original post about predestination, are you saying that actually I am following Jesus because God determined that I would?
Yes. God has laid his affections on you from eternity past based not on anything in you but in his good pleasure and will, and he has sent people who would proclaim the gospel to you, he has sent his Holy Spirit to regenerate your heart such that you understand what they say as true, beautiful and good, such that you place your faith in Christ. His work is not as simple as just that, but encompasses all things.
His work is effectual, such that Jesus can say that all who the father gives him will come to him, and he will raise them up on the last day. He began a work in me and he will see it through to completion. He is the author and the perfect or of my faith.
He does all of this not by dismissing my personality or my desires, but my lovingly cultivating them through his spirit and his providence such that they infallibly result in my faith. It is a gift.
Wow.
So, if someone dies ‘unsaved’, that’s because actually God didn’t want to save them. Even though he has said all over scripture that what he really wants is that everyone repents.
And if I do decide to follow Jesus, I haven’t REALLY decided because there was no way that I could have chosen otherwise. Irresistible grace doesn’t sound very loving.
My main objection is that none of this looks like the life and ministry of Jesus. If we see the glory of God in the face of Christ, we should use that to build a picture in our minds of what God is like (theology).
In Jesus’ ministry, there were plenty of people who rejected him. But there is NO hint that this was what God wanted all along. Note Jesus weeping over Jerusalem over their lack of repentance.
So that’s why I’m not a Calvinist.
Just to reiterate: God desires all people everywhere to repent. We both believe this. God desires something else more that prevents this from being what he enacts in reality. You believe it’s so he can allow the decision to be made by creatures with arbitrary wills, I believe it’s so that he can display the fullness of his attributes.
If you decide to follow Jesus as a result of God winning you over, you have decided to follow Jesus. The fact that it’s impossible to do what you will not do doesn’t qualify as a reason to consider that decision less valid. Your free will is compatible with God’s will if you take a less surreal concept of what free will is, namely that it’s a will that acts in accordance with who you are.
Jesus explicitly affirms that a corrupt governor only has authority because God has given it, that a man has been born blind in order to reveal the glory of God, that Judas’ betrayal was inevitable. He knows where the fish will be for Simon and Andrew to catch them presumably because he’s made sure they’ll be there, and off the back of that tells them that he will make them fishers of men. Jesus, in order to explain the Pharisees rejection of him, tells them that his sheep hear his voice. He says that all whom the father gives him will come to him. He says that he is destined to go to the cross. He affirms that God will search for his children like a shepherd looks after his sheep – he knows who they are and knows if any one of them is missing. The gospel writers affirmed that we become God’s children ‘not by the will of man, but by God’… And a bajillion other things that fit the idea that God is meticulously sovereign. The Bible also affirms that we’re genuinely responsible for our choices, which seems to be nonsensical on libertarianism. The idea that God could allow evil without any specific purpose for it seems incompatible with almost every incidence of suffering I can think of.
I’ve heard one response to Genesis 50 that ignores the actual words and grammar used in the passage. I’ve heard a stupendously speculative reading of Acts 4. I’ve heard no response to Isaiah 10…
So that and a few thousand other reasons is why I’m not a libertarian.
Ok, let’s do it!
Firstly, I will not go through all the verse in the bible that talk about how relationship with God comes through repentance and faith, with repentance something that is ultimately down to us.
1. “Jesus explicitly affirms that a corrupt governor only has authority because God has given it”
This is just talking about the authority structures of the world. The state has the power of the sword to restrain evil, and this power and authority has been given by the Lord. This doesn’t mean that God decided that Pilate should be governor (or that Hitler should be chancellor etc.) or that every decision he makes was actually God’s will. But rather, Pilate has authority over Jesus because he’s the governor and is in charge of Palestine.
2. “that a man has been born blind in order to reveal the glory of God”
Firstly, note that NT Greek has no punctuation or even word breaks in the original. The meaning is clear through context, word classes etc. Secondly, the NASB puts in italics the words that they have added in in order to translate it (I have tried to do so above). If we take out those words, Jesus’ answer says:
“neither this man sinned, nor his parents; but so that the works of God might be displayed in him, we must work the works of Him who sent Me as long as it is day; night is coming when no one can work.”
The man’s blindness doesn’t come from his sin nor his parents’ sin. In fact, Jesus doesn’t even speculate how the man was born blind. But instead he focuses on the job in hand: working the works of God, i.e. healing! God’s glory is revealed in healing a man born blind, not making a man blind in order to then come and heal it later on.
3. “that Judas’ betrayal was inevitable.”
Judas was chosen to be an apostle, just like the other eleven. This was his calling. However, he fell from his calling when he betrayed Jesus. I’m not sure where you are getting the idea from that Judas inevitably had to betray Jesus.
4. “He knows where the fish will be for Simon and Andrew to catch them presumably because he’s made sure they’ll be there, and off the back of that tells them that he will make them fishers of men.”
This is a miracle, no doubt, that Jesus was able to perform through the power of the Holy Spirit. God is able to work in this world, including providing abundant catches of fish, but this does not mean that he has to meticulously control everything in the universe.
5. “Jesus, in order to explain the Pharisees rejection of him, tells them that his sheep hear his voice.”
The Pharisees’ question was asking whether Jesus was the Christ. Throughout Jesus’ ministry, he speaks in parables, to disguise the meaning from those who might want to destroy him. If we have repenting hearts, turning to the Lord, he is able to explain to us what is going on and what Jesus means. To him who has, more will be given. But if we have hard, unrepentant hearts, then we don’t understand what Jesus is saying.
If we repent we can then become one of Jesus’ sheep and then see and believe that Jesus is the Christ. If we aren’t his sheep (because we haven’t repented), then it’s little wonder we don’t believe.
6. “He says that all whom the father gives him will come to him.”
The question is, who are the ones that the Father gives to Jesus? A few verses later, Jesus says “Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father, comes to Me.” (v.45) Who are those who have heard and learnt from the Father? It was those who repented at John the Baptist’s preaching, got baptised for repentance and then continued in that faith relationship with God. These are the ones that the Father gives to Jesus, and of course they come to Jesus because their hearts are ready!
7. “He says that he is destined to go to the cross.”
This is God’s plan and purpose: that Jesus would suffer and die at the hands of sinful man and then rise again on the third day IN ORDER to win a victory over Satan, death, sin, sickness, poverty and every evil and darkness.
I’m assuming that your argument is that God needed to meticulously control lots of people in order for Jesus to end up being crucified. As I’ve argued above in previous comments, all it would take for Jesus to get crucified would be to hand him over to the evil schemes of men and Satan. Throughout the gospels Jesus’ life is under threat. The amazing thing is that God’s plan would be that his very Son would suffer and die at the hands of sinners.
God used the evil intentions of wicked people in order to accomplish his plan. He didn’t ordain that they be wicked – after all, if there were no wicked people then there wouldn’t be a need for Jesus to die on the cross!
8. “He affirms that God will search for his children like a shepherd looks after his sheep – he knows who they are and knows if any one of them is missing.”
The context of this is the religious elite grumbling that Jesus eats with sinners and tax collectors. Jesus tells three parables about how God is always seeking after the lost and goes from the inanimate (lost coin) to animal (lost sheep) to human (lost son). Finding a lost coin involves hunting down when you put it last. Finding a lost sheep involves figuring out where it might have wandered off too. But finding a lost son is much more tricky, involves more risk and has no guarantees that love will succeed: after all, the elder son ends the story just as lost as he ever was.
I would say that the parables show us the seeking heart of God after lost humanity, always acting and wooing to bring us back, if only we will return to him. Not that it’s a fait accompli.
9. “The gospel writers affirmed that we become God’s children ‘not by the will of man, but by God’… ”
Many rejected Jesus. But those who received him (repented) and believed in his name, they had the right to become children of God, to be born of God. I would argue that ‘receiving him’ does involve our wills. We choose to turn to Jesus and accept him, or turn away and reject him. So what does verse 13 mean? To be honest, I’m not sure. But I’m not going to use that one verse to build a whole theology that we are born again by bypassing our wills (because God decides who gets saved), especially when the verse before says that WE have to receive Jesus to be born of God.
10. “The idea that God could allow evil without any specific purpose for it seems incompatible with almost every incidence of suffering I can think of.”
I think another problem here is viewing the nature of the problem of the universe. Is the universe basically OK because God is ‘in control’? Or are we in a state of war, where God is at war with rebellious cosmic powers (Satan and his angels) who have deceived and enslaved the human race? If God’s will ISN’T always being done (hence why Jesus tells us to pray “your kingdom come, your will be done” – because it isn’t being done!), then this makes better sense of the world of mindless and atrocious and pointless suffering that we live in. Where 6 million Jews get murdered by Nazi Germany. Where an earthquake in Nepal destroys thousands of homes.
God will accomplish his purposes in this world, but we now get to choose if we want to join in with him in bringing in the kingdom of Jesus or carry on being oppressed by the domain of Satan. For Christian, there is no ‘pointless’ suffering because (so long as we carry on loving God in it) he will work with us in bringing about good.
A God who would determine the evil and wicked suffering in this world for some greater and higher purpose is a God that I want nothing to do with and will not follow. I follow Jesus who shows us a Jesus-looking God who opposed evil and suffering whenever he came across it, healing the sick, raising the dead and driving out the demonic. He didn’t see God’s ordaining hand behind the woman bleeding for 14 years, but rather the affliction of Satan. He didn’t see the ordaining hand of God with the man born blind, but instead got on with God’s work, which is giving sight to the blind.
I could go on, but I’ll leave it at that.
PS. Which verses in Genesis 50/Acts 4/Isaiah 10 are you referring to?
In the numbers you give:
1. You agree with my point about God using human means, you disagree that Jesus is making a point about Pilate despite him addressing him with the term ‘you’. You also fall foul of Godwin’s law, so according to internet logic I have won by default, but I press on.
2. You make a point that you refute as soon as you quote the text. Jesus gives no reason when he says ‘*so that* the glory of God might be revealed’.
3. Jesus sends Judas away from the last supper, because he knows what he’s going to do – have you not read that bit?
4. You’re right. I’m sure Jesus saying they’ll be fishers of men is totally unrelated to the fishing-based sign he showed them immediately before. Don’t be daft. It’s clearly a teaching point related to what it means to be fishers of men.
5. So repentance is done by people before they hear Jesus’ voice? Come, now…
6. Intrigued to know where you get the John the Baptist thing from – can’t see anything in the text to indicate that his teaching specifically is what’s intended here? It just seems to have come out of nowhere to me.
7. The point in raising the crucifixion is that it shows that God has ordained an event that could not be accomplished without human sin, which seems to take the ground out from beneath a lot of your objections. It really doesn’t matter whether it’s via secondary causation as I argue or removed to any further degree – the same issue remains. If it’s ok here, you have to allow for the fact that God has ordained what is, on one level, the most evil act ever committed by man, and that it can still be warranted.
8. I don’t disagree with the reading you offer, but I don’t think it can account for the specificity of Jesus’ parables in this section of Luke. The lost coin, the lost sheep and the lost brother all focus on individual things missing. The heart of the shepherd is revealed in his concern for one sheep. That matters.
9. I’m certainly not arguing that John means receiving Jesus doesn’t involve our wills. Just that our wills are not the ultimate cause of our receiving Him.
10. Jesus doesn’t pray ‘your will be done, period’ he prays that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Satan is at war with God and with us. But Satan’s warring against God is under God’s control. Satan has to ask to torment Job. He has to ask to sift Peter. Satan’s ultimate defeat in Revelation isn’t credited to God or Jesus but to Michael. God’s not worried about losing any battles, is my point. Satan cannot do a thing unless God allows it, as far as I can tell.
P.S. Isaiah 10:5-7 would be great to look at if you wanted to offer your reading. 2 Tim 2:25 too, if you get the chance.
Hi Jamie
whileit’s been fun discusing with you, I’m now done as I don’t feel like you’re happy to engage in actual textual discussion.
Blessings
Tim
I responded to every point – a few times my answer was ‘I simply don’t think you’ve thought this through’, and I was rather brutish about the way I phrased it.
That certainly wasn’t meant to express that I don’t want to have a textual conversation. Were that the case, I wouldn’t have replied at all. I just don’t want to waste much time if a given interpretation is already floundering – put it out of it’s misery with a quick one-liner and move on to the plausible ones.
I hesitate to add another comment, and don’t want to flog a dead horse, but having managed to catch up on reading all these (thanks to a touch of insomnia), I do think there are one or two observations that might still be helpful. Also, for what it’s worth, I think there are now so many texts and points of dispute flying around that we’re in danger of not doing any of them justice at all–the pitfalls of comments threads.
A bit more definition on contingency/openness/free moral choice:
I think it might be helpful to point out that a meaningful choice between at least two genuine alternatives/possibilities does not require *absolute* freedom, or abritrariness/randomness, or complete independence from prior causes and circumstances.
That is to say: meaningful freedom of choice actually requires some restrictions, boundaries and limitations of choice. For example: I do not have absolute freedom, I cannot choose to wake up tomorrow and be an aeroplane, or an Ostrich, or a space alien. I can choose which socks to wear, but even then my choices are extremely limited. In fact, my choices are always enormously limited: there are continually millions of things I cannot choose to do or even think about (eg I can’t choose to think through a degree level maths theorem step by step–I wouldn’t even know one if it came up and slapped me in the face). Absolute freedom is obviously not available to me, and any freedom of choice that would make it possible to inhabit a world with other sentient beings and relate to them in any meaningful way would have to be very much boundaried and limited. The free moral choice of relational and open theology is choice within limits and boundaries.
Being able to choose between two (or more) genuine possibilities also does not rule out the influence of external circumstances and prior causes. We may be able to identify certain direct factors to any event or choice, but there are in fact millions of contributing factors and prior causes that we could not begin to understand or identify. These all have a bearing and an influence on what I will choose. Other human beings have an influence on what I will choose. God has an influence on what I will choose. Satan, unclean spirits etc can have a bearing on what I will choose. Acknowledging all contributing causes and factors however does not *necessarily* make my reaction inevitable. All factors taken into account, there can still be a genuine choice at the end of the day (or at any given moment!) between two (or more) alternatives: how I will react to circumstances and causes thrown at me. God (or Satan) may even override our choices at times (they may do it a lot!), but for a relational or open theologian, the existence of even the smallest nugget of free moral response to the myriad causes and factors in play in our lives makes all the difference in the world to the way the universe works. [See very soon to arrive blog article for definitions and differences of relational and open theology etc].
Likewise, the free choice between two (or more) alternatives does not require randomness or sheer chance. Rather, it would require God to deliberately design and create an environment with limited and boundaried freedom in which we can relate to and be influenced by God, creation, fellow man and Spirit powers, yet have a genuine moral choice between at least two moral alternatives–so the freedom of choice really just boils down to whether will we be accepting or rejecting of God’s invitation to trusting relationship, whether we will be obedient or disobedient to His command.
If I were searching for an illustration, something like God putting man and woman in a garden with a choice between two trees would probably do the trick…..watch out for the snake!
I’ll stick to one issue and leave it there.
ps Tim–how did you manage to do italics?! It’s really frustrating!
I think that my concern still applies – if you have 2 choices which you find both of them appealing in some sense (love God or be like Him in the case of the two trees), then how does your choice actually happen? What causes you to go with one over the other? If it’s who you are, then I can see how it could be fair to hold you responsible. If it’s something that could go one way or the other regardless of who you are, then I can’t see how that works.
We could say that our nature and external factors etc shape the number of choices available, etc, but if you still think that the decisive moment when, from the remaining options, any time we actually do anything of importance it cannot be ultimately because that’s our nature, it seems to render our choices meaningless, and negate responsibility for them.
Even if you can imagine how you could see how either of them could satisfy, the *decisive* factor renders that inconsequential.
Doubtless many things influence what we choose in the decisive moment, one of those things being “who we are”. But do those many causes=an inevitable result, or at the decisive moment are two or more reactions actually possible? I think the reality is that many factors push us in one direction or the other, one of which is “who we are”, which has been shaped by previous causes, circumstances, influences and choices. Do all these add up to an inevitable result, or has God actually made us in a way that more than one reaction is possible? If only one reaction was ever possible, I would question whether that person could be held responsible. If more than one reaction was possible, then we definitely should be held responsible for which we choose. Our reaction will be affected by who we are, but not inevitably caused by it. There are many factors, therefore, but the decisive factor is our moral choice towards or away from God, and that choice is unforced.
OK, while I have a minute, Isaiah 10 was in my daily reading this morning(!), which has prompted me to comment on it (inevitable…maybe! 😉 )
I think it’s important to point out that with relational theology and the relational end of the open theology spectrum (see forthcoming article), it is quite possible for God to influence, use, control, predict and even ordain future events and the actions of human beings. There are straightforward examples of these things happening in scripture, even though many are argued over and open to varying interpretations. The disclaimer is that this doesn’t necessarily mean He meticulously controls and ordains everything. This is asserted for the same reason: there are examples of God predicting, influencing and ordaining future events in scripture, there are also examples of Him saying: “depending on what you choose, I will do something different accordingly” (eg Jer 18). Relational and open theology attempts to do justice to both these streams in scripture, and allow our view of God to be shaped by these scriptures (of course interpreting them in the light of Jesus, God’s primary and ultimate revelation).
Just to acknowledge at this point, I know that reformed scholars try to do the same thing but in a different way, eg Bruce Ware explaining the second stream of scriptures as anthropomorphism. I’ll leave that to one side for now in order to look at Isaiah 10.
To be honest, having said that, there is no great problem with Isaiah 10. If you want to interpret God as controlling Assyria’s actions and then judging them and still be an open theologian, you can, it’s possible (no pun intended)! Ok, sure, a lot of relational/open theologians would try and draw the line a lot more open than that and probably explain God’s involvement in a different way, but that is a spectrum and depends on your particular interpretation of any given scripture. There’s no rule as to where exactly we draw the line of what God has decided/ordained and will make happen, and what He chooses to leave open to possibility–that’s up to Him!
What I’m trying to say is, God using Assyria to attack and to judge Israel is not necessarily a problem to a relational theologian. What would be a problem is if you said: ‘God overruled the King of Assyria’s own personal moral response towards Him’. In that respect, sending him to war is not quite such a big deal (I realise that in other ways, sending him to war really IS a big deal, to many people and myself included–but I’m trying to illustrate what the bottom line of moral freedom is).
I think it is likely that we would actually say some similar things about God being able to use the free and sinful actions of human beings and nations to get His will done on the earth. How much He is controlling those actions in specifics is a slightly different question, but fundamentally He still uses the actions of rebellious and hardened human beings to get His will done. The problem for the relational theologian only comes if you say God made them harden themselves against Him relationally and morally in the first place.
I agree with pretty much everything here.
I concede that it’s totally possible that God could ordain certain events without that entailing he ordains all events. I do think that if he does ensure his plans will be brought about through the sinful actions of people (which he sees in advance will follow as a consequence of him raising them up) that some of the wind is taken out of the main arguments against my position.
If it was ok in that instance, why is it a moral problem elsewhere?
Of course, no informed Calvinist would say that God contradicts our wills. That’s not in question. We don’t think God ‘makes’ people sin directly, or forces them into anything. We just don’t see openness as a possibility in the way you describe, owing to our view of passages relating to foreknowledge and sovereignty.
And of course we all want to make sure that our view is that taught by all of scripture.
Finding a right line to balance divine sovereignty and human responsibility, God accomplishing all of his purposes and being grieved by sin, etc is a tricky thing. I don’t so much adhere to Calvinism because I think it has nailed this perfectly, but because I personally find the arguments most persuasive, exegetically, rationally and pastorally, but I appreciate that you see things differently.
ps just in case you’re now wondering if I’m in fact not really much of an open theologian at all, I confess that I am probably a lot more ‘open’ than I am letting on in most cases–however, the bottom line remains the same!
Also my choice of words could have more helpful here:
“…it is quite possible for God to influence, use, control, predict and even ordain future events…”, I essentially believe this to be true, although I imagine the word ‘control’ would be contentious and at the least heavily qualified among most open scholars.
The one thing that has confused me most in this conversation is why you think it might be necessary for achieve to be free in the way you do in order for responsibility to be real.
There are hypothetical freedoms here – you’re being aware of other possibilities and choosing to act as you do – that we agree on, but it seems to me that real libertarian freedom extends beyond that, such that if you could wind back the clock (without inheriting any knowledge that would alter your mindset), that given the exact frame of mind that you had in exactly the same circumstances, you could still choose differently.
It seems to be considered almost axiomatic that this is a morally superior system, but I just don’t see it.
Do you think it is just that – axiomatic – or do you have any reasons to express why you think it is the case?
As I’ve said, my view simply assumes freedom is acting in line with who you are in given circumstances. I’m not free to make a choice if someone prevents me from doing as I desire, but if I can choose as I desire then my freedom is not in question.
So the reasons I’ve given are both philosophical and scriptural. The Philosophical arguments only have value as far as they are in line with and make sense of God’s ultimate revelation in Jesus, and scripture as a whole which testifies to Him.
So first of all the scriptural reason that I’ve offered so far is that the reality of free moral choice (in the way that I’ve described) makes the most sense of the fact that in scripture God both:
a) explicitly says that He determines some events in the future
and
b) explicitly says that He leaves some possibilities open and contingent upon human choice (eg Jer 18).
The philosophical reasons really just follow on from these scriptural observations (along with many others unmentioned). A deterministic philosophical system does not do justice to this scriptural worldview.
Freedom defined as “being free to choose according to our desires” or “being free to choose according to who we are” does not avoid the pitfalls of determinism, which cannot accommodate freedom and responsibility despite the best efforts of many Arminians over the centuries (consistent Calvinism emphasises human depravity far more than freedom and responsibility–to try and affirm both God’s exhaustive foreknowledge and man’s freedom and responsibility is a classically Arminian position).
Freedom as only “being free to choose according to our strongest desire” is still determinism, because the result is inevitable, and because our desires and our nature are equally the inevitable results of previous causes, which in turn are the inevitable results of other previous causes. We are not responsible for our desires or nature, previous causes are. Our desires, our nature and our choices are all links in a chain of inevitable cause and effect that was set in motion by God at creation. History can and will only ever take one course which is known by God ahead of time, no alteration to that course (even down to the finest detail) will ever be possible.
To hold determinism and free will/responsibility together is logically and philosophically impossible (unless written off as a paradox), which is (in my view) the failing of classical Arminian thought. Consistent Calvinism would (presumably gladly) have to agree with that criticism, and assert that yes, God is meticulously in control of everything that happens and has determined it to happen that way from creation, including your “free” choices. Free choice in the terms that I have described is non-existent or an illusion.
Free choice in the terms I have described is not a lottery or a random outcome generator: it is the God given ability of humans made in His image to make an unforced choice whether to reciprocate or reject God’s offer of loving relationship. Our moment by moment choices really do affect the future and eternity. God is not outside of time nor experiencing all moments past, present and future simultaneously, so a choice made in the present really does affect and change the future. The choice is not arbitrary or random, rather it is precisely that ability to choose whether to love God in return or not that makes us human. For any human being it comes down to a simple decision: do you want to know and love God or not? Yes or no? He has made the universe such that you can freely choose to love Him or reject Him, and He will not force your decision. For God love is pre-eminent and that is why He has made it in this way.
I’m certainly happy to say I think choices are determined, but forced makes it sound too impersonal, which is the opposite of what I’m going for. I’ll express my view on Jeremiah 18 tomorrow – far too tired now.
I do think it’s important to affirm the difference between Arminianism and Calvinism on how they see our wills interacting with Gods will as there are important distinctions (though not impervious to your criticisms) but again, that’ll have to wait till I’m more alert.
So, Jeremiah 18. I’m assuming that the key point your making is summarised in verse 8.
God talks about his work in the nations with an analogy of a potter working clay, but some of the clay is spoiled and that effects how he works with it. The spoiling is not attributed to him in the passage, only the way that he then works with it. The analogy goes on to speak of judgment, then God says in verse 8 “if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it.”
So God intended one thing, but will do another depending on their actions.
Now obviously that’s fine if his intent in the passage is just to talk about how judgment works. We all agree that Gods stance over us in sin is one of judgment with hope of repentance and we all agree that if we do repent then his stance towards us is different. We both accept that God uses warnings as a means of bringing about repentance.
But if the passage is not solely about how God relates to us in judgment or mercy given our behaviour (which we can both agree on), but also on why we behave that way, Calvinists might be in trouble, because it might suggests that the ‘why’ is out of his hands.
So, I guess the question for me at the moment is why you think it is referring to the origin of our behaviour, and what do you think it suggests is the origin? Where do you find it in this text?
What I’ve been pondering is the whole idea of determinism at all. We’ve accepted the premis that animals have a degree of compatibilistic free will, but does that mean they are entirely determined?
Take my pet rabbit. The sorts of choices he might have are determined by his nature – shall I hop over here or there? Shall I let the scary toddler stroke me or shall I run in fear and terror? But that doesn’t mean he’s entirely predictable. There is a degree of freedom/playfulness/responsiveness to the very fabric of our universe that just won’t be tied down.
Take weather for example. Very hard to predict. Not just because we’re not clever enough, but because it’s affected by so many factors that often have that little ‘wriggle room’ of freedom in them.
Or consider the ravens. They are all the time responding to their environment and acting out of their own needs and desires. Shall I fly this way or that? Shall I fly off or fight back to that pesky cat? Etc.
I reckon that animals have free will to an extent, in that they get to direct their lives. They will end up choosing out of their nature, but with a degree of indeterminacy. The rabbit most likely won’t bite my hand, but there is a chance it might. There are degrees of probability but always that element of uncertainty.
Because the Lord loves freedom (because he IS love) and has made a creation that is genuinely distinct from himself and can genuinely respond and interact with him.
What humans get is moral free will. Where the choices are not just between multiple options, but between options that are morally good or bad.
Just some thoughts.
Still don’t quite know if I’d use the word ‘will’ when describing an animal. I’d tend to assume things are more instinctual than willed, but it’s not a hill I’d die on.
I’m certainly happy to say that the factors involved in predicting anything meaningful are almost always mind-blowingly complex.
Everything you’ve said could fit a compatiblistic model perfectly, though.
I’m still not ignoring the fact I said I’d get back to Jeremiah 18 – I’ve just been crazy busy so can’t fit in more than a 2 minute reply. Hopefully lunch-time today.
Question: what in Jeremiah 18 suggests to the origin of our behaviour?
Verse 4: But the vessel that he was making of clay was spoiled in the hand of the potter; so he remade it into another vessel, as it pleased the potter to make.
The meaning from the chapter suggests that the fault of the spoiled pot is with the clay (some impurity) rather than the potter. The potter responds to the clay’s willingness or otherwise.
Verse 8: if that nation against which I have spoken turns from its evil, I will relent concerning the calamity I planned to bring on it
The ‘nation’ does the turning.
Jeremiah 18:11
So now then, speak to the men of Judah and against the inhabitants of Jerusalem saying, ‘Thus says the Lord, “Behold, I am fashioning calamity against you and devising a plan against you. Oh turn back, each of you from his evil way, and reform your ways and your deeds.”’
Here it is the ‘men’ who need to turn back from their evil ways and reform their deeds.
Wherever the action/intention comes, there is no suggestion that it comes from anywhere apart from within the men themselves.
The fact that the Lord is pleading with the wicked to repent suggests that neither their continued wickedness or their repentance is a certainty.
Blessings
Tim
You rightly say “wherever the action/intention comes from, there is no suggestion that it comes from anywhere apart from within the men themselves” and obviously that’s not a problem for Calvinism unless it is either:
A) a passage that Calvinists specifically uses this passage to teach meticulous sovereignty
or
B) it contradicts meticulous sovereignty.
My view is that it doesn’t teach or refute a specific understanding of how our freedom works, but that it refers to how God relates to us with that freedom and the choices we make taken for granted.
So God sees sin and earnestly warns U.S. and invites us to repent, some will and some won’t. That’s the beginning of the conversation. We know that happens. Now why? For that, obviously I’d use other passages.
I don’t know why autocorrect keeps changing us to U.S. but it’s a regular enough occurrence that I should have picked up on it. Sorry.
Now the question is, what is ‘meticulous sovereignty’? If it is that the Lord is king and reigns over the universe with love, I have no problem with it. If it is that God absolutely controls everything that happens in the universe (hard determinism), with not a single particle in the cosmos doing anything that God has not explicitly told it to do, then I have a problem.
1. Everything that happens is beside God has determined it to happen.
2. Therefore the sin that is mentioned in Jeremiah 18 has been explicitly determined by God to happen.
3. So when God pleads with Israel to repent it is quite hollow: they either will repent, because he has determined they will, or they won’t because he has determined they won’t.
Now I know you will disagree with points 2 and 3. But they do logically follow on from point 1.
Compatibilistic free will either softens some of this determinism (because there is a degree of freedom, even if it’s on ‘rails’ – freedom to act but only in line with one’s nature), or it makes any talk of ‘freedom’ meaningless: if all my decisions are determined by God, then they are his decisions, not mine. I might feel ‘free’, but in reality I am just a character in a book that has been written by the author, not me.
Do take a look at Jon’s latest post looking at the theological spectrum of human agency vs divine foreknowledge.
Blessings
Tim
I don’t disagree with point 2 (except possibly for the term ‘explicitly’ – not sure what you mean by it here), but I do disagree with point 3 as God’s warnings/invitations are part of the means he uses to bring about repentance.
God hasn’t determined to save me apart from means, or to condemn sinners without showing them a way out. We’re responsible because we willingly act as we desire in line with these factors. That doesn’t mean that God does not ultimately ordain that things will be a given way.
The reason I used the modifier ‘meticulous’ is because I don’t think you’d have an issue with me saying that God is sovereign and accomplishes his purposes by means of his sovereignty – the thing we disagree is how that works and how far that drills down. I believe that there are no ‘stray atoms’, but you think that takes the idea into areas that it’s not intended to be taken.
Hi Jamie
Not sure quite what I meant by ‘explicitly’ here. I guess as opposed to God just determining that there is a universe where love can exist and so there is therefore the potential for sin to happen. Maybe ‘deliberately’ or ‘meticulously might be better?
I think this is where we start hitting logical problems.
I do agree that warnings/invitations are the means that God brings about repentance. We willing act in response to these things, either to repent and be saved or harden our hearts and be condemned.
However, I don’t understand how you can say that God determines repentance or otherwise? We know from scripture that he wants everyone to repent. From the system you have been trying to explain to us, we act in line with our ‘nature’. Now if God has determined that sinner A will repent, and sinner B won’t repent, how does he make sure that happens? In Romans, we read that it is God’s kindness that leads us to repentance. But God is kind and good to all, but not everyone repents! So has God determined the nature of some so that they ‘willingly’ don’t repent, thus God still gets to be completely ‘in control’? Or is it actually that we are the determining factor for repentance? God doesn’t determine whether anyone repents or doesn’t repent: he invites and then, out of love, allows us to decide ourselves if we will respond or not.
The logical options are:
1. God determines who repents or not: our actions inevitably flow out of our predetermined natures.
2. God doesn’t determine who repents or otherwise: we get to decide if we want to repent or not.
It is a logical contradiction to claim that God determines exactly who will repent and we get to freely choose whether we will repent or not. Of course it is possible to write that in a sentence (just as it is to write 2+2=5 or “a square has three sides”), but that doesn’t make it logically sensical.
I’m happy for you to believe that there are no ‘stray atoms’, but please don’t try to claim that there is any freedom in such a universe.
We are again stuck with me explaining that just because you assume libertarian freedom is the only real definition of freedom does not make it so. I’ve explained innumerable times that my view on what freedom means differs from yours.
It’s a logical contradiction if I try and fit my view of determinism with your view of freedom. It’s not a contradiction if I put my view of determinism with my view of freedom.
God can want repentance from all, offer kindness to all and send his message to many (desiring that it eventually goes to all), yet still have that only save some and not others. I think that fits the text, your view and my view. Then we have different explanations of how things end up as they do owing to our views on human freedom and the nature of God.
If the debate was about whether we choose stuff and I was saying no, obviously I’d lose. But it’s not about that. We both agree that we choose things. The argument is about why we choose one thing and not another, and what that decision entails.
[point 1 should be ‘because’ not ‘beside’]
I agree – our issue boils down to outstanding of freedom.
I guess the question is then whether our theory of the fabric of reality corresponds with our experience of reality. Do we live life as if God determines everything and our decisions are the inevitable result of our natures? Or that we have genuine say- so in the universe and that our choices are significant and undetermined?
Why punish criminals, if their ‘choices’ are actually just the inevitable result of their determined nature, which Is exactly the way that God wants it? Do we not rather punish criminals because they are responsible for their actions and could have done otherwise?
Why bother deliberating over a decision, if every decision will inevitable result from my nature and be exactly what God determined would happen? Do we not rather carefully weigh up decisions, because actions have far-reaching consequences, good or evil.
I am not saying that this is how you think or how you act, but rather pointing out the logical conclusion of a deterministic view on the world. If my logic is inconsistent, please point out where.
If the best way to live in this world is to act as if our decisions were not determined but were in fact ‘free’, might this not suggest that the nature of reality is in fact like this?
Obviously, I don’t know what God has planned, so I can’t act as if I know I do, but I do live as if my choices are meaningful and that they have moral value, both of which seem somewhat incongruous if you assume libertarianism.
And you punish criminals because they are criminals. You don’t punish them if they were forced into it, but rather because they commit those crimes willingly.
If a criminal genuinely did not want to commit a crime and did so anyway, we would assume that he was insane, and thus his irresponsibility would be diminished. His actions have to be representative of his character for culpability to make sense.
By why did they willingly commit those crimes, if their decisions just emerged from their nature and are entirely predictable? Are there certain people who are born criminals and so act that way out of their nature?
Whereas I believe that people are born innocent and then make choices about the sort of (moral) person they will become. Like the garden of Eden – there was nothing in Adam or Eve’s nature that required them or even ‘made’ them do it: they chose to eat the fruit and choice have chosen not too!
There is a point that needs responding to here, but there is one thing I need to check first – does this mean you don’t believe in original sin at all?
I don’t believe in Augustine’s original sin: a lump of sin gets passed to a child during the (sinful) act of procreation, which needs to be washed away by infant baptism lest a child goes to hell if they die in childhood.
I do think that Genesis tells us the account of the ‘original sin’ – the first one in the human race. And I believe we all have original sin – the first time we sin.
I don’t believe we are born ‘sinners’ – what possibly can a newborn child do wrong?!
And we deliberate because that’s what God commands us to be wise. It’s not that our actions are irrelevant because God will get his way no matter what. It’s that our actions are part of God getting his way.
I believe that God predestines people to salvation, so I share the gospel. I believe Jesus will build his church, so I serve in it. Our actions are not superfluous to Gods plans, they are part of them.
I agree that evangelism matters. If we preach the gospel people get saved, and if we don’t then they don’t. But does that mean that if I don’t preach the gospel and no one gets saved, that was all part of God’s plan all along? That is the logical conclusion of such a determined position.
If God is instead genuinely partnering with us to bring the good news of the kingdom to the ends of the earth, our gospel preaching makes a real difference: it we preach, they get saved and if we don’t, they won’t. The only predetermining God has done is that all who call on the name of the Lord will be saved!
How can God still be morally good if he could save everyone but doesn’t? Is that not like leaving the sinking Titanic with a half-filled lifeboat?
If nobody preaches then nobody will be saved, and if that was the world we lived in then my logic would entail that God thought that was the right world to make. Obviously we know that isn’t the world God decided on because it’s not the world we live in. We know that God’s nature drove him to save undeserving sinners instead, because that’s the world we live in.
I don’t believe God’s nature drove him to save sinners. I believe that out of the overflowing love that is between the Father, Son and Spirit, they decided to save humanity. It was a choice, made freely.
I’m not sure why believing in libertarian free will means that our actions aren’t meaningful or have moral value.
Let me try to explain.
Every decision that we have made will have a reason for it. Eg. I ate the chocolate cake because my craving for sugar seemed more urgent than my desire to eat healthily. However, libertarian free will proposes that there is (a degree of) freedom at the point of decision: I could have eaten chocolate cake OR I could have refrained. If I had refrained from the cake, there would have been a reason for that too. What it suggests is that there is a degree of uncertainty over which decision will be made until it is done so. Chaos theory notes this indeterminacy in the universe: the sheer complexity and interconnectedness of the world means that nothing is entirely predictable. Which makes believing in a partially non-determined universe plausible. And a completely determined considerably less likely.
Now the reason that I mention that we only have a degree of freedom in our decisions, is because our decisions shape our character and restrict future decisions. If I choose to smoke today it will be harder to choose to not smoke tomorrow. If I choose to be loving today, it will be a little bit harder to hate someone tomorrow.
This is why I think compatibilistic free will is like a short circuit: if my decisions inevitably emerge from who I am, how can I possibly change? I choose X because my nature determines that I do. So could I have chosen Y? And who made me be the kind of person who would choose X?
Whereas libertarian free will says that I shape the person that I am by my decisions. And the one that is deciding is ME. And that is a little bit mysterious and free, much like quantum physics. But it makes more sense than a clockwork universe.
But that ‘degree of freedom’ as you put it is the problem. That’s the thing that makes the choice arbitrary.
Chaos theory is about complex relations, as you say – it’s opposed to randomness, but explains seeming randomness, as compatiblism does on a personal level. Some (not all) variants of quantum theory maintain that there is genuinely randomness in this universe. I don’t know enough about quantum theory to interact with those views meaningfully, but I assume based on scripture that God really is sovereign over all of the things that appear random to us, and that randomness that we think we perceive is in fact simply a consequence of our finitude.
As for the ‘can we change’ question, the answer is obviously yes. We are part of a story, and our characters and motivations change in different seasons of life. God might redeem someone and change them radically.
The only change I don’t believe can occur is a change that deviates from God’s plan.
If I might choose to commit adultery and I might not, and the decision isn’t ultimately settled by my view of God, even if it is a big factor leading me most of the way in one direction, then whatever that deciding factor is becomes more important than my moral concerns. My following my desire to please God would be a happy coincidence, or my choosing to pursue temptation would be an unhappy coincidence.
Neither choice is driven by my moral concerns entirely, so it would not be fair to judge me based on whether I lived up to those concerns or not. They cannot get the deciding vote. It is not allowed to them.
Ask any statistician about randomness…or roll a dice?
I think the word ‘arbitrary’ is getting me confused. The OED defines it as “based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system.” It comes from the word for ‘judge’ (arbiter). Are you saying that libertarian free will decisions are random (i.e. uncaused by human agency) or based on personal whim (i.e. a person is deciding them, as opposed to a system of decision making [computer says no])?
Proverbs 16:33
The lot is cast into the lap,
but its every decision is from the Lord.
To paraphrase, “we roll the dice, but God decides the number.”
And yes, I’m using the word arbitrary as the dictionary does.
Sorry, misread your post – I think the human agency itself is random on libertarianism. Everything becomes just a whim, a flighty decision rather than anything weighty.
Some decisions are just ‘whims’. But not all decisions. We can reason, consult others, consider carefully and then decide a course of action. The bottom line is that WE have to make the decisions.
Tim said: “I don’t believe we are born ‘sinners’ – what possibly can a newborn child do wrong?!”
You see, that isn’t original sin. It’s not that a newborn is born a sinner because they have sinned already, it’s that they inevitably will sin because they’re born sinners.
We are all in Adam, and bare the mark of his sin, so we are all biased towards sin. Augustine saw this as genetic, which is somewhat oversimplified – I prefer the doctrine of total depravity because I think it avoids some of the pitfalls of Augustine’s doctrine, though I certainly think he was on to something.
Tim said “I don’t believe God’s nature drove him to save sinners. I believe that out of the overflowing love that is between the Father, Son and Spirit, they decided to save humanity. It was a choice, made freely.”
But where did that love come from? Do you think it was incidental to him, rather than who he is? What do you think it means when John says “God is love”?
I do think that God IS love. And when you love, a whole world of options open up to you. There are plenty of ways to love your neighbour. I guess I want to ascribe to the Lord freedom in his action – if you HAVE to love someone, that doesn’t sound like love.
It depends on why you have to love them. If it’s because the object of your love is in fact perfectly lovely and you were unable to see it until you were coaxed into willingly opening your eyes, then I can’t see why you wouldn’t consider that love.
To see God as he is, and as he is towards us, is to love him. We’re unable to see it as we love darkness, it if God opens our eyes to really truly taste his goodness, then we can’t help but love him.
My objection to you using “have to” is it implies that you’re doing so despite yourself, rather than because you are who you are.
Ah, that’s assuming we’re talking about us loving God. God loves us out of an overflow of his abundant intra-trinatarian love. We were created both to be an object and a display of God’s glory. God loves us because he loves his glory, and because the Father loves the Son and the Spirit, and all operate in our creation, redemption and glorification.
He cannot suddenly choose to stop loving Jesus because that would mean he was somehow defective, so His love for those in Christ is eternally secure.
I would suggest that seeing God is as he really is, is not necessarily to love him.
If someone loves evil and loves darkness and wickedness, they will hate the light because it exposes them for who they are. As it says in Revelation, they will be tortured in the PRESENCE of the lamb. If you hate someone, being with them is horrible.
If someone responds badly to a little bit of light, they won’t respond well to a lot of it.
God is beautiful and lovely, but we still get to choose if we will love him and his ways or reject him and his ways. After all, Satan saw the Lord is all his splendour but still led a cosmic rebellion.
I’m not sure if we’re using ‘see’ in the same way – we might be. I mean ‘see God as He is’ – i.e. see Him as the sum of all love, holiness and perfection, the source of all truth, etc.
I see people every day where I have no inkling as to there nature, and with God, we have some of our immediate desires at stake if we find that He is who he claims to be, so we suppress the truth, we exchange idols for him – we refuse to see Him, even though he is everywhere present – and we are without excuse because his existence is so plain.
In one sense, it’s impossible to see God prior to redemption. In another sense it’s impossible not to see Him.
Tim said: “The bottom line is that WE have to make the decisions.”
I can see how you can say that on compatiblism the choices and the consequences flow as part of a story, and you cannot divorce them from one another. If *we* do not make the choice, *we* should not face the consequences. That would make the story arbitrary, and God is not like that.
But if it’s libertarianism, I really don’t see that it matters if *we* make the decisions, because they don’t ultimately reflect *us*. We could always go this way or that, no matter how we feel, how we think, what we believe – any of it. You can weigh those both up on either side, but they are not allowed to cast a decisive vote – the decisive vote has to go to this whimsical free-floating will that is somehow divorced from anything solid and real in us.
*just spotted a fairly significant typo: “I can see how you can say that on compatiblism *AS* the choices…”
This whole ‘free-will’ thing is tricky!
Referring back to how Paul Marston described compatibilistic free will, I do think we have that to extent. For example, my choice to spend hours on an Internet blog posting theological comments emerges from the fact that I am ‘by nature’ interested in theological matters. Perhaps.
The free-will thing comes down to moral questions – will I sin or not? I do not believe that it is in anyone’s ‘given’ nature’ to tell a lie, commit adultery etc etc. Non moral choices (chocolate or strawberry?) flow out of who we are (to a certain extent – we can always surprise people!). But moral choices (lie or tell the truth?) shape who we are. If I choose to hate, I may well end up a murderer.
I all this, I’m not entirely sure. The inner workings of the human soul are mysterious and profound. At the same time, I do not believe that everything we choose is determined by God. I act as if my choices really are mine, so why should I try and twist my mind around the contradictory idea that actually God had determined beforehand what I would choose.
Maybe we should turn back to scripture. Does the flow of scripture suggest that God is determining everything or rather that he has opened up some space for genuine freedom to exist? Maybe let’s start with Genesis 1?
“I act as if my choices really are mine”
And they are – we both believe that.
“…so why should I try and twist my mind around the contradictory idea that actually God had determined beforehand what I would choose.”
It’s not contradictory unless you assume certain things a priori about the nature of your choices.
“Maybe we should turn back to scripture. Does the flow of scripture suggest that God is determining everything or rather that he has opened up some space for genuine freedom to exist?”
Yes and yes – determined everything and given genuine freedom. The problem isn’t fitting freedom and determinism together, it’s fitting your particular notions of freedom and determinism together.
“Maybe let’s start with Genesis 1?”
Well, Genesis 1 doesn’t say anything directly about how our choices work, but it does tell us that when God speaks, his will becomes reality.
Interestingly, Genesis 1 is picked up by Paul when he refers to our knowledge of the salvific light of the gospel of the glory of Christ being analogous to when God said “let light shine out of darkness”, so we can look at what that means, I guess? It’s in 2 Cor 3:1-6.
Paul see’s our acceptance of the gospel coming from a light spoken into existence in us, and contrasts that with the experience of those who are perishing.
I agree, Genesis 1 doesn’t directly speak to issues of determinism.
These things struck me:
* You’ve got delegate authority in different places, such as the the sun and moon being told to ‘reign over’ the day and night, and of course with humanity being told to reign over all the creatures. All the power comes from God and he is ultimately responsible, but he is quite happy to delegate that power and reign to his creatures. He shares the power and control out!
* The very fact there is ‘reigning’ and ‘subduing’ to be done, implies (to me at least) that God’s will isn’t automatically done unless someone does some reigning. With all these creatures around, there is a degree of chaos that needs to be tamed and brought into order. God certainly does reign, but not through meticulous control but through delegated authority.
It’s lovely stuff!
On God’s will not automatically being done, I’d say that the example of the sun and moon somewhat work against your point, given that they can never do anything save what God has caused them to do (or be). I don’t think God has ever been frustrated that the sun wasn’t doing it’s job properly, or worried that it may fail to do so in future.
But on a related point, I think it is right to say that if we’re commissioned to reign with God (which we are) and we fail in our duty (which we do) that his will is frustrated by that. But obviously we then go back to different kinds of will. I wouldn’t bring those in to the text if I were reading this text alone, of course.
Curious to see what you make of Paul’s reference to Genesis 1 in the passage I asked you about above, though.
“For God, who said, “Light shall shine out of darkness,” is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” (2 Cor 4:6)
Lovely stuff! In creation, the Lord was speaking out the revelation of Jesus even then!
It’s interesting that Paul says that the unbelievers don’t see because Satan has blinded their eyes. Spiritual warfare/prayer is required in order to let the light in and get people saved.
Although, obviously, people still have a choice. People might like darkness instead of light. Plenty of people rejected Jesus in his day.
In a deterministic system, being “free to choose according to our desires” cannot be accepted as a definition of freedom–it is not.
In such a scheme, our desires are totally inconsequential. They are the automatic product of our environment. Our choices are the automatic product of our environment. This DOES make a human being no more than a very highly sophisticated robot/computer: everything we desire, think, feel and do is the automatic product of our environment–our choices, desires and actions are the direct and unchangeable result of whatever data is put into us. If the system is determined, being “free to choose according to our desires” is not freedom, and is not viable as an alternative definition.
99% determined and 1% open to possibility dramatically changes the picture. A choice made without “a decisive prior cause” (ie something prior that ultimately made you choose that way) does not have to be arbitrary, random or whimsical. It can be an active and deliberate, non-coerced choice between (at least) two alternatives. The capacity to to be able to make such a choice is a gift from God.
Is it your opinion that God is unable to make us with such a capacity for free choice without a decisive prior cause? Is He unable to make an environment for us in which such a thing a possible?
Jon says “In [any form of determinism including the one I’ve been defending], our desires are totally inconsequential.”
Nonsense.
“They are the automatic product of our environment. Our choices are the automatic product of our environment.”
And our previous choices, our past experiences, our current mood, how awake we are, who’s around us and how we feel about them, what we notice and a billion other things… Our desires are a reflection of our entire being.
“This DOES make a human being no more than a very highly sophisticated robot/computer: everything we desire, think, feel and do is the automatic product of our environment–our choices, desires and actions are the direct and unchangeable result of whatever data is put into us.”
Obviously on one level, we are computers – we compute things. But computers don’t have desires, preferences or wills, they don’t have souls or bodies, they are not God’s image-bearers.
“If the system is determined, being “free to choose according to our desires” is not freedom, and is not viable as an alternative definition.”
Viable to you? Apparently not. To philosophers, theologians, linguists and millions of Christians? Obviously we do consider it perfectly viable, and you really haven’t given a reason not to yet.
“99% determined and 1% open to possibility dramatically changes the picture.”
“99% determined and 1% open to possibility dramatically changes the picture.”
How do you decide percentages here? What you’re classing as 1% here has the capacity to overthrow any hint of meaning in a decision. This is the reason a decision ultimately gets made. The rest of it is background noise – it is not allowed to be determinative. This 1% is always given the deciding vote, and so ultimately this 1% is 100% of what matters. And it can’t be decisively shaped by anything. It always has to be independent from us, or it would be trapped. It’s a free floating thing that could go in any direction ant any time, and it overthrows any real hope of meaning or significance, of culpability or of personality. It’s just a wrecking ball to healthy discourse about what it means to be human.
“Is it your opinion that God is unable to make us with such a capacity for free choice without a decisive prior cause?”
Only because I don’t think he is that cruel.
Ok I’m sorry, I don’t want to go on about the same thing but I think you’ve actually missed my point here. If the overall system is deterministic, our desires make absolutely no difference to how free we are, because THEY TOO are determined.
You say that our choices are not the automatic product of our environment because they are are also the prouct of: “…our previous choices, our current mood, how awake we are, who’s around us and how we feel about them, what we notice and a billion other things…Our desires are a reflection of our entire being”. Doubtlessly true! But the point is, in a deterministic system, our previous choices, current mood, how awake we are, who’s around us and how we feel about them, what we notice and a billion other things are also ALL the automatic products of our environment, without exception! Indeed, our entire being (with all its complexities) is no more than the automatic product of our environment, the inevitable and automatic effect of previous causes, the inevitable and automatic result of the data put into the computer.
“Computers don’t have desires, preferences or wills…” with determinism, our desires, preferences and wills are all the direct results of prior programming! Hence nothing more than a very sophisticated computer!
The opinion of philosophers, theologians, linguists and (even!) christians does not prove a point–countless philosophers, theologians and linguists don’t believe God exists or that Jesus rose from the dead. That doesn’t mean their position is logically viable. Christians over the centuries have believed all kinds of things that are way off track–largely thanks to Augustine 😉 !
As far as the percentages go, I certainly don’t decide them– I’m just illustrating the point that you can still have all kinds of influences and determining factors, but even the smallest amount of open possibility radically changes the picture.
What’s more, this openness does not eradicate meaning from a decision, in fact it gives a greater sense of meaning to decisions, because they are no longer entirely automatic and pre-determined responses to prior causes (however complex the combination of causes may be). This capacity to choose is not free floating or independent from us in any way–in fact is fundamental to what it means to be “us”. It is shaped and influenced by many factors and causes as we have emphasised, but that does not mean it is 100% determined by prior causes. It doesn’t do away with culpability, significance or hope, all of which in fact depend on it.
It is far more hopeless to imagine that every thought, feeling, desire and action that will occur over the next 50 years (if we last that long) is already determined, and that nothing whatsoever within us or outside of us can change that. Our eternal destiny is likewise already determined, and according to Augustine even if we are wholeheartedly committed to following Jesus now, that is no guarantee that we will in fact persevere (if we fall away, it will only prove that our faith was not genuine in the first place and we were always predestined to destruction).
Not sure I would call that a hopeful alternative, or a healthier view of what it means to be human.
PS, just another appeal/recommendation to read God’s Strategy in Human History (particularly volume II), not because I want to get into telling each other which books we should read, but because part of the point of this blog is to draw attention to the books which deal with the issues fully (volume II gives thorough research and evidence). It may also deliver us from writing a poor man’s version of half the material in the book in this comments thread!
Also, Forster and Marston’s ‘Reason, Science and Faith’ does the job on deterministic philosophies very thoroughly.
“If the overall system is deterministic, our desires make absolutely no difference to how free we are, because THEY TOO are determined.”
Yes, I grant that they’re determined (I feel that I’ve been clear in stating that I am arguing for a form of determinism), but I still have no idea why you think that makes no difference – makes no difference to what, exactly?
If I punch someone in the face because I want to punch them in the face, then my action reflects my character so it’s fair to blame me for it. Whether my desire is determined by other factors preceding or running alongside my choice, in itself, quite irrelevant to whether I’m responsible for it. That’s established simply by the fact that I did it willingly.
If you accept that my beliefs entail that we are whole and entire persons engaging our entire being with a decision that is determined by both internal and external factors coalescing through our hearts, minds, affections, desires and wills and you still want to say that this just makes us mere computers, then I’ll just say fine.
William Lane Craig had a debate with someone who described a computer that had every attribute that God had, and he basically just responded by saying (more eloquently than I can remember, so I paraphrase): ‘you’re affirming God and just changing the name – if you want to call him a computer, it makes no difference’.
You seem to be doing that with humanity. If you can affirm everything that I believe makes us what we are, and want to call us by another name, fine.
“this openness does not eradicate meaning from a decision, in fact it gives a greater sense of meaning to decisions, because they are no longer entirely automatic and pre-determined responses to prior causes (however complex the combination of causes may be).”
And stating that every individual decision must be less necessary renders it more important how, exactly?
You assert that it is far less hopeful to say that God is responsible for history and guards over every moment of it, always working to ensure the good of those who love him and who are called according to his purpose than to believe in an undetermined history that God largely wipes his hands of (‘it wasn’t me! Yes, I might have built the world that did all of this harm, but I didn’t have certain knowledge and it seemed like a good idea at the time!). I still can’t see how that can possibly be more hopeful.
Just for the record…
“…an undetermined history that God largely wipes his hands of (‘it wasn’t me! Yes, I might have built the world that did all of this harm, but I didn’t have certain knowledge and it seemed like a good idea at the time!)…”
…is nowhere even close to a summary of our view of God or the universe!
He doesn’t wipe His hands of anything–far from it, He takes responsibility for all that has gone wrong in the universe and even the (free!) sinful actions of all individuals, and He does this at the cross.
He doesn’t look back and say “…it seemed like a good idea at the time..”, because He always knew it could be very messy, and He knew all the possibilities, but the possibility of freely chosen love was worth all the risk and the mess. He also knew that however messy it turned out, He would still ultimately get His will done.
Unlike earthly dictators, despots and control-freaks, He doesn’t have to meticulously control everything that other people do in order to achieve His purposes!
He’s a bit cleverer than that (and a bit better than that).
So we can say that compatibilistic free-will makes us mere computers then? ;-D
But let’s not pretend that there’s any freedom in a determined system. After all (and as I teach children at school), a computer will only do exactly what it is programmed to do.
The reason that God has given us free-will is so that we have the FREEDOM to choose to love him or not. Having a predetermined (or predestined…?) computer say “I love you” is pretty hollow. A but like the computerised voices on a train station saying “we apologise for the delay”.
I would state that God has a responsibility towards history and guards over every moment of it, always working for the good of those who love him and who are called according to his purpose.
But if God has determined everything, what is he guarding against? If everything is within his will, what does he have to fight against? Himself? And why would he need to do any work, if everything is always happening exactly the way that he intended it to?
Again, you can’t say everything is determined and then sneak in some indeterminacy: are there other forces or wills out there than need guarding against? Is there work to be done in the universe still?
Do read Jon’s post about ‘CAROP’ – just because God hasn’t determined everything doesn’t mean he hasn’t determined anything. Just because he makes space for freedom and choice to exist, doesn’t mean he washes his hands of the whole mess. The cross of Christ speaks of the fact that the Lord is redeeming this messy universe until it reaches its intended purpose!
Blessings
Tim
“Having a predetermined (or predestined…?) computer say “I love you” is pretty hollow.”
But I’d say that’s because they can’t ‘mean’ it. They are not ensouled, choosing, loving things. God isn’t making something that cannot feel pretend that it can. He is making something that can feel, so it does. Our feelings, choices, decisions, loves, hates etc are absolutely real on compatiblism, which is why this is a nonsensical analogy:
“A but like the computerised voices on a train station saying “we apologise for the delay””
That recording is from someone disconnected from the event that they’re speaking about. My whole view relies on the intimate connection between events and feelings, as I have outlined it.
“But if God has determined everything, what is he guarding against? If everything is within his will, what does he have to fight against? Himself? And why would he need to do any work, if everything is always happening exactly the way that he intended it to?”
I did explain this near the beginning of the conversation. When we say that all things are ordained by God, that doesn’t mean that all things are caused directly by him. Some things are caused directly, some through a chain of events, and some through inaction on God’s part. God doesn’t cause evil. He allows it and restrains it as suits his purposes, but he is not the perpetrator.
When I say that God is protecting us, I mean he is protecting me from Satan, from my sin, from the sins of others and any other unintended evil (though I’d want to emphasise that he’s primarily protecting me eternally – he does so in this life too, but he certainly could allow me to go through any suffering without doing any wrong). It is not a case of protecting me from himself, but from all the millions of things that could destroy me apart from his care.
I believe that absolutely nothing happens apart from God’s plan – not a bird falls from the sky apart from God, etc. But I don’t think that means God is shooting down sparrows. He works at a much higher level. He certainly does work miraculously too, but broadly in this conversation I’m talking about a different level of interaction – hence entire replies of mine where God isn’t mentioned.
And yes, I’ve seen that Jon concedes God might be a part time determinist, and I responded to that, but the main problem enters in on the times that it’s proposed he takes his hands off the wheel.
“When we say that all things are ordained by God, that doesn’t mean that all things are caused directly by him. Some things are caused directly, some through a chain of events, and some through inaction on God’s part. God doesn’t cause evil. He allows it and restrains it as suits his purposes, but he is not the perpetrator.”
It sounds like there’s a ‘backdoor’ in your determinism! So some things aren’t caused by him then? So there are genuine causes outside of God?
Which I’m completely happy with! At a ‘meta’ level, everything that happens is God’s will: he sustains the universe with the word of his power, and his will is that his creation has a degree of say-so in how things go. God may not like or agree with the choices his creation makes, but he allows them to choose all the same, because his ultimate aim is to form his image in us – make us look like Jesus, loving righteousness and hating wickedness.
So why is it so difficult for you to say that some things aren’t God’s will? Jesus didn’t have this problem: he taught us to pray “your will be done”, because it’s often not! He told parables where invited guests refused their invitations, and about enemies sowing weeds amongst a crop. When he came across sickness and suffering, he didn’t ascribe it to the mysterious will of God, but rather named it as Satan’s work and instead brought God’s kingdom to bear through healing. He wept at his friend’s grave, and then did his Father’s work and raised the dead.
The danger of determinism is that is ends up with fatalism, where everything that happens is the way it was always ‘meant’ to be. Whereas I don’t think everything that happens is meant to happen! A second quake in Nepal should make us pray “Lord, bring your salvation and stop the suffering!” rather than resigning ourselves to the mysterious will of God.
I am not saying that you act like a fatalist, or have even suggested that is how we behave. But it is a logical outworking of a deterministic view of the universe and of God.
“It sounds like there’s a ‘backdoor’ in your determinism! So some things aren’t caused by him then? So there are genuine causes outside of God?”
I have been saying this since the beginning, but kind of just assuming it after the first 40 or so replies. Basically, all things come from God ultimately simply because he is the creator. In that sense, he’s the ultimate cause of all that follows. Calvinists say in addition to that basic truth that he has created it with the purpose of glorifying himself through a fallen people, and that all things comply with his plan. This occurs largely through secondary causes. I don’t sin because God ‘makes’ me sin, but if God had no purpose for my sin it could not occur.
Of course, I’ve always affirmed there are genuine causes outside of God. I am a genuine cause in every decision I make. But God reigns over all of it. His knowledge and his plan is certain.
“So why is it so difficult for you to say that some things aren’t God’s will?”
Well, in one sense it’s quite easy to say murder isn’t God’s will. He doesn’t like it. It is not part of his final design for us when creation is restored. But I can’t make absolute statements that oversimplify it, because God is quite explicit that nobody dies without Him being behind it, and many deaths happen by murder. There are obviously more explicit historical moments where this occurs too – the crucifixion of Jesus being an obvious example.
It extends way beyond that, of course, but I don’t want to deny one truth so that I can affirm another. The Bible stands as a whole or falls as a whole.
“Jesus didn’t have this problem: he taught us to pray “your will be done”, because it’s often not!”
He didn’t stop at ‘your will be done’ – he taught us to pray for God’s will to be done in a particular way – namely ‘as it is in heaven’.
‘He told parables where invited guests refused their invitations, and about enemies sowing weeds amongst a crop.’
Which is entirely to be expected. He also gave reasons why they might refuse – the types of soil, the kinds of desires felt, etc.
‘When he came across sickness and suffering, he didn’t ascribe it to the mysterious will of God’
Except that sometimes he does.
‘…but rather named it as Satan’s work’
Which would fit with what I’ve said about secondary causes, it should also be pointed out that Satan specifically asks God’s permission to test Job, sift Peter, etc, and that Satan’s work in prompting the census is ascribed to God. The assumption that ‘Satan does something, therefore God has not planned it’ seems fallacious.
‘He wept at his friend’s grave,’
After waiting to make sure he was dead and everyone would know he was dead.
‘The danger of determinism is that is ends up with fatalism’
Only in the minds of people that don’t understand Biblical determinism.
‘…where everything that happens is the way it was always ‘meant’ to be.’
The Bible is more concerned about why something is the case rather than that it is the case. Jesus said the point of the tower falling in Luke 13 is so everyone would know their need to repent. He’s totally happy with the assumption that God determined the event, but absolutely not drawing the conclusion that we should just throw our hands up and give up. It was a teaching point. God intended it for a reason, and that should shape how we live.
‘A second quake in Nepal should make us pray “Lord, bring your salvation and stop the suffering!”’
Amen!
‘rather than resigning ourselves to the mysterious will of God.’
Yeah, I’m never going to say that resigning to God’s will is wrong…
‘I am not saying that you act like a fatalist, or have even suggested that is how we behave. But it is a logical outworking of a deterministic view of the universe and of God.’
…if not understood correctly.
Very good!
Couple of textual questions:
– where does it say in the bible that “nobody dies without [God] being behind it”?
– where did Jesus ascribe sickness and suffering to the mysterious will of God?
I very much query the idea that, if God didn’t have a purpose in an action, it would not have occurred. If God did step in and change the laws of nature whenever sin or evil was about to happen, the world would be a very unreliable place. Plus, we’d only be able to do good…but had we really chosen good, or was God just forcing us to do good by preventing evil?
I do not doubt that God uses evil and redeems situations. But that doesn’t mean he PLANNED the evil to happen. Which I don’t think you are saying. But then how can you say that God determines EVERYTHING?
I really must write that blog post on Job…
Can you explain why/how feelings make us responsible or free, when our feelings are pre-determined?
The past has been determined, right? What makes you responsible for actions that have already occurred? It’s the fact that you wanted to do them. You don’t need the ability to do otherwise – the fact that time has elapsed makes that impossible.
Compatiblism asserts that you are responsible for a choice if you choose to do it, and that your choices are a reflection of your nature. Play down ‘our choice’ and we’re less responsible, play down ‘our nature’ and we’re less responsible, neither of which God will permit. Libertarianism appears to add nothing meaningful to the first part and actually diminishes the second part.
The problem is it doesn’t actually answer the question…
“What makes you responsible…it’s the fact that you wanted to do them…”
…but what I wanted to do was determined by prior and external causes. So how am I responsible for what I want?
Oh yeah, you were going to look at Genesis 1 – did you see my reply to you above?
“Where does it say in the bible that “nobody dies without [God] being behind it”?”
Deuteronomy 32:39
“See now that I, even I, am he,
and there is no god beside me;
I kill and I make alive;
I wound and I heal;
and there is none that can deliver out of my hand.”
1 Samuel 2:6
“The Lord kills and brings to life;
he brings down to Sheol and raises up.”
That’s ignoring the hundreds of specific occasions where God is credited for deaths of specific people/groups and prayers assuming that God could prevent death if he desired to do so. It’s everywhere, really.
“Where did Jesus ascribe sickness and suffering to the mysterious will of God?”
In John 9, when asked why a man was born blind, he says it isn’t down to the sins of individuals but so that the works of God could be revealed. He says the same in John 11.
Jesus was also clear and constant in his affirmation of the OT, where the case is clearer still.
“If God did step in and change the laws of nature whenever sin or evil was about to happen, the world would be a very unreliable place.”
But that isn’t what I’m affirming – God isn’t caught on the back-foot. I believe all that would occur in creation was in his mind before the act of creation. He’s not jumping in and out because stuff is going off-kilter. He does interact with us in time to accomplish his purposes, but not to micromanage something that would otherwise be out of his hands.
“Plus, we’d only be able to do good…but had we really chosen good, or was God just forcing us to do good by preventing evil?”
I honestly don’t know what you mean here, but clearly that’s not what I believe. I believe no sin can occur that doesn’t result in God’s goodness being more fully displayed, but I certainly don’t think we act rightly in all or even most situations.
“I do not doubt that God uses evil and redeems situations. But that doesn’t mean he PLANNED the evil to happen. Which I don’t think you are saying.”
But it is what I’m saying – God planned all things that occur. He brings about his plan in different ways. All good comes directly from God, evil by privation of goodness, but it is all planned by God in my view.
“But then how can you say that God determines EVERYTHING?”
Because I think the Bible does so.
Ok, let’s take a look at some of these scriptures:
Deut 32:29 + 1 Sam 2:6:
both of these scriptures assert that God has the power of life and death: He kills and makes alive. This is simple and straightforward statement which is not at present under question–I think we would all agree that God has the power to kill and make alive. Neither of these scriptures say anything about God directly willing/causing/being directly responsible for every single death that ever happens–that is interpretation. Now I don’t think that is what your saying, but the point is that whole discussion is on the level how we interpret the verses, and what precisely you mean by “nobody dies without [God] being behind it”–these verses are not discussing or commenting on that.
In the Deuteronomy verse, Moses is contrasting Yahweh with false gods who can’t really do anything at all in comparison (cf Is 41:21-24). Yahweh on the other hand, He kills and makes alive, He’s the true God, the only source of life, creator of everything, nothing would exist except He gave it life, He is ultimately the Lord over life and death, and if He were remove His life giving, sustaining power for even a moment, the universe would grind to a halt. What can any false god do in comparison to that?
With 1 Sam 2:6, Hannah is rejoicing and exulting that the Lord has miraculously answered her prayer and given her a child. She is rejoicing that Yahweh has miraculous given life, as only He can. Is every birth a miraculous intervention as a specific response to prayer? Not necessarily. But God has answered her prayer, and she rejoices that He is the one who can give and take life. Can anyone give life except God Himself? Well, yes if you mean on the level that a man and a woman can reproduce, but no because they could not do that if God had not given them the ability. Can anyone except God kill? Well, yes on the level that the murderer kills (against God’s will). But no, on the level that He could not kill if God had not given Him the ability and possibility to do so–He would not even exist without God’s gift of life.
Now, these are also interpretations–but the point is, all the verse says is: ‘..He kills and makes alive”. Everything else we are saying about God’s direct or indirect involvement in every individual death that occurs is deduction based on other factors and other evidence. These verse are simply not making explicit or universal statements about that, and even if you think they are, that is claim that has to be substantiated from elsewhere.
As for the “hundreds of specific occasions where God is credited for deaths of specific people/groups”, what about the surely similarly large number in which there is no mention of God’s direct activity, and men, old age, disease or wild beasts are credited?!
One thing that these verses certainly do not comment on is determinism. If any of live long enough, we can take a look at all the pertinent verses raised so far, and any others, to demonstrate that nowhere in the Bible is determinism taught. Of course this is a question of interpretation, but that is what I shall argue.
So where does this determinism stuff come from if not scripture? Where does deterministic philosophy being brought to bear on the interpretation of scripture come from? Determinism is in Greek philosophy, and Greek concepts of deity for sure, and this has a part to play. But more to the point, it comes from Manichaean philosophy, the philosophy that Augustine of Hippo was soaked in before his conversion at the end of the 4th century. Augustine’s deterministic philosophical background, his legal background and his latin mindset coloured his interpretation of scripture thoroughly. He was not familiar with Hebrew and Greek, and did not value these pursuits, and he turned a huge proportion of christian doctrine completely on its head. Augustine gave the ‘Holy Roman Empire’ a theology for its total transformation of the nature of christianity, and the empire gave Augustine a platform for his novel theology.
Augustine became the most influential christian thinker worldwide, and has been the most influential theologian (at least in the west) throughout the subsequent centuries. Luther and Calvin were hugely influenced by Calvin, and so centuries of ‘Reformed’ teaching, preaching translation and interpretation have been soaked in this system of thought, taking it in with our mother’s milk, and barely able to imagine that there is another option, let alone that Augustine’s views were not those of the earliest christians and church fathers, and thoroughly misinterpret scripture and the teaching of Jesus.
A comment on interpreting the Old Testament in the light of Jesus: yes, we certainly do need the Old Testament in order to understand Jesus and the New Testament, so it works both ways. However, Jesus and the Old Testament are by no means on equal footing when it comes to revelation. Jesus is called the ‘exact representation of God’ (Heb 1:1-3), the ‘fullness of the Godhead bodily (Col 2:9), and the ‘only begotten God’ who has explained the God who has never been seen (Jn 1:18)–if you have seen Him, you have seen the Father (Jn 14:9). The revelation of the Old Testament is never put on the same level as the revelation of God in the person of Jesus Christ–in fact, it is explicitly called ‘shadows’ pointing to the substance and full revelation which is Christ (Col 2:17; Heb 8:5; 10:1). We take every jot and tittle seriously and have a high view of the Old Testament’s inspiration and revelation because Jesus does (Mt 5:17-18), and because it all points to Him, the full picture (Jn 5:39; Lk 24:27). So Jesus always takes precedence, and we can take it as absolutely fundamental and certain that whatever is revealed in Jesus is exactly as the Father is, even if it sometimes looks a little different to the ‘shadows’ of the Old Testament, which we have to interpret in a detailed way to understand how they point to Jesus and are fulfilled by Jesus.
Eg Lamentations, which speaks specifically of the judgement of Jerusalem and God’s people Israel (or Judah in this case, representative of God’s people Israel). Yes there is horrific judgement here, presented as God’s action. There’s a great to consider in the interpretation of the text itself, which would qualify this in a number of ways, but for it’s enough to say that this is God’s dealings with His people Israel–Jesus is the culmination, personification and fulfilment of Israel (Hos 11:1/Mt 2:15 + other places), and the judgement explored in Lamentations is fulfilled and exhausted by Jesus on the cross–it is ‘type’ and a ‘foreshadowing’ of the suffering of Christ as our substitute and for the sake of all humanity–so it is absolutely not a universal paradigm for the way that God causes/wills/interacts the death of every human being for all time, less still an evidence that God is behind/willing/causing atrocities such as the holocaust! Note also the distinction again between God ‘willing’ this suffering and God directly causing it.
So coming to John 9, let’s try and clear that up a bit. Don Carson says it’s barely possible to read it as an imperatival clause, and that’s fine because we’re not suggesting reading it as an imperatival clause. The issue at stake is where you choose to put the punctuation, whether in Greek or in English, and thus whether you identify “…but so that the works of God might be displayed in him…” with the previous clause (“neither this man sinned nor his parents”), which involves adding a lot of extra words in English that are not in the Greek in order to make sense of it (see the italicised words in the NASB), or whether you identify it with the following clause (“we must work the works of Him who sent me as long as it is day”), which involves adding no extra words in English to make sense of it, and is therefore a much more straightforward version of the Greek text. Better and less forced translation, then, is as given above:
“It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents. But so that the works of God might be displayed in him, we must work the works of Him who sent Me…”
So why do the editors of the Greek manuscripts (which as Tim rightly pointed out, are originally in capitals (uncials) with no spaces or punctuation between the words) and modern translators choose to punctuate this verse differently, despite the fact they have to add English word to make sense of it? This is not really surprising at all considering the pervasive influence of Reformed and Augustinian thought since the 5th century. Interpreter’s may not even consider an alternative reading, believing the point of the verse to be so clear and obvious. Even if they considered it, I imagine most would reject the alternative, assuming that the purpose of the blindness was to bring glory to God because it fits better with their broader system of theology and interpretation.
As for John 11, the same kind of assumptions come into play. Jesus says: This sickness is not to end in death, but for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified by it.”
The text then says that Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, so when He heard that He was sick, stayed two days longer in that place. Why did He wait?
Your interpretation is that Jesus waited until Lazarus died, so that God would get glory from the miracle of his resurrection. But the text does not actually say that, it does not give this as the reason why Jesus waited for two days. So why did He?
All the way through the gospel of John is a repeated theme of Jesus waiting for the right ‘time’, or the right ‘hour’, and only doing what He sees the Father doing (Time/hour: Jn 2:4; 7:6,8,30; 8:20; 12:23,27; 13:1; 17:1; doing as the Father does: Jn 5:16, 19-21; 8:28; 17:8). Jesus is continually, waiting, praying, listening to His Father only to do things at the right time, and most importantly, waiting for the right ‘hour’ to ride into Jerusalem knowingly giving the Jews an opportunity and provoking them to kill Him. In chapter 7, His brothers pressure Him to go to the feast. He says it is not the right time, but waits a little and goes at a different time. In chapter 11, Jesus is intentionally staying away from Judea because the Jews are trying to kill Him (Jn 7:1,19-20,25, 8:40; 11:8) and it is not yet the right time. In chapter 11, the disciples vigorously object to His suggest to go to Judea again and see Lazarus, because “…the Jews were just now seeking to stone you…” (11:8).
So what is happening? Jesus is moving away from Judea (probably back to Galilee, as He has continually been move up and down between the two in John’s gospel), and keeping His distance because the Jews are seeking to kill Him. But then He hears that Lazarus is sick, and because He loves Lazarus (and Martha and Mary–the reason actually given in the text, 11:5-6), He is torn, because He wants to go to Him, yet He knows His hour has not come and if He goes to Judea they will kill Him. He stays there two more days, praying to the Father (He does nothing out of Himself or apart from the Father, only what He sees the Father doing, 5:16-21), presumably praying for Lazarus’ recovery, and listening for what the right thing to do is. In v41, before Lazarus’ tomb, He prays “Father, I thank You that You have heard Me”, past tense, and says that He is only praying it now for the benefit of those hearing. Jesus has already done His praying–when? In the two days wait. Where does the miracle come from? Prayer and communion with the Father. Where does the confidence to go back into Judea and avoid the death plots of the Jews until the right time come from? Prayer and communion with the Father.
Jesus is not waiting for Lazarus to die just so that God will get greater glory. The statement in verse 4 is a statement of faith and confidence that He will not allow this to end in death, not that He is intending to let Lazarus die deliberately so that God will get more glory.
A cursory survey of the gospels reveals 42 accounts of individual healing miracles, as well as frequent general summaries of Jesus healing the multitudes. The only two accounts that could give even a hint that God might have caused the sickness in order to bring Himself greater glory are the two you have picked out, and I’ve offered interpretations based on better exegesis for each of these to demonstrate that they say nothing of the kind.
Incidentally, the free will point of view I’m espousing is not “part-time determinism”, it is the explicit teaching of relational/open theology. If you’re objecting to the idea of God leaving the future 100% open, that is process theology, which none of us would accept. See blog article “5 views on God’s foreknowledge” for a summary of the different views.
*Luther and Calvin were hugely influenced by Augustine*
Sorry I’ve missed out a huge number of words in the above, I did it in such a rush–I hope you can still make sense of the English (even if you can’t make sense of the biblical arguments!)
My typing has suffered terribly on here so no worries.
“both of these scriptures assert that God has the power of life and death: He kills and makes alive. This is simple and straightforward statement which is not at present under question–I think we would all agree that God has the power to kill and make alive.”
You’re ignoring a key part of the verse. It’s not simply that he has the power, it’s that he does it and no one else has the power to go against him. He kills, he makes alive and *none can deliver out of his hand*. A murderer could not kill *against Gods will* in the sense that would be relevant to this verse. If it was against his will, it would be delivered out of his hand rather than by it.
“As for the “hundreds of specific occasions where God is credited for deaths of specific people/groups”, what about the surely similarly large number in which there is no mention of God’s direct activity, and men, old age, disease or wild beasts are credited?!”
It would be begging the question to think that excluded God’s hand. Only half the passages mention God specifically, so should we assume the other half are nothing to do with him or that the same principals apply? It’s essentially an argument from silence.
“If any of live long enough, we can take a look at all the pertinent verses raised so far, and any others, to demonstrate that nowhere in the Bible is determinism taught.”
Think you might be getting a bit ahead of yourself, there!
I’ll ignore the stuff about Augustine. Firstly, even if I granted that he was the first to popularise a deterministic framework (which I don’t, because he wasn’t), it would still be irrelevant. It would just be an example of the genetic fallacy.
“Jesus always takes precedence, and we can take it as absolutely fundamental and certain that whatever is revealed in Jesus is exactly as the Father is, even if it sometimes looks a little different to the ‘shadows’ of the Old Testament, which we have to interpret in a detailed way to understand how they point to Jesus and are fulfilled by Jesus.”
Well, yes and no. If the OT and the Jesus contradict each other, that would make Jesus a liar, and he wasn’t that. Jesus insisted on a more consistent reading than his opponents. Jesus takes precedence over any prior theophany in terms of completeness and significance, but not in terms of truthfulness. That’s all I was guarding against. Jesus affirmed the OT and so must we.
“Note also the distinction again between God ‘willing’ this suffering and God directly causing it.”
I’ve been making this distinction myself all along. My point with the holocaust is not that the Bible says it was the same thing as Lamentations or that Lamentations provides a universal paradigm. My point is that many people seem to use the holocaust as a cheap trick to say ‘God could never allow something that awful to be part of his plan,” at which point I would say a global flood, Egypt’s firstborn, the various times that Israel was disciplined by other nations, the crucifixion, the fall of Jerusalem, the final judgment etc are all times that point to incredible violence being carried out precisely in accord with Gods plan.
I’ve given my reason why I think the John 9 argument doesn’t need to distract us – namely, almost all bible translations disagree, rarely even noting it as an alternative reading. Every commentator of repute I can find disagrees with your reading, and we have no doctrine on the line if you’re right, plus your view assumes that Jesus just ignores the question but you obviously do have a vested interest in the reading you take, plus the parallel in John 11. I’m intrigued that you don’t think this is an imperatival clause – does that mean you disagree with Tim’s reading, or did you mean something else?
Anywho, it seems your counter-argument is in two steps:
1) the standard reading was informed by Augustinian presuppositions, which does make the question worth asking about how this passage was interpreted before Augustine. I’ll see if I can track anything down. Still, genetic fallacy to say that makes it wrong (which is not what you’ve said, but it still makes your point about how it came to be popular a bit pointless)
2) no extra words needed – but my reading doesn’t require the words in italics anyway.
On to John 11.
“Your interpretation is that Jesus waited until Lazarus died, so that God would get glory from the miracle of his resurrection. But the text does not actually say that, it does not give this as the reason why Jesus waited for two days. So why did He?”
The text says that after hearing of Lazarus sickness, “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. *So* when He heard that he was sick, He then stayed two days longer in the place where He was.” When he left, he provided this reason: “I go, so that I may awaken him out of sleep.”
He stayed after hearing Lazarus was sick, and he didn’t leave until Lazarus was dead. I don’t think it’s an interpretive leap to say he was waiting for Lazarus to die.
You call this exegesis, but the proper term for what you’re doing is eisegesis.
Somewhat annoyingly, I can’t seem to find any references to John 9:3 online that predate Augustine. I’ve found references to the passage in John Chrysostom (349-407), Jerome (347-420) & John Cassian (360-435) and they all share my view of this verse, but they’re all contemporaries of Augustine. Admittedly, my search was little more than a quick Google and a browse of NewAdvent.org. I’ve seen plenty of Orthodox theologians say the same, and they’re obviously not fans of Augustine.
I’d be fascinated to see the earliest reference you can find to someone holding your view of this verse.
Ok we’re going to have to take each of these objections one by one.
“You’re ignoring a key part of the verse. It’s not simply that he has the power, it’s that he does it and no one else has the power to go against him.
Let’s be careful about what this verse is saying and what it is not saying. Yes, God is saying that He does it. I’m not denying that. The question is whether it is making a universal statement: every time someone ever dies, it is the Lord who is killing them. You may wish to assert that, but you will need to justify it, the verse does not explicitly say it. Even if it can be proven that the verse does say that, the question of how we fit that into a wider theological system is still up for grabs, ie what this means in terms of how God’s will interacts with other wills and agents (if such things exist!), and what it means in terms of direct/indirect causes in the light of the rest of scripture.
“A murderer could not kill *against Gods will* in the sense that would be relevant to this verse. If it was against his will, it would be delivered out of his hand rather than by it.”
The Hebrew literally says “..no-one can deliver from my hand…”, although I’m not sure this makes any difference to our discussion. Again the question is whether or not this is a universal statement: there is no question in my mind that when God chooses to act, whether to give life or to kill, no-one can prevent this. The verse says this explicitly. What it does not say explicitly, and what would need to be justified, is that in every death that ever occurs God is actively doing the killing, is willing the death, is the direct agent. The verse does not explicitly say any of these things. And once again, even if that could be proved, the verse makes no comment on the interaction of God and other agents/wills, or God as the ultimate cause and His relation with other causes. These are subsequent discussions not commented on by this verse.
“[Jon] As for the “hundreds of specific occasions where God is credited for deaths of specific people/groups”, what about the surely similarly large number in which there is no mention of God’s direct activity, and men, old age, disease or wild beasts are credited?!”
[Jamie] It would be begging the question to think that excluded God’s hand. Only half the passages mention God specifically, so should we assume the other half are nothing to do with him or that the same principals apply? It’s essentially an argument from silence.”
Precisely–it is begging a question! These verses make no comment on God’s involvement with these deaths, just as the other verses make no comment about the involvement of other agents! Neither of these are strong arguments, and both are arguments from silence. My meaning was: your point is a non-point!
“[Jon] If any of us live long enough, we can take a look at all the pertinent verses raised so far, and any others, to demonstrate that nowhere in the Bible is determinism taught.”
[Jamie] Think you might be getting a bit ahead of yourself, there!”
Not getting ahead of myself any more than any similarly blanket claims about the Bible teaches determinism or not teaching free moral choice (in the way that we have described it). Both depend on engaging with the relevant texts on a level exegetical playing field, which I am quite happy to do, and I imagine I am no less confident as to where this will lead than you are!
“I’ll ignore the stuff about Augustine. Firstly, even if I granted that he was the first to popularise a deterministic framework (which I don’t, because he wasn’t), it would still be irrelevant. It would just be an example of the genetic fallacy.”
Ok, this is not an example of the genetic fallacy. I am not basing my assessment of a Calvinist/deterministic framework merely on its Augustinian origins. My criticism and rejection of a Calvinistic/deterministic framework is based primarily on scripture.
My reason for pointing out the Augustinian origins of this theological framework was to explain to you why it should come as no surprise that countless translators and commentators overlook an alternative (and in my opinion better) translation of John 9.
“ [Jon] “Jesus always takes precedence, and we can take it as absolutely fundamental and certain that whatever is revealed in Jesus is exactly as the Father is, even if it sometimes looks a little different to the ‘shadows’ of the Old Testament, which we have to interpret in a detailed way to understand how they point to Jesus and are fulfilled by Jesus.”
[Jamie] Well, yes and no. If the OT and the Jesus contradict each other, that would make Jesus a liar, and he wasn’t that. Jesus insisted on a more consistent reading than his opponents. Jesus takes precedence over any prior theophany in terms of completeness and significance, but not in terms of truthfulness. That’s all I was guarding against. Jesus affirmed the OT and so must we.” “
As I have also said, the reason we affirm the Old Testament is because Jesus did, and not only do we affirm it, but we take every “jot and tittle” seriously (Mt 5:18). The question here really is how we do that, and how we deal with “apparent” contradictions (only ever apparent, as I too agree that we must have a consistent reading, and that the Bible is consistent and can be harmonised). In the process of how we harmonise, the revelation in Jesus takes precedence, He is the beginning, middle and end of biblical interpretation, He is the beginning, middle and end of any theological thought or system. It is consistent, because Jesus draws it all together, is the key to understanding it all, it is all about Him, and He fulfills the Old Testament (Mt 5:18 again)!
“[Jon] “Note also the distinction again between God ‘willing’ this suffering and God directly causing it.”
[Jamie] I’ve been making this distinction myself all along.”
Yes, this is what I was acknowledging and reminding you of–you need to be consistent in keeping this distinction in mind when interpreting verses such as Deut 32:39 and 1 Sam 2:6, and not making blanket statements which bypass these discussions or careful exegesis.
“[Jamie] My point with the holocaust is not that the Bible says it was the same thing as Lamentations or that Lamentations provides a universal paradigm. My point is that many people seem to use the holocaust as a cheap trick to say ‘God could never allow something that awful to be part of his plan,” at which point I would say a global flood, Egypt’s firstborn, the various times that Israel was disciplined by other nations, the crucifixion, the fall of Jerusalem, the final judgment etc are all times that point to incredible violence being carried out precisely in accord with Gods plan.”
We have again slipped off the exegetical wagon and onto subsequent discussions, but that’s ok. We strongly affirm that God deliberately created a universe with the possibility of immense suffering, but that this was necessary and 100% worth it for the possibility of immense, freely chosen love and relationship (I’m not trying to open that whole thing up again here though). The only pertinent point is that Lamentations does not offer a universal paradigm for God’s involvement in death and suffering: if you have accepted that, then we can remove Lamentations as a piece of evidence for God’s relationship to every death and case of suffering that ever occurs.
“[Jamie] I’ve given my reason why I think the John 9 argument doesn’t need to distract us – namely, almost all bible translations disagree, rarely even noting it as an alternative reading. Every commentator of repute I can find disagrees with your reading…”
I’m afraid ‘all bible translations’ and ‘every commentator of repute’ is not in fact enough to prove a point. Every Bible translation and every commentary stands and falls on its own exegetical merits: if you, or another commentator or translator, can offer actual exegetical reasons why another translation or interpretation is better, then I will be happy to concede and go back to the drawing board. But there has to be an actual argument!
Of course we have to take very seriously the consensus of scholars, and not imagine that our individual reading is superior without examining all the alternatives. But a better alternative has not yet been offered! We should also take seriously that whole generations of scholars have been terrifically misguided on all sorts of issues over the centuries, and we must always go back to our fundamental authority–Jesus and the scriptures–and assess by that plumb line.
“[Jamie]…we have no doctrine on the line if you’re right….”
…seems like we have some pretty major doctrines on the line–namely, the ones we’ve been debating for the past 152 comments!
“[Jamie]…plus your view assumes that Jesus just ignores the question but you obviously do have a vested interest in the reading you take, plus the parallel in John 11…”
Let’s be honest about the fact the we all have vested interests, we cannot ever avoid or disassociate ourselves from them 100%. But I hope we can both say that any wider concerns or considerations that we bring to the text are on the basis of loving Jesus, loving and seeking more of His truth, loving scripture, and doing our very best to interpret it rightly. I don’t ask you to judge my readings of John 9 or 11 on the basis of other concerns or theological questions, but on the basis of exegesis.
Also, Jesus does not ignore the question–He answers it by saying “neither this man sinned nor his parents”.
“[Jamie]…I’m intrigued that you don’t think this is an imperatival clause – does that mean you disagree with Tim’s reading, or did you mean something else?”
The imperatival reading that you (/Don Carson) offered was this: “Let the works of God be displayed in him!”. As you will see below, that doesn’t appear in Tim’s translation:
“It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents. But so that the works of God might be displayed in him, we must work the works of Him who sent Me as long as it is day; night is coming when no one can work”
If you are actually questioning the imperatival force of the later clause, “we must work the works…”, that is a very straightforward translation of the Greek “dei”, which I don’t think Don Carson would question for even a moment.
So–any more reasons to dismiss this straightforward, literal translation–other than prior theological convictions?
“[Jamie] Anywho, it seems your counter-argument is in two steps:
1) the standard reading was informed by Augustinian presuppositions, which does make the question worth asking about how this passage was interpreted before Augustine. I’ll see if I can track anything down. Still, genetic fallacy to say that makes it wrong (which is not what you’ve said, but it still makes your point about how it came to be popular a bit pointless)”
We can go down the road of checking out the early church fathers if you want, and that is very important to consider in interpretation, if it is part of an overrall exegetical argument. Alternatively, you could read ‘God’s Strategy vol. II’, which has already done masses of this research re Augustine.
Again: I’m not appealing to ‘genetic fallacy’ to reject these interpretations–I’m appealing to exegesis of scripture! Mentioning Augustine was simply to point out that we shouldn’t be so surprised that we have got so much of this biblical interpretation wrong (particularly in the reformed camp).
“2) no extra words needed – but my reading doesn’t require the words in italics anyway””
I don’t know what you’re offering as a translation, but as it is really just a matter of moving punctuation, I’m not surprised you don’t need extra words. It seems the english versions (disappointingly even the more ‘literal’ ones) add the extra words in to clarify/ram home the assumed theological point.
“[Jamie] The text says that after hearing of Lazarus sickness, “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. *So* when He heard that he was sick, He then stayed two days longer in the place where He was.” When he left, he provided this reason: “I go, so that I may awaken him out of sleep.”
He stayed after hearing Lazarus was sick, and he didn’t leave until Lazarus was dead. I don’t think it’s an interpretive leap to say he was waiting for Lazarus to die.”
I’m afraid that most definitely is an interpretative leap, whether you think it to be a small one or a large one. The text simply does not say: “…so Jesus waited for Him to die”.
The reasons the text actually gives are: 1. He loved Mary, Martha and Lazarus, and 2. The Jews were seeking to stone Him.
By inference, I think the text also indicates that He was praying (vv41-42), and taking time to make a decision (v7). This is a strong argument in the wider context of John’s gospel, the movement of the narrative at this point (Jesus travelling away from Jerusalem because His hour has not yet come), and the repeated emphasis on Jesus waiting for the right moment to do things, only doing what He sees the Father doing (verses listed in previous comment).
“[Jamie] You call this exegesis, but the proper term for what you’re doing is eisegesis.”
Please do not throw stones when they are completely unwarranted. Every reason given above re John 11 is an exegetical piece of evidence: it is “drawn out” of the text itself, not “reading in” an idea that is not actually mentioned. Even if you consider my inferences from the wider narrative and context of John’s gospel speculatory, context is still a major part of good exegesis, and any exegesis should take these things into account and expect to be strengthened, affirmed, and at least not contradicted by the wider context of the literature.
Let’s be clear what is involved in exegesis: detailed textual and linguistic study in the light of literary, historical and cultural context. The arguments I have offered for John 9 and John 11 are based entirely on textual and linguistic study and the wider literary context of John’s gospel.
Hmm, tricky passages!
Now, as a Christian I believe that Jesus is the full revelation of God. If we want to know what God is like, he looks like Jesus. The Old Testament, however, is only partial revelation. It’s like a shadow of the fullness we have in Christ. Jesus fills up the Old Testament. Now the Old Testament is vital and should definitely not be chucked out, but it must be interpreted in the light of Jesus. If it seems to contradict what Jesus said or did or the God revealed in him, we have to allow Jesus to shape our understanding of the Old Testament.
So when the Old Testament says “I kill and I make alive, I wound and I heal”, do we go ‘Aha! See, God ordains everything!’?
Or do we look at the life and ministry of Jesus and interpret it in the light of that?
Whenever Jesus came across sickness, he healed it and opposed it, calling it the work of Satan. And when he came across death, he opposed it by raising the dead. As John says, Jesus came to destroy the work of the devil. As Jesus says, the thief comes to destroy and kill and steal, but Jesus gives life in all its fullness.
So is Father busy killing and wounding and then Jesus busy raising the dead and healing? Or is there another way of interpreting?
God created and is currently sustaining everything that happens. So nothing happens that is outside of his sustaining power, both life and death, both healing and sickness. But that doesn’t mean that every death happens just when he exactly wanted it to. There are other free agents in this world, both human and angelic, and their actions have real impact.
Now if someone dies of old age, it’s sad but we can say in a healthy way that the Lord has taken back the life that he has given (knowing of course that God’s aim is for the resurrection of the dead, where the enemy that is Death with be vanquished forever). But if a child is cruelly killed in an accident, or a young person is murdered in a gang fight, do we say “it’s God’s mysterious will, it’s God’s perfect plan”? Rubbish! That does not sound one tiny bit like Jesus.
You refer to John 9, which I tackled in an earlier post. But needless to say, a better translation of the verse is as follows:
1 As He passed by, He saw a man blind from birth. 2 And His disciples asked Him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he would be born blind?” 3 Jesus answered, “It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents. But so that the works of God might be displayed in him, we must work the works of Him who sent Me as long as it is day; night is coming when no one can work.
Jesus doesn’t answer why the man was born blind. It’s not really an answerable question. Instead, his concern is that the works of God are displayed in him, i.e. that he gets healed! The man wasn’t born blind so that God could heal him: rather God just wants to see the guy healed, so let’s get on with it!
“Jesus was also clear and constant in his affirmation of the OT, where the case is clearer still.”
I do agree that the case for determinism is stronger from the Old Testament. But I’m interested in the full revelation of God in Jesus: does Jesus reveal a God who is determining everything, or one who is seeking to overthrow the evil domain of Satan on the earth?
“I believe all that would occur in creation was in his mind before the act of creation.”
How do we then get a choice? If God KNOWS I will choose x, in what way am I free to choose y? All the postmodern time-travelling films of the last 30 years (Back to the Future) explore this and find it’s not really possible! Hence why we can’t travel faster than the speed of light and that time travel is impossible. But hey, going off topic…
“I believe no sin can occur that doesn’t result in God’s goodness being more fully displayed, but I certainly don’t think we act rightly in all or even most situations.”
Doesn’t Paul talk about this in Romans 6:1? ;-D I do agree that God will use all of our decisions to bring about his purposes. But whether we get to be a vessel of honour or a vessel of no honour is up to us.
“But it is what I’m saying – God planned all things that occur.”
So he planned the holocaust? (I know, Godwin’s law – but theology has to stand and work and be meaningful at the gates of Auchwitz if it’s true) That God sounds like a monster then. There are some truly, truly awful and evil and despicable things that happen in this world by evil men and women: do you really want to lay the intention and plan and purpose for those things at the door of God? Remember: God looks like Jesus!
Blessings
Tim
“Now, as a Christian I believe that Jesus is the full revelation of God. If we want to know what God is like, he looks like Jesus.”
Amen.
“the Old Testament is vital and should definitely not be chucked out, but it must be interpreted in the light of Jesus.”
And vice versa – promises and fulfilment make no sense apart from one another.
“If it seems to contradict what Jesus said or did or the God revealed in him, we have to allow Jesus to shape our understanding of the Old Testament.”
Yes, but… If we perceive a contradiction between what Jesus teaches and what the OT teaches, we know that we must have misunderstood at least one of them. It’s just as likely that we’ve misunderstood Jesus as it is the OT.
“So when the Old Testament says “I kill and I make alive, I wound and I heal”, do we go ‘Aha! See, God ordains everything!’?”
Yes, unless the text can be read in another way on its own merit, for Jesus insists that scripture cannot be broken.
“Or do we look at the life and ministry of Jesus and interpret it in the light of that?”
I don’t think that the ‘or’ is necessary. It’s always ‘and’ for me.
‘Whenever Jesus came across sickness, he healed it and opposed it, calling it the work of Satan.’
Mostly, not always. We have examples of times when he left places before everyone was healed. But saying that Satan caused something doesn’t go against the idea that God planned it – again, see Job, Peter, census, etc.
‘So is Father busy killing and wounding and then Jesus busy raising the dead and healing?’
Clearly.
‘If a child is cruelly killed in an accident, or a young person is murdered in a gang fight, do we say “it’s God’s mysterious will, it’s God’s perfect plan”?’
Yes. The alternative is to charge God with negligence.
‘Rubbish! That does not sound one tiny bit like Jesus.’
Sounds like Jesus to me. When he knew Lazarus would die and clearly stated that he was waiting for that to happen before going to Him, for instance.
RE: John 9, you say that a better translation of the verse in question would be:
“…Jesus answered, “It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents. But so that the works of God might be displayed in him, we must work the works of Him who sent Me…”
To which I’ll quote Don Carson: “The attempt to read this as an imperatival clause (‘Let the works of God be displayed in him!’) is just barely possible, but rendered highly unlikely by the parallel in 11:4.”
I can cite four other commentaries I own that say the same thing. That combined with the fact that pretty much every translation going disagrees with your reading suggest that it may not be better at all. Obviously a Calvinist could accept your reading happily, so I’m not obliged to defend it, but considering the scholarly heft going against your case and my suspicion that you have a vested interest biasing you against the traditional reading, I’m not inclined to take it too seriously.
“I do agree that the case for determinism is stronger from the Old Testament. But I’m interested in the full revelation of God in Jesus: does Jesus reveal a God who is determining everything, or one who is seeking to overthrow the evil domain of Satan on the earth?”
On my view, that’s a false dichotomy.
“How do we then get a choice? If God KNOWS I will choose x, in what way am I free to choose y?”
Read the last bajillion comments. I think choice means something different than you do – namely a willed decision expressing our nature in a given situation/environment under given conditions. I don’t believe an equally actualisable alternative is required in order for a choice to be free.
‘Back to the Future explores this and finds it’s not really possible!’
Dang it! Why didn’t you just say that at the beginning? If Open Theism is good enough for Marty McFly, it’s good enough for me…
“So he planned the holocaust?”
Yes. That’s what I’ve been saying. God works all things. Not just the consequences of some things. Even the Holocaust is not without hope.
“Remember: God looks like Jesus!”
Amen.
On the Holocaust, though, I must say it strikes me as odd that this keeps coming up when I have this kind of conversation when there are Biblical narratives at least as harrowing where we could expect to have a Biblical response rather than just a general one. I’d say look at the book of Lamentations, and see what Jeremiah has to say about a siege that is so devastating in its consequences that it turns my stomach to think about. Mothers eating their own babies out of starvation being one image that haunts me. And see what Jeremiah says about God’s relationship to the siege that they’re facing.
He never flinched for an instant from saying that it was God’s will. There is a mighty hope that can rise from that. Saying ‘this – even this – is part of God’s plan’ means that any trial can be faced head on. Not one is accidental, or occurs when he isn’t looking, or isn’t a big enough deal for him to get involved with. Every last inch of our suffering is only allowed to pass for a reason.
Jon:
“[if] what I wanted to do was determined by prior and external causes [then] how am I responsible for what I want?”
I think you’re misunderstanding me. We are responsible for our thoughts and actions because they reflect our desires. If they don’t reflect our desires it’s not fair to blame us for them. If they do act in line with their desires, then *regardless* of why their desires are a certain way, that is sufficient to ground responsibility.
I think some kind of necessity is required for our actions not to be arbitrary, but not necessarily divine determinism. I believe that simply because it’s what I think God teaches us.
Ugh, that’s still unclear. Wish I could edit!
Basically, I think I’m responsible for my thoughts and actions because they reflect who I am. I think that as long as that is the case – that my actions reflect my nature through the expression of my will, then it doesn’t make any meaningful difference whether I’m describing past, present or future actions.
I think that you’d have to say that we’re responsible for our past actions even though we cannot act differently now. The responsibility we have now for past actions isn’t muted because they cannot be altered. They were what we wanted to do, so we remain responsible.
It is the ‘me’-ness of an action that grounds our responsibility, not the mutability of the future.
Hmm thanks for the response but I don’t think it clears things up–regardless of past/present/future, “me-ness” is still determined by something(s)/someone(s) else, so why is it sufficient to ground responsibility? Desires too are pre-determined…who I am and what I want is all caused entirely by someone(s)/something(s) else.
Past, present and future lose their meaning with determinism and God being outside of time, but I think past, present and future do have meaning, both within God and in creation.
Why not? If I do something because I want to do it, why are other factors relevant in assessing responsibility?
You say “Past, present and future lose their meaning with determinism and God being outside of time…” But of course they don’t lose their meaning for us.
And God isn’t purely outside of time on my view. He is also everywhere and everywhen present in time.
Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book 5, Chapter XV, paragraph 2:
2. And for this reason did the Lord most plainly manifest Himself and the Father to His disciples, lest, forsooth, they might seek after another God besides Him who formed man, and who gave him the breath of life; and that men might not rise to such a pitch of madness as to feign another Father above the Creator. And thus also He healed by a word all the others who were in a weakly condition because of sin; to whom also He said, “Behold, thou art made whole, sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon thee: ” pointing out by this, that, because of the sin of disobedience, infirmities have come upon men. To that man, however, who had been blind from his birth, He gave sight, not by means of a word, but by an outward action; doing this not without a purpose, or because it so happened, but that He might show forth the hand of God, that which at the beginning had moulded man. And therefore, when His disciples asked Him for what cause the man had been born blind, whether for his own or his parents’ fault, He replied, “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.” Now the work of God is the fashioning of man. For, as the Scripture says, He made [man] by a kind of process: “And the Lord took day from the earth, and formed man.” Wherefore also the Lord spat on the ground and made clay, and smeared it upon the eyes, pointing out the original fashioning [of man], how it was effected, and manifesting the hand of God to those who can understand by what [hand] man was formed out of the dust. For that which the artificer, the Word, had omitted to form in the womb, [viz., the blind man’s eyes], He then supplied in public, that the works of God might be manifested in him, in order that we might not be seeking out another hand by which man was fashioned, nor another Father; knowing that this hand of God which formed us at the beginning, and which does form us in the womb, has in the last times sought us out who were lost, winning back His own, and taking up the lost sheep upon His shoulders, and with joy restoring it to the fold of life.
Irenaeus is concerned about the Lord’s works being done, i.e. forming the eye properly! No hint at all that God had caused the blindness just so he could then come along and heal it later.
Irineaus: “For that which the artificer, the Word, had omitted to form in the womb, he then supplied in public, that the works of God might be manifested in him, in order that we might not seek out another hand by which the human being is fashioned, nor another Father, knowing that this Hand of God which formed us in the beginning, and which does form us in the womb, has in the last times sought us out who were lost, winning back his own, and taking up the lost sheep upon his shoulders, and with joy restoring it to the fold of life.”
So he omitted to form his eyes in the womb, and formed them now in order that the work of God might be revealed. That’s pretty clear to me.
I’m a tad upset with myself for skipping right to the bottom and missing that you’d posted the same quote as me prior to the final reply.
Anywho, if we were to ask Irinaeus why the man was born without functioning eyes, he says “the artificer, the Word, had omitted to form [them] in the womb”. If you asked him why God would omit them, he says “that the works of God might be manifested in him, in order that we might not seek out another hand by which the human being is fashioned.”
Sounds like my reading to me…
Apologies for spelling Ireneaus’ name wrong twice. I saw that it was wrong the second time and intended to fix it before posting, but apparently I got distracted by something shiny.
Hi Jamie
“I’ll ignore the stuff about Augustine. Firstly, even if I granted that he was the first to popularise a deterministic framework (which I don’t, because he wasn’t), it would still be irrelevant. It would just be an example of the genetic fallacy.”
John Wesley said that there were four tests for God’s truth: scripture, reason, experience and tradition. I would surmise that our discussion is about the best way to interpret scripture – determinism or free-will-ism? We both hold a high view of the authority and primacy of scripture but differ in our understanding of what it says.
Therefore, we need the other three to help us: which reading is most reasonable (makes logical sense of the text)? Which matches with our experience of being a human in God’s world? And what has traditionally been held to be true?
Now, as a reformer, I guess you’re happy to accept that certain truths can have gotten lost over time. Certainly that was Luther’s experience! So the issue of the ‘genetic’ origin of an idea is actually really important. I would say that the understanding of scripture we really want is the apostolic one — how Jesus’s apostles interpreted the OT and taught as we now read in the NT.
This is where the early church fathers come in as important: they give us an insight into the thinking and ways of understanding biblical ideas that were very close to the source, close to the root.
Jon’s argument is that Augustine, not versed in Ancient Greek nor showing interest in the apostolic teachings or understandings, dramatically altered every single doctrine he came across. This is important and should not be lightly dismissed. Is determinism an apostolic approach or is it a later addition that holds huge sway, thanks to Luther/Calvin etc?
Blessings,
Tim
“Now, as a reformer, I guess you’re happy to accept that certain truths can have gotten lost over time. Certainly that was Luther’s experience!”
Underemphasised or placed in conflict with other views that had become dominant, yes, but never lost. Justification by faith alone was always taught, purgatory was always disputed, etc. Luther didn’t see his arguments as unique to him at the time he proposed them. Not even Athanasius did that. There is always an uphill battle to cling to the truth, hence the “Semper Reformanda” slogan. The church is “always reforming”, but I absolutely reject the idea that any central truths are lost in any absolute sense for a given period.
“So the issue of the ‘genetic’ origin of an idea is actually really important.”
Indeed, but not as a way of saying something is true/false. If I believe Jesus is God because I saw his face on my toast, that may well be a terrible reason to believe it, but it doesn’t render the belief false.
“I would say that the understanding of scripture we really want is the apostolic one — how Jesus’s apostles interpreted the OT and taught as we now read in the NT.”
Absolutely agreed.
“This is where the early church fathers come in as important: they give us an insight into the thinking and ways of understanding biblical ideas that were very close to the source, close to the root.”
Yes, within reason. The church fathers often wrote from a Greek mindset, and were tackling particular issues. It’s absolutely appropriate to recognise that they had some weaknesses we should be glad to be free of and some strengths we should diligently pursue, and it’s also appropriate to recognise that truths were generally recognised and formalised out of conflict – the development of subtleties in the teaching of the trinity, the hypostatic union or the Filioque clause were borne from disputes. It’s not that you can’t find the various premises required to reach the proper conclusions throughout that period, but we must be honest in conceding that there were a fair few howlers there too. That’s fine. It happened in the book of Acts and the Epistles too. No era is perfect. You’re looking for the reasoned consensus of the Biblically faithful church, vindicated by tradition.
“Jon’s argument is that Augustine, not versed in Ancient Greek nor showing interest in the apostolic teachings or understandings, dramatically altered every single doctrine he came across.”
Which is simply embarrassingly inaccurate.
On the church prior to Augustine, I think it is trivially easy to find as many quotes that affirm determinism as it is to find quotes that affirm a pretty libertarian concept of free will.
The early church made claims that could affirm my views & yours on this matter. I think we can honestly say that there was some confusion here. Augustine was certainly more consistent in his view of determinism, but frankly, I think it occasionally borders on fatalism and occasionally affirms something like a libertarian concept of free will. He was a staggering intellect, and he made some conclusions that I think are pretty much dead on. Some times, I think he went overboard. Some times I think he was just plain wrong. I think he helped correct the overly Greek thinking of some of his contemporaries and his work on the trinity is astounding. His understanding of the nature of sin, too, seems incredibly astute. But he didn’t nail it. He brought issues to the fore. He resolved some issues. He opened up some new problems.
I object to the idea that one guy can just steamroller his way through the church and that everyone afterwards just gives up on thinking for themselves on such a pivotal issue. It’s a crass view of church history.
Response to May 15 post:
“Why not? If I do something because I want to do it, why are other factors relevant in assessing responsibility?”
Because what you ‘want’ was 100% caused by something(s)/someone(s) else–so clearly THEY are responsible for what you want! They are extremely relevant, because they are entirely responsible for causing you to ‘want’ what you ‘want’!
I think we may have reached a dead end on this one…
Sorry to confuse this thread, couldn’t work out how to get that comment in the right place
No worries – I’ve had the same problem!
I’m not denying that God *is* responsible. That’s part of my point. But that’s not the same as saying I’m *not* responsible. Compatiblism is named after the idea that those two ideas are compatible. That’s the point. Attempting to refute that by saying God is responsible is a non-starter, because it just affirms one of the two central premises for my view.
We would also affirm that God has ultimate responsibility for everything that happens, because He is the creator, but that man is still responsible–so could agree with the first two sentences above, and say that yes, they are compatible.
What is in question, however, is the idea that everything can be 100% determined (including our choices and desires), but that man is still responsible and free because he chooses in accordance with these desires. My assertion is that those two ideas are logically incompatible.
I understand that compatibilsm is basically trying to hold the positions of God’s sovereignty and Man’s responsibility at the same time.
Our argument is that if God is 100% determining everything that happens, then it is logically meaningless to to say that humanity is also in any comprehensible way responsible.
Now I can think of examples of shared and overlapping spheres of responsibility. If my child does something bad (like break the neighbour’s window), I will hold the child to account (dock pocket money) but, as a parent, will take responsibility as they were my child. If I had created a robot that had broken the window, I would have to take full responsibility because I had created the robot and determined all of its actions. We couldn’t really ‘blame’ the robot. But with a child, they get to make their own decisions, so a parent cannot be 100% responsible for the choices because the child made them.
Can you give a meaningful way of illustrating how God determines everything and yet we have the freedom to make our own choices?
Can I give an illustration? Well, I have done already with ‘God as storyteller’ and ‘our responsibility for past actions’.
The White Witch chose to fight Aslan and it is right that she faces the consequence for that – she’s not acting against her will. She can’t point to C. S. Lewis and say ‘this is your fault and not mine!’ – it is her fault because *she chose* to act that way, and it was not Lewis’s fault! but his goodness.
You made thousands of choices yesterday that have been determined by the passing of time, but also by you. You remain culpable for choices already determined.
The fact is, Compatiblism (like Libertarian Freedom) is a model that looks at the choices that we make all of the time. Responsibility for me is grounded in the choices we make and the reasons that we choose them. The stuff that is tangible to both of us seems totally sufficient to me.
I got bullied a lot at primary school, pretty much from the start. One of my guiltiest memories is the joy I experienced when a new kid started in the third year and the kids picked on him instead of me. I joined in after a week or two. Thankfully after 3-4 months that kid sent me to hospital (nothing serious, mind) and I learnt my lesson, but the fact is that I knew exactly what I was doing. I knew how horrible it was to experience bullying, and I joined in doing it quite gleefully.
The fact that around 15 years later I’d come to accept the gospel, or that 3 years after that I’d be persuaded that God was fully aware of everything going on, more than able to intervene but allowing it, even directing it for his purposes – all of that does nothing to change the fact that the reason *I* had for doing it is because I preferred to be one of the bullys than the bullied. That’s what I’m responsible for: *my* decision and *my* reasons.
I’m not God, so I don’t claim responsibility for his reasons or his decisions. With regards to discussing my own culpability, I don’t think they’re strictly relevant.
Now with the example of an author and characters in a book, that has no meaningful responsibility or free will. Whilst an author may convincing tell a story that makes us believe in the characters, they are no actually real and are not making any decisions themselves. The White Witch’s actions emerge entirely from the imagination of CS Lewis. She’s not real!
So there we have 100% determined and 0% freewill.
Unless you’re suggesting that God writes our lives like an author does and we are actually only a figment of the divine imagination?
Can you explain it in another way?
I think reality is spoken by God. Obviously, God is infinitely greater than C.S. Lewis and so his creation is as well.
The difference between ‘story’ and ‘creation’ is vast, but the difference between ‘storyteller’ and ‘Yahweh’ is infinite. In one sense, I think we are products of Gods imagination, but not figments of it, because God spoke us (and keeps speaking us) into reality.
The White Witch doesn’t exist outside of the imagination, but within the imaginitive context, the analogy works (within our imagination, the White Witch made her choices for herself). Obviously I can’t give you a perfect analogy of someone doing precisely what God does with creation, because nothing but God has the attribute of aseity and in creation we’re all contingent beings. He is altogether distinct from us.
I agree that God is separate from us.
The problem with determinism is that God and his creation get rather fused. If everything that happens is exactly what God wills and plans to have happened, creation then just becomes an extension of God.
Whereas if you have a genuinely distinct creation that isn’t micromanaged by the Lord, God is able to interact with and relate to his creation whilst still being distinct from it.
Anyway, I feel we’re reaching a bit of a dead end with all this.
“We couldn’t really ‘blame’ the robot. But with a child, they get to make their own decisions, so a parent cannot be 100% responsible for the choices because the child made them.
“Can you give a meaningful way of illustrating how God determines everything and yet we have the freedom to make our own choices?”
The above is important. A robot doesn’t choose an action but a child does. That’s what grounds responsibility. Saying that an equally plausible alternate reality (where the child or robot would have acted differently) is required in order for that to be a responsible decision seems daft to me. Its not the inevitability of the choice (or lack thereof) that grounds responsibility. It’s the fact that it was chosen and the reasons that it was chosen that matter.
If a child broke a window because he wanted to see if he could get away with being naughty without someone noticing, he’s culpable. If a robot broke a window because it was processing commands that are no more meaningful than mathematical operations, it’s not culpable.
Aye, I guess it’s time to stop flogging this particular dead horse. It’s been helpful chatting to you guys.
I’ll look at grabbing “God’s Strategy in Human History” this week. I think if I was going to make a single book recommendation for my view it would be “God’s Greater Glory” by Bruce Ware. It’s a pretty easy read, but it’s clear and well-argued.
Hi guys,
I’ve just added a couple of comments above, but agree that on the free will thing particularly it’s probably at a dead end–at least we’ve got right down to the issue!
I’m happy to leave things here too–perhaps it’s a good place to stop. I think it’s only really the discussion of the early church fathers that we’ve left open ended, and although that’s very important evidence, I think we’re all primarily interested in scriptural arguments.
Thanks for the recommendation Jamie–I read Bruce Ware’s book about 8 years ago when I was first working through the openness issue, and although it’s definitely the most persuasive account I’ve heard for the determinist position, the inadequacy of his ‘anthropomorphic’ interpretation was one of the factors that eventually confirmed my opinion in favour of an alternative view.
I hope you enjoy God’s Strategy–I think you will find vol.II more what you’re looking to get your teeth into, with the more detailed argument and research there. Volume I is an overview written to be more accessible at a popular level, but as a result you may be frustrated at a lack of evidence/engaging with other points of view.
Just to say again, I really appreciate the spirit in which you came to this discussion, and am very glad to have had the opportunity to debate the issues with you–I think this is a very important thing to do, and much better than bible believing christians getting polarised in different theological camps without ever talking. Let’s spur each other on to a greater understanding of the truth!
I would be happy to carry on the conversation whether here or on other blog articles, or if you would like to continue the conversation through personal contact at any time, I would be very glad to do that. I’ll ask Joe (the site moderator) to pass on my contact details to you.
Many blessings,
Jon
Enjoy the read! Remember there’s two volumes of ‘God’s Strategy in Human History’…
One last thought: according to Aristotelian logic and contradictions, “One cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same respect and at the same time.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contradiction)
“All human actions are determined by God” and “some human actions are undetermined (as in, not determined by God)” is therefore a contradiction. I guess our discussion has teased out what exactly one might mean by saying God determines all things and that humans have free will.
Blessings
Tim
PS. Feel free to have the last say, and will try and resist the temptation to reply!
Regarding the law of non-contradiction, there are times where I think I’ve sounded like I’ve breached it – I hope the conversation in its entirety glossed over any lack of precision.
I believe all that happens is as God has planned, and he has brought his plan to pass by directly causing events or simply allowing our agency to do that which he perfectly foreknows.
I’m ok saying ‘God causes all things’ or saying ‘God doesn’t cause all things’ but only because I’m using different concepts of causation (if someone trips when I could have prevented it by telling him, in one sense you could say it happened ‘because’ of me, but strictly speaking I didn’t actually cause it), hence the possible confusion.
We’ve already fleshed out why we disagree, but I just wanted to clarify that whether I’m right or wrong, I don’t think there are any formal contradictions in my view. Just sloppy language occasionally!
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