In this discussion, one of the commenters makes the following argument against Reformed views of divine providence:
On a related topic, I still don’t quite get Reformed theology. God desires all to repent, but He doesn’t desire all to repent. How does one believe something one is incapable of understanding? It’s like saying I “believe” that the round plate before me is also a square, as if my saying it makes it so.
What follows is an expansion of my response in the comments there.
What the commenter has hit on is a formal contradiction, at least if no fallacious equivocation is going on. If the word “desire” is being used in the same sense, then the statement that God desires all to repent and the statement that God does not desire all to repent do indeed result in a formal contradictiom. But there’s no problem if the two uses of “desire” are in fact different senses in which God desires.That is in fact what the Reformed view means by both claims, but the basic distinction required to take such a view isn’t limited to Reformed theology. Any adequate response to the problem of evil needs something like that, as has been known at least since Thomas Aquinas. (At least you need something like this if you want to avoid open theism, but I’ve long thought open theism doesn’t really have the resources to respond to the problem of evil anyway, because it can’t guarantee a full victory over evil, not to mention being overkill, so that becomes a null option.)
You need to have some sense in which God wants to evil to happen if God in any sense knowingly allows it, so those with models of divine sovereignty that are more commonly associated with Wesleyan or Arminian theology will need to say the same thing this commenter is criticizing. God allows something rather than preventing it. Why? Perhaps the reason is because God thinks human freedom is more desirable than the desire to prevent that particular evil. You need not be a Calvinist to appeal to this sort of thing. But you better not say that God wants it to happen in every sense. God certainly disapproves of the evil, and wouldn’t desire it if it weren’t for whatever issue led God to allow the evil.
Once you have that distinction between desiring for its own sake and desiring for some other reason, when for its own sake God would want it removed, you have exactly the thing you’re criticizing. God can desire something and not desire the same thing.
I would say that Arminians need to say this even about the salvation of non-believers if they want to avoid universalism. If anyone dies in their sins and goes to hell as a result, then God will be desiring that fate for them given their rejection of him, even if God desired them to repent and thus avoid that fate. So God both desires it and desires that it not happen, even with Arminianism. Only an open theist or a universalist can avoid saying something like that about these cases, and I don’t think either can avoid saying it entirely. Even to allow one bit of evil or even the risk of it is a tradeoff in one sense, with God choosing one thing over another that would be good and desirable if all things were equal.
July 15th, 2010 | 7:04 am | #1
Yes, I think that is true: both sides need to say there are two wills. Arminians should differentiate between God’s antecedent will (his will that everyone repent and be saved) and his consequent will (that if one rebels and does not repent then one will not be saved). The Calvinist must talk of his will of precept (that everyone repent and be saved) and his will of decree (that only some repent and be saved). I think the problem of contradiction still is found in Calvinism’s two will theology, because in Calvinism God gets precisely what God wants and would not change a thing, but to suffice it to say, both systems use two will theology.
July 15th, 2010 | 7:29 am | #2
Adam Omelianchuk: “I think the problem of contradiction still is found in Calvinism’s two will theology, because in Calvinism God gets precisely what God wants and would not change a thing…”
Could you be a bit more precise and expansive in your statement that there is a problem of contradiction in Calvinism?
July 15th, 2010 | 10:40 am | #3
Much of this I agree with.
I disagree that we need to acknowledge that God in any sense desires us to sin. He desires our freedom and our righteousness, and (mercifully) blocks neither path.
I will try one of those contrived philosophical examples: Suppose Bob wants to commit adultery, and plans to do so. In one of your senses of “desire,” God is on board with Bob’s plan. But then suppose things don’t work out for Bob to commit adultery. Bob is disappointed. Is God disappointed that He couldn’t allow Bob to commit adultery?
What I’m trying to highlight is that this is not “desire” in any meaningful sense. When I give a test to my students, I desire them to work independently and freely. I’m not desiring in any sense that they fail. I won’t violate their freedom to prohibit that, but valuing their freedom is entirely different from wishing for their failure.
In regard to your last paragraph, I think an important point is that the unsaved want to reject God. Sending them Heaven would violate their freedom, and I don’t think they’d like it anyway. (This point from C.S. Lewis, of course.)
That last bit doesn’t blend well, of course, with the usual way that Heaven is pitched: “If there’s anything you think you might prefer to burning for eternity, sign with the Jesus of Nazareth today!”
July 15th, 2010 | 9:25 pm | #4
Adam O: I’d like to see an explicit P and not-P contradiction as well, because you only gave a statement of the form of P. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to contradict in the form of not-P unless you also say that God ultimately doesn’t get what he most truly wants. Not getting what you would want if other things were true is not contradictory to getting what you ultimately do want.
Adam B: The only sense in which a Calvinist would say that God desires us to sin is the same sense in which Thomas Aquinas said God desires us to sin, which is that, when looking microscopically at the sin, God sees it as intrinsically bad and doesn’t want it, but when looking macroscopically at the entirety of history, God sees the providential role the existence of sin and particular sins can play and sees the goodness that results as good.
Should we say that’s God desiring sin in some sense? If we do, it’s not what it sounds like when you first hear such a statement. But Aquinas does argue that, in a sense, there’s something you can mean by such a statement that’s true. And keep in mind that Aquinas is not just not a Calvinist but a semi-Pelagian when it comes to soteriology (although I think a case can be made for a very Calvinist-friendly approach to the general theological issues that arise from the philosophical end when he’s not treating scripture).
In the adultery case, I’m not sure why you think a Calvinist would grant the assumptions. If Bob fails to complete the plan to commit adultery, then obviously God was not on board with it in either sense. He wasn’t on board with it in his moral will, since it’s morally wrong. He wasn’t on board with it in his providential will, since it didn’t happen. It would be in God’s providential will for Bob to intend to do it but to fail, and it would be in God’s moral will for Bob never to intend to do it.
I think the exam case shows that a libertarian approach might be able to say that God doesn’t desire the sin in any sense, but it can’t say that God doesn’t will it in any sense. If God can foresee that not intervening will result in a sin and chooses not to intervene, it seems that God is willing the state of affairs where the person’s libertarian freedom leads to a sin over the state of affairs where God prevents the person from being free. So the state of affairs including the sin is willed over a different state of affairs not including it. I would even say that God desires that state over the other, on a standard libertarian approach with foreknowledge of what will happen if he intervenes and what will happen if he doesn’t.
The problem with how heaven is pitched is that evangelists don’t always present it in terms of its most fundamental nature, namely being with God, the most perfect being possible but who also has impossibly perfect standards for us vs. being apart from the being who desires our perfection with full freedom to do as we choose but also being apart from only being who prevents things from being as bad as they can, which will indeed happen if terrible people are with terrible people whose badness is never mitigated forever. We present that in terms of the metaphors scripture presents with the worms and flames, and (1) I don’t think people see the true horror of it while (2) they dismiss it as what they call too medieval while not seeing why justice apart from mercy requires true separation from God and tune out the awfulness of that.
July 16th, 2010 | 8:37 am | #5
“Not getting what you would want if other things were true is not contradictory to getting what you ultimately do want.”
Jeremy,
Let’s unpack that statement a bit and explore what possible other things could be true and put them in the context of Scripture. In Calvinism God gets precisely what he wants and would not change a thing. This implies that our world is the best of all possible worlds. The best of all possible worlds includes God getting what he “ultimately wants” but in order to get what he “ultimately wants” he has to do some things he does not want to do, yet he would not have it any other way. One of the things God has to do to get what he “ultimately wants” is to determine some of his creatures in his image to be damned. Therefore, while God may in some sense desire all of his creatures made in his image to know him in a saving relationship, God is bound by some other “ultimate desire” to see them lost. What desire would that be for, exactly? If it is for greater glory or the manifold display of his attributes, then his desire to save everyone is superseded. So far we are consistent with the statement above.
If the desire in God to see everyone repent and be saved is superseded by a greater desire in God to see some not repent and not be saved then it would be odd to take the (inerrant) Scriptures that declare the intentions of God to see everyone repent and be saved as well as his universal offer of salvation as in fact genuine. Thomas McCall has pointed out the problem in following logic:
(1) God truly loves all persons
(2) Truly to love someone is to desire her well-being and promote her true flourishing as much as you can.
(3) The true well-being and flourishing of all persons is to be found in a right relationship with God, a saving relationship in which we accept the invitation of the gospel and come to love and obey him.
(4) God could determine all persons freely to accept the invitation of the gospel and come to a right relationship and be saved.
(5) Therefore, all persons will be saved.
Orthodox Christianity teaches that (5) is false, so we must either modify or deny one of our premises. Arminianism teaches that (4) is false, thus the world God creates is one where God does not get precisely what he wants and would have it differently. Still, God deems it worth creating because on the whole the moral good it contains outweighs the moral bad it contains. This is because if God’s antededent will is not done, his consequent will is done (see above). This implies that God cannot create the “best” of all possible worlds, but that the world he made is still a good one.
What are the solutions for the Calvinist? In light of the fact that God gets precisely what he wants and would not change a thing it cannot be true that (4) would be false, so some other premise has to be questioned. Premise (1) seems to be the easiest to deny, and so the passages that declare God’s intention to save all have to be modified so they speak of only the elect or they should be considered false. If we maintain the proposition that they are true for everyone, we are left with a revealed will that only speaks of God’s conflicted desire to save us, and no one would be reasonable for trusting it in light of the revelation that God’s “ultimate desires” are achieved through not determining everyone to be saved. It is more reasonable to call such a proposition contradictory and therefore false.
All of this does not deny that there is a “two wills” theology in Arminianism; just that the two wills are more consistent than they are in Calvinism.
July 16th, 2010 | 9:42 am | #6
I admit my example was a bad one.
“Providential will” is a bit more neutral, and I could accept that, where “God providentially wills X to happen” means something like “apparently God prefers to have X happen rather than nuke the world before X happens.” That’s something we all can agree on — and, I’m not sure whether Calvinists are really saying anything more than that. Correct me if I’m wrong, though.
I take issue with the idea of God, “looking macroscopically at the entirety of history, God sees the providential role the existence of sin and particular sins can play and sees the goodness that results as good.” As if God is saying, “Well, I guess that isn’t so bad after all.” I think the question is, does God fail to intervene because He is respecting human freedom, or because He can see that in the long run sin has some good effects?
I think the former. The problem with the latter (in my view) is that it attributes some positive element to sin, which I don’t believe exists. The good things that might result are from God, not from the sin.
If on the other hand if we say that the effects of sin are themselves good in the long run, then rather than dealing with theodicy, we say that the problem doesn’t exist. (I also think that this precludes any meaningful definition of sin, but that is a broader point.)
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