“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.)

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 If it is for greater glory or the manifold display of his attributes, then his desire to save everyone is superseded.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If the desire in God to see everyone repent and be saved is superseded by a greater desire in God to see some not repent and not be saved then it would be odd to take the (inerrant) Scriptures that declare the intentions of God to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.

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.

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!”

Could you be a bit more precise and expansive in your statement that there is a problem of contradiction in Calvinism?