Smith’s article sums up David Burrell’s argument that we cannot have freedom at all without a Creator as a final cause. Burrell writes:
“if I cannot be pushed to will something, but only drawn to do so, not even God can cause me to do something freely, if we are thinking of an efficient cause. Yet God, as my sovereign good, could so draw my will as to bring me freely to consent to the end for which my nature craves. So freedom is less a question of self-determination of what otherwise remains undetermined than it is one of attuning oneself to one’s ultimate end.”
In thinking of God as “cause” of all that comes to pass, has Reformed theology been sufficiently clear about what sort of cause He is?
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Restoring Man at Notre Dame
It is fascinating to be an outsider on the inside of an institution going through times of…
Deliver Us from Evil
In a recent New York Times article entitled “Freedom With a Side of Guilt: How Food Delivery…
Natural Law Needs Revelation
Natural law theory teaches that God embedded a teleological moral order in the world, such that things…
