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
The Church in the Age of Therapy
In 1966, Philip Rieff wrote in The Triumph of the Therapeutic that “Religious man was born to…
Canada’s Deadliest Blind Spot
On September 20, the Daily Mail ran a story with the provocative headline, “Our 83-year-old Christian grandmother…
The Faithful Joy of Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen
Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen seem to have had little in common. She favored rhinestones; he wore…
