“Whatsoever comes to pass, comes to pass by the will and eternal decree of God.”
The Westminster Confession? Nope; Spinoza.
Yet, the argument where this appears is incoherent.
Spinoza claims that the Bible’s attribution of miraculous events to God is an accommodation to pre-existing opinion (he somehow has extra-biblical access to the opinions of ancient Hebrews): “miracles are only intelligible as in relation to human opinions, and merely mean events of which the natural cause cannot be explained by a reference to any ordinary occurrence, either by us, or at any rate, by the writer and narrator of the miracle.”
Or, “all the events narrated in Scripture came to pass naturally, and are referred directly to God because Scripture, as we have shown, does not aim at explaining things by their natural causes, but only at narrating what appeals to the popular imagination, and doing so in the manner best calculated to excite wonder, and consequently to impress the minds ofthe masses with devotion.”
Or, he claims that the attribution of events directly to God is a Jewish-poetic way of speaking.
But on his own argument, it makes no sense to distinguish, as he does, between the biblical claim that “God changed the hearts of the Egyptians, so that they hated the Israelites” and his own claim that this is “evidently a natural change,” explained by the Egyptian fear of the rising Israelite population. Natural causes are the expression of the will and nature of God: To repeat, “Whatsoever comes to pass, comes to pass by the will and eternal decree of God.” On Spinoza’s own premises, the biblical language that attribute apparently “natural” events to God is strictly true . Why not say that?
Spinoza cannot say that the biblical language is philosophically accurate because that would violate his prior argument (assumption) that the Bible’s teaching is restricted to knowledge of God and virtue, and that it doesn’t deal in speculative philosophy. Spinoza can say “God causes everything,” and it’s philosophy; Scripture says, “God causes everything” and it’s an accommodation to primitive conceptions of the universe. He knows that one’s philosophy and the other is not because the Bible is not interested in philosophy.
Dear Reader,
Can I be direct with you?
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