What I see in the pages of posts and comments on DRC—and certainly in Bill’s posting from May 2nd—are the words of committed Christians striving to follow their Savior. In our age this challenge continues to beleaguer us all, as it did the apostles and martyrs of the first century. I recognize the sincerity and passion for truth of all of those posting here. Praise God for that. I pray that my meager musings on these pages are equally committed to Christ and to the truth.
As we continue in this glorious season of Easter I thought it might be an appropriate time to take up where our previous discussion on grace and justification left off. I hope you all will not object to indulging more in this question as I think it a most important one to this dialogue.
In light of Bill’s expressed desire for dialogue with non-Reform but equally passionate Christians (I pray a category within which I might fall), I hope that you will bear with me as I attempt to gain clarity on the Reformed teaching on a particularly sticky issue. I do realize that this can be a rather sensitive area, one which has a long history of misunderstanding and disagreement. So please accept my promise that I am not trying to raise hackles here nor to beat a horse that perhaps many consider to be dead. It is my expressed desire to gain a better understanding of the Reform teaching on predestination and original sin and even the concept of sin itself and perhaps, in the process, to help some readers gain a better understanding of Catholic theology in turn.
When I consider the exegeses made in previous posts and comments regarding grace and sin and justification I am drawn to the theological beginning of the question: the opening chapters of Genesis. God creates the world and all that is in it. God creates man. All that he creates is good. On this surely we agree.
How then does sin enter the world? This question has been posed myriad times throughout the ages, particularly by those questioning the goodness of God. Since the goodness of God is clearly not in question here at DRC, I feel free in posing this question as a challenge against the previously-posted Reform understanding of sin and grace. Based on the Reform understanding of sin and grace, how does sin enter the world?
In Catholic theology, the moment of the fall of Adam presents little difficulty. In fact it reinforces our understanding that God allows all of us the possibility of choosing to reject Him. All men are created with freewill. The purpose of freewill is to be given the opportunity to love since without freedom there can be no possibility of love. Adam was created in the grace of God which was manifested in the perfect beauty of Eden. At the moment that he pridefully bought the lie of the serpent, Adam fell into sin. God gave him the freedom to make this choice because he loved Adam enough to grant him that greatest blessing of all: the ability to love as God loves, to choose God or to reject Him. Adam could have chosen otherwise and choosing otherwise would have allowed him to remain in that grace, in the garden. Because he had freewill, his decision to reject God is fully his own. This, as best as I can express it, would be the Catholic understanding of the entrance of sin into the human world.
So I am wondering, based on the Reform understanding of this event, how exactly did He Fall? I’m not so concerned with the vehicle (i.e. the serpent as symbol or reality) but with the essence itself. How does evil come into the world if God is all good? Of course, prefigured in the story of Adam and Eve is the existence, already, of evil. The serpent is already in the garden and clearly is a manifestation of evil. For the sake of simplicity, I believe we can focus our discussion on the fall of Adam and Eve as this is the first sin of man.
If I am understanding it correctly, it would seem that based on the Reform understanding of grace and sin presented previously, Adam and Eve were not granted the grace of God to save them from the fall. It would then seem to follow that based on the Reform theology, it was God’s will that evil enter into the world since his choice to grant grace to one or another person is all His own. Yet this obviously would be antithetical to His nature.
So my question is: How does Reform theology resolve this apparent conundrum of the entrance of sin into the world?
Great topic! I’m sorry for “trolling” or whatever the proper internet term might be, but I was interested especially by the line that “”in Catholic theology, the moment of the fall of Adam presents little difficulty.”
I’m not sure that this is wholly the case, when one examines the question historically. I agree that, today, most Catholic theologians and laypeople would let human free will bear the entirety of the grave moment when sin entered into the world. This is in part the result of the putting aside (and partial forgetfulness, maybe salutary) of the polemical battles between Dominicans and Jesuits and, later, Jansenists and Jesuits that raged in the Catholic world from the late 16th to the late 18th centuries (and beyond, if you consider Garrigou-Lagrange’s fierce criticisms of Molinism).
But if we remember these old struggles, we will realize that many Catholic theologians had to wrestle with the same questions that were posed to the Reformed tradition in this post. It is certainly true that God is not the author of sin and that free will is responsible for evils of this sort. But difficulties remain. There was a very strong view of Divine Providence, where God not only “foreknew” the fall of Adam when He created man (and in eternity) but where he also could have granted intrinsically efficacious grace to Adam and Eve, that would have prevented them from falling, while (of course) preserving their freedom.
Though you don’t frequently see this language in Thomas Aquinas or the great medieval doctors, who tend to talk about the fallen angels and Adam putting up “impediements” to the divine grace that they were given, later theologians in the Thomist tradition are quite explicit about saying that God withdrew His grace or willed not to grant the help (auxilium) that could have prevented these gravely sinful acts. But Thomas Aquinas does say that, as the cause of all things, God is the cause of the act of sin, though he is certainly not the cause of the form of the sin itself… This shows how seriously the scholastics took Divine Providence and God as universal cause.
As is well-known, God is not the author of sin in the Catholic tradition, but I would want to say that the great Reformed theologians and confessions were saying something pretty close, if not substantially the same thing. More discussion is necessary but consider Westminster:
CHAPTER III.
Of God’s Eternal Decree.
I. God from all eternity did by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass; yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin; nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.
By the way, there is a book that just came out on free will in Reformed theology, which looks extremely interesting:
http://books.google.com/books?id=HjCNPQAACAAJ&dq=Reformed+Thought+on+Freedom&ei=6PPeS8u8EJniyQTcqqDPCQ&hl=it&cd=1
Well, there are many nuances and distinctions that must be left out in a comment. I hope that the key point is basically clear!
Hi Matt,
Certainly there has been debate of this “question of questions” going back to Augustine and even the early Church Fathers. And theologians may spend a great many waking hours pondering it. But Catholics believe that the Holy Spirit is ultimately responsible for the conclusions reached in Catholic theology. Both the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) and the Code of Canon Law are the results of this divine action. For purposes of this discussion we need to distinguish between theological path through which Catholic teaching arrives at this conclusion and the fact that this is Catholic doctrine.
As stated in the CCC, ultimately the freedom to choose evil is essential to making the distinction between God who is all good and the fall of Adam who no longer participates in that all goodness by his choice.
“311 Angels and men, as intelligent and free creatures, have to journey toward their ultimate destinies by their free choice and preferential love. They can therefore go astray. Indeed, they have sinned. Thus has moral evil, incommensurably more harmful than physical evil, entered the world. God is in no way, directly or indirectly, the cause of moral evil. He permits it, however, because he respects the freedom of his creatures and, mysteriously, knows how to derive good from it:
For almighty God. . ., because he is supremely good, would never allow any evil whatsoever to exist in his works if he were not so all-powerful and good as to cause good to emerge from evil itself.”
It is one thing to say that God allows Adam to turn away from Him so that Adam’s choice to turn toward Him is, in fact, a free choice (i.e. freedom is requisite for love). It is quite another to say that God chose not grant grace to Adam SO THAT he would turn to sin. This would appear to the non-Reform observer to be the conclusion Reform teaching and thus would appear undermine the total goodness of God.
I didn’t say that any of these theologians taught that God chose not to grant grace to Adam _so that_ he would turn to sin. The will to permit sin is not part of God’s “proper” work.
Instead, they taught that God chose not to grant grace to Adam _with the result_ that, through his choice and the “mystery of iniquity” (if you will), he fell into sin. This was, in that broadly Augustinian tradition, not only foreseen but part of the eternal divine plan, as is everything that happens.
But Thomism has never been condemned by the Roman Catholic Church, even if attempts have been made. There was a Congregation “De Auxiliis” which ended in the early seventeenth century that dealt with the charge that Thomism fell into the Calvinist heresy (as well as that Molinism was semi-Pelagian). The conclusion (which was not much of a conclusion!) was the papacy’s saying that neither side–whether the (to be anachronistic and rather oversimplistic) more “Arminian” Jesuits or the more “Calvinist” (!) Dominicans–was allowed to call the other side heretical in their disputes.
The recent Catechism has, as one can expect, remained almost silent on the points of dispute. Sometimes, though, it articulates a position which seems to undermine one side or the other. But a Catechism is operating on a different level of theological discussion, I think. I’d be happy to elaborate. Of course, I agree that being Catholic entails submission to the Magisterium.
The main question here, though, is the extent to which the Reformed soteriological tradition, especially insofar as it is authentically Augustinian, can/should be pushed outside the bounds of Catholic orthodoxy. You are right that we can observe difficulties in the history that tradition with addressing the sin of Adam and the Providence of God. But since this is a debate that has played out in the Western theological tradition as a whole, I don’t know if it needs to be a point for drawing a line between the Catholic and Reformed theological traditions. I mean, for starters, we all agree that God is not the author of sin and that Adam was responsible for his sin…
I’m interested to dig into this and find where specific points of disagreement remain. Thanks again!