First, I would like to thank Bill for his clarification that he does not consider me a Pelagian. Pelagius and I never got along very well. I can see the possibility of my observations being misread–that somehow I was denying the effects of the Fall. Bill accurately surmises that this is not my position and I appreciate his comments so as to avoid an unnecessary sidetrack to our discussion. Indeed once the relationship between God and man was broken, only God himself could repair it. Christ is the essential and only possibility to heal this rupture. On that we agree.
It may not surprise, however, that I have some qualms with what remains of the responses to my original question: “How does Reform theology explain the presence of sin in the world?”
Based on what has been said I gather that, currently, in Reform theology there is no answer to this question or at least not an answer which is comprehensible through human reason.
And if this is this case, I find this to be a major weakness in Reform theology. The question of the presence of sin is fundamental. We have “theology” because people have looked around them and asked questions: Why am I here? What is the meaning of life? Is there a God? Even if we place ourselves in a secular philosophical world for a moment, we find that it is the existence of love that is a mystery, whereas the existence of sin is a plain fact.
There are a great many mysteries in our world. Some mysteries are difficult because of our desire for understanding, but all of the mysteries of God are immensely beautiful. They are like flashes of glory where the strands of faith and reason intertwine.
I do not find the existence of sin to be a mystery.
God created Adam in His image. This does not mean that God has two arms, two legs and a tailbone. It means that God has granted us the capacity to love. In order to love we MUST have freedom. Like Adam before the Fall we have the freedom to choose good or evil, that is, we have the capacity to love. Unlike Adam before the Fall we are now in need of redemption. We cannot redeem ourselves, but we have the freedom to reject God’s redemption. He gives us that choice because He loves us. And the only way we can love Him in return is to have freedom to do so.
If we don’t have freedom, we can’t love. If we can’t love, then literally we haven’t got a chance of heaven. Love MUST be a choice with real possibilities and certain consequences. God’s Love is where our love begins and where our love ends, but in the end it has to be OUR choice with the alternative choice being death. We must, daily, be choosing between these two certainties. In fact the greatest mystery which differentiates us from God is that God, because He IS Love, can ONLY love because it is His Essence. If He doesn’t love then he would not longer be God. So it is love that is the mystery. Sin is prosaic.
Further, the only way to be in God’s presence in heaven is to be fully cleansed of everything but love (hence the theological necessity of a state of purgation from sin, i.e. purgatory) because it would be impossible to be in God’s presence with any stain of sin.
And here’s the kicker (sorry, I live in Texas). This entire idea of pre-Fall Adam being in a position being free to choose good or evil is clearly revealed in the Gospels. Else, how is it that Jesus, the 2nd Adam, born without sin, could be “tempted” in the desert? Else, why does Jesus, free of sin, sweat blood in the Garden of Eden and ask that the cup pass him? The Gospel writers, by including these real events from Jesus’ life, are illustrating quite clearly that the struggle for Jesus was real, that the temptation was real even though he was without sin. That is why Christ’s sacrifice was an act of love. He had the choice, in his human nature, to turn from what was good. And unlike Adam, he chose good.
The two natures of Christ is most certainly a mystery. The first person to be presented with this truth recognized it immediately as a mystery: Mary says, “How can this be?” Like Mary we must accept that this was God’s plan. But not so with sin. Sin is easy: it is a necessity as the opposite of love. Love is the Mystery.
Never push “send” at 1:00 in the morning! I should clarify the above by reassuring that it is not sin which is a necessity but the option to sin. That is, if man is to choose to love God he must have the option to “not-love.” To choose God, I must have the option of ‘not-God’ which we call “sin.” God does not create sin but he gives us the option to love him or not.
Hi Kevin,
Hope all is well. I have a couple questions, to understand better where you’re coming from.
Did God know beforehand that Adam would sin?
Will some men and angels be eternally lost?
Thanks,
John
Kevin,
We agree that Adam had freedom to chose prior to the fall. But this does not mean that God had not ordained from the foundation of the world all that would come to pass. Yes there is tension between freedom and Divine sovereignty, but it is simply false dealing to say that we must be able to resolve the problem. Augustine could not resolve the tension. Aquinas could not.
I want to caution you about your formulation. It suffers a fatal flaw. Who says that absolute freedom is necessary for love? By absolute freedom? Adam could choose to sin. We can choose to sin. But do the Saints in heaven have a choice to sin?
The answer is, of course, no. The saints in heaven are confirmed their righteousness. They are not where Adam was … but where Adam was intended to be. And yet they love with a purity that we can only imagine. They have freedom… but not the freedom to sin.
To drive things further. I agree that the ability to love is part of bearing the image of God. Love is of the essence of the Triune God. However, sin is not of the essence of the Triune God. In fact, the Triune God’s own freedom is not absolute in the sense advocated by Kevin’s post. Rather, God’s freedom is bound by His Holy Will. He cannot act contrary to His Holy nature. To put it simply, God cannot sin. He cannot choose to violate His nature. Is love in, nonetheless, the foundation upon which all love rests.
Yes, that is true. God’s Love is essential to Him. As I stated above, this is precisely what differentiates us from God. He cannot do anything which would not be Love because He would then cease to be God. God He exists outside of time and therefore is in an external state of Love. In fact, the only way that I can conceive of it is to picture time existing as a tiny sliver within the All Powerful, All Enveloping God. Somehow He creates time within His Eternity. But even in the state of Heaven we will not be God, but we will be fully in His Presence and therefore by necessity, cleansed of all sin.
John and Bill, I agree with you both. God could not have but known the course of the events of history. But he could have, and I believe did, endow Adam and Eve with the ability to make this choice so that they could be with Him in heaven as the only beings who could choose to be there. This possibility passes to all humanity. God could create all the heavens and the earth and all creatures imaginable. But by necessity these creations would be subject to Him unless they possess a will. God wanted us to be able to love Him and consequently each other and ourselves.
Those who have “passed the test” as St. Paul says, now live in a state without time. They have made their choice whether for God or against Him. Thus they no longer have the ability to choose because to choose requires time. They either love eternally or they don’t love eternally.
Only those who love can be with God forever. Those who do not are without God, forever.
Kevin,
Just so I am clear, you agree that the “free will” is necessary constituent to love argument is untenable?
We also affirm that God both knew the course of events (without recourse to external events, and without dependence upon the actions of his creatures) and that Adam was endowed with an ability to make a choice. I assume you still object to the portions of the last statement that are set off by the parenthesis. To do so threatens any form of orthodox theology proper as you have made the God who is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable subject to the capricious whims of his creatures. But that it a different argument for now.
My objection to your last comment is the sentence “this possibility passes to all humanity.” This sentence passes from flirting with Pelagianism to dating it. You simply cannot make a one step leap from Adam to his posterity without taking into account to great facts. First, the fact of the fall. Second, the fact of redemption in Christ. There are four estates for mankind. Man prior to the fall who was able to sin or to not sin. Man after the fall who is not able to not sin. Man redeemed in Christ who is able to sin or to not sin. Man in the glorified state who is not able to sin. How can make an argument about man’s spiritual ability moving directly from Adam to fallen mankind?
Further, who says that “choice requires time”? It is not immediately obvious to me that finite creatures can ever be free from created time. Surely time is different for the glorified church in the intermediate state. Surely time will be different in the new heavens and new earth, but no time? I am not sure this is possible. And what of the Angels who rebelled? Were they “in time”? Was time a necessary part of their probation? While I am sure you are arguing beyond what the Scriptures teach, I am not sure that you are arguing in conformity with tradition either… but I am interested to learn otherwise.
Bill,
Maybe we can take this one concept at a time. Regarding the relationship of love and freewill: As created beings endowed with the capacity to love, freewill is necessary for us to participate in love. For us love must be a choice. For God, who is the embodiment of Love, He can do nothing but Love. His Will is timeless–this is how He can be the Alpha and the Omega and the All-Knowing Creator. Therefore His Love is also timeless.
Once in His presence we will participate in that timelessness–the eternal exchange of love with God. In fact, eternity really can only be comprehended as a ‘state of being’ not as an ‘amount of time.’ Exactly “how” God allows this to happen (i.e. created beings existing in timelessness) is beyond our understanding (or at least beyond mine), but this is a traditional understanding as it is the understanding that I have received from the Church. As I’ve said I’m not a formal theologian so I do not know the details of the development of this understanding, but I’d be happy to find the references if that would be helpful.
Kevin and William,
This is an important exchange, but from the perspective of an outside observer it seems like it’s becoming an all too familiar instance of Protestants and Catholics talking past one another. I have a few questions/comments that may or may not be helpful (which, of course, you are simply free to ignore).
1. I don’t quite understand the original premise of this post: namely, that evil is not a mystery (whereas love is). The suggestion is an intriguing one, and given the metaphysical status of love and evil, I sense it’s founded on a valuable insight. With that being said, I don’t see how explaining Adam’s fall in terms of “free will” dispels the mystery of Adam’s sin and man’s fallen state. Admittedly, it’s an important anthropological and theological claim that goes a long way, but I took the point of the claim to be that it has a certain explanatory power that makes it superior to the Reformed explanation of evil. Free will seems to be a necessary anthropological condition that renders possible both Adam’s fall and our own sinful acts (emphasizing, of course, that our will is not in the same condition as was Adam’s), but admitting the existence of free will doesn’t seem to exhaust the reasons why Adam *actually* sinned and why we continue to do so. In fact, having a rich sense of human freedom actually seems to set the stage for the inscrutability of evil. In any case Kevin’s point seems to be that “freedom” is a prerequisite of love, and thus any Christian narrative about sin–and about why God created the world as He did–needs to mention this, if it’s to have much explanatory power. Here, I’m sympathetic, even if I don’t understand to what degree this parts ways with Reformed theology.
2. It seems as though various senses of “freedom”/“choice”/“free will” are at work in this discussion; clarifying the terms of the debate would be helpful. In one sense, we might talk about “free choice” as a kind of “cognitive faculty,” which is simply the will of a rational being. In addition to sensitive appetites, human beings have rational appetite, or will, that allows human beings to act in consultation with the intellect (i.e., through deliberation). Having a will is a prerequisite for loving, and a will acting in accordance with the gift of charity—that is, a will that participates in the love of God–can love meritoriously. Thus, rational creatures can freely will and love, and only rational creatures can do so. Now, having a will doesn’t, of itself, seem to imply that one must have been able to act otherwise (say, would have acted otherwise in a “parallel universe”); this seems to be a second sense in which freedom is being used. Sure, humans beings often exercise choices that could have been otherwise in their everyday existence. But there are other instances of willing (willing I would even call “free”) that can’t be otherwise: God willing the good at all times (and here, of course, God has a “will” in a merely analogical sense), human beings in beatitude willing the good, etc. Beatified human beings cannot turn from God—not because their wills have been obliterated, but because they are fully conformed to the Good/God, insofar as their intellects clearly see God for what God is. Their love for God, while a supernatural gift, perfects their natural human faculties, so the root of their human freedom (the intellect and will) remains. The possibility to do otherwise is no longer a real one, even though the powers undergirding this possibility still exist as powers. If I understand him, Kevin’s point seems to be that the human power to choose (rooted in the intellect and will) is a fundamental ontological reality of the human condition, even if that power is perverted and misdirected by the fall, corrected/strengthened by grace, or completely fulfilled in the vision of God (who is, as Goodness itself, the will’s ultimate object). Thus, human choice need not suggest that the will is wholly unconditioned and wholly equivalent in all modes of human existence (prelapsarian, fallen, redeemed, etc.), but that this power/potency is something fundamentally human and that God would have created and would be sustaining something other than a human creature, were we to not have “freedom” as a condition (even if a conditioned condition) of our being. Of itself, there seems to be nothing Pelagian about this.
3. Finally, and most importantly, I detect—although I might be wholly wrong about this—a kind of looming disagreement about the relationship between human freedom and God’s providence and predestination of the “elect.” More specifically, it seems that there is this working assumption that the relationship between human freedom and God’s providence is some sort of “zero sum game” (1). Thus, if Catholics want to emphasize human freedom, they can do so only at the expense of God’s providence, and if Calvinists want to emphasize predestination, they can do so only by snuffing out human freedom. While one could certainly emphasize freedom at the expense of providence (or vice versa), and this often occurs in popular debates, I don’t see why human freedom cannot be a participation in God’s providence–for example, in the way that Thomas Aquinas construes it. Anyway, without going on at length, it in no way seems contradictory to say that, as Bill points out, God guides all the events of creation (and necessarily so, since He creates and sustains all of them), while also saying with Kevin that humans participate in this divine plan in a way that, relative to a rock or tree, is “free.” At the level of soteriology, none of this suggests, of course, that we somehow “choose God” and force him to “hand over the grace.” God along can offer us salvation, in the historical Person of Christ, and in the graces gained by Christ that we come to receive in our own place and time in history. At the very least, Kevin calls us to realize that humans receive this grace and aren’t “coerced” by it in the way that a rock has the material exigency to fall.
Thanks in advance for allowing me to ramble on about this!
Lee
(1.) This is the only way I can make sense of this accusation: “We also affirm that God both knew the course of events (without recourse to external events, and without dependence upon the actions of his creatures) and that Adam was endowed with an ability to make a choice. I assume you still object to the portions of the last statement that are set off by the parenthesis. To do so threatens any form of orthodox theology…” I may be missing something, but I didn’t read anything in Kevin’s posts that lead me to believe that he thinks this.
Lee,
Thanks for the valuable comments. Thank you for focusing us back on topic.
I am in whole hearted agreement. God is sovereign. Man is free. There is tension and mystery. Not only do I believe that this is what Reformed theology teaches, I think that it is a perfectly orthodox position for a Roman Catholic as it stands in the Augustinian/Dominican traditions.
As I understand the tension in the debate to be as follows, Kevin please correct me if this is wrong:
1. I understand Kevin to be saying that the Reformed understanding of man free will is double dealing because of our position on Divine providence;
2. Kevin’s is using the love requires free will as a proof.
In response, I am perfectly happy to leave a mystery between two biblical truths a) God is sovereign and b) man is given freedom of will.
Further, I am unconvinced in the merit of the argument that love demands a form of freedom unhinged by God’s sovereign, providential control over all things.
BC
Lee,
For helpful context you might want to go back and read through an earlier posts entitled Adam and Evil.
BC
Bill and Lee,
Thank you for your insightful responses. I do think there is a lot of talking past each other in our discussion and though I am trying to alleviate that as much as possible in my comments, I’m certain that I do not always fully understand Reform theology.
It does appear that we are in agreement that God is sovereign and man is free. The question I would like to present is: Can a sovereign, all-powerful God will to temporally (i.e. “in time” and therefore temporarily) suspend His sovereignty over our souls through the gift of freewill in order that we might have the ability to choose Him in a real act of love?
I think it is a question worth discussing and has definite consequences for our Christian faith. Perhaps it is best to put the discussion aside for now as we pick up our conversation on Brad’s new book. But I would certainly be interested in continuing at a later date.
For, in the first place, remember that it was the Person of the Son of God Who came in the likeness of sinful flesh. He took upon Himself all our sins, and suffered and died on Calvary. And to be sure, we are very careful to state that as to His divine nature He could not and did not suffer; all the agonies of death and hell were suffered only in the human nature. But at the same time, never may that be understood so that dogmatically we destroy the mystery that it was nevertheless the only begotten Son of God Who suffered on the cross! While all the agonies of Calvary were suffered only in the human nature, the Word of God nevertheless draws our attention to the fact that at Calvary you behold the suffering of God’s Son, and that by that suffering you may measure the infinite height and depth of the love of God. For, in the second place, even on Calvary you dare not separate between the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity. To be sure, the Person of the Son of God died on Golgotha; but his death was the revelation of the love of the Triune God! God Himself suffered the agonies of death in the flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ. Or, to put it otherwise, do you imagine that the Father and the Holy Spirit looked coldly on while the only begotten Son died on the tree? No, that were impossible! The message of the love of God, the Word of the cross, is this: God spared not His own Son! When faced, as it were, with the alternative of giving His only begotten Son or letting the world perish, God so loved the world that He sent His Son to the death of the cross.