Calvin's nonvoluntarist deity

John Calvin

Engraving

after

Original Oil Painting

in

University Library of Geneva

(Image from Wikipdia)

I've recently become aware of more and more Calvinists among Southern Baptists, the church in which I grew up, but when I was young, I never heard anybody in my church speak up in favor of predestination. That doctrine was for the Presbyterians. Most Baptists adhered to a sort of popular Arminianism, which emphasizes the free will of individuals to make their own choice in accepting or rejecting grace.

My grandmother had even heard of 'official' Arminian theology and mentioned it once in explaining to me her rejection of predestination. The term stuck in my head, but I hadn't seen it written down, so I later confused it with Armenian Christianity as my knowledge increased beyond my understanding, so I imagined in my sophomoric views that the early theologian Pelagius (born 354), who emphasized free will, was an Armenian and that his theology had so influenced the Armenian Church that Pelagianism came to be known as Armenianism.

Eventually, sometime after my sophomore year, I got that point straightened out.

Anyway, as I was saying, I've noticed more Calvinist among Southern Baptists these days, and my anecdotal impression has now been confirmed through an article in Christianity Today by Ken Walker, "TULIP Blooming" (1/17/2008), which reveals the following fact:

Although only 10 percent of SBC pastors identify themselves as Calvinists, nearly 30 percent of recent seminary graduates do.

The influence of these new graduates on the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is already being felt:

Long considered more Arminian in orientation -- emphasizing an individual's need to respond to the gospel rather than God's election in salvation -- the nation's largest Protestant denomination is grappling with doctrines of grace and election amid a seminary-led revival.

I suppose that I'll be hearing more about this issue in the years ahead, so I'd best start boning up on the predestinarian and free-will theologies of Calvin and Arminius, respectively. In fact, one of the leaders of the Bible study class that I attend at Seoul International Baptist Church (SIBC) is a Calvinist, and he's a very well-informed, interesting individual.

This man regularly refers to God's "sovereignty," a theological point that I've often heard Calvinists emphasize in such as way as to nearly suggest theological voluntarism, an extreme view emphasizing the power of God to do anything he damned well pleases. Obviously, this would make Calvinism similar to the Medieval Nominalism of Duns Scotus or to the mainstream theology of orthodox Islam (insofar as I understand these).

However, the Christian philosopher Michael Sudduth, writing in his unpublished paper "Calvin and the Medieval Dialectic of Divine Omnipotence" (1997), argues that Calvin was no voluntarist, and he cites this passage from Calvin:

That Sarbonic dogma, therefore, in the promulgation of which the Papal theologians so much pride themselves, "that the power of God is absolute and tyrannical," I utterly abhor. For it would be easier to force away the light of the sun from his heat, or his heat from his fire, than to separate the power of God from His justice. Away, then, with all such monstrous speculations from godly minds, as that God can possibly do more, or otherwise, than He has done, or that He can do anything without the highest order and reason. For I do not receive that other dogma, "that God, as being free from all law Himself, may do anything without being subject to any blame for doing so." For whosoever makes God without law, robs Him of the greatest part of His glory, because he spoils Him of His rectitude and justice. Not that God is, indeed, subject to any law, excepting in so far as He is a law unto Himself. But there is that inseparable connection and harmony between the power of God and His justice, that nothing can possibly be done by Him but what is moderate, legitimate, and according to the strictest rule of right. And most certainly, when the faithful speak of God as omnipotent, they acknowledge Him at the same time to be the Judge of the world, and always hold His power to be righteously tempered with equity and justice. (Calvin, A Doctrine of the Secret Providence of God (1558) in Calvin's Calvinism: Treatises on the Eternal Predestination of God and the Secret Providence of God, tr. Henry Cole (Grand Rapids: Reformed Free Publishing Association, 1987?), p. 248)

By "Sarbonic dogma," I'm assuming that Calvin was referring to theologians associated with La Sorbonne (the University of Paris), that Medieval university founded in Paris by Robert de Sorbon in 1257, for one of its early theologians was the theological voluntarist Duns Scotus, who taught there from 1293 to 1297.

At any rate, Sudduth comments on the passage above from Calvin:

Perhaps more than any other single passage in Calvin this statement is crucial to understanding Calvin's position on both voluntarism and the Distinction [i.e., between "the potentia Dei absoluta (absolute power of God) and the potentia Dei ordinata (ordained power of God)"]. What is striking about this passage is that in it Calvin clearly denies that God can do just anything without being subject to blame for doing so. Similarly he denies that God is exlex or super legem (beyond law). Furthermore, Calvin is explicit that God has reasons for what He does, and they are just reasons, but they are simply hidden from us in this life. These points set definite moral constraints on what God can do. I take this to be evidence against the voluntarist reading of Calvin alluded to earlier (in section II). For the voluntarist, God cannot act inordinately because whatever God does is just by virtue of his doing it. The divine act makes the moral fact. Calvin, however, following theologians such as Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, maintains that God cannot act inordinately because of the consistency of the divine nature. God's being righteous may be epistemically mysterious in many respects, but it is not ontologically vacuous.

This emphasis upon God's consistent nature thus precludes a radically voluntarist reading of Calvinism (though some hyper-Calvinists might even deny Calvin on this point and return to Duns Scotus). But Calvin is also worried about the Euthyphro dilemma, which he wants to circumvent through these words concerning God:

He is a law unto Himself. But there is that inseparable connection and harmony between the power of God and His justice.

Calvin wants to ensure that God is just, but Calvin's emphasis upon God being a law unto Himself leaves unclear what makes the 'justness' of God just. Calvin does not wish to leave God's justice arbitrary, as though God's absolute might makes what he does absolutely right even though he could have done utterly differently than he has done. But he also does not wish to impose justice upon God by referring to a standard external to God. But is God, then, divided within Himself into a capacity for willful absolute power and a standard of divine, infinitely wise justice? Would the latter act as God's conscience, as though an imperial God were to think, like Nixon, "Yes, we could do that -- but it would be wrong." Calvin probably wouldn't like to imagine God in this way either.

Be that as it may, Calvin's insistent Christian belief that God has a divine nature that in some nonarbitrary way grounds divine justice, and also divine love, places Calvin's thinking in the mainstream of Christian theology and, as it happens, distinguishes his position from that of mainstream Muslim theology, which holds that God does not have a nature and can do as he arbitrarily pleases.

Or such is my understanding of Islamic theology...

Blumenberg's Legitimacy of the Modern Age: Reviewed by Martin Jay (On Curiosity)

Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration

Curious Odyssey through the Pillars of Hercules...

(Image from Bibliothèque nationale de France)

The Christmas season is upon us, the season of giving, and dozens of students are generously giving me their final papers.

Well, I believe in the Christmas spirit of reciprocity, so each one of these same students will soon be receiving something particularly fitting in response.

Merry Christmas, O My Students...

Anyway, due to this holiday cheer, I won't be writing much this morning, nor perhaps for several mornings, though I'll keep posting daily snippets.

Today, a long snippet. First, though, I should inform you that I contacted my old history professor Martin Jay because I wanted to get a copy of his review of Blumenberg's Legitimacy book. I read it some 20 years ago but couldn't recall where I had found it. Jay wrote back:

I was very interested to hear that you are working on Blumenberg, a thinker who definitely repays the effort it takes to read him. I don't know of anything as penetrating on the theme of curiosity as his discussion in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age . . . . As for my own review of the Blumenberg book, it first appeared in History and Theory back in about 1975 [sic: 1985] and then was republished in my collection Fin-de-siecle Socialism a few years later. I don't have an electronic copy to send as an attachment, but if you can't find it anywhere, I would be happy to send a reprint.

Once I knew where to look for it, the search became simpler -- though I could have located it anyway through a Google search but didn't want to deal with logging in to the university's document retrieval system. Well, I had to log in anyway, and I've easily found the review. Jay does such an excellent job of summarizing Blumenberg's thesis that I will simply quote the five central paragraphs on curiosity:

[I]t was the unleashing of curiosity, so Blumenberg contends in the third major section of his book, that marks the modern sensibility. Turning a remarkable amount of erudition on the question of why that unleashing took so long, Blumenberg presents a brilliant account of what he calls the "trial" of theoretical curiosity. Theory in its classical guise was, as we have already had occasion to note, contemplative rather than experimental, which meant that the ancients refrained from doing more than passively "reading" a cosmos whose objective existence they did not doubt. What made it even more inimical to the full unleashing of curiosity was the assumption that such contemplation could produce human happiness, an assumption itself tied to the belief, still held by many medieval thinkers, that knowledge of the Truth was the road to contentment. In this sense, both classical and medieval theory could be called "pragmatic," for its ultimate goal was not knowledge per se, but the happiness its possession would bring. But this kind of pragmatism, which perhaps can be traced back as far as the Socratic quest for the good life, proved hostile to any kind of knowledge that does not translate into personal fulfillment. Thus, Blumenberg concludes, it created an impediment, more passive than active, to the complete valorization of human curiosity no matter what its purpose.

With the Stoics, Blumenberg argues, came a further obstacle to unlimited curiosity. Far more skeptical than their predecessors about the possibility of achieving a human version of divine truth, they preached against the inevitable disappointment that seeking it would engender. Instead of an open-minded and open-eyed contemplation of the world, they counseled a therapeutic form of ataraxia, in which disillusionment is avoided by a preemptive refusal to seek the truth at all. For the Stoics, Blumenberg writes, "intellectual curiosity is now the disastrous drive that misleads us into violating the boundary settlement between the human and the divine sphere" (264). Although Christian thinkers like Augustine had to work their way through the skeptical implications of this doctrine, they nonetheless did not come to accept theoretical curiosity as a viable alternative. For now the road to happiness was understood to be through faith, not philosophy and certainly not science. Augustine was particularly uneasy about worldly curiosity because of its potential to distract man from his proper sacred concerns. Moreover, insofar as legitimate knowledge comes only from its rightful author -- here the Platonic residue was still potent -- the Truth can be grasped not by examining the world through the fallible senses, but rather through the unmediated acceptance of God's word. What Augustine damned as "ocular desire" (312), because it led man into temptation, was thus as far removed from the classical emphasis on contemplative vision as the modern stress on its experimental counterpart.

Although the Scholastics were poised ambiguously between Aristotle's affirmation of a contemplative knowledge of the cosmos and Augustine's warning against all curiosity as a vice, it was not really until the modern age that the verdict of the "trial" was finally rendered in favor of unconstrained curiosity. One major reason for the change was the uncoupling of happiness and salvation from knowledge, which followed the growing popularity of the doctrine of predestination prepared by the nominalists and brought to a head by Calvin. For if man's redemption had nothing to do with his practical life on earth, then it was unnecessary to be so anxious about the distracting effects of curiosity about allegedly superfluous matters. In addition, the growing hiddenness of God in the early modern era meant the world could no longer be passively read as a divine text. A Deus Absconditus meant a "speechless" world lacking the marks of the divine word, a world as a result open to man's own constructs and manipulations.

The vindication of curiosity was therefore closely linked to the emergence of self-assertion as an alternative answer to the still unresolved Gnostic question of the meaning of an imperfect and corrupt world. Only when the qualitative knowledge assumed to be the analogue of divine wisdom was abandoned as a goal and replaced by an inevitably imperfect knowledge expressed in quantitative terms could modern science begin. Only then could man break through the forbidding Pillars of Hercules standing as the image of transgression as far back as the Odyssey and embark, as the famous title page of Bacon's Instauratio Magna implies, on uncharted seas.

Moreover, only when personal happiness was decisively severed from the collective pursuit of a truth that could be sought but never completely won, only when the hope for immortality was displaced from the individual soul to the species as a whole, only then could curiosity be utterly without limits. As such, it could then be extended from nature to man himself by philosophers like Hobbes and projected by others like Feuerbach into a desire to know what is not yet knowable. Faust's famous pact with the devil, an early modern invention that expressed a still ambiguous attitude towards the "vice" of curiosity, could ultimately become a triumphant symbol of modern man's insatiable desire to know, which Freud would later naturalize into a sublimation of an infantile sexual curiosity to see. (Martin Jay, "Review: The Legitimacy of the Modern Age by Hans Blumenberg; Robert M. Wallace," History and Theory, Vol. 24, No. 2. (May, 1985), pp. 190-191. Accessed via JSTOR.)

The irony in Blumenberg's moral tale lies in the way that Christianity liberated the 'vice' of curiosity from its Ancient and Medieval constraints by its dissociating human happiness from any human effort, a feat achieved first through the late Medieval Nominalists but carried forward by the Protestant Reformation, especially by the Calvinists.

In short, Blumenberg argues that modern science emerged not through Christianity's conception of a rational God but through its conception of an irrational one.

Christian Jihad?

"Reaching the world for Christ"

...and breaching it, too?

(Image from Wikipedia)

Over at Ambivablog, Annie -- who calls herself Amba (but she's ambivalent about that) -- has posted an blog entry on imprecatory prayer.

That means praying God's curses down upon someone.

This has become a political issue because Rev. Wiley Drake, who pastors the First Southern Baptist Church of Buena Park, California and was formerly the vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention, supports Arkansawyer Mike Huckabee for president and has called for "the children of God" to call down God's curse upon "the enemies of God." Here's how he puts it:

In light of the recent attack from the enemies of God I ask the children of God to go into action with Imprecatory Prayer. Especially against Americans United for Separation of Church and State. I made an attempt to go to them via Matt 18:15 but they refused to talk to me. Specifically target Joe Conn or Jeremy Learing. They are those who lead the attack. ("Pastor Wiley Drake Calls for Imprecatory Prayer against So-Called Religious Liberty Watchdog Group," Christian News Wire, August 14, 2007)

I wonder if Pastor Drake conceives of ever taking this beyond mere prayer to direct action. I'm just asking, mind you, not accusing, and I'm asking because I had thought that -- at the very least -- the "New Covenant" espoused by Christians forbade imprecatory prayer and that Christians held that imprecatory prayers belonged to the "Old Covenant."

Apparently, Drake doesn't think this way, for he states, "Imprecatory prayer, is now our duty," and he does some prooftexting:

Now that all efforts have been exhausted, we must begin our Imprecatory Prayer, at the key points of the parliamentary role in the earth where we live.

John Calvin gave the church its marching orders from Scripture. The righteous have dominion, but only through imprecatory prayer against the ungodly.

David as our Old Testament shepherd gives us many Imprecatory prayers, and can be found to be in best focus in Psalm 109. Also chapters 55, 58, 68, 69, and 83

Pray these back to God and He will answer.

Jesus in Matthew 23: 13, 15, 16, 23, 24, 27, and 29 gave us our New Testament marching orders as well.

Let us join Paul and declare anathema upon anyone" who loves not the Lord Jesus." I Cor 16:22

Church father Martin Luther, led us by saying . . . "If any of the enemies of God's people belong to God's election, the church's prayer against them giveth way to their conversion, and seeketh no more than that the judgment should follow them, only until they acknowledge their sin, turn, and seek God." ("Pastor Wiley Drake Calls for Imprecatory Prayer")

That last part, from Martin Luther, is a right strawy quote! "If any of the enemies of God's people belong to God's election..."? A bit obscure, no? Well, I think that Drake quotes this to balance his Calvin quote about the dominion of the righteous over the ungodly. The Luther citation is intended to soften the effect a bit by emphasizing that imprecatory prayer is yet another way of winning souls for Christ because it will bring conviction to the hearts of those enemies of God whom God has already selected for salvation but hasn't yet followed through on by converting them. Cursing them will bring that about ... apparently.

I'm guessing that Reverend Drake believes in predestination, not freely accepted grace.

Anyway, noted above, I had thought that Christians were forbidden from uttering imprecatory prayers, which I understood had been excluded by such New Testament verses as those calling upon Christians to "love your enemies" (Matthew 5:44) and to "bless and not curse" (Romans 12:14). However, I've discovered that the issue, unfortunately, is not quite so clear. Here are some lines from the opening of a dissertation devoted to the issue:

I will seek to establish that the sentiment expressed in the Imprecatory Psalms is consistent with the ethics both of the Old and New Testaments, while at the same time recognizing that the New Testament evidences a certain progress in the outworking of that essentially equivalent ethic. This I will do by plausibly demonstrating that the Imprecatory Psalms root their theology of cursing and crying out for God's vengeance in the Torah -- principally the Song of Moses (Deut 32), the lex talionis (e.g., Deut 19), and the covenant of God with his people (e.g., Gen 12) -- and that this theology is carried essentially unchanged through the expanse of the canon to the end of the New Testament (e.g., Rev 15:2-4; 18:20). (John N. Day, "The Imprecatory Pslams and Christian Ethics," PhD Thesis, Department of Old Testament Studies, Dallas Theological Seminary)

I've not read this thesis and probably won't have time, but the mere fact of the document's existence provides evidence of a problem that I had thought behind us. I'm not shooting the messenger here. John Day may be right -- for all I know -- in his reading of the Bible on this issue.

For the record, I should note that Mike Huckabee would perhaps disagree with this sort of interpretation, for the Huckabee campaign has disavowed Reverend Wiley Drake's views as "evil comments." A campaign, however, is one thing, and biblical hermeneutics is another. I've not yet heard if the Southern Baptist Convention has distanced itself from Drake's hermeneutic.

And this is troubling, for if imprecatory prayer is legitimate, would martial cherem itself also legitimate? Can Christians also declare jihad? And who decides?

A missing soteriological critique?

John Calvin

Elected for his merits?

(Image from Wikipedia)

Short on time again today as this semester winds down and students' essays come pouring in, I'm going to focus on merely one point -- a perplexing aside, in fact, that Robert Koons makes about Calvinism in his essay "A Lutheran's Case for Roman Catholicism":

If we say, with the Calvinists, that Christ has died only for believers, we make faith into a human work that merits salvation in conjunction with Christ’s life and passion. Roman Catholics join with Lutherans in rejecting this error: Christ’s life and passion is the sole meritorious cause of our salvation. (pdf, pages 40-41)

I don't know Calvinist theology in any detail, but this looks like a travesty of what Calvinists believe. My understanding on this Calvinist point is that Calvinists teach that believers only believe because they have been drawn to faith through God's "irresistable grace," a saving grace extended not as a reward for human works of merit but out of an "inscrutable" soteriological decision that God made -- "before the foundations of the world" -- to save certain individuals, the elect, "because it pleased him to do so."

You'll notice that I'm quoting without providing citations. That's because I have these expressions in my head but don't know precisely where they come from, aside from casual conversations with Calvinists over the years -- with the exception of Ephesians 1:4-5, where Paul uses the expression "before the foundations of the world" in referring to God's decision to bestow grace.

I therefore do not know precisely what point Koons is making here, for it directly contradicts what Calvinists explicitly teach. I have to assume that he is alluding to some critique making the argument that Calvinism -- despite intentions to the contrary -- implicitly treats faith as a human work that merits salvation.

I'd have to see this missing soteriological critique before commenting further. Meanwhile, does anybody know what Koons is talking about?

Koons on Lutheran 'Inconsistency'

John Calvin

A Merely Carnal Thinker?

(Image from Wikipedia)

One learns something new every day. Robert Koons reports (pdf) on what he calls "three mutually inconsistent theses":

Lutherans affirm what seem to be three mutually inconsistent theses: (1) that we can lose our faith, and thereby our salvation, (2) that our faith is strengthened through the external means of grace (Word and sacrament), which require our diligent use, and (3) that our works have absolutely no role in securing our final salvation. (page 31)

I presume that Koons will elaborate further on this point about inconsistency, but I'll confess that I didn't know enough about Lutheranism to realize that it teaches that a Christian can lose the state of grace. As Koons notes, Lutherans differ here from Calvinists and many of those evangelicals whose denominations stem from the Calvinist tradition:

Calvinists and modern evangelicals who embrace the theory of "once saved, always saved", have the virtue of logical consistency. On their view, once we have received the free gift of salvation through faith, there is absolutely nothing we can do or fail to do that would entail the loss of our salvation. The Lutheran Confessions (the Apology of the Augsburg Confession and the Formula of Concord) rightly rejects this position as offering a merely "carnal assurance". (page 31)

Koons then quotes from the Apology and the Formula on the necessity of works and deeds and also cites -- without quoting -- I Corinthians 6:9, Galatians 5:21, Ephesians 5:4, Romans 8:13, and Colossians 3:6 as indicating that salvation can be forfeited.

I wonder, however, what is meant by "carnal assurance." Assurance of salvation in the formula "once saved, always saved" would seem to be about spiritual things, so I have to guess that the Lutheran dismissal of this assurance as 'carnal' would have to mean that such a (mis)understanding about salvation stems from lack of spiritual insight on the part of those who believe such a thing.

Hmmm, speaking of ad hominem...