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Christian theology teaches that God is both omniscient and omnipotent and many people have interpreted this as meaning that he not only knows what choices individuals will make but that he may also control those choices by virtue of his omnipotence for in Romans 8 it says, “those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed”. The protestant reformer, John Calvin from whom Calvinism derives, famously argued that predestination is “the eternal decree of God, by which he determined that he wished to make of every man.” Calvinists focus on the idea that God alone determines who will be saved, “for it is by grace you are saved, through faith, and this not of yourselves, is the gift of God” (Ephesians: 2:8) and one of the concept’s greatest defendants was Johnathon Edwards. He argued that the concept of free will was incompatible with individual dependence on God and challenged his sovereignty for if we could choose our response to God, our salvation is partly dependent on ourselves and thus we are also claiming that God is not absolute and universal which is clearly untrue because in John 15:16, Jesus says, “you did not choose me, but I choose you.” Essentially, Calvinism is theological determinism but it claims we are free to act on moral impulses and desires yet not contrary to them. For example, if I want to eat the chocolate, I will eat it no matter how bad for my health it may be and if I do not, I will not. John Girardeau also argues for moral neutrality – i.e. if I both want and do not want to eat the chocolate then I could not make any choice if I were inclined equally in both directions. Augustine too argues for predestination saying that human nature is so depraved and corrupt due to the Fall that we could not be good unless God helped us and thus that only those elected by God could receive salvation.
Some Christians attempt to reconcile the concepts of predestination and free will by using the example of Jesus for, in taking the form of a man, Jesus had to exist as a mortal and when he was born, he did not possess the fully omniscient power of God the Father – he was, they claim, still fully God however. They suggest God is able to abandon knowledge or ignore it while still remaining God and thus, although God may know what the future holds for us, it is possible for him to deny this knowledge in order to preserve our free will. Yet as Loraine Boettner argues, foreknowledge is the same as foreordination and thus what is foreknown is certain and we have no choice, no matter whether God chooses to remember or not. What has been more successfully suggested by Boethius and Rabbinic literature is that God is not aware of future events because he is eternal and thus, being outside time, he sees the past, present and future as one whole creation. He would not have known that I would, for example, fall over tomorrow years in advance but he would have been aware of it for all eternity, viewing time as a single present. For example, if I travel to the future, I might know that my friend is going to lose her hairbrush on 8th March but the fact that I know she will do this does not cause her to lose it – she has free will even though I have foreknowledge. A variation of this is the idea that God knows the choices open to each individual but not the choices the individual will actually make in their freedom. Isaiah Horowitz argues this does not however alter Gods’ perfection.
Those who deny calvinsim usually follow the theory of Open Theism or Free will Theism which derives from Arminian theology. It is claimed that concepts like immutability and omnipresence do not stem from the bible but rather from the fusion of Judaeo-Christian theology with Greek philosophy. The God described in the bible is the most loving, most knowing, most unchanging etc. but not onmi-everything. In the bible he not only responds to prayer and changes his mind, he is hurt and sometimes urprised by events on earth, (Isaiah 5:4) “why when I expected it to produce good grapes did it produce worthless ones?” According to classical theism, God’s foreknowledge leads to problems in terms of the point of prayer and the idea of allowing evil when he can do anything and is perfectly good. Open theism solves some of the problems because we can influence God by prayer in an undetermined future, sin is punsihable because we sometimes make decisions contrary to God’s will etc. This view has been criticised for denying God’s omniscience but Greg Boyd suggests that instead, God knows all facts. However parts of the future which consist only of a set of possibilities like human actions are not yet factually determined and thus they do not exist to be known even by an omniscient entity. A minority of open thesists also follow William Hasker who says God knows everything that is logically possible to know. We uses the example of rock saying we would not expect an omnipotent God to be able to create a rock so large he couldn’t lift it because it would be logically impossible and similarly, we cannot expect him to know what is logically impossible to know even if he is omniscient. This arises because future facts are what he terms soft facts and these, unlike hard facts, can be changed by an enity. Bruce Ware responds by saying that we have then redefined omniscience to the point that it is no longer “bibically acceptable.”
Despite this, the Catholic Church embraces the idea of free will and it is this which is in fact the focus of the majority of the bible. When God created Adam and Eve he said, “you are free to eat from any tree in the garden” (Genesis 2: 16-17) and he clearly believes them to be morally autonomous agents because he punishes them when they disobey him, “he cast them out, and to the East of the garden he stationed the cherubim.” (Genesis 3:24-25). Likewise, the Christian theologian, Aquinas, wrote in Summa Theologica, “…man chooses not of necessity but freely” and the reason is that God wants us to love him and in order for us to feel any emotion, we must be free to choose to follow him or not. God warns Cain about sin saying it “is crouching at your door” yet Cain can disobey God’s will and kill his brother. The essential problem however is that the bible itself is somewhat contradictory for while we are told in Numbers 23:19, “God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should change his mind” and yet God does change his mind – he created us and then he decided he was “grieved that he made man on earth” (Genesis 6:6-7) and sent the flood and thus biblical evidence is irreconcilable. What is clear, however, is that we need a justice system for society to function.
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Originally written by hunibuni on TSR Forums.
