A common objection to God's exhaustive control over all events is the claim that such determinism would make humans "robots." However, the Historical Calvinist never claims that man does not possess a will or that he is coerced into making decisions. Man makes decisions according to his nature and desires. Therefore, in one sense it may be properly said that man's will is free, if we just mean this in the sense that his choices are voluntary. However, the libertarian position that assumes man's will must be autonomous and independent from his character and any other outside influences is clearly false. Man's will is bound by his condition and his condition is evil. Because man freely chooses evil (in the sense that he is not forced or coerced), he is responsible for his actions. But because man is dead in sin (Eph. 2:1), a child of wrath (Eph. 2:3), and a hater of God (Rmns 1:30), he does not have the desire or the ability to do anything other than evil. Jesus explained this best when he said:
43 For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit, 44 for each tree is known by its own fruit. For figs are not gathered from thornbushes, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. 45 The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks. (Luke 6:43-45; ESV)
Of course he may do actions that are morally redeeming from a human perspective. However, these actions are not morally pleasing in the sight of God because unregenerate man cannot have faith (Rmns 8:7) and whatever does not proceed from faith is sin (Rmns. 14:23). How accurate was the prophet Isaiah then when he said, "We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away (Is. 64:6)." If even our righteous deeds are tainted with sin, how much more repugnant are the rest of our actions? There is a striking conclusion we must draw from all this: man's remedy does not lie in the will. As Walter Chantry said:
Our LORD has taught that the tree must be made good. Man must be renewed in his entire character. He must have a new heart to bring forth good fruit; the will cannot make the tree good; it may only exercise liberty to be what the tree already is. The will cannot reload the treasure chest with a new kind of goods; it may only freely bring forth what is there. The will cannot cleanse the fountainhead; it may overflow only with the waters available in the soul. (Walter Chantry, "Man's Will-Free Yet Bound")
How then can anyone be saved? I will respond with this with the same response our Lord Jesus gave, "With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible (Mtthw 19:26)." Soli deo gloria!
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11 comments:
According to your own words, "[man] does not have the desire or the ability to do anything other than evil," Jesus was lying when he said "The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good." Not "God produces good for man," but "man produces good out of the goodness of his own heart."
Which one of these is false? Either man can choose to do something other than evil, or man cannot choose to do anything other than evil. Either you are right, or Jesus's words in the Bible are right. Are you repudiating the Bible here? How apostatic!!
BTW, you seem to be using the term "libertarian" in an unclear way. Are you familiar with the works of Gary North, a prominent libertarian economist whose life's work is to justify the libertarian roots of Christianity in the Bible?
For North, the promotion of socialism in the Bible requires the "judicial specifics of the Bible" to be watered down, repackaged as a political mandate for power by the elites rather than as a declaration of the property rights of the Promised Land for the children of God. I disagree with some of his conclusions, but his discussions of power and its uses by hegemonic forces is fascinating!
My own comment is that the definition of an omnimax God would simply be overwhelming if His effects were at all evident in our space-time continuum. He would literally have to be everything, everywhere--thus becoming nothing in the definition.
I disagree that man is "dead in sin," on account of the fact that Mary was born without sin as a vessel for Jesus. Considering the passage of several thousand years since Mary had Jesus and his brothers and sisters, there is ample reason to assume that a large percentage of the population would have some residual DNA of the Sinless Virgin. Perhaps not enough to be entirely sinless, but humans are definitely not sinful enough to entirely damn the species.
Also, without man, sin would not exist. Sin does not exist before man, and indeed, would not exist without man. This leads me to assume that man is not a result of sin, but that sin is a result of man, and therefore not the only result of man. Sin must be created, especially since the doctrine of Original Sin died with Jesus and the breaking of the Temple.
No, I much prefer the medieval notion of sin as peccata--errors, mistakes, stumbles on the winding road. To assume a priori that all men are inherently sinful from birth to death and that men have no way to ameliorate sin is to eliminate any possibility for salvation. Because even in a plea for salvation, sinful corruption is evident. For do not many desire salvation NOT because of the greater glory of the divine, but merely to avoid the flames of hell? Sinful way to ask for salvation, as merely the lesser of two evils!
No, the "sin reflex" you are talking about cannot be the Alpha and Omega of man, because not all men (or women) have been sinners, by your own document of faith. If it can happen that at least one man (or woman) can be without sin, then it does not follow that ALL humans are sinful from birth to death. Perhaps you just haven't found the sinless ones yet!
Wow. Are you seriously proposing that it is possible for someone to live a sinless existence? How do you even define "sin" given your worldview, Matt?
Secondly, if you read Scripture in its entirety, you would understand that natural man is dead in sins (Eph. 2:1), has a heart of stone (Ezek. 36:26), is unable to submit to God's law (Rom. 8:6-8), and is a child of wrath (Eph. 2:3). The point of Scripture is that, until we are born again, there is none good (Rom. 3:10-18).
Now all of the sudden you are suggesting that Mary was immacuately conceived? That is Roman Catholic dogma. If you really wish to go in that direction then so be it, but I think you will find that there is no support for that in the pages of the New Testament...
And finally, you should probably be more reluctant to respond to a theological post which you obviously have no clue about. I am not talking about economics! I am talking about the nature of the will (determinism, soft determinism, libertarianism).
"And finally, you should probably be more reluctant to respond to a theological post which you obviously have no clue about."
Well, since you've made it quite clear that I have no clue about anything, i'm free to comment on everything! If ignorance is bliss, then i guess i have no reason not to be blissful, right?
Yes, Catholic dogma, something I guess you don't agree with? Too bad... Marian devotion is such a nice part of catholicism, absent that whole sin business.
Yes... "sin." Sin is the human equivalent of the ace in the hole. In my opinion, man desired a love and a father figure so greatly that he made one infinitely loving and infinitely great. The only problem then became, well... man. To love another human is easy, because your love is visible, tactile, sensible. You can literally *see* the effects of your loving behavior on a loving partner.
But with God, there is no ability to see. In fact, human beings are so perpetually apart from God that they must invent "feelings" of God that are tantamount to delusions of access to a higher power. Whether or not they really are accessing a higher power is beyond me to say, but what is clear is that their love, their FAITH, has inspired their bodies to respond. Just like Jesus says--"Your _faith_ has made you whole." I never did like how self-healing becomes miraculous healing in the modern evangelical tradition--Jesus did his utmost to avoid taking any responsibility for the healing of others, even running away into the desert to escape the hordes of crazed followers, seeking healing without wisdom.
To make my (usual ignorant :)) point, man had such a distance to cross to reach God that he had nobody else to blame for the silence of his beloved deity. Unlike the tit-for-tat Roman gods, Christians had only martyrs and dead saints and faith to substantiate them. At such a time, then, did a wonderful concept of self-blame become a highlight of Christian worship.
(Don't forget, as you well know, that Constantinus originally considered the concept of Original Sin an unnecessary Jewish appendage in his new Sun worship... it wasn't until several hundred years later that a true concept of inborn sin was the subject of debate in the works of Gregory the Great. As you well know, of course!)
You see, rather than blaming God for his lack of response (because the Old Testament God, as you well know, was quite involved with His people, the Jews), Christians instead blamed themselves, believing themselves NOT to be the Chosen People of God, but instead considering themselves worthless, ruined, fractured, and, as you say, "dead." Nevermind that Jesus never says a single thing against his own followers (though he has a complaint or three for the Pharisees and Sadducees!) and it is left up to the anonymous writers of the Letters (none of whom were alive when Jesus was, modern analysis says) to cherry-pick Old Testament and New Testament sayings to fit each individual community of followers being addressed.
This is what I do not understand about evangelicals: Catholics, Jews, even Muslims recognize that the Bible was written by various people in WILDLY various places, collected by committee, translated multiple times, and ultimately transformed from a series of tribal narratives and a revolution story into a "seamless" narrative that has more inconsistencies and factual errors than any contemporary historical document of the region! I mean, even the Jews don't believe the earth was created in 7 days--they recognize that Moses was a mad Egyptian who needed Aaron to translate everything for him and who aggrandized his own position in his own life. Why can't we all? Why must so much of the evangelical's self-worth be tied up in such a diffuse, multifaceted literary and allegorical narrative of the ancient world?
I mean, I read the Tao Te Ching before bed, but not because I wish to be Chinese, or to have lived 2000 years ago, or believe that Lao Tse to have been divinely inspired by anything, or even that his work describes anything particularly divinely inspiring. In fact, the TTC works very hard to AVOID inspiring its readers, instead telling readers to avoid inspiration if at all possible.
And no "sin" is needed, because man is evil enough by himself--no eternal tabulation of rights and wrongs, no measuring hearts on scales next to feathers, no divine scorecard of wins and losses for an impersonal deity--the "sins" of man are simple errors, peccata, if you wish. They are not the disfavor of the Great Divines, whose attention must seriously be strained between the 6 billion of us all milling about, many without even knowing of His/Her/Their glory! I trust Occam's Razor on that account--but then, i'm ignorant, so who would care what I say? :) Certainly not a Christian like yourself!
To use a more LeVayan or Crowleyan idea of "sin," let's not forget that people have to *choose* the nature of the sin that they commit. For sins have to have bases in codes, usually given by the impersonal Lawgiver (whose supposedly unbiased human interpreter ought to be given no authority in his authorship!).
In other words, sins don't choose men, men choose sins. In fact, they decide what they do is sinful, and then STILL sin! Or, they decide that what they do is sin, and avoid it. At no point does "sin" ever make the choice for them. Thus, it is not sin that has the power, but the man. The sin is just an afterthought of the deed.
All that is needed for a man to repudiate sin in himself is to recognize that he made sin in the first place. Sin is not morality--let me be crystal clear on that, because many people think abstinence from evil behavior = morality, which it doesn't--sin is merely the punishment that people feel is appropriate for whatever deeds they do against themselves, their fellows, or their deity.
I mean, we do not call infractions of the legal code "sins!" When you break the law, the law does not "break," you simply decide not to follow the law! And, as another evangelical used to say, "there are just laws and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that an unjust law is no law at all... One who breaks an unjust law must do it openly, lovingly...I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law." See--you can even break the law code by substantiating it with your own HIGHER code! How cool is that?
So yes--if a man grows up with no concept of sin, he will live a sinless existence. Sin is only that mental trap in which sinful people place themselves until they feel they've justified their own behavior, moral, immoral, or whatever. Sin would not exist without being named so by those who wish to involve themselves in it. Morality exists in numerous cultures without a specifically named set of "sins" one has to follow--Buddhism has both your Dharma, your duty in this life to yourself and others, and your Karma, your deeds, which can be good, evil, or neither.
In fact, Buddhism is a special case because even GOOD deeds still keep you on the Great Wheel of life and death and rebirth, Samsara, such that even the best of deeds is still in some way ineffectual in reaching Nirvana. Instead, you must literally learn the way of No Deeds, to stop blowing on the candle of your passions and avert your entire existence from the earthly plane--even from good and evil! Sounds rather Calvinist, actually--are you sure you aren't really a closet Buddhist?
"Man's will is bound by his condition and his condition is evil."
Do you have any substantiation outside of the bible for this statement? I would ask for evidence from the Bible, but it is just a book. Do you have any EVIDENCE for this bare assertion? Or are you just cherry-picking to fit your preconceptions?
I wonder if it's funny or sad that I'm the only one commenting on your posts... not exactly an active readership.
I have found a wonderful heretic called Pelagius who was condemned by Augustine of Hippo because he preached that sin does not have power over the human's ability to choose. Augustine, as most of the ancient scholars, intentionally committed appeals to supernatural authority by saying that only God's "gift" of grace can overcome sin. Augustine's "gift" was certainly not the only idea accepted by the Church fathers--Justin Martyr, Theophilus, Tertullian and Irenaeus all disagreed with Augustine on the subject of free will, asserting that one has to have the ability to come to God and choose God without force or coercion, such as an impassable blockade of sin would impose.
And yes, the Church fathers used quotes from the Bible to support both sides of their claim--thus invalidating the Bible as a reasonable rule for evaluating this particular argument. The argument then falls to the efficacy of choice, on which (in my opinion) Pelagius trounces Augustine. One of my favorite quotes is
"Grace indeed freely discharges sins, but with the consent and choice of the believer."
and
"Nothing impossible has been commanded by the God of justice and majesty...Why do we indulge in pointless evasions, advancing the frailty of our own nature as an objection to the one who commands us? No one knows better the true measure of our strength than he who has given it to us nor does anyone understand better how much we are able to do than he who has given us this very capacity of ours to be able; nor has he who is just wished to command anything impossible or he who is good intended to condemn a man for doing what he could not avoid doing."
Both of these advance the very pointed argument that God, having endowed man with rational thought and free will, would have to invalidate rational thought and free will by making man unable to choose the good as well as the evil in this world. Only the free and educated choice of goodness can make a person righteous; in fact, an anonymous follower of Pelagius writes later, saying that humans who believe themselves sinful FULFILL their sinful desires by believing themselves unable to to ought else:
"Under the plea that it is impossible not to sin, they are given a false sense of security in sinning... Anyone who hears that it is not possible for him to be without sin will not even try to be what he judges to be impossible, and the man who does not try to be without sin must perforce sin all the time, and all the more boldly because he enjoys the false security of believing that it is impossible for him not to sin... But if he were to hear that he is able not to sin, then he would have exerted himself to fulfil what he now knows to be possible when he is striving to fulfil it, to achieve his purpose for the most part, even if not entirely."
Awesome! Inherent sinfulness means voluntary goodness is an impossibility! Therefore, the ONLY way to have truly Free Will is to have goodness be unaided and unbound, a free choice by a rational individual. As Pelagius himself says, "Our most excellent creator wished us to be able to do either but actually to do only one, that is, good, which he also commanded, giving us the capacity to do evil only so that we might do His will by exercising our own. That being so, this very capacity to do evil is also good--good, I say, because it makes the good part better by making it voluntary and independent, not bound by necessity but free to decide for itself."
Fortunately for you, Pelagius is a heretic like yourself (according to the Catholic church, which you abjure quite viciously in your other posts), so you should have no trouble contemplating his views apart from the "mockery" and "blasphemy" of Catholic dogma. :)
http://socrates58.blogspot.com/2006/07/luke-128-full-of-grace-immaculate.html
A better scholar than I, reviewing the biblical evidence for Mary's sinlessness in Luke. Plena gratiae, indeed!
M
I am one of Trevor's many readers who choose not to make many (or in some case, any) comments. I enjoy reading and reflecting on Logan and Trevor's writings but don't always feel the need to respond in writing.
I have been reading your cross-postings for some time now and have been somewhat grieved at your misunderstanding of the Christian faith. Not for Christianity's sake, (God's truth can hold up to your questions) but for your sake. I pray that you will one day know the freedom of the Gospel. All that to say, I truly don't mean to butt in on your debates, but there is one issue that I didn't see Trevor address that I believe to be particularly important.
'According to your own words, "[man] does not have the desire or the ability to do anything other than evil," Jesus was lying when he said "The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good." Not "God produces good for man," but "man produces good out of the goodness of his own heart."'
It's true- man doesn't have the desire or ability to do anything other than evil. This however, is talking more about motivation than actual deeds. When I was an unbeliever I could obey my parents. I had the ability and I did obey. Good, right? No. My motives were for my parents to be pleased with me, or for me to be pleased with myself... not because of my love for Christ and because He commands me to obey my parents. You see, "the good treasure in his heart" is CHRIST! Knowing our sinfulness and knowing His grace causes a response of love and gratefulness. We can only do "good" when what we do is motivated by our love for Christ.
Of course this sounds like foolishness to you. It's okay. I just wanted to be clear that Christ himself is the treasure that compels us to do "good", not something inherently good in ourselves. I'm praying for you Mr. Matthew and I truly hope the best for you.
Katie
Thank you, Katie, for responding--I was beginning to think I was once again shut out of the discourse because my ideas weren't to the liking of the majority.
And thank you also for your prayers. Indeed, it was years ago that I came to know the freedom of the Gospel. Trevor (in his rather biased assumption) naturally assumed that because I disagreed with HIM, naturally I had to disagree with Christ. I certainly hope you don't take such a blasphemous stance as well, so I will keep my comments short.
A great deal of levity is needed in modern Christianity, lest it become a new theocratic movement as Islamic fundamentalism has become in the near East. Even the Church Fathers knew not to take the Bible "literally," by which I mean the first level of reading, ad litteram, by the letter or word. The only problem comes in the next step of Christian fundamentalism, which asserts that Yes, some parts of the bible can be interpreted allegorically and otherwise, but (and this is the turn) certain passages MUST be interpreted literally in order for our justification to make sense. Anyone with even a paltry education in logic can see the danger in hinging one's beliefs on the INTERPRETATION of a 2000+ year old document, whatever it may be!
On another subject, I shall quote you directly:
"I had the ability and I did obey. Good, right? No. My motives were for my parents to be pleased with me, or for me to be pleased with myself... not because of my love for Christ and because He commands me to obey my parents. You see, "the good treasure in his heart" is CHRIST!"
First, a few temporal issues--Jeshua bin Nazaret was still a Jewish revolutionary during his own time, and the vast majority of his sayings are actually redactions of the Hebrew Tanakh--loosely, the Old Testament and the Mishnah. Thus, it is difficult to superimpose "Christ" in the "treasure" analogy, because "treasure" had already been in use for nearly a thousand years prior, mainly as an analogy for "virtue." So, while it fits a particular agenda to assume the "treasure" referred in the passage means "Christ," in fact neither Jeshua bin Nazaret nor the Jewish writers he was quoting intended such a conclusion to be made. However, you are perfectly free to believe for yourself that the treasure of YOUR heart is Christ--in fact, i heartily (sorry for the pun :)) recommend it!
Since the "treasure" of one's heart is (according to the text) one's virtue, it thus does not follow that one can be virtuous and yet incapable of virtue. Either one has the ability to do virtuous action independent of God (such as the virtuous pagans who Christ frees from hell) or one does not. Witnessing of Christ (remember the Roman centurion who, though pagan, had faith enough to believe that Christ would heal his daughter) does not necessarily equate to good action either--merely to a conscious choice of faith in a particular deity.
Do not forget that belief in Christ is a choice, not a requirement. Christ's message would not be a message if everyone were forced to listen to it or die an eternity of deaths in hellfire. This is something even the bible has a hard time understanding. The Biblia Sacra Vulgata, our version of the bible and the foundation for the King James Translation which a majority of Christians (Catholic and Protestant) still use, was in effect a ROMAN document, ordered by political decree, compiled by committee, and produced with a singular political ideology--convert or burn. It is frankly un-Christian to worship a politically-motivated book over the politically-neutral God that inspired the words to be first set on paper.
I know that my writings seem inflammatory because they are not what you are used to; however, if all we ever listened to were those people with whom we agreed, we would not really be listening, would we? If all I ever wrote were in blogs of people who already wholeheartedly accepted my beliefs, what would be the point of my writing?
Yours in the Anointed,
M
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