"On Becoming a Heretic"

Calvinism comes under fire all the time by professing Christians of a more liberal stripe. And there’s a sense in which they’re half-right—as long as you buy into their operating assumptions. But their conclusions fall short of their premises—for these doctrines hang together with great inner cohesion and Scriptural support.

Edwin Curley is a seasoned philosopher who specializes in the Enlightenment. In describing his youthful apostasy, he presents the logical alternatives with the frank clarity and refreshing candor of someone who has nothing to lose since he long since ceased to have a personal investment (from his perspective) in the correct answer.

“My mother—and maternal grandmother, who had lived with us from my infancy—were Episcopalians. They saw to it that I went to the Episcopal church and Sunday school, and rejoiced when I became an acolyte,” “On Becoming a Heretic,” L. Antony, ed. Philosophers Without Gods (Oxford 2007), 80.

“As I became an adult, I began to have doubts about the religion in which I had been raised…Probably the most crucial factor was the prayer book my mother gave me when I was sixteen…At sixteen I read those articles of religion, carefully and critically, for the first time,” ibid. 80.

“I was disturbed that my church accepted predestination. Before the foundations of the world were laid, the articles said, God had chosen some vessels for honor and others for dishonor, that is, some of his human creatures for salvation and others for damnation. This did not seem fair. But one of the first principles of my church was that no one should be required to believe, as necessary for salvation, any doctrine that could not be proved from scripture. So far as I could see, there was as good scriptural foundation for this teaching as there was for any doctrine my church taught. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans seemed pretty unequivocal on this score,” ibid. 80-81.

“There also seemed to be strong philosophical reasons for accepting predestination. If God is omniscient, if he knows everything, he must have foreknowledge of the future, including his creatures’ ultimate destiny. So before they are born there must be a fact of the matter about what their fate will be, a fact that would seem to be unalterable, unless we suppose that God can be mistaken in his beliefs. So our belief that we might determine our destiny by the choices we have yet to make, choices that might go either way, must be an illusion,” ibid. 81.

“Some Christian philosophers will say that God’s omniscience requires only that he know everything that is knowable, and that propositions about the future (or more modestly, propositions about future human free actions, and all others that depend on them) lack a truth value; not being knowable, they are not in fact known, even by an omniscient being. This may be a way of reconciling God’s omniscience with human freedom, but it does so only by creating problems for the doctrine of divine providence,” ibid. 289n3.

“Moreover, if God is omnipotent, if he can do anything he wants to do (or any logically possible thing he wants to do), then nothing can happen except by his will. If I wind up going to hell, God must have willed that I go to hell. This takes it out of my hands. How can I prevent what an omnipotent being wills?” ibid. 81.

“Theologians sometimes try to save God from responsibility for our sins by saying that he merely permits them. But to permit something to happen when you could have prevented it, and when you knew what would happen if you didn’t act, is not to escape responsibility for it. In Lillian Hellman’s Little Foxes, Regina is having a quarrel with her husband when he suffers a heart attack. He asks her to bring him his medicine, and she refuses to do so. She has it in her power to bring him the medicine, and she knows what will happen if she does not. Her decision not to bring him the medicine makes her as much responsible for his death as if she had shot him,” ibid. 81.

“Some Christian philosophers will no doubt object that, although God could prevent me from committing the sins that will justly cause my damnation, he cannot do so in a way that would entitle me to moral credit for refraining…Even if we accept the libertarian conception of freedom that this reply presupposes, it doesn’t seem to work. It doesn’t show that God can’t cause me not to perform the act that, if done freely, would be a sin. It just shows that he can’t do this without depriving me of the libertarian freedom necessary for my refraining to accrue moral credit. It’s the value he places on human freedom that prevents him from causing me not to sin, and that value may seem, on reflection, too high,” ibid. 81.

“If I am destined to go to Hell, God will not only have known that from eternity, he will also have willed it from eternity. The scriptural texts supporting predestination seem to do no more than endorse the implications of deeper theological commitments to God’s omnipotence and omniscience. Sometimes Christians claim that the acceptance of predestination—or as they may say, double predestination, the predestination not only of the elect, but also the damned—is an example of Calvinist excess. It’s well to remember that the chief theologian of the Roman Catholic Church also accepted double predestination [‘See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, xxiii’],” ibid. 82, 289n4.

“Another doctrine of my church that disturbed me as an adolescent was the doctrine that we are all sinner, who require God’s grace if we are to be saved…This is the doctrine of original sin. I cannot believe in original sin. Original sin is less widely accepted now than when my church was founded. I find many Christians who reject original sin. I sympathize with them. Their hearts are in the right place, certainly. But Christians can reject original sin only at the cost of a substantial reinterpretation of their scriptures and traditions,” ibid. 82.

“Consistently with the doctrine of original sin, it is common among Christians to believe that we cannot earn salvation by our works. If we are to be ‘justified,’ that is, to achieve salvation, it must be by our faith in Jesus. Not that this is an action that is in our power to perform or not, an alternative to obeying God’s commandments, which is beyond our power. Rather, God is merciful; he may forgive us and treat us as if we were righteous. The mark of our having been forgiven is that God, by an act of grace, gives us faith (Rom 3:21-26),” ibid. 82.

“It implies that those among us who lack faith in Jesus have not received grace, have not been forgiven, and will, if we continue in that state, go to Hell. So the doctrine of justification by faith, which has strong support in the Christian scriptures, leads to exclusivism, to the idea that all who reject Christian doctrine must be damned, no matter how good they may be by ordinary standards. If God chose the beneficiaries of his grace on the ground of some distinctive merit they possessed, this might not be unfair to those he didn’t choose, whom we would presume to lack that merit. But that would be contrary to the idea of grace, which implies a free gift, not something given to someone who deserves it on account of merit,” ibid. 82-83.

“It’s a hard and ugly business, this doctrine of grace…Yet my church taught that these people could not be saved, not matter how good they might otherwise be, if they did not believe in Jesus. While there might not be any philosophical reason to believe this, there certainly seemed to be ample scriptural support for it, as is illustrated most clearly by the Gospel of John, though also by other texts,” ibid. 83.

“The scriptures that my church pronounced sacred seemed to teach that most of us will go to hell: ‘The gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it…the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it’ (Mt 7:13-14). Another passages reads: ‘Many are called, but few are chosen’ (Mt 22:144),” ibid. 83.

“So far, my objections have been mainly theological; they are objections to teachings whose basis is primarily scriptural rather than philosophical. The main exception to that generalization is the doctrine of predestination, which has philosophical grounds as well as scriptural grounds. I know many Christians will not feel that their understanding of Christianity requires them to accept all these doctrines, either because they have a different interpretation of scripture or because they do not regard the Christian scriptures as absolutely authoritative in determining their beliefs and conduct. I think those Christians who adopt a freer attitude toward scripture—and do not feel that their acceptance of Christianity commits them to predestination, or hell, or original sin, or justification by faith, or exclusivism—those Christians have their hearts in the right place, I say. But I also think their feet many be planted on the slippery slope to heresy, and that more conservative Christians, who would accord greater authority to scripture, have a clearer right to call themselves Christians. How much of traditional Christianity can you reject and still be a Christian?” ibid. 85.