Allowing evil

Arminians typically claim that if God merely allowed evil, then that exonerates God–but if God predestined the fall, then that makes God the “author of sin.”

They also say that Calvinists engage in special pleading to justify the moral ramifications of predestination.

But one of the oddities about the way Arminians debate this issue is how oblivious they are to the elephant in the room. In scripture, it’s not as if God merely allows men to do various things. God also commands men to do things. What is more, God sometimes takes matters into his own hands.

And these include cases in which, if a human being were acting on his own initiative, it would be sinful or evil for him to do that.

For example, God commands the Israelites to execute the Canaanites. If a human being took it upon himself to do that, he would be guilty of mass murder. The reason it’s not mass murder in this case is divine authorization.

So one question we might ask is this:

Is the same action moral to command, but immoral to decree?

To answer my own question, anything which is moral to command is moral to decree.

(Using “decree” as a synonym for “predestine” or “foreordain”).

Perhaps the Arminian would say that God had a right to command the execution of the Canaanites, even though it would be immoral for you or me to kill them without divine authorization.

That, however, concedes a key principle: God can rightfully do something which would be wrongful for you and me to do.

And the only reason that human beings could rightfully do it is in cases where God has delegated his judicial prerogative to human agents. We’re acting as his commissioned representatives.

But why, then, is it special pleading for a Calvinist to use the same argument to justify predestination? The Arminian has admitted that divine standards are not identical with human standards. This doesn’t mean they have nothing in common. But they’re not conterminous.

Not only does God command men to do thing certain things which would be immoral, absent the command, but God himself does things which would be immoral if a human being were to do the same thing–absent divine authorization.

God uses natural disasters like plagues and fire and floods and earthquakes and venomous snakes to indiscriminately wipe out thousands of human lives.

If a human being deliberately set a wildfire which killed thousands of people, if a human being dynamited a dam which thereby drown thousands of people downstream, if a human being intentionally released venomous snakes to kill thousands of people in the vicinity, we would try him and convict him for a heinous crime.

So one question we might ask is this:

Is the same action moral to do, but immoral to decree?

To answer my own question, anything which is moral to do is moral to decree.

The Arminian takes refuge in the notion of divine permittance. But what about the argument from the greater to the lesser? If God commands men to do certain things, then he can rightfully decree whatever he commands.

Likewise, if God himself can rightfully do certain things, then he can rightfully decree the same outcome by intermediate means.

Why center the debate on a distinction between what God allows and what he decrees when we must also consider what God commands or actually does? These are “proactive” measures.

It’s hardly adequate to retreat into the weaker notion of divine permittance while disregarding the stronger situations in which God either prescribes a course of action for others to carry out or perpetrates the action himself.