Arminian Gnostics

I’m going to quote and comment on some statements in this article:

http://evangelicalarminians.org/files/McCall.%20I%20Believe%20in%20Divine%20Sivereignty%20(Contra%20Piper).pdf

Thomas McCall, “I Believe in Divine Sovereignty,” TrinJ 29.2 (Fall 2008): 205-226.

Why do tsunamis rise up and send walls of water through unprepared and largely defenseless communities, leaving behind in their wake hundreds of thousands of dead, with beaches littered with the broken and lifeless bodies of young children, shattered families, and grief-stricken loved ones?

McCall then proceeds to quote David Bentley Hart. Since McCall’s article is available online (see above), I’m not going to manually transcribe the quotes. In addition, Hart says the same things in two online articles about the South Asian tsunami, so I’ll copy/paste some representative passages from them to give the reader the flavor of the objection.

The Christian understanding of evil has always been more radical and fantastic than that of any theodicist; for it denies from the outset that suffering, death and evil have any ultimate meaning at all.

When confronted by the sheer savage immensity of worldly suffering–when we see the entire littoral rim of the Indian Ocean strewn with tens of thousands of corpses, a third of them children’s–no Christian is licensed to utter odious banalities about God's inscrutable counsels or blasphemous suggestions that all this mysteriously serves God's good ends.

http://davidbhart.blogspot.com/2006/03/david-b-harts-tremors-of-doubt.html

Being infinitely sufficient in Himself, God had no need of a passage through sin and death to manifest His glory in His creatures or to join them perfectly to Himself. This is why it is misleading (however soothing it may be) to say that the drama of fall and redemption will make the final state of things more glorious than it might otherwise have been. No less metaphysically incoherent–though immeasurably more vile–is the suggestion that God requires suffering and death to reveal certain of his attributes (capricious cruelty, perhaps? morbid indifference? a twisted sense of humor?). It is precisely sin, suffering, and death that blind us to God’s true nature.

There is, of course, some comfort to be derived from the thought that everything that occurs at the level of what Aquinas calls secondary causality–in nature or history–is governed not only by a transcendent providence, but by a universal teleology that makes every instance of pain and loss an indispensable moment in a grand scheme whose ultimate synthesis will justify all things. But consider the price at which that comfort is purchased: it requires us to believe in and love a God whose good ends will be realized not only in spite of–but entirely by way of–every cruelty, every fortuitous misery, every catastrophe, every betrayal, every sin the world has ever known; it requires us to believe in the eternal spiritual necessity of a child dying an agonizing death from diphtheria, of a young mother ravaged by cancer, of tens of thousands of Asians swallowed in an instant by the sea, of millions murdered in death camps and gulags and forced famines. It seems a strange thing to find peace in a universe rendered morally intelligible at the cost of a God rendered morally loathsome. Better, it seems to me, the view of the ancient Gnostics: however ludicrous their beliefs, they at least, when they concluded that suffering and death were essential aspects of the creator’s design, had the good sense to yearn to know a higher God.

I do not believe we Christians are obliged–or even allowed–to look upon the devastation visited upon the coasts of the Indian Ocean and to console ourselves with vacuous cant about the mysterious course taken by God’s goodness in this world, or to assure others that some ultimate meaning or purpose resides in so much misery.

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2008/05/tsunami-and-theodicy

i) Hart is Eastern Orthodox. By contrast, McCall is a member of the Wesleyan Theological Society, as well as a theology prof. at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Notice that McCall quotes Hart approvingly. He agrees with Hart. Notice, too, that McCall’s two articles are hosted by the Society of Evangelical Arminians.

ii) I wonder if we’re not seeing a paradigm shift in Arminian theology. Contemporary Arminians who feel free to deny the traditional view of God as the ultimate cause of natural evil. McCall acts as if this is unique to Calvinism. If so, he’s rewriting historical theology.

iii) I also wonder why Arminians like McCall think their denial is even orthodox. Why do they think that’s a live option in evangelical theology?

Likewise, why do they think their denial is even plausible? It’s as if they imagine that they can simply wish away God’s complicity in natural evil. They seem to begin with emotional revulsion at natural evils. Based on their emotional reaction, they say it’s “blasphemous” or “odious” or “vile” or “morally loathsome” to attribute natural disasters to God. They then simply deny that God is responsible for natural disasters.

But what makes them suppose that’s a credible denial? Denying something doesn’t make it go away. Denying something doesn’t suspend the laws of logical entailment. An unwelcome truth remains true, even if you shut your eyes, stop your ears, and stamp your feet.

iv) Aren’t natural disasters and fatal diseases the result of physical determinism? Natural cause and effect? Where antecedent conditions, events, and natural forces necessitate the result?

If God is the Creator of the world, then he created natural forces. He initiated second causes. He initiated the ensuing chain-reaction.

v) But suppose, for the sake of argument, that we treat natural evils as random events, a la chaos theory. Still, if God is the Creator of the world, then he initiated the stochastic process that produces natural evils.

So on either model, I don’t see how McCall can insulate God from complicity in the dire outcome.

vi) Moreover, the Bible attributes natural evils to God. At the very least, that’s a prima facie defeater for McCall’s position.

vii) Furthermore, I assume McCall believes in God’s knowledge of the future. So whether he views natural evils as determinate or indeterminate events, his God was in a position to anticipate the end-result. And God was in a position to circumvent the dire outcome.

McCall’s God knows what will happen if he intervenes as well as what will happen if he declines to intervene. McCall can erect as many buffers between God and natural evil as he likes, but that’s beside the point, for as long as God can stop it, God is responsible for not stopping it.

viii) McCall can’t very well invoke the freewill defense. It’s not as if earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, and cancer cells have freewill.

ix) To say that “Being infinitely sufficient in Himself, God had no need of a passage through sin and death to manifest His glory,” is utterly confused. This is not about God needing anything for himself to complete himself.

Rather, this is about the nature of finite timebound spacebound creatures who learn by personal empirical experience. And there’s a dimension of knowledge by acquaintance which no amount of knowledge by description can adequately capture.

In the nature of the case, you can’t have a manifestation of justice and mercy absent sinners.

x) In a footnote, McCall appeals to either Molinism or Thomism as alternatives to Calvinism. But God is the ultimate source of natural evils in Thomism and Molinism alike.

xi) Finally, McCall endorses Hart’s view that natural evils are surd evils. Gratuitous evils. They serve no good purpose.

But how does that even begin to exonerate the Arminian God? To say that God knowingly exposes men, woman, and children to horrendous evils for no good reason? How does that let God off the hook? And how is that an improvement on what McCall finds so objectionable in Calvinism?

McCall acts as though it’s just too horrible to believe that God is behind natural evils, therefore he refuses to believe it. Well, by that logic (if logic is the operative word), why not bite the bullet and go all the way with Mary Baker Eddy. Evil is too horrible to believe, therefore there really is no evil. That’s all an illusion.