On Facebook, Jerry Walls recently said:
To me it is as clear as any moral intuition I have that not even a good God, let alone a perfectly good God, could determine people to sin and then consign them to eternal misery for their sin.
Let's compare that to another Arminian intuition: Calvinism reduces humans to robots.
Let's grant both these "intuitions" for the sake of argument. Now let's combine them:
To me it is as clear as any moral intuition I have that not even a good God, let alone a perfectly good God, could determine robots to sin and then consign them to eternal misery for their sin.
Problem is, it's hard to see how these two claims mesh. Presumably, Arminians think robots lack one or more essential human properties. Robots aren't real people. To be real people, they must have moral agency. And moral agency requires libertarian freedom. To be real people, they must be free to choose or to withhold love. In fact, according to Arminians, only free agents can truly sin.
But if robots aren't real people, then what's so bad about determining them to do wrong, then consigning them to everlasting hell for wrongdoing?
What they did was objectively wrong, but it wasn't subjectively wrong, for they lack that subjective dimension. That first-person perspective.
If a robot isn't a real person, you can't wrong a robot. It's just a machine. At best, a deluded machine. It may suppose it's human, because it's been programmed to think that, but because it isn't human, it can never know what it's like–really like–to be human. It lacks human experience from the inside out.
Great point. That's like Romans 9 in judo form.
ReplyDeleteOf course, Calvinists don't agree that limited free will makes us robots, but as long as non-Calvinists think it does it's still a Biblical response.
Reading the comments to begin with, I thought you might go in the direction of correcting the false idea of sin implied here, namely that the commission of a sin is what makes it a sin. We aren't condemned because of the commission of sins. We're condemned because of the fallen nature that makes it a sin. If God causes us to do anything, even an otherwise good thing, then it's laced with sin because of our nature. Our motives at the very least are impure. But God's motives are always good.
That's why the Calvinist argument that God restrains us from committing sin is important. If he allows us to do anything, then we sin. But God is not at fault for it for his motive is always righteous according to his righteousness as creator all things.
Their argument boils down to "I don't approve of the way God chose to do things!"
ReplyDeleteShall the clay say to the Potter...?