We all hesitate here…"What about my little girl who was run over by a trash truck?"…Here's where the Bible becomes practical…Imagine a God who didn't deliberately permit the smallest details of your particular sorrows. What if your trials weren't screened by any divine plan? What if God insisted on a hands-off policy towards the tragedies swimming your way? Think what this would mean.
Either God rules or Satan sets the world's agenda and God is limited to reacting. In which case, the Almighty would become Satan's cleanup boy, sweeping up after the devil has trampled through and done his worst, finding a way to wring good out of the situation somehow. But it wasn't his best for you, wasn't Plan A, wasn't exactly what he had in mind. In other words, although God would manage to patch things up, your suffering itself would be meaningless. One Christian writer who believes that God has little to do with the specific circumstances that come your way expressed it like this: "sadly, there was no meaning in those deaths. Each was a bizarre, horrible coincidence, nothing more. Therein lies the tragedy." Joni Eareckson Tada & Steven Estes, When God Weeps: Why Our Sufferings Matter to the Almighty (Zondervan 1997), 83-84.
This argument is both troubling and, for purposes of comfort, unnecessary.
ReplyDelete(a) If this viewpoint were true, it would logically, necessarily imply that God was pleased to have a little girl run over by a garbage truck (or any other tragedy one cares to name). And since it is part of a perfect divine plan, then we should rejoice in it rather than seek comfort. Indeed, viewing it as a "tragedy" would then actually be an insult to God.
Yet God implies exactly the opposite in His word. Think of ancient cultures in which child sacrifice was practiced. Let's apply the "Steve/Tada" argument here: children were, in this view, sacrificed because God willed it - i.e., desired and caused it - from eternity-past. Yet here's what God Himself declares on the subject: "They have built the high places of Baal to burn their children in the fire as offerings to Baal — something I did not command or mention, nor did it enter my mind." (Jer. 19:5; cf. 7:31; 32:35)
Yet if Calvinism is true, not only did it "enter God's mind"--He actually desired it and directly caused it to happen.
(b) In order to comfort those who grieve or are faced with extreme hardship, it's a false dichotomy to suppose that _either_ God operates Calvinistically _or_ is merely reacting to satanic initiatives or natural bad luck. The predestinarian language found in many places in Scripture must be understood in conjunction with - rather than at odds with - statements of God's desire/intent like I just cited from Jeremiah. There is a divine arithmetic involved here:
"creation + foreknowledge = foreordination"
We need not suppose that God specifically willed all tragic or evil events, much less caused them. Instead, we need only grasp that, given foreknowledge of all possible outcomes, God's decision to create in itself constitutes foreordination of all foreknown outcomes; i.e., the choice to create automatically guaranteed that all foreknown outcomes would indeed come to pass - yet _without_ this requiring us to conclude that God _wanted_ or _caused_ tragic/evil outcomes.
Yet the fact that God foreordained whatsoever comes to pass - and this view is commensurate with classical Arminianism - demonstrates His sovereignty. And it's His sovereignty which is all that's necessary for us to find comfort in Him.
"If this viewpoint were true, it would logically, necessarily imply that God was pleased to have a little girl run over by a garbage truck (or any other tragedy one cares to name). And since it is part of a perfect divine plan, then we should rejoice in it rather than seek comfort. Indeed, viewing it as a 'tragedy' would then actually be an insult to God."
Deletei) We could easily recast the same objection in terms of freewill theism. If God lets the little girl to be run over, then he was pleased to let her be run over. We should rejoice in what God permits, for he must have allowed it for a good reason. Viewing it as a "tragedy" would actually be an insult to God's wisdom and goodness in permitting that to happen.
ii) Something can be bad in its own right, but be a source of good. Say a child dies of leukemia. So the parents have another child as compensation. It's good that the replacement child exists, even though it's bad that he exists because his sibling predeceased him. One can grieve for the child who died but be happy for the child who was born in his stead.
iii) How do the Jeremiah passages constitute a prooftext for divine foreknowledge? Taken literally, God professes ignorance of that eventuality.
iv) If Calvinism is true, it doesn't follow that God "directly" causes every event, or even most events. To the contrary, Calvinism has a doctrine of ordinary providence.
"creation + foreknowledge = foreordination"
Scripture doesn't ground foreordination in foreknowledge but the reverse.
Andydoerksen:
ReplyDelete“we need only grasp that, given foreknowledge of all possible outcomes, God's decision to create in itself constitutes foreordination of all foreknown outcomes.”
How is this substantially different than the theological determinism you oppose? There are a plethora of possible worlds God could conceive of independent of his decision to create.
Either God decides to create on the basis of knowing the details of all possible worlds and including the possible world he would instantiate, or God did *not* create on the basis of knowing the details of all possible worlds including the possible world he would instantiate. If that knowledge informed his decision, how is that different than theological determinism when God could have avoided any particular evil or all evil in general. On the other hand, if that knowledge did *not* inform God’s decision to create so that his knowledge of all the particulars is logically posterior to his decision to create a world, how is that risky behavior appropriate to God? Or for that matter, how is that substantially different than open theism. Whether his knowledge is probabilistic or infallible, it’s still quite a bit useless.
At least Molinism sweeps away some of God’s options by positing middle knowledge. I just don’t see how you’ve extricated yourself from the problem—on your own terms.