1. One of the flash cards objections to Calvinism is that true love can't be "forced". Of course, even on its own terms, that's a clueless objection. If everything predestined, then God isn't "forcing" himself on anyone. Force presumes resistance. But if everything is predestined, then there can't be any tension between the plan and the execution. It isn't possible to resist predestination and providence if everything we think and do is the effect of predestination and providence. No doubt freewill theists will find that equally objectionable, but that's a different objection than "forcing" agents to love him.
2. In their rhetorically knee-jerk way, what they seem to mean by "force" is that we didn't choose to love God in return. So let's consider some comparisons:
i) In this clip, David Platt talks about adopting a young boy:
At that age, the boy didn't choose to be adopted. He never consented to be adopted. At that age, the love was one-sided. It was all from his adoptive parents.
ii) Sometimes it's a virtue to befriend someone who wants to be left alone. Suppose I'm a high school student. I notice another student who's a brooding, standoffish loner.
He has no friends, and it's a vicious cycle. He dislikes the other students, so they dislike him in return. They sense each other's antipathy. And that reinforces his social alienation.
Suppose I make an effort to cultivate him. I reach out to him. He resents my gestures of friendship. But I persist. I "force" myself on him, in hopes of wearing down his resistance. I impose on him because he clearly needs of friend. I try to gain his trust. Break through the barrier.
Maybe I won't succeed, but even if I fail, he will know that there was one person who cared about him. And maybe that will initiate a thawing process. Perhaps, a few years later, I'll bump into him, and at that point he will be more open.
iii) I'm no expert an autism, but it's impression that for severe autistics, love has to come from the parental side. Perhaps severe autistics lack the psychological makeup to reciprocate. At the very least, it takes the infinite patience of caring parents to draw them out. That's very lopsided love. They can't enter your world, so you must enter theirs–as best you can.
iv) I once saw a scene on TV of a drunken partier who climbed out the window onto the ledge of a fourth story apartment, then tried to climb onto the roof. He slipped. He avoided falling to his death by gabbing onto the rails of balconies as he went down. Although he couldn't hold on, it broke the force of the fall, so that while he landed hard, he didn't kill himself or break any bones.
But after he got up, dazed, he tried to climb back up the outside of the apartment. Having narrowly eluded death, he went right back to more insanely dangerous behavior. At that point two guys intervened to pull him down before he got too far up, and hauled him off until he dried out. They physically overpowered him for his own protection. If would be interesting if they showed him the footage, after he was sober.
I'm still agnostic viz. Irresistable grace. But it seems certain free-will theists seem to forget that the will is ordered toward goodness. It can't but be this way, I think. Of course since we are finite, moreover fallen, we are often mistaken, often culpabily so, about what goodness really is. God's grace is more than his causing or conserving natural secondardily causes, such as my intellect and will, in existence. It at least involves a resotarative effect on the nature of the will and an impression of God and Christ's Gospel. If my intellect and will are now restored and I am shown God, who is infintely Good, and told about all the good things he has done for me, it js naturally to love Him. That is just part of what it means to be truely human, to be free (in the only important sense). I'm not sure if this is resistable, or synergistic or irresistable or monogeristic.
ReplyDeleteBut to be justified we seem to have to hating and resisitnt God. We have to at least have quissence of the will, if not trusting and loving God, at least not hating him. But if this state of the will requires an act of the will to enter into, it isn't a libertarian one, on pain of Semi-Pelagianism or Pelagianism. If it doesn't require an act of the will, then it doesn't involve a libertarian act of the will. Some kind of compatibalism seems in order. And so if God is the cause of our will beinf quiet, no longer having but not yet trusting him, he is also the cause of instilling in us a heart that loves him, and so is the source of our sanctification, at most by a compatibilist act of our will.
I think compatibalism fits with synergism, if so, I guess I'm a synergistic. But not a libertarian-synergist. God's grace is that which is the cause of our responding to the shepherds words. I choose to, which God causes, not merely as he causes the sun to shine, but causes bt his grace. He doesn't coerse me, I don't think, since my will wouldn't have any being or power apart from him. He doesn't intervene in my will as I'd not already present as it's cause. He doesn't interfere anymore than a mechanic who removes some obstruction from a piece of equipment doesn't interfere. He gives me good arrows, fixes my bow, gives me glasses, a clearer target, archery lessons and a great incentive to hit the target. Of course I'm going to hit it!
Hopefully that was intelligible. I'm still thinking these things through, and would be interested on your thoughts. Presently, either a broadly Thomsitic or Calvinist notion of grace and predestination seem to most plasuible to me, though, I won't pretend I grasp either sufficently well.