Do Calvinists understand Arminianism? 6

That hits the nail on the head and perfectly articulates my own disagreement with Calvinism.

Scot,
I appreciate that this review has largely been a conversation about God, as opposed to us, but which naturally has bearing on everything else. You should get some good comments today on this. As someone who used to be obsessed with these issues, but had set them aside for many years, I’ve only been willing to skim this conversation, but I look forward to seeing some comments from some thoughtful Calvinists today. You seem to have come to a larger point in the discussion.
Cheers.

Thanks for posting this review/examination, Scot. I’ve found it very enlightening, and encouraging. I grew up in the nondenominational Christian churches, which are Arminian, but the theology was not usually clearly stated, only “We aren’t Calvinists.” But this series of posts has reminded me and helped me clarify again where I fall on the Arminian-Calvinist spectrum. Thanks!

If God is the all-determining reality and creatures have no incompatibilist (libertarian) freedom, then where did that first evil motive or intent come from? If the Calvinist says from God, which is logically consistent with divine determinism, then God is most certainly the author of sin and evil. If the Calvinist says from autonomous creatures, then this opens up a hole in divine determinism so large it consumes it (135).
The difficulty I have with Roger’s argument here is that he seems to assume that evil exists an ontological reality—as though evil were a thing. Augustine—and I think others in his tradition such as Calvin and Edwards—viewed evil as a privation of the ultimate good (in the same way that darkness is not a thing in itself but is only the absence of light, or cold and heat, etc.). Thus evil should not be viewed as something that must be “created” in order for it to exist.
From an Augustinian perspective, prior to creation, evil could not exist for there was no thing outside of God that could experience a privation of God—the ultimate good. But when God created autonomous moral agents, the possibility for privation sprang into being. Man/Angels now possessed the potential–and indeed exercised this potential–in a way that moved them out of the union with God–thus the void of evil opened.
As to why man would exercise the potential to fall, I think that this surely must have something to do with the utter “otherness” of the divine nature. God is so ontologically other—so vast and infinite—that mere human perfection cannot hope to attain to his fullness, nor maintain an unassisted fellowship. The finitude of our nature by necessity takes us out of orbit of the divine light and into the darkness, out of the divine heat and into the cold. Like an object moving at a finite speed which cannot freely maintain “fellowship” with an infinitely speeding object, so too the God’s granting of freedom to finite creatures (his “releasing” of us to our finitude) inevitably means that we will fall away from his infinite trajectory.
Thus left to himself, the finite perfection of the first Adam could not uphold humanity. Unlimited moral Freedom for finite moral beings became a gift too great—a blessing that necessarily became a bane. Yet the example of the second Adam (and our subsequent perfection in his image) points to a day when humans will retain both unlimited freedom and moral perfection.
Thus within a Calvinist/Augustinian construal of the origins of evil, God knowingly and sovereignly permitted the fall of humanity into the void—a void that necessarily sprang into being through the creation of that which was not eternal, all in accordance with his divine and foreordained plan.
I suspect that such a construal will not alleviate the moral objections that many Arminians have with divine determinism, but I do think that it goes some way toward explaining—at least on metaphysical level—how it is that evil came into being in a way that is consistent with the divine deterministic paradigm.
Blessing all!

While Calvinists need to explain how God can predestine everything, including where sin is involved, Arminians need to explain how God can predestine much of anything given that sin is involved in so much of human activity.
Scot, how do Arminius and Olson address this issue?

While Calvinists need to explain how God can predestine everything, including where sin is involved, Arminians need to explain how God can predestine much of anything given that sin is involved in so much of human activity.
God knows the all contingencies and the future and is able to restrain or release any and all beings. He also is also at work in meticulous ways as well, as far as that system is concerned. Any being like that would be able to run the world however he/it saw fit. He/it could use both evil and good to his ultimate advantage.

I agree that Arminians (classically) believe in God’s sovereignty, only defined differently than Calvinists. However, two disagreements with this analysis. First, it isn’t a small difference. Meticulous vs. General Sovereignty are very radically different…ten billion differences very hour in the world in terms of how God relates to it!! And second, in the Arminian scheme, it isn’t accurate to say that God is sovereign over everything but evil/sin. Rather, he is not sovereign over all free decisions human beings make…which includes the good things we do, as well as the bad. These both come from us, and not from God (ultimately). Blessings.
Nick

Intentions have objects, so isn’t an “evil intent” defined in relation to an evil object of that intention?

Sorry. The first sentence in my last post should have been in italics.

As I meant it, for evil to have “ontological purchase” doesn’t require that it be an entity apart from beings any more than “blue” having an ontological status as a property requires that there be such a thing as “blue” apart from beings that are blue.
In most cases (some reptiles excluded), a being blue isn’t a behavior, but I understand what you’re getting at. However, it seems necessary, to me, to look at intent and its relationship to its source. In that case, I think Olson’s point is quite accurate.
The absence of good in a formerly good in a being, then, would be like the absence of blue in a formerly blue being. Overtly, something has changed, but observing that isn’t enough.

How does this reconcile with Christ’s crucifixion?
An issue here is “concurrence” — that God permits and cooperates with human freedom — in God’s sovereignty. God chooses to turn evil into good rather than not to permit evil to exist. (http://www.jesuscreed.org/?p=1545#comments)

Brad,
Regarding your crucifiction question: I don’t know if this helps–I don’t even have any strong views on the subject yet–but allowing sinners, those now enslaved to sin and the powers behind it, to act in a way that is pretty predictable (certainly by God, and even to us in hindsight), this is not the same as causing the evil, and the crucifixion seems like the ultimate move of evil being (inevitably) duped and humiliated by God. Evil likes to sell itself as smarter than God for some reason. God knows this. The crucifixion is the pinnacle, to me, of God being smarter than evil and knowing exactly what it will do, what it’s inherent limits are (better than evil knows these things), and using all these limited evil actions, despite their intentions, toward his own loving purposes. The big ambitions of evil come to nothing (well, not nothing, actually, but even more glory for God’s brilliance and love, etc.) It is what happens when the limited evil and intellect of humans and even of the powers takes on the unlimited love and righteousness and, for lack of a better word, intellect, of God. Sometimes my daughter rebels against me–she’s two. Sometimes the best way to teach her to love what’s right and trust me is to let her follow her course of action rather than forcibly stop her. I could do either, but love and my understanding guide me as to which I should do in a given instance.
I guess the technical term for the above dynamic is “concurrence” (having just read Jake’s comment #21). I might prefer ‘unequal concurrence’, cause, c’mon, who are we dealing with here? It’s more than a little lopsided–much more so than me and my two-year old daughter.

but allowing sinners, those now enslaved to sin and the powers behind it, to act in a way that is pretty predictable (certainly by God, and even to us in hindsight), this is not the same as causing the evil, and the crucifixion seems like the ultimate move of evil being (inevitably) duped and humiliated by God.
That seems to be a very Calvinistic response with exception that God can only predict the inevitable but not yet firmly know it…that’s very slippery and seems to be saying weakly the same things. Again, how does this get you around the Father’s determination of Christ’s death (i.e. as decreed by the prophets) and not be in vioation of the Arminian view that God cannot be the author of sin and evil?
Calvinists focus on God’s sovereignity, at the risk of making it seem like they think people are puppets or God is the author of evil.
It seems that Arminians either need to deny that God decreed Jesus’ death on the cross and thereby toss aside the prophets, or they need embrace that God determined in advance the death of his Son and deal with the fact that they are in the very same cross-hairs of their own argument.
By the way, and with all respect to the sincere folks here trying to assert their own view, the same rhetoric over and again does not address the argument that Arminians seems to be in volation of their own argument.
Brad