Ten or twelve life-changing books: #5, 6

5. 1979. Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law

Lewis had brought me back to an Arminian, though militant, form of Christianity.

Rushdoony was the wedge used by a couple of dear college friends, one male, one female, to break down the Arminian delusion. The actual breach was affected by the joint assault of this book and the next one in the list.

Rushdoony has faded from the center of my thinking, but the impact at this time was… life-changing. People that write him off as “legalist” don’t understand what he accomplished. This was nothing less than a sifting of every stage, every level, every pretension of modern society under the gaze of the word of God. It it a totality-critique. What it did to this Arminian was show that Sovereignty was far more than Predestination. It paved the way to see God as the Source, and the only possible Source, of every meaning, every beauty, every norm, every project. This is the true center of Calvinism.

Oddly enough, the real problem with Rushdoony is not legalism but antinomianism. He wriggled out of the Sabbath with a finesse that would do a PCA candidate proud.  But that is a discussion for another day — even as it was many years before I understood this problem.

6. 1980 Jonathan Edwards. Freedom of the Will (abbreviated title)

When I started this book, sitting in Jefferson’s cloistered gardens in Charlottesville, I was an Arminian; when I finished, I was a Calvinist.

Now that I have studied philosophy formally, I am impressed at the contemporaneity of Edwards. He anticipated, unless (as I suspect) he is simply the unacknowledged precursor, of much of the modern discussion of free will under the rubric of “compatibilism.” What he showed, basically, is the incoherence of the concept that today goes under the name “libertarian free will.” You are free because you do what you want. But how can you want something you don’t want? Peter Van Inwagen as a Christian libertarian is great because he admits he can give no coherent account of his position. It is a leap of faith for him, and he admits it.

So Edwards proved that my Arminian instincts were naive. Later, I came to realize (as Cunningham nicely explains) that Edwards only pushed the mystery back a layer or two. Now the question is, where does the disposition (to freely and inevitably choose evil) come from?

So I don’t say that Edwards answers every question. It is more that by breaking down the Arminian’s first line of defense, he shows the possibility of Calvinism as a moral framework.

Despite the tight, sustained reasoning of the work, Edwards must not be regarded as a Christian rationalist. It is more, using tight reasoning to show (1) the impossibility of reason conceived as autonomous, (2) God as the necessary starting point in every train of reasoning, (3) that revelation enlightens, but does not exhaustively explain, (4) there is no thought without that revelation, and (5) thus, we can embrace mysteries rooted in that revelation without fear. If, in contrast, the path of Christian Rationalism is taken, then one must either remain an Arminian, or become a hyper-nominalist-Calvinist. This is why Gordon Clarkism is, oddly, not very far spiritually from Arminianism. It is also very fragile. One of my dear Clarkian friends is now, in middle age, being tempted by Arminianism. And one of the great promising Clarkians of a decade ago is now chanting Hare Krishna.

Thank you, Jonathan, for rescuing me from these possibilities.

7 thoughts on “Ten or twelve life-changing books: #5, 6

  1. “Now the question is, where does the disposition (to freely and inevitably choose evil) come from…”

    Tim,

    If Adam intended to act sinfully and was tackled prior to acting upon his intention, wouldn’t he have sinned just the same? Moreover, had Eve abstained from eating the forbidden fruit solely because she was concerned for her figure, would she not have sinned just the same in the eyes of God? Certainly God is not a legalist who overlooks the intentions of the heart. Consequently, the sin of eating came from a sinful intention that had occurred prior to the visible act that followed from that intention. I think if we begin by revisiting these first principles, at least some of the mystery disappears.

    The first sin was Adam’s nature upon becoming fallen, which correlates with his desire to be like God. Adam, in other words, had concupiscence prior to acting upon his fallen nature sinfully. To deny that Adam’s first sinful act came from a nature that had already fallen is to affirm that a sinful act came from a non-sinful nature, a monstrosity indeed. An upright Adam didn’t choose his sin nature any more than a fallen man chooses his regeneration.

    The question that we should be concerned with is not how did an unrighteous act spring from an upright being (which is the common question; yet one that proceeds from a false premise). But rather, how did an upright being acquire a sinful nature (followed by an intention to act sinfully)? In one sense the answer is no different than the answer to the question of how does any intention and subsequent act come into existence. Doesn’t God providentially orchestrate circumstances that come before the souls of men thereby moving them by secondary causes to act in accordance with new inclinations that are brought into existence according to God’s providence that He decrees? (That much of concurrence we find in Edwards and Dabney; though I don’t know that they grappled with how it relates to the fall.) By God’s pre-interpretation of the otherwise brute particulars of providence (CVT gleanings) the intentions of men and their subsequent acts fall out as God so determines. For Calvinists to argue that an act of sin proceeded from an upright nature is to assert a contradiction – and no amount of mystery can save contradiction.

    I am not pretending to know how God pre-interprets particulars or how the mind of man relates to the movement of the body. That’s not in view at all. My simple point is that true Calvinists, like Edwards and Dabney, do not generally find it mysterious that volitional acts necessarily follow from intentions and that God’s orchestrating of circumstances are an ordained means by which intentions that never existed before come into being. Why, therefore, should we not apply the same theological reasoning to the first sin as we do to God’s sovereignty over the intentions of fallen men? The mystery is largely the same. We don’t know the details of how God brings to pass the intentions of the heart, but that is not peculiar to the first sin. It pertains to all intentions. Again, had Adam been tackled prior to eating the fruit, wouldn’t his intention to eat have been sin? And wouldn’t that intention have come from a fallen nature? Now did his intention to eat somehow not become sin because he was not tackled and actually did act according to his intention? Of course not. His sin was the intention of his heart (which could have only come from a nature that could produce such an intention), and he also sinned by acting on that intention.

    So the first sin was (i) the fallen nature and the desire to be like God, then the second sin, (ii) the specific intention to act and then finally the next sin, (iii) the subsequent action. Now is any good Calvinist going to say that we choose our intentions or our nature? No, but we are certainly responsible for them, for they are ours.

    Thoughts?

  2. Hey Ron, good to hear from you!

    The eating of the apples is the climax of the story — so I want to save the narrative. Would they have hid if Eve only refrained for her figure? I tend to think not, at least in the diving-for-cover sense. The “hiding” would perhaps be a certain hesitation at the boundary, a failure of full forthrightness in the evening chats. But I think the fall would still not have occurred. The trajectory would have started, which might lead to the fall, but might yet be circumvented. Even the metaphor of a fall implies an edge one drops over, but just prior, not.

    The story cannot be eliminated while keeping the punchline, it seems to me. Otherwise, it is a kind of demythologizing. Instead we need to keep the “mythic” in a sense that does not deny its historicity.

    I don’t see how it is less “monstrous” to posit a nature spontaneously shifting from righteous to wicked, than a righteous nature becoming wicked through a wicked act. All the more so, such a model is not “rescued” by saying “not spontaneous, but act of God.” In either case, we are left with an impenetrable mystery, but above all we want to preserve that God does not create an evil nature. I can’t see how mere providential time introduces the missing ingredient. Moreover, the hardening of Pharaoh is qualitatively different than a suggested hardening of pre-fallen Adam: for Pharaoh had not just failed to merit upholding, but had positively demerited such.

    One test of theology running amok is by the fruits. I have seen the stoical version of Calvinism lead people to become manipulators: to “arrange circumstances” in view of their superior knowledge of human nature, so to contrive it, that their victim falls into their trap, apparently, by the victim’s own decisions and reactions, which the manipulator foresaw and took into account. It is a passive-aggressive objectification of their fellow man that is quite despicable. (Let me hasten to add that I don’t see you making this mistake.) I set this up as a scare-crow against the stoical appropriation of Calvinism. Its origin is in a denial of the Creator-creature distinction.

    And is not this the problem with all efforts to rationate through every aspect?

  3. You’ve misunderstood the post.

    “I don’t see how it is less ‘monstrous’ to posit a nature spontaneously shifting from righteous to wicked, than a righteous nature becoming wicked through a wicked act.”

    You’ve experienced many spontaneous inclinations. You’ve never experienced one willful act that wasn’t accompanied by a preceding triggering inclination of that act. If you think you’ve experienced an act of the will not caused by a triggering inclination, then of course you couldn’t be embracing an Edwardsian view of the will. You’d be embracing LFW instead. Pure contingency. But I thought your post conceded Edwards, though I’ve seen you deny him on this issue both at my blog and on GB. Anyway, this brings us full circle. The inclination to act sinfully had to be preceded by an inclination to such an act lest the act wouldn’t involve the faculty of choice – the will – that by which the mind chooses.

    This leaves us with a fallen nature from which the specifc sinful inclination arose, triggering the act of the will to eat the forbidden fruit.

  4. Need to correct typo. It’s after “full circle,”

    Ron on September 8, 2016 at 7:57 pm said:
    You’ve misunderstood the post.

    “I don’t see how it is less ‘monstrous’ to posit a nature spontaneously shifting from righteous to wicked, than a righteous nature becoming wicked through a wicked act.”

    You’ve experienced many spontaneous inclinations. You’ve never experienced one willful act that wasn’t accompanied by a preceding triggering inclination of that act. If you think you’ve experienced an act of the will not caused by a triggering inclination, then of course you couldn’t be embracing an Edwardsian view of the will. You’d be embracing LFW instead. Pure contingency. But I thought your post conceded Edwards, though I’ve seen you deny him on this issue both at my blog and on GB. Anyway, this brings us full circle. The choice to act sinfully (against God’s command) had to be preceded by an inclination to such an act lest the choice wouldn’t involve the faculty of choice – the will – that by which the mind chooses.

    This leaves us with a fallen nature from which the specifc sinful inclination arose, triggering the act of the will to eat the forbidden fruit.

  5. Keep in mind there is no temporal order with respect to the fallen nature, which is general, and the first inclination to act sinfully, which is specific. But again, I think you think there is pure contingency and metaphysical LFW. I also know you’ve defended on GB doxastic voluntarism of a very libertarian variety. Unwittingly maybe.

  6. Ron,
    You can decide to believe what someone is saying, contrary to what your eyes seem to be telling you. So there you have “two dispositions” so to speak at conflict. Or, today the Sunday School teacher said, “The RCs believe that that Mary is a co-mediatrix, but we do not believe that.” Meaning, whatever it is that your own reasoning “forces” you to believe on this, both you (the parishioner) and I (the speaker), to be members of this church, must believe what I just said. So you can imagine some members forcing their belief to conform to their church’s teaching here, even if they would be inclined to the opposite view.

    It is that sense that I was tilting at in the GB discussion. It was opposed to what I had earlier said to you, which I carelessly modeled as “one believes whatever one’s reasons + senses compels one to believe.” I see now that there is a “voluntary aspect” to some beliefs.

    Now one can always say, “the choice of disposition A vs B was itself a consequence of being “disposed” (C) to favor one of them” — but at least we should concede a complexity to the dispositional model then. Which JE does of course.

    In my thinking, JE clears the field for a Calvinist ethic after the fall, but I know of no theologian other than perhaps Clark who suggests that the fall itself is thereby purged of mystery. (Yet it was the Clarkians on the GB site that were pushing for a voluntary aspect!) To say that the Fall was not the eating of the fruit, nor the decision to do so, but rather a supra-temporal and irrational shift of disposition logically prior to the Will seems to me to raise as many new issues as it solves.

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