Apologetics.com Neiswonger

(A response to a friend)

Well it’s a tough one, because those of a Greek orthodox persuasion are very into being Greek, and so the Greek theology is closely tied in with their sense of themselves and their thoughts of their own identity as a people. What I mean is, for them the fact that their theology is old and Greek, or old and Russian, or old and Armenian, or whatever is a powerful argument for it being correct, whereas for others those things hold no rational weight.

Every major heresy in the heretical canon of heterodox belief was born and flourished in the first few centuries of the Church, so for the thoughtful person, a doctrine being old is not necessarily good. Most old thoughts are bad ones. Arianism. Pelagiansim. Gnosticism. Etc. How would we know? What would the reasonable person think would be the deciding factor in a delineation of belief when there are competing interpretations of ancient lineage? Well, some would say, the judgment of the Church. But the Church was often persuaded by heterodox belief and later repented. Sometimes there were only a handful of Christians holding to the orthodox belief on the Trinity or the deity of Christ, for example. It often took centuries for the institutional Church to give up historically heretical content, if ever. The historical Church has been a notorious promoter of heterodox thought through the ages. That is not an arguable matter; it’s just history.

The Protestant view is that the only infallible resource, the ultimate arbiter in every matter of faith and morals, will always by necessity be, the writings of the Prophets and Apostles themselves, that we call the Holy Scriptures; the Bible. There is no avoiding it being the beginning and end of every theological conflict, because it is the content of every theological conflict. There is no amount of authority or power in an earthly office (the church) that can make them say what they don’t say or not say what they do say. And so they judge the decisions of men and even Church councils. All human decision can and will err, but the Scriptures cannot and do not err, therefore they themselves are the ultimate and final authority.

Someone will say to you about this, that that makes everyone judge for themselves what the Scriptures mean, and so it is by necessity. Even if someone chooses to believe that whatever the Church says must be correct, they have chosen what to believe. The question is, have they believed the right thing for the right reasons. The Church saying that the Church is right because the Church is right is not a reason, it is a confusion. It is an arbitrary act of power without rational justification and Christians are a reasonable people.

So if they want to make the claim, they will need to justify their authority. And how will they do it? How will they justify the identity, nature, offices, authority, and powers of the Church in history? There is no other option. They will need to argue from the Scriptures. And when they do, they have practically admitted what Protestants have simply revived as the dominant Christian knowledge tradition. That the Scriptures themselves are the ’sole infallible rule in all matters of faith and practice’. What we call “sola scriptura”, the fundamental article of the Reformation.

You can’t even know there is a Church unless Scripture tells you so.

And if someone says, you can’t know what the Scriptures are apart from the Church telling you what they are, we would need to ask, “What Church?”, and “How do you know that?”. If they say it is from the Scriptures, they have shown their argument to be circular and fallacious, because they would have needed to reference Scripture itself in order to know what Scripture was, which is the Protestant position; that the Scriptures carry their own authority. If they say it is not from the Scriptures, you may kindly disregard it as an argument from an improper authority, since nothing has the authority to justify the words of God.

Christopher Neiswonger

“You have given us a good explanation, one that many opponents of Calvinism don’t understand. It still doesn’t explain why God chooses some and not others, or rather why he would choose some for destruction. That is left to the inscrutable, hidden, mysterious will of God. Barth pointed out the problem with that, is that it leaves some aspect of the will of God unrevealed by Christ.”     http://alterfaith.wordpress.com/ Mark.

The Five Points of Calvinism. Part Two.

 The ‘inscrutable’ will of God. ‘Unsearchable’. In any system, including theological systems, if you carry them back far enough you will eventually get to their axioms. Their things that are the source of everything else that in itself cannot be explained in terms of another previous thing or some other things co-equal to themselves. This is why Coherentism as an epistemological method is a wash. It ends up holding that you believe everything because of something else but nothing for any good reason.

In Christian thought, the will of God is searchable and unsearchable. It’s searchable in that He so often tells us why He does this or that or explains His thinking and decision making process (even if in an anthropomorphism that cannot actually be representative). But there are some things that He only tells us why He does not decide something. He tells us pretty clearly that He does not save people because of anything good in them that prods Him into gracious action. That He does not examine the fallen and find some article of goodness in one that marks them off as more worthy of His grace than another.

The point being, that this implies that in the acts of God toward the salvation of a soul, He is internally, and not externally, motivated.

This is part of the essence of the Calvinist/Arminian debate also, but little attention is currently given to it. The traditional Augustinian/Thomistic doctrines of the divine attributes argue the way they do because of basic metaphysical commitments. There is being in general, but God is not part of it. God, is the Uncaused Cause of everything else that is caused. Because everything that we see seems to exist within some kind of contingency or dependence upon other things, there must logically be some kind of thing that exists in and of itself, otherwise nothing would now exist.

Whether or not you happen to buy the argument, there is nothing obviously irrational about it. Common sense being common enough it appeals to our most basic assumptions about the way things are. An infinite series of uncaused causes leaves everything without an ultimate explanation. This is the root of what we call Cosmological argumentation, and has been the majority position in the Christian Churches for two thousand years.

With that, the idea of God as self sufficient and in need of nothing while all created things are self-insufficient and in need of God for their very existence, is the premise, while His being ultimately self motivated, and not Himself caused to have a motive by anything outside Himself is the conclusion. It intends that all of God’s actions are ultimately self-ordained, Uncaused, Eternally intended, and Unchangeable. We could put it like this, God doesn’t really in a temporal sense decide things after a certain period of deliberation. There is never a time when He doesn’t know what He is going to do. There is never a time when He is surprised. And there is no possible set of conditions under which He is merely a re-actor. He is the ultimate, but not the immediate, cause of all things. Does that mean that He doesn’t act in response to actions and events within the creation? No. But even those causes are subservient to an over arching theme; an ultimate co-ordination. A plan. The universe is not a gamble.

In going back to the will of God in reference to its unsearchableness, God doesn’t have a reason. I know that in itself sounds weird so don’t take me as saying something I’m not, but God in His ultimate motivations does not have any reason for doing anything that lies outside of Himself as a point of reference. God does things because He wants to, just like anybody else. But everybody else has a referential reason. We are made to have, in every decision, an external referential source of the meaning of our choice and action. We cannot interpret ourselves, so to speak, because we were created as a certain kind of being in reference to God as an absolute point of reference, that in Himself has no point of reference but Himself. He is the absolute point of reference, and we a relative referent.

In ethics for example, what I should do under conditions x, y, and z are dependant upon what I am, what my purpose is, and what the things are that are to be done. This is just to say there is a context to everything. Point being, God is the context for everything else but He Himself is devoid of Contextualization. That’s why we don’t really think of God as fitting into a certain context within our own ordered system of thought or philosophy. (Some will dissent that this would make philosophy a sub-category of theology. And so it is.) His uncaused being, His being in itself in that traditional Christian line of thinking, is the source of meaning and context for all other things while He Himself is above that type of measurement. He is the thing that is above all things that gives all things their meaning.

But what God should do, is not the same as what we should do, in this way. What I should do depends upon what I am, that depends upon God’s purpose for me, that depends upon God’s intent or will. Thus it is referential to another, begging the pardon of our existentialist friends; we do not decide what we are. What God should do is dependant, if we can use the term this way, upon Himself, upon His purpose for Himself, and His will, like our will, is not something other than Himself, but an expression of His essence; His being. To put it better, God’s will and His being are the same thing, just as His intellect and His being are the same thing. When we say, “God’s will”, we are using shorthand for that which is the expression of His personal nature.

But God’s will is a broad field of content and includes everything from the creation of the universe from nothing to the crucifixion of Christ, so when we speak of right and wrong we narrow the scope by calling it His ‘prescriptive’ will, or His will in regard to right and wrong. But these are still not something that He uses some external means of finding out, but the expression of His moral will. There is a kind of thing that God is, and the purpose of all that He has made is found is the expression of that kind. As such, right and wrong, good and evil, are neither merely voluntaristic, nor the measurement of what God can and cannot will. This is just to say that God cannot have willed that good and evil would be other than they are, because it would be against His moral nature, so though good and evil really are defined by God’s desire that things be done in a certain way, there is nothing arbitrary about this unless we mean by arbitrary not having a cause outside of Himself (contra Euthyphro?). God wills what He is and His will is free, but like anyone else, He is not free to will that which is against His nature, because that would be to will that which is against His will. Which would at least be confusing.

To sum up, the reason why we say that God’s will is unsearchable is related to the reason that we say that God’s being is unsearchable. We do not ask the question “What is the cause of God’s uncaused being.” God’s being, being the first cause and source of everything else, does not then cause His will. God’s will is not unsearchable merely because of the epistemological limitations of apprehending the mysteries of the God-head that are beyond a human psychology. His will is unsearchable because it has no causes outside of itself, and thus can have no external measurement. His is an “unwilled” will.

Christopher Neiswonger

The Five points of Calvinism. 

You know the whole ‘5 points’ thing is kind of funny. John Calvin never had five points. While I really think he would have agreed with them, his was mainly an exegetical way of looking at what he thought Scripture was saying about some very important things. I think that if he had been asked how many points there should be, he would have been troubled by that kind of thinking. As it is, he was never asked. Are these things really to reducible in that way? To a laundry list of theological slogans? A grab bag of propositions? A neat set of categorical relationships? Or is the depth and breadth of all this such that a few years of thoughtful study is the minimum?

Still, the T.U.L.I.P. is a helpful little acronym for measuring the traditional lines of the in-house debate between Christians of the Arminian and Calvinistic bent, even though the issue has been debated in the Church since before there were either. This is an old argument. I guess, one of the oldest.

And yes, sometimes I feel a bit Arminian. Like when things in the world seem out of hand and you have to wonder if God is really in control of everything in this specific universe, or some other with a little more law and order. But then when you pray with Arminians, they always pray as if they think God is really sovereign over all those things that they say He’s not. Like the course of history, the salvation of their friends and family, and the ultimate destiny of all things. It’s as if they think He has every hair on their heads numbered and that not even a leaf falls to the ground apart from the will of their heavenly Father. But we all have our inconsistencies.

It was the Arminians that formulated the five points (the followers of Jacob Arminius), so we should lay out their 5 points first. It helps us to apprehend the intended scope.

You probably already know this stuff but I’ll write it for the mildly interested.

The five points of Arminianism:
Represented by the acronym P.R.U.N.I.

Partial Sinfulness
Relative Destination
Universal Atonement
Negatable Grace
Insecurity of the Saints

1. Man is not affected by sin in all of his faculties and is still capable of good even while sinful. God gives people enough non-salvific ‘grace’ to make everyone capable of good decisions apart from regeneration or faith.

2. God’s choosing of certain people to receive His grace is based upon conditions that they themselves must fulfill. God might give everybody some graces but ‘predestination’ is by reservation only.

3. The death of Christ did actually atone for the sins of all people, even those without faith or that never repent. But they have to do something themselves prior to salvation for it to count.

4. The work of God’s grace in salvation is able to be resisted and thwarted by the intended recipient. The will of the sinner is inviolable. What merit would there be in salvation if the sinner did not have to do some good work to apprehend it?

5. Those who have received the grace of God and are truly regenerated to new life can and sometimes do, become unregenerate and absent the salvific grace of God given to them.

So, those pesky five points of Calvinism were formulated 80 years or so after Calvin died to respond to these.

That’s how we ended up with… T.U.L.I.P

Total Depravity
Unconditional Predestination
Limited Atonement
Irresistible Grace
Perseverance of the Saints

The Calvinist system goes like this:

1. While not being ‘abjectly’ depraved, every aspect of the human person has been effected by sin. There is no remaining ability to spontaneously choose an ultimate good as an effect of that change in human nature from one that is spiritual, to one that is fleshly in its intent. The human nature apart from God has a ‘direction’, so to speak.

2. God places no conditions on the gift of His grace. It is freely given apart from any good in the recipient. He does not look ahead in time to see what people will do in response to His grace and then give them His grace in response to their response.

3. The benefits of Christ in the atonement for sin apply only to those that have faith, and while there may be benefits of Christ’s work that fall upon the unrepentant, atonement for sin is not one of them. Thus the atonement is Specific and not General.

4. The grace of God being an actual work of the Spirit of God in the soul is always given to those not inclined to receive it, and thus succeeds because it is the power of God, and not because of some inherent good in those receiving grace. There is not a difference in those receiving the grace that causes one to accept and another to reject it. There are not two kinds of sinners: bad and really bad, that is the cause of some believing and some rejecting. Grace is not a thing, it is something God does, and He acts with an intent to save and actually achieves what He intends.

5. Those who have truly believed in Christ unto salvation, and been filled with the Spirit through faith, will be kept by Spirit of God throughout their lives, and so cannot by any means finally fall away. Though many that seem to believe at one time may show themselves to have been false, and many that seem hostile to religion may yet prove the grace of God by repentance.
So it all comes down to whether you think the Bible teaches TULIP, or PRUNI…

The essence of Calvinism is that the effective cause of the salvation of the sinner is the Grace of God, mercifully given in Jesus Christ, and not some pre-existing good found in the sinner apart from God. Does God save sinners? Or do sinners save themselves and God just makes their atonement for sin a hypothetical possibility? Contrary to a common misunderstanding, that if a sinner continues in their rejection of Christ it is their own choice and decision, and so their own moral responsibility, is exactly what Calvinism teaches.

The Calvinist question might be, when someone does turn to God, is it because of their own goodness? Because some people are just better or smarter than others? Or the grace of God alone? The Calvinist says that when someone rejects God it is their own willful decision, but when someone turns to God it is the effectual grace of God that is the cause. If one continues in sin it is the will of the person; if one comes to salvation it is the grace of God.

Some have no attraction to the notion that all sin is of the free will of man apart from grace while all good works are born of the grace of God alone and thus not merely free, but this is closer to what Calvinism teaches than what it is often accused of. There is free and really free, and if a person is not free from sin, how free can they be? But here we’re speaking of the scope of freedom and not metaphysical freedom. The idea that the decisions that men make have no causes either within themselves or from the context of their lives within the environment that God places them, so that they are all ultimately arbitrary, doesn’t do anything to help this kind of problem. That’s kind of the answer that is no answer because, it doesn’t have any explanatory force. If a man can make decisions apart from his own moral nature then we make human nature itself a phantom and destroy the thing we hoped to protect.

So the Calvinist, for better or worse is saying that God is not choosing some of the slightly better or more receptive against the slightly worse and less receptive. He is giving grace to some from a pool of equally unlikely characters of unsavory intent and contrary actions. There is nothing good in any, and He saves some, without being any respecter of men or giving any special favors. All are equally lost and broken, and have nothing in themselves to make one of us more noble or worthy of a special grace. It is a gift.

Christopher Neiswonger

 (A response to a friend)

I’m an Augustinian.  Poor and ragged as we might be.

The essence of Calvinism is that the effective cause of the salvation of the sinner is the Grace of God, mercifully given in Jesus Christ, and not some pre-existing good found in the sinner apart from God.  I appreciate your taking the time to give a little analysis of Calvinism, but you might be missing the real center of the whole idea. 

Does God save sinners?  Or do sinners save themselves and God just makes their atonement for sin a hypothetical possibility?  And with many of the verses you quote, the fact that if a sinner continues in their rejection of Christ it is their own choice and decision, and so their own moral responsibility, is exactly what Calvinism teaches, so to not explain that and just quote verses that Calvinists wholly agree with in meaning might be misrepresentative.

The Calvinist question might be, but when some one does turn to God, is it because of their own goodness?  Because some people are just better or smarter than others?  Or the grace of God alone?  The Calvinist says that when someone rejects God it is their own willful decision, but when someone turns to God it is the effectual grace of God that is the cause.  This is a pretty important point so I thought I would drop it in here.

All the best,

Neiswonger

Last night I was watching Stevie Ray Vaughn. First live at the Monterrey Jazz Festival in 82, then his triumphant return in 85. The first time, they nearly boo-ed him off the stage. When he came back in 85, he headlined the event to the cheers of adoring thousands. Really the two performances weren’t very different, but the people were. I would think that there were a lot of the same people in the audience for both shows. Those Blues and Jazz guys go to those events all the time. I don’t really get Jazz. I have friends that do, but it’s kind of either you get it or you don’t get it stuff, and I don’t get it. But Blues I get. And Vaughn had that peculiar talent, that spark of God, that went beyond what people were ready for. He was making strange sounds, making a plank of wood with metal strings beg for grace. You could feel it crying in his arms with that strange steamy brew of sublime betrayal and resolute passion of the ‘she did me wrong’ variety. “I really meant I was sorry, for ever causin’ you pain. You showed your appreciation… by walkin’ out anyway. And that’s a cold shot baby.” Now I know everybody doesn’t like Stevie Ray Vaughn, because some people have personal problems that I don’t pretend to understand, but the man could make it laugh and cry. He could choke and bend and hurt the guitar until it started to sing in steep falsetto and mumbling baritone from sheer frustration. There was something there, between the too simple lyric and the unforced rhythm, that cuts you. Makes you feel things a man doesn’t want to feel. Except when he listens to Bach, or Metallica, or that old hymn “O’ Sacred Head now wounded”, or, if he happens to scratch your particular itch, Stevie.

And that’s why we love the these things. They reach beyond our little day to day and hit us deep. Hang upon us with all the woe of the fall of Adam and breach the wanting peace of a soul self satisfied with mere functionality. It’s easier to live without beauty or to simply worship it as an end in itself. But what we can’t do is reconcile that inner tremble in the face of the numinous with an empty naturalism. The denial of the God who gives gifts to men is the denial of all meaning, the denial of all good, and the reduction of all things to the relationships of matter in motion. At the end of the day, everything that we are, everything we feel and touch and taste, all of our loves and hopes, are illusions to people that think this way. Nothing matters but the quiet of the grave to those that have hearts too small for their Creator. With Him lies our first and most important relationship, the primary personal relation, and because we are before everything else personal beings, the form of all our other loves take their cue from this one.

Our relationships, our children, our little graces from God who give us meaning, are slandered by some as accidental fabrications of some inexplicable impulse of the universe to create within itself conscious things made of meat and bone, that love us and are loved by us only as an expression of non-conscious instincts that target the survival of an unintended combination of genes, that are explained in terms of chance chemical reactions, that are explained by the laws of physics, that are then said to have no meaning.

As far as philosophies go, it’s worse than death. There is that constant progress of living in the necessary face of ultimate meaning while pretending not to have one. Telling ourselves again and again that we are just the dust from the stars that will burn out eventually. Praying for oblivion to no one in particular. Hoping to silence the nagging suspicion that we might mean more than that. That we might be something reconcilable with beauty and justice, human dignity and Divine grace. Because anytime we participate in one of the gifts of God, be it music, or film, or story, or morality, or law, or medicine, or sport we join ourselves in something that can never be explained within the narrow social constructions of modernist scientism or methodological naturalism; that in the end nature is all there is.

We are either more than we admit, or more than we can bear.

Neiswonger

On Contemplative Spirituality, Reason, and the Pre-trans Fallacy. Part One of Two.
<a href=”http://christiantheology.wordpress.com/2007/08/11/to-a-friend-about-jesus-contemplative-spirituality-and-mere-human-reason/”></a>

“It appears that you are operating under the pre-trans fallacy.”

Thanks for the comment, and I can see why you might think so.  But I wouldn’t consider this an example of a Pre-Trans Fallacy and I will try to explain why.  Your comment is worth a fuller explanation but I will stuff in a lot of information that I’m sure you already know, for the interested reader, … because it’s a blog thing.

When we talk about logic, and reason, and reasonableness we are usually talking about Meta-physical distinctions.  But it’s true that when we start to speak of them within the context of consciousness and the related domains of thoughtlife and interpersonal communication, we are blending Psychology and Sociology with the Metaphysical distinctions.

‘Metaphysical’ is a weird word, so before someone takes it as saying something that it isn’t, metaphysics is just the area of philosophy that deals with what things really are, what they are made of, and what their substantial relations are.  It’s not as strange as it sounds.

Now I tried to avoid playing too deeply upon the psychological aspect because there is an ocean of information there to go into, but in doing that I purposefully equivocated on the terms.  Reason, rationality, logic, inference; mixing the verbs and the nouns for a broad effect without paying too close an attention to the subtle differences in the meaning of the words.  I just kind of mean the whole she’bang, if you know what I mean.

Now I don’t really mean that “faith without reason is impoverished.”  I mean that it is incoherent.  Faith, if it is any kind of a Christian idea of faith, must have content.  We don’t just “believe”, we believe something, or as the case may be, someone.  Just as a thought without content is a non-thought faith without content is a faith in nothing in particular.  And a faith in nothing is not what we mean by Christian faith.

You write that a reasonless faith is similar to superstition, but that really isn’t what I am talking about here.  People call superstition superstition because they think that someone believes what they believe with a bad reason.  But there is still a reason.  Astrology is not believed for no reason but for reasons that are not reasonable and that have no manifestation of complementary effect that we could see as a qualification of truth.  It does not really do what it says it does.  If it did, if my being born in May really told me that I would be loyal and true, given to long walks in the park, and would marry late and die early, then even if the reasons for believing it were spurious, the proof would be in the pudding.  We would all believe it, practically, because it works.  Things that work don’t need good reasons because we will use the methods even if we have no idea how they work to obtain practical results.  Long before Newton, things fell down.  The point being, this doesn’t give anyone practical results unless they read their lives into the tea leaves, the crystal ball, or the stars.  It doesn’t tell me anything about myself.  Myself tells the stars what they should mean today.

What I am saying about non-rationality is more in line with this, that reason-less faith is not simply a faith without good reasons; it is not faith at all.  I’m not implying the distinctions of Kierkegaardian Fideism here, but a primary truth of the state of a personal being, prima facie.  When we speak of “prehending the divine”, frankly I don’t see that as being a legitimate category for analysis.  Now to prehend simply means to grasp something, as opposed to “comprehend” which means to completely understand something, and “apprehend” which means to truly but partially understand something.

All of us Apprehend mathematics, but no one but God Comprehends mathematics.  So what does someone prehend?  That depends upon what is meant by it.  The most famous ‘prehender’ was Alfred North Whitehead who was always talking about how God prehends itself, the world, and whatever Whitehead thought might be in there.  He put prehension as an area of study on the map, but what he meant by it isn’t what we’re talking about, and Whitehead was no Christian.

I think we are talking about mere human prehension which is more suitable to the field of psychology, even if all fields of study overflow, so to speak.

I found a good little statement on this as an abstract of study of the subject…

“A field-oriented interpretation of Whiteheadian societies of actual occasions, when used to explain the notion of “strong supervenience” as applied to the mind-brain problem, allows one to claim that not only higher-level properties such as consciousness but even higher-level entities such as the mind or soul are emergent from lower-level systems of neuronal interaction. Moreover, it also explains the preexistence of God to the world and Christian belief in eternal life with the triune God in a way that is impossible within the limits of a theory of strong supervenience.” 1.

So what he is really saying is the consciousness, or as pertains to the Pre-Trans Fallacy, Personality, is something that emerges from a previously existing state.  Personal consciousness, in this way of thinking is an effect, an expression, a later step in a process from a previously existing sub-personal state.

When we think of Freud and all of his now famously discredited bluster we can see how all of this bounced to the surface of the popular imagination.  Everything you do, all of you conscious actions and apprehensions, for Freud, are really caused by non-conscious (or sub-conscious) causes manifesting themselves in conscious behavior.  William James wrote and influential text on consciousness and found that it did not exist.  Jung said that ultimately it wasn’t the non or sub conscious that was the real center of all these things but the super rational, the “transpersonal”.

Transpersonal-ism in psychology is a small minority position but still carries some steam.  In the commonly accepted schema, because there is no official textbook interpretation of transpersonal psychologies, there are the Pre-personal, the Personal, and the Trans-personal stages.

We can see why this kind of thinking has had a certain attractiveness for Christian thinkers.  Those of a more naturalistic bent, tend to end the discussion at Personal.  The manifestation of a mature ego is the end of the road in personal development for them.  More spiritualistic thinkers would like to imply something else, something deeper, or wider, to the scope of an individuals mature development, and so they include the trans-personal.  Trans-personal, simply, going beyond the merely personal manifestations.

And of course, like just about anything, there has to be at least some truth to this.  It isn’t like everything Freud said was false by definition.  People really do force themselves to avoid the truth in order to live more comfortably.  But they were doing this long before Freud came into the picture, and everybody knew that people did this kind of thing.  What Freud came up with was an explanation of the mechanism of how all of this really works, which Christians find to be obviously false and irreconcilable with Christian thought.  Did Jesus really want to kill His Father and marry his mother?  The implications of this kind of thinking are not only abhorrent to common sense they are offensive to a Christian conscience.

So to the Pre-Trans Fallacy.  The supposed fallacy is usually taken to be, the naturalistic assumption, that a spiritual activity or consciousness, which is really a manifestation of a higher Transpersonal maturity, is being ascribed to a Pre-personal cause or level of maturity.  Example, a person tells their therapist that they have an experience of the existence of God and that He cares for them deeply.  The Therapist scribbles in their notes (because they are always scribbling in their notes being a scribbling type of people) that “the Client is showing signs of the need for infantile care and need that might have been caused by neglect from the nursing mother figure.”  Attributing the Trans-personal to the Pre-personal.  The Pre-trans fallacy.  It is also of course a certain kind of subtle jab at thinkers that think that all such things are thus attributable, Freud being a common example, of reductionism in their thinking, showing themselves to be only Personal egos, not yet Trans-personally mature themselves.  How can they treat others if they are only at a Personal stage of development?

Then there is the other fallacy associated with this area, called ‘Elevationist’ in which childlikeness is super-imposed as a higher level of personal development.  Many Trans-personalists themselves tend to this direction. The fallacy would be attributing what might even be considered Trans-personal maturity to pre-personal, or at least lower order, personal states.  But that’s not what you think I do.

Now I, am a strict Personalist.  Let me explain.  In taking a specifically Christian approach to an understanding of Psychology, anthropology precedes psychology.  We need to know something about what man is, what his purpose and meaning are, before we can interpret his thinking and supposed stages of egoistic maturity.  If man is a mere accident of natural forces that has no ultimate meaning and simply decides what he is at the time, then my entire understanding of the human experience of which thoughtlife is simply a part, will be entirely different from what I think they are if I think that a man is created in the image of an eternal, moral, reasonable God, who created me for certain purposes that apply whether or not I think them good.  There is either a thing that I am, before I begin thinking about it, or I decide what I am because I am not anything in particular.

Thus in taking that specifically religious Christian approach to these things I have an entirely different kind of soul that I am thinking of when I think psychology.  Every soul, every sentient being, is created in the image and likeness of God, and has some aspects of His personal properties, by definition.  It might be true that the soulish complexities of the embryo are not scientifically verifiable, and this might be more because of our current barbaric level of understanding in the fields of medicine and the hard sciences, but we have a hard enough time measuring and defining personhood in mature adults for goodness sake.  The fact that we can’t ‘see’ a personality at work in the developing fetus does not imply pre-personality in the developing child at all in Christian thought.  Being a few cells, for the Christian, is just what a fully personal being looks like when they are very young.  As such, that the human person, at whatever age, is pre-rational, is really to say that they are pre-human, or pre imago Dei, or somehow, pre valuable as a life, and I don’t think that’s so.

When we take things that the Bible speaks of as ‘Spiritual’ and describe them through the interpretive lens of this Trans-personal, and so super-rational psychology we can get thing that seem very different from what seems to be the intent of the passages.  For instance, when the Apostle Paul chides us for being ‘carnal’ and not ‘spiritual’ people, his intent doesn’t in anyway seem to be that we are too reasonable in our thought.

But these are all rational distinctions.

Neiswonger
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/0591-2385.00344/abs/

http://www.wordwebonline.com/en/PREHEND

http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2995

http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=3012

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8248%28195710%2924%3A4%3C331%3ACLAWTO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-K&amp;size=LARGE&amp;origin=JSTOR-enlargePage
 

On “Faith Alone” in the thought of Phillip Melanchthon
I wouldn’t want you to misunderstand me as to writing that what you said, was well said.  It was meant to imply neither agreement nor that your arguments had persuasive force, but that I can appreciate you apart form all of that.  Your initial comments were thoughtful, if a bit rude, and I appreciate thoughtfulness and bitey conversation, especially from those I disagree with.  Shouldn’t we all?  I mean, part of the joy of it all is in the practice.  If it’s not, we shouldn’t write out here in the air.  We can’t sit around and speak with ourselves for goodness sake.  I find myself boring and I’m always surprised when others urge me on to write even one more line.  Having not read my blogs before you wouldn’t have known that most of them come as responses to letters sent to me or questions asked.  It keeps it from getting dry as we write continually about only subjects that entertain ourselves.

Now of course, you are not going gain any affection from people like me, in telling a story that gives bitter self aggrandizing insults to a mountain of a Christian like Phillip Melanchthon.  His moral purity and theological brilliance are legendary.  Besides that, it is such an awful misrepresentation of his thought and practice.  To place him in Hell, even if it is merely a Hell of Swedenborg’s continuously re-creative imagination is beyond credulity.  And why?  Because He (Melanchthon) believed that his justification before God, the reason that God took pleasure in him and loved him, was not to be found in some meritorious good found in himself, but in the merciful pleasure of God himself apart from Melanchthon’s ambitious accumulation of merits?  That’s what sola fide, Faith Alone, means after all.  It has never meant or been taken as, a faith that is alone, or that is not immediately effective to mercy and good works, but these are the effect of faith, not its cause or nature.

The point of it all being this, that God does not sit in Heaven counting our sins on the cosmic abacus.  His love for us is internally self motivated, not externally coerced or won by favors.  This is the traditional Evangelical/Augustinian position, and it is mine.

I am familiar with writings of Swedenborg, though there is nothing of a peculiarly Christian sense to his writings, all of which seem to be compiled to the end of the refutation of Christianity and the beginning a new religion, very different from the one that Christ brought to us.  But it might be obvious from your comment that you have not read Melanchthon, otherwise you would not have fallen into this kind of misrepresentation, since I am confident it is not intentional on your part.

Here is a little of what Melanchthon wrote on this in the Augsburg Confession, one of the most famous confessions of faith in the history of the world.
      The Confession of Faith:
      Which Was Submitted to His Imperial Majesty Charles V
      At the Diet of Augsburg in the Year 1530_.
      by Philip Melanchthon, 1497-1560 1.
               
        Article VI: Of New Obedience. 
        
        Also they teach that this faith is bound to bring forth good
        fruits, and that it is necessary to do good works commanded by
        God, because of God’s will, but that we should not rely on
        those works to merit justification before God. For remission
        of sins and justification is apprehended by faith, as also the
        voice of Christ attests: When ye shall have done all these
        things, say: We are unprofitable servants. Luke 17, 10. The
        same is also taught by the Fathers. For Ambrose says: It is
        ordained of God that he who believes in Christ is saved,
        freely receiving remission of sins, without works, by faith
        alone. (Melanchthon)

An equally famous presentation of these things by Martin Luther gives the depth and meaning that is so often left out of Modernist communications of Evangelical theology, by Evangelicals themselves.  Just to be on point, neither Luther, nor any official Lutheran presentation of dogma, and really the official presentations are all that matter, has ever held any other view.  (And Melanchthon was nothing if not a good solid Lutheran.)
An Introduction to St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Luther’s German Bible of 1522 by Martin Luther, 1483-1546

“Faith is not what some people think it is. Their human dream is a delusion. Because they observe that faith is not followed by good works or a better life, they fall into error, even though they speak and hear much about faith. “Faith is not enough,” they say, “You must do good works, you must be pious to be saved.” They think that, when you hear the gospel, you start working, creating by your own strength a thankful heart which says, “I believe.” That is what they think true faith is. But, because this is a human idea, a dream, the heart never learns anything from it, so it does nothing and reform doesn’t come from this `faith,’ either.

Instead, faith is God’s work in us, that changes us and gives new birth from God. (John 1:13). It kills the Old Adam and makes us completely different people. It changes our hearts, our spirits, our thoughts and all our powers. It brings the Holy Spirit with it. Yes, it is a living, creative, active and powerful thing, this faith. Faith cannot help doing good works constantly. It doesn’t stop to ask if good works ought to be done, but before anyone asks, it already has done them and continues to do them without ceasing. Anyone who does not do good works in this manner is an unbeliever. He stumbles around and looks for faith and good works, even though he does not know what faith or good works are. Yet he gossips and chatters about faith and good works with many words.

Faith is a living, bold trust in God’s grace, so certain of God’s favor that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it. Such confidence and knowledge of God’s grace makes you joyful and bold in your relationship to God and all creatures. The Holy Spirit makes this happen through faith. Because of it, you freely, willingly and joyfully do good to everyone, serve everyone, suffer all kinds of things, love and praise the God who has shown you such grace. Thus, it is just as impossible to separate faith and works as it is to separate heat and light from fire! Therefore, watch out for your own false ideas and guard against good-for-nothing gossips, who think they’re smart enough to define faith and works, but really are the greatest of fools. Ask God to work faith in you, or you will remain forever without faith, no matter what you wish, say or can do.”  Martin Luther. 2.
This section of Augsburg goes a little deeper in to the nuances and the refutation of the possible misrepresentation of the Lutheran position, usually by Roman Catholic apologists, but it applies equally to Swedenborg under the circumstances.
        Article XX: Of Good Works. 
        
        Our teachers are falsely accused of forbidding good Works. For
        their published writings on the Ten Commandments, and others
        of like import, bear witness that they have taught to good
        purpose concerning all estates and duties of life, as to what
        estates of life and what works in every calling be pleasing to
        God. Concerning these things preachers heretofore taught but
        little, and urged only childish and needless works, as
        particular holy-days, particular fasts, brotherhoods,
        pilgrimages, services in honor of saints, the use of rosaries,
        monasticism, and such like. Since our adversaries have been
        admonished of these things, they are now unlearning them, and
        do not preach these unprofitable works as heretofore. Besides,
        they begin to mention faith, of which there was heretofore
        marvelous silence. They teach that we are justified not by
        works only, but they conjoin faith and works, and say that we
        are justified by faith and works. This doctrine is more
        tolerable than the former one, and can afford more consolation
        than their old doctrine. 
        
        Forasmuch, therefore, as the doctrine concerning faith, which
        ought to be the chief one in the Church, has lain so long
        unknown, as all must needs grant that there was the deepest
        silence in their sermons concerning the righteousness of
        faith, while only the doctrine of works was treated in the
        churches, our teachers have instructed the churches concerning
        faith as follows: –
        
        First, that our works cannot reconcile God or merit
        forgiveness of sins, grace, and justification, but that we
        obtain this only by faith when we believe that we are received
        into favor for Christs sake, who alone has been set forth the
        Mediator and Propitiation, 1 Tim. 2, 6, in order that the
        Father may be reconciled through Him. Whoever, therefore,
        trusts that by works he merits grace, despises the merit and
        grace of Christ, and seeks a way to God without Christ, by
        human strength, although Christ has said of Himself: I am the
        Way, the Truth, and the Life. John 14, 6. 
        
        This doctrine concerning faith is everywhere treated by Paul,
        Eph. 2, 8: By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not
        of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, etc. 
        
        And lest any one should craftily say that a new interpretation
        of Paul has been devised by us, this entire matter is
        supported by the testimonies of the Fathers. For Augustine, in
        many volumes, defends grace and the righteousness of faith,
        over against the merits of works. And Ambrose, in his De
        Vocatione Gentium, and elsewhere, teaches to like effect. For
        in his De Vocatione Gentium he says as follows: Redemption by
        the blood of Christ would become of little value, neither
        would the preeminence of man’s works be superseded by the
        mercy of God, if justification, which is wrought through
        grace, were due to the merits going before, so as to be, not
        the free gift of a donor, but the reward due to the laborer. 
        
        But, although this doctrine is despised by the inexperienced,
        nevertheless God-fearing and anxious consciences find by
        experience that it brings the greatest consolation, because
        consciences cannot be set at rest through any works, but only
        by faith, when they take the sure ground that for Christ’s
        sake they have a reconciled God. As Paul teaches Rom. 5, 1:
        Being justified by faith, we have peace with God. This whole
        doctrine is to be referred to that conflict of the terrified
        conscience, neither can it be understood apart from that
        conflict. Therefore inexperienced and profane men judge ill
        concerning this matter, who dream that Christian righteousness
        is nothing but civil and philosophical righteousness. 
        
        Heretofore consciences were plagued with the doctrine of
        works, they did not hear the consolation from the Gospel. Some
        persons were driven by conscience into the desert, into
        monasteries hoping there to merit grace by a monastic life.
        Some also devised other works whereby to merit grace and make
        satisfaction for sins. Hence there was very great need to
        treat of, and renew, this doctrine of faith in Christ, to the
        end that anxious consciences should not be without consolation
        but that they might know that grace and forgiveness of sins
        and justification are apprehended by faith in Christ. 
        
        Men are also admonished that here the term “faith” does not
        signify merely the knowledge of the history, such as is in the
        ungodly and in the devil, but signifies a faith which
        believes, not merely the history, but also the effect of the
        history — namely, this Article: the forgiveness of sins, to
        wit, that we have grace, righteousness, and forgiveness of
        sins through Christ. 
        
        Now he that knows that he has a Father gracious to him through
        Christ, truly knows God; he knows also that God cares for him,
        and calls upon God; in a word, he is not without God, as the
        heathen. For devils and the ungodly are not able to believe
        this Article: the forgiveness of sins. Hence, they hate God as
        an enemy, call not upon Him, and expect no good from Him.
        Augustine also admonishes his readers concerning the word
        “faith,” and teaches that the term “faith” is accepted in the
        Scriptures not for knowledge such as is in the ungodly but for
        confidence which consoles and encourages the terrified mind. 
        
        Furthermore, it is taught on our part that it is necessary to
        do good works, not that we should trust to merit grace by
        them, but because it is the will of God. It is only by faith
        that forgiveness of sins is apprehended, and that, for
        nothing. And because through faith the Holy Ghost is received,
        hearts are renewed and endowed with new affections, so as to
        be able to bring forth good works. For Ambrose says: Faith is
        the mother of a good will and right doing. For man’s powers
        without the Holy Ghost are full of ungodly affections, and are
        too weak to do works which are good in God’s sight. Besides,
        they are in the power of the devil who impels men to divers
        sins, to ungodly opinions, to open crimes. This we may see in
        the philosophers, who, although they endeavored to live an
        honest life could not succeed, but were defiled with many open
        crimes. Such is the feebleness of man when he is without faith
        and without the Holy Ghost, and governs himself only by human
        strength. 
        
        Hence it may be readily seen that this doctrine is not to be
        charged with prohibiting good works, but rather the more to be
        commended, because it shows how we are enabled to do good
        works. For without faith human nature can in no wise do the
        works of the First or of the Second Commandment. Without faith
        it does not call upon God, nor expect anything from God, nor
        bear the cross, but seeks, and trusts in, man’s help. And
        thus, when there is no faith and trust in God all manner of
        lusts and human devices rule in the heart. Wherefore Christ
        said, John 16,6: Without Me ye can do nothing; and the Church
        sings: 
             Lacking Thy divine favor,
             There is nothing found in man,
             Naught in him is harmless. 3.
The presentation here might differ, but there is no substantial disagreement in the official Creedal statements or standards of any of the Evangelical Churches, so if you are going to disagree, this would be the place.  Now since your argument, well, not yours but Swedenborg’s, which you may or may not hold personally, but from his writings he certainly did, is that Melanchthon is in Hell, accompanied I’m sure by a bevy of other notorious Evangelicals.

I would think that now that the materials are on the table you could voice your reasoning as to why you would agree with Swedenborg on this point, or at least why you think the Evangelicals were wrong in thinking that God loves them apart from their works of Merit, and that their justification before God was by Grace alone through Faith alone, as was the measure of their corporate doctrine.

All the best,

Neiswonger
1.    Translated by F. Bente and  W. H. T. Dau Published in:Triglot Concordia: The Symbolical Booksof the Ev. Lutheran Church_.(St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1921), pp. 37-95.

2. An Introduction to St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Luther’s German Bible of 1522 by Martin Luther, 1483-1546

3.The Confession of Faith:
Which Was Submitted to His Imperial Majesty Charles V At the Diet of Augsburg in the Year 1530_.by Philip Melanchthon, 1497-1560 Translated by F. Bente and  W. H. T. Dau Published in:_Triglot Concordia: The Symbolical Books of the Ev. Lutheran Church_. (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1921), pp. 37-95.

To a Friend,

As much as I disagree with much of what Van Til said and wrote, saying that General Revelation, God’s revelation of Himself in creation, is of equal authority with Special Revelation, meaning the Scriptures themselves, seems to be true.

It’s good that you are careful on these distinctions because many under value their necessity, and while Van Til’s understanding of the nature of revelation can get very strange at times, this in itself is not a strange thing for him to say.

Sola Scriptura, is taken to be the doctrine that the Scriptures are the sole infallible rule in faith and practice for the Christian.  The Bible alone has ultimate and infallible authority.  But that is not intended to imply that whatever other way God has made Himself known does not carry its own authority within itself.  God has revealed himself in the creation and the constitution of man, as created in His image so that every person is responsible to both know God and obey His moral law.  This revelation is absolutely authoritative and infallible in and of itself.  What makes it fail is a problem in the person, not a problem in the revelation.  It is not a “source” problem it is a “reception” problem.  All revelations from God have an equal authority; His.

The distinction comes in when we speak of the things necessary for salvation, or, Christian faith and practice.  These things are not revealed in nature or in the constitution of man as created in the image of God.  Those things necessary for salvation are revealed in ‘Scripture alone’.  There may be things that can be learned from philosophy, the sciences, and human experience, what the historic Church has called “the light of nature”, but these are taken to be inferior and fallible authorities, apprehended through fallible means.  Sola Scriptura takes the Scriptures as the sole infallible rule, but not the only rule.  This is sometimes surprising even to the Christian thinker tutored in the thought of the historical Church because Sola Scriptura could seem to be saying that Scripture is the sole source, instead of the sole infallible source, and so the source that stands above and judges all other sources.

As an example, in my theological tradition, being old line conservative Evangelicalism, we are generally taken to be “the” group that defined the modern understanding of Sola Scriptura, notably in the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1664 and its subsidiary documents.  Notice that even to them, the Confession itself is an authority.  It is a measurement of faith and practice.  But it is taken to be a fallible rule fallibly formed and fallibly compiled.  But it is not taken to have no authority, otherwise, why write it? 

Think of the Apostles Creed.  It is, whether the average Christian in the pews knows it or not, held to be an authoritative statement of the faith for almost every Christian denomination in history.  Now, it does not fail.  It does not “err”, so to speak.  But that does not mean that the Creed in itself is “infallible”.  A failure to fail does not imply infallibility.

But that doesn’t mean it is not an authority.  When Christ arranged His Church, He set within her certain kinds of fallible earthly authority, like Pastors and Elders, and these while not being an infallible authority, are authorities established by the infallible authority of Scripture itself.

So really, the idea that God’s revelation of His being and attributes in nature, is every bit as authoritative as God’s revelation of Himself in Scripture, is a pretty solid idea.  It’s not as if one revelation is less effective than the other.  But the different source and the different, though in places overlapping, “content” of the two can be something that needs to be carefully defined.

Scripture in this is not the only authority, but the ‘sole infallible rule’, and while general revelation is certainly infallible in itself, because of the natural effects of the fall and sinful nature of man, incapable of any use in achieving salvation, and prone to be inordinately apprehended.

But to imply by this that men in general do not know that God exists, at least well enough suppress the truth in unrighteousness, even apart from the knowledge of Him given in the revealed word, does not seem to be the plain teaching of Scripture itself.  One must know, in order to reject.

Romans 1:17 

“For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “BUT THE RIGHTEOUS man SHALL LIVE BY FAITH.” For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened.”

Christopher Neiswonger

The Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 1.

“I. Although the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men unexcusable;[1] yet are they not sufficient to give that knowledge of God, and of His will, which is necessary unto salvation.[2] Therefore it pleased the Lord, at sundry times, and in divers manners, to reveal Himself, and to declare that His will unto His Church;[3] and afterwards for the better preserving and propagating of the truth, and for the more sure establishment and comfort of the Church against the corruption of the flesh, and the malice of Satan and of the world, to commit the same wholly unto writing;[4] which makes the Holy Scripture to be most necessary;[5] those former ways of God’s revealing His will unto His people being now ceased.[6]” 

“VI. The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men.[12] Nevertheless, we acknowledge the inward illumination of the Spirit of God to be necessary for the saving understanding of such things as are revealed in the Word:[13] and that there are some circumstances concerning the worship of God, and government of the Church, common to human actions and societies, which are to be ordered by the light of nature, and Christian prudence, according to the general rules of the Word, which are always to be observed.[14]” 

A Recent Spate of Calvinism.  Part Five.
http://neiswonger.wordpress.com/2007/06/29/a-recent-spate-of-calvinism-part-four/”>Continued from Part Four.

“Now since one and the same grace may in one instance be efficacious, and in another inefficacious, it follows that the so-called gratia efficax must be conceived according to its essence as efficax ab extrinsico. In this conception there is no lessening of the dignity and priority of grace. For since the anticipatory grace invests the created will, quite irrespective of its consent in actu primo, supernaturally with moral and physical powers, and since moreover, as a supernatural concursus, it influences the actus secundus or good act and thus becomes efficacious grace, it follows that the good act itself is the joint product of grace and free will, or rather more the work of grace than of free will.” 1.

So more the work of Grace than free will.  It’s an interesting play on words.  It needs to be said, because anything less would  be an obvious statement of what the Thomists, (followers of Thomas Aquinas) are often found accusing Molinists of: Pelagianism.  And nobody wants to be on the side that is being called Pelagian, because censure, condemnation, and excommunication usually follow pretty close behind.  The Romanists might have accused the Calvinists and Lutherans of many things during the Reformation, but for obvious reasons, Pelagianism wasn’t one of them.”
Part Five.

The usual thought here would be that as far as percentages go, if it isn’t more free will than Grace, but more Grace than free will, it isn’t as free as we were first led to believe.  That is, if we think of Grace as an act of God’s mercy and the rest as an act of man apart from that Grace.  The Protestant position is much more direct by famously, or if we are not Protestant infamously saying clearly and constantly, by Grace Alone.  Sometimes, when the other positions are followed to their logical conclusions they start to sound very Calvinistic, and this would at least lead us to think that Calvinism might not be as obviously wrong as we were led to believe.  And they tend toward this because sooner or later any theology, especially a soteriology, will be met by the force of the Scriptures themselves as the a given authority, and no matter how intricate a system of philosophical explanation might be, if it can’t resolve itself into a plain reading of the text, it will never convince the serious reader.  And these are of course matters of Revealed Theology and not Natural Theology which might be more open to philosophical scrutiny.

But now we get to the money.  An attempt to reconcile something that every theology worth listening to needs to come to terms with, for good or ill.  Remember, this is the Molinist position, even though many, especially Protestants that tend toward a Molinistic view of this or that, may not recognize it as such within the context of its theological, instead of a philosophical frame.

“For it is not the will which by its free consent determines the power of grace, but conversely it is grace which makes the free good act possible, prepares for it and co-operates in its execution. The infallibility of the success, which is contained in the very idea of efficacious grace, is not to be explained by the intrinsic nature of this grace, nor by a supernatural Proemotio Physica, but rather by the Theologoumenon of the scientia media, by virtue of which God foreknows from all eternity whether this particular will would freely co-operate with a certain grace or not. But since God by virtue of His scientia media has at His own disposal all the sufficient and efficacious grace, the infallibility of the successful outcome remains in perfect accord with the freedom of the will, and furthermore the dogma concerning final perseverance and predestination is entirely preserved.” 2.

(Theologoumenon just means, words about God, or, how things about God should be said.)

When the writer tells of the Molinistic rejection of the “Promotio Physica” he is saying that they reject the traditional Thomistic interpretation of how God foreordains the effects through choosing and causing the First Motion.  The “First Mover” idea is the basis for the Cosmological Argument, the most famous and enduring argument for the existence of God.  So Thomists take this very seriously as not only an attack upon Thomas but upon accepted Roman Catholic dogma.  Molinists generally hold argument to be invalid because of their different interpretation of causation.

Now here, is something that seems like a small point, but is really a huge point, though many try to ignore it.

“This view of Suarez is found also in Molina. Molina says: “When causes are subordinated, it is not necessary that the superior cause moves the inferior cause, even though the two causes be essentially subordinated and depend on each other in producing a common effect. It suffices if each has immediate influence on the effect.” [230] This position of Molina supposes that active potency can, without impulse from a higher cause, reduce itself to act. But he confuses active potency with virtual act, which of itself leads to complete act. Now, since a virtual act is more perfect than potency, we have again, contrary to the principle of causality, the more perfect issuing from the less perfect.”

“St. Thomas and his school maintain this principle: No created cause is its own existence, or its own activity, hence can never act without divine premotion. In this principle lies the heart of the proofs, by way of causality, for God’s existence. [231].” 3.

People often think: Molinism, middle knowledge, libertarian free will, end of story.  Simple, neat, but not a sufficient representation of the meaning, reasons, or systematics involved.  Molinism is not about middle knowledge.  It is about Grace.  Middle knowledge is a means for explaining why they think Grace works the way it does, or in this case, doesn’t work, while trying to preserve some kind of a traditionally orthodox conception of God.  None of this starts with middle knowledge; it goes to middle knowledge.  So there is little surprise that the modern reformulations that lack the stabilizing controls of Roman Catholic Traditionalism, when faced with the some of difficult questions, instead of reformulating their conception of freedom, reformulate the traditional orthodox conception of God.

And so this is where it all gets a bit wild because we have all the players here: Predestination, perseverance, efficacious Grace, freedom of the will, bondage of the will, the cause of free action in a fallen being, the First Mover as first cause, middle knowledge, the Sacraments being the vehicle for the conveyance of the Grace, the Priest as having the power to create the Grace, and exhaustive Divine foreknowledge.  Isn’t all of this beginning to sound quite a bit like Calvinism?

It should, because even though most of these definitions and interpretations are very new in their philosophical form and application, the ideas were relatively common.

Look at it this way.  As much as Calvinism was a reaction developing directly within the scope of a trend toward Thomism, Molinism was a reaction developing directly within the scope of Calvinism as a reaction to Thomism.  Is that Confusing?

Think of those pesky traditional Five points of Calvinism?  Remember that none of the early Calvinists, including Calvin, ever had Five points of Calvinism.  The five points were formulated a hundred years later at the Synod of Dort as a reaction to the five points of Arminianism, which were not written by Arminius, because he also, was long gone.  But they do seem to be a crystallization of some of the main points of Calvin’s thought, if in a somewhat barren and so possibly misrepresentative form.  Taken in themselves apart from their theological context they can really empty the whole system out if you know what I mean.  This is why many Calvinistic theologians while being in general agreement tend to shy from them as being sufficient in themselves as descriptive of their thought.

Here are the categories that need to be reconciled.

1. Every aspect of man is effected by sin and there is a human inability apart from Grace, to do good, including to respond to the Gospel.

2. God’s choice to give Grace is not based upon foreseen merit or anything good in the recipient, but upon the free will of God to give that person effectual Grace.

3. Divine forgiveness is limited to those actually receiving effectual Grace.

4. That the intent of God in giving Divine Grace is infallible, effective, and certain to achieve all that He intends in giving it.

5. That a continuation of Divine Grace is necessary for Perseverance to the end and without such Grace perseverance is impossible.

But are these the Five points of Calvinism or the Five points of Molinism?  As we’ve seen and will see, Molinism holds to all of these, with qualifications and of course different definitions of  key terms like Grace, but could easily agree to these in principle.

Not to tell you how to read, but we need to read this next section carefully as to what Molinism historically entails.

“….Molinists have made concessions to the Thomists in the question regarding predestination, without however abandoning the essentials of Molinism. The theory of the prœmotio physica agrees admirably with the idea of an absolute predestination to glory irrespective of foreseen merits (prœdestinatio ante prœvisa merita). This is the reason why this theory appears, except in the case of a few theologians, as a characteristic feature of the Thomistic doctrine on grace. Now, absolute predestination to glory necessarily involves the rather harsh doctrine of reprobation, which, though only negative, is nevertheless equally absolute. For, if God determines to bestow efficacious graces only upon those whom He has from all eternity predestined to glory, then those not contained in his decree of predestination are a priori and necessarily damned.” 4.

Hey, this sounds like John Knox here.  Jonathan Edwards waiting in the wings.  Charles Hodge and Spurgeon in the balcony.  Why does this way of thinking, when we get deeper into, it start to sound a lot like Calvinism even if it is written in opposition to Calvinism?  Because Calvinism was not reinventing the wheel.  It was trying to get back to the wheel.  There is only so much room for reinterpretation before the floor falls out of your Orthodoxy.  We can’t go too far to the sides in order to make a system work without scraping the borders of what can be reconciled with everything that came before.  And having a view on these things cannot be avoided.

Someone can agree or disagree with Calvinism that the Grace of God is effectual, sufficient, necessary, irresistible, infallible, that some are predestined and others passed by, that free will is the cause of sin, that the sinful person is not free in the widest possible sense of the term but only expresses their freedom within the scope of their nature apart from grace, that though there is no necessity in the actions of fallen people as to some kind of external compulsion that there does seem to be some kind of inner necessity as to the mode of internal expression, that perseverance is only possible as an effect of special Grace,  that predestination is not on the basis of foreseen merits, that though all of the good in conversion is attributed to God all of the evil in failing to convert is attributable to the reprobate, and so on.  But no one can say that the Christian faith has not always held to some collection of these and that the Christian Churches have not always held them to be true.

So as complicated as all of these things can become, in the end, everybody has to deal with the same stuff in order to have a coherent explanation.  Good, bad, or other, every side is trying to work it all out within the context of certain parameters set before hand by Holy Scripture.  The question is, and will always be, who is most true to what is taught in there.
Augustine. On Nature and Grace. Chapter 4 [IV.]—Free Grace

“This grace, however, of Christ, without which neither infants nor adults can be saved, is not rendered for any merits, but is given gratis, on account of which it is also called grace. “Being justified,” says the apostle, “freely through His blood.” Romans 3:24 Whence they, who are not liberated through grace, either because they are not yet able to hear, or because they are unwilling to obey; or again because they did not receive, at the time when they were unable on account of youth to hear, that bath of regeneration, which they might have received and through which they might have been saved, are indeed justly condemned; because they are not without sin, either that which they have derived from their birth, or that which they have added from their own misconduct. “For all have sinned”—whether in Adam or in themselves—”and come short of the glory of God.” Romans 3:23” 5.
Christopher  Neiswonger

1. CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Controversies on Grace  http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06710a.htm

2. CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Controversies on Grace  http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06710a.htm

3. http://www.thesumma.info/reality/reality6.php REALITY—A Synthesis Of Thomistic Thought by Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O. P CH 5. ACT AND POTENCY

4. http://www.catholic.org/printer_friendly.php?id=8074§ion=Encyclopedia
 CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Molinism  http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10437a.htm

5. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1503.htm
1,2,3 Written by J. Pohle. Transcribed by Sean Hyland. The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume VI. Published 1909. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Nihil Obstat, September 1, 1909. Remy Lafort, Censor. Imprimatur. +John M. Farley, Archbishop of New York

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JOHN CARDINAL FARLEY ARCHBISHOP OF NEW YORK Copyright, 1909 BY ROBERT APPLETON COMPANY Copyright, 1918 BY THE ENCYCLOPEDIA PRESS, INC. The articles in this work have been written specially for The Catholic Encyclopedia and are protected by copyright. All rights, including the right of translation and reproduction, are reserved. PRCSSWORK AND BINDING BY J. B. LYON CO., ALBANY, N. Y , U. S. A.

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First causes and second thoughts.  (an answer to a friend)

Plato and Aristotle were the big “First Cause” guys.  They wrote quite a bit about it in their books on everything from politics to metaphysics.  It’s must reading for those interested.  Aquinas was the main technical formulator of the Five Ways, or what we call the Classical arguments for the existence of God, in Christian thought.  I think it can be very useful for getting in on the thing to just find them online somewhere and read what he had to say on that.  They only take up a few pages.  It’s important because everyone else will be writing about them and fighting about them and it’s good to know what they’re talking about.

Some of the modern guys that use this method to great effect from a Christian perspective are R.C. Sproul and William Lane Craig.  (Sproul’s use is the truer to the Classical Thomistic formulation; Craig has an interesting version of the Kalam argument of Averroes, a Muslim author.)  There’s a classic debate between Bertrand Russell and Frederick Copleston that is a prerequisite to modern work on the subject.  It’s much better listened to than read.  Most of it boils down to, what are the reasonable conditions necessary for the world that we experience today?  Does an eternal flux of meaningless arbitrary matter, or some kind of a wise intentional being with the power sufficient to create, best explain our human experiences and the world in which we experience them?  (Quinton Smith for example claims the universe as the cause of its own existence.)

To be sure, there are no arguments that can disprove cosmological arguments.  I agree though, with the internal Christian critiques that say they are not sufficient in and of themselves to produce the kind of assent necessary for faith.  Theism does not equal  Christianity.  What I am saying is, it is true that God is the first cause, and the arguments are simply better than the atheistic options, but I don’t agree that in any of the ways classically formulated they “prove” the existence of my God.  More likely, they imply  something that would be a sufficient cause for all of this stuff.  They certainly imply the existence of something though, and while atheistic theories have no basis for wanting, finding, or explaining truth as a quality of existential phenomena, theistic answers do.  The meaning that there is no meaning will always be logically weak to all but those already biased against their own dignity.

Now as far as those arguments go that the universe just causes itself, or that matter just happens to spring into being from nothing for no reason, or that matter, flux, and process are eternal and thus need no explanation other than themselves, or that since every thing in the universe is reducible to the relationship of its causes the universe itself is explained by the infinite series of finite causes, or that the Aliens did it, these are all together so lacking in coherence and explanatory power that we are justified in dismissing them without a great deal of thought.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean that there are not more reasonable competitors with Christian thought that need to be met.  The entire scope of Cosmological argumentation seems to me to only begin the analysis instead of ending the discussion the way some medievals and scientistic moderns might imply.  We need an explanation that is not merely sufficient but actual.  Not just possible, but accurate.  Truth, in other words.

For my money, Cosmological methods in general are useful as a kind of argumentum ad absurdum by showing some of the less rational claims of materialism and pantheism, naturalism and spiritualism, to be unstable and inherently unworkable.  They are not so much the proving of truths directly on point as they are the refutation of antithetical claims.  This of course means that I see them as in reality a negative apologetic and not a positive apologetic as they are generally accepted to be, which puts me in the minority position.  Aquinas, for example, would never have said as much.  He thought it was a fundamental positive proof of the existence of God.  I see it as a truth that Christians already know, that God is the first cause of all things, formulated as an argument to refute absurd claims against one thing that must be true if Christianity is true, i.e., Creation ex Nihilo.  So because it is not the reason that we believe in God but a refutation of the belligerent and a support for the conscience of the faithful, I think of them this way.

On that, I think that as long as we don’t break the rules by pretending that we are not Christians by accepting certain fundamental posits of the Pagan in order to engage in the  conversation, or by feigning the absurdity of some nonsensical “neutrality”, as if such a thing were even possible, in order to gain a grounding for commonly accepted facts, use them all you like, with vigor.  The only compromise would be if we were really doing what some formulations of the Argument seem to say that they are doing, which is starting from nothing, or just ourselves and our own personal finite human experience, and inevitably arriving at the existence of a God by empirical induction and phenomenological analysis.  So that we only know Him a posteriori, or as a conclusion from other things that we already know more fundamentally.

That won’t do, because it is not what we do.  It can’t be what we do, because if we say it is what we do, and then come to the revealed word of God and read what it says we do, they do not say the same thing, and that would be very confusing if we actually proved the existence of God and the truth of the Bible in a way that the Bible says is not the way we do.  But if anyone can read Romans chapters 1 and 2 and comes to some other conclusion I’m always ready to hear a brilliant theory.  There are certainly lines in it, and in other places that imply knowing the existence of God as an inevitable consequence of reasonable experience, but there are other verses in there that seem inadequately explained by that kind of thinking alone.  It’s not less than that, it’s more than that. “In Him we live, and move, and have our being” after all.  And primordial things are “written on the heart” of every man and seem known innately contemporaneous with his very reflection upon existence, no matter how severely suppressed by the thinker they may be.

Christopher Neiswonger

<a href=”http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1002.htm”>Aquinas</a>
<a href=”http://www.bringyou.to/apologetics/p20.htm”>Copleston-Russell </a>