Apologetics.com 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