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For what it's worth, historically Reformed theologians did resort to something more like compatibilist arguments. I know this claim sounds unlikely in a world where Calvinists proudly adhere to determinist views and claim there is no free will and so forth, so let me provide a source for it. Unfortunately, it turns out that through liberal theology on the one hand and anti-intellectual fundamentalism on the other modern Protestantism has jettisoned quite a bit of its theological tradition.
Whether there's free will is in part a semantic issue. Luther famously wrote "The Bondage of the Will". What he's talking about there is about free will but primarily through a moral lens: you are not free to do good. I'm pretty sure some have affirmed free will, but not in a
compatibilistlibertarian sense. People fight over the meaning of the term.I'd be interested in hearing more about the book—at least, a summary of where it gestures to in those authors. My impression was definitely that determinism was mainstream; that's what I've picked up from my own reading of old authors.
Those authors were later, not first or second generation reformers. (The earliest is the third generation Zanchi, I think.)
Not expecting to see Gomarus on there, since I thought he was a supralapsarian (and maybe Voetius as well)?
EDIT: Made the comment better. Also, this review seems relevant, if you can access it.
EDIT 2: Compatibilist->Libertarian. I misspoke terribly.
I cannot access the review unfortunately.
To put it briefly, the view described by @urquan is pretty much the view that the theologians described in the book have. There are a lot more details about things like different types of necessity, how free choice functions before the Fall, after the Fall, after regeneration and after glorification, etc. but the overall view is pretty much what urquan described. Also, the book deals mostly with free will specifically, not with all the doctrines of elections. So the text provided for e.g. Gomarus deals with all sorts of philosophical ideas about how free will works, but he does not go into supralapsarianism or anything like that.
However, you are also correct about Luther and Calvin not having that view! The authors of ‘Reformed Thought on Freedom’ actually acknowledge that explicitly in the conclusion of their book when discussing possible objections. I know that it sounds implausible that Calvin and Luther had anti free choice views whereas pretty much all their successors the next couple of centuries did try to retain a notion of free choice. However, based on what I’ve read in the book, I am inclined to believe that. The later theologians all using a scholastic philosophical apparatus are very careful to retain free choice, despite affirming a very high view of God’s sovereignty. For what it’s worth, Calvin at least does hint at a little bit of nuance in his views at some point in the Institutes. I’d have to take some time to find the passage again, but I remember that somewhere in the Institutes Calvin says that fallen humans sin ‘necessarily’ but aren’t ‘coerced’ to sin. So they can’t not sin, they sin freely in some sense. This seems to hint at something more like the view that Urquan described and which later Reformed theologians also defended, albeit without the careful technical scholastic language used by later Reformed theologians and there are other places where Calvin does not seem to show this nuance.
Note that I am here specifically claiming the Reformed tradition as Reformed Orthodoxy developed retained a notion of free choice, not that they didn’t believe God foreordained everything. How there can be an omnipotent and omniscient God, who knows and allows and in some sense causes everything that is, while also somehow not being the author of evil and allowing for human freedom, remains a tricky question. There is a long tradition from the Church Fathers, through the Middle Ages and into Modernity of theologians grappling with that problem. I am not even claiming here that the Reformed scholastics were particularly successful in their approach to answer this question, just that mainstream Reformed theology from the sixteenth up to and including the eighteenth century, stands in the same line as the Medieval scholastics trying to reconcile Gods sovereignty with human freedom. In fact, somebody like Bernard of Clairvaux who made some distinctions between different types of necessity gets cited approvingly a bunch of times by different theologians discussed in the book. Some of the theologians seem to not like the standard Latin term for free will ‘liberum arbitrium’, although they all acknowledge that the Church Fathers used that term and so they also seem uncomfortable (unlike Calvin and Luther) with completely rejecting that term. However, when you read the treatises in the book, it becomes clear that they are accusing their Roman Catholic and Remonstrant interlocutors of something like what we would call a libertarian free will view, while they themselves argue for something more like what we would call compatibilism today.
You specifically mention Gomarus, so let me try to summarise the treatise on free will from Gomarus provided in the books. Gomarus first talks about what free choice is:
He goes on to make a distinction between free choice (liberum arbitrium) and will (voluntas). The will is concerned with what we want, i.e. with goals, whereas the free choice is concerned with means, i.e. making a concrete choice between A or B. Let me give an example to try and explain this distinction. If somebody is thirsty and wants to drink a glass of water, the thirst and the goal of satiating that thirst, is the voluntas. Nobody thinks somebody made a conscious free choice to be thirsty and desire a glass of water, that’s not what people talk about when they say ‘free will’. The person in the example then has a choice to drink a glass of water or not. That’s the liberum arbitrium. Unless he has knowledge that the glass of water is poisoned or something he will more or less certainly choose to drink the glass of water, but he was completely able to choose not to drink the glass of water.
After a bunch of specific definitions and distinctions and technical terms and stuff as is common in scholastic theology, Gomarus goes on to describe free choice in four states, the state before the Fall, the state after the Fall, the state after regeneration and the state after glorification. As I understand it, the key here is this distinction between liberum arbitrium and voluntas. The potency to choose either A or B, i.e. liberum arbitrium, is affirmed by Gomarus in all those four states. What changes, is the voluntas. The fallen unregenerate man has a corrupted voluntas that is no longer oriented towards God, but towards sin. Therefore, though he is completely free in the choices that he makes, he will always use that freedom to sin, because that is now his goal:
So Gomarus does not deviate from Reformed ideas about total depravity and such. What he argues is that man being fallen and in some sense not able to do anything but sin, is compatible with humans being free. They sin, not because of some sort of necessity, but because, their nature, being corrupted after the Fall, they want to. The argument Gomarus uses here about angels is also used a couple of times by other theologians in the book. Can good angels, glorified saints in heaven or even God sin? Christians typically believe it’s certain God is not going to sin, or that glorified saints in Heaven are not going to fall into sin again, but it would also be rather absurd to claim that God or glorified saints are not free. So this must mean it is possible for your will to be so strongly confirmed in good, that you will certainly always freely choose to do good. Likewise, for the unregenerate man, their will is corrupted to the extent that they will always freely choose to do sin.
I am not saying that this view is perfect or that the Reformed scholastics are able to answer all the questions this raises in a satisfactory way. But it is clear that somebody like Gomarus, who has a reputation of being a hardcore Calvinist, because he is the one who originally started the beef with Arminius himself, surprisingly actually confirms humans have liberum arbitrium, even in their fallen state, despite John Calvin and Luther rejecting that term.
See the second edit to the previous comment: I misspoke.
Anyway, to be clear, Luther and Calvin were able to talk about the will being free in a moral sense—your will is free when it's in alignment with God's will, rather than a slave to sin, etc. etc. They denied free will in fallen man, but not e.g. in glory.
This fits well with a compatibilist understanding (which I would affirm) but isn't quite talking about the same thing.
It looks like you're saying that people developed a broader understanding of free will afterwards, in a compatibilist sense, which makes complete sense. (Didn't Edwards, as well?)
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It was arguing that they were misreading Turretin, mostly. I haven't read either the book or Turretin, and only skimmed the review, so I have no idea of the extent to which that is true. There seems to have since been more scholarly argumentation from people in response.
Thanks for the analysis of Gomarus. Much of this might be a terminological dispute, as they all believe in an exhaustive divine decree, and not in a Molinist sense either.
I don't think it's unreasonable to characterize Luther and Calvin as compatibilists, in the sense that they think that we are genuinely making meaningful choices, that they depend on us, that there's moral responsibility, etc. even though they think that they have qualms about the term free will. My impression was that something compatibilist-ish was just broadly mainstream within the Reformed world. But this is interesting, I wasn't really aware of these debates.
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My understanding is that predestination wasn't originally interpreted by Calvinists as eliminating free will -- the argument for predestination wasn't total determinism, it was total depravity. So, the view was that people have free will (in a philosophical sense), their will is just totally entangled in sin such that it is impossible to choose the good without prevenient grace. Which, well, is essentially the Christian consensus since Augustine (at least in the West; the Orthodox are harder to pin down, though they would certainly insist that salvation is totally connected to cooperation with grace), but the unique proposition of Calvinism is that such grace is given only to the elect, and is irresistible.
This view is correct as far as I can gather from the book I linked to. Albeit with the caveat that John Calvin himself and Luther did reject the idea of free will. That being said, the book presents authors who for instance contributed to Reformed confessions and are all influential figures in the Reformed tradition, so I think it is reasonable to say that the Reformed tradition had a view similar to what you describe, even though Calvin himself did not.
I don't think there's much of a distance between the views.
It's worth noting, when you talk about people having free will, that that does not mean libertarian free will—it is fully compatible with determinism. (And yes, this fits with Augustine and others)
The Reformed theologians did affirm determinism, and had a notion of providence fully extensive over the world, such that nothing occurs without first being decreed by God. Nevertheless, @urquan is right that that is not what the word "predestination" usually referred to, it referring specifically to the choosing of people unto salvation.
To be clear, I agree that Luther and Calvin were more concerned with a moral sense of free will as you put it in another post. Actually in the conclusion of "Reformed Though on Freedom" the authors of the book touch on this topic as well:
So yeah, the view of the book which I think I agree with, isn't that Luther and Calvin were completely wrong and later generations of theologians fortunately completely rejected their view. Rather, Luther and Calvin correctly emphasized the corruption of fallen man over and against a more optimistic view of human nature that was common in the late Medieval/ early Modern period, but in doing so they made some statements that have unfortunate philosophical consequences. Later generations of theologians had more or less the same idea about the spiritual and moral consequences of sin, but were a little more careful and nuanced in working it out philosophically. While, to be clear, I don't think this should lead us to a negative view of Luther and Calvin at all, I don't think it is a completely theoretical point either. I know at least in the Netherlands, where I am from, there are some very conservative Reformed groups that fall into some sort of hyper Calvinism who would benefit greatly if they were told that contrary to popular belief, people like Gomarus and Voetius believed in free will.
Without using the words free will, what wrong beliefs do they end up having?
I guess I don't see what unfortunate philosophical consequences Luther/Calvin had.
To be clear, this is very much not going to be a steelman of their beliefs because I'm trying to describe a failure mode in a couple of sentences. The problem is mostly that they can be overly passive in certain ways. There is a common doubt about whether one is part of the elect in these communities and a fatalistic attitude towards this, because it's all God's grace and they can't do anything about it. This is caused by a combination of an extreme emphasis on personal conversion and an extreme emphasis on predestination which leads to people doubting whether they are saved because they did not have the right type of personal conversion experience and their response is waiting and hoping that they will someday be converted by God.
The overly strong emphasis on personal religious experience can be problematic in itself, but it is especially toxic in combination with a type of Calvinism that pretty much only allows them to use verbs in the passive mode when discussing spiritual matters and anything other than God is the subject. There are churches in the Dutch bible belt where you will find a thousand people twice a Sunday, but only a third or less of confessing members will feel like they are true Christians and for instance won't participate in the Lord's Supper, because they feel like they haven't really been converted yet. People will in some sense live like faithful Christians all their life, believe God exists, believe they are sinful and need salvation from God, believe Jesus died to bring about that salvation, etc. but at the same time they will tell you they haven't been converted yet and maybe they are just not part of the elect and will go to hell and then continue just wait and hope that their salvation may someday come to pass. In my view, they can just convert if they want to, God's grace is already at work in them in fact that they even want to be converted. Or maybe they already are converted and they don't have to doubt their salvation because they didn't have the right type of religious experience.
Again I'm not doing justice to these communities because I am zooming in on a particular problem that affects them. The problem is not solely caused by Calvinism but it is definitely exacerbated by a particular application of Calvinism.
EDIT: I just realized the "they" in your post might refer to either the Dutch hypercalvinists that I mentioned at the end of my post, or Luther and Calvin. I wrote my post interpreting it is the former. If purely looking at Luther and Calvin, I think it is more of a theoretical problem and not super important. I don't feel the fatalism I described in my post affects them. The reason I do have a clear preference for using the free will language, contrary to Luther and Calvin, is because of the fatalism I see in some Dutch reformed churches around me, which I think would be undermined by a clearer view of free will and also because I feel it undermines some caricatures of Reformed theology.
Ah, makes sense. I'd vaguely heard that that was a thing in some places, but wasn't super aware of it.
I did mostly mean the former, so you read me rightly.
Yeah, fatalism is bad.
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Total determinism is normal. See Calvin, Institutes book I, chapters 16-17, where he lays out an exhaustive model of providence.
This wasn't unique to Calvin, Luther also thought we were predestined, along with many Catholics (especially Dominicans/Thomists). You're right though, that's more explicitly talking about sin and salvation (as does Calvin later in the Institutes), but they also thought that all creation was predetermined, I believe.
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