This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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?)
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link