God's Providence

Yeah, I know, I can't resist a challenge. It's awful. 

I've been thinking for a while about doing this, so the answer by "anonymous" to my previous blog on predestination has spurred me to go for it.

In it, he stated that we can't be as black and white as I was when it comes to free-will and predestination. A more nuanced approach would be closer to the truth. Now first of all, let me say that I am a strong proponent of the happy medium. I think that it is healthy, and most often the closest answer in complexity to difficult questions. However, I believe that the tension between man's will and God's is not a tension between God's will being totally free and sovereign and ours being totally free and independant rather than one between God's will being totally sovereign - the prinicple cause behind every effect in this universe - and the fact that we humans have a responsibility for our actions. I won't go into trying to tie up the knots of the tension between Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility. I'll leave such a task for Donald A. Carson, in his book called (fitingly) Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility. 

What I want to do is simply show that man can't determine himself if God is sovereign. 

Let's get one thing clear first: the Bible displays tension in many areas. God is three persons in one being, Jesus-Christ is a sinless God come into a decaying human world, born of a woman. The Bible is both human and divine in authorship. These are tensions but they are never contradictions. God is not three and one in the same way. He is not three persons and yet one person at the same time. When it comes to his being, he is one. There is only one God. When it comes to his personhood he is three (not the forms which he takes on, not the different characteristics that he has but rather the physical - or metaphysical - entities in which he exists). The greek word hypostasis (that which stands under) is helpful to understand the concept of personhood. So God is three and God is one. But not on the same level. If God were both three and one in being or both three and one in personhood, it would be a contradiction. It just can't happen!

It's the same with free-will and divine sovereignty. You can't say: "man can determin himself freely and God has control over him". It just doesn't work. It's a contradiction! Either man is totally free or God is totally determining. I'll try to show this with the help of pictures, trying to put the doctrine into practise: 

The common position that I meet in anglican church (who just love to compromise, sometimes at the expense of reason) is that God has a general movement to history that he wants to give. And he will make history come to a point where Christ reigns and the whole earth is under his dominion. And this reign is going to come in with the assistance of free, self-determining agents. 

But that can't work. Because this is what happens in a totally free universe (the "universe" that I'm depicting is the universe on its historical level, not its spacial level - obviously, as men can't go everywhere in the unvierse. It is the universe as far as man's ideas go and as far as history goes. There is a historical point which needs to be atteigned through the ideas, wills, movements and actions of men. This is what I've tried to depict here. It is a kind of "metaphysical" universe if you will. I am not quite happy with the word "metaphysical" but it comes close enough): 

If man is free, God can't do anything with man whatsoever. Because man's freedom and God's freedom are on the same level (in the same way that God being 1 person and yet 3 persons would be on the same level), they can't both coexist. If man is free, self-determining, ultimate, then God can't make sure that history will lead towards a specific conclusion at all because he is not the determining factor: man is. This is black and white because shades of grey can't be allowed lest we be contradictory, like saying "oh, there's got to be a way to make a square circle. Just take a circle and make it a little more angular... That's not a circle any more! OK then well take a square and just curve the edges round a bit... That's not a square any more!

Now what most common theologians hold is that, OK, God restricts man's free-will and directs it in a way that will ultimately lead to the conclusion of history.

This, first of all, means that man isn't in fact free. He is simply given the illusion of freedom. Because this is now what the universe looks like: 

If God starts determining man in any way whatsoever, man no longer has free-will. He can't have a little bit of free will, because with this little bit of free will he could will to have more free-will. And more. And more. Like Aladdin wishing for more wishes if Aladdin was ultimate and determining and the Genie was relative and determined. Man doesn't in fact have free-will at all: if he had free-will, he could just by-pass God's vortex and get out of it, because he would be self-determining. What God is saying is this: "you may move around as much as you want, but you can't go out of the vortex. Because you're not free to. I don't allow it". So already, we've erased the possibility of free-will, if God is sovereign. Because they are on the same level, man can't determine himself and also have God determine him. It does not compute! It is a contradiction!!

Now the next problem, as is illustrated on this graph is that even if God allows man to move around only within the limitations of the vortex, leaving man totally free within this vortex, how can he be sure that man will head towards the point where Christ is ready to let his reign break in? It doesn't make sense of the certitude of God's promises.

So how about God reduces man's will a bit more, letting him go "freely" inside a square inside the vortex and slowly edging him towards the point of Christ's reign? Basically, concretely, saying: your day to day decisions are free, but I am actually taking you on a ride, taking you slowly into different regions of the vortex which will ultimately lead you to the end of times where my full will is done". Something like this: 

Now again, the issue for God is: "so that I can move on to the next section, I need man to go to point "x", with things like, for example, the death of Christ". And so God creates a smaller section in the vortex that man moves around in. And then a smaller one because still that one doesn't fit. And then a smaller one, until every one of man's details and minutes is predestined in every which way possible.

It is common sense that every action, however small has mass consequences, given time. I really enjoyed the film "Stranger than fiction" in which Will Ferrell, playing the role of Harold Crick, had unwittingly put his watch back by three minutes, which meant that he was a bit late for his bus, which made him cross the road at the exact right time to save a boy and get knocked over by a bus. And of course if the boy on the bike was there at that exact time it was because of the hug that he had given his dad before leaving his home. And if the bus arrived at that exact time it was because of all the minute details of the bus driver's morning leading up to her driving the bus. Everything has consequences, and leads to mass events, some of them dramatic. Think of the thousands of factors that must have been put together that meant that Christ would be crucified when he went up to Jerusalem around 27 a.d. It is just mind boggling. And then think of the millions of reasons why these things were the way they were. And the gazillion reasons why those previous things happened the way they happened. It is all too intricate for it to be the fruit of randomness, as far as God is concerned. There must be a sovereign ruler, designer, God up there making things happen.

Two last statements: the first one concerning randomness. Steven, in your very interesting answer to my blog post, you said that because man is rational, the fact that he is free to do what he wants won't lead to randomness and the order that we can see in this world is explained by the ordering virtues that man's mind has. Agreed. I just didn't express myself well enough when talking about randomness. I meant total "out of controlness" from God's point of view. I was speaking about God answering prayers. If man has free-will, he is totally out of God's control. Most christians will agree that God can intervene in history to make certain things happen. However, if God has no control over things in the first place, if he is to bring about a certain event, with, as a starting point, a world of mass complexity that he has no control over, there is no way, apart from through very weird and suspect turns of events (such as teleportation or the breaking in of freak randomness in someone's situation leading up to an answer to prayer) that God could answer our prayers. Our world is too complex to allow that, unless God has control and is the one intricately designing this complexity within the total control of his good will.

The second one concerns my first diagram. I know some people who will want to hold on hard as can be to the fact that man has free-will and that the first diagram must therefore be correct. This means that if God's will for this universe is to be done, and if we are to reach that point in history where man brings in the reign of Christ, that means that man is good enough, by himself, to make that happen. And I've been reading Genesis in my devotional time lately. And it depicts man's foolishness in such graphic terms: Adam and Eve, Cain, the population of the world before Noah, Ham, the people building the tower of Babel, Lot, Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot's daughters... It just never stops!!! it is just a whirlwind or man rebelling against God and God being gracious and working out his perfect plan for the salvation of mankind through the election of certain people, leading up to Christ, a Christ who is announced and proclaimed in typological imagery pretty much everywhere, from the creation of the earth, to the clothing of Adam and Eve, to Noah, to Melchizedek, to the Lamb slain in the place of Isaac. This is the main message of Genesis as far as I can see it so far: man is bad and God is in control, making things right. And man doesn't choose good. If history is to go anywhere positive (and it is: the cross tells me so, the promises of the second coming tell me so) then it has to be because God is in the business of determining history, not man! 

So voilà. What do you think?