CONCLUSION
CONCLUSION
In the introduction to this volume, we established that Scripture contains no unambiguous doctrine of providence. Rather, it presents extensive data about God’s influence on the world and leaves it to the reader to synthesize the teachings scattered throughout its pages. In the foregoing, Paul Kjoss Helseth, William Lane Craig, Ron Highfield, and Gregory Boyd articulate four such syntheses and comment on each other’s views. Helseth, in particular, defends his understanding of providence as divine omnicausality. He argues, that is to say, that by causing every creaturely event that occurs, God exercises comprehensive control over even the minutest aspects of his creatures’ activities. Craig, by contrast, advocates Molinism, according to which God employs “middle knowledge,” his knowledge of what human beings would decide to do under any conceivable set of circumstances, to control creaturely affairs without depriving human beings of libertarian freedom.
Highfield, without employing the language of divine omnicausality, stresses all creatures’ dependence on God for their being and their operation. He argues, moreover, that this dependence in no way compromises human freedom, because Scripture identifies true freedom with a life of obedience to God. Boyd then counterposes his open theist perspective on providence to the more conventional views expressed by the others. If one views the incarnate Christ as the supreme revelation of God’s nature, Boyd argues, one cannot consistently deny that God desires what is best for all human beings and that God fails to achieve this only because he cannot ensure that human beings will obey him without depriving them of libertarian freedom. In the following, we attempt to clarify the perspectives advocated in this volume by identifying and discussing areas of agreement and disagreement between the authors and their contrasting views of providence.
Areas of Agreement
Divine Transcendence
On at least three points of inestimable significance, all of this volume’s authors agree. First, each of the authors repudiates panentheistic identifications of the world as God or as an aspect of God. It is not surprising, admittedly, that four authors who are evangelical Christians oppose panentheism. This sets the authors of this volume apart, however, from broad swaths of contemporary theologians who regard the inclusion of the world within the divine being as essential to any credible conception of God and his action on the world.
Their agreement on God’s distinctness from the world notwithstanding, Helseth, Craig, Highfield, and Boyd differ sharply about the extent to which God qualitatively transcends his creation. Helseth and Highfield, for instance, conceive of God as a simple, immutable, atemporal, impassible being whom the world can in no way influence. Craig, while displaying greater flexibility, stakes out a position that, in many respects, approximates the classical theism of Highfield and Helseth.
Boyd, however, takes the life of Christ qua human to be the paradigmatic revelation of the divine nature and, on this basis, effects a wholesale transformation of the classical idea of God. He depicts God, for instance, as capable of change and suffering, as able and eager to receive influences from the world, and as subject to temporal succession. Boyd’s God is even partially ignorant of the future, although, given Boyd’s assumptions, not ignorant of any truth that is knowable at any given time.
One would radically misunderstand the significance of these four authors’ ideas, however, if one failed to place them in the context of contemporary theology: that is, if one failed to observe that, in an academic theological environment awash with panentheism, they stand united in refusing to identify God even partially with his world. The four authors are allies therefore, not enemies, in larger struggles over the relationship between God and the world.
Divine Intervention
Each of this volume’s authors, moreover, grants that the God who transcends the world intervenes in worldly affairs nonetheless. All four authors, for instance, believe not only that God can bring about those extraordinary events Christians call “miracles” but also that he has done so on numerous occasions. All four, likewise, acknowledge that God can and does intervene in human affairs in ways that, although nonmiraculous, amount to more than mere localized results of the causality he exerts always and everywhere. These shared convictions place the four authors of this volume well outside the mainstream of contemporary academic theology.
Helseth and Highfield, furthermore, maintain that God originates, supports, and brings to completion every creaturely act. Craig, as a Molinist, likewise considers divine causality essential to the accomplishment of any human act. He denies, however, that divine causality determines how the will uses the impetus that God’s cooperation, or concursus, supplies. Helseth, Highfield, and Craig, therefore, agree that God, in a certain sense at least, causes all human actions. They differ, however, over the nature of God’s causality: deterministic (Helseth and Highfield) or indeterministic (Craig).
Boyd, by contrast, repudiates the notion that God causes every human act. For he explicitly characterizes free agents as “the ultimate originators and ultimate explanation of their own acts” (Boyd’s emphasis). 394 Boyd, in other words, imputes to free agents other than God the capacity to effect a creation ex nihilo of sorts, that is, the capacity to realize states of affairs that do not ultimately originate in God. Those who sympathize with the perspectives of Helseth, Highfield, and Craig typically find such ideas alarming and wonder whether one does not subtly compromise monotheism if one postulates the existence of multiple uncaused causes, as Boyd appears to do when he identifies the ultimate source of free human acts as human beings rather than God.
Banezian Thomists and Reformed scholastics, moreover, typically argue that Molinists like Craig also implicitly posit the existence of more than one uncaused cause. For although Molinists regard an influx of divine causality as essential to the occurrence of any human act, they hold that the human agent, rather than God, determines whether the act God causes will be virtuous or vicious.395 From whence, ask the Bañezians, does the agent’s determination derive? If it derives from something intrinsic to the agent, but not from God, as the logic of Molinism suggests, then this intrinsic something creates a reality that does not ultimately originate in God. For reasons we will explore later, however, Craig is unlikely to find this criticism troubling. The fissures between the four thinkers’ understandings of the relation between divine action and the actions of free creatures, then, are severe. In the face of widespread opposition to the very idea that God intervenes in human affairs, however, the four authors’ unity in affirming this idea is encouraging and significant.
The Veracity of Scripture
Remarkably, all four of this volume’s contributors regard the witness of Scripture to God’s nature and action as authoritative and comprehensively true. In some respects, this is unsurprising. All four authors are members of the Evangelical Theological Society, whose members reaffirm annually: “The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written and is therefore inerrant in the autographs.” Admittedly, exegetical considerations appear peripheral to the overall argument of Craig’s essay, and the confessions and writings of Reformed theologians speak at least as loudly as Scripture in Helseth’s case for divine omnicausality. Although Boyd refers to Scripture extensively, moreover, the christological hermeneutic he employs shifts his discussion away from scriptural texts that many regard as crucial to answering the questions he poses about God and divine action.
Nevertheless, the commitment to Scripture’s authority and inerrancy that this volume’s authors share is rare in the upper echelons of contemporary academic theology and, to this extent, worthy of notice and celebration.
Areas of Disagreement
This volume’s authors also disagree about a number of weighty issues. Besides their disagreement on the nature of divine providence, they dissent from each other’s opinions on free will, divine omniscience, and the problem of evil. In the following, we intend to explore these areas of disagreement and thereby disclose the nature and the roots of their differences.
Free Will
Of the volume’s four authors, Boyd sets forth his view of human freedom most clearly. He embraces a qualified form of the principle of alternate possibilities, according to which acts cannot be sufficiently free to incur praise or blame, reward or punishment, unless their agent can refrain from performing them. From this principle, Boyd excepts only actions performed out of irreversible character traits. These acts he considers free, even though their agent cannot refrain from them, because they spring from dispositions the agent himself has forged by a long pattern of free decisions.
Although the originator of Molinism, Luis de Molina, subscribed to an understanding of freedom similar to that of Boyd,396 William Lane Craig, writing on Molinism’s behalf, sets forth a conception of freedom that sharply diverges from Boyd and resembles in important respects the conception ordinarily advocated by Calvinists. Specifically, Craig proposes (1) that so-called “Frankfurt examples” prove the principle of alternate possibilities false and (2) that an agent can be morally responsible for his decisions, even if he cannot decide otherwise, as long as he is the decisions’ ultimate originator.
Both Craig’s and Molina’s views on freedom might seem to conflict with their belief that God, in a certain sense, causes all human acts. Craig and Molina, however, attempt to resolve the seeming conflict by claiming that God causes the acts of free creatures only by means of a “simultaneous concurrence,” that is, a divine cooperation with human acts that enables them to occur without determining precisely what they will be. Not God, but the human will, argue Molina and Craig, ultimately determines what human beings do with the causality that God supplies
Opponents of Molinism have objected for centuries, however, that if something other than God ultimately determines how human beings act, some causality in the universe must not derive from God.397 Craig answers this objection in his response to Helseth. “The problem,” he writes,
is supposed to be that in this case the secondary agent is causing something, namely, the motion of its own will, but is doing so without divine concurrence, which contradicts the doctrine. But libertarians do not consider an agent’s freely choosing to be an instance of an agent’s causing its own choice, for that would lead to an infinite regress of causes. Rather, an agent’s freely willing something is just an action of the agent, not an effect of the agent. So it is not as though some effect is produced by a secondary cause without God’s concurring.
If the fundamental objection, then, depended on the notion that the human will must cause itself to decide, instead of simply deciding, it would refute itself by causing an infinite regress. The objector’s point, nevertheless, seems to be that all creaturely occurrences, that is, all creaturely transitions from potency to act, require causes and that a human being’s decisions, although not products of the human being’s causality, are creaturely occurrences. One who grants that agents do not cause themselves to decide, therefore, may still reasonably assert that the decision of the will, being a creaturely occurrence, must derive from some cause.
Craig would presumably respond to this objection by identifying God’s simultaneous concurrence with a human decision as the cause of that decision insofar as it constitutes an occurrence. Craig would insist, however, that the will’s disposition alone, which is more of a characteristic than an occurrence, accounts for its preference for one option rather than another. The objector, nonetheless, could counter Craig’s rejoinder by arguing:
Craig’s effort to reconcile God’s causality of everything other than himself with the human will’s power to originate its own decisions, accordingly, seems to fail. Helseth’s and Highfield’s attempts to counteract the criticism that their affirmation of divine deterministic causality undermines human freedom and responsibility, nevertheless, fail much more spectacularly. Instead of devising an account of human freedom that manifests its compatibility with an all-determining divine causality, they simply declare the matter inscrutable. Craig, ironically, does more than either Helseth or Highfield to vindicate the compatibility of freedom and determinism by criticizing the principle of alternate possibilities. 398
Divine Omniscience
The second principal subject about which Helseth, Craig, Highfield, and Boyd disagree is that of divine omniscience. Boyd, for instance, differs from the other authors in his very definition of the term. Whereas the other authors and the Christian tradition as a whole conceive of divine omniscience as God’s knowledge of all truths that will ever exist, Boyd conceives of divine omniscience as God’s knowledge of all the facts that are logically possible for him to know at any time. Because Boyd conceives of the future as indeterminate, he holds that this set of facts does not include definite knowledge about decisions made with libertarian freedom in the future. As far as decisions taken with libertarian freedom are concerned, Boyd believes that there is no fact as to what will happen until the decisions actually occur.
Boyd’s conception of divine omniscience makes sense, it seems, only if God exists within time and is subject to change: conclusions that Helseth, Highfield, and, to some extent, Craig reject. Here as elsewhere, questions about the divine being impinge on the debate over providence in a way that relativizes the significance of disputes about the responsibility and freedom of human beings.
Craig, writing on behalf of Molinism, agrees with Helseth and Highfield that divine omniscience includes knowledge of all facts that will ever exist. He includes within the scope of divine omniscience, moreover, what Molinists call “middle knowledge,” a kind of knowledge that, though logically prior to God’s decree to create, indicates precisely what any creatable free being would do in any given circumstance. Helseth, Highfield, and Boyd find the notion of middle knowledge troubling, because the truths in which it putatively consists are, although distinct from God, prior to and thus independent of his creative decree.
The gravest difficulty for the notion of middle knowledge seems to be the problem of how God could conceivably possess it. That is, inasmuch as the truths that God putatively knows through middle knowledge are both distinct from God’s being and logically prior to his decision to create, they concern, by definition, merely potential states of affairs. That which is merely potential, naturally, does not exist.
The nonexistence of some state of affairs, admittedly, does not ordinarily prevent God from knowing it. For although God cannot know of something that does not exist simply by inspecting it, he can know of it indirectly insofar as he can cause it. Since God knows himself perfectly, he knows of everything he could possibly cause.399
The truths that God putatively knows through middle knowledge, however, concern things that God cannot simply cause. They concern, rather, decisions made by nondivine beings through libertarian freedom: decisions whose occurrence God can cause but whose content, qua free in the libertarian sense of the term, he cannot causally determine. God, accordingly, cannot cause precisely those realities that middle knowledge concerns to become fact.
Furthermore, the truths in which middle knowledge consists, being contingent, cannot form aspects of God’s necessary being. He cannot know them, therefore, by contemplating himself. As we have just seen, moreover, they are not things that God can create; they are logically prior to God’s creative decree. That which is neither created by God nor integral to his being, however, must exist and hence be knowable, if it exists at all, independently of God’s being. Therefore, if God can possess middle knowledge, the truths in whose knowledge it consists must exist independently of his being.
If this were the case, however, (1) something other than God would exist, which he has not created ex nihilo, and (2) something external to God, which he cannot control, would place limits on what kind of history he can actualize for subjects who are free in the libertarian sense of the term. For those who subscribe to the doctrines of creation ex nihilo and divine omnipotence, it seems, both consequences are problematic in the highest degree.
Whether or not one considers human beings in the universe envisioned by Helseth and Highfield to be genuinely free, furthermore, it seems difficult reasonably to dispute that their position coheres with the classical doctrine of divine omniscience. To contemplate the range of possible universes that God might actualize, according to Helseth’s and Highfield’s account, God need merely gauge his own creative capacities. To know what events will actually occur, God need merely behold his own decree to cause them to occur precisely as he desires.
Helseth’s and Highfield’s view of God, then, may pose enormous difficulties when one attempts to resolve the problem of evil or to reconcile divine sovereignty with human responsibility and freedom. Beyond all question, however, a God who deterministically causes all things can know everything that will ever occur. Helseth’s and Highfield’s high doctrine of divine sovereignty thus meshes seamlessly with classical theism’s understanding of divine omniscience.
Evil
The third principal subject about which this volume’s authors disagree is how Christians ought to address the problem of evil. This disagreement, unlike the others, manifests itself in even the authors’ theological method. Boyd, for instance, seems to regard the problem as of architectonic significance for Christian theology. Manifold aspects of his theology reflect his eagerness to respond adequately to the problem of evil, and theodicy, the enterprise of vindicating God from culpability for evil, appears to influence even his exegesis.
Unlike Boyd, Craig does not view the entire doctrine of God through the lens of theodicy. Craig appears, for example, to regard determining Scripture’s teaching about God’s omniscience and control over the world as logically prior to the task of resolving the problem of evil. Like Boyd, however, Craig seems to elevate adequacy for the purposes of theodicy to the status of a criterion by which one may distinguish between true and false doctrinal claims.
Highfield and Helseth, by contrast, appear to regard theodicy as altogether secondary to the theological enterprise. For them, apparently, theodicy constitutes a purely apologetic concern: something legitimate and important in its own sphere but logically subsequent to the theologian’s task of determining what Scripture teaches. Highfield, in particular, displays acute sensitivity to the danger that if one does not treat apologetics as distinct from and subordinate to systematic theology, one may easily falsify the teaching of Scripture to render it palatable to human tastes.
Highfield, nonetheless, at least gropes toward a rudimentary theodicy. While human beings commit sins with evil intentions, he observes, when God causes them to act as they do, he does so from the purest of motives. Inasmuch as God achieves a great good through the entire course of the world’s history, Highfield therefore concludes, the particular evils that contribute to this ultimate good cannot constitute evils in an unqualified sense of the term. While this insight hardly amounts to a comprehensive theodicy, it does represent a promising step in the direction of one.
Craig’s highly developed theodicy, by contrast, appears almost entirely to depend on two central claims: (1) that God can empower human beings to make decisions whose content he does not causally determine and (2) that God possesses middle knowledge. We need not repeat our earlier comments on these subjects here. The value of Boyd’s theodicy, finally, hinges on the accuracy of his views on the divine nature, that is to say, the crucial question for Boyd’s theodicy is not whether he succeeds in absolving God of responsibility for evil; it is whether he absolves the right God.
Conclusion
The contributors to this volume, naturally, disagree about numerous other matters that we cannot discuss here. The authors’ views on the divine attributes, the theology of grace, and the extent of the atonement, for instance, all bear significantly on the issues we have explicitly addressed. Notwithstanding the inevitable omissions, however, the primary factors that ought to guide decision making about the various models of providence seem to have received at least limited attention.
In conclusion, we should like briefly to recall the foremost strengths of each author’s view of providence. The most attractive element of the Calvinistic option, dubbed “God Causes All Things,” presented by Paul Kjoss Helseth is surely its exalted conception of God. One may dispute, admittedly, whether paying God metaphysical compliments constitutes a fit manner of glorifying him. Nonetheless, Helseth’s penchant for ascribing to God the utmost in power, knowledge, and grace, for example, lends a reverential tone to his writing that suggests an intimate link between exalted conceptions of God and devotion that befits God’s infinite exaltation.
The most attractive characteristic of Craig’s Molinism is its combination of breadth of vision with philosophical insight. One cannot contemplate Molina’s attempt to reconcile libertarian freedom with complete divine control over the universe by reconceptualizing God’s foreknowledge without noticing (1) the breathtakingly ambitious character of Molina’s project and (2) the almost mathematical elegance with which Molina executes it. Whether one agrees with Molinism or not, therefore, one cannot help admiring the inventiveness and acumen of its originator.
The most impressive feature of Highfield’s doctrine of providence is its unvarnished biblicism. In keeping with the predilections of his Restorationist tradition, Highfield eschews philosophical argumentation and constructs his doctrine, which coheres in all essential respects with classical theism, on thoroughgoingly exegetical grounds. A worshipful tone, moreover, pervades Highfield’s presentation of his view so that his readers learn not only of his doctrine’s biblical basis but also of the kind of spirituality that it instills.
The most praiseworthy aspect of Gregory Boyd’s open theism, finally, is its unconventional apologetic thrust. Boyd’s reconfiguration of the doctrine of God, that is, seems to constitute a kind of indirect apologetic: an attempt to render Christianity more attractive, not by presenting evidence for it as in traditional apologetics, but by reformulating its content so as to manifest its intrinsic plausibility. This enterprise, as Boyd would surely admit, is fraught with perils. It is at least arguably necessary, however, inasmuch as no amount of evidence for the Christian faith will seem persuasive to persons who regard Christianity as inherently unworthy of belief. Whether or not one approves of his ideas, therefore, Boyd seems to perform a vital task.