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And Jesus came and said to them, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age." (Matt 28:18-20, ESV)
I realized something at a baptism last year about Matthew 28's Trinitarian formula. It doesn't just use a Trinitiarian formula that assumes enough of a parity between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to put them in the same sentence in parallel. I've seen commentators mention this, but it's not a strong enough argument that all three persons of the Trinity are fully God. After all, you could list God, the church, and the world in parallel like that, although here there's a sense of commonality and joint authority in addition. One thing occurred to me that I had to go check the Greek to be sure of. Jesus talks about the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This 'name' is singular, one name for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The name of the Father is 'YHWH' (Hebrew at the time didn't have written vowels), also called the tetragrammaton and covenant name of God. I can't think of another name that these three persons could share. Anyway, that's not the sort of thing those who deny the Trinity but want to affirm the scriptures will be able to deal with easily. Even the fact that there's one name they fall under is some threat to that view. I think the clearest statement at least of the divinity of Jesus is in Philippians 2:1-11, but it will take some work to draw it out. Some common misreadings of what Paul says there (due to the infelicities of English renderings) hinder what I think would have been an obvious implication of the text to its original readers.
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In the first post, I gave some indications of why I think denying God's foreknowledge of free human acts doesn't really explain that much evil. What I'd like to do now is lay out a number of elements of the traditional response to the problem of evil, the one that open theists find unsatisfying. This will all be at a fairly basic level, but I'd like to get all the general things on the table before going into depth on how denying foreknowledge is supposed to help.
One of the primary strategies for responding to the problem of evil is to treat some good as a higher-order good in the sense that it can't exist without allowing some evil to exist yet the good is worth the evil it allows in some sense. Many traditional presentations of the problem of evil have assumed utilitarianism, and thus they will talk about the consequences for happiness and unhappiness, saying that more unhappiness is created than the happiness that requires it, so it's not ultimately worth it. Some theists have responded that utilitarianism is false, and thus the theist has more resources to explain evil. Some kinds of evil may simply be wrong to prevent, with no relevant questions about how much evil is allowed by not doing that wrong thing. If it's wrong to do it, then God shouldn't be expected to do it. So I don't want to assume utilitarianism here, even though it's easier to frame the problem of evil if you do have such assumptions. The way to think of higher-order goods in a non-utilitarian framework would be to see some goods as being so important that it would be wrong not to pursue them. Alternatively, one might simply see preventing certain evils as morally wrong, because any method of preventing that kind of evil would involve doing something wrong. Most theodicies or defenses (I'm not going to deal with the distinction some philosophers make between the two) fall under some kind of higher-order good, I would say. I've gotten the sense that the problem of evil is the primary motivation for many who subscribe to what's commonly called open theism, i.e. the view that God does not know the future, takes risks, and changes his mind due to learning new information.
Some open theists take God to have voluntarily given up the right to have knowledge of the future for the sake of human freedom. The assumption is that divine foreknowledge and human freedom are incompatible. Other open theists take God's ignorance of the future to be a necessary fact about the nature of time, since there's no future to be known. This view assumes what I call a growing block theory of time. Some think it follows from presentism, i.e. the view that the present exists but the future and past don't, but if presentism is going to justify the view that there are no truths about the future, then it must also justify the view that there are no truths about the past. So it assumes a growing block view, according to which past and present exist but no future, since those truths aren't somehow sense "fixed". I share neither of these assumptions, so I have little sympathy for open theism, but my concern here isn't to deal with those elements. I'm interested in a different motivation for open theism, the motivation that God's ignorance of the future can explain the kinds and amount of evil in the universe in a much more satisfying way than any other view. I just don't think that's true. I'm not talking about the political view. I'm talking metaphysics here. For those more familiar with theology than philosophy, I'm talking about the view Arminians assume about free will. The libertarian view can be expressed in two non-equivalent ways (and some people hold one and not the other, in which case I don't know if I would call them libertarians).
1. Your action is free only if you could have done otherwise than you actually did. It has to be genuinely possible for you to have done otherwise. If determinism is true, then (on most views) this condition fails. 2. Your action is free if it's caused by you and not by prior events. This condition by definition rules out freedom if determinism is true. The first principle is called the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP). Harry Frankfurt famously argued against this principle (I think successfully) but still thinks you can meet condition 2 without having alternative possibilities, so he considers himself a libertarian. He just only adopts the second condition. There are compatibilists who accept 1 and give a complex account of possibility to explain how we can be predetermined and still possibly do otherwise. So not everyone who accepts 1 accepts 2, and not everyone who accepts 2 accepts 1. Still, I think 2 is essential for libertarianism, whether 1 accompanies it or not. Therefore, I'm going to argue against 2, which is commonly called the concept of agent causation. John Owen argues for the view Reformed thinkers call limited atonement, basically the view that Christ's death was only for the sake of those who would be saved. Since those who never become saved never take advantage of the atonement, in what sense is it for them? Their sin is never atoned for. His argument is slightly for a more detailed, though it's very short and worth looking at.
I think Owen gives a good argument for limited atonement (or what more recent theologians have preferred to call particular atonement, which I think is just as obscure a term). But what about I Timothy 2:5, which says that Christ Jesus gave himself as a ransom for all? What about John 3:16, which says that God's love is for the world that anyone who believe in him will have eternal life? Reformed thought has an easy answer to the second part. Those who do end up believing, i.e. those chosen by God to believe, will have eternal life. But what about God's love for the whole world? What about God's desire that no one die in Ezekiel 18:23 and Ezekiel 33:10? This essay is intended to sort out such issues. Many Reformed thinkers will reduce what seems to me to be the obvious intent of these passages. They take them to include a much smaller group than they seem to include at face value. Thus the "all" in I Timothy 2:5 is merely all the elect. The "world" in John 3:16 is only those in the world who will be saved. The "none" in Ezekiel whom God doesn't want to die doesn't include those who persist in their rebellion against God, who are some whose death God delights in. This goes on for far more passages than these, but these are some of the most obvious examples. This approach seems to me to be too reductionistic. These passages seem to be saying something deeper about God's heart, and I hope what I have to say shows that. So I want to say that Christ on one level did die for those who aren't elect. I want to say that God's love does include those who will never repent. These statements aren't true on the same level as the statement that Christ's death is only for the elect. Both are true. Both may not be equally fundamental, but both are true. Scripture says both, and anyone who trusts what it says should affirm both whole-heartedly. At the most fundamental level, Christ died on behalf of those who would respond to him in faith, namely those chosen from before the foundations of the world. That's what Owen has argued for, and that's what I agree with him on. However, it's also true that in some less fundamental but equally true and still important sense Christ died for the sake of all who would turn from sin and to him, and this is the message we must proclaim. If we go around telling people to repent if they're elect, they won't understand what we're talking about. If we tell them God loves them if they're elect, they won't see the beauty of God's love for those who don't deserve it, since he loved us in our unrighteousness and accomplished all that he did for us while we deserved nothing. The way to see that point is to proclaim that Christ died for sinners, that he died for those who would not be able to earn or deserve anything. So from a human level, the important message is: Believe, and you will be saved. Turn from your sin and follow Jesus, and you will be a child of God. The emphasis in the gospel message is not on unconditional election, irresistible grace, or limited atonement, though these are true doctrines. It's on God's love in the face of it total depravity and Jesus' willingness to express his divine Sonly character of eternal submission to the Father by becoming a man and dying a shameful death, becoming sin so that we can become righteous. The five points of Calvinism are not the gospel. They're a human systematization of some of the truths in scripture, and they are correct when rightly understood (and you know how easy it is to misunderstand or misinterpret their wording), but they're not a balanced gospel presentation. They don't even get at the heart of the gospel anywhere near as well as Philippians 2:6-11 does, not that that's a complete picture either, since it has little about our response to it; it's just closer to the heart of it. So our context will affect which truths to stress. In the context of evangelism, it's important to stress, as the apostles did, that anyone who truly repents will be saved. Look at the formulations in Peter and Stephen's sermons in Acts. They're not theologically profound, they're not extremely careful as if to ward off possible heretical misinterpretations, and they're not pastorally balanced, as if they consider all the points you would use to instruct a believer in their growing faith, which you do get in more developed theological reflections about the nature of salvation, as in Ephesians, Romans, or I John. (There are more extreme examples. Consider such ones as "believe and be baptized, and you'll be saved".) This uncarefulness, imbalance, and lack of theological depth doesn't mean these are inappropriate statements. What they do is focus on the need to repent and the promise that anyone who does will be saved. This is a hypothetical statement -- a conditional. If you repent, you will be saved. So there's a potentiality -- anyone who turns out to fulfill the first part will have the second part true of them. This is how our language works for creatures in time who do not know the future and don't know people's hearts. It's perfectly appropriate to use such conditional language, as long as we know that it's conditional, and as long as we're honest with people about its conditionality when the subject arises. So when I say that Christ died in one important sense (though not the most fundamental sense) for the whole world, I mean that everyone in the world has the following conditional true of them: "If I turn from my sins and follow Jesus, I will be saved". That may be true only vacuously for lots of people, since the first part will never be true of them. On a fundamental level, God determines which people the sentence is true of. On the other hand, it's also true that their response to the gospel is something they do, and their rejection of the gospel is something they're responsible for. That's why I stress things like the potentiality of the gospel for all. For one thing, I don't know who is elect, but even moreso it's clear in scripture that God doesn't delight in the death of the wicked. God has a desire that the wicked will turn and live (Ezekiel 33:10-11). This is accompanied by an urgent plea from God to these wicked that they turn and live. The language harks back to Ezekiel 18:23, where the same statement is made about what God takes pleasure in. This follows a conditional statement about those who repent not dying. But the crucial thing for me is how the chapter ends. "Why will you die, O house of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone ... so turn, and live." If God has no pleasure in the death of anyone, then that's making a strong claim about God's attitude toward those destined for hell. He asks why they will die, with urging speech. It can't be dismissed as merely rhetorical flourishes and that he's merely speaking to those who will end up repenting. They will die. He's pleading with them about why they refuse to turn and why they insist on ending up dying. The last statement shows that his desire on this matter extends to those who aren't elect, in Calvinist terms. Of course, this needs to be balanced with the end of Revelation 19, where at the marriage supper of the Lamb we will eat the flesh of all who opposed God, meaning that we will end up rejoicing with God over the end of all evil, which happens to include the end of all evil beings, at least for the purposes of those in the eternal community with God (whether it implies annihilation or eternal exile in a conscious separation from God). Jonathan Edwards has been labeled a moral monster for agreeing with the author of Revelation that we will one day rejoice that evildoers are in hell, but what he's rejoicing at is the end of all opposition against God's good purposes, the final vindication of those who have persevered in following God (especially at the rough end), and the carrying out of justice with true finality and full severity on all those who haven't responded in trust to the one who was willing to take all injustice on himself and pay the penalty. So rejoicing over the destruction of the evil is consistent with God's pleading that the evil repent. It's not as if God is rejoicing over the same exact thing as he is grieving. It's just that the same human action requires both. I don't know how this all works, but both seem to be affirmed in scripture. I hope I've suggested some key ways to begin thinking about this. So how does this reconcile limited atonement with the idea that Jesus in some way did die for everyone? On a fundamental level, Jesus died for those who would end up believing in him. He didn't die for those whom he knew would not take advantage of the offer given to them. He didn't die for those who would end up rebelling to the end against the perfect restoration of all things that began with Jesus' coming. Yet in some way God intended his warnings to turn to apply to all people. His desire in some way applies to all sinners, since he has no desire that anyone die. We should have no trouble, therefore, saying that his love extends to all people in some way, reading John 3:16 to include all the world as it seems at face value to intend. We should have no trouble saying that Jesus was given as a ransom for all, as I Tim 2:5 says, and mean it at its full face value. It was in some sense intended for all, and it was in some other sense intended only for the elect. I don't see a contradiction, as long as you realize that these are at two different levels. The analytic philosopher in me wants to systematize this, and there is a helpful analytic philosophical way to show that there's no contradiction here, but I wouldn't want to insist that this is the right way to look at this. I think God's desire that no one perish is deeper than this model shows. However, it demonstrates the consistency of saying both things, which is my primary goal here. Suppose I tell you that I wish for you to do really well on your exam. Do I wish that you do well even if you didn't do any of the work for the class? No! I wish that you do the work and then do well. But that's not what I said. Did I speak incorrectly? Perhaps not extremely carefully with strict language, but what I said was fine. It was conversationally appropriate, because my intended message was received. Ideally, I would want you to do well because I'd want you to do your work. Now consider the case of God and the sinner. God wishes for each person that that person not die. Does that mean he wishes that they will be saved no matter what else is true? No! Ezekiel's message from God is that God wishes that they would turn and not die. It's specifically stated what the wish really is at the most fundamental level. Then when it's abbreviated in the passages like I Timothy 2:5, the most fundamental level is that Christ Jesus did give himself for a ransom for all -- but really the only ones of the "all" that he intended to be ransomed are those who would end up being saved and coming to knowledge of the truth (v.4). That doesn't mean he doesn't in some way desire for all to be saved and come to knowledge of the truth. It just means that at a fundamental level God has hand-picked which people would be saved and come to knowledge of the truth. On a fundamental level of speaking, these are the people covered by the Jesus' death. Somehow God's desires are that the others would be saved. I don't know how that works with God's selecting the others and not them. I suspect it has something to do with certain priorities of desires in God's mind and heart. God's love is one of them. This is as fundamental as anything else about God, since John tells us God is love (I John 4:16). Somehow other things come into the picture and prevent this desire of God's from being actualized. Does it mean God's desire is frustrated? I wouldn't presume to put it in those terms. Is it better to describe it as God's desire being outweighed by a more important desire? This is becoming the realm of speculation at this point, and it's dangerous to speculate on what God hasn't specifically revealed, especially when such speculations can easily lead to heresy. The point should be clear here, however. If there's a contradiction, it's not in affirming limited atonement while saying that in another sense Christ's death, God's love, etc. apply to all. There's no contradiction between saying God desires all to be saved but only chose some to be saved. Both are affirmed by the scriptures, and anyone with a high view of the scriptures should believe both. In a previous post, I considered whether Muslims and Christians worship the same God. My answer was sort of a yes and a no. Literally speaking, I think the answer is yes. It's just that Christians and Muslims believe very different things about the one God that exists. As a Christian, I think Muslims believe radically false things about God, and I think Christians believe generally true things about God. There would be no meaning to calling myself a Christian if I didn't think something like that. In that sense, what some people really mean when they say Christians and Muslims worship different gods is true. Their sentence is false, but what they were trying to convey is true. The different things the two believe about God are very different.
I had another instance of happening upon a gem of a discussion this morning, when I was following a reference in a footnote on an entirely different topic. After looking up a reference in N.T. Wright's The New Testament and the People of God, I decided that it might be worth looking through his introduction, since I've had the book for a while but barely looked at it. In the introduction, he explains his use of 'god' rather than 'God' consistently throughout the book (which I won't bother to go into here), and in the process he gets into the very issue of my aforementioned post, focusing mostly on the differences between first-century Christianity and first-century post-Christian Judaism (though mentioning Islam in the process). I thought enough of the issues were parallel that it was worth summing up Wright's thoughts and looking at their significance for the discussion about Islam from my previous post. Not too long ago my wife and I finished reading through Matthew's gospel, and my own reading of the gospel strikes me as so far removed from the direction of a lot of scholarship. There seems to be a sense among some scholars that Matthew had a loose view of history and just sort of made things up about Jesus, not caring if many of it really happened. There's also this contrary sense from the same people that Matthew looked long and hard to find passages in the Hebrew scriptures that were vaguely similar to events in Jesus' life, usually resulting in huge stretches of the imagination to try to connect the two as if the first had been a prophecy of the second.
This combination creates a strong tension. How can it be both that Matthew twists OT passages way out of context and that he invents stories that never happened to fulfill those same OT passages? If he was in the business of inventing stories that never happened, he could have made it so that they were closer to the events as described in the OT passages he's referencing. That suggests that he's not simply inventing stories and finding OT passages to fit them. I think it's absolutely obvious and not even an open question that there are many levels of what it might mean to fulfill something, and Matthew is well aware of that. The view I'm questioning assumes only the kind of fulfillment that simplistic apologists assume when they say that a reference to an OT passage is about Jesus simply because the NT references it, then listing countless passages and giving the sum of all this as an argument that Jesus must have been who he said he was because he fulfilled so many prophecies. Not all the fulfillment in the NT is that kind of fulfillment, as if some prophet said something and it was about Jesus and not about anything else. President Bush has gotten in trouble with some of his fellow evangelicals. They don't think he's a real evangelical because of his comments about other religions. He says Islam is a good religion, that Muslims, Jews, and Christians worship the same God, and that the beliefs of other good religions like Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, etc. will help contribute to a better society. Meanwhile, Christianity (at least any Christianity that takes the scriptures as authoritative) states quite clearly that there's no other way to the Father except through Jesus. It says that God is three persons in one being, a Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit), while Islam and contemporary Judaism insist that God is one in every way possible and that Jesus, a mere creation of God, is not to be identified or confused with God. Islam does believe he's a prophet and will return. They don't believe he died, never mind that he was resurrected. Judaism (except for Messianic Jews, if you count them) don't even believe that much about him.
What do we make of this? I want to explain what I think President Bush means when he says these things and why I think it's not just consistent with evangelicalism but it's what evangelicals should say. What the evangelicals who resist saying these things want to avoid is the kind of pluralism that attributes one reality to the multiple beliefs systems in world religions. They're all getting at the same reality but in different ways. I don't think that's at all what Bush has in mind, and I think a careful look at the nature of the language will show that the many repeated claims against Bush's statements are assuming an implausible view of how names function in natural languages like English. Some people say yes, but can there be if theological determinism is true? The idea is that if God stands behind every action in some way, good or evil, then there cannot be potentiality in God. It's somehow inappropriate to say that something different could have happened, I could have done something different, etc. I am the one who did it, and I am responsible for doing it, but could it have been different if God stands behind it in some fundamental sense? Many Reformed thinkers will say no. There is no potentiality in God.
I disagree with the conclusion, though I think the general picture behind it is correct. To get a sense of why I think the fundamental picture behind it is correct, read through chapter 10 of Isaiah's prophecy and Peter's speech in Acts 2 and Acts 4. Evil actions are described -- first the king of Assyria and his attack on God's people, then Judas' betrayal of Jesus and the Jewish leaders -- follow-through that led to his being put to death. These are evil actions. There's no question about that in the minds of Isaiah (who gave the prophecy from God but presumably through his own mind and ways of expressing things, including through his own divinely inspired theological reflection), Peter (who gave the speech in the Acts narrative), and Luke (who gave us the Acts narrative). These people are blamed by the biblical writers for their evil actions. However, it's also true that God stands behind these events. The actions of Judas and the Jewish leaders, while evil, were necessary for God's plan of salvation. They are, in effect, part of that plan. Similarly, the actions of the Assyrian king are evil but are part of God's process of judging Israel. Isaiah goes so far as to call him a tool in God's hands, and yet somehow he's responsible for what he did! There is a mystery here. I'm not trying to sort it out, but its background is important for this issue. Now about the conclusion many Reformed thinkers draw -- does this mean that only one thing is possible? After all, God has his one plan, which includes evil things in it, so we can't insist that the evil things are not part of God's plan and say that they allow for the various possibilities. If it's possible that God can in some way stand behind evil actions without himself being morally responsible for the evil people do, then we don't need to insist on human free action as something outside God's control. Then there really only needs to be one possible outcome, and it seems as if there aren't real possibilities. I once thought this was a good argument, but I'm now convinced that it's not. The biblical data from above points us one way. What you'll find is another set of passages in tension with the ones above, pushing us in a different direction. First let's consider those, and then we'll move on to discuss the philosophical implications. Eschatology is one of the most controversial topics in theology today. In my experience, people tend to look at scripture in light of a system they learned that had its basis in some scriptural statements but then took them beyond those statements and interpreted all else in light of those statements. I don't think the scriptures themselves are that had to interpret, at least in their basic message about the end times. What I'm primarily doing in this post is explaining what seems pretty clear to me (or at least very likely) in the scriptural teachings on the end times. This all assumes the divine origin of the scriptures. I'm not giving any argument here. I'm just summarizing my conclusions about what the scriptures say. Also, some of this assumes some background in the terminology.
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AuthorJeremy Pierce is a philosophy professor, Uber/Lyft driver, and father of five. Archives
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