Superglue – 4: God and Chaos

In attempts to substantiate the idea of libertarian free will, as the history of Pelagianism and Arminianism has shown, it is necessary to find a new starting point in theology: that is, God. By a new starting point, I mean an entirely new doctrine of God, one which does not fit with traditional Christianity. In this realm, the more recent ideas of Open Theism have been an attempt to apply the logic of Pelagius-Arminius in a more consistent manner. It is something they themselves recognize.

The arguments go like this: “We recognize that the Augustinian-Lutheran-Calvinist idea of eternal decrees hangs on the basis of the idea of God as timeless, immutable, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. We reject these ideas because they do not fit with what we observe about the human condition (people make choices), or what we see in some parts of the Bible ( God relents, repents) and, anyway, these concepts of God come from Greek philosophers.”

What, then, is the basis for the rejection of this picture of God? There are a number of syllogisms:

Major Premise: The Greek philosophers spoke about the attributes of God as timeless, immutable, omniscient, etc.
Minor Premise: Early church furthers often quoted the Greeks in reference to their understanding of God.
Conclusion: Traditional Christian doctrine about God is Greek in origin, not Hebrew.

A second syllogism:

Major Premise: The Bible is written from the perspective of a Hebrew worldview
Minor Premise: Traditional Christian theology is drawn from a Greek worldview
Conclusion: Therefore the traditional Christian teachings about God are not correct.

Or a third syllogism:

Major Premise: God exists eternally and is wholly and completely unrelated to the temporal order
Minor Premise: In order for this to be true, there must be no possibility of relating any attribute or activity of God to the temporal process
Conclusion: It is impossible that God could act in any way that might be given temporal location.

A fourth syllogism:

Major Premise. God created man responsible and accountable.
Minor Premise: Man is created responsible and accountable
Conclusion: Therefore man must have libertarian free will

Fifth syllogism:

Major Premise: God created man responsible and accountable
Minor Premise: Man must have libertarian free will in order be responsible and accountable.
Conclusion: Therefore God has limited himself in order to allow human libertarian free will.

Syllogism #6:

Major Premise: There are some people who wish to uphold the idea of libertarian free will.
Minor Premise: Cicero, quoting the Greek philosophers, upheld the idea of libertarian free will.
Conclusion: Those who uphold the idea of libertarian free will got their idea from Greco-Roman philosophers.

The syllogisms are offered here just as an example of how those who deny the traditional (i.e. Augustinian-Lutheran-Calvinistic) view about God attempt to substantiate their revised view. The falsity of each of these syllogisms is apparent on a little reflection, and demonstrate a poor use of this kind of argument. Syllogism #6 is simply an application of the open theism syllogism about the origin of traditional ideas about God. This syllogism proves nothing, just as the open theism syllogism fails to prove their case.

But as in all debates, the issue ultimately comes down to the comprehensiveness of the debate. The idea of libertarian free will has two key issues. Calvinism asserts that God foreknows the future because he has foreordained it. Arminian belief asserts the foreknowledge part, but denies the foreordination part of the equation. In this system, God’s foreknowledge is based on his omniscience, not his foreordination – his eternal decree.

Contemporary attempts to justify libertarian free will have thus found it necessary to deny foreknowledge, foreordination and omniscience, just as Socinianism attempted. And in order to do that, they have to give up on the traditional attributes of God.

Is God timeless? Following Schleiermacher (syllogism #3 above), the assertion claims God is time bound because they cannot reconcile a timeless Creator acting within time. Therefore, he did not create time. Eternity is merely a continual sequence of time that never ends, an infinite regression of time. Time has usually been seen as an area of potentiality for man; under the open theism idea, time also becomes the arena of potentiality for God as well. If you look back at syllogism #3, it doesn’t work because while the first premise in a syllogism should be a true statement, the second premise is to be application of that premise. But in this construction of Schleiermacher’s idea, the second premise is not necessarily a truth statement required by the first premise. It is just a statement which may or may not be true, and assumes what it needs to prove. In other words, this is not a syllogism at all, just two statements followed by a conclusion that is not necessitated by the premises.

Is God immutable? In a recent online discussion with someone who denied immutability, he eventually conceded God is unchangeable in his trustworthiness. I’ll take that as a recant on the denial of immutability. But some people look at passages of Scripture that indicate God “relents” or repents” or changes his mind, and they use this as “proof” that the traditional explanation of these passages must be rejected. It is never asked, nor even an answer suggested to this question: “How can God be changeable and unchangeable at the same time?” Or, “if God is completely self-determinative or self sustaining (the aseity of God), how can he be self-determinative and not self-determinative at the same time?” If God is subject to the “free-will” decisions of his creatures, then his aseity has been given up and God is now dependent upon his creation not only for the final outcome, but also for his self-determination. In other words, God is no longer complete or self-sufficient, within himself.

Is God omniscient? “As long as God continues to allow the freedom of other agents, He cannot know the actual outcome of the future choices of those agents in advance.” Such a view destroys predictive prophecy, and as Bruce Ware points out, such a view ignores whole sections of predictive Scripture where God asserts he not only knows that is going to happen, but he is going to make certain it happens. God’s Lesser Glory: The Diminished God of Open Theism More than that, correct predictions are the mark of a true prophet (Deut. 18:22), a test that God applied to himself. Following his explanation of Isaiah 41:22ff, Ware makes this conclusion:

Since God himself declares the criterion by which the question of his deity is to be evaluated and established, and since that criterion is the possession of a knowledge of the future that can be declared and its truthfulness verified (or falsified) by the unfolding of future events, how utterly impertinent and presumptuous to deny of God divine foreknowledge and so deny the very basis by which God himself has declared that his claim to deity shall be vindicated and made known.

To limit God’s omniscience to historical and current events plays certain havoc with any idea of an inspired and infallible word. The Scriptures cannot be what orthodox and historic Christianity says they are because it means God interfered with someone’s libertarian free will in order to get his word in place.

Is God omnipresent? No, they say, but this is a conclusion from the denial of omniscience and omnipotence, and it reduces omnipresence at best to multi-presence. If you wonder why people don’t get their prayers answered, perhaps it is because God wasn’t close enough at the time to “hear” the prayer. Why pray if God is not present to “hear” and does not have the power or ability to answer that prayer? If God cannot “hear” prayer, then prayer is no more than self-satisfying psycho-babble. It seems God has a receptive communication limitation forced by his ontology.

Is God omnipotent? If you think so, you’ll get this question: “Can God make a rock so big he cannot lift it?” You’ll probably answer, no he can’t, in which the response is, “I prove my point: God cannot do everything. He is not omnipotent.” Jewish theologian Maimonides recognized that logical absurdities are outside the range of God’s omnipotence. “God cannot square a circle or make a thing to exist and not exist at one and the same time,” according to Rabbi Epstein. Thus, in order to deny God’s attributes as historically understood, proponents of open theism offer “logical absurdities” as some kind of proof that God’s attributes, as historically presented, have been misunderstood. All they do, however, is argue against their own misrepresentation of the historic position, a view on which both Judaism and Christianity agree.

The important question, therefore, is not whether God’s omnipotence is completely unlimited, but whether God can do anything contrary to his nature. And that’s a question of a different character.

In the year 451 AD, a number of Christian bishops met to discuss a question about humanity and divinity. They saw that there was a metaphysical difference between divinity and humanity, and denied that the attributes of divinity ever because a part of the created order, even in the Second Person of the Trinity. They denied the “confusion” of the two natures, even in the person of Christ. This became the “orthodox” belief in the West (the Armenian church was not represented because the Armenians were involved in a military battle with the Persians that prevented their attendance, and a century later the Armenian barons rejected Chalcedon.)

In order to maintain “libertarian free will” open theism is prepared to give up everything — everything. They have given up on a hermeneutic methodology that does justice to the whole Scripture; they have given up on logic by the misuse and abuse of logical reasoning; they make no attempt to provide any idea of epistemology that would help them resolve some of these issues biblically; and finally, they abandon Christian soteriology because for them, God opens the door of possibility, but it is up to man to get up off his sinful backside and walk through that door. And God cannot even know with any certainty that someone will walk through that door tomorrow.

With the stroke of a pen, open theists eliminate the necessity of Chalcedon, because for them, divine and human nature are equal. God’s eternity is identical to man’s eternity, a continual sequence of time. Man’s “free will” is made identical to God’s free will, and in order to sustain the argument, every historical understanding of God will be given up. Traditional Christianity, it is claimed, needs to be “dismantled.”

This is not a theology of possibility: it’s a theology of impossibility and frustration for a God who must be eternally on alert otherwise he might get caught out by his “free will agents” of whom he can have no knowledge of their future actions, and any knowledge he might have “is subject to continual modification” because his current knowledge would be unreliable until the event is completed. His superior knowledge does not even allow God to “guess” the final outcome reliably.

The history of Christianity is the struggle for which view of God is “orthodox”. That question is never answered by appeals to logic or facts. Rather it is answered by the fundamental presuppositions that governs how a person interprets himself, the world about him, and Scripture.

What is the choice before us? God’s eternal decree or contingency, chance? But in order to be chance, it must be random chance, not organized chance (a self-contradiction). As one person has put it, “God’s initial and continuing decision not to abrogate human freedom is a voluntary choice which grounds the necessary conditions for the existence of the chaotic element in history; and second, actors within the human and divine drama each sustain their own conditions of chaos as long as they continue to act as free agents.” Is it necessary,then, for both God and man to stop acting as free agents in order to eliminate chaos?

If this view is correct, then God is the God of chaos who himself sustains chaos so long as he acts as a free — that is, random — agent. The “problem of evil” exists because the world is out of control — out of God’s control, that is.

The solution: Man must exercise his free will and pick up the bits and pieces of this chaotic world jig-saw puzzle and put them back in their right place. It is man’s random actions that will eventually bring coherence to everything.

And there you have the classic conclusion of the new world religion: humanism. It is man who will determine the future, not God.

Why, then, is God, or Christ, or the Holy Spirit even necessary? Short answer: they’re not. You can do this all on your own, because if God steps in he can only do so at the expense of your free will.

And this, they claim, is biblical logic. But since Scripture cannot be an inspired and infallible word, there is no attempt to ground their belief system in the Scripture. It is, instead, grounded in their idea of man and his libertarian free will.

But now, by their own recognition, you can see what the choice is: God’s eternal decree on the one hand, or chaos on the other. Meaning based on God’s superglue that holds everything together — the eternal decree — or meaninglessness based on chaos or pure randomness.

There is no middle ground.

See also
Van Til on Libertarian Free Will