Putting First Things First: Why Be A Catholic?

On another blog, I was reading of certain conflicts some people had in being interested in being a part of the Church, yet disagreeing with what it taught.  In my comment on this blog I said I found myself perplexed as to why people would want to join the Church if they think she errs so fundamentally on a matter.

I did some looking around and found this was a position which did exist more widely than I had thought.  There are people out there who are attracted to the Church, but disagree with what she teaches, and think she should change her ways before they would enter.

On reflection I should not have been surprised. After all, within the Church there are many who think the Church should be what they want it to be and get angry when it goes a direction they do not want.

This is not a rebuttal to the blog in question (so if the author is reading this, I hope you don't think this is an attack on what you wrote.  Rather your blog made me reflect on this issue).  Rather it is a reflection on the underlying concern of the question and why I was perplexed: Why should one be a Catholic?

Preliminary Clarification

Let me be clear here that I am not speaking of people who do not like to see dissent within the Church, so long as they recognize the authority of the Church to act as they think best for the salvation of souls.  Rather I am speaking of when the magisterium of the Church is attacked by those who want what the Church itself teaches. People who say “The Church needs to change its policy on X before I join” or “I joined the Church because I thought it did Y” are missing a fundamental point in joining the Church.

Many Wrong Reasons: The Example of Marriage

There are many wrong reasons to do a thing.  In getting married, for example, it would be a wrong reason to marry because the future spouse was rich, or had a wonderful body, or seeking the endless romance, or the marriage would improve the social class of the one seeking to marry.  No doubt people do marry for these reasons, but in doing so; they choose the wrong reasons for taking part in an institution which has specific purposes which cannot be changed.  Most of us would recognize the above reasons as the wrong reasons to marry of course. 

Certainly the bride-to-be would have a right to be hurt. She could justly say “You don’t love me! You only love the image of me you want, and that will only last as long as I meet your ideals!”

There is only one right reason to consider marriage, and that is knowing what marriage is for, one is willing to make a lifelong commitment to join to a person for life to share lives, raise children (if the couple is able to) with mutual love [which is not the same thing as Romance]. When this primary reason is kept first in mind, these other things become superficial. If one truly loves a spouse, the fact she is not wealthy, does not have the appearance of a supermodel and so on.

Wrong Reasons: Joining the Church

Of course the idea of an analogy can only go so far. It would be wrong to apply the examples above in an over literal way. However the basic point needs to be considered.

When it comes to entering the Catholic Church, there are many wrong reasons to seek to join: Being attracted to the liturgy or art, being attracted to certain positions which agree with yours, being attracted to the unity it possesses or being impressed with the sanctity of certain members of the Church.

While these are all elements within the Church which do bear witness to the primary reason the Church should be sought out for… but they are all secondary, and if one makes the secondary reason the primary reason, the person will ultimately grow disillusioned.

One Right Reason: Because it is True

The right reason to join the Church is because one believes that the Church exists because she was established by Jesus Christ intended a visible and hierarchical Church, under the headship of Peter, for the purpose of bringing people to Him, recognizing that she has, through Christ, the authority to bind and to loose and is protected from error when she formally teaches on what we are to do. In other words the one who would join the Catholic Church would need to accept that what the Church teaches is true.

If one rejects what the Church believes about herself, then to put it bluntly, why would one want to join the Catholic Church to begin with?

Putting Second Things First Will Not Support Us

The reasons I mentioned above in the section Many Wrong Reasons are wrong, not because it is wrong to think such things within the Church are good, but because they are not the key reason to be a Catholic and that the real reason for joining or remaining in the Church exists whether the other things are present or not.

If I believe the form of the Liturgy is the reason to join the Church, what happens if the Church changes the form of the Mass to something less desirable?  Many Radical Traditionalists are in this boat.  They loved the Extraordinary (Tridentine) form of the Mass with the Latin and the chants and the incense… but then the Church changed it.  If the form of the Liturgy is the reason one becomes Catholic, it creates a very unstable formation to base one's Catholicism.  One's personal sense of aesthetics become the judge.

Joining the Church because of its art is even worse.  Yes in certain times in history we have seen man and women create beautiful works of art brought about by their religious faith.  At other times, we see particularly bad looking architecture and tacky religious artwork.  Now it is true that art and architecture done for the purpose of glorifying God helps elevate our hearts and mind to Him.  However, a church which looks like the Bauhaus and plays Handel's Messiah on kazoos yet still does what Christ intends His Church to do [Not that I'd want to see this of course] is far superior to a beautiful gothic Cathedral with a beautiful choir which taught error. 

Likewise, joining the Church because you approve of its stand on an issue is not wise… particularly if it is because you perceive the Church to be "Liberal" or "Conservative" overall.  The purpose of the Church is not to create a physical government structure.  It is to direct people to Jesus Christ for the purpose of their eternal salvation.  Political movements, when they depart from what the Church teaches separate man from God, and are to be opposed.  If one joins the Church on grounds that the Church teaching on a subject is conservative/liberal, what will such a one do when the Church must take a stand against something else which is conservative/liberal?  Too many have decried the Church for turning "right" or "left" which basically means "The Church doesn't do what I want it to do!"  This makes the individual the infallible judge of what is right and wrong, when in fact it is the Church who guides us to live our lives in accordance to what Christ wills.

In concerns of the sanctity of a specific person, this is also a bad reason to join the Church by itself.  All of us, being sinners, can fall short of the Christian witness we are called to give.  Then what?  Because such a person stumbles, does this mean that what he professes about Christ is not true?  Tragically some people do make this error.

Love what the Church Is, Not What You Want it to Be

In all of the above reasons, it is the personal desire of what the Church should be which is seen as good, not the Church itself. It is like falling in love with the ideal image of a woman. No real woman can match up to an ideal, because she is a real person and not a fantasy. Likewise the Church is made up of real persons who are sinners, not merely a hypothetical ideal museum of saints. We believe that Christ protects His Church from error. It does not mean that people within the Church will always behave as we think they ought, or even that they behave as God requires them to act.

The Proper Perspective on the Church

As I said above, the only right perspective to join the Church is the perspective that "what the Church teaches is true, and that the Church exists because she was established by Jesus Christ intended a visible and hierarchical Church, under the headship of Peter, for the purpose of bringing people to Him, recognizing that it has, through Christ, the authority to bind and to loose and is protected from error when it formally teaches on what we are to do."

If one does believe this, then the other issues are put in their proper place.  Yes, good liturgies, good art and architecture, stands we like on issues and sanctity of the members of the Church are all things which are desirable.  However, none of these things reflect what the Church is supposed to be and if we insist on these things over what the Church is supposed to be first (the ordinary means Christ uses to bring His salvation to the world), then the point has been totally missed.

Things to Be Understood

A person who walks away from this article thinking I am saying we should just shut up and ignore people in the Church who do wrong is completely missing the point. Likewise it would be wrong to think I am saying we should tolerate error in the Church. The Church is indeed called by God to be Holy, and when individuals are saying we can disobey the Church, those individuals err.

We must understand that while individuals are in the Church, it is only by heeding the authority of the Pope and the Bishops as successors to Peter and the Apostles when they teach in a way requiring assent that we can say we are of the Church.

When we pass judgment on the Magisterium, saying “it cannot be the true Church unless it agrees with me” we are missing the point entirely.

If we believe that the Catholic Church was established by Christ to teach in His name and that Christ protects the Church from teaching in error, then it requires us to ask a fundamental question: If this is true, and I disagree with the Church, then who is really in error?

Either God’s Church or No Church at All

This is where the Cafeteria Catholic and the person outside the Church who thinks “If only the Church would change X, I would join,” are in error. I believe the anti-Catholic is in error, but he or she at least recognizes the point better than the cafeteria Catholic.

The point the anti-Catholic recognizes but the Cafeteria Catholic does not is that: either the Catholic Church has the authority to teach in Christ’s name or it does not. This leaves us with two possible conclusions:

1. One believes the Church is indeed the Church willed by Christ and is protected from error, and therefore must be heeded when she teaches formally.
2. One believes the Church is not the Church willed by Christ and is not protected from error, so she may or may not be right on an issue.

Under condition 1, one must accept the Church when she teaches formally and not reject the Church because of certain cosmetic changes.

Under condition 2, it is entirely irrelevant whether the Church is beautiful, or holds the “right” positions or has people who behave as we like. What she claims fundamentally about herself would be wrong.

A Clarification

Don’t misunderstand me and think I am saying “Love it or Leave it!” Don't think I am saying the truth is subjective.  I am saying if you think the Church is right in what she claims, then recognize it is far more likely that you err than the Magisterium of the Church when it comes to an issue of truth, while a question of aesthetics is irrelevant to what the Church is intended to be (though it can be a symptom of problems the Church needs to address).

God calls all of us to seek the truth, and follow the truth, because He IS the Truth (see John 14:6). Truth is objective. So either the Church teaching is true or it is not.  This is the first issue which will affect how we view the rest.

Conclusion

I expect the non-Catholic, the non-Christian or the non-Believer will take the second option and reject what the Church teaches about herself. However, since God is truth, He will require of such people to make an honest search for what is true. If such a person rejects the Church, it would have to be due to their honest error in seeking the truth, and their honestly believing that they are doing right – and have no way of knowing they had made an error. This of course means investigating why the Church teaches as she does and not merely invent a reason.

However for those in the Church struggling with resentment that the Church “changed” or the person outside the Church thinking they would join the Church “if only…” the question is: Do you believe the Catholic Church is the Church established by Christ and is kept free from error when she teaches formally through the Magisterium?

If so, when it comes to the final judgment, the person remaining outside or the person living disobediently inside will have to answer God’s question: Why did you disobey My Will, when I said of my Church, “Whoever rejects you rejects me. And whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me” (Lk 10:16)?

Was Man Set Up to Fail? A Look at Predestination and Fate (Article III)

Introduction: Is Man Predestined to Be Saved or Damned?

There is an old joke concerning John Calvin, who is credited with creating the idea of Predestination in Christianity.  He took a terrible fall down the stairs, and at the bottom, he was heard to remark, "Thank God I got that over with."

Now this joke is of course an exaggeration of what Calvin believed, but it seems to be a good way to introduce the subject matter for the article today.  Given that God knows the things which happen to us, does it mean we are fated to do these things?

This article approaches an objection which is the opposite of the other objections.  While most people argue that God should have stopped man from sinning but did not (that is, we should have been made free to do good but not evil), this objection is based on the claim we are not free to reject sin to begin with.

The similarity to the other objections is that the sin of man was known by God in advance. The difference is that here God is directly responsible for man being unable to resist sin.

So from the perspective of the one who believes in Fate or Double Predestination, the answer to the question “Was Man set up to fail?” would have to be “Yes.”

It is tragic that God gets the blame for foolish heresies, instead of the creators of the heresies.

What Is Fate?

Fate is a term which can be understood in the sense of "the development of events outside a person’s control, regarded as predetermined by a supernatural power" according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Thus we see the belief that if something is prophesied to be, or God knows a thing is to be, it means the person could not avoid doing a thing.

Christians have to reject this view of course.  Belief in wrong and in sin indicates a belief there is a right to compare to the wrong and good conduct which is to be compared to sin.  If one cannot help what they do, because it is fated for them to do it, how can it be an act of evil?

The Pagan Idea of Oedipus

The Greek myth of Oedipus (memorialized by Sophocles) gave us a story of a person whom the oracle said was fated to kill his father and marry his mother.  To avoid this, his father abandoned him in the woods.  However, Oedipus was found by a passing shepherd who took him in.  When he grew up, he consulted the oracle and found he was fated to kill his father and marry his mother.  To avoid this, he left home.  He ended up killing a man on the road, going to a city, freeing it from the Sphinx and marrying the recently widowed queen.  Eventually he discovered the man he killed was his father and the woman he married was his mother.

Essentially under this view, one cannot escape an evil destiny even if one wills to reject it.  Oedipus had no idea that the people who took him in were not his real parents.  He had no idea that the man he killed was his father and the woman he married was his mother.  In seeking to avoid doing the evil he was horrified by, he ended up carrying it out.  Trying to avoid one's fate becomes futile.  This can lead to the idea of fatalism (which derives from fate), which is: "the belief that all events are predetermined and therefore inevitable."

Indeed, in the ancient world, astrology was used as a way of seeking to determine one's own fate while magic was often seen as a possible way to escape a fate which was otherwise inevitable.

Fate and the Will of God

Some individuals do look at the Bible with this mindset.  Events where prophecies of evil befalling the Israelites are given, people assume that these people who persecuted the Israelites did so because God commanded.  Jesus, as God, knew He was to betrayed and handed over to be crucified.

Does this mean Judas, Pilate and those members of the Sanhedrin responsible could not avoided the tasks set out for them by God's decree?

The answer is simply NO.

The fact that God knows of things which are outside of our ability to know does not mean He decrees a person will do a thing regardless of whether he wants to or not.  Rather, God can permit a thing which men do for an evil intent for the purpose of our benefit.  Because God's knowledge is infinite, He knows the choices we will do before we do them of course, but this doesn't mean He forces our hand to act.

Let's look at it this way.  God knows whether I will wind up in Heaven or Hell.  He knows what I will do in the future.  However, this does not mean I am not responsible for what I do.  It is my willing actions which makes me either cooperate with God's grace or refuse to do so.

It is wrong to say I will do evil because God wills me to be damned. Indeed, claims that man is compelled to act indicate that doing good or evil holds no meaning: It would be wrong to say that God predestined me for Heaven… for this would mean it was irrelevant what I did which was wicked.  It would be wrong for me to say that God predestined me for Hell.  Then it would also be irrelevant what I did.

The Eternal Nature of God and the Knowledge He Possesses

While sometimes God does speak through the prophets with a warning of what is to come if the wicked do not change their ways, men often speak of foreknowledge, saying God has advance knowledge of what we are to do.

The problem with this view is that it views God with the same limitations as man.  It sees God as being in time, but merely existing without an end, something similar to the lifespan of the elves in JRR Tolkien.  This is an error.

God is entirely outside of time itself.  What happened yesterday, today or tomorrow, God sees from a perspective we who are inside time cannot see.  The prayers of Moses, of a person in Christ's time on Earth, of a person today, and even a person 10,000 years from now (assuming humanity exists so long before the Second Coming) are heard by God, who is outside time.  Hence Scripture speaking of a thousand years being like a day and a day being like a thousand years (see 2 Peter 3:8).

Because of this, He can see plainly what each man will do in his life just as plainly as we can see what we did yesterday.  None of us can say we were fated to do what we did yesterday.  We did what we did through our own fault.  God can see today and tomorrow just as we can see yesterday.  The choices we will freely make tomorrow, He sees.  Not because He foreknows what we will do, but He knows what we will choose to do.

God's knowledge of what we will freely choose today, tomorrow or fifty years from now does not mean we are compelled to act in a certain way.  To argue otherwise is actually to make use of the post hoc fallacy: God knew I would act in this way; therefore His knowledge caused me to act this way.  Knowledge of what another man will do does not mean causing a thing.

The Consideration of Prophecy and Fate

So what of prophecy?  What of those wicked men who end up fulfilling something God has said, through the prophets, would happen? Do these not mean that man was fated to continue to sin and could not help it? Does it mean those who did the evil acts mentioned in prophecy were caused by God? Here we have to remove some confusion.

The fact that God knows certain men will behave in an evil nature, and for their evil motives they will afflict the Israelites or the Christians does not mean that such evil men act because God compels them to do so. Rather such men would have acted earlier had God not protected us. If God removes His protection, the wicked afflict the Israelites or the Christians.

Calvin’s Bad Idea

Unfortunately, certain Christians in the 16^th and 17^th centuries adopted such fatalism, misinterpreting the prophecies as inevitable, they have said that God causes the wicked to sin and then punishes them for their deeds. John Calvin, in his Institutes of Christian Religion describes his belief this way:

The covenant of life is not preached equally to all, and among those to whom it is preached, does not always meet with the same reception. This diversity displays the unsearchable depth of the divine judgment, and is without doubt subordinate to God's purpose of eternal election. But if it is plainly owing to the mere pleasure of God that salvation is spontaneously offered to some, while others have no access to it, great and difficult questions immediately arise, questions which are inexplicable, when just views are not entertained concerning election and predestination. To many this seems a perplexing subject, because they deem it most incongruous that of the great body of mankind some should be predestinated to salvation, and others to destruction. How ceaselessly they entangle themselves will appear as we proceed. We may add, that in the very obscurity which deters them, we may see not only the utility of this doctrine, but also its most pleasant fruits. We shall never feel persuaded as we ought that our salvation flows from the free mercy of God as its fountain, until we are made acquainted with his eternal election, the grace of God being illustrated by the contrast--viz. that he does not adopt all promiscuously to the hope of salvation, but gives to some what he denies to others. It is plain how greatly ignorance of this principle detracts from the glory of God, and impairs true humility. (Institutes: Book III Chapter 21)

In seeking to give assurance to the believer that he could not be separated from God, Calvin tends to skim over the problem that others rightly object to: In order for punishment to be just, it must be over a thing which man has control over.

Double Predestination: Attempting to "Christianize” an Unjust Idea

Now, as I understand it, Calvin’s idea was formed with the intent of reassuring the Christians that if they were behaving as a Christian, it was a sign they were of the elect. Fair enough. To a limited extent, one can interpret some of the writings of Paul in such a way. The problem is with the idea if DOUBLE predestination, which not only asserts God wills men to be saved, but also wills some to be damned.

Double Predestination could be considered "Fate" in the pagan view.  In this view, before the world begins, God has determined some will be saved and some will be damned.  Neither the saved nor the reprobate will be able to change from one category to the next.

The 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia describes it as follows:

Predestinarianism is a heresy not unfrequently met with in the course of the centuries which reduces the eternal salvation of the elect as well as the eternal damnation of the reprobate to one cause alone, namely to the sovereign will of God, and thereby excludes the free co-operation of man as a secondary factor in bringing about a happy or unhappy future in the life to come.

Double Predestination is promoted by some because it is feared that man’s refusal to accept God’s ultimate authority indicates God is not all powerful. Because God is all powerful, and some people refuse to accept Him as Lord, the argument is that God chose not to save Him. Jesus died on the cross only for those who were predestined to be saved. The end result is that the person who holds this position has to do some interesting verbal gymnastics to explain why a suddenly arbitrary version of God is really good, in deliberately refusing to save Person X.

Limited Love from a Limitless God?

Of course, God, as Lord of all creation is free to save us or not as He wills. From a perspective of justice, humanity lost its right to original grace, and He is under no obligation to save any of us. However this is not the same thing as saying God chooses to save one person and absolutely refuses to save another.

Double Predestination would be like a man on the river bank who sees a number of people drowning. He has the ability to offer rescue devices to all of them, but arbitrarily chooses only some of them, leaving the rest to drown. Such a God is either limited or petty

Now, theoretically the elect could live like a porn star and be saved, while the reprobate could live like Mother Teresa and still be damned, but supporters of this view would tend to object, arguing that how a person acts shows which side of the line they are most likely on. Thus the person who lives morally upright is probably a member of the saved, while the person who lives immorally is probably a member of the reprobate.

Of course there is always the problem of the backsliding Christian. Making use of the No True Scotsman fallacy, if such an upright person is discovered having a secret sinful life; it means he was really one of the reprobates all along. If a total sleaze has a change of heart and becomes a Christian, it means he was always a member of the elect.

All of this is necessary for the believer in double predestination, because such a believer must deny free will. Because he cannot understand how God can permit a thing without causing a thing, he or she reasons that God must cause the person to be saved or damned.

Now of course this is a minority view among Christians, mostly among those branches influenced by Calvin. However, I find myself wondering how many people who rejected Christianity as being unjust were influenced by this awful view which made God into such a monster.

Since God Is Perfectly Just, We Must Reject This View

Double Predestination assumes that God wills certain people to go to Heaven and certain people to go to Hell regardless of what they may want to do on their own.  The problem is that if God is perfectly just, which Christians must believe, then Hell — which is a place of punishment — is only just if a person who goes there is there because of his own actions, which he had responsibility for.  If the person could not avoid behaving in such a way because he was fated to act this way, then the putting of such a person in hell is unjust. If a person is directly willed by God to go to Hell regardless of what he would want to do, this is also unjust.

Since Christians must believe God is perfectly just, such a view is incompatible with God. Therefore we should reject the nonsense of Double Predestination. Can God give special graces to help people to receive His salvation? Yes. Does this mean whoever does not receive these graces are hated by God? No. If we are determined to do evil, sometimes God will give us what we demand: to be left alone.

Is The Alternative Pelagianism?

Some may accuse me of Pelagianism here. Because I say that Double Predestination is false,  They might misinterpret me as saying that God does not matter and only our own works will save us or damn us. This would be an error however.  The rejection of Double Predestination does not mean a belief that man has the power to save himself.

Pelagianism is described as:

Doctrinal system associated with Pelagius and others, based on the inherent created goodness and innocence of human beings, the efficacy of the human will to achieve salvation, and sinless perfection without divine help…

…It held that every soul is created sinless, that the will is absolutely free, and that the grace of God is universal but not indispensable.

Kurian, G. T. (2001). Nelson's new Christian dictionary: The authoritative resource on the Christian world. Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson Pubs.

In other words, Pelagianism holds that man can get to Heaven by his own efforts, and while God helps, He isn't necessary.  This is not true.  Because man has lowered himself into a pit, as it were, he cannot get out of it by his own efforts.  God would be like a person offering us a rope to get out of the pit.  Without His help, we cannot escape the pit.  However, we can refuse to accept His help and remain in the pit.

So, to say man can be ungrateful and refuse the help God offers is not Pelagianism. Nor does it mean that God is not all powerful if a person refuses to accept His salvation.  It means God will not force us to accept His gift. He made us free to be good, but to be free means we can do wrong with our free will.

We need God if we are to be saved, but we are damned for our own actions which we are free to perform and can blame on no other person.

Denying Double Predestination Does Not Mean God Owes Us Anything

Let’s be clear on this. God does not owe us salvation. Our fallen nature comes because Adam and Eve, by their freely chosen sin, corrupted the nature God gave them. The children born to them in their fallen state share the same nature as their parents, as nothing can give a greater form of existence than one has (since Adam and Eve had lost their original grace, they could not pass it on to their offspring).

The fact that God sent His only Son so we might be saved is a gift we could not merit and did not deserve. However, there is a vast difference between not being able to merit a thing and not being able to refuse the free gift of God.

We believe God loves all of us, and desires all of us to be saved. However, because He has given us free will, we can use it to turn against Him. If we do, He is not obligated to override our Free Will.

Being Fated to Fall Is Not a Christian View, but a Sectarian View

We do know that Calvin’s claims of this being the correct interpretation of Scripture to the contrary; other Christian faiths do not accept this claim. People who think this view of God is unfair and unjust should know they are not alone in it.

The Second Council of Orange said in AD 529:

According to the Catholic faith we believe this also, that after grace has been received through baptism, all the baptized with the help and cooperation of Christ can and ought to fulfill what pertains to the salvation of the soul, if they will labor faithfully. We not only do not believe that some have been truly predestined to evil by divine power, but also with every execration we pronounce anathema upon those, if there are [any such], who wish to believe so great an evil. (Denzinger 199)

Against Calvin, the Church decreed in the Council of Trent,

Can. 17. If anyone shall say that the grace of justification is attained by those only who are predestined unto life, but that all others, who are called, are called indeed, but do not receive grace, as if they are by divine power predestined to evil: let him be anathema (Denzinger 827).

Finally, Augustine — so often cited by those who support Double Predestination — has had this to say in his Letter to Jerome, circa AD 415:

5. I am, moreover, fully persuaded that the soul has fallen into sin, not through the fault of God, nor through any necessity either in the divine nature or in its own, but by its own free will; and that it can be delivered from the body of this death neither by the strength of its own will, as if that were in itself sufficient to achieve this, nor by the death of the body itself, but only by the grace of God through our Lord Jesus Christ, and that there is not one soul in the human family to whose salvation the one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, is not absolutely necessary. Every soul, moreover, which may at any age whatsoever depart from this life without the grace of the Mediator and the sacrament of this grace, departs to future punishment, and shall receive again its own body at the last judgment as a partner in punishment. But if the soul after its natural generation, which was derived from Adam, be regenerated in Christ, it belongs to His fellowship, and shall not only have rest after the death of the body, but also receive again its own body as a partner in glory. These are truths concerning the soul which I hold most firmly.  (Emphasis added)

If every soul can depart from life apart from the grace of God, it stands to reason a person cannot claim predestination to be saved or predestination to be damned.

So before condemning God or Christianity for the idea that man was set up to fail because he was fated to fall, one needs to remember this is a view which is not universally Christian.

Was Man Set Up to Fail? A Look at Predestination and Fate (Article III)

Introduction: Is Man Predestined to Be Saved or Damned?

There is an old joke concerning John Calvin, who is credited with creating the idea of Predestination in Christianity.  He took a terrible fall down the stairs, and at the bottom, he was heard to remark, "Thank God I got that over with."

Now this joke is of course an exaggeration of what Calvin believed, but it seems to be a good way to introduce the subject matter for the article today.  Given that God knows the things which happen to us, does it mean we are fated to do these things?

This article approaches an objection which is the opposite of the other objections.  While most people argue that God should have stopped man from sinning but did not (that is, we should have been made free to do good but not evil), this objection is based on the claim we are not free to reject sin to begin with.

The similarity to the other objections is that the sin of man was known by God in advance. The difference is that here God is directly responsible for man being unable to resist sin.

So from the perspective of the one who believes in Fate or Double Predestination, the answer to the question “Was Man set up to fail?” would have to be “Yes.”

It is tragic that God gets the blame for foolish heresies, instead of the creators of the heresies.

What Is Fate?

Fate is a term which can be understood in the sense of "the development of events outside a person’s control, regarded as predetermined by a supernatural power" according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Thus we see the belief that if something is prophesied to be, or God knows a thing is to be, it means the person could not avoid doing a thing.

Christians have to reject this view of course.  Belief in wrong and in sin indicates a belief there is a right to compare to the wrong and good conduct which is to be compared to sin.  If one cannot help what they do, because it is fated for them to do it, how can it be an act of evil?

The Pagan Idea of Oedipus

The Greek myth of Oedipus (memorialized by Sophocles) gave us a story of a person whom the oracle said was fated to kill his father and marry his mother.  To avoid this, his father abandoned him in the woods.  However, Oedipus was found by a passing shepherd who took him in.  When he grew up, he consulted the oracle and found he was fated to kill his father and marry his mother.  To avoid this, he left home.  He ended up killing a man on the road, going to a city, freeing it from the Sphinx and marrying the recently widowed queen.  Eventually he discovered the man he killed was his father and the woman he married was his mother.

Essentially under this view, one cannot escape an evil destiny even if one wills to reject it.  Oedipus had no idea that the people who took him in were not his real parents.  He had no idea that the man he killed was his father and the woman he married was his mother.  In seeking to avoid doing the evil he was horrified by, he ended up carrying it out.  Trying to avoid one's fate becomes futile.  This can lead to the idea of fatalism (which derives from fate), which is: "the belief that all events are predetermined and therefore inevitable."

Indeed, in the ancient world, astrology was used as a way of seeking to determine one's own fate while magic was often seen as a possible way to escape a fate which was otherwise inevitable.

Fate and the Will of God

Some individuals do look at the Bible with this mindset.  Events where prophecies of evil befalling the Israelites are given, people assume that these people who persecuted the Israelites did so because God commanded.  Jesus, as God, knew He was to betrayed and handed over to be crucified.

Does this mean Judas, Pilate and those members of the Sanhedrin responsible could not avoided the tasks set out for them by God's decree?

The answer is simply NO.

The fact that God knows of things which are outside of our ability to know does not mean He decrees a person will do a thing regardless of whether he wants to or not.  Rather, God can permit a thing which men do for an evil intent for the purpose of our benefit.  Because God's knowledge is infinite, He knows the choices we will do before we do them of course, but this doesn't mean He forces our hand to act.

Let's look at it this way.  God knows whether I will wind up in Heaven or Hell.  He knows what I will do in the future.  However, this does not mean I am not responsible for what I do.  It is my willing actions which makes me either cooperate with God's grace or refuse to do so.

It is wrong to say I will do evil because God wills me to be damned. Indeed, claims that man is compelled to act indicate that doing good or evil holds no meaning: It would be wrong to say that God predestined me for Heaven… for this would mean it was irrelevant what I did which was wicked.  It would be wrong for me to say that God predestined me for Hell.  Then it would also be irrelevant what I did.

The Eternal Nature of God and the Knowledge He Possesses

While sometimes God does speak through the prophets with a warning of what is to come if the wicked do not change their ways, men often speak of foreknowledge, saying God has advance knowledge of what we are to do.

The problem with this view is that it views God with the same limitations as man.  It sees God as being in time, but merely existing without an end, something similar to the lifespan of the elves in JRR Tolkien.  This is an error.

God is entirely outside of time itself.  What happened yesterday, today or tomorrow, God sees from a perspective we who are inside time cannot see.  The prayers of Moses, of a person in Christ's time on Earth, of a person today, and even a person 10,000 years from now (assuming humanity exists so long before the Second Coming) are heard by God, who is outside time.  Hence Scripture speaking of a thousand years being like a day and a day being like a thousand years (see 2 Peter 3:8).

Because of this, He can see plainly what each man will do in his life just as plainly as we can see what we did yesterday.  None of us can say we were fated to do what we did yesterday.  We did what we did through our own fault.  God can see today and tomorrow just as we can see yesterday.  The choices we will freely make tomorrow, He sees.  Not because He foreknows what we will do, but He knows what we will choose to do.

God's knowledge of what we will freely choose today, tomorrow or fifty years from now does not mean we are compelled to act in a certain way.  To argue otherwise is actually to make use of the post hoc fallacy: God knew I would act in this way; therefore His knowledge caused me to act this way.  Knowledge of what another man will do does not mean causing a thing.

The Consideration of Prophecy and Fate

So what of prophecy?  What of those wicked men who end up fulfilling something God has said, through the prophets, would happen? Do these not mean that man was fated to continue to sin and could not help it? Does it mean those who did the evil acts mentioned in prophecy were caused by God? Here we have to remove some confusion.

The fact that God knows certain men will behave in an evil nature, and for their evil motives they will afflict the Israelites or the Christians does not mean that such evil men act because God compels them to do so. Rather such men would have acted earlier had God not protected us. If God removes His protection, the wicked afflict the Israelites or the Christians.

Calvin’s Bad Idea

Unfortunately, certain Christians in the 16^th and 17^th centuries adopted such fatalism, misinterpreting the prophecies as inevitable, they have said that God causes the wicked to sin and then punishes them for their deeds. John Calvin, in his Institutes of Christian Religion describes his belief this way:

The covenant of life is not preached equally to all, and among those to whom it is preached, does not always meet with the same reception. This diversity displays the unsearchable depth of the divine judgment, and is without doubt subordinate to God's purpose of eternal election. But if it is plainly owing to the mere pleasure of God that salvation is spontaneously offered to some, while others have no access to it, great and difficult questions immediately arise, questions which are inexplicable, when just views are not entertained concerning election and predestination. To many this seems a perplexing subject, because they deem it most incongruous that of the great body of mankind some should be predestinated to salvation, and others to destruction. How ceaselessly they entangle themselves will appear as we proceed. We may add, that in the very obscurity which deters them, we may see not only the utility of this doctrine, but also its most pleasant fruits. We shall never feel persuaded as we ought that our salvation flows from the free mercy of God as its fountain, until we are made acquainted with his eternal election, the grace of God being illustrated by the contrast--viz. that he does not adopt all promiscuously to the hope of salvation, but gives to some what he denies to others. It is plain how greatly ignorance of this principle detracts from the glory of God, and impairs true humility. (Institutes: Book III Chapter 21)

In seeking to give assurance to the believer that he could not be separated from God, Calvin tends to skim over the problem that others rightly object to: In order for punishment to be just, it must be over a thing which man has control over.

Double Predestination: Attempting to "Christianize” an Unjust Idea

Now, as I understand it, Calvin’s idea was formed with the intent of reassuring the Christians that if they were behaving as a Christian, it was a sign they were of the elect. Fair enough. To a limited extent, one can interpret some of the writings of Paul in such a way. The problem is with the idea if DOUBLE predestination, which not only asserts God wills men to be saved, but also wills some to be damned.

Double Predestination could be considered "Fate" in the pagan view.  In this view, before the world begins, God has determined some will be saved and some will be damned.  Neither the saved nor the reprobate will be able to change from one category to the next.

The 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia describes it as follows:

Predestinarianism is a heresy not unfrequently met with in the course of the centuries which reduces the eternal salvation of the elect as well as the eternal damnation of the reprobate to one cause alone, namely to the sovereign will of God, and thereby excludes the free co-operation of man as a secondary factor in bringing about a happy or unhappy future in the life to come.

Double Predestination is promoted by some because it is feared that man’s refusal to accept God’s ultimate authority indicates God is not all powerful. Because God is all powerful, and some people refuse to accept Him as Lord, the argument is that God chose not to save Him. Jesus died on the cross only for those who were predestined to be saved. The end result is that the person who holds this position has to do some interesting verbal gymnastics to explain why a suddenly arbitrary version of God is really good, in deliberately refusing to save Person X.

Limited Love from a Limitless God?

Of course, God, as Lord of all creation is free to save us or not as He wills. From a perspective of justice, humanity lost its right to original grace, and He is under no obligation to save any of us. However this is not the same thing as saying God chooses to save one person and absolutely refuses to save another.

Double Predestination would be like a man on the river bank who sees a number of people drowning. He has the ability to offer rescue devices to all of them, but arbitrarily chooses only some of them, leaving the rest to drown. Such a God is either limited or petty

Now, theoretically the elect could live like a porn star and be saved, while the reprobate could live like Mother Teresa and still be damned, but supporters of this view would tend to object, arguing that how a person acts shows which side of the line they are most likely on. Thus the person who lives morally upright is probably a member of the saved, while the person who lives immorally is probably a member of the reprobate.

Of course there is always the problem of the backsliding Christian. Making use of the No True Scotsman fallacy, if such an upright person is discovered having a secret sinful life; it means he was really one of the reprobates all along. If a total sleaze has a change of heart and becomes a Christian, it means he was always a member of the elect.

All of this is necessary for the believer in double predestination, because such a believer must deny free will. Because he cannot understand how God can permit a thing without causing a thing, he or she reasons that God must cause the person to be saved or damned.

Now of course this is a minority view among Christians, mostly among those branches influenced by Calvin. However, I find myself wondering how many people who rejected Christianity as being unjust were influenced by this awful view which made God into such a monster.

Since God Is Perfectly Just, We Must Reject This View

Double Predestination assumes that God wills certain people to go to Heaven and certain people to go to Hell regardless of what they may want to do on their own.  The problem is that if God is perfectly just, which Christians must believe, then Hell — which is a place of punishment — is only just if a person who goes there is there because of his own actions, which he had responsibility for.  If the person could not avoid behaving in such a way because he was fated to act this way, then the putting of such a person in hell is unjust. If a person is directly willed by God to go to Hell regardless of what he would want to do, this is also unjust.

Since Christians must believe God is perfectly just, such a view is incompatible with God. Therefore we should reject the nonsense of Double Predestination. Can God give special graces to help people to receive His salvation? Yes. Does this mean whoever does not receive these graces are hated by God? No. If we are determined to do evil, sometimes God will give us what we demand: to be left alone.

Is The Alternative Pelagianism?

Some may accuse me of Pelagianism here. Because I say that Double Predestination is false,  They might misinterpret me as saying that God does not matter and only our own works will save us or damn us. This would be an error however.  The rejection of Double Predestination does not mean a belief that man has the power to save himself.

Pelagianism is described as:

Doctrinal system associated with Pelagius and others, based on the inherent created goodness and innocence of human beings, the efficacy of the human will to achieve salvation, and sinless perfection without divine help…

…It held that every soul is created sinless, that the will is absolutely free, and that the grace of God is universal but not indispensable.

Kurian, G. T. (2001). Nelson's new Christian dictionary: The authoritative resource on the Christian world. Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson Pubs.

In other words, Pelagianism holds that man can get to Heaven by his own efforts, and while God helps, He isn't necessary.  This is not true.  Because man has lowered himself into a pit, as it were, he cannot get out of it by his own efforts.  God would be like a person offering us a rope to get out of the pit.  Without His help, we cannot escape the pit.  However, we can refuse to accept His help and remain in the pit.

So, to say man can be ungrateful and refuse the help God offers is not Pelagianism. Nor does it mean that God is not all powerful if a person refuses to accept His salvation.  It means God will not force us to accept His gift. He made us free to be good, but to be free means we can do wrong with our free will.

We need God if we are to be saved, but we are damned for our own actions which we are free to perform and can blame on no other person.

Denying Double Predestination Does Not Mean God Owes Us Anything

Let’s be clear on this. God does not owe us salvation. Our fallen nature comes because Adam and Eve, by their freely chosen sin, corrupted the nature God gave them. The children born to them in their fallen state share the same nature as their parents, as nothing can give a greater form of existence than one has (since Adam and Eve had lost their original grace, they could not pass it on to their offspring).

The fact that God sent His only Son so we might be saved is a gift we could not merit and did not deserve. However, there is a vast difference between not being able to merit a thing and not being able to refuse the free gift of God.

We believe God loves all of us, and desires all of us to be saved. However, because He has given us free will, we can use it to turn against Him. If we do, He is not obligated to override our Free Will.

Being Fated to Fall Is Not a Christian View, but a Sectarian View

We do know that Calvin’s claims of this being the correct interpretation of Scripture to the contrary; other Christian faiths do not accept this claim. People who think this view of God is unfair and unjust should know they are not alone in it.

The Second Council of Orange said in AD 529:

According to the Catholic faith we believe this also, that after grace has been received through baptism, all the baptized with the help and cooperation of Christ can and ought to fulfill what pertains to the salvation of the soul, if they will labor faithfully. We not only do not believe that some have been truly predestined to evil by divine power, but also with every execration we pronounce anathema upon those, if there are [any such], who wish to believe so great an evil. (Denzinger 199)

Against Calvin, the Church decreed in the Council of Trent,

Can. 17. If anyone shall say that the grace of justification is attained by those only who are predestined unto life, but that all others, who are called, are called indeed, but do not receive grace, as if they are by divine power predestined to evil: let him be anathema (Denzinger 827).

Finally, Augustine — so often cited by those who support Double Predestination — has had this to say in his Letter to Jerome, circa AD 415:

5. I am, moreover, fully persuaded that the soul has fallen into sin, not through the fault of God, nor through any necessity either in the divine nature or in its own, but by its own free will; and that it can be delivered from the body of this death neither by the strength of its own will, as if that were in itself sufficient to achieve this, nor by the death of the body itself, but only by the grace of God through our Lord Jesus Christ, and that there is not one soul in the human family to whose salvation the one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, is not absolutely necessary. Every soul, moreover, which may at any age whatsoever depart from this life without the grace of the Mediator and the sacrament of this grace, departs to future punishment, and shall receive again its own body at the last judgment as a partner in punishment. But if the soul after its natural generation, which was derived from Adam, be regenerated in Christ, it belongs to His fellowship, and shall not only have rest after the death of the body, but also receive again its own body as a partner in glory. These are truths concerning the soul which I hold most firmly.  (Emphasis added)

If every soul can depart from life apart from the grace of God, it stands to reason a person cannot claim predestination to be saved or predestination to be damned.

So before condemning God or Christianity for the idea that man was set up to fail because he was fated to fall, one needs to remember this is a view which is not universally Christian.

Was Man Set Up to Fail? A Look at God Creating Man as He Was (Article II)

Recap of the Last Article

Last time I discussed some general Christian Beliefs about God, Creation and the Fall in regards to the question, “Did God set up man to fail?” To recap, the premise of the challenge is that God knew man would fail, yet created the situation where free will, the serpent (the Devil) and the Tree of Knowledge existed. Therefore God set man up to fail.

In my article, I stated that man did have the ability to refuse, yet chose to act against God, knowing it was forbidden. As a result, man and his descendents fell from what God created them to be.

So let us now look at some of the questions of why God made us in such a way which we could fail.

On The Nature of Triangles

One of the common questions intended to stump believers is to ask whether God could make a triangle with four sides. The supposed dilemma is: If God can make it, it isn’t a triangle. If He can’t make it, He isn’t all powerful.

The problem with this dilemma is that it assumes that the nature of things comes before God, and not that the nature of things comes because of God.

If God wills to make a triangle, He wills to make a thing with three sides. If He wanted a thing with four sides, He wouldn’t make a triangle to begin with, because the essence of a triangle is that it has three sides and the total interior angles total to 180 degrees, whether it is scalene, isosceles or equilateral.

Things like the lengths of the sides and the degrees of each angle depend on the type of the triangle it is. A triangle is not less of a triangle because it is scalene and not equilateral for example. However, once you add a fourth side or make the angles of the interior > 180 degrees, you no longer have a triangle, but something else entirely.

So the answer to this supposed stumper is that it is nonsense to ask whether a four sided triangle can exist, because a four sided object is not a triangle to begin with, and the question can be rewritten “Will God call a four sided object a triangle?”

The answer is no, because to call a four sided object a triangle is to speak falsely, which would mean God was not perfectly good.

So what does this have to do with the creation of human beings?

On the Nature of Men

From the point above, we need to consider what the human person necessarily is. The Human person necessarily possesses certain characteristics in essence, where if you remove them from the idea of “human” what you have is no longer human.

As Christians, we believe that all people are created with an immortal soul. No soul, no person. Or to state it in the opposite way, if one is a human being, he or she has an immortal soul. We also believe that God created man with the potential for free will. So what is the significance of this?

Because man is created with an immortal soul, he will not end with death. Because he is created with free will, the consequences of his choices will exist beyond death. Because he is created with free will, he does have choices he can make, for which he is responsible.

(Excursus: The Question of the Mentally Disabled

I would like to pause here to address the issue of the insane or mentally disabled, who through birth defect or accident or age, are unable to make use of the free will which exists in all men. Does this mean such a person is not a human being?

I would say this would be as wrong as to say that a female who, through birth defect, injury, old age or disease, is unable to bear children is not a woman. The potential is there, though some individuals wind up with the inability to make use of such things because of these circumstances.)

So Why Did God make Man with Free Will?

The common claim here is that if man had not been created with free will, then he would not have been able to sin. Perhaps this is the case. However, man would not have been able to do good either. Essentially we would be not much more than two legged cattle.

Now, if God is perfect (which Christians do believe), then it follows God does not need anything. If He needed anything, it would indicate a lack. Yet the deist concept of the Divine Clockmaker is also illogical. If God merely sets the clock in motion and then ignores everything, the question then arises, “Why make the clock?”

We need to remember the statement, “God is love.” (1 Jn 4:16). Now love is not sentimentality and indulgence. It desires the true good for the beloved. Sometimes this must involve “tough love” to help us. Now since man was created with an immortal soul, it follows that the good God desires for us must take this into account.

Christians believe that God created the universe with the human person in mind, and that He created the human person out of love with the desire of giving us the eternal good, not temporal goods.

The Lover and the Beloved

Now, if this good is something which must be received, it cannot be achieved by man’s own effort because man is a finite creature. Only by being offered the eternal from the eternal God can it be received. If it is to be offered and not forced, it requires a free acceptance of the gift God offers.

So why does God not simply remove free will and give us this eternal good? This is because love is not a one way street. There is the lover and the beloved. Scripture uses many images of God as the lover wooing us, the beloved. The lover never forces himself on the beloved. If the beloved spurns the lover, God will not force the beloved to accept Him. However, with this in mind, the beloved who spurns the Lover has no cause for complaint when they have no part of the life of the Lover. Since God is the eternal lover and we are created with an eternal soul, if we spurn His love, we must spend eternity apart from Him.

So in short, God gave us free will, because we are not merely constructs of God, but people whom He loves and wants to share in His love.

This is the divergence between the one who says God set man up to fail and the Christian belief. We were not given free will so we could choose sin. We were given free will so we could choose to accept what God offers.

Parent and Child

In terms of creator and created, God does have the authority to make behaviors required of us.  However, a parent can at times leave to the discretion of the child when one wishes to teach responsibility as opposed to standing over the child with the immediate readiness to punish.  CS Lewis discusses this in his work Mere Christianity:

…anyone who has been in authority knows how a thing can be in accordance with your will in one way and not in another.  It may be quite sensible for a mother to say to the children, 'I'm not going to go and make you tidy up the schoolroom every night.  You've got to learn to keep it tidy on your own.'  Then she goes up one night and finds the Teddy bear and the ink and the French Grammar all lying in the grate.  That is against her will.  She would prefer the children to be tidy.  But on the other hand, it is her will which has left the children free to be untidy.  The same thing arises in any regiment, or trade union, or school.  You make a thing voluntary and then half the people do not do it.  This is not what you willed, but your will has made it possible.

It is probably the same in the universe.  God created things which had free will.  That means creatures which can go either wrong or right.  Some people think they can imagine a creature which is free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot.  If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad.  And free will is what has made evil possible.  Why, then, did God give them free will?  Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the thing which makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.  A world of automata — of creatures which worked like machines — would hardly be worth creating.  The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water.  And for that they must be free. (pages 47-48)

The parent who wants a thing to be done can of course stand over the child with a whip and make sure it is done this way.  However, the parent who wants the child to understand the importance of doing a thing so the child chooses to do a thing of his own free will must take a different course.  We believe this is the case in our relationship with God.  Since God loves us and wants us to choose the good, He must make us free if doing good is to have any meaning at all.

The Error in Denying that Free Will Exists.

Now it follows that if Love is a choice we must make, the possibility of spurning God is there. The risk of rejection is always there in love. God being the perfect lover will not betray us, but we can betray Him. Adam and Eve did, and so do we. He will always offer it, but will not force us to accept it.

Certain groups of Christians fear the idea that if man has to accept, it means God is not fully in control, and it puts the emphasis on man (Calvin and Luther for example seem to have leaned this way). Such individuals try to argue that the one who God chooses has no say in the matter, and the one who God rejects can never be saved because he was rejected from the beginning. Such a view [known as Double Predestination] is, I believe, blasphemous, as it makes God responsible for all evil done.  If one is predestined to be saved, we cannot call his actions good.  If one is predestined to be damned, we cannot call his actions evil.  Such a one is merely doing what he is predestined to do.

It also confuses the issue by ignoring that without God’s acting to begin with, the man has nothing to choose to accept. What God offers is so far beyond the ability of man to do on his own, that unless God offers it, man cannot receive it.

I think it would be interesting to see whether the "God set man up to fail" argument had its roots in the claims of double predestination.

Misusing Free Will Has Consequences

Now, if will is free, it follows that a person may choose to act in a way which is in violation of what was intended to be. He can do this in the sense that nobody forced him to do something in violation of what he chose to do. However, this does not mean it is good to do so, and in acting against what we were called to be, we do ourselves harm. Sometimes in the temporal realm, sometimes into eternity.

I am able to drive drunk if I choose to. However, it is not permitted for me to do so, and if I do, there will be legal or even life threatening results which will affect me in time or even eternally (if it kills me). I cannot say in response that the law, in not physically preventing me from driving, is to blame for the result.

Likewise, our using our free will to act against God is possible, and because He made us with free will, He recognizes some of us can use our free will for evil instead of for good. However, it is not God’s fault we do evil, because He gave us the ability to think on our own.

The Flip Side of Freedom

What is often forgotten today is that freedom is part of a package deal. The other side of the coin is responsibility. If a person has free will, the person has the responsibility to use their free will in a way which does not harm themselves or others. He, and not the lawmaker, is to blame for failing to act responsibly. The idea of responsibility indicates it is something we can control. If a person slips on the ice, nobody blames him because the law of gravity forces him to the ground. It is only when the circumstances are things we can control that we can be blamed for failing to do so.

Looking at Adam and Eve

Now Adam and Eve were given free will, and they were given the responsibility in using it rightly. Moreover, with original grace, they had the ability to resist temptation to do evil. In other words, they had the free will to control their own actions, and they had the responsibility to make the right use of those actions. With the ability to resist the impulses to choose wrongly, Adam and Eve could not claim that their actions could not be helped. The reason they were judged was because they were able to resist but chose not to.

So from this, we can see that in failing to resist temptation, their actions were because they could have but did not refuse the lies of the devil.

Conclusion: The Direction Next Time

I have given a demonstration of why Christians believe we have free will. However some individuals have a hard time contrasting God’s omnipotence with our free will. If God knows what we will do, does this not mean we are fated to do these things?

The short answer is no.

The longer answer will be covered in part III of this series.

Was Man Set Up to Fail? A Look at God Creating Man as He Was (Article II)

Recap of the Last Article

Last time I discussed some general Christian Beliefs about God, Creation and the Fall in regards to the question, “Did God set up man to fail?” To recap, the premise of the challenge is that God knew man would fail, yet created the situation where free will, the serpent (the Devil) and the Tree of Knowledge existed. Therefore God set man up to fail.

In my article, I stated that man did have the ability to refuse, yet chose to act against God, knowing it was forbidden. As a result, man and his descendents fell from what God created them to be.

So let us now look at some of the questions of why God made us in such a way which we could fail.

On The Nature of Triangles

One of the common questions intended to stump believers is to ask whether God could make a triangle with four sides. The supposed dilemma is: If God can make it, it isn’t a triangle. If He can’t make it, He isn’t all powerful.

The problem with this dilemma is that it assumes that the nature of things comes before God, and not that the nature of things comes because of God.

If God wills to make a triangle, He wills to make a thing with three sides. If He wanted a thing with four sides, He wouldn’t make a triangle to begin with, because the essence of a triangle is that it has three sides and the total interior angles total to 180 degrees, whether it is scalene, isosceles or equilateral.

Things like the lengths of the sides and the degrees of each angle depend on the type of the triangle it is. A triangle is not less of a triangle because it is scalene and not equilateral for example. However, once you add a fourth side or make the angles of the interior > 180 degrees, you no longer have a triangle, but something else entirely.

So the answer to this supposed stumper is that it is nonsense to ask whether a four sided triangle can exist, because a four sided object is not a triangle to begin with, and the question can be rewritten “Will God call a four sided object a triangle?”

The answer is no, because to call a four sided object a triangle is to speak falsely, which would mean God was not perfectly good.

So what does this have to do with the creation of human beings?

On the Nature of Men

From the point above, we need to consider what the human person necessarily is. The Human person necessarily possesses certain characteristics in essence, where if you remove them from the idea of “human” what you have is no longer human.

As Christians, we believe that all people are created with an immortal soul. No soul, no person. Or to state it in the opposite way, if one is a human being, he or she has an immortal soul. We also believe that God created man with the potential for free will. So what is the significance of this?

Because man is created with an immortal soul, he will not end with death. Because he is created with free will, the consequences of his choices will exist beyond death. Because he is created with free will, he does have choices he can make, for which he is responsible.

(Excursus: The Question of the Mentally Disabled

I would like to pause here to address the issue of the insane or mentally disabled, who through birth defect or accident or age, are unable to make use of the free will which exists in all men. Does this mean such a person is not a human being?

I would say this would be as wrong as to say that a female who, through birth defect, injury, old age or disease, is unable to bear children is not a woman. The potential is there, though some individuals wind up with the inability to make use of such things because of these circumstances.)

So Why Did God make Man with Free Will?

The common claim here is that if man had not been created with free will, then he would not have been able to sin. Perhaps this is the case. However, man would not have been able to do good either. Essentially we would be not much more than two legged cattle.

Now, if God is perfect (which Christians do believe), then it follows God does not need anything. If He needed anything, it would indicate a lack. Yet the deist concept of the Divine Clockmaker is also illogical. If God merely sets the clock in motion and then ignores everything, the question then arises, “Why make the clock?”

We need to remember the statement, “God is love.” (1 Jn 4:16). Now love is not sentimentality and indulgence. It desires the true good for the beloved. Sometimes this must involve “tough love” to help us. Now since man was created with an immortal soul, it follows that the good God desires for us must take this into account.

Christians believe that God created the universe with the human person in mind, and that He created the human person out of love with the desire of giving us the eternal good, not temporal goods.

The Lover and the Beloved

Now, if this good is something which must be received, it cannot be achieved by man’s own effort because man is a finite creature. Only by being offered the eternal from the eternal God can it be received. If it is to be offered and not forced, it requires a free acceptance of the gift God offers.

So why does God not simply remove free will and give us this eternal good? This is because love is not a one way street. There is the lover and the beloved. Scripture uses many images of God as the lover wooing us, the beloved. The lover never forces himself on the beloved. If the beloved spurns the lover, God will not force the beloved to accept Him. However, with this in mind, the beloved who spurns the Lover has no cause for complaint when they have no part of the life of the Lover. Since God is the eternal lover and we are created with an eternal soul, if we spurn His love, we must spend eternity apart from Him.

So in short, God gave us free will, because we are not merely constructs of God, but people whom He loves and wants to share in His love.

This is the divergence between the one who says God set man up to fail and the Christian belief. We were not given free will so we could choose sin. We were given free will so we could choose to accept what God offers.

Parent and Child

In terms of creator and created, God does have the authority to make behaviors required of us.  However, a parent can at times leave to the discretion of the child when one wishes to teach responsibility as opposed to standing over the child with the immediate readiness to punish.  CS Lewis discusses this in his work Mere Christianity:

…anyone who has been in authority knows how a thing can be in accordance with your will in one way and not in another.  It may be quite sensible for a mother to say to the children, 'I'm not going to go and make you tidy up the schoolroom every night.  You've got to learn to keep it tidy on your own.'  Then she goes up one night and finds the Teddy bear and the ink and the French Grammar all lying in the grate.  That is against her will.  She would prefer the children to be tidy.  But on the other hand, it is her will which has left the children free to be untidy.  The same thing arises in any regiment, or trade union, or school.  You make a thing voluntary and then half the people do not do it.  This is not what you willed, but your will has made it possible.

It is probably the same in the universe.  God created things which had free will.  That means creatures which can go either wrong or right.  Some people think they can imagine a creature which is free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot.  If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad.  And free will is what has made evil possible.  Why, then, did God give them free will?  Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the thing which makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.  A world of automata — of creatures which worked like machines — would hardly be worth creating.  The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water.  And for that they must be free. (pages 47-48)

The parent who wants a thing to be done can of course stand over the child with a whip and make sure it is done this way.  However, the parent who wants the child to understand the importance of doing a thing so the child chooses to do a thing of his own free will must take a different course.  We believe this is the case in our relationship with God.  Since God loves us and wants us to choose the good, He must make us free if doing good is to have any meaning at all.

The Error in Denying that Free Will Exists.

Now it follows that if Love is a choice we must make, the possibility of spurning God is there. The risk of rejection is always there in love. God being the perfect lover will not betray us, but we can betray Him. Adam and Eve did, and so do we. He will always offer it, but will not force us to accept it.

Certain groups of Christians fear the idea that if man has to accept, it means God is not fully in control, and it puts the emphasis on man (Calvin and Luther for example seem to have leaned this way). Such individuals try to argue that the one who God chooses has no say in the matter, and the one who God rejects can never be saved because he was rejected from the beginning. Such a view [known as Double Predestination] is, I believe, blasphemous, as it makes God responsible for all evil done.  If one is predestined to be saved, we cannot call his actions good.  If one is predestined to be damned, we cannot call his actions evil.  Such a one is merely doing what he is predestined to do.

It also confuses the issue by ignoring that without God’s acting to begin with, the man has nothing to choose to accept. What God offers is so far beyond the ability of man to do on his own, that unless God offers it, man cannot receive it.

I think it would be interesting to see whether the "God set man up to fail" argument had its roots in the claims of double predestination.

Misusing Free Will Has Consequences

Now, if will is free, it follows that a person may choose to act in a way which is in violation of what was intended to be. He can do this in the sense that nobody forced him to do something in violation of what he chose to do. However, this does not mean it is good to do so, and in acting against what we were called to be, we do ourselves harm. Sometimes in the temporal realm, sometimes into eternity.

I am able to drive drunk if I choose to. However, it is not permitted for me to do so, and if I do, there will be legal or even life threatening results which will affect me in time or even eternally (if it kills me). I cannot say in response that the law, in not physically preventing me from driving, is to blame for the result.

Likewise, our using our free will to act against God is possible, and because He made us with free will, He recognizes some of us can use our free will for evil instead of for good. However, it is not God’s fault we do evil, because He gave us the ability to think on our own.

The Flip Side of Freedom

What is often forgotten today is that freedom is part of a package deal. The other side of the coin is responsibility. If a person has free will, the person has the responsibility to use their free will in a way which does not harm themselves or others. He, and not the lawmaker, is to blame for failing to act responsibly. The idea of responsibility indicates it is something we can control. If a person slips on the ice, nobody blames him because the law of gravity forces him to the ground. It is only when the circumstances are things we can control that we can be blamed for failing to do so.

Looking at Adam and Eve

Now Adam and Eve were given free will, and they were given the responsibility in using it rightly. Moreover, with original grace, they had the ability to resist temptation to do evil. In other words, they had the free will to control their own actions, and they had the responsibility to make the right use of those actions. With the ability to resist the impulses to choose wrongly, Adam and Eve could not claim that their actions could not be helped. The reason they were judged was because they were able to resist but chose not to.

So from this, we can see that in failing to resist temptation, their actions were because they could have but did not refuse the lies of the devil.

Conclusion: The Direction Next Time

I have given a demonstration of why Christians believe we have free will. However some individuals have a hard time contrasting God’s omnipotence with our free will. If God knows what we will do, does this not mean we are fated to do these things?

The short answer is no.

The longer answer will be covered in part III of this series.

Set Up to Fail? Reflections on Creation and the Fall (Article I)

Preliminary Note: This will be a series of a few articles, as the topic is too broad to deal with at once.  People wondering why I didn't address topic X in this first article should wait until I finish the rest before claiming I ignored the issue.

This article is devoted to establish the framework of the Christian belief of the nature of God, the nature of creation, and the view of the fall.  The idea of why God created us in this way will be addressed further on in this series.

Please note that being an article and not a textbook, this article must necessarily be simplified, and should not be considered the definitive and final word on the subject. Just because I draw conclusion X on the subject does not mean I reject other conclusions the Catholic Church brings forward.

Note on Linguistics: Some readers may note I make reference to man and he.  This is not due to chauvinism, but rather because the term "man" reflects the Latin humanis (person) and not viri (male).  The English language is more limited than Latin in expressing itself.  In terms of philosophy and theology, "man" refers to male and female both, while the use of male or female would be used to speak of a certain gender.

Introduction

Awhile back, an atheist visitor to my site asked if I would write about whether God set man up to fail.  Unfortunately the individual never clarified what was meant by this so I needed to go search for the topic on line [So, if this individual is reading this, my apologies if if I didn't answer your specific concerns here].  The question is a valid one I think, though the answer is never merely a direct rebuttal.  Rather it requires a set up of what we as Christians believe as a starting point.

The Premises of the Challenge

Scanning various atheistic sites and challenges posted on Christian sites, the basic premise seems to be as follows (this isn't a syllogism by the way, so I won't be evaluating this part as if it were.  I'm just laying out the points the objection makes):

1. God is all knowing and all powerful and all good
2. God Created Adam and Eve
3. God Created the Tree of Good and Evil
4. Because He was all knowing, He must have known that Adam and Eve would have eaten the fruit of the tree.
5. Therefore God set man up to fail.
6. Therefore He either isn't all knowing, all powerful or all good

I hope this is a fair recreation of the objection.

Now, I would unconditionally agree with points 1-3.  I would conditionally agree with point 4 (my problem is with the post hoc fallacy it assumes).  I would reject point 5, and because of that, point 6 would remain unproven.

The Preliminaries to the Case

However, before we get to the argument, we need to understand how the Christian understands God, omnipotence, omniscience and being pure good.

First lets look at that which God is.  Non Christians and atheists may disagree with these things.  However, if one wants to understand the Christian view of the fall, one needs to understand how we view the God who created everything.  This is of course a very simplified and truncated view.  For fuller details, one can consult St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Contra Gentiles.

1. God is Eternal.  He is not a very old being.  God is outside of time itself.  Time came to be when God began creation of the universe we know.  Whether one holds to Young Earth Creationism or to evolution, the theist holds that before the beginning of creation, there was no time, but God still existed.  This is why we call God Eternal.  He isn't going to change His mind some time in the future about good and evil, or on how gravity and light functions.  Thus He is unchanging.
   1. Because of this, it would be error to think of there being a difference between the God of the Old Testament and that of the New Testament.
2. God is All Knowing (Omniscient).  Despite claims from people like Vox Day, God is not surprised or unaware of what goes on in the universe.  Some Christians who know God is not evil will try to meet the challenge of evil in the world by denying omniscience so they don't have to deny He is all powerful or All Good.  Theologically this is nonsense however.  A God who is not all knowing is therefore limited and therefore not all powerful.  God does not learn something new about His world, us or morality.
3. God is All Powerful (Omnipotent). Nothing happens against the direct will of God.  If He wills that event X will happen, it cannot be thwarted.  God will not be defeated.  Nor will what He decrees fail to happen as He decrees it to be.
   1. This is not the same thing as sin being against what God requires of us.  Below we will look at free will of man, which is in fact what the issue is really about.
4. God Is Perfect and Perfectly Good.  This is necessarily a trait of an all powerful God to lack nothing in His own nature.  This is because evil is not a positive force in itself.  With the exception of the mentally deranged, nobody chooses to do evil solely on the grounds it is evil, but because there is a good end which one chooses to achieve in a way which is harmful or unjust to oneself or others.  If God could choose to do evil, he would be choosing something less good, which would deny the other traits of God.  [That is: Either He did not know it was wrong, or He did not have the ability to do good]
   1. Dawkins' claim of omniscience and omnipotence being in contradiction is also theologically nonsense.  Dawkins' claim, paraphrased, is that because God is all knowing, He can't change His mind.  Because He can't change His mind, He can't be all powerful.  Theologians reject this on the grounds that because God is all knowing, He already knows the best solution for the situation at hand.  Changing one's mind would be to go from a worse to a better or from a better to a worse.  Both would be a sign of imperfection in God.
5. God is Fully Present Everywhere (Omnipresent).  Unlike pantheism, God is not all things nor in all things as a sort of a mist or presence that is spread out partly here, partly in Russia and so on.  That would make Him dependent on matter.  Rather it is the case that God is fully present everywhere without limits.  He is always fully present, and not merely partially present.

To sum up, we can knock down the idea that God is merely a more advanced form of sentient being.  God is not a being who is more knowledgeable than us.  He is the fullness of knowledge.  God is not merely a being who is more powerful than us.  He is the fullness of power.  He is not merely more moral than us.  His nature reflects what is good, and that which goes against His nature is evil.

So any view which looks at God as merely a "greater person" is looking at God in the wrong way, and if he or she judges God from this assumption, the judgment comes from a flawed assumption.

The Nature of Evil

Evil is visualized in a dualistic vision to be a positive force, and sometimes this view of evil leads to a distorted view of God, creation and what is good.  Christians do not accept this view of evil however.  We do not think that evil is a positive force, but is a lack or a misapplication of a good God has given us.

For example, a person who is valorous, but lacks compassion may do brave things, but this bravery will most likely lead to acts of cruelty in war because he lacks the ability to understand the suffering of others.  This would be one type of evil.

Another type of evil would be choosing to suppress something which a person possesses at the wrong time.  The idea of seeking to improve the prosperity of a nation one rules is generally a good thing.  However, if this desire comes at the expense of depriving other nations of their own prosperity, freedom or life, it is generally considered evil.  Hence there is a difference between a nation which seeks to improve its infrastructure and creates mutually beneficial trade with neighbors on one hand and the invasion of Poland in 1939 for Lebensraum.

Because of this, we do not see the Devil as an evil being who was created evil by God.  The devil is not some sort of evil God.  Rather, we consider him a rebellious being, who because of a willful choice to use the gifts God had given Him, put Himself in rebellion with God.

As I mentioned above, nobody chooses evil because they want to do evil (unless the person is extremely disordered), but because they see a good they want while lacking the discipline to seek it in context of what is right or else want what they see as a good at the expense of others.

God and Creation

Now some readers may grumble that I am over 1000 words into this article and have not addressed the Fall yet.  Quite true.  However, before we can understand the relation of God and man, we must show how we understand God and things which are false before we can understand why God created the universe He did.

Principles of Creation

Now, when we recognize that God is eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, perfect, perfectly good and omnipresent this sets some boundaries to the understanding of Creation:

1. The Creation of the Universe was not by chance
2. It was created as God willed it to exist
3. It was not created haphazardly
4. Nothing which exists came to be without God willing it to exist.
5. God cares about His creation
6. What He created was GOOD.

These are important things to remember.  Denial of any of these points would be considered heretical.

If one comes to look at Creation from the view of unguided evolution, there are points which are often assumed which the Christian does not believe.  Such as, one may assume the view of God as the divine clockmaker who sets the pendulum into motion and then left it alone.  Or one may assume that God merely started evolution with no idea what the end result would be.  Or, one might be tempted to take a dualistic view which holds matter is evil and spirit is good.

These are views foreign to Christianity, and any attempt to view Creation or the Fall by these views will be a view which is not Christian.

The Creation of Humanity

With the principles above we can also apply to the nature of the human person.  Man was not a product of chance.  Man was created in the nature God intended him to have.  Man was not created through a slapdash work, but was the pinnacle of His creation.  God cares about man and created Him to be good.

Now, one of the common misconceptions is that some think of Adam and Eve as the stereotypical "cave men" who were extremely primitive and limited in knowledge.  Christians would reject this view.  We would believe that when God created man, he possessed the state of natural grace and being free of sin.  Adam and Eve were not inferior to us as cave men.  They were not merely our equals in the sense of having the same concupiscence we have.  They were created as God intended them to be, free of sin and possessing mastery over their emotions and passions.

The Fall of Man

It is when we consider this, that we can see what the Fall meant.  It was not, as Phillip Pullman has said in his wretched (both in the theological and literary sense) Dark Materials books, a "fall upward."  Adam and Eve possessed the knowledge of good, and had the grace to resist the temptations the devil offered them.

Man was not forced to sin.  Nor were Adam and Eve deceived into disobeying God without realizing it.  Rather, the devil appealed to their pride arguing that God was holding them back from something good:

^1 Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the animals that the LORD God had made. The serpent asked the woman, “Did God really tell you not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?”

^2 The woman answered the serpent: “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden;

^3 it is only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, ‘You shall not eat it or even touch it, lest you die.’”

^4 But the serpent said to the woman: “You certainly will not die!

^5 No, God knows well that the moment you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is bad.” (Gen 3:1-5)

^The temptation was to become equal to God, instead of recognizing that God is superior in power and knowledge.  The "knowledge" of what was good and evil was not the theoretical knowledge as some have claimed.  Adam and Eve had knowledge of what was good, and one could deduce what was evil through recognizing what departed from this good.  Rather, this "knowledge" was nothing more than the practical experience from doing evil.  It's like the arguments today that to understand the evils of drugs, we have to have first tried drugs, pure nonsense which assumes that experiential knowledge is the only form of knowledge which exists.

The devil's seduction of Adam and Eve was an appeal to their pride, encouraging them to think of themselves as being the equal of God, and being able to be independent of God.

The result of this (God's punishment) is not God arbitrarily taking away from man things He had given Adam and Eve.  Rather, the sin of Adam and Eve caused the break in the relationship with God and His creation.  God is telling them "Because you have done this…" X will happen.

Man has chosen to make himself God's equal, which is an impossible thing.  In choosing such a path, and rejecting God, man has chosen a path which makes him subject to the evil he has knowledge of.  It is important that this was not inevitable or fated.  Adam and Eve were free to refuse the devil's offer.  They specifically chose against God's will, knowing it was against God's will and having the ability to choose God's will.

Conclusion: The Subject for the Next Article

Now that we have set this framework, we can move on to the main part of the "God set man up to fail" argument, which seems to be "why did God make man this way?"  To answer this, we need to understand what God intended man to be, and remember that God still intends for us to become.

Of course, what He intends for us to become is not something we can do on our own.  We can lower ourselves into a well under our own power.  This does not mean we can raise ourselves up from what we got ourselves into.

At the risk of getting ahead of myself, this is ultimately why we need Christ as Savior who can deliver us, and why God needed to become man.  It is impossible for a man who has broken the relationship with God to restore it under his own power.  It takes God to restore the relationship which man has broken, though it requires man to repay what He has broken.  This is also why Christians must believe no other religion can save.  No founder of any other religion can do what Christ did.  Other religions have a glimmering of the truth in recognizing that evil exists, and/or recognizing that the Divine exists.  They do not have within them the salvific act which Christ performed for us.

So next time, a look into why God made us as He did in terms of free will.