I
invocation
Guest
For Calvin you could be said to use your freedom in similar ways in the determination of your salvation and in the your choice between pizza or salad. God’s Knowledge is the first cause of all things and secondary causes are the way in which God’s will is realized over the passage of time (which of course, does not exist for God in any real way; God is beyond time). To treat God’s causality and human causality as somehow directly symmetrical with each other is a simple category mistake in Calvin.You’re playing in semantics here. God explicitly creating some for destruction, and some for salvation is determinism. Their fate is sealed before they have a chance to exercise free will.
Yes, I understand that Calvinism accepts freewill when it comes to things not pertaining to God, I think everyone understands that Calvinism doesn’t have God dictating whether or not I will have pizza or salad for supper tonight. No one is using it in that sense.
SO, of course you are morally responsible. You did it. And you did it through an act of your own will. The free human will is how God’s providential plan for history and how God’s election is realized for human beings. Similarly, one studies physics to learn how the material word is ordered, but God is no less the first cause, and the laws of motion and the natures of things are the secondary causes by which the divine causality is realized in time, with respect to material things. It makes no sense to deny that it is the nature of the ball to tend to roll downhill even though rolling downhill is, of course, the way in which God’s will for the ball is realized. God knows the ball to have certain set of characteristics and thus the ball is what it is and where it is. Thus also, it turns out that John Doe is elect because God knew John Doe to be that, but that divine knowledge is actualized by John Doe living, freely, i.e., acting rationally, from his own internal desires, in the manner that he did).
It is obvious to Calvin that created things do not have effects on God (including knowledge of who we are). The relation between God and creation is entirely asymmetrical. God’s Knowing is causal, because knowledge and will are one, because God is one.
Calvin’s position is not that strange, really. While Thomas Aquinas, for instance, claims that predestination only extends positively to the elect and that there is no positive will, on God’s part, to damnation, the difference from Calvin is minimal and the effect is the same. God’s knowing will constitutes the distinction between elect and damned. And of course both Augustine’s philosophical and theological reflections on what it means to talk of God, and Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings are formative for the entirety of the Latin tradition. (One might think of Augustine’s “O, happy fault…”).
Moreover, in both Calvin and Thomas, predestination is seen simply as the logical consequence of the doctrine of creation and is an extension of the logic of creation into the particular area of salvation (other issues, like whether or not I eat pizza tonight, is a matter of divine providence). Divine sovereignty is a core idea that runs through both the Catholic and Reformed traditions, refusing to compromise the simplicity and aseity of God.
Furthermore, it is hard to see how one doesn’t hold a position like Thomas’s or Calvin’s if one actually believes in God, in the Christian sense of the term, and not some paganized super-being in the world that could place itself at the whim of creatures. After all, as Thomas points out, when one is talking about God, one is talking about pure Esse or the full actuality of being by which existent things are. To have God and creation be in a causally competitive relationship would involve making God a finite thing. You can misuse the word God to refer to something other than pure Esse (e.g., a particular being that made a bunch of other things, but is capable of being affected by the things it made, whether in respect to its knowledge or in some other manner), but then you are just failing to talk about God in the proper sense.