Understanding free will in light of God's sovereignty

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AugustineFanNYC said:
But among most of the modern students of St. Augustine the conviction is constantly gaining ground that the African Doctor at no time of his life, not even shortly before his death, embraced this dangerous view of grace which Jansenism claims to have inherited from him. Even the Protestant writer E.F.K. Müller emphasizes the fact that St. Augustine, with regard to the liberty of the will in all conditions of life, “never renounced his repudiation of Manichæism, a step which had caused him so severe a struggle” (Realencyk. für prot. Theologie, Leipzig, 1904, XV, 590).
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Again, another technicality: Jansenism didn’t recognize the existence of sufficient Grace, which created many problems because if the reprobated is left with literally no Grace he can’t be held accountable for his sins and he cannot be “justly” damned.

But still, the fact remains that according to the perspective of unconditional predestination and unconditional (albeit passive) reprobation, sufficient Grace has the only purpose of making you accountable for your sins, since you will never, ever, possibly cooperate with said Grace unless God intervenes directly with efficacious Grace.

And it’s also logical, because if unconditional predestination and unconditional reprobation were true, the consent and even the mere non-resistance to Grace on the part of the elect cannot come from the elect himself, otherwise his predestination wouldn’t be unconditional anymore and also the reprobates would have been reprobated on account of their unwillingness to repent, thus nullifying the claim that the elect and the reprobates are chosen and rejected “for no other reasons except divine will”.

Jansenism is not only a heresy; jansenism is also extremely illogical.
 
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You make a lot of excellent points. Points which I am willing to give ample consideration. It’s just I am not at that stage yet. I am still studying all of this since I am new to Catholic theologians. Perhaps I will let go of the fear someday of needing to have a worldview that is closer to what I learned as a Calvinist, only because of it’s grip that anything less would lead to universalism. I have to study Molinism more but if you say it will not lead to such a thing, and only brings out God’s love more, and isn’t a ruse to avoid a sobering reality, then I would greatly welcome something like that. I am even surprised famous Protestant theologians such as William Lane Craig and Alvin Plantinga (a Reformed Calvinist) are accepting it.

It’s just “middle knowledge” to me sounds like trying to find middle ground between man and God, so as to reconcile beefs we may have with the sobering reality of predestination. I guess I just see the desire to reconcile this with “God’s love and mercy” as an attempt to have our way as well. Growing up Calvinist, I guess I see any theories that attempt to do this as being man-centered. I guess I grew up thinking it should be all about Him regardless of what we want, and what we want to be true. I honestly just do not have this obsession people have with wanting what they want to be true. I want what God wants to be true. I want His will to be done on Earth. The less man-centered my theology is the better.
 
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Perhaps you’re also not being fair to calvinists? While not agreeing with their heresy they don’t rejoice at the idea of God sending people to hell or making them objects of wrath. They too feel awful about that but rejoice that God spares them, and that it was nothing of what they did, so they cannot boast but of what God will do through them.
Ephesians 2 was always a big thing to quote among calvinists. That we were but dead in our trespasses, hopeless, and were by nature children of wrath, BUT GOD…

The rest of it read, with no context, seems to be a home run for Calvinists. The despair is before the BUT, and the rejoicing is after the But God part.
 
From a catholic point of view, I don’t think you have to choose between Thomism and Molinism. We can take from each what seems right and more in conformity with the official teaching of the Church and Holy Scripture, a kind of synthesis like. In talking about Thomism or Molinism also, I think we need to distinguish between what St Thomas, for example, actually wrote and taught and various Thomistic schools of thought and interpreters of his in which it is possible that the interpreters teach some point of doctrine that St Thomas may not have actually taught or believed. I think the solution to the problem at hand here can be explained according to the doctrine of St Thomas minus some texts of his most notably his interpretation of Romans 8:28 - 9:24 in which he was heavily influenced by Augustine’s interpretation.

The Molinists laid more emphasis on the autonomous freedom of the will than the Thomist school of Domingo Banez and in the 20th century represented by Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange. For the Molinists or the Jesuit school, or at least some of them probably Molina himself I think, grace was made efficacious by the will’s consent or non-resistance to it. At least some autonomous or real freedom of the will I believe is something good we can take from the Molinists. I mean, the Church and Scripture do teach that we have free will. From the Thomists, we can take the physical premotion of the will which is an effect of grace anyway but not the strict distinction between efficacious and sufficient grace as they understand it. St Thomas himself did not explicitly make this distinction. In a word, according to God’s ordinary providence and bestowal of grace, the effectiveness of grace is conditional upon whether we resist it or not, we need to freely cooperate with his grace as the CCC says. And these graces can be more or less powerful in attracting the will. I also do not rule out as probably no theologian would that God can infallibly move a human will to accept his grace though Fr Most calls this secondary freedom.

I think it is obvious that autonomous freedom of the will does not necessitate universalism. I don’t think the idea of universalism is scripturally supported either with angels or human beings or with the brute facts of human history and historical figures or present day humanity. I think Jesus himself said something like ‘the eternal fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels.’ Many other texts of scripture could be quoted involving angels or humans, for example, Noah and the Flood.
 
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(continued)

Robert has mentioned Fr Most a few times in his posts. Are you famaliar with his book ‘Grace, Predestination, and the Salvific Will of God’? I think this is an outstanding book on these doctrines which Fr Most considers throughout the history of the Church. I highly recommend it. That our eternal destiny is in our hands so to speak in some real manner, though not independently of God obviously as we are dependent on his grace and essentially everything else, I think is the only thing that makes sense of this world, the Bible, and concepts such as praise and blame, merit and demerit, reward and punishment, moral good and evil, commandments and counsels, and such like. Fr Most argues even quoting St Thomas, that it is within our power of free will that we can either resist or not resist God’s grace which is actually a teaching of the Council of Trent as well as the CCC. By our resistance or non-resistance, God’s grace is either made effective in us or not. Fr Most argues that this resistance or non-resistance of ours are ontological zeros so that God’s causality doesn’t need to come into play here.

In his book, Fr Most quotes a lot of the fathers of the Church. I believe he makes the point that among all the fathers Augustine’s sort of hard line view on predestination concerning the good and the wicked in various texts of his was peculiar. I mean, the other fathers for the most part did not share his view which I think is telling. We can’t just focus on Augustine and ignore the other fathers of the Church. Augustine, of course, is arguably the greatest of the fathers and one of the greatest exegetes of scripture that the Church has had. I love reading his writings, he had a tremendous penetrating intellect. Sometimes I think that I’m reading the thought of the Holy Spirit himself as I read his commentaries and exegesis of Holy Scripture. However, he was not infallible in everything he wrote and the Church has never officially adopted his sort of hard line stance concerning the predestination or reprobation of the good and bad from some of his works. Actually, I don’t think Augustine was very clear on this anyway, kind of wavering here and there in various works. No wonder though as it has been a very great mystery for the Church’s theologians in one way or another throughout most of the Church’s history.

Link to Fr. Most’s book:
https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/most/getwork.cfm?worknum=214

The CCC says very little on the subject of predestination in relation to human freedom but in one sentence I think it sums up what the Church has officially stated on the matter and which Fr Most’s book agrees with, namely, ‘In God’s eternal plan of predestination, he has included in it each person’s free response to his grace’.
 
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OP. One of the best explanations I have heard on Calvin, predestination and free will and then how the Catholic Church sees these things is by Dr David Anders in the Called to Communion programmes produced by EWTN. It is a question that comes up every two/three weeks so either listen to the programmes or call in yourself and ask your question. The programmes are on their website, radiostations and Youtube.
 
AugustineFanNYC said:
Calvinism sort of trains you to take no prisoners and the talk of “love” and “God’s mercy” means nothing (I embellish of course) in light of stressing God’s sovereignty and how you should be so lucky, and get on your knees everyday that He chose you and not the guy next to you.
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Eh, yeah.

The problem is when someone you deeply love doesn’t seem to be a predestined, and the thought of this person existing only to satisfy God’s wrath in Hell (as i said, whether God directly wants to damn you or simply doesn’t want to save you, your odds are exactly the same), the thought of this person having born reprobate “for no reason except the divine will” is soul crushing.
 
The church often emphasizes the freedom of the will to the extent that it ignored mans natural weaknesses and the fact that we can never be certain that we will attain salvation because we have a weakness thanks to original sin that means that sinning is often more easy than avoiding sin. While it is of course possible to avoid sin it is often a fact that we will slip in and out of mortal sin during the course of our lives. What the church teaches is that Edward who dies in a state of mortal sin after having looked at a porn site goes to hell even though he went to confession every 2 weeks while Robert who never went to confession and often looked at porn sites decided to go to confession one day and the day after he was killed in a plane crash and went to heaven because he was in a state of grace. Is this unfair? St Thomas Aquinas simply said that why god draws one sinner to him and not the other is something that we should not question unless we be judged ourselves.
 
oliver109 said:
What the church teaches is that Edward who dies in a state of mortal sin after having looked at a porn site goes to hell even though he went to confession every 2 weeks while Robert who never went to confession and often looked at porn sites decided to go to confession one day and the day after he was killed in a plane crash and went to heaven because he was in a state of grace. Is this unfair?
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Well doesn’t the church believe in a sort of perseverance of the saints (or elect)?

Aquinas (and even Molina) said this grace always ensures that a person will persevere. [Aquinas said it always saves a person because of the kind of grace it is; Molina said it always saves a person because God only gives it to those whom he knows will respond to it. But the effect is the same: The gift of final perseverance always works]. Aquinas said, “Predestination [to final salvation] most certainly and infallibly takes effect.” [ST I:23:6.]. But not all who come to God receive this grace.

Aquinas said the gift of final perseverance is “the abiding in good to the end of life. In order to have this perseverance man . . . needs the divine assistance guiding and guarding him against the attacks of the passions . . . [A]fter anyone has been justified by grace, he still needs to beseech God for the aforesaid gift of perseverance, that he may be kept from evil till the end of life. For to many grace is given to whom perseverance in grace is not given.” [ST I:II:109:10].

https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/a-tiptoe-through-tulip
 
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oliver109 said:
What the church teaches is that Edward who dies in a state of mortal sin after having looked at a porn site goes to hell even though he went to confession every 2 weeks while Robert who never went to confession and often looked at porn sites decided to go to confession one day and the day after he was killed in a plane crash and went to heaven because he was in a state of grace
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The Church doesn’t “teach” this, you are wrong. The Church doesn’t know if God gives to Edward the chance to repent or not, so no, this is not a teaching of the Church, this is only your own opinion.
 
@ oliver109

Just to clarify, you are free to have that opinion, it is not explicitly condemned by the Church.

But you people (I mean you and the others who subscribe to Aquinas and Augustine’s perspective about Grace and Salvation) shouldn’t talk about these subjects as if Aquinas opinion had been officially accepted as a universally binding teaching.

If you want to believe that God just rolls a dice, be my absolute guest, but it’s simply not true that it is a “teaching of the Church).
 
Thank you for your response, i think that by “the church” i mean a large proportion of priests teach it. Most sermons i have heard preached on the subject have spoken about going to hell as being a simple choice like going to eat at a diner or going to watch a baseball game. Most priests i have heard preach the subject have spoken about always being prepared unlike the foolish virgins as should we have committed a mortal sin and die suddenly we will have no choice but to choose hell.
 
oliver109 said:
i think that by “the church” i mean a large proportion of priests teach it. Most sermons i have heard preached on the subject have spoken about going to hell as being a simple choice like going to eat at a diner or going to watch a baseball game
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Things must be different in America. 😉

By the way, those priests aren’t doing a good service to the faithful, but that’s just me,
oliver109 said:
Most priests i have heard preach the subject have spoken about always being prepared unlike the foolish virgins as should we have committed a mortal sin and die suddenly we will have no choice but to choose hell.
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That’s because they haven’t analyzed the full implications of what they are preaching. If they did, maybe they would change their minds. Or maybe not, who knows, just my two cents.
 
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That is odd. I’ve never heard of that kind of preaching either.
 
I don’t know where you are replying from but i am in Britain, here i would say that if you go to a more traditional church with historic architecture and hymns you are more likely to hear preaching about Hell while i have had priests in other churches never mention the subject at all in their homilies.
 
To be fair to Aquinas and which Fr. Most points out in his book, there is a line of thought in Aquinas in which his teaching on grace is completely compatible with the Church’s official teaching in his exegesis of 1 Timothy 2:4 in the SCG, Book 3, ch. 159. Other texts of his are compatible too for he certainly taught that humans have free will. I think Fr Most makes a good point in that two lines of thought emerge from Aquinas from two apparently contradictory passages of scripture which he followed in one way in the SCG according 1 Timothy and in another way according to Romans 8-9 such as in the ST. The difficultly came in how to reconcile two apparently irreconcilable passages or just leave them as they stand which this later is what Fr Most says St Thomas did following strict theological method.
 
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Richca said:
The difficultly came in how to reconcile the two passages or just leave them as they stand which this later is what Fr Most says St Thomas did following strict theological method.
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Fr.Most’s doesn’t believe in passive unconditional reprobation, Aquinas did. I know that Fr.Most thinks that he is just explaining the true thomistic perspective, but the truth is that Aquinas was thoroughly Augustinian when it comes to predestination.

He sure was a great saint and he certainly was in good faith, both him and Aquinas, but still it seems clear to me that Fr.Most is offering something different.
 
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This is not what Aquinas says in SCG, Book 3, ch. 159. That’s the point Fr Most is making.
 
Richca said:
This is not what Aquinas says in SCG, Book 3, ch. 159. That’s the point Fr Most is making.
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Unfortunately what he said in the Summa is much more clear. Fr.Most is interpreting some very clear statements in the light of something much less clear.

I know his point about this and this is exactly where i disagree with him.

Other than that, his outlook on predestination is by far the most convincing i have ever read, imho. I just disagree with his attempt to sell Aquinas as someone who didn’t believe in passive unconditional reprobation. I think that, when it comes to the correct interpretation of Aquinas, Banez is right and Fr.Most is wrong. But I agree with Most’s outlook on predestination.
 
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