this is another piece in an examination of arminian theology and its implications. what does arminianism require us to believe? what does it teach us? what are the logical extensions of its doctrine?
God Limits His Power
Reichenbach lays out the problem in six pieces. These pieces
include human freedom and God’s sovereignty, omnipotence, omniscience,
eternality (or lack of), and providence. Interestingly enough, but hardly
surprising, he places human freedom as the first and most important piece,
building every attribute of God around this.
A person is free if “given a certain set of circumstances,
the person could have done otherwise than he did. He was not compelled by
causes either internal to himself (genetic structure or irresistible drives) or
external (other persons, God) to act as he did.”[1]
Reichenbach gives two pieces of evidence to prove his definition of free will.
One, our perception confirms this. He says, “There is universal, introspective
evidence. We feel that we have choices.”[2] Second,
we make moral choices for which we are held accountable.
First, as Christians, we do not build theology on
perspective or perception. We build theology on scripture. Perspective differs
from person to person. We all feel differently and we cannot use our
feelings as some kind of “evidence” with which to relate to God. In Judges, the
Israelites all felt like they knew
what was right. The author of Judges tells us, “In those days there was no king
in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17.6). Today,
a doctor claims to be Christian while performing thousands of abortions because
he feels that killing human beings is
right.[3]
Scripture tells us we are slaves to sin but we feel like we are not. Scripture tells us that without Christ, we
can do nothing, but we feel that we
can. Scripture tells us that God leads us (Psalm 23.1), turns our hearts
towards him (Ezra 6.22; John 6.44, 65), and hardens our hearts against him (Exodus
33.19; Romans 9.15) but we feel that
we turn to him or away from him on our own. Do we believe our limited,
fallible, human perception, or do we believe God’s word?
Second, God does not hold us accountable because we are able
to meet his demands. If any person was ever able, Adam was, but he failed. If
the best human failed, how shall we fare any better? We are born into death,
but Adam was not created in death. Despite being created with his life in
connection with God, Adam disobeyed. Adam represented all of us, and regardless
of the corrupted nature of death that he passed on to every person, God holds
us accountable in him. Paul says, “By the transgression of the one the many
died…judgment arose from one transgression resulting in condemnation…by the
transgression of the one, death reigned” (Romans 5.15-17). How can God do this?
How can God condemn all of us for Adam’s sin? Here, Arminians echo Pelagius. If
God holds each of us responsible as he did Adam, we can only conclude that each
of us possesses the same moral capacity as Adam. If God holds us accountable,
we must be capable. But Scripture denies this repeatedly. God holds us
responsible not through some pleasant, comprehensible, philosophical
assumption, but because he is God. God created us to be moral creatures,
but Adam, as our representative, disobeyed. We are responsible to God not
because we are able but because Adam was able, and Adam failed. Unable to
choose God because of this corrupt nature we inherited, we depend on God to
choose us for salvation, and he does choose some for salvation, but not all. To
our human mind, this appears unjust, and unable to accuse God of injustice, we
deny the plain teaching of Scripture: man must be therefore free. God cannot
hold us responsible if we are not free, but Paul believes otherwise. Anticipating
objections against God’s sovereign election, he asks, “Who are you, O man, who
answers back to God?” (Romans 9.20). God says the same to Job:
Now gird up your loins like a man;
I will ask you, and you instruct Me.
Will you really annul My judgment?
Will you condemn Me that you may be justified?
Or do you have an arm like God,
And can you thunder with a voice like His?[4]
We are dust, grass, and insects. God loves us, but he does
not concern himself with our petty objections. We are not free, but we are
responsible. We cannot understand this because we do not understand God. God
does not command us to understand him, but to trust him and submit to him. He
is wiser than us, perfectly just, and far more loving.
After establishing human freedom, Reichenbach defines the
limits of God’s sovereignty by comparing God to some human governor. Completely
ignoring any kind of biblical data, he says
Sovereignty invokes the political relationship of governance.
It implies that there are at least two classes of individuals, governors and
the governed, between which there is an ordered relationship…The sovereign’s
power is determined and limited by [the laws he has created.] …To be sovereign
does not mean that everything that occurs accords with the will of the
sovereign or that the sovereign can bring about anything he or she wants. The
ability of the sovereign to determine the outcome depends, in part, on the
freedom granted to the governed.[5]
God is not a man,
and he does not rule as men rule. He is not limited, ignorant, or sinful as men
are. If God acts in ways that offend us, he does not offend us because he is
unjust, but because we are. Arminians define justice, truth, and love around
themselves and their perceptions, and attempt to fit scripture to their limited
comprehension. Reichenbach establishes free will in order to build sovereignty
around that. Free will is literally the center of his theology and God’s
sovereignty is an afterthought molded to fit.
Reichenbach describes
the novelist:
The novelist creates his own characters, plot, setting, and outcome. All of the participants in the storyline do exactly what the author determines. All have their traits laid out by and have no existence apart from the author. The plot moves inexorably to the end determined by the author. What he desires is precisely what occurs; there can be no variation.[6]
What is the
problem? Do we not trust the Judge of all the earth to do right? Or do we think
we can do better? God has created his own characters, plot, setting, and
outcome. He reveals his “novel” from Genesis to Revelation. Human history is
literally his story. We do not exist apart from
him (Acts 17.28; Colossians 1.17). God knew his plan before all Creation. Yes,
he wanted Adam to sin. He did not cause Adam to sin nor did he tempt him, but
he allowed him to in order to bring a greater glory to himself through this story
of our redemption. God seeks to glorify his name and he will let nothing
interfere (Psalm 115.3). Nothing can interfere.
Reichenbach redefines
omnipotence by prioritizing human freedom. Orthodox Christianity teaches that “a
being who is omnipotent is capable of bringing about anything.”[7]
This omnipotence has limits, however, which in no way impugn the omnipotence of
said omnipotent being. He says, “an omnipotent being cannot create a circle
that is square nor cause another person to perform a free act.”[8]
In the most
ridiculous part of this examination, Reichenbach likens a question of geometric
semantics to a question about philosophy and religion. A circle cannot be
described as “square” because this is how we define the words “circle” and “square.”
A circle has a specific, mathematic definition. A circle is a set of points
that are equally distant from a fixed center. A square has four equal sides and
four right angles. These are precise, easily verified definitions. They can be
measured and established by simple inspection. A child can do this. For
Reichenbach to compare the definitions of shapes to a philosophical concept
that opposes simple, rigid definitions betrays an immense oversimplifying and
misunderstanding of the terms involved.
Any act of the will
is hardly free. Many influences constrain our decisions—our biology, the
behavior of our parents or caregivers, our circumstances, our needs, and so on.
If I work at a certain job, earning a certain wage, and I receive an offer for
increased wages in another city, how free am I to choose one option or the
other? Of course, I am “free” to make either choice, but I am not actually
free to make either choice. I have needs that limit my decision. Prudence
limits my decision.
Scripture tells us
that God turns hearts towards him (1 Samuel 10.9; Ezra 6.22), that he grants
repentance (Acts 11.18; 2 Timothy 2.25), that he writes his law on our hearts
(Jeremiah 31.33). Scripture also says that God renders men insensitive and dull
to his word (Isaiah 6.10), and that he hardens hearts (Exodus 4.21). Whether
God grants men repentance or whether he hardens hearts, he holds us responsible.
God grants repentance but we do the repenting. Moses tells the Israelites, “When
you return to the Lord your God and obey him with all your heart and soul, then
the Lord will restore you from captivity and have compassion on you”
(Deuteronomy 30.1-3). Moses also says, “The Lord your God will circumcise your
heart and the heart of your descendants, to love the Lord your God with all
your heart and all your soul, so that you may live” (30.6). God reigns in our
hearts yet we obey or disobey. How can we describe this? Is this freedom? It is
not coercion if we make the decision, but for the Arminian, it is not freedom
if God had any part in the decision. While the Calvinist accepts this confusing
dichotomy, the Arminian does not. I cannot explain the terms or explain the
mechanics because scripture does not explain them. If we attempt to add our
human philosophy to scripture, we only weaken our theology and we therefore
weaken God. We cannot firmly establish this coveted human freedom without
destroying scriptural teaching.
My actions limit
God’s knowledge. God cannot know of an event until the event happens. God does
not know what I will do until I do it.[9]
Clark Pinnock makes the same argument.[10]
Scripturally, they both speak gibberish. We only exist because God wills it.
Our very life depends on his will. He holds Creation together by “the word of
his power” (Hebrews 1.3). In Christ, “all things hold together” (Colossians
1.17). At his command, fire will consume all the earth and the heavens (2 Peter
3.7,10). God knows the future because God commands the future. We believe we
make plans, but God is the one who plans (Proverbs 16.33; James 4.13-16). We
perceive our “human freedom,” but God alone is free (Proverbs 16.7). He directs
our steps. He knows our words before we speak them (Psalm 139.4). Reichenbach
acknowledges this yet he fabricates this philosophical gobbledygook so that he
can assert his independence from his Creator and his Creator’s dependence on
him. He says that God’s knowledge is “dependent…on the person who is the object
of that knowledge.”[11]
Reichenbach’s god is not the eternally self-existent “I AM,” but the possible,
temporal, “Maybe, I could be, if that’s ok with you. I think.”
Reichenbach vaguely
defines the orthodox position on God’s relationship with time. Perhaps even he
finds his position odd, but Reichenbach believes that traditional orthodoxy
teaches that God cannot act in time. He tries to refute what he thinks is the
orthodox belief by saying that God does act in time. Traditional Christianity
believes that God is “timeless,” rather than eternal. He cannot act within our
world because he exists outside of time. Reichenbach refutes a very bizarre
belief that I have never heard of nor read anywhere within orthodoxy. He says
that since God acts, he must have duration.[12]
“Productive actions are necessarily time-bound and sequential,” he says.[13]
Reichenbach thinks that explaining how actions take place in time proves that
God must exist in time. Explaining his view seems ridiculous in itself. Explaining
how events occur in time, he says
There is a time prior to the causal event when the person had
not acted to produce and there is a subsequent time when he acts to produce the
effect. Otherwise one cannot account for the production of the effect at a
given time.[14]
God acts within our time and therefore he exists in and is
limited by time. He believes that
since the effects of salvation take place in an orderly manner, that God must
be limited by time.[15]
God could not have “chosen us before the foundation of the world if he did not
exist in time,” he continues.[16]
This very sentence contradicts itself. Time did not exist before the foundation
of the world!
Scripture describes
events in sequence not because God acts in time, but because we exist in time.
Scripture tells us that God acts in our world but this does not mean that he is
limited by the time-space dimensions of our world. Reichenbach has taken his
limited, human understanding of his perception and assumes that God has the
same limits. This is absolutely baffling. Salvation has an order because each
effect of salvation has a requirement. Since we are dead in sin, God must give
us new hearts (regeneration). We then believe in Christ (repentance), are set
apart in Christ (sanctification), declared righteous by God (justification),
and will be glorified with Christ. We are time-bound but God is not. To say
that because God acts in our world that he is therefore limited by its
limitations is like saying that because Adam and Eve heard God “walking in the
garden” he must therefore have legs and feet. It is complete nonsense. A
being that exists in time cannot create time just as a being that exists in the
natural world cannot create the natural world. No entity can create the space
that contains him. This is preposterous to imagine. Can I create my mother? Or
my body? Charles Hodge says, “As God
is not more in one place than in another, but is everywhere equally present, so
he does not exist during one period of duration more than another.”[17]
Before the mountains were born or you gave birth to the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, you are God.
Of old You founded the earth, and the heavens are the work of Your hands. Even they will perish, but You endure; and all of them will wear out like a garment; like clothing You will change them and they will be changed. But You are the same, and Your years will not come to an end.
With the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day.[18]
Wayne Grudem defines God’s relationship to time very
differently than Reichenbach: “God has no beginning, end, or succession of
moments in his own being, and he sees all time equally vividly, yet God sees
events in time and acts in time.”[19] God’s
eternity “can be concluded from the fact that God created all things, and that
he himself is an immaterial spirit.”[20] God
must exist outside of time. If God exists in time, then he cannot have existed
any earlier than the beginning of time. He began when time began. How then has
he created existence? How has he created time if he began with time? If God
began with time, then he will end with time. Puritan minister Stephen Charnock
says
Time began with the foundation of the world; but God being
before time, could have no beginning in time…To be in time is to have a
beginning; to be before all time is never to have a beginning, but always to
be…It is as easily deduced that he that was before all creatures is eternal, as
he that made all creatures is God. If he had a beginning, he must have it from
another, or from himself; if from another, that from whom he received his being
would be better than he, so more a God than he…If he had given beginning to
himself, then he was once nothing; there was a time when he was not; if he was
not, how could he be the cause of himself?[21]
Finally, Reichenbach tries to mutilate God’s providence.
Reichenbach believes that God’s purposes can be thwarted.[22] He says
that God has entrusted his purposes to human activity. According to
Reichenbach, God “does not purpose or dispose everything that happens; his
purposes are both general and specific, but they do not include every detail of
human existence.”[23] God
does not want humans to suffer, but he allows it because he does not want to
interfere in his creation. God does not often act directly; instead, he “calls,
woos, cajoles, remonstrates, inspires and loves.”[24] God
indirectly attempts to work his purposes in our lives, and if he is successful,
great! If not, too bad for him.
Puritan Thomas Watson writes that “Providence is god’s
ordering all issues and events of things, after the counsel of his will, to his
own glory.”[25] God must order all things.
How can he place his purposes in the hands of men? We are sinful, impotent,
unreliable creatures. Reichenbach believes that we are free, but scripture does
not. Job says, “No purpose of yours can be thwarted” (Job 42.2). In Isaiah, God
says, “There is none who can deliver out of my hand; I act and who can reverse
it?” (43.13). Watson continues
God’s providence reaches to all affairs and occurrences in the world. There is nothing that stirs in the world but God has, by his providence, the over-ruling of it...Providence reaches to the least of things, to birds and ants. Providence feeds the young raven, when the dam forsakes it, and will give it no food. Providence reaches to the very hairs of our head.[26]
It is impossible that it should be otherwise. God knows all.
God is wiser than all. Why should he let men interfere in his plans? How can
they? God can do all. No one can stop what he is doing. King Nebuchadnezzar,
after losing his sanity, repented of his arrogance and humbly submitted to
God’s sovereignty. He said, “All the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as
nothing, but he does according to his will in the host of heaven and among the
inhabitants of earth; and no one can ward off his hand or say to him, ‘What
have you done?’” (Daniel 4.35). God does not seek our counsel, nor does he need
our help (Isaiah 40.13-14). He does not allow us responsibility over his
purposes, but he commands us to do works that he has prepared, not that we do
independently of him (Ephesians 2.10).
There is absolutely no sense in which Reichenbach is
correct. God at times intends our suffering. He closed up Hannah’s womb, so
that she would humbly and desperately seek him (1 Samuel 1.6-7), and then he
blessed her with many children. He disciplines us through suffering (Psalm
119.71,75; Hebrews 12.10). Reichenbach says that God does not act to change our
desires, but instead “cajoles” and “inspires.” How can any man resist if God “cajoles”?
If God desired, could he not overpower our desires with this “cajoling”? If at
times he persuades to the point of repentance, and at other times with other
people does not, is this not equivalent to him accomplishing exactly what he
desires?
God in no way limits his power. God is God and his power has
no limits. Reichenbach needs a limited god in order to be independent from God,
but scripture does not describe God in this way. We are limited. We are
limited by our humanity, by our sin, by our lifespan, by our physical bodies, by
our needs, by our circumstances, etc. Any theologian who seeks to limit God
does not trust the God of scripture but instead seeks to create a god that will
bend to his will and submit to his sinful, selfish, arrogant whims. God does
not do this because he is wise, just, and knows who we are. He alone sits on
the “mount of the assembly” (Isaiah 14.13). John Gill says, “There is a time
fixed for every purpose; a time to be born, and a time to die; and for every
thing that befalls men between their birth and death: all which open in time,
in providence.”[27] God alone must order the
world, completely and without exception, lest we drag all Creation down into
the death of our corruption.
David Basinger and Randall Basinger, editors, Predestination
and Free Will: Four Views on Divine Sovereignty, (Downers Grove,
InterVarsity Press: 1986)
Charles Hodge, Systematic
Theology: Volume I: Theology, (Peabody, Hendrickson Publishers: 2016)
[1]
Ibid, 102. Even secular philosophers struggle with this definition. We exist
conditioned by many things, by our past, by our environment, by our biology.
Var Narain eventually concludes that we must hold to free will, not because it
is a fact (he seems to lean evidentially toward determinism), but because
society requires it: “Pragmatic humanism must assume that every person bears
moral responsibility for his or her actions. Any other course is bound to have
disastrous social consequences.” Var Narain, “Determinism, Free Will, and Moral
Responsibility,” The Humanist, October
21, 2014. Retrieved from https://thehumanist.com/magazine/november-december-2014/philosophically-speaking/determinism-free-will-and-moral-responsibility
[2] Ibid,
103.
[3]
Amanda Prestigiacomo, “‘Christian’ Abortionist Admits To Killing ‘Human Beings’
In Shock Video: ‘What Does It Matter?’”, The Daily Wire, February 25,
2019. Retrieved from https://www.dailywire.com/news/christian-abortionist-admits-killing-human-beings-amanda-prestigiacomo
[4] Job
40.7-9
[5]
Basinger and Basinger, 105.
[6] Ibid,
106.
[7] Ibid
107.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid,
110-111.
[10]
Ibid, 150.
[11]
Ibid, 111.
[12]
Ibid, 112.
[13]
Ibid, 113.
[14]
Ibid.
[15]
Ibid.
[16] Ibid,
114.
[17]
Hodge, 385.
[18]
Psalm 90.2; 102.25-27; 2 Peter 3.8;
[19]
Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, (Grand Rapids, Zondervan Publishing:
1994), page 168.
[20]
Ibid.
[21]
Stephen Charnock, The Existence and the Attributes of God: Volume 1,
(Grand Rapids, Baker Books: 1996), pages 281-282.
[22]
Ibid, 117.
[23]
Ibid.
[24]
ibid.
[25]
Watson, 119.
[26]
Ibid, 121.
[27] John
Gill, A Body of Divinity, (Grand Rapids, Sovereign Grace Publishers:
1971), page 71.
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