I am trying to wrap this conversation up… but I’ll clarify as you seem to be missing it… YOU , independently, in your own words, asserted your view that there were two different senses of God’s will, echoing if not copying the very view that Luther’s was espousing. Do I really need to quote your own words back to you again?
There’s nothing incoherent about having a wider and specific will about something. A mother may wish for her son to brush his teeth twice every day. But because more widely she wishes for him to learn to look after himself, she might not nag him every time he forgets. Maybe getting bugged at school for having bad breath will progress her wider will for her son, even though it transgressed her specific will.
It’s different when both wills target the same thing. If she expresses one will by asking her son to brush his teeth and another will by locking up all the toothbrushes and toothpaste so he has no ability to brush his teeth, that’s something different. Maybe not incoherent, but at least schizophrenic.
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I completely agree that this is the reason that God gives people the freedom to act counter to his will (i.e. sin) in specific instances. It is because God’s overarching will is to have loving relationships with free, moral beings (love only being possible in a world where humans have an agency independent of God’s). Thus, to realize his overarching will, God must will the potential for other free agents to act against his will, although he’d still rather they’d not do so. Note that this is different than saying God has willed the person to sin.
The problem with “Luther’s 2 wills of God” is that they do propose opposing things as I see it, although if you’ve followed the thread, Daniel Fisher disagrees with that analysis.
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Sounds like Lewis’s illustration…
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 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. That is not what you willed, but your will has made it possible.
…Again… I seem to need to point out… YOU are the one acknowledging that there are two non-contradictory aspects of God’s will. you are not simply relaying Luther’s view that there are two senses of God’s will… YOU are describing YOUR VIEW that there are two aspects of God’s will.
(His revealed/prescriptive will, and his permissive will.)
You are seeing this, no?
Honestly sorry to burst your bubble but no. If you interpreted me as agreeing that Luther’s 2 wills of God made logical sense to me at this point you were mistaken…chalk it up to my sputtering brain? Doesn’t mean I won’t continue to read theology and wrestle with the “mysteries”.
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You honestly and sincerely are telling me that you are not recognizing that you yourself have explicitly and repeatedly espoused your own personal belief that there are two aspects of God’s will - his revealed/prescriptive will, and his permissive will?
But Scripture did not fill in all the details. It did not specify Judas, or any other specific human involvement
No one is claiming that Scripture was written devoid of Spiritual assistance only that the specific words are human not Divine.
Richard
I won’t search back for this on my phone here, but somewhere above, Daniel, I’m sure it was you who spoke of God having a ‘secret’ will as opposed to a revealed one. Which sounds suspiciously like a divided God. Not one who thinks it good for a ‘yes’ to mean ‘yes’, and a ‘no’ to mean ‘no’. Sure, there is the mentioned complexity of willing that someone should behave certain ways while simultaneously willing that they should also have the freedom to not do so, but that still remains an unambiguous single divine will that we not give in to evil. Just because God can make use of our evil and even fold it into the greater Divine plan in which all evil is destroyed, doesn’t mean that God needed us to be evil or willed us (even Pilate!) to sin. One can always find a few prooftexts, mostly in the old testament but some even in the new which, taken in isolation make it sound like God orchestrated the evil choices of Pilate and the religious leaders in order to get Jesus murdered on the cross, but one is forced to violently distort the whole of the New Testament and even much from the prophets of old in order to understand those prooftexts in such a way as to mean that God needs/wills some of our evil so that He can become a forgiving God. God always was already that, and always will remain so. There is no division of the Divine office where God has to choose between being Just and being Merciful/Loving, even if some passages can make it sound like those two are in tension. God is always both, simultaneously and perfectly, even if prior to Christ it wasn’t yet revealed to people (beyond scattered prophetic foreshadowings) how this could be. But after Christ, we would have to ignore nearly everything he and his disciples/apostles teach if we go back to the old ways of thinking that God is the source of evil as well as of good.
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Mervin, there is a lot here, and I worry that I have already derailed the thread enough! Lots of the discussion about predestination and free will was particularly relevant to the question of inspiration, and whether the Bible, being in God‘s words could also be freely written human words, but I would prefer not to derail the thread much more on this topic.
But I would be happy to discuss further. In particular, I would certainly love to challenge your idea that the passages that teach God’s foreordination and purpose for human sin are somehow isolated or rare either in Old Testament or New Testament.
Additionally, I’d be happy to discuss the specifics around the idea of God‘s having two wills. Personally, I think this beyond self evident, regardless if one is Arminian, Calvinist, or whatever: his will is that there be absolutely no sin in this world, and yet there is sin in this world, therefore he must have some other sense of will or purpose, or a higher reason that he still decided (willed) to allow a world with sin, for whatever reason: human freedom, higher purpose, whatever. The real dispute between you and I, or between calvinistd and Arminians in general, is the specific details of what that higher purpose was for which God willed that there be sin in the world he created. But it is simply axiomatic and inescapable that there are two senses of God’s will.
Calvinists do indeed talk about God’s “secret” versus his revealed will (that’s just the common, though not necessary standard, terminology), but Armenians similarly need to talk about God’s “permissive” will versus his revealed will (as I think your were suggesting above)… And I could certainly discuss further, but I don’t think those two concepts are quite as different as you seem to suggest.
But in any case, can I recommend that we start this fresh on a new thread? I fear I have derailed this one enough already. Would you mind starting a new thread and lay out any specific questions you might like me to address in further depth?
Will do! Good idea - though I might also warn, I’m only doing brief pop-ins here while I’m away from home. I’ve got my laptop with me, but most of my checkins and interactions here are by phone which limits what I do. Even the post above was a longer labor than you might imagine, with my clumsy one-finger poking. And it sounds like @klw wasn’t all that interested in this becoming a much longer exchange, but nonetheless, this seems to have a life enough here! Look for a new thread in a minute here…
[I did my best to guess which posts ought to be moved … Sorry if anybodies thread-of-interaction got rudely divided between the two threads.]
[And sorry if I got a bit too cutesy with the thread title there … can make keep it shorter again if it implies an offending bias.]
No. I can state without hesitation that you are literally adding things to the Bible which are not in the text.
This is not to say that God did not know what Pilate would do or that God doesn’t manipulate some people to do what He chooses. Because I think He does that sometimes. I think not only God but any of us are perfectly within our rights to manipulate people who have made themselves predictable and easy to manipulate. The bad habits of sin, in particular, make people very predictable, for sin does considerable damage to our free will. Sometimes its like they wear big button on their chest just waiting for other people to push them. And if you can use that to accomplish something good, then why not?
Yes, it is vile – in every way imaginable. It makes God the author of sin and evil.
Yes and the Gnostics chose to believe in an evil creator. Some Christians frankly sound quite similar to them, like they are worshiping the devil in all but name.
Sorry but I decline to worship, honor, or serve such a god. You can count me out. I consider all possibilities. No problem. But for something like this I stand with Albert Camus ready to defy a god like that no matter what the cost to me might be. I will not be the servant of the devil no matter what name you choose plaster on him, or what threats you use to try making people serve him.
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Well, I’ll save discussing the biblical warrant for these ideas later when I have more time. But let me get our discussion rolling a bit just by stating what I mentioned earlier I find to be inescapable, self-evident, and axiomatic.
I will point out that it is undeniable that there must be two senses of God’s will, and this is not limited to Calvinism. Even the most ardent Arminian must agree that God, for his purpose, choses - or dare I say - wills - to allow things to happen that was “against his will.”
So on the one hand, there is what we commonly call God’s “revealed” or “prescriptive” will - i.e., the ten commandments, the golden rule, the summar of the commands (Love God and Neighbor), etc., etc. I assume there is no dispute there. God commands that people not commit sin. To keep it specific, let’s choose a specific one: He has said, “You shall not steal.” It is God’s revealed, prescriptive will that people do not steal.
On the other hand, God has chosen (nay, “willed”) for a world to exist wherein people commit theft. There must be some reason, important enough for God, that he chose (or willed) for a world to come about wherein stealing would happen. He had (and has) the power to prevent it, he could have steered the course of history differently, he could intervene each and every time by miraculous power to stop people from stealing… but he has chosen (willed) to permit individuals to commit theft. Although it is called by different terms depending on other theological commitments, for simplicity in this discussion it would be simplest to refer to this as God’s “permissive” will.
So on the one hand, theft is against God’s will.
On the other hand, God’s will is that he gives people the freedom to commit actions, like theft, that are actually “against his will.”
Just so I’m clear as we get started… do you have any dispute, big or small, on this point?
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Why not just leave that right there? Full stop. Because to add any “yeah, but…” To that is the beginning of all sorts of rationalized human mischief up to and including the murder of innocent people like the very son of God himself! To be sure… I’m full of those “yeah, buts…” myself. I’m every bit the sinner that everyone else is too. If I needed to steal a car to rush someone to a hospital and save a life, I hope I would have the courage and ability to do whatever was needed. But I suppose that falls under the rubric of loving my neighbor, and making sure the car got returned so that it wasn’t really stealing after all. But even if such a thing happened within the providence of God, at no point would we say his will was altered to be that stealing is really okay; we would rationalize instead that it wasn’t really any spirit of theft that was in operation in such a scenario. The commandment still stands, and stands unviolated at least by the higher law of love.
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Why not leave it right there?
Because thefts happen.
If thefts were against Gods will in any and every conceivable way, then thefts wouldn’t happen.
It is almost a basic variation of that old argument about the problem of Evil…
If God is all good, then he would not want to see thefts happen.
If God is all powerful, then he could prevent theft from happening.
So if thefts happen, then either:
God is not all powerful, and cannot prevent these thefts from happening,
God is actually not good and really for real doesn’t mind thefts happening…
Or there must be some reason God has chosen (willed) to allow thefts to happen in his world.
It just seems inescapable logic… what am I missing?
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Yes. Especially in the context of ID and creationism.
The biological world is filled with creatures that steal. If God designed it all then it is easy to conclude that theft is not against God’s will.
Ok, so what about outside the context of ID and creationism? (since I obviously disagree with these things anyway)
Then of course, you cannot put the use of theft by animals down to God. But I still have objections. I simply don’t think it is about a bunch of things which are “against God’s will.” I think it is about natural consequences. One of those natural consequences is that in general theft is destructive of human society. So yes God gave the 10 commandments to Israelites, including one which prohibits theft. But I don’t think it is about “theft being against God’s will.” I think it is about what is best for the long term well being of the Israelites and ultimately mankind in general.
So what is the difference? I object to this idea that God has some will or plan for everything and thus anything which goes against that will or plan is bad. That kind of thinking lends itself too easily to the abuse of religion for power over others, including making good people do evil things. You just have to convince them something is God’s will and since this is the only measure of whether something is good or not, you can make them to evil.
Exactly.
And the flaw as I have said before is the assumption that God will always use His power to make things happen according to His will.
But if God chooses love and freedom over power and control, then He will not do this. Love requires a freedom of choice.
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@Mervin_Bitikofer , I think @mitchellmckain is making my very point. Even though unless I’m very much mistaken, he has very little sympathy whatsoever for my Calvinist perspective in general.
But unless I totally misread him, he also acknowledging that on the one hand, God has a will that Evil things don’t happen.
On the other hand, Mitchell is recognizing the obvious reality that in another sense, God’s will Is to refrain from using his power To ensure that things happen according to his will, knowing that by so refraining, evil things will happen.
If I understand Mitchell‘s position correctly, he attributes this to God valuing a world with love and freedom more than God would value a world that was absent of evil (thefts, etc.)
But whatever the underlying purpose, or prioritization in God‘s mind, I think Mitchell is simply observing the obvious and self-evident: In one sense, it is absolutely true that God‘s will is that evil never happens. But on the other hand, God’s will is to refrain from doing those things that are within his power to keep evil from happening, knowing that if/as he does so refrain, things will happen that are “against his will.”
Put simply… it is God’s will that people have the freedom to do things that are against his will.
I don’t see how this is even remotely controversial, as obvious and self-evident as it seems to me.
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The only thing which bothers me in what you said is the following.
I would rephrase this as follows…
God’s will is to limit doing things that are within his power to keep evil from happening, knowing that if/as he does so, evil things will happen (things which include the horror and suffering of those He loves including the innocent).
Two alterations here are important:
- It is not that God will never act to stop evil from happening. It is only that He will limit such interventions to uphold the natural law which life depends upon.
- God is not worried about things going against His will, but He is concerned about the terrible things which happen to people (people He cares about), especially when it serves no good purpose (which is not say God cannot make some good happen because of them).
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So you go with the hardcore rabbinical scholars who had no problem saying that God is the author of evil?
Hey, I’ve nailed Jello to a wall! (university days dare/bet)
Thus also Luther and for that matter the East.
Luther’s position is coherent: think of it as “100% by the blueprint” versus “good enough for government work” (or as we said when I was assistant manager at the campus Newman Center, “good enough for Catholic work”), except the second is really “good enough for a fallen world”. That God operates according to that last is shown by the fact that He didn’t wipe the slate and start over right there in Genesis 3.
I would argue that a just God Who is love must have two wills, the one He really wants to see and the one He settles for. Earthly parents have two wills in just that way; why not our heavenly Parent?
Concur, I appreciate those clarifications, that is helpful; I’d find myself in general agreement and see the point of the clarifications you made there.
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The “Deep Magic”. 
For example Ahab in the northern kingdom, who got enticed by his own desires by a spirit from God.
(Or was that Ahaz?)
That’s a very Luther-like statement, though good Martin would likely have followed with a "but . . . ".