Systematic Theology (Volume 1 of 3)

Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 133-188, gives a good definition of this fourth kind of freedom: “Freedom is self-determination by universal ideals. Limiting our ends to those of family or country is a refined or idealized selfishness. Freedom is self-determination by universal love for man or by the kingdom of God. But the free man must then be dependent on God in everything, because the kingdom of God is a revelation of God.” John Caird, Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 1:133—“In being determined by God we are self-determined; i. e., determined by nothing alien to us, but by our noblest, truest self. The universal life lives in us. The eternal consciousness becomes our own; for ‘he that abideth in love abideth in God and God abideth in him’(1 John 4:16).”

“There is a liberty, unsung By poets and by senators unpraised, Which monarchs cannot grant nor all the powers Of earth and hell confederate take away; A liberty which persecution, fraud, Oppressions, prisons, have no power to bind; Which whoso tastes can be enslaved no more. 'T is liberty of heart, derived from heaven, Bought with his blood who gave it to mankind, And sealed with the same token.” Robert Herrick: “Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take That for a hermitage. If I have freedom in my love, And in my soul am free, Angels alone that soar above Enjoy such liberty.”

A more full discussion of the doctrine of the Will is given under Anthropology, Vol. II. It is sufficient here to say that the Arminian objections to the decrees arise almost wholly from erroneously conceiving of freedom as the will's power to decide, in any given case, against its own character and all the motives brought to bear upon it. As we shall hereafter see, this is practically to deny that man has character, or that the will by its right or wrong moral action gives to itself, as well as to the intellect and affections, a permanent bent or predisposition to good or evil. It is to extend the power of contrary choice, a power which belongs to the sphere of transient volition, over all those permanent states of intellect, affection, and will which we call the moral character, and to say that we can change directly by a single volition that which, as a matter of fact, we can change only indirectly through process and means. Yet even this exaggerated view of freedom would seem not to exclude God's decrees, or prevent a practical reconciliation of the Arminian and Calvinistic views, so long as the Arminian grants God's foreknowledge of free human acts, and the Calvinist grants that God's decree of these acts is not necessarily a decree that God will efficiently produce them. For a close approximation of the two views, see articles by Raymond and by A. A. Hodge, respectively, on the Arminian and the Calvinistic Doctrines of the Will, in McClintock and Strong's Cyclopædia, 10:989, 992.

We therefore hold to the certainty of human action, and so part company with the Arminian. We cannot with Whedon (On the Will), and Hazard (Man a Creative First Cause), attribute to the will the freedom of indifference, or the power to act without motive. We hold with Calderwood, Moral Philosophy, 188, that action without motive, or an act of pure will, is unknown in consciousness (see, however, an inconsistent statement of Calderwood on page 188 of the same work). Every future human act will not only be performed with a motive, but will certainly be one thing rather than another; and God knows what it will be. Whatever may be the method of God's foreknowledge, and whether it be derived from motives or be intuitive, that foreknowledge presupposes God's decree to create, and so presupposes the making certain of the free acts that follow creation.

But this certainty is not necessity. In reconciling God's decrees with human freedom, we must not go to the other extreme, and reduce human freedom to mere determinism, or the power of the agent to act out his character in the circumstances which environ him. Human action is not simply the expression of previously dominant affections; else Neither Satan nor Adam could have fallen, nor could the Christian ever sin. We therefore part company with Jonathan Edwards and his Treatise on the Freedom of the Will, as well as with the younger Edwards (Works, 1:420), Alexander (Moral Science, 107), and Charles Hodge (Syst. Theology, 2:278), all of whom follow Jonathan Edwards in identifying sensibility with the will, in regarding affections as the causes of volitions, and in speaking of the connection between motive and action as a necessary one. We hold, on the contrary, that sensibility and will are two distinct powers, that affections are occasions but never causes of volitions, and that, while motives may infallibly persuade, they never compel the will. The power to make the decision other than it is resides in the will, though it may never be exercised. With Charnock, the Puritan (Attributes, 1:448-450), we say that “man hath a power to do otherwise than that which God foreknows he will do.” Since, then, God's decrees are not executed by laying compulsion upon human wills, they are not inconsistent with man's freedom. See Martineau, Study, 2:237, 249, 258, 261; also article by A. H. Strong, on Modified Calvinism, or Remainders of Freedom in Man, in Baptist Review, 1883:219-243; reprinted in the author's Philosophy and Religion, 114-128.

Dr. Duryea: “The way of life has two fences. There is an Arminian fence to keep us out of Fatalism; and there is a Calvinistic fence to keep us out of Pelagianism. Some good brethren like to walk on the fences. But it is hard in that way to keep one's balance. And it is needless, for there is plenty of room between the fences. For my part I prefer to walk in the road.” Archibald Alexander's statement is yet better: “Calvinism is the broadest of systems. It regards the divine sovereignty and the freedom of the human will as the two sides of a roof which come together at a ridgepole above the clouds. Calvinism accepts both truths. A system which denies either one of the two has only half a roof over its head.”

Spurgeon, Autobiography, 1:176, and The Best Bread, 109—“The system of truth revealed in the Scriptures is not simply one straight line but two, and no man will ever get a right view of the gospel until he knows how to look at the two lines at once.... These two facts [of divine sovereignty and of human freedom] are parallel lines; I cannot make them unite, but you cannot make them cross each other.” John A. Broadus: “You can see only two sides of a building at once; if you go around it, you see two different sides, but the first two are hidden. This is true if you are on the ground. But if you get up upon the roof or in a balloon, you can see that there are four sides, and you can see them all together. So our finite minds can take in sovereignty and freedom alternately, but not simultaneously. God from above can see them both, and from heaven we too may be able to look down and see.”

An ungodly editor excused his vicious journalism by saying that he was not ashamed to describe anything which Providence had permitted to happen. But “permitted”here had an implication of causation. He laid the blame of the evil upon Providence. He was ashamed to describe many things that were good and which God actually caused, while he was not ashamed to describe the immoral things which God did not cause, but only permitted men to cause. In this sense we may assent to Jonathan Edwards's words: “The divine Being is not the author of sin, but only disposes things in such a manner that sin will certainly ensue.” These words are found in his treatise on Original Sin. In his Essay on Freedom of the Will, he adds a doctrine of causation which we must repudiate: “The essence of virtue and vice, as they exist in the disposition of the heart, and are manifested in the acts of the will, lies not in their Causebut in their Nature.” We reply that sin could not be condemnable in its nature, if God and not man were its cause.

Robert Browning, Mihrab Shah: “Wherefore should any evil hap to man—From ache of flesh to agony of soul—Since God's All-mercy mates All-potency? Nay, why permits he evil to himself—man's sin, accounted such? Suppose a world purged of all pain, with fit inhabitant—Man pure of evil in thought, word and deed—were it not well? Then, wherefore otherwise?” Fairbairn answers the question, as follows, in his Christ in Modern Theology, 456—“Evil once intended may be vanquished by being allowed; but were it hindered by an act of annihilation, then the victory would rest with the evil which had compelled the Creator to retrace his steps. And, to carry the prevention backward another stage, if the possibility of evil had hindered the creative action of God, then he would have been, as it were, overcome by its very shadow. But why did he create a being capable of sinning? Only so could he create a being capable of obeying. The ability to do good implies the capability of doing evil. The engine can neither obey nor disobey, and the creature who was without this double ability might be a machine, but could be no child. Moral perfection can be attained, but cannot be created; God can make a being capable of moral action, but not a being with all the fruits of moral action garnered within him.”

It is possible that the elect angels belong to a moral system in which sin is prevented by constraining motives. We cannot deny that God could prevent sin in a moral system. But it is very doubtful whether God could prevent sin in the best moral system. The most perfect freedom is indispensable to the attainment of the highest virtue. Spurgeon: “There could have been no moral government without permission to sin. God could have created blameless puppets, but they could have had no virtue.”Behrends: “If moral beings were incapable of perversion, man would have had all the virtue of a planet,—that is, no virtue at all.” Sin was permitted, then, only because it could be overruled for the greatest good. This greatest good, we may add, is not simply the highest nobility and virtue of the creature, but also the revelation of the Creator. But for sin, God's justice and God's mercy alike would have been unintelligible to the universe. E. G. Robinson: “God could not have revealed his character so well without moral evil as with moral evil.”

Robert Browning, Christmas Eve, tells us that it was God's plan to make man in his own image: “To create man, and then leave him Able, his own word saith, to grieve him; But able to glorify him too, As a mere machine could never do, That prayed or praised, all unaware Of its fitness for aught but praise or prayer, Made perfect as a thing of course.” Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 268-270, 324, holds that sin and wickedness is an absolute evil, but an evil permitted to exist because the effacement of it would mean the effacement at the same time both for God and man, of the possibility of reaching the highest spiritual good. See also Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:108; Momerie, Origin of Evil; St. Clair, Evil Physical and Moral; Voysey, Mystery of Pain, Death and Sin.

C. G. Finney, Skeletons of a Course of Theological Studies, 26, 27—“Infinite goodness, knowledge and power imply only that, if a universe were made, it would be the best that was naturally possible.” To say that God could not be the author of a universe in which there is so much of evil, he says, “assumes that a better universe, upon the whole, was a natural possibility. It assumes that a universe of moral beings could, under a moral government administered in the wisest and best manner, be wholly restrained from sin; but this needs proof, and never can be proved.... The best possible universe may not be the best conceivable universe. Apply the legal maxim, ‘The defendant is to have the benefit of the doubt, and that in proportion to the established character of his reputation.’ There is so much clearly indicating the benevolence of God, that we may believe in his benevolence, where we cannot see it.”

For advocacy of the view that God cannot prevent evil in a moral system, see Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 17; Young, The Mystery, or Evil not from God; Bledsoe, Theodicy; N. W. Taylor, Moral Government, 1:288-349; 2:327-356. According to Dr. Taylor's view, God has not a complete control over the moral universe; moral agents can do wrong under every possible influence to prevent it; God prefers, all things considered, that all his creatures should be holy and happy, and does all in his power to make them so; the existence of sin is not on the whole for the best; sin exists because God cannot prevent it in a moral system; the blessedness of God is actually impaired by the disobedience of his creatures. For criticism of these views, see Tyler, Letters on the New Haven Theology, 129, 219. Tyler argues that election and non-election imply power in God to prevent sin; that permitting is not mere submitting to something which he could not possibly prevent. We would add that as a matter of fact God has preserved holy angels, and that there are “just men” who have been “made perfect” (Heb. 12:23) without violating the laws of moral agency. We infer that God could have so preserved Adam. The history of the church leads us to believe that there is no sinner so stubborn that God cannot renew his heart,—even a Saul can be turned into a Paul. We hesitate therefore to ascribe limits to God's power. While Dr. Taylor held that God could not prevent sin in a moral system, that is, in any moral system, Dr. Park is understood to hold the greatly preferable view that God cannot prevent sin in the best moral system. Flint, Christ's Kingdom upon Earth, 59—“The alternative is, not evil or no evil, but evil or the miraculous prevention of evil.” See Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:406-422.

But even granting that the present is the best moral system, and that in such a system evil cannot be prevented consistently with God's wisdom and goodness, the question still remains how the decree to initiate such a system can consist with God's fundamental attribute of holiness. Of this insoluble mystery we must say as Dr. John Brown, in Spare Hours, 273, says of Arthur H. Hallam's Theodicæa Novissima: “As was to be expected, the tremendous subject remains where he found it. His glowing love and genius cast a gleam here and there across its gloom, but it is as brief as the lightning in the collied night—the jaws of darkness do devour it up—this secret belongs to God. Across its deep and dazzling darkness, and from out its abyss of thick cloud, ‘all dark, dark, irrecoverably dark,’ no steady ray has ever or will ever come; over its face its own darkness must brood, till he to whom alone the darkness and the light are both alike, to whom the night shineth as the day, says ‘Let there be light!’ ”

We must remember, however, that the decree of redemption is as old as the decree of the apostasy. The provision of salvation in Christ shows at how great a cost to God was permitted the fall of the race in Adam. He who ordained sin ordained also an atonement for sin and a way of escape from it. Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:388—“The permission of sin has cost God more than it has man. No sacrifice and suffering on account of sin has been undergone by any man, equal to that which has been endured by an incarnate God. This shows that God is not acting selfishly in permitting it.” On the permission of moral evil, see Butler, Analogy, Bohn's ed., 177, 232—“The Government of God, and Christianity, as Schemes imperfectly Comprehended”; Hill, System of Divinity, 528-559; Ulrici, art.: Theodicée, in Herzog's Encyclopädie; Cunningham, Historical Theology, 2:416-489; Patton, on Retribution and the Divine Purpose, in Princeton Rev., 1878:16-23; Bib. Sac, 20:471-488; Wood, The Witness of Sin.