It wasn't my intention to completely drop the debate in which I had been engaged; nevertheless, there were more pressing obligations that took my time away. Since I have some of it free for awhile, I would like to continue by responding to Chris' Choice and Sin. I begin with a relatively short explanation for denying that God has libertarian free will under any circumstances and continue with a lengthier and more detailed defense of my contention that there is no difference between created and fallen human nature.
Chris begins by asking why I object to calling God's freedom libertarian. I answer that God's status as a free agent is not at issue; the operation of his will is. Granting, for the sake of argument, that the choice between creating and not creating was equal, that both of these options were so well within the boundaries of God's nature that it could not be a factor determining which choice was made, that, in effect, there was nothing prior to this choice, I would still be unable to say that this choice constituted an example of libertarian free will.
The question is not about any prior restraints on God's decision, but, whether, the decision having been made, his will could have [been] operated contrary to it. The will of any person is synonymous neither with the person nor with the the person desiring. The will is a constituent faculty of the nature. Because there is always a prior reality (i.e., the decision to act on a desire that is within the bounds of natural ability) such that the will cannot be exercised other than it has been, it follows that the will can never be "libertarian free." So long as the connection between the personal desire to act and the exercise of will remains intact the person remains a free agent responsible for his actions. Interfere at this point and personal liberty has been violated. Restrict natural ability and, even though personal liberty remains intact, personal responsibility may be mitigated
And then there is moral ability or inability, which precedes, not only the exercise of the will, but also the personal desire itself. This is where Adam comes in. Persons with perfect natures, such as God or people in heaven, are incapable of sinning. It isn't that they lack the natural ability to sin, nor is it that the connection between desire and the will is broken. Rather, they are morally incapable of desiring sin. Insofar as desire is the immediate and necessary antecedent to the exercise of the will, it is impossible that the will be exercised in a sinful direction if the desire to do so is lacking. The relative strength of one's inclinations is beside the point. The inclination to sin in someone with a perfect nature is zero. Adam sinned; therefore, Adam did not have a perfect nature. Saying that Adam had a perfect nature that was able to sin is not going to work. Perfection in this case, where the standard of comparison is the aforementioned group of people who cannot sin, is an absolute quality admitting of no degree. The most we might say about Adam before the fall is that the liklihood of his sinning was considerably less than that of post-fall humanity. If we do, though, it will be necessary to account for his diminished capacity (or our increased capacity) to sin.
The first candidate is environment. Our circumstances are inferior to those that existed in the garden of Eden; consequently, we are more likely to sin at any given time. Yet, while I will not deny a demonstrable link between environment and sinful acts, I will deny that such an environmental change constitutes the essence of the fall. If it did, then we would be forced to conceive of sin in the shallowest of terms. The only real power in the environment to affect sin is found in its enhancement or restriction of natural ability. Its power consists solely in external restrictions on the exercise of the will. It has no effect on moral ability. A theology that locates the fall in the environment has failed to address the desires of the heart. But this is where moral culpability is located- in that which is immediately prior to the exercise of the will. It only matters that this internal desire is necessary for the will to function. That it may be insufficient to affect the will due to external restrictions on natural ability is beside the point (by the same token, when the internal moral desire is to do good, failure to act is not blameworthy if this failure results from restrictions on natural ability).
There is an even greater problem with explaining our fallen state in terms of environmental factors. One's view of the fall is directly related to his view of salvation. If our sin problem is due to the environment, if it is explained by the fact that, in Adam, we lost access to the garden, then the solution is to change the environment. Whether found in the social gospel of theological liberalism or in the cultural transformationalism of neo-Calvinism the underlying assumption is the same-- salvation is found in the efforts of fallen humanity to recreate Eden out of their natural condition. But even if such a return were possible, I do question the value of a salvation that includes the possibility of falling again.
Our fallen condition needs to be explained, not in terms of the relative strength of our natural ability to sin, but in terms of our moral inability not to sin. The problem of sin is found neither in the environment nor in a faulty connection between the desire and the will. The blameable location of sin is found in the heart before the will is ever exercised. Sinful man, although free to will anything that falls within his natural ability, is actully unable to will the good because he is incapable of desiring the good. While natural inability may mitigate guilt, moral inability does not.
Salvation is insufficient unless it results in the perfection of moral ability; that is, it must result in the inability to desire and therefore to will evil. Because it involves a change in that which is necessarily prior to the will it cannot result from an exercise of the will. The will, because it never has libertarian freedom with respect to the antecedent desires of the heart, would be incapable of so exercising unless the change had already taken place. The only hope for salvation is found in the external and supernatural act of God in changing that which is inaccessible to the human will.
If the solution to the fall must be supernatural, then the cause of the fall could not have been anything that might be fixed naturally. Environment as the explanation for the human propensity to sin is out. And here we come to an explanation of the fall that does require a supernatural solution-- Posit a fundamental difference between human nature as created and human nature as fallen. This is, in fact, the standard orthodox account and one which I was always willing to accept. Nevertheless, as is evident by the fact that we are even having this conversation, I have changed my mind. To see why, allow me to examine the presuppositions behind this view.
First, Adam was created as he was intended to be throughout eternity. That is to say, there will be no difference between human nature as it will be in heaven and human nature as it was created. Salvation is the supernatural restoration of what was lost. The fact that we will not sin in heaven is due more to the removal of the object of probation than to the fact that we will possess an inate inability to sin, which Adam did not have. Had Adam not sinned, he would not have fallen but would have remained in the same condition in which he was created.
Still, this notion suffers from the same problem as environmental views of the fall. Environment is only able to restrain natural ability as far as willing sin. It has no ability to control the internal desire. And if Adam had the internal desire, as evidenced by the fact that he did sin when given the chance, there is no reason to suppose that anyone possessing Adam's nature would necessarily be free of that desire, even though he would never have the opportunity to exercise his will accordingly. The solution to this is to see Adam's probation as a test. If he passes, nothing more need be done. He's just fine as is. If he fails, then his salvation, in order to be eternally effective, must include an improvment on his nature as created. While this is an improvement over the idea that there is no difference between human nature as created and as redeemed, I am uncomfortable with the idea that this difference only comes into play if Adam falls. It's as though the creation of man was such an enormous endeavor that God would need at least two attempts to get it right. This view would rightly fall under Chris' objection that nothing God makes is ill-made.
There is, I believe, a better way. The WCF refers to Adam's probation as a condition or a "Covenant of Works." Implicit in this terminology is the notion that Adam is working, not to retain what he has, but to gain what he does not have. In other words, there is a real difference between created human nature and human nature in the heavenly state, but this difference is a part of God's original intent for man. Salvation goes beyond restoring what man once had and gives him everything that unfallen man could have gained. The end of our salvation is not described by the condition in which Adam was created but by the condition for which he was created.
In securing our salvation, Christ does two things. First, he pays the penalty for sin that is ours due to the fall. But this can only bring us back to our original condition. To gain for us what Adam might have had, Christ must also fulfill the terms of the Covenant of Works. Since Christ has done all that is possible for our salvation his righteosness is imputed to us in justification. However, contrary to what many in the Reformed community may think, forensic imputation is not the end of the story. Even though the declaration of God grants us the right to have our nature translated into a state of perfection, it can do nothing to actually effect the change. This comes about, not from what Christ does, but from who Christ is. He is the incarnate Son of God. The purpose for which man was created goes beyond the perfection of human nature. It is eternal communion with the triune God as a result of being made partakers of the divine nature. While the necessary and logical distinction between the Creator and his creatures must always remain intact, we are, nonetheless, destined for apotheosis.
Even if Adam had fulfilled the Covenant of Works, thereby making it unnecessary for Christ to fulfill it himself or to pay the penalty for sin, it still would have been necessary for the Son of God to take on human nature. The most that we could hope for in an unfallen world without the incarnation is that the Holy Spirit would perform a supernatural work of glorification and thereby render us morally incapable of desiring sin in any form. Yet, while this is a desireable goal, it isn't all that God had in mind. The Holy Spirit is the supernatural agent of our glorification; nevertheless, it is not sufficient to our chief end that he glorify our human nature as it was created. Rather, he must glorify our human nature as it has been united to the second person of the Trinity in the incarnation.
There is, then, a fundamental change in our human nature from creation to final apotheosis. The work of a man, namely, the Federal Head, sets this change in motion. It is not, however, sufficient. There must also be the declaration of the Father, the hypostatic union of the Son, and the glorifying work of the Holy Spirit.
This is as far as I dare go with this line of thought for fear of taking the discussion completely off track. I have spoken of the change that exists between human nature as created and as originally intended along with what is necessary to effect that change. All this by way of contrast with what I have denied, which is that there is no difference between created human nature and fallen human nature. My first argument is this: any fundamental change in our nature, while it may be conditioned by human works, is ultimately supernatural; that is, its final cause can only be found in the direct intervention and work of God. This is fine if we are talking about a sanctifying change. It is, however, an entirely different matter for God to recreate human nature into that which, by design, necessitated sin.
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I am well into writing more in defense of my views on human nature; however, since it is too late in the evening to finish, I will consider this a natural breaking point and save it for the next post.
I have updated my post linking the exchanges:
Soteriology Diablog with Various Interblogolocutors.
Posted by: Clifton D. Healy at janeiro 3, 2006 8:31 AMWhen I wrote my response, it seemed to me that your third paragraph was muddled and confused. In fact, I still think that, but I'd like to get clearer about the nature of the confusion, since it could be that I'm misunderstanding you, and I want you to know what it is that I think you are saying.
In a prior post you wrote, "There will be no marble statue unless someone performs the activity of sculpting. If we go even further back, the activity of sculpting is due to the decision to sculpt, which is another activity. This decision, in turn, is the direct result of the exercise of the will." There you seem to put the exercise of the will prior to the decision. But in your third paragraph above, you seem to put the decision prior to the exercise of the will, "Because there is always [?!] a prior reality (i.e., the decision to act on a desire that is within the bounds of natural ability) such that the will cannot be exercised other than it has been, it follows [?!] that the will can never be "libertarian free". So, on your view, is the decision prior to or posterior to the exercise of the will? It seems to me the decision just is the exercise of the will, so the question of priority is out of place. But even if the decision is something distinct from the exercise of the will, I can still make my point.
In an earlier post, you distinguished between the will and the exercise of the will. Since I like Latin, I'm going to call the faculty "voluntas" and the exercise "volens". Now, I gave a definition for what makes a choice libertarian free. And I presume "choice" and "decision" mean the same thing. I didn't define what makes a will (voluntas) libertarian free, but the obvious way to define it would be this: a voluntas is libertarian free if and only if it enables the person to make some libertarian free choice. The voluntas does not determine which option gets chosen; rather, it makes the choice possible, laying both options before the agent. Any voluntas that ever lays options before an agent in such a way that neither it, the voluntas, nor anything else, prior to the choice itself, determines which option is chosen, is a libertarian free will. Alternatively, we would also call the will libertarian free if it can sometimes be exercised libertarian-freely. Hence, in order to figure out whether God's will is libertarian free, all we need is to see whether he has ever engaged in a libertarian-free exercise of will, or else has made some libertarian free choice, i.e., some choice/decision that was not determined by any prior reality.
Now, regardless of whether God's volens creare was prior to his choice to create or vice versa, one of them has got to be libertarian free. If the decision was prior to the volens, then the decision was libertarian free, because there was nothing prior to it determining it as a decision to create rather than not to create. If the volens was prior, then the volens was libertarian free, because there was nothing prior to it determining it as a volens creare rather than a volens non creare, and if you posit some third thing prior to both, then that third thing must be libertarian free, and on pain of infinite regress, we eventually come to some choice, or decision, or exercise of will, or something of that sort, which is libertarian free.
I don't know if that helps clear things up. I suppose the important point, logically speaking, is the one I made on my blog: if you concede my premises you can't reject my conclusion unless you show me exactly where my argument slipped. Perhaps you were trying to do that, and I just couldn't figure out what you were saying.
P.S. My post on apotheosis in the works. I'm very keen on discussing that topic.
Posted by: chris at janeiro 3, 2006 7:39 PM