Morphemics

Sour Notes

First, a statement of the obvious: my response time is slow. And now on to the post. Clifton begins his third Soteriological Sidebar in gratitude for my harmonization of Gregory of Nyssa and Athanasius. Nevertheless, from what I can tell, his interpretation of this harmonization and my interpretation are two different creatures. My account of Athanasius is this: The Son is eternally begotten of the Father and it is impossible that this could have been otherwise. I did not give any reason to believe that Athanasius taught a “not involuntary generation of the Son.”

Clifton is correct to point out that I place our respective views of the begetting of the Son within the nature/will debate. My own claim is that the eternal begetting of the Son is tied to the nature of the Father. I understand Clifton’s views of the monarche of the Father to be “the idea of God willing to beget the Son.” He objects to this because I shouldn’t be putting it in terms of nature vs. will. The proper place, as he sees it, is in the personal ekstasis of the Father. Just for the sake of argument, let’s assume that it actually is possible to transcend the nature/will distinction in favor of the Father’s person. I’m still left wondering something. Does the hypostasis of the Father beget that of the Son as a matter of definition or because he just happened to decide on it?

Bottom line- it is not possible to remove this question from the nature/will debate. But, as long as Clifton contends that it is, I have another question. What does this have to do with the larger debate? The subject is monergism and its relationship to the will. A significant ground of my own argument for monergism is the impossibility of libertarian free will. Whatever can be predicated of any person as such can be predicated of all persons. Consequently, if it can be demonstrated that the Father, a person within the Trinity has libertarian free will, then we must allow the possibility that any other person may have libertarian free will. If Clifton can demonstrate that the begetting of the Son is a matter of the Father’s will as unconstrained by his nature, he will have succeeded in shaking my own argument for monergism. Oddly enough, though, he removes the question from the nature/will debate. Which leads me to wonder just what, in his mind, the connection is. Either the Father’s begetting of the Son is a matter of libertarian free will, or, whether as an example of the will exercised according to the nature or not an example of the will at all, it is not relevant to the discussion.

Still, despite his quest for irrelevance, Clifton has not succeeded. The question of the Son’s begetting cannot be removed from the nature/will debate and, despite his objections to the contrary, Clifton’s own explanations place him squarely on the side of will. They also create a situation of far more consequence than the debate between synergism and monergism. The point of my harmonization between Gregory and Athanasius was to show that their use of the will could not be the same. The essence of Arianism is found in the proposition that there was a time when the Son was not. If this statement is true, then the Son cannot be God. If it is not, then the Son must be God.

Clifton affirms the necessity of the Father begetting the Son. He claims that this begetting is, in fact, eternal. This is, as far as it goes, orthodox. However, the necessity of which Clifton speaks is only the kind wherein that which actually is the case is necessarily the case. While this is a legitimate use of necessity, it says nothing about whether something had to be that way in the first place. Every contingent thing is necessary during its actual state of existence. But nothing says that it actually had to exist. In denying the premise presented by Chris in the comments section, that “It is not the case that the Son might not have existed,” Clifton attempts to be consistent with his view of the necessity of the Son’s generation. Even though the Son has always existed, this did not have to be the case. The distinction between this view and that of Arius is that Arius flat out denies that the Son always existed. Clifton does not, in fact, he affirms that the Son has always existed. Unfortunately for his case, however, this is an affirmation that, logically, cannot be maintained.

Clifton denies the possibility of knowing how God might otherwise have been. We cannot know, by his account, whether or not the Father might have existed without the Son. This is wrong. The actuality of the Son’s eternal existence proves the impossibility of the contrary. At the moment I am typing this (which must be distinguished from the moment anyone may be reading this) I am the only one in my immediate vicinity. There is no one that I have ever known for whom I can say with absolute certainty, “This person is currently alive.” From my limited perception of how things are at this moment, the statement, “Human person X might not exist” is true. It is not, however, true of me. I know that I’m alive right now; therefore, it is necessary that this be the case. There is no way that it might be otherwise. Even though I cannot say that I might not exist right now, I can say that I might not have existed right now. There are any number of ways that I could have been eliminated before now. Furthermore, I might not have existed at all. God could have chosen not to exercise the Kevin option. My existence could have been prevented all together.

For any point in my life, it is possible to say that I might not have existed. It is not possible, however, to pick any point from my conception up to the present moment and claim the possibility that I did not exist then. My actual existence throughout my life dictates the impossibility of the contrary. Admitting the possibility that I might not have existed is not the same as claiming the possibility that I never came into existence. Why not? Why is it that the present perfect and the simple past tense are not different means of expressing the same idea? First, I have limited the past tense to my actual existence. But I could have just given some dates. Given the propositions, “It is possible that I did not exist in 1960" and “It is possible that I did not exist in 1980" anyone who does not know me would have to agree. They may make educated guesses, but the possibility of both would remain. On the other hand, those who do know me well enough would also know whether the contrary disproved one or even both of these statement. They are, in fact, compelled to disagree with the second statement. The information content of the past tense is limited by how far back I decide to take it and by the prior knowledge of my readers as to my actual time of birth. The present perfect does not work in the same way. I cannot limit this tense to a particular time of my choosing. Instead, it latches on to a time when the contrary to my existence actually obtained. Despite appearances, the use of the past perfect here is not so much about ignorance of what might otherwise have been as it is of knowledge about what actually was the case at one time. “I might not have been” is a concept inseparable from “At one time, I wasn’t.”

If we affirm that the Son has always existed, then we cannot say that he might not have existed. If we say that the Son might not have existed, then we must affirm that he has not always existed. The denial of the proposition “It is not the case that the Son might not have existed” logically entails the proposition “There was a time when the Son was not.”