The Object of Predestination

I. The Supralapsarian Opinion:  The decree of predestination precedes the decree to permit the fall, so that God predestines some individuals to hell and some to heaven without consideration of their sin.
The object of predestination is man as not-yet-fallen and innocent.

Objections to Supralapsarianism:  This order seems harsh, for (1) the first act of God’s will towards some of his creatures is made an act of hatred even before they were considered to be in sin.  This violates God’s unspeakable goodness.  (2)  Justice and mercy presuppose guilt and misery - but God’s predestination is an act of mercy or justice, so that the object being predestined must be guilty and miserable if God is to be correctly said to exercise mercy or justice towards them in predestinating them (3) Sin would be on account of damnation, which is backwards.  Damnation should be on account of sin.

II. The Infralapsarian Opinion:  The decree to permit the fall precedes the decree to predestine.
The object of predestination is man as fallen and sinful.

This position adequately dispels the objections to Supralapsarianism.  For God’s first act towards some of his creatures is not hatred.  Rather, he considers their sin and then determines to hate some of them on account of that sin.  And on Infralapsarianism, God would truly be said to be exercising mercy and justice towards his creatures, because he predestines in view of their being sinful.  And damnation would truly be said to be on account of sin.

III. Double Predestination?  The Asymmetry of the Decrees

The Moderate View:
Election and reprobation differ in respect of causality.
Election causes faith and, eventually, heaven to believers.
Reprobation, on the other hand, does not cause unbelief.  But it does cause, in the future, just torment on account of that unbelief.
So reprobation is predestination to hell, but on account of an already-present sin.  
“Your loss is from yourself, O Israel.”

(Taken from Aquinas)

So there’s an asymmetry in the decrees for the moderate Calvinist.

God does not cause people to sin because they are reprobated. God in electing some, passes the unelect by, and they are ‘ordained to dishonor’ on account of their sin.

Preterition is God’s act of passing by those he does not elect.  It is not a supplying of unbelief, but a withholding of the provision of belief to the reprobate.  If it were a supplying or causing of unbelief, then it would be double predestination.

IV. Does Supralapsarianism lead to the harsher view that God causes or supplies unbelief?

While it seems to me that Supralapsarianism may be able to accept some type of divine permission, it’d remain the case, on this view, that individuals are predestined to hell or heaven prior to consideration of their sin - so that reprobation could not be subsequent to a subject’s permitted unbelief.  The causality of predestination in the cases of reprobation and election could not be differentiated in the way suggested by Aquinas, and would not be asymmetric as in moderate Calvinism.

“The infralapsarian perspective is frequently called single predestination because its standard formulations represent God as electing some men for salvation out of the fallen mass of humanity and then, not decreeing reprobation, but merely passing over the rest, leaving them in their sin to their own damnation.” Richard Muller

Should We Fear Death?

Epicurus and Redditors say that we shouldn’t fear death - for it cannot harm us, given that, when we’re dead, we no longer exist.  In order to be harmed, we must exist.  But if death is the cessation of our existence, then we cannot be harmed by it.  

There’s a few points we can make in response to this:  First - death isn’t the cessation of existence. It’s the deprivation of our bodies from our souls and our ability to commune with our loved ones and to help them along.  It’s thus an immense damage to us.  

Second, even if death were a cessation, it’d still harm us - it just wouldn’t harm us at the moment of death or posterior to our death.  We’d be harmed by it while alive, for death means that our existence only extends finitely into the future, and that’s a harm for us, for we should continue to exist into the future.  And note that this is a harm for us while we still exist, even if death ceases our existence in the future.

WLC quote: “We are rightly afraid to die because by dying we lose everything, even our own selves. It’s just wrongheaded to imagine a person after he dies and to say that death can’t hurt him because he doesn’t exist. We don’t fear that after we cease to exist, we might somehow be harmed by death. Rather what we fear is ceasing to exist!”

Some Comments on 1 John 2:27

As for you, the anointing you received from him remains in you, and you do not need anyone to teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about all things and as that anointing is real, not counterfeit—just as it has taught you, remain in him. (1 John 2:27)

Given this passage, do we need preachers? Teachers? Sunday school?

The “you” in “remains in you” is not singular; instead it should be “y’all”; the anointing “remains in y’all,” “among us,” etc. as a community - it is communal, and it is the Church that does not need external teachers, not individual Christians.  We all, as Christians, have the Holy Spirit. If we emphasize the anointing as too individual, then the spirit’s ministry would be primarily interior and too self-focused. (Robert Yarbrough for this point)

The anointing and the Word were given at the same time; a Christian does not need any additional teaching beyond what he has “received.” “See that what you have heard from the beginning remains in you.”  So the Word and anointing are tied.  The reason you don't need anyone to teach you is because you've already been taught it when you received the Word.  This is the key to properly understanding this passage.

“You do not need anyone to teach you.”  “Anyone” is probably alluding to the heretics leading the Christians astray.  You don’t need *those* teachers to teach you.  You don’t need them to teach you anything new, because what you’ve already received (Word and Spirit) are enough. “So, when John says they do not need anyone to teach them the ‘anyone’ is speaking of those giving new revelations.”

This heightens the fact that our preachers are not teachers of *new* stuff, but teachers, expositors, applicators, of what we have already received.

“Teaches you all things.” We’re not made omniscient by the Spirit.  “All things” refers to the things under discussion, whether Jesus came in the flesh.

As John emphasizes, the role of the inner witness is as a testimony to the received Word or tradition given by the apostles – “what you have heard from the beginning” – and not the role or source of new revelation.

Supplementary points:  
This passage must be consistent with the teaching authority and office as outlined in other New Testament books.  
John is himself teaching, or “reminding,” in this book.  If teachers or instruction were unnecessary, then his letter would be unnecessary.

The Perseverance of the Saints

“A true believer cannot lose their salvation.”  I can think of two different ways this suggestion could go:  (a) Given the nature of true faith, it guarantees that one cannot abandon it (b) A true believe is among the elect, and election cannot be revoked.

I think (a) is the more interesting claim.  Just by having the right type of belief in Christianity, I’m assured that I cannot defect from it.  But it seems that (a) is vulnerable to counterexamples; people who claim to have had strong belief who nevertheless defected. (We can of course always ask whether they did in fact have the "right type of belief.")  Jesus even seems to affirm that such people exist with his parable of the sower, people who had the right type of belief who nevertheless abandoned it.

But if we just affirm (b), then the doctrine of assurance may be in trouble.  For despite our strongly held commitment to Christianity that satisfies (a), we may not count among the elect. But maybe it's okay for the doctrine of assurance to be in trouble, for we should be worried - as the doctrine of assurance seems to struggle to make sense of the warning passages to believers (Hebrews 6).

I think the two following cases and their corresponding answers will help illuminate the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints. 

The objective case:
    1. God elects, and all of those that he elects will attain salvation
    2. God elects, but only some of those that he elects will attain salvation
The personal case:
    3. A person can come to a true faith only as a result of election
    4. A person can come to a true faith apart from election

It seems that (2) is false on Scriptural grounds - “he who began a good work in you will complete it,” and “no one will snatch them out of my hand.”  So all of the elect will attain salvation. So (1) obtains.

What about the personal case?  It seems that (4) is false, especially if we accept Amyraldianism.  For if Amyraldianism is true, then God would elect any who initially had faith in the first place.  There’s also more general Scriptural grounds to reject the possibility of faith apart from some type of election.  So (3) obtains.  

So we have it that if a person is elected, they will, having genuine faith, be saved and that a person cannot have genuine faith apart from being elected.  

So it seems to be true that it is indeed impossible to lose one’s salvation, both on account of (a) as well as (b).  So we can ask the question from both directions; whether it’s possible to apostatize given the nature of one’s faith or given the nature of election, and the answer seems to be “no” in both cases.  So (a) was right after all - given the nature of genuine personal faith, one cannot defect from it.  The answer is the same in both the objective and personal cases.

Still, it doesn’t follow that this discussion is relevant to practical applications of this doctrine to individual purported apostates.  They can have some lesser form of non-saving “faith” from which they could have apostatized, and still count as “believers” in that broader sense.  Or they could have had faith in something other than genuine Christianity.  Or they may not have really left the faith, in the deepest sense, and will eventually return.  So the practical applications of the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints are far more complex than it may at first seem.

This discussion heightens the problematic nature of Hebrews 6 - for the passage seems to describe true believers that nevertheless walk away from the faith.  But if a true believer is a person who has persevering faith, then how can they walk away?  

The best solution to this is to hold that the author of Hebrews is describing an impossible conditional, ala Schreiner. 

Genuinely persevering means that you’re elected.  Being elected means that you will genuinely persevere.  A false profession will never just be lacking in election - for, on the Amyraldian scheme, God elects people to faith only on the presumption that none will come to faith apart from election.  So there are no genuine cases of faith that occur outside of the sphere of election. 

Motivation and Reasons Externalism

Humean Theory of Reasons (HTR):  Reasons reduce to desires.

Also known as Reasons Internalism.  If a person doesn’t have a desire for something, then they have no reason to do it.

Humean Theory of Motivation:  Desires are necessary and beliefs are not sufficient for motivation.  Beliefs cannot motivate on their own.

It seems to follow that if one has no desire to do A then one has no reason to do A.  

Shafer-Landau holds that these theses lead to the Non-Cognitivist Argument for moral anti-realism: 

1. Necessarily, if one sincerely judges an action right, then one is motivated to some extent to act in accordance with that judgment. (Motivational Judgment Internalism)
2. When taken by themselves, beliefs neither motivate nor generate any motivationally efficacious states. (Motivational Humeanism)
3. Therefore, moral judgments are not beliefs. (Moral Non-cognitivism)

We can deny 1 or 2.  A person can make a sincere moral judgment and be left cold and unmotivated to perform it - this requires the possibility of the amoralist.  Or, beliefs can motivate all by themselves - perhaps normative type beliefs?  Kant took this option. 

Moral Rationalism:  If something is morally wrong then that entails that there is a reason not to do it.

Philippa Foot denied Moral Rationalism in rejecting Categorical Imperatives.  She would hold that what Hitler did was wrong even though he had no reason not to do it.

Moral Absolutism: Some actions are morally wrong for any agent no matter their desires or motivations. 

If we take HTR, Moral Rationalism, and Moral Absolutism, we get the Central Problem:
It was wrong for Hitler to commit genocide, even if it was his desire.
If, as MR holds, its wrong for Hitler to commit genocide only if there’s a reason for him not to do it, and
If, as HTR holds, there is a reason for him not to do it only if he has some desire against it,
Then it follows that whether an action is morally wrong for an agent depends on what he desires.
But that contradicts Moral Absolutism.

And this is the central problem.  So we must reject HTR, Moral Rationalism, or Moral Absolutism.  

I think we should reject HTR.  An agent can have a reason to do something whether or not he desires it.

If one admits Categorical Imperatives and Moral Rationalism, then they are committed to Reasons Externalism.

If one admits that moral beliefs can be non-motivating, then they are motivation externalist.  They believe the amoralist is a possibility.

Commenting on Bogardus

"What if we could put you in a machine that would zap your body and change you at the molecular level to make you a physical duplicate of yourself but with your sex swapped? Is it even theoretically possible to change sex?

Yes, I think there are situations where it would be possible to change sex. If you took at CRISP technology, it seems that one day we could take an embryo XY and swap out the Y chromosome for an X chromosome and I think the thing to say now and I think Aristotle would say this is that this embryo now has the natural disposition to produce ova when functioning properly. Although there was this artificial intervention, still I think the thing to say is now this embryo has all that's required and is sort of naturally disposed to go down the developmental pathway that results ultimately in ova. So that would be a kind of sex change at least at the level of an embryo.  It certainly would be more complicated for a full-grown human, but if the answer is just is it conceptually possible to change sex, then yes.  In fact, there are organisms that do change sex, such as the clownfish.  So not only is it hypothetically possible for an organism to change sex it actually happens.

But maybe the more relevant question is whether it is feasible, given our current technology, for a human to change sex?  I don't think so. It would take quite a lot more technological advancement to reach that point."

(The quote has been slightly modified for style.)

For a successful sex change to occur, it seems a few conditions are required:  The organs must be capable of trying to reproduce and they must be appropriately linked with the rest of the person’s body; that is, the organs should be directed at the person in question’s reproduction.  These requirements exclude head transplants and genital transplants as avenues of successful sex changes. 

Still, given the possible machine discussed in Bogardus, it seems that both conditions could be satisfied.  This would require a genetic rewrite of the organism.  There’s still a way to disagree with Bogardus that this would be a successful sex change, however. For it could be that genetic identity is necessary for a person or organism’s identity . If such a genetic change were to occur, then, it wouldn’t be an organism changing into another sex, but another organism coming to replace the initial one.   It seems quite plausible to think that genetic identity is necessary for personal identity. 

Or, it could be that such a sex change is immoral on other grounds, even though any resulting sexual unions would be permissible qua sexual union.  Candidates for those other grounds:  Discontentment with what’s supplied. Waste of resources (expensive?).  Unwillingness to adjust one’s will over one’s body or circumstances.  The lines seem to get blurrier, but an argument in this vicinity seems possible.

The Jesus Principle of Interpreting the Torah

The laws contained in the Torah are not the eternal law.  They are not perfect.  They are not universalizable.  They are dim reflections of the true law and they often make concessions to the sinful state of mankind - so when we find a critic of the Bible complaining about the imperfect nature of the Mosaic law, it may be a legitimate move to just agree with them, admitting the imperfection.

How can I say such a thing?  I’m speaking about the Bible, after all! But this is exactly the manner in which Jesus spoke about the Mosaic law, specifically in regard to divorce:  For “it was not this way from the beginning,” and the concessions made in the Mosaic law were due to the “hardness of heart.”  But we can broaden the case beyond divorce.  We can see that, once this interpretative principle is admitted, that it can lead to a whole new view of how we should read and understand the Mosaic law.  Jesus was quite the radical.

So mention of slavery, polygamy, divorce, conquest, odd civil code, and so on in the Torah may very well be concessatory.  I think it’s important that we think of these concessions as regulations of already ongoing sinful practices.  The effect of such regulations isn’t so much as to approve of these practices as it is to reduce and regulate an already ongoing practice.  Take laws that aim to regulate abortion, either by forbidding the practice after the second trimester or enforcing stricter medical rules.  The effect of these laws isn’t an approval of abortion, but a reduction and regulation of it.  A similar thing can be said in regards to the OT’s regulation of sinful behavior like divorce, polygamy, and slavery.  

We may ask why God would make concessions to sinful man–why not just proclaim the eternal and perfect law from the get-go? But this is a matter of probing the divine intention and may be beyond our capabilities.  Still, Jesus does gesture towards one answer: “Because of your hardness of heart.”  Perhaps worse realities would have resulted if these concessions were not made.  Perhaps God wished to slowly meld society into the Kingdom of God.  Perhaps God wanted the moral reformers of society to sprout organically, so that he could integrate these men and women as strongly motivated instruments for his Kingdom.  I’m only guessing, but it seems like many options are on the table.  

With this in mind, let’s take a look at a difficult passage, Exodus 21:20-21

If a man strikes his male servant or his female servant with a staff so that he or she dies as a result of the blow, he will surely be punished. However, if the injured servant survives one or two days, the owner will not be punished, for he has suffered the loss.

As the ANE scholar Harry Hoffner has argued, this law was in place to probe whether the master had homicidal intent. If the slave died immediately, that was enough to prove homicidal intent and warrant immediate punishment on the charge of intentional murder. If the slave survived for a few days before dying, the death would instead classify as something like an accidental death, as presumably the master took the effort and restraint to not intentionally kill the slave - but the punishment due the master for accidental death would have been paid in the expenses and time it would have required to care for the slave in that period, as well as the loss of one his workers, for the master had ‘suffered the loss,’ and that would count as their punishment. Intentional homicide and accidental death warranted different levels of punishment to the master.

And, secondly, presumably the slave would have been a member of the Canaanite peoples, known for their avid human sacrifice. The enslavement of these peoples could thus be construed as punishment for prior crime and the Israelites would then be construed as wardens rather than slavers.

Peter, His Concept, and Spontaneity

Here’s my problem:  God’s CCC of Peter - what does it have to do with the actual Peter?  Does the nature dictate to Peter what he *will do*?  That doesn’t seem to give us the right sort of spontaneity.  For a concept is not a substance, and is not the same as causing a state.  So the dictations shouldn’t go from Peter’s nature to Peter himself, but from Peter himself to Peter’s nature.  So God’s CCC of Peter is *about* Peter himself, following his track.  So the CCC tracks Peter, or possible Peter, found as he is incipiently in God's power-to-create.

This is similar to the worry here.

PDE and Calvinism

“I much prefer to say that if free will and determinism are compatible-and if determinism is true and if people do sometimes act freely-then there will, of necessity, be true counterfactuals of freedom and an omniscient being would, of necessity, have middle knowledge." - Peter van Inwagen

Sin is an intrinsic evil.  It is wrong to intentionally bring about intrinsic evils.  So God cannot intentionally bring about sin. So it looks like the Calvinist must say that God only intentionally brings about some good state of affairs that will result in sin, but only foresees the sin and does not intend it.  Some commentators have suggested the orderly and lawful nature of the universe as one such candidate for intentional willing, a candidate that God foresees, but does not intend, will result in sin.  There are probably other candidates.

As Heath White points out, “foreseeing” seems to entail causing and is stronger than mere permission, but weaker than intention.  But, given that God creates everything - the laws, the sequences, characters, effects, consequences, and so on - then it looks like we may have a problem drawing the intention/foresight distinction, for foresight seems to require causing a sequence that results in some evil unintentionally, but if God is responsible for every detail of the sequence, what causes what, and so on, then it seems like the evil may be bound up with his intentions.

The Molinist theodicist seems to have an advantage over the Calvinist in this sphere - for the CCFs constrain God’s creative ability, as he cannot force agents to freely will things. So it seems easier to draw the intention/foresight distinction on Molinism.

Yet the Leibnizian path that I’m fond of also has this advantage, and Heath White approaches the solution in this comment: “As for Molinism, I am not sure the Calvinist can’t take advantage of CCFs. (I’m very unclear here.) Suppose ‘If he were offered a $1m bribe, Curley would take it’ is true. Perhaps God cannot create *Curley* any other way.”

The Ascension

 “Though we cannot say with certitude where this place is to be found, or what its relation is to the whole universe, revelation does not allow us to doubt of its existence.” - Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange

The oddity of the ascension is apparent.  Does it betray a naive view of the universe, with heaven “up there”?  Is heaven reachable by a spaceship?  Is Jesus living on some faraway luxury planet? 

I think it’s important to stress that Jesus was and remains an embodied person.  His resurrection body still exists, and is still a body.  He did not transform into a spirit.  Yet he surely isn’t reachable by space ship.  It isn’t as if we could find Jesus’s body hiding out somewhere in the universe.

So there’s two constraints, I think, on what occurred in the ascension:  (1) Jesus remains embodied and (2) We cannot reach him by mere spatial travel.

This seems to commit the Christian to unreachable alternate space-times.  That seems fine, for science has been suspecting something like this for a while now.

Thomists have speculated that Jesus’ body now occupies an “uncontained place.”  It’s hard to figure out exactly what this means, but I’ve seen one Thomists explain it as Jesus occupying a universe that’s constituted by just his body.

But I don’t think that sounds right. Jesus tells us what he’ll be doing while he’s away - he’s preparing a place for us.  I think this implies that he’s occupying something more far reaching than some weird world-isolate containing just his body.  He’s interacting with other things, I think.

WLC has an alternative proposal:  While Christ retains his human nature after the ascension, he thinks that he loses his body.  He’s no longer embodied.  When the human nature of Jesus exits our space-time, no longer manifesting in it, then it will lack a body.  But when he re-enters it, his human nature will remanifest as a body.  I’m not sure how I feel about this proposal:  If our embodiedness is a perfection of our nature, and Jesus possesses the glorified state of human nature, then it seems like he’s going to be embodied currently.  But this is all very tentative to me, and this option remains on the table.

Still, whether WLC’s view or the earlier view I sketched is correct–if Jesus is not ascending so as to literally occupy some place “up there,” then what’s the point of ascending in the first place?  As Eric Manning points out, the unique and spectacular act of ascending into the air would serve to highlight the finality of this meeting to the apostles. Remember, Jesus had been meeting with them over the course of 40 days prior to this, conversing and popping out on occasion.  So as to signal that this would no longer be the case, that he would be leaving for an indeterminate amount of time, he chooses a spectacular way to vividly illustrate the finality of his leaving.  Given the association of heaven with “up there,” he seems to have chosen a good means to illustrate where he was going, too.