Divine Will and Human Choice

Freedom, Contingency, and Necessity in Early Modern Reformed Thought

Muller, Richard A.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781493406708
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie chrétienne

This fresh study from an internationally respected scholar of the Reformation and post-Reformation eras shows how the Reformers and their successors analyzed and reconciled the concepts of divine sovereignty and human freedom. Richard Muller argues that traditional Reformed theology supported a robust theory of an omnipotent divine will and human free choice and drew on a tradition of Western theological and philosophical discussion. The book provides historical perspective on a topic of current interest and debate and offers a corrective to recent discussions.

Part I

Freedom and Necessity in Reformed Thought: The Contemporary Debate

1

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Introduction: The Present State of the Question

1.1 Reformed Thought on Freedom, Contingency, and Necessity: Setting the Stage for Debate

Studies of the older Reformed theology, whether of Calvin or of “Calvinism,” particularly when the early modern debates over Arminius, Arminianism, and other forms of synergistic theology have been the focus of investigation, have quite consistently identified Reformed theology as a form of determinism. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the modern term “determinism” was not yet coined, debate over the Reformed understandings of predestination led early on to the accusations that Calvin and later Reformed writers taught a doctrine of Stoic fatalism and identified God as the author of sin—which, of course, they denied. Beginning in the late seventeenth and continuing into the eighteenth century, the language of the debate began to change with the alterations of philosophical language and Reformed theology came to be seen by its adversaries as a form of determinism, even though the philosophical underpinnings of the Reformed orthodox formulations concerning necessity, contingency, and freedom did not coincide with the philosophical assumptions of determinists of the era in the lineage of Hobbes or Spinoza.

The debate became significantly more complex as some Reformed thinkers of the eighteenth century adopted the premises of the new rationalist and mechanical philosophies and argued overtly in favor of a deterministic reading of Reformed doctrine.1 The thought of Jonathan Edwards is paradigmatic of this new determinism,2 and to the extent that Edwards has been identified as a “Calvinist,” his work accounts for much of the more recent identification of Reformed theology as deterministic.

The historiographical problem was complicated even further by the work of Alexander Schweizer, Heinrich Heppe, and J. H. Scholten in the nineteenth century, when predestination was identified as a central dogma from which Reformed theologians deduced an entire system.3 Among these writers, Schweizer also held that secondary causality was so subsumed under God’s primary causality as to leave God the only genuine actor or mover. Schweizer’s deterministic interpretation not only of Calvin but also of later Reformed orthodoxy was conflated with Heppe’s use of Beza’s Tabula praedestinationis as the outline of a theological system, yielding a view of scholastic Reformed orthodoxy as a highly philosophical and thoroughly deterministic system, ultimately becoming a prologue to, if not a form of, early modern rationalism.4

The actual reception and use of philosophy by the Protestant scholastics has been little examined by this older scholarship and, when examined, presented in a rather cursory manner often accompanied by highly negative dogmatic assessments.5 These cursory examinations have often operated on the assumption that Protestant scholasticism can be identified simplistically as an Aristotelian-Thomistic inheritance. This inheritance has, moreover, been associated with the use of causal language—and that language, in turn, has been dogmatically interpreted as indicating a movement away from Reformation-era “christocentrism” toward a commitment to deterministic metaphysics. According to this line of scholarship, whereas Calvin’s predestinarianism was offset by christocentrism, later Reformed writers transformed the doctrine by relying on Aristotle and the scholastic tradition, notably on the Thomistic trajectories of that tradition.6

This kind of argumentation has remained typical of discussions of Reformed understandings of predestination, grace, and free choice. The Reformed or “Calvinists,” as they are all too frequently identified, have been viewed as pairing almost dualistically “the nothingness of man” with “the overmastering power of God,”7 and, accordingly, as teaching a fundamentally predestinarian or deterministic theology—whether in utter accord with Calvin’s thought or in a further, negative development of it. When, moreover, this determinism has been understood as a negative development, its problematic character has been typically associated with its scholastic patterns of argumentation.8

Despite a considerable amount of scholarship that has reassessed orthodox Reformed theology, these readings of scholasticism, Aristotelian philosophy, and the language of fourfold causality, together with the identification of Reformed thought as a form of determinism, indeed, as a predestinarian metaphysic, have continued to be made by critics of the older Reformed theology, whether Arminian or nominally Reformed.9 This reading of Reformed understandings of necessity and freedom has also been affirmed by various modern Reformed writers who advocate a determinist or, as it has more recently been identified, compatibilist line of theological formulation, often in the line of Jonathan Edwards.10 These assumptions about the deterministic nature of Calvinism have been absorbed both positively and negatively in much modern literature on the subject of divine will and its relationship to human free choice with the result that Calvinist or Reformed thought has been described, almost uniformly, by both opponents and advocates, as a kind of determinism, often compatibilism or soft determinism—with little or no concern for the possible anachronistic application of the terms.11

In short, an understanding of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Reformed theology as a variety of fatalism or determinism, despite early modern Reformed claims to the contrary, became the dominant line in modern discussion. Arguably, this line of thought is prevalent because of the loss of fluency in the scholastic language of the early modern Reformed, particularly in the distinctions used to reconcile the divine willing of all things, the sovereignty of grace, and overarching divine providence with contingency and freedom, not merely epistemically but ontically understood as the possibility for things and effects to be otherwise. In addition, not a few of the proponents and critics of the Reformed doctrine of free choice and divine willing have confused the specifically soteriological determination of the Reformed doctrine of predestination with a “divine determinism of all human actions,” presumably including such actions as buttering one’s toast in the morning or taking what Jeremy Bentham once called an “anteprandial circumgyration” of his garden.12

More recent work on Protestant scholasticism has drawn a rather different picture. Various scholars have argued a fairly continuous development of Western thought from the later Middle Ages into the early modern era and have argued that there is a clear doctrinal continuity between the Reformation and the later orthodox theologies, particularly when examined in terms of the confessional writings of the era. Typical of these studies has been their attention to the actual nature of scholasticism as primarily a method rather than as a determiner of doctrinal content.13 They have also recognized that scholastic method was a rather fluid phenomenon with its own lines of development—with the result that the scholasticism of the seventeenth century cannot be seen as a simple return to medieval models.14 Attention has also been paid to the nature of the Reformed tradition as rooted broadly in the Reformation and as developing into a fairly diverse movement, albeit within confessional boundaries,15 with the result that a naive characterization of Reformed theology as “Calvinistic” and measured almost solely by its relation to Calvin’s Institutes has been called into question.16

Several of these studies, moreover, have drawn on the concept of “simultaneous” or “synchronic contingency” to argue that developing Reformed theology in the seventeenth century held a rather robust theory of human free choice, in continuity with various lines of argumentation found among the late medieval scholastics and the early modern Dominicans.17 Nor ought it to be assumed that developing Reformed theology was monolithic on the issue—among the Reformed there were varied definitions of freedom and diverse appropriations of the older tradition.18 Identification of the scholastic Reformed approach to human freedom with the compatibilistic views of Jonathan Edwards has also been drawn into question.19

These differing views of Calvin, Calvinism, and Reformed orthodoxy correspond with shifts in the historiography on the nature and character of confessional orthodoxy, its scholastic method, and its relationship to the older Christian tradition in its appropriation of Aristotelian or Peripatetic philosophy. In much of the older scholarship, the theology of the Reformers has been represented as antithetical to scholasticism and to Aristotelian philosophy and as opposed to various forms of speculation and philosophical argumentation. Accordingly, the rather positive relationship of early modern Protestant scholasticism to traditional, largely Peripatetic, forms of Christian philosophy has typically been presented in equally negative terms on the basis of the twin assumptions that the Reformation set aside the long-standing relationship between theology and what can loosely be called Christian Aristotelianism and that the fundamental recourse, identifiable among the Protestant scholastic theologians of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, to this older mode of dialogue, debate, and formulation between theology and philosophy was little more than a problematic return to the norms of a rejected tradition.20

Allied to the older view of Protestant scholasticism is the assumption, also representative of the older scholarship, that the philosophical tendency of early modern Reformed thought was toward a form of philosophical determinism—perhaps associated with a deterministic reading of Aristotle or, at least, with a deterministic understanding of causality as defined by the standard Aristotelian paradigm of efficient, formal, material, and final causes.21 Leaving aside the muchdebated question of continuity or discontinuity between Calvin and later Calvinism, the Aristotelian philosophical assumptions of the Reformed orthodox have been understood either as developing and solidifying Calvin’s already-deterministic understanding of predestination and free choice or as drawing Calvin’s predestinarianism into a deterministic metaphysic.

Writers who argue this negative dogmatic assessment and the related assumption of a clear break with the philosophical and theological past engineered by the first and second generations of Reformers have been slow to absorb nearly a half century of revisionist scholarship that has rejected the sense of a neat dividing line between the Middle Ages and the era of the Reformation.22 This revisionist scholarship has identified significant medieval antecedents, both theological and philosophical, of Protestant thought in both the Reformation and the post-Reformation eras. It has identified continuities in doctrinal development between the Reformation and the era of post-Reformation orthodoxy, and it has documented not merely the maintenance but also the positive development of the Peripatetic tradition in Christian philosophy well into the seventeenth century.23 Other recent studies have demonstrated the complex and often subtle relationships between early modern Reformed thought and the varied philosophical trajectories of the era—undermining further the simplistic association of Reformed thought with scholasticism and scholasticism with Aristotelianism.24

Recent studies of the medieval and early modern language of “simultaneous” or “synchronic contingency,” already noted as adding a further dimension to the reassessment of Reformed orthodoxy, have raised a series of significant issues concerning the nature and content of later medieval thought and its reception by Protestant thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Having accepted the often disputed readings of Aristotle and of later formulators of Christian Aristotelianism like Thomas Aquinas as determinists, they have argued a major moment of transition in understandings of necessity and contingency that took place in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, specifically, in the thought of John Duns Scotus. Scotus, in the words of one of these scholars, Antonie Vos, resolved the “masterproblem” of Western thought. Vos has also argued that the Scotistic resolution of this problem served as the basis for nearly all further discussion of necessity and contingency through the early modern era.25

Vos’ interpretation of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Scotus, it needs be noted, stands in accord with the work of Jaakko Hintikka and Simo Knuuttila on modal logic in the later Middle Ages.26 Beyond this, according to Vos, Scotus’ resolution of the problem carried over into Reformed orthodoxy as its central identifying feature—in the words of another contributor to this line of thought, rendering Reformed orthodoxy a “perfect will theology,” understood as a Scotistic variant on the tradition of “perfect being theology” distinguished by a more nuanced understanding of divine agency.27

The most significant recent contribution to scholarship on the issue of freedom and determinism in the older Reformed theology is Reformed Thought on Freedom, edited by Willem J. Van Asselt, J. Martin Bac, Roelf T. te Velde, and a team of associates. The significance of the volume arises from the fact that it has taken a different approach to the materials and, accordingly, has quite radically altered the field of discussion. These scholars have argued that the orthodox, scholastic Reformed theology of the early modern era, as exemplified by such authors as Franciscus Junius, Franciscus Gomarus, Gisbertus Voetius, and Francis Turretin was not a form of determinism or compatibilism, nor, indeed, a form of libertarianism. ...