Freedom and Sin

Evil in a World Created by God

Ross McCullough

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781467464291
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

A freshargument for a venerablebut recently neglected solution to theproblem of human freedomand divine sovereignty.

If God is the creator of all that is, then God is the creator of everything we do.

This basic premise of Christian theology raises difficult questions. How can we have free will if God is the source of all our actions? And how can we explain the existence of evil without ascribing it to God? Freedom and Sin resolves this conundrum through a classical position known as compatibilist indeterminism: the idea that God can determine our free choices while not determining all our choices. This solution, which insists that God's agency is both non-competitive with ours and is not implicated in our sins, has been neglected in recent years but remains the most compelling response to philosophical objections to Christian doctrine.

In this volume, Ross McCullough provides a detailed defense and exposition of compatibilist indeterminism, showing how human freedom is not compromised but perfected by being fixed to the will of God. With a novel re-working of Hans Urs von Balthasar's account of analogy, with an attention to everyday Christian concerns about suffering, and with a consideration of challenging scriptural passages—Jesus's cryptic explanation of parables in Mark 4 and Paul's account of election in Romans 9—McCullough demonstrates a commitment both to formidable theological questions and their concrete applications.

CHAPTER ONE

GOD AS EFFICIENT CAUSE OF A SINFUL WORLD

Wisdom, understanding, and knowledge of the law come from the Lord;

affection and the ways of good works come from him.

Error and darkness were created with sinners.

—SIRACH 11:15–16

How is God a complete cause of our actions and yet not a cause of sin? How are we, who are in some way less completely than God the cause of our own acts, somehow more than God the cause of our sins? To answer these sorts of questions inevitably involves metaphysics: about what causation consists in, what makes it more or less complete, how it differs between Creator and creature in the acts that creatures perform. This chapter will therefore have a certain technical character that occasionally verges on the infelicitous; not only must it adopt a metaphysic, but it also must extend the metaphysic to cover the minutiae of sin—and since sin is a slippery thing to account for, its mysteries liable to assume excessive proportions, its explanations occasionally lost in the epicycles of our action theories, the minutiae can be very minute indeed.

While I will attempt some simplifying, it is well to keep in mind three basic points at the beginning. First, God is the complete and immediate cause of all that exists. This will imply a rejection of the two most prominent late scholastic accounts of how God causes our acts—that of the sixteenth-century Jesuit Luis de Molina and that of his Dominican contemporary Diego Báñez—in favor of a view that is more strictly Aristotelian in its metaphysics of causation. Here the twentieth-century Jesuit Bernard Lonergan is particularly helpful. This position will ground the compatibilism suggested already in the introduction: that our free acts are compatible with God’s predetermination of them.

Second, evil is a privation, a nonexistent that in some cases—those of moral evil or sin—is traceable in no way to God but is initiated by the sinner.¹ This will imply a rejection of the universal infallibility of God’s decrees or acts, whether these are acts of natural concurrence or acts of supernatural grace; that is, it will imply that God can predetermine our free acts but that God does not always do so. This will require an account of God’s involvement in sinful acts, one indebted especially to the twentieth-century Thomist Jacques Maritain.

Third, God knows all things, possible and actual, existent and nonexistent, deprived and depraved. This will involve a discussion of divine foreknowledge—classically, a knowing that is bound up with God’s making or willing—and the related, though relatively neglected, issue of how God responds to sin. The suggestions here will be somewhat more tentative, as the account required to sustain the rather odd metaphysical implications of some of the options will be more extensive than I can give. (I have here some mercy on the metaphysically disinclined.)

Together, these basic points imply a position in which God causes our acts in all their being and all their particulars, but in which we can impede these acts to make them less than, worse than, God wills them to be. These impediments are not themselves traceable to God withholding the necessary assistance; they are traceable rather to our resistance to God’s aid.

BEYOND MOLINA AND BÁÑEZ

In what does such resistance consist? One explanation—that of the sixteenth-century Jesuit Luis de Molina and the Reformed theologian Jacobus Arminius—is that God’s concurrence provides a general sort of being that is then specified or particularized by the free creature.² God gives being to our acts, and we determine their character; God moves us to do something, we determine what something it is. Resistance, then, is when we specify the act in a way contrary to God’s will. On this view, God’s action does not cause us to cause the effect but causes the effect along with us. There is only one act that both God and we cause, not two acts that work together or some such thing; still, the act can be divided into different aspects that are ascribed primarily to us (specification) or primarily to God (being). This is supposed to avoid both our contribution rendering God’s superfluous (a position ascribed to the late scholastic Durandus of Saint-Pourçain) and God’s contribution rendering ours superfluous (occasionalism).³

All the same, with its desire to parcel out credit within an act here to God, here to the creature, this view fails to maintain an entirely noncompetitive account of concurrence.⁴ Recall from the introduction that on a noncompetitive account, God is most active precisely in our acts. This does not render us superfluous because the act that God chooses to work is a human-caused one and therefore has essential reference to us as cause, but neither does it imply some contribution to the act on our part, like specification, that is not also worked by God. For the advocate of noncompetition, the question at the heart of concurrence is not redundancy—if God works the whole, what need is there of us?—but something more like indignity: if God gives us causal powers, why not use them? Redundancy might be a worry for an account within the creaturely plane, to avoid overdetermination, but that is no reason to apply it to the excessive God.⁵ After all, the theist bases the simplicity of her explanations on the goodness of creation: a simple or nonoverdetermined creation is more elegant. But creation’s goodness, far from being exhausted by simplicity, contains other goods as well, ones that might temper or qualify simplicity. Thus it would be a simpler, in the sense of sparser, creation in which God does everything—and worse. Indeed, strictly speaking, creatures are not needed for anything at all: God could do everything; God could be everything; and the parsimonious ontologists could rest content with no creation whatsoever—a desert ontology without even a desert. But the goodness of creation, far from being upheld, would be entirely destroyed. We should, then, not be so worried by redundancy; we should indeed be no more worried than is the God to whose goodness creatures add nothing.

The Molinist account of concurrence therefore requires modification, to put God behind our specification of the act as well as the act’s general being—the specification, too, is part of the act’s actuality and so also existence in the full sense. God does not just contribute an unspecified sort of existence, whether that is conceived as a “‘maximally neutral’ property or ‘on/off switch’”⁶ that is added to the Aristotelian categories (as if the merely possible things described by the categories have no commerce with being until they are made actual) or the sort of thing that is at the top of the system of categories, abstracted from all difference, awaiting our specifying activity into categorically distinguishable entities. No: God does the whole of the thing. As Lonergan says, “the transcendental notions are not abstract but comprehensive: they intend everything about everything.”⁷

Obviously I am using “being” or “actuality” here in an older sense, or in several connected older senses. Roughly speaking, “being” in the first place indicates what makes something actual as opposed to merely possible; it is the existence added to a thing’s essence to make it real. In the second place, since you need fully specified properties in order to be the sort of thing that can be made actual—even God cannot create animal as such but only particular animals—the specification of a thing’s properties, and especially the addition of differentiae by which it is essentially and not merely accidentally constituted, is a step on the way toward realization and so counts as adding being. The particular is more real, exists more in this sense, than the universal. In the third place, since some things differ from others on the basis of having positive properties that the others do not—one individual might have knowledge that another lacks; one species might have rationality where another merely has consciousness—those that contain more positive properties can be said to exist more. (This is of course dependent on an account of ontologically positive properties, to explain, for example, why knowledge counts as a thing and ignorance as a lack rather than the other way around.) To some extent, the hierarchy of being was understood in these terms, moving from the corporeal that lacks life (rocks) to the living that lacks locomotion (trees) to the locomotive animal that lacks rationality (lizards) and so on.⁸ There is a special way in which this third sense of “being” combines with the first sense in order to suggest a fourth meaning of the term. For an individual might be said to exist less by lacking even extraneous properties so long as they are positive—for instance, knowledge of what happened on May 4, 1675. But there is a special sense in which an individual exists less by lacking those positive properties that contribute to its flourishing. For things pass out of existence as it were slowly before doing so all at once: the sickly oak is approaching nonexistence in a way that the healthy oak is not, not in a temporal sense (the sick oak might recover, the healthy oak might be chopped down tomorrow) but in an ontological one. In this sense, the flourishing individual is said to exist more than the sickly: not just that it has some positive properties that the other lacks, but that these positive properties remove it further from nonexistence, from returning to the merely possible. And this idea of being as flourishing is the ground for counting evil as a privation.

One way to put the problem with Molina, then, is that his God is present only by means of an unspecified being, and his God is found only by abstraction, by filtering out what characterizes us or moving up the ladder of genera until we reach the Summit. The godlikeness of the act is its unspecified being; so also the godlikeness of us is to be found in what is unspecified. But this would be a kind of Eckhartian mistake, even if it is not finally Eckhart’s; it would see godlikeness as a loss of differentiation and finally of self.

We should instead heed our Aristotelian instincts here, though the Aristotelian legacy is sometimes ambivalent on this point: specifics add being; concrete particulars are more actual, more perfect—better and more beautiful—than abstractions. The Porphyrian tree branches upward, and we are closer to the Summit at its leaf-tips than at its root. And this means that God who is the source of such being is most present precisely in the specifics of the act. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are the measure and source of actuality in every sense: not just of the actual over against the possible but also of the particular over against the universal, of the more realized member of a kind over against the less realized (the flourishing as against the sickly oak), and of the higher on the chain of being over against the lower.

We should not follow Molina so much as his fellow Jesuit Robert Bellarmine, then, in holding that God is the source of all being (ostendamus nihil omnino fieri sine Deo), including specification; that some choices are not predetermined by God’s concurrence; and that this is so because we are able to “introduce” defects or nonbeing into the being to which the Spirit moves us, a sort of negative determination of the will (negativa quaedem determinatio) that is not itself predetermined by God’s provision, or not, of assistance.⁹ This also happens to be the line of those doctors of the Catholic Church most directly involved in the de auxiliis controversy.¹⁰ Its most extensive defenders in the twentieth century include Francisco Marín-Sola, Jacques Maritain, and William Most.¹¹

The standard form of this defense appeals to physical premotion, which is the Banezian account of how God moves our will to act. On this view, God moves us by a created “motion” logically antecedent to our will’s causing the effect. This motion represents the reception of God’s movement in the creature, and as such “does not have being as a natural thing does, although it does have intentional being” or esse viale (a sort of via-tific being).¹² For the predeterministic Thomist, this motion infallibly causes our causing in all its particulars; it is efficacious of itself. For the nonpredeterministic Thomist, the motion can be (but is not necessarily) resistible: we can destroy or nihilate it, or some part of it, as it is received in us.

The most influential critiques of physical premotion have come not just from the Molinists but, more recently, from Lonergan and those following in his wake.¹³ If the Molinist account of concurrence undermines the sense in which God is a complete cause of our acts—the cause of every aspect of their existence—the Banezian account undermines the sense in which God is their immediate cause.¹⁴ One of the Christian adaptations of Neoplatonism was to emphasize God’s direct control over every effect, not just the presence of the One felt through a cascade of mediating powers; and premotions reintroduce, in however slight or spectral a way, some shadow of those interposed gods. A premotion is not a demiurge, to be sure, but it is a hemi-demi-semi-urge, a ghost of an intermediary prompting us to act. On the Lonerganian view, by contrast, concurrence is an instance of, and not distinct from, creation; it is just the creation of our acts. We do not need some special or supplementary account of how God creates actions on top of our account of how God creates agents, and just as God’s creation of agents is unmediated, so is God’s creation of actions. God moving us to act just is God creating the action in us; there is no other entity, no premotion, besides the act itself.¹⁵ If one problem with the Molinists is that they are too worried about redundancy (if God does all of it, then what do we do?), the problem with the Banezians is that they are not worried about it enough (why posit an extra being behind every act?).

Notice two implications of this directness, paired in a kind of paradox. The first is that, even where God is said to predetermine our acts, the predetermination is not going to meet the standard definition of theological compatibilism. The reason, as Matthews Grant has pointed out, is that there is nothing here that qualifies as a sufficient antecedent cause of our actions, a cause whose presence is antecedent to and guarantees the outcome of our choice.¹⁶ God is not such a cause because God’s presence is compatible with any number of outcomes, including that outcome in which no creatures at all exist. And “God’s causation of the act” is not such a cause, because God’s causation of the act is not some antecedently existing reality, like a premotion, that produces the act, but just is or at least includes the act itself. So on the standard definition of the term, this will qualify as a kind of libertarianism.

The second implication of this directness is that there is no longer any motion for us to destroy or resist or nihilate. God’s performing the act just is the act; if it happens, then it would seem that God did it, and if it does not, that God did not. Without premotion, we do not seem to have the ontological space to mark the difference between an infallible motion, which produces its effect without fail, and a negatable motion, whose failure is a possibility.¹⁷ The difference cannot be on the side of God, since God is unchanging; the difference cannot be on the side of the creature, since the creature just is the act.

So we have a kind of strangeness here, that this view seems to imply both a kind of libertarianism and a kind of predetermination—whereas I have promised a kind of compatibilism and a kind...