Professor:

You affirm free will, but as a Christian, you also accept Scripture as a teacher.  What then do you make of Romans 9:19-21, which is often viewed as denying free will?  St. Paul says, “You will say to me then, ‘Why does [God] still find fault?  For who can resist his will?’  But who are you, a man, to answer back to God?  Will what is molded say to its molder, ‘Why have you made me thus?’  Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for beauty and another for menial use?”

Reply:

The theology of free will and divine sovereignty is not my area, but I will answer according to my ability.  I think it is a mistake to view St. Paul’s remarks about the potter and the clay as denying free will.  After all, he is alluding to Jeremiah 18:1-10, in the Old Testament, which uses similar words but plainly affirms free will:

“The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord:  "Arise, and go down to the potter's house, and there I will let you hear my words."  So I went down to the potter's house, and there he was working at his wheel.  And the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter's hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do.  Then the word of the Lord came to me:  "O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done? says the Lord.  Behold, like the clay in the potter's hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.  If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, and if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will repent of the evil that I intended to do to it.  And if at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, and if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will repent of the good which I had intended to do to it.”  (Emphasis added.)

Because of the Jeremiah passage, and because of all the other passages affirming personal responsibility for our choices, I don’t think the challenger is asking “Why did you make me sin?”  God does not make anyone sin.  No, the challenger is making excuses for himself; he is using God’s foreknowledge to rationalize his free choice to do evil.  He is really asking a different question:  “Foreknowing that I would freely choose to sin, why did you make me at all?”  To this question, God answers in the same way He answers Job’s question about why he has been allowed to suffer:   Who are you to challenge what is so far beyond you?

In the end, Job is satisfied, not because God presents him with a philosophical solution to the puzzle, but because God visits him; all he wanted in his suffering was for God to hear his cry.  And so God has visited us; indeed He has died for us.  But the challenger in St. Paul’s remarks is not satisfied by anything that God has done, because he does not want to turn away from the evil he has chosen.

“With the decline of clerical power in the eighteenth century, a new kind of mentor emerged to fill the vacuum and capture the ear of society. The secular intellectual might be deist, sceptic or atheist. But he was just as ready as any pontiff or presbyter to tell mankind how to conduct its affairs. He proclaimed, from the start, a special devotion to the interests of humanity and an evangelical duty to advance them by his teaching. He brought to this self-appointed task a far more radical approach than his clerical predecessors. He felt himself bound by no corpus of revealed religion. The collective wisdom of the past, the legacy of tradition, the prescriptive codes of ancestral experience existed to be selectively followed or wholly rejected entirely as his own good sense might decide. For the first time in human history, and with growing confidence and audacity, men arose to assert that they could diagnose the ills of society and cure them with their own unaided intellects: more, that they could devise formulae whereby not merely the structure of society but the fundamental habits of human beings could be transformed for the better. Unlike their sacerdotal predecessors, they were not servants and interpreters of the gods but substitutes.”  -- Paul Johnson, Intellectuals

Professor:

I am wondering if I could ask your opinion about pragmatism.  I get weary of hearing about pragmatic truth, because what “works” is not always right, but then I like how some of the pragmatist writers explain the pragmatist tradition as moving beyond the epistemologically-centered Cartesian type of philosophy.

Reply:

You’re right that pragmatism is flawed at the root.  Truth isn’t what “works,” that is, what gives us what we want, but what corresponds to how things really are.  I can hardly think of anything more like the philosophy of hell l than losing hope of connection with reality.  Unless it would be rejoicing in the loss of that hope, as some pragmatists do.

About getting away from the epistemologically-centered Cartesian type of philosophy – I agree with you that Descartes got Western thought going in the wrong direction.  It seems to me, though, that the way pragmatism “moves beyond” Descartes is that it goes even further in that wrong direction.  Dreadfully further.  Let me explain.

Classical thought recognized that before we can investigate how we know something, we have to know something.  In that sense, it began with things, not with knowledge.  It understood truth to lie in correspondence with reality, and it held that when we are investigating reality, we should believe what we have the best reasons for believing.  It took for granted that disagreements would arise, and held that when they do, the view with the best arguments in its favor should prevail.

But Descartes refused to take disagreement for granted; he demanded a certainty so unassailable that it would eliminate the possibility of disagreement.  Almost in despair of knowing anything with that kind of certainty, at last he thought he had found a starting point.  He could be certain of his existence, he thought, just because he was thinking about the problem.  But this famous cogito, ergo sum is fallacious, for the certainty “I exist” does not follow from the bare premise “I think.”  One must also know for sure that thought requires a thinker.  We derive this fact from experience.  So we do know something already; we are beginning with things after all. Since we do this inevitably, wouldn’t it be better to admit it?  Rather than refusing to believe anything we are capable of doubting, wouldn’t it make more sense to use the matters we are less in doubt about to test the ones we are more in doubt about?  But to do that would be to return to the classical method that Descartes rejects.

From the failure of Descartes’ experiment, subsequent thinkers should have drawn the lesson that putting the study of knowledge before the study of things known is a blind alley.  They should have returned to the classical approach, putting the study of things before the study of knowledge.  Pragmatists, however, go in the other direction.  Theydisconnect what they believe from how things are in reality.  They no longer believe that it is even possible to know how things are in reality.  When a pragmatist says he believes proposition P, he doesn’t mean that P is how things are, but that P “works.”

What does it mean to the pragmatist for P to work?  That insisting on P produces results that someone likes.  What if others don’t like what he likes?  Then it comes down to which one can silence the other.  Silence them how?  With better arguments?  But arguments are about how things are in reality, and the pragmatist no longer believes in how things are in reality.  Apart from arguments, what means of silencing them are left?  That’s alarmingly easy to figure out.  In the final analysis, pragmatism, like all anti-realist philosophies, is a philosophy of power.  Whether it uses a sneer or a gun, in the end it depends upon intimidation.

Nobody in his right mind likes to discuss his own idiocies.  But because we are all in danger of being idiots, sometimes we owe it to each other to do so.

Professor:

I was struck by the remark in one of your books that before your change of heart about God you had almost reached the “point of no return.”  Would you explain?

Reply:

On a journey, a point of no return is a point beyond which it is impossible to get back to where one started.  For example, someone might jump into a deep hole, or descend into a steep valley, and be unable to climb back out.

Something like that happened to me when I was a young man, after I turned my back thoroughly on God.  St. Paul remarks of the pagans, “for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened.”  Placing the comment in context, I think he is saying that although the pagans knew very well the reality of the Creator, they pretended to themselves that they didn’t; they suppressed their knowledge.  That’s what I did too.

What happens when you try to make yourself stupid is that you succeed even better than you had intended, and that also happened to me.  In order not to recognize the reality of God – whose reality is really quite obvious – I had to disable all sorts of powers and capacities, one part of my mind after another.  I had almost reached the point of being unable to realize my own condition.  It is like pulling out one’s eardrums in order not to hear the voice calling one home.

There are lots of ways to reach this point.  Sometimes we take the act of turning our back on God lightly, thinking, for example, "I'll live without God now, but it will be okay, because later I'll turn back and He'll accept me."  The problem is that by the very act of turning away from Him, we harden our hearts so that it becomes more difficult to turn to Him.  True, we can put no limits on His grace.  Even so, we should not "put Him to the test," saying to ourselves, "Since He can break even the stoniest heart, let us be hard-hearted."

Professor:

I see that you’ve written about the International Theological Commission’s statement on natural law.  Why do you think the statement received so little attention and popularity in English-speaking countries?

Reply:

Some reasons, I think, are internal to the document.  I’ve offered some gentle criticisms here.  A second reason is that the English-speaking countries are mostly Protestant, and although Luther and Calvin believed in natural law, many of their followers have been deeply suspicious of the idea, viewing it as a pagan invention, wrongly baptized by Thomas Aquinas, incompatible with recognition of the Fall.

Fortunately, I think this situation is finally changing.  Strong interest in natural law is reawakening among traditional Lutherans, Calvinists, and Evangelicals:  See for example Robert C. Baker, ed., Natural Law: A Lutheran Reappraisal,Stephen J. Grabill, Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics, David Van Drunen, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms, and  Jesse Covington, Bryan T. McGraw, and Micah Watson, eds., Natural Law in Evangelical Political Thought.  I might also mention stirrings of interest among Eastern Christians like Fr. Michael Butler, who spoke at last week’s Acton University conference in Grand Rapids, Jews like Rabbi David Novak, author of Natural Law in Judaism, and here and there a few Muslims.

But I think that other reasons for the poor reception of the document have to do with natural law itself.  Although it is a gracious gift of God, it is good news only to those who desire to live according to virtue, and even then it may not be good news without the grace which enables us to obey it.  St. Paul speaks of that knowledge which is a fragrance from life to life for those who are being rescued, but the aroma of death to death among those who are perishing.  How much more is natural law without that fragrance, because morality alone has a heart of rock.

So in one way the natural law is one of the praeambula fidei, the “preambles” to faith, as the Church has traditionally held, but in another way faith may be one of the praeambula amicitiae cum natura, the “preambles” to renewed friendship with our own created nature.