Calvin's Providence - puppets or people?




I think I have written on this before, and if you are tired of the debate don't worry about it, but providence to me is the most confusing and most exciting doctrine in Christian theology from my perspective (I know other people will favour Trinity and such, but I am a Calvinist in the 21st century so happen to be most oriented towards Providence). And I think this is a continuing issue of some importance since we all seek to be assured that God is in control and that He will triumph ultimately (even after such events as the Amish incident). What I want to do is stay away from emotive arguments such as "I don't like that kind of God (and world)" and keep to a more rational account, of course taking into account that just because something is rational does not mean it is right. All I want to do here is try and defend a Calvinistic form of providence against the objection "That makes us puppets with no free will!", a comment I heard just recently from a close friend. So on to the show!

A few words from Calvin first:

"For he is deemed omnipotent, not because he can indeed act, yet sometimes ceases and sits in idleness, or continues by a general impulse that order of nature which he previously appointed; but because, governing heaven and earth by his providence, he so regulates all things that nothing takes place without his deliberation." (Institutes, I.xvi.3)

"Let him, therefore, who would beware of this infidelity [grounding causality to motion of the stars] ever remember that there is no erratic power, or action, or motion in creatures, but that they are governed by God's secret plan in such a way that nothing happens except what is knowingly and willingly decreed by him." (Institutes, I.xvi.3)

So what we have in Calvin is a total providence, such that nothing happens without God's positive control (whether that is willing permission or something else is left aside). God decrees or ordains all events in the most meticulous manner. The natural response to this is of course "Then we are all just puppets and free from all blame for our actions!" Now there are a number of ways to approach this objection, but let's have a go at it from the free will angle and see what we get.

Free will. Everyone knows (or should know) that we must have free will of some sort in order to make sense of what we all experience in everyday life. We all make choices and these are owned by us in such a manner that we can honestly say "I did that." No one, especially not Calvin, would dispute this. Free will, in some sense, is necessary for the doctrine of sin and atonement, along with other Christian principles, let alone mental satisfation that we lead meaningful lives. So no one in the Christian tradition should dispute the fact that we have free will.

The question is, what kind of free will is it? Here is where the debate begins. Calvin maintains that we have free will insomuch as our wills are not constrained. He does not believe we have free will in the sense that we can do whatever we like. Here is a trivial example of this: I have free will to jump in the air or not to jump in the air. I do not have the free will to jump 100 feet(probably even 2 feet, to be honest!) in the air. My free will concerning my desire to jump is constrained by my non-ability to jump a certain height. I could change this to a degree (say by practicing) but only to a degree (it is physically impossible for me to jump 100 feet without assistence). But it would be insane to say that I did not have free will when I chose to jump! The issue of free will then depends on how constrained the will is. Morally Calvin thinks the will is pretty constrained, but I want to focus in on the metaphysical constraints on the will because of a meticulous providence.

To focus down then, imagine coming to a fork in the road. For simplicity's sake let's assume there is an unclimable wall on all sides except these two paths before you and the one you came from (basically you are in a maze). When you come to the fork you have basically four options: go left, go right, go back, or sit and meditate. Now there are a ton of options that you can think of but are not allowed to do: climb the wall, go through the wall, jump over the wall, become a Blue Whale. But that does not remove your freedom, for your freedom is ultimately placed in the fulfillment of your desires - you always have a limited number of options and you are free insomuch as you own or desire a certain one. So eventually you will decide which one of the paths to take, but the most important part is not the fact that you chose between one from another, it is that you desired or made that certain on your own. In this sense the fact that other options are available is besides the point; only one options is really necessary to excercise free will in the basic level of accepting or desiring a path.

And I think this is exactly what the metaphysical constaint of Calvinistic (and traditional) Providence means: you only have one option based on God's decree but that does not mean your freedom is nonexistent; it may mean it is constrained to a great degree, but then all freedom is constrained. The fact is that we all make the option ours by owning it or desiring it. What this comes down to is that free will is defined by Calvin as the absence of coercion. In the above example, you would not have free will if someone forced you by spear point to go in a certain direction because you would always be able to say "I am not desiring this!" even as you moved. But since there is no physical (let's leave out non-physical coercion for now, please) external agency then you are free to do what you desire, even if there is only one thing to desire, as in the case of Providence.

So we have free will in the sense of not being coerced and can excercise this free will in the sense of being responsible even if there is no other choice. It is the element of coercion that destroys causal responsibility. But I hear someone saying "It seems like coercion is involved, because God is the ultimate determiner of all events!" Good point, let's investigate.

Calvin's classical response to this objection is to seek a dual causality or multiple causal levels metaphysics. Basically there are always two active agents in any causal choice (involving humans, that is): God and me. Both are necessary and sufficient. But who do these two work together so that we need not appeal to pure coincidence that all of God's choices are also our choices? Well, that's tricky, but we might have a shot of explaining it by desciribing the nature of the different levels. Let's have a simple description of a certain event as follows: God ordains and I choose to do something. The first part (God's ordaining) is rather straightforward and Scripturally sound, it is the second that is troublesome, for how can God's ordination allow me to "choose" something freely? Remember first that freely means without compulsion, so it means that I desire or own something. More specifically Calvin breaks down the human choosing into three components (following scholastic thought - which may not be perfect but can be helpful): the will, the habit, and the choice. The will is the function in man which allows us to choose something, and we have already said it is free in the Calvinist sense of non-coerced. The choice is the actual decision made which leads to action (at this point the outcome of the choice is irrelevant since we are focusing on choosing not whether we actually accomplish our choice). But the key point is that there is something between the will and the choice. Our will gives us the capacity to choose while the choice is the decision - but the background or "reason" of the choice is our habit, or our desire. Now as long as our desire is our own then we have chosen "freely". And this is where Calvinism finds its ability to reconcile God's ordination and our free choosing, in my mind.

In a simple way, all events could be described as follows: "God ordains that Adam wills to choose x." This is where the levels come in: God forms our wills in such a way that our desires are towards certain things (namely, whatever happens in the world, whatever choices we end up choosing), but it is our choice which is made based on our desires. This is not to make us free in a libertarian sense from God, it merely means that God has constrained our choices to one option (remember the one path taken) but it is our choice and our desire that chooses that option. Basically God desires that we desire to choose x. This means that God does not coerce us because coercion must occur at the choice level (we can desire something differently than what is choosen in coercion), not at the desires level. So God forms our will to certain desires, but it is our choices (based on our desires) which make the happenings of the world. That is why we must always have both God and man in any description of an event while discussing providence; God wills/desires/chooses that man desires to choose x.

To give an everday example of this (which will not be perfect but may ground the discussion a little better) we can think of a parent raising a child to desire a certain thing. This happens all the time. For instance, I was raised to desire to keep dry when it is raining. I didn't have to be, in some places (probably England, where rain is just a constant experience) this desire wouldn't be necessary because it would be impossible to fill or there was never rain (in Antarctica, for instance). But when it starts raining I do not feel forced to run inside or wear a rain coat, I am just choosing based on a desire implanted in my by my parents or whatever other place I got that desire from. I am totally free in my choice to run inside, but the choice is based on a desire I did not initially determine (it was given to me). It might be the same with God - except that we are still acting in the early stages of practicing choices since we are fallen creatures and a new kingdom is coming. God plants desires into us for a certain action and we choose based on that desire, but it is us who make the choice. We are therefore responsible for the choice and the action which occurs or doesn't occur, but the event was ordained by God at the earlier level.

It seems to me that this dual-causality Calvinist account allows some insight into how we can hold together consistently the two Biblical maxims: All things are ordained by God and at the same time we are free creatures responsible for oour decisions. This doesn't totally remove blame from God for the evil in the world - but then he is perfectly happy to take a certain amount of blame as seen in the death of his Son on the cross. This explanation does not answer the question of why God planted certain desires in us towards certain actions (Amish shootings, for instance), but that question is unanswerable according to Paul ("Who are you, O man?). This account does answer the more immediate question of how Calvin's providence does not make us puppets, and I hope this account of non-coerced free will and desired choice brings some rationality (not all, of course) to that answer.