How does Calvinism deal with the existence of other religions and denominations in the grand scheme of things? It’s never made sense to me.
I’ll use Catholicism as an example, just because Calvinists believe Catholicism is false and a lot of them have a hate-boner for it, but you could substitute Catholicism in this question for any other religion. Mormonism, Islam, Judaism, etc.
In the Catholic perspective, you should be Catholic because the Catholic Church was founded by God.
If you believe in a third religion, neither Calvinist nor Catholic, you can account for the existence of Catholicism by saying “that is a false, man-made religion” or “that’s a trick from the devil.”
But if you’re a Calvinist, in the grand scheme of things, the Catholic Church was founded by God, any man or spirit involved in its creation was acting according to the will of God, who ordained from eternity past that the Catholic Church must exist. Every doctrine and dogma it has, it has because God willed it to hold those doctrines. The action of every Catholic Saint was the will of God. Every Catholic theologian wrote what they wrote because God chose them to write those words from the beginning of time. Despite all this, it is a false wicked religion and everybody has to get out of it and find a reformed church.
I could understand Calvinism if they had a view that everything that exists is inherently holy and sacred, but they don’t. They have very strong negative opinions towards things which, again, were willed by God to exist in the first place.
Is there any good Calvinist lit explaining this? Even a sermon on the topic would be enlightening.
Calvinism is not a real religion, but a political movement. Just like Islam, Mormonism or Scientology, it was created to serve the interest of one deranged megalomaniac.
Who wanted to exploit people for profit and go to heaven
Tell me you're israeli without telling me you're israeli.
Are you serious? Calvinism is why we have the modern "work until you die" mentality that's destroying culture today.
Judaism did more harm long term than any other political movement. And yes, I'm throwing Zionism in the mix as well.
What's the alternative here?
Well, where does that mentality come from? It comes from the concept of salvation. So, we should start by educating people that salvation is bullshit — the good life can always start right now because it's entirely a matter of will.
How can you have a "good" life without salvation from sin? If the ultimate good is God, and so contemplation of and union with the Divine Nature (Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Eckhart, etc.), then how can the "good life" start without metanoia, illumination, and reconciliation? How can there be deification and theosis in sin, which is antithetical to these?
It seems that all the could be offered is a life of concupiscence, a life of being ruled over by the body, by the appetites and the passions rather than by the reason and the Logos.
>If the ultimate good is God
What if it isn't?
What good is better than transcedent perfection, a "being greater than which none can be imagined?"
Hard to see how there can be one.
isn't that the Puritan work ethic or whatever?
Alright you got me. We killed your messiah, gonna cry about it?
>Is there any good Calvinist lit explaining this?
Institutes of the Christian Religion
God allows evil in order to create from evil a greater good
Catholicism =/= Calvinism. Therefore, Catholics are wrong, doesn’t matter if they’re not as wrong as Muslims, it’s a pass or fail system.
Why can’t God just create grater good?
But Catholicism and Islam, in the Calvinist view, were both created by God
Strange that no one recognizes here the big (historic) enemy of the Calvinists: the Quakers' 'inner light' 'still small voice' theology which has in fact triumphed these latter-days over the Protestant Work Ethic so-called.
>Why can’t God just create grater good?
Because evil is required for greater good.
>inb4 then He's not omnipotent
picrel
>Anything that happens is God's will
Isn't this just the logical conclusion from 'God is omnipotent'?
No, because unlike Calvinism, other religions put emphasis on free will, saying that God chooses not to interfere with it.
You could argue that denying the existence of free will is a sounder conclusion to the existence of an omnipotent God, but that doesn't solve OP's question.
define free will
Not him, but; will which has the space to take action besides submit. In the Calvinist view (which is the logical conclusion of an omnipotent God), such will does not exist; you either submit or perish.
Omnipotence, like all infinities, is not provable — or desirable to the strong will, which wants the space to take action besides submit.
>[John 8] 34 Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. 35 Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. 36 So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.
>[Romans 6] 16 Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? 17 But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, 18 and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. 19 I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.
>20 For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. 21 But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. 22 But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
For someone who's born with original sin, practicing righteousness can seem like slavery, but this is not ideal. As one grows in enlightenment, one is no longer "submitting" in the sense of grudgingly setting aside one's own desires for the sake of obeying God, but becomes free because the desires of the heart have been changed to what leads to life and approval from God.
Submission and conformity are two sides of the same coin. If this is the only choice besides perishing, it's not free will.
What level of freedom do you want? Justice implies some restriction of freedom, in that sense. Murderers go to jail. So total freedom implies no justice. Is there some amount of justice that allows for will to be considered free, in your view?
Your question is a diversion from the core problem. Let's start with "any level of freedom at all," shall we? Because under Calvinism, there is none. Even polytheism, which is still about submission / conformity, offers the choice of which god to submit to — an action that differs from submission / conformity.
>Murderers
You've been conditioned into this black-and-white thinking by the Protestant ethic. Why does your brain jump straight to murder? You really can't conceive of any action outside of submission / conformity besides murder? Maybe you'd like to add theft and rape to that list?
If you're unwilling to examine the limits of your own beliefs, then you've discredited any criticism you have for anyone else.
But you acknowledge murder and theft as impermissible (so you aren't a Marxist; that's good), so there are some wills that must be reformed or suffer punishment. So it's not an absolute law that freedom, defined in the broadest sense, is a good; or to put it another way, it's not an absolute law that a will cannot be considered free if there are any restrictions on it. So for what reason can a sanctified, Christian will be accused of being enslaved?
You seem to be assuming that people would "freely" chose the bad over the good. How is that supposed to work? Who seeing the better chooses the worse?
Certainly, people can choose the worse out of incontinence, being consumed by appetites or passions, or through ignorance, but then being led by ones appetites (a mere part of oneself, not the whole) or being led by ignorance (that which lies outside the self, which implies a lack of self-determination) is not freedom.
It would seem that rapists or murderers are not free to the extent that they fail to know the good or fail to be able to get themselves to act in accordance with the good they know—slaves to desire, drive, and circumstance or else slaves to ignorance. But to be free means not to be determined by ignorance, nor by a mere part of oneself. To be free means being able to truly choose what is best.
Good post. Yes, the will always chooses the strongest of its desires, or, put another way, follows the last judgement of the faculty of reason. So a will would never choose other than what it most desires. But the problem is that what a will most desires is not the good, nor even its own best interest. Human wills are fallen and corrupted. They do not choose the good, and they do not choose their own best interest, unless God changes the desires of the heart. In Calvinism, this is called regeneration.
>But you acknowledge murder and theft as impermissible
I didn't acknowledge absolute impermissibility.
The good that permits free will.
No one looks at the better and decides to go with the worse instead. To not recognize the highest good is to be unfree in an important sense, to prefer to worse to the better out of ignorance or deficiency.
>No one looks at the better and decides to go with the worse instead
I agree. That's why I don't accept God as the ultimate good. A good that does not permit free will is an inferior good.
But God, as being itself, Ipsum Esse Subsistens, is the ground of freedom. God does allow freedom. Indeed, God perfects freedom within the flow of human history, giving it meaning and value, allowing the agent to partake in the exitus and reditus from the One and eventual unification (e.g. in the though of St. Maximus the Confessor).
Only in corrupted visions of God is God opposed to freedom.
>God does allow freedom.
If there is only the choice of submitting / conforming or perishing then God does not permit free will.
You seem to be establishing yourself as the standard for what counts as free. Anyone who's more evil than you is not free; anyone who is less evil than you is conforming. The problem is, you aren't the standard. God is.
>You seem to be establishing yourself as the standard for what counts as free
No. I already defined free will here
Only the friend permits free will, and only another human being can be a friend. Friendship is the path to free will, not God. Friendship is the ultimate good. "Friend" and "freedom" share a common etymological ancestor in Old English for this reason.
And when I tried to probe your definition further, you flew off the handle.
What didn't I address? Did you stop reading after the first sentence?
You refused to explain why some restrictions on will are compatible with freedom and why others are not.
At no point did I say any restrictions on will are compatible with free will. If you thought I did, you misinterpreted me.
So why did you get so offended when I brought up murder? Apparently it was a telling test case, since you even consider the freedom to murder essential to free will. And then you pretended it was really offensive to you that I would bring it up.
Yes, the only way to be free is to know and choose the Good. Anyone who knows the better as better chooses it.
God gives people options though, the world is full of evil people and atheists, so I'm not really sure what you're getting at. God cannot make evil good.
>God gives people options though
Submit / conform or perish / be punished — a set options which does not provide freedom.
I didn't get offended. I thought you were absurd.
Well I'm sorry, to the rest of us, people who believe they have the freedom to murder are concerning. We just came out of the 20th Century, so you'll forgive us.
If you can't kill, you're not free. A beast without claws is merely a pet, a slave.
Murder, not kill. Don't think I won't notice that appaling attempt at sleight of hand.
Killing encapsulates murder. I speak of all killing.
So as much as you tried to hide it (which is telling in itself), I got out of you that you think you have the freedom to murder. Fortunately for the thread, you have now put yourself on the outside of human morality, so we can all ignore you and discuss more relevant points from now on.
You fear freedom.
People do have 'the freedom' to murder: Murder itself proves this. But people also have the freedom to establish laws and make it a punishable offense, etc. What is competition but freedom at odds?
Freedom is the life of Life: we require it, but anything goes, howsoever good or bad.
Up in this post
we began with the definition of freedom as being free from punishment. You're discussing a different definition of freedom, which is also valid.
How is it "submitting" to prefer and choose what is truly good?
You seem to say that God could only let people be truly free by rewarding evil and empowering people to choose what is worse over what is better. It's a strange sort of "freedom" where justice is antithetical to such "freedom."
Even anti-religious moderns don't try to justify anything like this. They realize that if freedom is going to be pure potency, the ability to "choose anything," then goodness needs to simply not exist and be illusory. They have to deny goodness and beauty and reality to that the "freedom to choose evil and have this be the better choice," is there. But this leaves an impoverished freedom that is constrained by everything, one where love, marriage, having children, accepting duties, etc. all represent crippling restrictions on freedom rather than its fulfilment. Taken to the extreme, such wholly negative freedom requires never making any choice, since to have done A and B is not to have not done A and B, or C, or refused all three, etc. Hence, pure negative freedom collapses into the inability to choose anything, since all choice ultimately constricts freedom (as envisaged as pure potency). This, pure freedom makes choice impossible, the collapse into contradiction Hegel identifies in PR and the Logic.
>How is it "submitting" to prefer and choose what is truly good?
How is it free will if there is no space for action that is not submission / conformity or perishing / punishment? and if it's not free will, how is it "truly good"?
If God is good, the best, then God will be freely chosen. To not choose God is to choose the worse over the better, which implies a lack of freedom.
I don't know why you think this is "submission." This is like saying that someone who wants to be a good father is "submitting" to his child when he wakes up in the middle of the night to go take care of them, even though they might want to sleep (choosing the better).
Of course, there is an element of "submission" in recognizing legitimate authority. But to willingly serve that which is truly good is not a mark against freedom. If all "servitude" cut against freedom then one could never be free to take on any role that entails duties (and so never be free to become a doctor, knight, priest, fire fighter, etc.) without losing one's freedom, since such roles require that one submit to one's duties. But this leads to an incoherent vision of freedom where one must fly from all relations to preserve freedom, making one only "free to be" a hermit with no social ties.
>I don't know why you think this is "submission."
If it's not, then please provide me with an example of an action that God permits, which is neither the choice of submitting to his rule, conforming to his standard, subjecting myself to his punishment, or perishing according to his law.
I want to add that I don't disagree with this:
>pure freedom makes choice impossible
Hence, free will is not "pure freedom" — it is will which has the capacity to take action that is not submission / conformity or punishment / death. This will actually operates somewhere between "pure freedom" and "pure servitude" and is of a different nature than the one that reduces will to these two polarities.
>between
"outside" rather
How exactly is injustice supporting freedom? I don't really see how "being free to get mugged" or "being free to have my house broken into," or "being free to be enslaved," really promotes true "freedom."
Justice is, rather, essential to freedom
It depends how you define freedom. I agree with you, though. "Freedom" to wrong someone else is not any kind of freedom I'm interested in. That's why true freedom is only found in Christ, because glorifying God and enjoying him forever is the way not to wrong yourself, others, or God.
Calvinism is fatalistic. You don't choose to submit or perish in any meaningful way. God chooses what you do.
But omnipotence is in no way inconsistent with freedom, as the classical tradition can demonstrate. Relative self-determination for creatures works fine with a conception of a God who wants to offer creatures the perfection of freedom, the self-determining actualization of goodness.
If God chooses not to interfere, then whatever happens is still the result of his will.
It's a pretty simplistic formula. God is all powerful and free. Man cannot be free in any true sense because this would entail that God is constrained by man's actions. Therefore God must will everything that happens.
The classical and medieval tradition never had this sort of extreme problem with the sovereignty of God versus the freedom of man because they didn't labor with two modern innovations of late medieval nominalism:
A. The univocity of being (this makes God have being in the same way a tree or person is. God is not fully transcedent in such a view. God is no longer "existence itself," but rather God is simply a very powerful entity who sits outside and besides the world. Such a view puts God underneath the category of being, on a Porphyryean tree besides created being. In such a view, God is already constrained by creatures in that God is defined by what God is not, so already this move demotes the God of Plotinus, St. Denis, St. Aquinas, St. Augustine, etc. in a way. Now, if creatures do anything on their own, it constrains God.
B. The idea of freedom in terms of potency. This view, which dominates modernity (notably Hegel rejects it) sees freedom as the potential to "do anything." But this in turn makes anything outside of one a constraint on freedom. The classical tradition by contrast sees freedom as a self-determing move to actualize the Good. If one doesn't do what is good, then clearly one is in some way constrained and thus not fully free.
Plotinus uses Oedipus as an example here. Oedipus is a model of freedom, clever, powerful, a king, etc. But he kills his dad, doing exactly what he wanted to avoid with all his heart. Thus, he was controlled by a fact that lay outside him (and here we see why knowledge is essential for freedom in the classical tradition; knowledge is also transcendent, a reaching beyond current opinion and desire).
The deflation of freedom into potency rather than act and the univocity of being make it so that you either get Calvinism or "mysterious contradiction." The upside of them is that understanding the classical tradition is hard. As religion got way more "democratic" in the Reformation that was a plus, at least as far as convincing people was concerned. You no longer had an audience restricted to the cognitive elite, exquisitely trained and living lives of fasting and contemplation completely organized around these topics. Instead popularity was about appealing to the middle class who read pamphlets.
This is also, I think, why early modern philosophers have an absolutely terrible, strawman understanding of the medieval sources they are critiquing (there are exceptions, but Kant and Hume really don't understand the classical tradition, or simply choose to attack strawmen instead).
The Analogia Entis gets around this but is a bit of a doozy. I feel like the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius is pretty accessible though, but it's easy for moderns to shrug off by not engaging with it.
Luther and Erasmus exchanged letters on predetermination. Luther basically says, "if predestination makes God seems evil this just shows how human reason is so fallen that it can't understand goodness."
Of course, Luther is selective here. Human reason is good enough when it is used for interpreting the Bible according the Luther. When it seems to make God evil? Well that's just an area where we can discount reason as broken.
What you see here is the begining of modern misology which sees reason not as Divine Logos, holding all things together (Colossians 1) but instead as broken and only relating to parts. It's a short skip from this to the modern view that reason simply doesn't apply to ethics or aesthetics (i.e. the reduction to emotivism and "rational self interest" in Hume, etc.). Misology is not generally the rejection of reason tout court, but rather selectively applying where it should have any purchase at all.
So you actually see in the Reformation the post-modern reduction of whole areas of inquiry to "power struggles." This perhaps explains why the religious right as been able to so easily imbibe and use the ideas and methods of post-modernism and identity movements.
Posting this book recommendation in response to yours.
>https://archive.org/details/fromrationalismt0000cgre/mode/1up
While I don’t agree with the author that Christianity is somehow special in its treatment of reason, this book explains the long decline of reason in the western world.
This isn’t all the Protestants fault. This decline began as long ago as the Greeks with the increasing autonomy of reason. The Catholics only slowed it down they didn’t stop it, because they kept those parts of ancient metaphysics in their theories.
The concept of the two wills might be helpful.
https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/are-there-two-wills-in-god
Everything that happens is, in a sense, willed by God, because otherwise it wouldn't happen. But God wills both evil and good for the sake of good. See Romans 9:
>For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills.
>You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory—
So God "wills" in one sense that some people do what he does not "will" in another sense. By allowing for such evil, he is able to bring about more good than there would have been otherwise, viz., the display of his just wrath and power on those who transgress his moral "will" on the one hand, and the display of his mercy on those who obey his moral "will" on the other. Humans are still accountable to obey the moral will, though, not the sovereign will (which is simply whatever actually happens).
What is the question?
if god let happen, why bad