Writing in 1882, L.D. McCabe wrote the following about how contingent foreknowledge, not divine determinism, protects the character of God, with the latter being an affront thereof:
3. Nescience
is necessary to the perfection of God’s fatherly heart.
“I have thought for years,” said a worthy and
thoughtful minister of Christ, “that if God now knows that I will be lost, it
is already certain that I will be, and it is no relief to me to be told that
foreknowledge does not necessitate my certain fate. It is the solemn fact that
I will be lost that concerns me, rather than the agency by which my destiny is
determined.” This is perfectly natural, and it was the present uncertainty of
his future destiny that aroused all his immortal energies to make his calling
and election sure. So long as he believed his future to be now certain he was
paralyzed into suspense and inactivity. If God is now certain that I will be lost,
he knows that any further anxious tender solicitude concerning me will be of no
possible avail. It is impossible for him, in the nature of things, to feel
relative to an immortal soul as he would necessarily feel were he in profound
uncertainty over his future fate. The suspense, doubt, apprehension,
alternation between hope and fear, and the fervent desires of infinite
Benevolence relative to the endless destiny of his immortal child, which divine
nescience requires, are indispensable to that tenderness of the infinite heart,
and to that degree of parental solicitude and fatherly care which as a father
he unquestionably owes to his deathless offspring, travelling the hazardous
path of trial, to the judgment of the great day. God left Hezekiah on a certain
occasion, it is said, (2 Chron. xxxii, 31,) to try him, that he might know all
that he was in his heart. “Forty years,” said Moses, “hath he led thee in the
wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart,
whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no.” Here light for us breaks
in on the feelings and working of the infinite heart of the universal Father.
How the anxious Father’s heart is bewrayed into the expressions, “If therefore
the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness,” . . . and “Let
him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.” “oh that thou hadst
hearkened to my commandments! then had thy peace been as a river, and thy
righteousness as the waves of the sea” . . .5. Nescience of future contingences is necessary to safeguard the divine candor.
God said, “I set before you life and death,
blessing and cursing; therefore choose ye life.” If after this solemn address
he had added, “But I know you will choose death, and all my arrangements are
made up on your choice of death; I have made your choice of death a working factor
in my future plans; upon that choice I have made thousands of predications,
reaching in their influence round the globe and through all time;” could he in
any way, I inquire, have so effectually eliminated all efficiency from their
will-power and binding force from his commands? Could he in any other way have
so thoroughly discouraged his struggling children, or enfeebled their purposes
in their honest efforts to elect between eternal life and eternal death?
And if he certainly foreknew their choices
candor sternly required of him to make it known to them. In uttering this
heart-felt entreaty he clearly assumes that he does not foreknow their ultimate
choices. “God teaches us,” says Rudolf Stier, “Matt. xxi, 37, that he makes
trial of goodness in men just as he would did he not know beforehand in what
cases it will prove in vain.” And in this entreaty God certainly assumes that
there is valid ground for the alternation between the alternates of obedience
and disobedience. And if he assumes
it, how dare any creature call it in question? “A capacity for alternate
action,” says L.P. Hickok, “or a cause which has an alternative, is itself no
ground for determining which of the two shall come to pass.” ow, if there was
not in this command any ground for alternation between the choices, then the
command was cruel and double-dealing in the extreme.
If a future event is now certain it is
unreasonable in Deity to implore me to change from the choice of sin to the
choice of holiness. “It is for us,” says Dr. Chalmers, “to do strenuously that
which God has commanded, and never allow ourselves to think of what he knows relative to our future, for
these are mysteries too deep for us.” But Christians in multitudes, in all evangelical
Churches, live in the most intimate and tender fellowship, secret understanding
and delightful oneness with the Father of their spirits. But how incongruous
with this state of grace and nearness to God that the devout soul should never
enter into questionings relative to God’s knowledge of its endless wellbeing or
misery? God simply trifles with me if he commands me to choose and to act in
reference to that which to me is an uncertainty, but which to him is a positive
certainty. To affirm that God requires me to act as though an infallible certainty
were an actual uncertainty is simply blasphemous toward God and paralyzing toward
all my moral energies. Should God command me to act as though the morrow’s sun were
an uncertainty he could not play a part with more heartless insincerity. God
calls me to act promptly, under his moral government, with an earnestness that
is unspeakable; and yet, if prescience be true, I can never act as a
probationer for eternity but under the inspiration of an unquestioned delusion
that my future choices are now real uncertainties, and that it is now possible
for me to do an impossible thing, namely, to change my infallibly foreknown
destiny. No learning, no greatness, no ingenuity, can never defend from
ignominy the divine candor if absolute foreknowledge can be true. (L.D. McCabe,
Divine Nescience of Future Contingencies
A Necessity [New York: Phillips and Hunt, 1882], 48-49, 53-55)
