In his 1882
volume defending contingent foreknowledge, L.D. McCabe wrote the following against
Charles Hodge, a leading Reformed systematic theologian, and the Calvinist
belief in compatibilist free will and, not simply exhaustive foreknowledge, but
God having decreed all things that would take place and other aspects that are part-and-parcel of historic Reformed theology (e.g., the Westminster Confession of Faith):
Dr. Hodge says: “man is responsible for his
volitions, because they are determined by his principles and feelings, and he
is responsible for his principles and feelings because of their inherent nature
as good or bad, and because they are his own and constitute his character.” But
how could feelings and principles be a man’s own, unless he had freely chosen
them, between contrary feelings, and then adopted them? The will sovereignly decides
between virtue and vice, and then the principles and feelings follow, according
to the law of cause and effect, the decision made by the will. I can obey God
or not. If I disobey him my feelings necessarily become holy. And my feelings
and principles can only become mine through my will electing obedience or disobedience
to duty.
Dr. Hodge says; “Man is responsible for his
principles and feelings because of their inherent nature.” But whence did they
receive that inherent moral nature? It was given them by some free-will. It is
revolting to ascribe the inherent nature of evil principles and feelings to
Deity. To do this Dr. Hodge hesitates and trembles; he therefore points down
into the soul of man, intimating that possibly somehow or other, and in some
inexplicable way, the morality of actions is to be sought for there. He positively
affirms that the morality of actions is not to be sought for in the
self-determining power of the will, because that power he vehemently denies. He says:
“A man is free, so long as his activity is controlled by his reason and his
feelings. The will is not independent, not indifferent, not self-determined,
but it is always determined by the previous state of the mind. Man is free, but
free agency is the power to decide according to character. Self-determination
means that man is the efficient cause of his own act, and the reason and
grounds of his determination are within himself.” We thus see that Dr. Hodge
denies the self-determining power of the will, but affirms self-determination.
If he would grant to self-determination the full power to choose between the
attractions of sin and the claims of holiness, he would have a place on which
to posit the morality of actions. But he vehemently denies the power of
alternative choices and therefore he has absolutely no place in which he can
distinctly locate the moral quality of actions. It does, indeed, seem
marvelous, that the good doctor could so ignore logic, psychology, common
sense, and the pungency of the feeling of our accountability, in the interest
of a system of faith, relative to the distinguishing features of which, we have
in all its pulpits, the uniform eloquence of absolute silence. But the mystery
is easy of explanation. We know that God did use men as instruments, and in so
doing was compelled to put their wills under the law of constraint, and without
the power of contrary choice, they chose consentingly as God desired. The
Doctor’s great defect was the limited view he took of the whole subject Though
as an instrument, man does choose just as he is constrained as a free agent, he
must choose or himself, and this necessitates the power of contrary choices.
Regarding man as an instrument, in all kingdoms, he applied and followed his
constraining principle, up into the dizzy heights of inexplicables and
inconsistencies . . . Dr. Hodge denies that sin came out of that capricious
abyss of the self-determination of the will. He says, (page 537,) “The reason
why any event ever comes to pass is that God so decreed it.” No wonder he
explains with evident hesitation and tremor, “It may be difficult to reconcile
the existence of innate evil dispositions in the soul of man, with the justness
and goodness of God. It is, indeed, repugnant to our moral judgment that God should
create a malignant being, but this has nothing to do with the question whether
moral dispositions do not owe their character to their nature.” But why should
the good man cling to a system of theology that necessitates such heart-disturbing
meditations? Neither psychology, nor logic, nor common sense, nor Scripture,
nor the success of Christianity, nor the comforts of the Gospel, require of him
any thing of the kind. Ten thousand times better repudiate such an origin of
sin, and then race its incipiency down into that uncertain abyss of the
self-determining power of a free-will, rather than therewith to darken the
throne of the Eternal, and fasten an appalling dubiety on the moral character
of Jehovah. And yet John Calvin made the divine will the originative cause of
evil. “All the descendants of Adam,” says he, “fell by the divine will into that miserable condition in which they now are.”
No wonder that distinguished Presbyterian, Dr. Duryea, a man so eminent for his
union of analytic and synthetic ability, recently in a public manner positively
denied that he was any longer a Calvinist. (L.D. McCabe, Divine Nescience of Future Contingencies A Necessity [New York:
Phillips and Hunt, 1882], 175-76, 186)
Further Reading
