Monday, January 13, 2020

L.D. McCabe vs. Charles Hodge on Calvinism and Compatibilist Free Will


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