Monday, January 13, 2020

L.D. McCabe on God's Character and Contingent Foreknowledge


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)