Saturday, January 15, 2022

J.S. Banks (1899) on the Hardening of Pharaoh's Heart

  

The moral difficulty of this subject is the ascription in Old Testament of the hardening of men’s hearts to God . . . First of all, the result is twice foretold. The Lord say, I will harden his heart (Exod 4:7). In the case of the first five plagues and the seventh . . . the phrase is Pharaoh hardened his heart or his heart was hardened . . . In the sixth, eighth, and ninth . . . the phrase is the Lord hardened his heart . . . Thus, the result is not ascribed to God only; both the divine and the human agencies are recognized. Whatever God had to do with the result, Pharaoh’s freedom of action was not interfered with . . . At each stage Pharaoh might have yielded instead of refusing . . . It shows us, that divine appeals and commands never leave men as they find them. If not yielded to, they increase insensibility, benumb and gradually deaden moral feeling. This effect is contrary to the divine purpose, and is entirely man’s fault; but it is natural and inevitable. The more powerful the appeals, the more rapid the hardening process, until God’s Spirit withdraws, and leaves man to his own ways (Rom 1:28). Looked at from the human side, Pharaoh, like every smaller transgressor, is seen acting with perfect freedom, consciously pitting his own will against God’s, despising louder and louder warnings of ruin, self-punished and self-destroyed. Looked at from the divine side, God is seen commanding, forewarning, repeating rejected opportunities, doing everything to ensure submission and safety . . . It is evident that we have here again the old problem of reconciling the divine foreknowledge and government with human freedom and responsibility. Each element is attested by its own evidence. Both are necessary to a complete explanation. The two regions meet at some point invisible to human eye and undefinable in human speech and thought. (J.S. Banks, “Hardening,” A Dictionary of the Bible, ed. James Hastings, 4 vols. [Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1899], 2:302-3 in Timothy A. Stratton, Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism: A Biblical, Historical, Theological, and Philosophical Analysis [Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf and Stock, 2020], 32)