Wednesday, October 19, 2022

Terry J. Wright on Calvin's Struggle with God's Secret Decree and Human Responsibility

  

Certainly, Calvin’s emphasis on the divine will and the ambiguity about its relation to the world of creatures means [that] the place of secondary causation in his teaching on providence [is] ambiguous. Secondary causation affirms genuine creaturely causal efficacy, which remains subject at all times to possible negation by the divine will. It is no surprise, therefore, to know that Calvin had to defend himself from accusation that his teaching reduced human activity in particular to an irrelevance or that he championed some form of fate. That he always reacted to such allegations somewhat angrily suggests that however he saw God’s primary causation operating in the world, he did not think it freed humanity from the responsibility of its own actions. The Libertines, for example, could not truly distinguish between good and evil because they conflated primary and secondary causation; if they are correct, then, says Calvin, ‘we must either attribute sin to God or dissolve the world of sin, inasmuch as God does everything’ (Calvin, Against the Libertines, 239). For Calvin, a pancausal doctrine of providence neither absolves people of responsibility for their actions, particularly their sinful actions, or names God the author of sin. However, although he could affirm secondary causation as having its own casual efficacy, Calvin was never able to explain how it related to primary causation. He did make it quite clear that God was no remote first cause: God’s primary causation is ontologically but not sequentially prior to creaturely secondary causation, and, in this sense, it is very much a positive notion, ensuring that God plays a role personally in everything that happens (though this personal action effectively is God’s willing of each and every thing that happens). Nonetheless, Calvin’s stance on the relation of primary causation to secondary causation is little more than a simple assertion that the two types of causation are not in competition; but this leads us to ask why we should see creaturely events and actions in terms of primary and secondary causation. It is not far simpler to affirm without qualification that God either determines all things or that he allows the world to act without his pancasual involvement? There remains, then, an ambiguity about the relation between God and his creation, and so between primary and secondary causation. Although Calvin’s desire to avoid the extremes of occasionalism and divine inaction is laudable, he seems not entirely to have avoided confusion with the first. (Terry J. Wright, Providence Made Flesh: Divine Presence as a Framework for a Theology of Providence [Paternoster Theological Monographs; Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf and Stock, 2009], 51-52)

 

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