Over at Roger Olson's blog, and in his most recent post where he is interacting with our recently released book, one of the issues that has come up –
or that is not being appreciated 'yet' –
is the Evangelical Calvinist eschewing of logical-causal-deductive determinism. This is somewhat of a fundamental key toward appreciating the distinct offering that we are, under the 'Evangelical Calvinist' nomenclature. True, not all, even of the authors in our book, would necessarily go this far in offering critique of classic determinism (or they might, but just might to it differently); but the following (which is a repost of mine), will illustrate how I, at least, want to proceed in relation to the usual epistemological methods employed by the 'classical' tradition. So the following is in response to what I am perceiving, thus far, as somewhat of a lacuna in the reading of Olson and those commenting vis-à-vis an Evangelical Calvinist approach.
Here T. F. explains and undoes the usual understanding of how events
in history and causation relate one to the other. He defeats the idea of
causation, appropriated by
Classical Theists, in general; and
Classical Calvinists & Arminians, in
particular, that there is a necessary relation between the event that
happened, and the events that led to the happening. He makes a
disjunction between
Factual event and
Necessary event; the former being that which
we understand as an actual happen-stance of the past, and the latter
having to do with the idea that because that happen-stance happened,
that the events that led to its happening also were necessarily
organised in a certain way in order for the the conditions of that event
to be so — as if we, as historians (or scientists, theologians, etc),
can absolutize causes based upon an idea of uniformitarian conception of
Event. Obviously this is a little complicated, and not for the
faint of heart, but I think it important to be grasped in order to
understand what Evangelical Calvinists mean when we say that we eschew
the
logico-causal-determinism of ‘classic’ thought.
Here’s T.
F. Torrance (this whole discussion takes place in the context of TFT
talking about resurrection):
(a) Interpreting ordinary historical events
(i) Freedom and necessity in historical events
Let
us try to understand this from a merely natural point of view. Think of
a historical happening: in taking place it appears as a free happening.
Once it takes place, it cannot be undone. Throw a stone through that
window and you are engaging in a free act, but once it has taken place,
the act cannot be recalled — we cannot turn it backwards as we can a
film of the event. Thus once an event has taken place, it becomes
‘necessary’ — in the sense that it cannot now be other than it is. At
this point, however, we are liable to suffer from an illusion, for we
tend to think that because it is now necessary fact, it had to happen.
This is the kind of optical illusion we suffer from on the golf course
when our opponent putts a ball from the other end of the green and it
goes right down into the hole — immediately that happens we somehow
think it had to happen from the start, but what we have done in a flash
is to read the final result back all along the line of the ball’s course
into the free act behind it. It is through this kind of illusion or
indeed delusion that some historians think that historical events are to
be interpreted in the same way in which they interpret the events of
natural processes as concatenated or linked together through causal
necessity.
The distinction between causal necessity and factual necessity
But
it is important to distinguish in historical happening between causal
necessity and factual necessity, between causal determination of events
and the fact that once they happen they cannot be otherwise. An
historical event, once it has taken place, is factually necessary for it
cannot now be other than it is, but an historical event comes into
being through a free happening, by means of spontaneous human agencies.
Certainly all historical events are interactions between human agents
and nature, as well as interactions between agents and other agents — so
that there are elements of causal determination in historical happening
that we have to take into account, physical factors relating to the
kind of patterns of space and time in which we live and work. But
historical events are not by any means merely natural physical
processes, for as happenings initiated and bound up with purposeful
agents they embody intention which often conflicts with and triumphs
over the course of events that nature would take on its own.
(ii) History is the interweaving of natural processes with human intention
It
is this interweaving of natural processes and human agencies, of nature
and rational intention, that gives history its complicated patterns.
The course of events has often quite unforeseen results, for human acts
may fail to achieve what would have been expected or may achieve far
more than would or could have been anticipated. But in our
interpretation of history we must never forget that in the heart of
historical events there is free happening which bears the intention in
which the true significance of history is to be discerned. Thus while we
must appreciate fully the physical factors involved, we must penetrate
into the movement of time in the actual happening in order to understand
the event in the light of the intentionality and spontaneity embedded
in it. The handling of temporal relation has proved very difficult and
elusive in the history of thought, for it has so often been assimilated
to logical relation and so transposed into something very different. The
confusion of temporal with logical connection corresponds here to that
between spontaneity and causal determinism in natural science. We can
see this error recurring, for example, in notions of predestination
where the free prius of the divine grace is converted by the
scholastic mind into logico-causal relation, while the kind of
time-relation with which we operate between natural events is imported
into the movements of divine love and activity. It is a form of the same
mistake that people make in regard to the resurrection, when they think
of its happening only within the logico-causal nexus with which they
operate in classical physics. (Thomas F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, edited by Robert T. Walker (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2009, 249-50)
In keeping with Torrance’s usual mode of thinking
from the Incarnation & Atonement (here the resurrection being the focus)
, he
seeks to excoriate any ideas of logico-causal determinism as the lens
through which profane historians would attempt to interpret the
‘historicity’ and ‘facticity’ of the resurrection itself — Torrance’s
discussion here, is all taking shape within his line of thought
associated with
Kata Physin (or according to the nature of the thing, or his more popular method
Theological Science). As he deconstructs the
post hoc ways
of what might be called ‘natural theology’ (meaning all modes of
intellectual inquiry which make inferences from supposed stable events,
works, physical nature, etc. to their “necessary causes”), by
implication, he also gets at theological constructs (like classic
Calvinism-Arminianism, Neo-Orthodoxy like Brunner’s) that operate with
this same
modus operandi.
The moral:
There are unseen, unknown contingencies built into the nature of things
themselves that make it impossible to accurately infer a stable causal
chain of events from the event back to the cause itself. The answer to
this, in relation to knowledge of God, is to see the event and cause
conjoined together in the person-act of Jesus himself. It is from this
vantage point that we then are set up to know God, in Christ, but no
longer as some sort of deterministic causal agent; but instead, as
personal, triune Divine agent who
apocalyptically breaks into the contingencies of history re-creating them towards their
telos or
created purpose in Christ (cf. Col. 1:13ff) — the resurrection, then,
being the instantiation of this within time-space history.
I
doubt this has cleared much up, but if nothing else it helped me to
write this out for my own process. I also would surmise that it is
because of the nuance of this kind of thought, evinced by TFT, that
Evangelical Calvinism will continue to have problems with making headway
with the
typical American Christian. It is easy to
understand causal-determinism, because that’s what “we see” in “nature”
all the time (there is an “apparent” coordination between how things
appear to the naked mind’s eye, and how we then assume things in
themselves “must” be — so it is natural to operate with a
docetic understanding
of things — but this is not Christian (and when I write 'Christian', I mean by way of what we perceive as 'principled' Trinitarian theological methodology — I am not even coming close to questioning anyone's 'salvation'), nor Evangelical Calvinism — it
is the mode of Classical Calvinism & Arminianism [and I realize this
is hard teaching, who can hear it?]).
