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I'm probably going to be corrected by some theology major (I don't care) but let me give my best explanation of Calvinism:
Before you're born, it's already predetermined whether you're going to heaven or hell.
"So why, pastor, should I be good and righteous"
"My son, when you sin, it reveals that you're wicked and going to hell. Best, therefore, to abstain from sin."
As a persuasive technique, this probably works just as good as anything. It's often difficult to tease out causality in noisy data. I point this out in the context of Scott's latest post. Look at the graphs here and tell me what you notice:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-polyamory
I notice that choosing to be monogamous or polygamous barely matters at all across many aspects of wellbeing. But there is one key difference: fertility. Polygamous people have many fewer children.
Does polygamy cause infertility or does infertility cause polygamy? Does it matter? It's extremely dysgenic and bound to go the way of the Shakers.
Calvinist predestination (which is the only truly contentious point out of the five in Calvinism) is basically Schrödinger's cat: the only way to know where one is predestined is to die, and there is a single truth value in the future which cannot be directly known from the past.
However true it may be, though, it is also possibly the single stupidest way to approach Christianity, faith, free will, and eternity.
Jesus has guaranteed that whoever turns from wickedness and asks Him for forgiveness will have eternal life in the presence of overwhelming love; the kind of love which cares for all victims of others’ misdeeds, and seeks that none should be wicked. If you ask, then, what God finds wicked, He asks you what you find wicked when others do it and asks you to shun it from your choices, now and forever.
Calvinists affirm that all those who have faith in Christ will be saved.
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If you consistently do really shitty things as a devout Calvinist, can you kind of deduce you’re going to hell?
It's Bayesian evidence in that direction, but God can and does save sinners, which we all were. (See Paul!)
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No. Because you don't know what's around the corner. You might have such an experience of grace next week that you're saved on the spot. You might do something even better, you might go from Saul to Paul.
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IIRC(not a Calvinist) that the answer for a doctrinaire Calvinist is no, it is not, the reprobate have no knowledge of their fate but the elect do.
Of course there are not so many doctrinaire Calvinists these days and lots of them are in cults so you can’t ask them.
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I always thought predestination was a really bad way of dealing with theological fatalism.
The Orthodox style of biting the bullet and telling you that mystery doesn't have to logically make sense is probably the solution I respect the most, but even if you're a westerner that has to find a logical trick, there's a plethora of compatibilist arguments that are all much better.
Predestination just seems poised to generate either quasi-nihilist fatalism or a belief in universal salvation that renders Christian morality moot. At least in this world.
What do you mean by predestination?
Calvinists are generally compatiblists. We're neither nihilists, fatalists (in the Oedipean sense), nor universalists.
There is an undeniable tension between (God's) omniscience and (the gift of) free will, I call this tension theological fatalism.
Christians have varying ways of resolving this problem, and my understanding of the Calvinist solution (predestination) is that it essentially negates the impact of free will in this world. It has already been ordained whether you'll be saved and there is no act on your part that can change that. Your only way to find out is to die.
I see religion at least in part as a tool to shepherd humanity in this world, so I find this problematic for similar reasons I find strict Thomism to be flawed. It makes little sense to me that God that sacrificed himself for us wouldn't be trying to guide our actions even here. Or that he would gift us with free will if free will didn't allow us to prevent evil.
Now I suppose strictly speaking predestination is a sort of compatibilism. But compared to other compatibilisms it seems nominal at best. If one can't prevent their damnation, how free are they really?
There's some ambiguity in your comment, but I'll try to answer it.
There might be some readings of this where this is technically correct, but that's a pretty bad way to look at things, at least. Calvinists, as Protestants, think that our salvation is dependent upon our having faith. This is both necessary and sufficient for our salvation. Your lives are relevant to your salvation/damnation: you're damned for your sins, and saved due to faith in Christ.
But this is part of God's plan; in fact, the turning of people to him is itself his work.
You seem to be saying that God doesn't care about how we live our lives, and that this somehow follows from predestination. This is not true. For one thing, he told us things, in the commandments. For another, he actively works in us, giving us a new heart. Predestination isn't something laying out some separate path of salvation that has nothing to do with this life. Rather, those who were predestined and will ultimately be saved in the meantime go through thiselife, and, by the work of God, are brought to faith in Christ, are sanctified unto improvement in the Christian life and good works, etc.
We just don't want to.
Sorry, but libertarian-style free will is always really bizarre to me—you dislike the idea of any of it being determined, but then you end up with everything being arbitrary, which is plainly worse. My actions are based on things—whatever I like more/think is better/whatever other motivations shape my choices and ultimately result in whatever I choose, and it's weird to me that people would prefer that they didn't have reasons for choosing things.
Given that you brought up Thomism, I assume you're catholic. Looks like Trent disagrees:
But I don't especially care whether we call our wills free or not; it suffices that we recognize that people are the sources of their actions and morally culpable for the choices they make. I am perfectly willing to affirm that people are unable to will themselves out of damnation. Eph 2:1.
I guess this is where our disagreement truly lies, on what this means. It's evident that Calvinists still preach that one should live a godly life, but their doing so ultimately only successfully to the elect, while logically consistent, doesn't sit right with the essential meaning of salvation in my opinion.
I understand the position is that salvation is solely due to grace, but I believe synergism, whether Catholic or Orthodox makes a lot more sense as a solution. Regeneration preceding faith seems to sap the miraculous nature of grace and to obviate the need to preach the wicked.
The opposite, rather. Regeneration preceding faith (logically, not temporally) makes our salvation a miraculous work of God. Preaching to the wicked is essential because God works through means, and we don't know who will be saved, (and, of course, he told us to).
What's your theological background?
I expected this answer, and it's the most coherent with the premise. But preaching the wicked simply being going through the motions of humility seems to undersell our purpose.
It's complicated. I think the best approximation for the current standpoint I study religion from at this time is the same sort of theistic rationalism as Thomas Jefferson. I'm most familiar with Catholic and Sunni theology but I'm always curious of the minutiae of any successful credo since it must contain at least in part a measure of eternal wisdom. That said, so far I have not found a unique philosophy that provides a comprehensive solution to Mystery.
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For what it's worth, historically Reformed theologians did resort to something more like compatibilist arguments. I know this claim sounds unlikely in a world where Calvinists proudly adhere to determinist views and claim there is no free will and so forth, so let me provide a source for it. Unfortunately, it turns out that through liberal theology on the one hand and anti-intellectual fundamentalism on the other modern Protestantism has jettisoned quite a bit of its theological tradition.
Whether there's free will is in part a semantic issue. Luther famously wrote "The Bondage of the Will". What he's talking about there is about free will but primarily through a moral lens: you are not free to do good. I'm pretty sure some have affirmed free will, but not in a
compatibilistlibertarian sense. People fight over the meaning of the term.I'd be interested in hearing more about the book—at least, a summary of where it gestures to in those authors. My impression was definitely that determinism was mainstream; that's what I've picked up from my own reading of old authors.
Those authors were later, not first or second generation reformers. (The earliest is the third generation Zanchi, I think.)
Not expecting to see Gomarus on there, since I thought he was a supralapsarian (and maybe Voetius as well)?
EDIT: Made the comment better. Also, this review seems relevant, if you can access it.
EDIT 2: Compatibilist->Libertarian. I misspoke terribly.
I cannot access the review unfortunately.
To put it briefly, the view described by @urquan is pretty much the view that the theologians described in the book have. There are a lot more details about things like different types of necessity, how free choice functions before the Fall, after the Fall, after regeneration and after glorification, etc. but the overall view is pretty much what urquan described. Also, the book deals mostly with free will specifically, not with all the doctrines of elections. So the text provided for e.g. Gomarus deals with all sorts of philosophical ideas about how free will works, but he does not go into supralapsarianism or anything like that.
However, you are also correct about Luther and Calvin not having that view! The authors of ‘Reformed Thought on Freedom’ actually acknowledge that explicitly in the conclusion of their book when discussing possible objections. I know that it sounds implausible that Calvin and Luther had anti free choice views whereas pretty much all their successors the next couple of centuries did try to retain a notion of free choice. However, based on what I’ve read in the book, I am inclined to believe that. The later theologians all using a scholastic philosophical apparatus are very careful to retain free choice, despite affirming a very high view of God’s sovereignty. For what it’s worth, Calvin at least does hint at a little bit of nuance in his views at some point in the Institutes. I’d have to take some time to find the passage again, but I remember that somewhere in the Institutes Calvin says that fallen humans sin ‘necessarily’ but aren’t ‘coerced’ to sin. So they can’t not sin, they sin freely in some sense. This seems to hint at something more like the view that Urquan described and which later Reformed theologians also defended, albeit without the careful technical scholastic language used by later Reformed theologians and there are other places where Calvin does not seem to show this nuance.
Note that I am here specifically claiming the Reformed tradition as Reformed Orthodoxy developed retained a notion of free choice, not that they didn’t believe God foreordained everything. How there can be an omnipotent and omniscient God, who knows and allows and in some sense causes everything that is, while also somehow not being the author of evil and allowing for human freedom, remains a tricky question. There is a long tradition from the Church Fathers, through the Middle Ages and into Modernity of theologians grappling with that problem. I am not even claiming here that the Reformed scholastics were particularly successful in their approach to answer this question, just that mainstream Reformed theology from the sixteenth up to and including the eighteenth century, stands in the same line as the Medieval scholastics trying to reconcile Gods sovereignty with human freedom. In fact, somebody like Bernard of Clairvaux who made some distinctions between different types of necessity gets cited approvingly a bunch of times by different theologians discussed in the book. Some of the theologians seem to not like the standard Latin term for free will ‘liberum arbitrium’, although they all acknowledge that the Church Fathers used that term and so they also seem uncomfortable (unlike Calvin and Luther) with completely rejecting that term. However, when you read the treatises in the book, it becomes clear that they are accusing their Roman Catholic and Remonstrant interlocutors of something like what we would call a libertarian free will view, while they themselves argue for something more like what we would call compatibilism today.
You specifically mention Gomarus, so let me try to summarise the treatise on free will from Gomarus provided in the books. Gomarus first talks about what free choice is:
He goes on to make a distinction between free choice (liberum arbitrium) and will (voluntas). The will is concerned with what we want, i.e. with goals, whereas the free choice is concerned with means, i.e. making a concrete choice between A or B. Let me give an example to try and explain this distinction. If somebody is thirsty and wants to drink a glass of water, the thirst and the goal of satiating that thirst, is the voluntas. Nobody thinks somebody made a conscious free choice to be thirsty and desire a glass of water, that’s not what people talk about when they say ‘free will’. The person in the example then has a choice to drink a glass of water or not. That’s the liberum arbitrium. Unless he has knowledge that the glass of water is poisoned or something he will more or less certainly choose to drink the glass of water, but he was completely able to choose not to drink the glass of water.
After a bunch of specific definitions and distinctions and technical terms and stuff as is common in scholastic theology, Gomarus goes on to describe free choice in four states, the state before the Fall, the state after the Fall, the state after regeneration and the state after glorification. As I understand it, the key here is this distinction between liberum arbitrium and voluntas. The potency to choose either A or B, i.e. liberum arbitrium, is affirmed by Gomarus in all those four states. What changes, is the voluntas. The fallen unregenerate man has a corrupted voluntas that is no longer oriented towards God, but towards sin. Therefore, though he is completely free in the choices that he makes, he will always use that freedom to sin, because that is now his goal:
So Gomarus does not deviate from Reformed ideas about total depravity and such. What he argues is that man being fallen and in some sense not able to do anything but sin, is compatible with humans being free. They sin, not because of some sort of necessity, but because, their nature, being corrupted after the Fall, they want to. The argument Gomarus uses here about angels is also used a couple of times by other theologians in the book. Can good angels, glorified saints in heaven or even God sin? Christians typically believe it’s certain God is not going to sin, or that glorified saints in Heaven are not going to fall into sin again, but it would also be rather absurd to claim that God or glorified saints are not free. So this must mean it is possible for your will to be so strongly confirmed in good, that you will certainly always freely choose to do good. Likewise, for the unregenerate man, their will is corrupted to the extent that they will always freely choose to do sin.
I am not saying that this view is perfect or that the Reformed scholastics are able to answer all the questions this raises in a satisfactory way. But it is clear that somebody like Gomarus, who has a reputation of being a hardcore Calvinist, because he is the one who originally started the beef with Arminius himself, surprisingly actually confirms humans have liberum arbitrium, even in their fallen state, despite John Calvin and Luther rejecting that term.
See the second edit to the previous comment: I misspoke.
Anyway, to be clear, Luther and Calvin were able to talk about the will being free in a moral sense—your will is free when it's in alignment with God's will, rather than a slave to sin, etc. etc. They denied free will in fallen man, but not e.g. in glory.
This fits well with a compatibilist understanding (which I would affirm) but isn't quite talking about the same thing.
It looks like you're saying that people developed a broader understanding of free will afterwards, in a compatibilist sense, which makes complete sense. (Didn't Edwards, as well?)
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It was arguing that they were misreading Turretin, mostly. I haven't read either the book or Turretin, and only skimmed the review, so I have no idea of the extent to which that is true. There seems to have since been more scholarly argumentation from people in response.
Thanks for the analysis of Gomarus. Much of this might be a terminological dispute, as they all believe in an exhaustive divine decree, and not in a Molinist sense either.
I don't think it's unreasonable to characterize Luther and Calvin as compatibilists, in the sense that they think that we are genuinely making meaningful choices, that they depend on us, that there's moral responsibility, etc. even though they think that they have qualms about the term free will. My impression was that something compatibilist-ish was just broadly mainstream within the Reformed world. But this is interesting, I wasn't really aware of these debates.
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My understanding is that predestination wasn't originally interpreted by Calvinists as eliminating free will -- the argument for predestination wasn't total determinism, it was total depravity. So, the view was that people have free will (in a philosophical sense), their will is just totally entangled in sin such that it is impossible to choose the good without prevenient grace. Which, well, is essentially the Christian consensus since Augustine (at least in the West; the Orthodox are harder to pin down, though they would certainly insist that salvation is totally connected to cooperation with grace), but the unique proposition of Calvinism is that such grace is given only to the elect, and is irresistible.
This view is correct as far as I can gather from the book I linked to. Albeit with the caveat that John Calvin himself and Luther did reject the idea of free will. That being said, the book presents authors who for instance contributed to Reformed confessions and are all influential figures in the Reformed tradition, so I think it is reasonable to say that the Reformed tradition had a view similar to what you describe, even though Calvin himself did not.
I don't think there's much of a distance between the views.
It's worth noting, when you talk about people having free will, that that does not mean libertarian free will—it is fully compatible with determinism. (And yes, this fits with Augustine and others)
The Reformed theologians did affirm determinism, and had a notion of providence fully extensive over the world, such that nothing occurs without first being decreed by God. Nevertheless, @urquan is right that that is not what the word "predestination" usually referred to, it referring specifically to the choosing of people unto salvation.
To be clear, I agree that Luther and Calvin were more concerned with a moral sense of free will as you put it in another post. Actually in the conclusion of "Reformed Though on Freedom" the authors of the book touch on this topic as well:
So yeah, the view of the book which I think I agree with, isn't that Luther and Calvin were completely wrong and later generations of theologians fortunately completely rejected their view. Rather, Luther and Calvin correctly emphasized the corruption of fallen man over and against a more optimistic view of human nature that was common in the late Medieval/ early Modern period, but in doing so they made some statements that have unfortunate philosophical consequences. Later generations of theologians had more or less the same idea about the spiritual and moral consequences of sin, but were a little more careful and nuanced in working it out philosophically. While, to be clear, I don't think this should lead us to a negative view of Luther and Calvin at all, I don't think it is a completely theoretical point either. I know at least in the Netherlands, where I am from, there are some very conservative Reformed groups that fall into some sort of hyper Calvinism who would benefit greatly if they were told that contrary to popular belief, people like Gomarus and Voetius believed in free will.
Without using the words free will, what wrong beliefs do they end up having?
I guess I don't see what unfortunate philosophical consequences Luther/Calvin had.
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Total determinism is normal. See Calvin, Institutes book I, chapters 16-17, where he lays out an exhaustive model of providence.
This wasn't unique to Calvin, Luther also thought we were predestined, along with many Catholics (especially Dominicans/Thomists). You're right though, that's more explicitly talking about sin and salvation (as does Calvin later in the Institutes), but they also thought that all creation was predetermined, I believe.
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It is nobility for the non nobles. Effectively, middle class people wanted to give themselves a noble title as elect without having the responsibilities of being a noble. They didn't actually want to fight in a war or take responsibility for society, they wanted to be special individuals with no real obligation to the people and rest of society. There isn't really chivalry, there is just being special by being born special.
I have read a fair bit of Calvinist theology from John Calvin himself up to contemporary stuff and I've never had a sense that there was some sort of class struggle going on behind it. Where did you get this idea?
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