Binding the Hands of God

My monthly blog seems to be slowly becoming my yearly blog. That's going to have to change.

If you know me well enough to realize that this blogpost is coming at one of the busiest points in my semester, you may well be wondering why my writing is welling up now rather than, say, during some time when I can actually afford to be producing it. This seems to be a trend with me. Contrary to the literary ideals of Woolf and Barthes, I don't write when I have the time, the perfect space, or the monetary incentive. Neither of these normally accompany my writing; my vacations are spent with family, my Friday nights with friends, and my in-between times with good books. I don't write then. Instead, I write exactly when I don't have the time. Like now, for example: on the night before a test when I have unread readings stacked up past my ears. I'm starting to think that I should stop trying to understand my psyche.

Busy or no, this post must be written. Too much has transpired (and expired) since my last post that I can no longer delay such a communication. My thoughts since November have encompassed far too much territory to express in one post, so I will narrow my scope to a thought I had last summer which has not seen light outside a hurried discussion with one of the profound Salvos Down Under. My thought was about the nature of the Trinity.

Hold up!

Please don't be turned off from my blog because I bring up this subject. I know about the controversy that has arisen in the past year or so because of The Shack, and I want to assure you that my thought has no connection to it. I have purposely been putting off reading the novel so that I would be able to record my thought without being influenced by the mainstream discussion. I do have some vague notion that William P. Young has been criticized for making the Persons of the Godhead seem too individualistic, but that is my only knowledge of the book. Long before I had even heard of The Shack, I was inspired to think about this subject because of my good friend Daniel.

Daniel is an amazing guy: someone I respect for his crazy abilities (ranging from swing dancing to mathematical abstraction), his sincere struggle with God, and his genuine love for others. But Daniel is a Calvinist. At least, I thought he was a Calvinist. It turns out that he just knows how to argue for the validity of any position on the spot, and this quality lends him the power to render his actual beliefs inscrutable. Combined with his playful and truth-seeking disposition, his gift for rhetoric often expresses itself in refreshingly truth-revealing forms. Upon determining that my theological background was influenced by Arminianism, Daniel proceeded to adopt an opposing persona and question me on what had hitherto been the unquestioned foundations of my faith.

I should at this point make it clear that before this encounter, I had never heard of "Arminianism" and had no understanding of what it was. The idea that God gave humans freedom of choice was one that I had never considered controversial. No one I had known had ever suggested an alternate possibility, and I had accepted the idea as self-evident and undeniable. Little did I know, this position, known as Arminianism, is held by only a minority of Protestants. As my Critical Theory professor likes to say, definitions require binary oppositions; I had never needed a label for my belief in free will because I had never considered that there was an alternative. And it was this position that Daniel required me to defend.

I was floored. Here was a man I looked up to spiritually, and he was telling me that I was a mindless automaton without any say about... anything. How could I possibly respond?

The truthful answer is, not very well. In one sense, retrospectively, I'm very glad about that. The main reason I was ill-equipped to answer such a questioning was because I grew up in The Salvation Army. From its origins, The Salvation Army has purposely withdrawn from all theological debate and sacramental practice that it has not seen as integral to faith in Jesus as Saviour. The idea is that too much conflict arises from inconsequential theological debates; one should be able to accept the basic tenants and move straight into service (or even move into service before accepting the basic tenants). It's a good way of focusing on what's important. I still believe that. In any case, because I had never really attended any churches outside the denomination, I had never discovered the Calvinist-Arminian debate, and was quite mal-equipped to participate in it. All I could offer was a simple story.

The story was told me by my program director while I was working at camp. He was attempting to prepare us to answer tough questions about why we believed what we believed. The tough question of the day happened to be "Why is there sin, evil, and pain in the world?" I was shocked. I had never thought of such a question on my own, and I had no idea that this was one of the most prominent arguments against the existence of God throughout all history. All at once, the problem of pain seemed all-consumingly important, and potentially a reason to doubt everything. Fortunately or not, my faithful program director did not wait until panic had taken full force before providing me with the solution.

"Mindless automatons."

Those are the two words that stuck with me from the ensuing explanation. His actual speech was lengthier than that, but "mindless automatons" is all I really remembered. The idea was that God wants the people He has created to love Him in the way that He loves them: out of choice, not coersion. In order for us to exercise our choice, there must be another option, which is consequently dubbed 'sin'. And with that, my moral dilemma was at an end. I was soothed by an easy answer, and largely left the subject alone for several years.

Until Daniel came along. And in some confusedly jumbled way, my former program director's explanation was what I blurted out in response to Daniel's friendly provokation. Unsurprisingly, my defense did not hold up, but our mutual interest in pursuing truth did. Many conversations insued. In the course of time, we dissected the tulip, struggled with the Bible, and generally dwelt on this subject to such an extent that I think I may have partially missed out on getting to know Daniel's other wonderful attributes. We never really came to a conclusion in our searchings, but the questions we were asking changed considerably. While the initial questions centered around whether or not we have free will, the primary question eventually became what free will would look like if we had it.

This is yet another question I had never really considered. I always thought gaining knowledge was like building a house: starting with a foundation and going from there. Why is it that the further I search, the more fundamental my questions become? Whatever the reason, the pursuit of a definition of free will is an important one. It's all well and good for me to claim that I have free will, but if I don't have a definition for "free will," I might as well be saying that I have a jabberwocky.

So I started thinking. And this was my intrapersonal conversation:

"What do I mean when I say that I choose to do something?"

"Well, I guess I mean that I choose independent of God's choice. He doesn't enforce His will on mine. He chooses not to control me. "

"But He created me. He set the entire universe in motion - including my predispositions. The way He set everything up necessitates His determining of all the decisions I will ever make."

"But I make some pretty horrible decisions - ones God wouldn't want me to make, and certainly ones He wouldn't make Himself. That means that I must have made them on my own."

"But if God knows everything, He would have known how to create the world in such a way that all the decisions I would ever make would be the ones He wanted."

"Then either God doesn't know everything, or I don't have free will."

"But... but..."

And the "but... but..." was where I stalled. These are two very basic things I have always held as integral to what I believe: God is omniscient, and throughout my life, I have chosen to disobey Him. I had never seen a contridiction between these two ideas before, but now the discrepancy seemed insurmountable. I couldn't bring myself to deny either of these two tenants, but neither could I reconcile them. Knowing that something I believed must change in order for my worldview to be internally consistent, I naively attempted to solve a problem that has been debated down through the centuries by people who have had far more theological training than I. And I came up with a solution.

... but you may find it disagreeable.

It's my thought about the Trinity I told you about all those paragraphs ago. Think about the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Only one God, but three... Persons. I hesitate to use that term because I don't have a definition for it, and as I clued in earlier when I had no definition for "free will," words don't mean anything without definitions. I will satisfy this difficulty by vaguely defining "Persons" as "constituents." I'm still not convinced that there are only three. I mean, there could be, but I don't see any Biblical evidence for limiting the number of Persons in the Godhead to that. "Trinity" is an extra-Biblical word. But enough side-tracking.

If the preceding statements do not fall under the definition of heresy, what I'm about to suggest might - but it is a possible solution to the Calvinist-Arminian debate. At least, it's been helpful for my views on things. The problem I have with Calvinism is that in removing free will, it makes no account for evil in the world. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this; it's just that no Calvinist I've put the question to has been able to give me an answer. And my problem with Arminianism is that it doesn't provide for a logical definition of free will, because God's creation of me and His omniscience together necessitate His determination of my actions.

What if we could separate God's creation of me and his omniscience? To me, that would solve the problem. "Free will" only lacks a definition because God created me knowing how I would eventually act, and besides that, I can't accept that God would create a person knowing full well that they would reject Him and never return to Him. So here is the only solution that makes sense to me; the only option I know which allows God to remain the omniscient omnibenevolent Creator of a faulty creature like me:

Creation was the undertaking of God the Father alone. For the speck of a moment it took to create mankind, God the Father was not in communication with God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. And according to God's omnipotence, He chose of his own free will to keep God the Father from the knowledge of whether mankind would eventually turn its back on Him or not, just for one solitary moment. In that moment, God the Father created mankind. Mankind was given free will because in the act of creation, mankind's Creator did not know whether or not mankind would ultimately choose Him or not, and God remained omniscient because God the Son and God the Holy Spirit still knew about the future of mankind in that moment of mankind's creation.

You may think that this robs something of God, but I don't think it does. If God is omnipotent, He should be able to choose to limit the powers of one of the Persons within Himself. Without realizing it, I think most Christians already believe this idea. Consider when Jesus was on Earth. Was baby Jesus able to scrawl mathematical formulae on his manger? Could seven-year-old Jesus already speak all the languages that would eventually exist in the 21st century? If God did not choose to limit His own omniscience in the Person of the incarnate Son, why did Jesus pray "My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me"? If God the Son knew whether or not it was possible, why would he add the words "if it is possible" to His prayer? God the Son must have chosen not to partake in all the power of God while on Earth. And if God can limit the omniscience of one of His Persons for a specified amount of time, why couldn't He do so with one of His other Persons at another time?

But this is all speculation. How do I know whether God the Father limited His omniscience while creating mankind or not? The simple answer is, I don't. The only thing I can ever claim to know is God and His love (and incidentally, I'm starting to think that the phrase "God and His love" is redundant). My purpose in this mental exercise was simply to determine whether it could possibly be consistent for me to believe what I believe: that God is infinitely powerful and good, that He is the creator of everything including me, that He gave me the freedom to choose or deny Him, and that He loves me and intensely desires to be with me. My conclusion has been... it's possible. Perhaps (or even probably) the solution I've constructed is not correct, but that doesn't really matter. The presentation of a dozen possible solutions are not required in order to establish that a set of beliefs is internally consistent; only one solution is required, whether it is true or no. The point is that these beliefs are not contradictory. Whether they are true, well, that's for you to decide.