I noted in my last post that from my own personal perspective, Calvinism suggested a God with a completely different character than the one I had long believed in, and for that reason, it caused a huge crisis of faith. As long as the debates about grace and free will were primarily about how works relate to salvation, it always seemed to me that this was one of those debates that could be discussed quietly over coffee and was not worth making a fuss over. But when it came to the point where it appeared God was, by his eternal decree, the "author" of evil, I fell into a state of anguish.
It was in my short stint in seminary that I was introduced to the idea of "compatibilism". This is the suggestion that free will is compatable with determinism, based on the idea that individuals freely choose what they are predisposed to choose by their character, circumstances, psychology, etc. In other words, if I choose A as opposed to B under a given set of conditions, then I will have freely chosen A and will always choose A given the same set of conditions. My own nature, combined with the set of conditions in which I am found, produce a specific result.
In Calvinism, this makes it possible for some to say that God accomplishes his sovereign will by creating human beings with a specific makeup and placing them in the right set of conditions to insure that what they freely choose will be exactly what His design predicts they will choose. The distinction then is between "free choice" - meaning that one chooses between two or more options, as opposed to voluntary compliance - meaning that a person "voluntarily" chooses one and only one possible option.
As Calvin put it in the Institutes
"What matters it whether you sin with a free or an enslaved judgment, so long as you sin voluntarily, especially when man is proved to be a sinner because he is under the bondage of sin?"
An example of compatabilism was put forth by John Feinberg in my apologetics class, which I'll attempt to reconstruct in my own words:
If I want someone to leave the room and force them to leave it by coercion, then I will have denied their free will. If on the other hand, I tell that person that there is a $100 bill waiting for him in the hallway, he will almost certainly leave the room of his own accord. So I will have gotten what I wanted without violating his freedom.
Here is the problem I have with this example. It is one thing to speak of enticing someone to freely commit an act that is morally good or morally neutral. I would not be considered a cad for manipulating events to guarantee that a person merely leaves a room, particularly if he is rewarded a hundred bucks in the exchange. On the other hand, if I manipulate events in such a way as to entice another person to commit murder, and that person then faces execution for the act that he "voluntarily" chose, no sane person who knew that I set up the events would excuse me from guilt. But we have to excuse God from such guilt, and this is done by essentially moving God's justice completely out of the realm of human discussion.
We are asked to believe that God, in his infinite wisdom, desired a certain type of world and before the foundations of that world decreed what would take place, including the actions and beliefs of every individual. He sets certain conditions so that each and every event and each and every human choice will be made according to his perfect plan. And He "justly", we are assured, holds all non-elect persons accountable for those choices which they made, in response to the conditions He set, according to His plan. Finally, he "justly" condemns them eternally for those choices when they could, by their nature and circumstance, only choose those choices.
Like the situation I described above, if I were to manipulate someone to "willingly" commit murder, no one in their right mind would say I had no guilt in the planning and execution of that plan. How then can we say, in any meaningful sense, that God is just? Or even that God is good? Calvinists will often respond that this is beyond human understanding, but this is hardly a helpful reply.
I had always believed that right and wrong were not some standard that existed outside of God, but were extensions of His character. But if God is the one who plans evil, in what way can I say that goodness corresponds to his character and evil does not? If there is no correspondence between a human conception of justice and fairness and things which seem to us to be completely unjust are actually a "justice" we can't comprehend, then what does justice mean? What about God do we really understand? God's character becomes an impenetrable mystery and salvation and damnation become something beyond human discussion.
Scripture says God is not completely understandable, but certainly does not say we can know nothing about God that is true and reliable. It seems to me that a basic fairness that can be understood as fairness by human beings ought to be able to be applied to a God who we are told is grieved by sin and who is not willing that any should perish. Remove genuine choice about at least a few things that relate to eternal destiny and the is no way for me to see God as any less than a tyrant. Define freedom and justice in a way that must be applied differently to human beings than it is to God and we lose all sense of confidence we can know anything at all truly about him.
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