Theses on Predestination and Free Will Part One

I thought since I haven't blogged in a while that I should start again! These theses I hope to expand individually into seperate posts later on, but for now they shall remain in this list (and obviously in this initial format not everything can be squeezed into the thesis, so all will undoubtedly bear marks of incompletness. Also I labeled these "part one," as I may want to add more at the behest of any comments/concerns that might arise, and the simple fact that I havent slept due to my damned allergies and I am very tired and in all likelyhood not very able to get to everything I wanted to):


1.) The relationship between God and the World is inherently (and radically!) Trinitarian; God is not a "single" personal subject, a monistic entity that stands over/against the world, or us, as a self contained or "opaque" subjectivity. Rather, the material explication of the term "predestination," for the role of God, and the term "human freedom," for the role of man in the God-world-man relationship needs to be understood as itself mediated, and not other, than the activities of the three divine persons or identities, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.


2.) Because of the fact that Father-Son-Holy Spirit are the persons of God's interaction with the world, and that fact that this means that Personhood, and not Impersonality or abstract Substantiality, is the primary terms of relation, then "Causality," (as in God "causes" this or that to happen) and "effect," cannot be the primary heuristic to organize the "products," of the God-world-man relation. Persons approach, evoke, love, cherish, repel, open, close, command, request...of other persons, and not just "cause."


3.) God is truly infinite. This means that God does not merely oppose or contradict the finite, but takes the contradiction into himself and overcomes it. The infinite takes the finite into itself. This is not merely an abstract postulation to help solve an esoteric problem; rather since the Infinity (and whatever other "attrbute" we might speak of God, as omniscience) as God's infinity, is nothing other than a description of the relation and its "effects" of the Triune perichoresis. Hence the question "how much does God limit my freedom," or "how much do I limit God's freedom," are not true questions; they do not oppose eachother, and indeed presuppose both an insuficient theology and an insufficient anthropology. God and man do not displace one another as if on a closed energy system, even if in a commonsense and initial way one might speak of one or the other (that is, God or man) as having been the "agent," of an action.


4.) if God is Free, given what force any "God is" statement must have for reality, Freedom must be an ontological category. Freedom cannot (whether for God or for man) be equated with an autonomous sovereignty of an autarchic subjectivity, or equated with the Libertarian notion of choice (in which to be free, abstractly speaking, one must have been able to choose "otherwise") or otherwise as something that one "has" as an attribute, like blond hair or blue eyes. Strictly speaking, God is not autonomous or free from relation, but is relation itself; God is not "first" God as divine substance and only then the Three Persons, rather "God" describes the perichoretic interrelationships of the Triune community. "Freedom," then describes nothing other than the authentic activity of our Triune God. Therefore any model of Freedom that attempts to proffer a definition of freedom as only freedom-from, or as strict autonomy for the human agent (whether in the form of "choosing otherwise," or "freedom from restriction,") or as something humans "do" rather than "are" would automatically alienate this freedom from the type of Freedom that God is, which is neither "autonomous" nor a type of hyper-Voluntarism dependant on an absolutely singular Divine Will. Moreover, for the human agent, freedom cannot be equated with choice. If this were so, then the extent of human freedom would positivley correspond to the range of possible choices (which is often what it is taken to be). Yet one is not free to not choose. The basic structure of "choice," cannot bear the weight of the equivocation "freedom=choice."


5.) Freedom for humanity cannot be something individuals "possess." Therefore, if Freedom is, as these theses have been arguing, an ontological category rather than, say, primarily a mode of choice, then speaking along the same lines if you or I are free, this Freedom is mediated to us via a community, namely the Church. This is closely related to the Biblical concept of "predestination," and "election," which are primarily related to the gathering of a community, and only secondarily of gathering individuals.


6.) God is not primarily the First Cause. This is different (but related) than saying, as in Thesis 2, that the primary heuristic cannot be "cause-effect." Rather, arising alongside mechanistic undersandings of the world, in which the Aristotelian "efficient" cause is emphasized above all else, calling God the "first Cause," often went hand in hand both with a mechanical understanding of predestination, and a subtle (and sometimes not so subtle, even if explicitly rejected) Deism. Though it might seem counterintuitive, if God is the God of Promise, as Moltmann so fervently argues for in his Theology of Hope, or if God is the God of the Future as Pannenberg remarks, or a God who is "first future to Himself and only thereafter past and present to Himself" (Jenson), or if Christianity needs to be "a thouroughgoing eschatology," as Barth wrote in his commentary on Romans (however that actually played out in Barth's theology) then God creates, not from the past, but from the "absolute future." I take the term "absolute future," (as with many of the ideas in these theses) from F. LeRon Shults. God is not "only" future and thereupon past and present, for this would be to limit God temporally to a specific "temporal place," and just so would make God finite, and not infinite. Rather, that God is the "absolute future," means that he is present in both the past and the present is Future, as the ground, sustenance, and telos of all of our activities. He "approaches," from the Future, not by transversing "from" a distant point, but by evoking and conditioning Creation "towards" Himself, by "opening their futures," in event and encounter.


7.) God's absolute Futurity also breeds a commentary on time. Time is not a "thing," or the reification of a concept. Temporality is not something that "stretches" ahead of God into which He must "look ahead" to see what is happening (or "look behind" as if "from the Future," in a crude sense). Nor is Eternity simply the negation of Temporality, so that God is "time-less-ness" absolute and static as the Great Ego in the sky, the Transcendental Subjectivity. Eternity is not something God exists "within," nor is it some sort of metric (measurable or not) that dictates God's movement and action: Eternity is God's very life, the interactions and relations between the Persons defines Eternity. Nor is Time a "container" in which we exist (which relativity theory has shown well enough). Robert Jenson helpfully describes Time and Creation as God's "stretching out" the Triune Life to "make room" for us. In a similar way, Jurgen Moltmann speaks of the "zimzum" of God, appropriating a kabbalist concept of God's "concentration," into Himself to allow room for time. Jesus and His Spirit enter into History, and it is just this that (counterintuitive as it may seem) make history possible in the first place. Hence time cannot be something in which God must look "ahead or behind," to see what "will or will not" happen, or what possibilities of free-agency may occur; Time itself is the very distension of the Triune life, and finds its "boundary conditions," in reference to that life.


8.) "Contingency" and "necessity" are themselves relative to the thought of some greater whole. That an event was "necessary" can only be viewed when an event is complete. This means that necessity and contingency cannot be, strictly speaking, opposed to one another, because they have different aspectival reference points: contingency operates by speaking of possibilities that have not yet occured, while necessity speaks of things that have occured (even if they "have" only occured in the "future"). If the temporal passage of history, and the temporal relationships in which things stand, actually constitute their being, then the width of the temporal process cannot collapse into single "essential" points of reference to describe an object. I 'am' myself only in reference to the totality of history in which I stand, because any "portion" of my temporal life refers to other portions, and ultimately to the entirety of history in which I am embedded. This means that when I say "what I am" at any given point along that line, I am to a large extent anticipating the total outcome of myself in history. If, also, to speak of "necessity" or "contingency" in reference to an object, or an event, or a person, is in some sense to describe the "essence" of the thing, event, or person, this essence can only be described anticipating the finality and totaliy of a thing, unless the finality and totality of the thing is actually present (meaning the end of history as we know it). But if this is so, then to describe something as "necessary," in reference to its "whatness," can only take place definitively in retrospect of the totality. But this means that necessity is necessity only when the event/object/person has already occured and now could not occur otherwise because it is fixed in the past. Continency on the other hand describes an event in its occurance-as-process. Contingency must always "turn-into" necessity becuase of the "present" always giving way to the fixity of the past. But in its "immediatness" the totality has not yet occured to an object/event/person, and so events that happen are not "necessary," in the sense of a fixity. Fixity only happens retrospectively, if we are to assume that God's creation is not primarly a "Cosmos" that only then "has" (accidentally!) a history, but is itself historical and eschatological.