A Tribute to My Grandma on the Occasion of Her 90th Birthday

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to live a good life. Perhaps this preoccupation has to do with having children of my own now, but it is no longer sufficient to philosophize about the good life or critique others I feel don’t live good lives. I’m learning how urgent it is for me to be a wholly good human being right now.

What you have provided for me is a model of what it means to live well. What makes you great in my eyes is your constancy in selflessness. As you know, I am educated beyond my intelligence, and I am aware of various philosophers and their definitions of greatness. But surely the best definition is that provided by Jesus Himself: greatness is humble service, first of God, then of others.

You have served God in your marriage and in your home. You have never been ashamed of the notion that a woman’s value can be fully realized in caring for a hard-working husband and in faithfully raising children. You have lived the principle that the highest calling and the noblest glory of a woman is nurturing life. Wherever you have been, there has been joy and feasting and laughter and the spirit of home.

You have served God by the manner in which you have extended generosity to others over the years. In my college years, you took me in, made wonderful meals for me, and supported even my immature efforts at sketch comedy, which is certainly confirmation of your saintly perseverance. More importantly, your gracious care energized my ability to complete my first two years of college. And I know that your emotional and monetary support enclosed many members of your family in times of need.

You have served God by the manner in which you entertain guests, your selflessness tangibly expressed in excessive volumes of goulash, innumerable Thanksgiving dinner masterpieces, fried fish and peach cobbler.

You have served God by your commitment to His Church. To this day, many of my fondest memories of childhood involve your lessons in Sunday school at Evangel Temple. Of course I don’t remember the lessons, but that does not diminish their importance in my development and in the development of so many other children privileged to sit under your guidance. Please know that your thankless and faithful service has resulted in the cultivation of souls. Anyone can build a thing, but you have been instrumental in the building of people.

You have lived life slowly enough to absorb its detail, to understand and support your loved ones, and you have stopped frequently enough in the flow of daily life to listen to the voice of God.

You have graciously endured much, including thankless grandchildren like me, the poverty of the great depression, cancer and the loneliness that comes with outliving your friends. But you have emerged not merely a good and praiseworthy woman, but a living testament to the reality of God in the world, a true, deep and authentic Christian, a righteous woman!

I know what you wanted to teach us all; that our greatest wealth and greatest achievements in this brief life involve our relationships, first with God, then with family and then with the world. Most in our age deliberately attend to various professional relationships with the world, and after that is secured we perhaps make time for family and God. I pledge to you that my family will seek to honor God by the manner in which we conduct our family life, as you have always done. The greatest honor we can give you is to pattern our lives after the legacy of love, desire for truth and genuine faith you have plainly exemplified.

When I look into the innocent eyes of my twins, or when I see Trinity’s unbounded joy, I think of the simple carefree days of my own childhood, spent with you and grandpa. It is in those moments that I learned that life is not a matter of duration but of quality; that what counts is paying attention to what matters, being wholly present in the moment and that the preservation of moments is not nearly as important as the preservation of character. Let me put it this way: I want to be for my children and grandchildren what you have been for me, a source of noble humanity. Streams do not rise higher than their source, but your love for your grandkids flowed from the reservoir of God’s love for you.

I’m so proud that you are my grandmother; that my children are the living legacy of so luminous a woman, who in the winter of her years continues to show the way for future generations. It is a poor recompense—it is no recompense—to offer my profuse thanks for all you have done and all you have been to me. Because of you I am a truly rich man; rich in everything that matters. But I say thanks, and I join others on this occasion in applauding you, not for the duration of your years, but for the depth of your soul.

Your deeply grateful and deeply honored grandson,

Bo

A Comparison of Middle Knowledge and Calvinism

Many philosophers are taken with the notion of libertarian free will, meaning that the will is uncoerced by any external factors whenever we encounter a decision, especially the decision to follow Jesus or not.

Critics of libertarian free will, as I understand them, would suggest that the problem with it is that it seems to enthrone free will as a kind of pristine and untainted residual feature of Edenic man. Man has fallen altogether, except his will, or so goes the criticism a Calvinist would level against libertarianism. I must say that what I've read of libertarians does seem to suggest that they believe the will is utterly neutral with respect to just about every choice. These men will speak of sin nature, but one is led to wonder what they can possibly mean by it if it does not affect and inform the will in any appreciable way?

This freedom of the will for libertarians is protected by a doctrine known as "Middle Knowledge--" which means simply that God knows what you would do if external factors and conditions were different. He sort of surveys all the choices that people freely make and then chooses to instantiate the world that has the largest, or most acceptable, balance of people freely choosing Him. As it pertains to me, he knows that if certain factors had not been in place in my life, I would have exercised the free choice to reject Christianity, but God knew that and instead chose to create a world in which other factors moved me to freely accept Christianity. In God's knowledge (His "Middle Knowledge") are all the contingent realities that would result from the infinite number of variations in external conditions presented to the wills of individuals and He has chosen this particular world to create.

I will pursue a few questions in this piece:

1. How does this protect libertarian free will as it has been defnined by so many scholars?

2. How is it substantially different from hard Calvinistic predestinarianism?

3. Is not "middle knowledge" a useless division of God's knowledge into a million merely potential realities?

4. How does the notion that God's knowledge does not contain "counterfactuals of freedom" (the choices you could have made but didn't) rule out freedom?

Questions 1 and 2:

On the "middle knowledge" view, God chooses to establish the world that will result in the "external conditions" necessary to produce the exact number of converts He desires. It may be a penultimate reality that they are choosing, but the ultimate reality is that they (and the conditions that will produce them) are already predetermined, or perhaps pre-selected would be a better term.

Calvinist Perspective

1 God, "before the foundations of the world ordains the number of those to be saved (the elect)."
2 Person A is "in the number to be saved."
3 Person A is saved.

"Middle Knowledge" Perspective

1 God, "before the foundations of the world computes the available contingencies of people's free choices and all the factors necessary to produce/lead/elicit the free responses of the exact number He desires to be saved (the elect) and ensures the production of that world."
2 Person A is "in the number to be saved."
3 Person A is saved.

In what substantive sense are the two first premises different, besides the impressive rhetoric of the second? While it is clearly possible that I am not understanding the "middle knowledge" perspective in all its depth, it could also be possible that middle knowledge is merely a modification of the reformed view?

I frankly think that premise one in argument two is merely a long form of the same idea in premise one of argument one. It seems to me that Edwards, for example, would simply say that among the factors necessary to lead or produce the free responses of the elect is the active grace of Christ in the hearts of the elect, enabling them to believe. One must remember that, on the Calvinist view, the purpose of God's active grace is to restore the capacity of the individual will to embrace Christ. But the fact remains that either argument above envisions a world populated by elect and non-elect people whose final position is not really under their ultimate control. What real difference does it make to the number of elect whether or not God predestines or pre-selects? They are still not free to be anything other than elect!

Let us remember that libertarian free will has to do with making choices without causal determinents. But if the range of my legitimate choices is limited by a power outside of me, it is true that I am free within the range of choices, but surely something has acted externally to limit my available choices, and to limit them on so fundamental a question as my eternal destiny. Actually, God has acted to limit even my knowledge of available choices. I frankly see this as strangely similar to the Calvinist view that God allows freedom, defined a certain way, within certain pre-established boundaries. But either view limits freedom through God's active agency. The libertarian turns out only to broaden the limits of freedom by making God's actions purely "external," but that by definition is only a modification of Calvinism and not a new view. God's will still acts over against human choices to shape the emergence of the redeemed family.

Thus the only difference between the two views comes down to the definition of freedom. In one view, freedom is no causal interference after the causal interference of limiting choices. In the other view, there is causal interference after the causal interference of limiting choices, but it is a causal interference curiously to restore the wills of the elect. One merely establishes boundaries around choices, but those boundaries are predetermined. The other establishes boundaries around choices and says that grace penetrates the hearts of those in such a quality of rebellion that they would continue in their free rebellion regardless of the boundaries. One view changes the environment to produce a new person. The other view changes the environment and the person in the environment.

Perhaps I have mis-spoken. The difference turns out to be a biggish difference between the classical Reformed position and that of Dr. Craig and other advocates of this "Molinist" or "middle knowledge" perspective on the issue of human freedom. It is simply unthinkable to the Reformers that willful choices are purely uncaused phenomena; like particles generated from some quantum vacuum of the will. If they are utterly uncaused phenomena, then who really is choosing? If nothing is, so to speak, causally behind the will and controls it, then what accounting can be made of the origin of our choices?

Libertarian freedom would mean that for every choice, desire may result from the choice and be bound to the conscious personality, but can never motivate a choice (because this would constitute a causal force sufficient to move the will). Once desire is set by a choice, in order for sufficient neutrality of the will to be maintained, the desires of the personality would need to dissipate with rapidity so that the "quantum vacuum of the will" could be, as it were, reset for the next choice to be made.

Edwards, and the other Reformers, on the other hand, would vehemently contend that the fallenness of our humanity affects the heart of man to such an extent that his desires, bound up with his conscious personality, move his will. In short, we choose what our personalities desire, and so the motive of the heart is logically anterior and logically connected to all our choices.

Question 3: Is "middle knowledge" a useless division of God's knowledge into a million merely potential realities?

My critique here is analogous to Aristotle's critique of the Forms. He wanted to know why we should not believe that there is only one reality rather than two, and that the forms of things are imbedded within them, or are so tightly related to them as to be distinguishable but inseparable? By analogy, why should we believe that God's knowledge is somehow filled with what must only be considered an infinite number of variant versions of history?

Philosophy is concerned with "ultimate reality." That surely must be reality as it is to God. Of course, we can't see reality as God's sees it, so we may have to remain somewhat agnostic about how reality actually is as God see it. Note I said, "somewhat agnostic" because I do believe that God has given us enough to go on to understand reality as we are designed to know it, and that does bear some analogical resemblance to how God knows it. But surely there must be points at which our knowledge, as analogical, is merely approximate, and in some cases we must be wholly in the dark on certain questions. Whether or not God knows "counterfactuals of freedom" seems to me thoroughly speculative. It is unprovable either rationally or biblically. That God knows exactly how history will turn out is a manifest fact of Scripture.

But we still ask the questions, because we are on a continuum, from our imperfect understanding of reality to God's understanding. He himself has asked us to go with Him on the journey toward understanding, and so we persist.

Given this understanding, what is the best theory of God's knowledge?

Question 4: Why is "middle knowledge" necessary to establish human freedom?

In no way does it seem to me obvious that God's knowledge must contain conterfactuals of freedom in order for human beings to be free, at least given the definition I have enunciated above.

Freedom defined as "doing what one desires" is still a legitimate exercise of the will informed by the motives of the heart. If God's knowledge contains only the sum of His creative and redemptive actions combined with the actual choices of people, then how in any way does that result in determinism for the creature whose choices are simply known by God? (see the next entry for a further discussion of this)

Simple Extraordinary Moments

Today I went to the park with Trinity, and I learned a few things.

When we reached the park, Trinity enthusiastically proclaimed, "I love the rocks." Here was rapturous joy at simply playing on the rocks beside a river. She was wholly present in the moment, fully enjoying the simple pleasures of being alive and being five. Nothing distracted her attention from jumping, singing, skipping along the banks of the river.

I couldn't help but think how discontened I often am in this world--how it is never enough. When was the last time I was awestruck by rocks and the rush of water? Perhaps I have my excuses, such as the weight of adult responsibilities, worries about children and the stresses of aging and more complicated relationships, but they are all excuses. Can we adults really believe that it is acceptable to miss days like today? I never want to breathlessly pursue a better life and forget that my life is already extraordinary.

The lesson today is that the best joys of the world are the simple and pure ones. No TV's. No entertainments. No Facebook. No need for money. No noise. Just a child who doesn't know that the world is anything less than marvelous, and the time to take it in.

After a period of time enjoying the rocks, Trinity spotted another little girl nearby. She went up to the girl and asked, "Can I play with you?" The girl said, "Yes, you can be my friend." And they skipped off holding hands to build castles from the mud. A friendship was forged in thirty seconds.

I thought, when did I cease to be able to do this? When did relationships become so complicated? When did I become such a judge of other men that it requires months of analysis before I can determine whether another is worthy of my friendship?

Today my five year old taught me that love is as simple as surrendering the right to determine who is worthy of love.

Today my five year old reminded me that my joy filled life is enviable, simple, pure, clean, like the crisp fall air, even if I don't see it.