"What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun." As a general rule, human behavior varies very little, within certain norms - fallen human nature's desires and fears are constant, so that "what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun."
One such constant is that those who do evil are often afraid to do it alone. Even when the rest of society is content to let institutionalized evil exist, even when that evil is safe for the moment, those who partake in it seem eager - insistent, even - that the rest of society take part as well. It isn't enough that they be allowed to do as they please, others must dirty their hands, too. While one could point to many different examples, two of the more prominent can be found right here in America: the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and the HHS mandate passed four years ago.
The first example is well-known by name, but its specifics are poorly understood. An understanding of its example, and how it applies to the battle liberty-minded Americans are fighting today, would not be amiss. The Fugitive Slave Act contained a number of provisions, but two in particular upset Abolitionists (and indeed all those who valued personal freedom). The first denied the right of those accused of being escaped slaves to trial by jury. This provoked a great deal of protest - and rightly so - but the second part is more relevant to our discussion. This required that magistrates and ordinary citizens in free states not only refrain from hiding escaped slaves, which was already illegal, but also actively work to capture and return escaped slaves. The law not only worked to prevent slaves from escaping, it attempted to force northern states into taking part in the brutal "peculiar institution" of the South.
The free states did not receive the law with apathy. Wisconsin and Vermont both effectively nullified the law, and juries across the North refused to convict those accused of breaking the law. Going beyond simple nullification, some openly defied the law, either by passively disobeying or by actively freeing those accused of being escaped slaves or of aiding escaped slaves, sometimes through force. In fact, northern states' opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act was one of the direct causes of the Civil War - once the country elected a president who would not use federal troops to enforce the act, northern states were far more likely to be successful in nullifying the law, and southern slaveholders would have been forced to bear the guilt of their "peculiar institution" alone.
Sixty-four years later, we face a similar situation. Not content with legalized - even, in some cases, taxpayer-funded - abortion, advocates for abortion insist that every business owner be forced to bloody his hands by providing funds to his employees specifically for the purpose of providing abortifacients (or, if he chooses an "exemption," he can pay someone else to do the exact same thing). It isn't enough that employees can already use their salary to buy abortifacients, the employer must provide compensation for that and no other purpose. Why? It isn't because of financial hardship - the abortifacients covered by the HHS mandate range from $30 to $60, and someone claiming financial hardship can get them from Planned Parenthood free of charge. Abortifacient drugs for early pregnancy are readily available and inexpensive - this, by the way, is a shameful indictment of the value our society places on life, but it is nonetheless true. No one is being prevented from using abortifacients because they can't afford them. At face value, it would appear that there is no particular reason to force employers to pay for these drugs, and yet that is exactly what the HHS mandate does. Again, why? Perhaps because "there is nothing new under the sun," and those who do evil are still afraid to do it alone. One person standing up for right is a threat to those who do wrong and a prod to their sore conscience. By forcing universal participation in their misdeeds, abortion's apologists apparently hope to wipe away every hint that abortion is a sickening affront to the dignity of humankind, just as slavery's apologists hoped to silence their consciences by silencing their opposition.
Sixty-four years later, we face a similar situation. Not content with legalized - even, in some cases, taxpayer-funded - abortion, advocates for abortion insist that every business owner be forced to bloody his hands by providing funds to his employees specifically for the purpose of providing abortifacients (or, if he chooses an "exemption," he can pay someone else to do the exact same thing). It isn't enough that employees can already use their salary to buy abortifacients, the employer must provide compensation for that and no other purpose. Why? It isn't because of financial hardship - the abortifacients covered by the HHS mandate range from $30 to $60, and someone claiming financial hardship can get them from Planned Parenthood free of charge. Abortifacient drugs for early pregnancy are readily available and inexpensive - this, by the way, is a shameful indictment of the value our society places on life, but it is nonetheless true. No one is being prevented from using abortifacients because they can't afford them. At face value, it would appear that there is no particular reason to force employers to pay for these drugs, and yet that is exactly what the HHS mandate does. Again, why? Perhaps because "there is nothing new under the sun," and those who do evil are still afraid to do it alone. One person standing up for right is a threat to those who do wrong and a prod to their sore conscience. By forcing universal participation in their misdeeds, abortion's apologists apparently hope to wipe away every hint that abortion is a sickening affront to the dignity of humankind, just as slavery's apologists hoped to silence their consciences by silencing their opposition.
The problem is not new, and the correct response is not new. An unjust law, to quote Saint Augustine, is no law at all. The proper response is to follow the abolitionist's example and disobey the law, either by passively ignoring it or, should it become necessary, through open defiance. Until now, abortion laws in the US, although immoral and unjust, allowed moral people to stand aside and take no part themselves. Now, however, in order to run a business Christians may be required to take active part in murder. That crosses a line - it cannot be obeyed, and if implemented must be met by civil disobedience, at the very least. Just as Christians in the past refused to follow unjust laws, so we must do the same.
"What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun." The particular circumstances may change, but we must continue to do the right thing, because fallen man will keep on doing the wrong thing. "New occasions teach new duties," to quote a rousing old abolitionist hymn, but right never changes.
"What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun." The particular circumstances may change, but we must continue to do the right thing, because fallen man will keep on doing the wrong thing. "New occasions teach new duties," to quote a rousing old abolitionist hymn, but right never changes.
God is perfectly sovereign, and man's will is free. At the risk of dangerously abbreviating a fascinating discussion, I'd like to prove both phrases in that sentence, and, more important, provide a commentary on why they are anything but contradictory.
The first is easy. The Bible makes it perfectly clear that God is sovereign over all things. In Psalm 103:19 we are told that "the Lord has established His throne in the heavens; And His sovereignty rules over all." Again in Isaiah 46:10, "remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I
am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning
and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall
stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose,'" Yet again, Psalms 103:19, 115:3, and 135:6, among many other verses, speak to God's sovereignty. The final piece is Ephesians 1:11, which tells us that God "works all things after the counsel of His will." We are left in no doubt that God is indeed sovereign. In addition, we are told that we are created in the image of God. We are not given his power, so the implication is that we are given the ability to be free moral agents, responsible for our own action - that man has free will.
"Behold,
to the LORD your God belong heaven and the highest heavens, the earth
and all that is in it. - See more at:
http://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/God,-Sovereignty-Of#sthash.eOYoowKB.dpuf
"Behold,
to the LORD your God belong heaven and the highest heavens, the earth
and all that is in it. - See more at:
http://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/God,-Sovereignty-Of#sthash.eOYoowKB.dpuf
Deuteronomy 10:14Deut
Deuteronomy 10:14
"Behold, to the LORD your God belong heaven and the highest heavens, the earth and all that is in it.
- See more at: http://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/God,-Sovereignty-Of#sthash.eOYoowKB.dpuf
- See more at: http://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/God,-Sovereignty-Of#sthash.eOYoowKB.dpuf
Deuteronomy 10:14
"Behold, to the LORD your God belong heaven and the highest heavens, the earth and all that is in it.
- See more at: http://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/God,-Sovereignty-Of#sthash.eOYoowKB.dpuf
- See more at: http://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/God,-Sovereignty-Of#sthash.eOYoowKB.dpuf
How is it possible to reconcile the competing facts that man's will is free and that God is sovereign? The answer, I think, lies in properly understanding the nature of God. Too often, we approach God as if He were simply a human like us with a particular ability - for example, when we think of God's omnipotence we think of a human who can do anything, or when we think of His omniscience, we think of a human who knows everything. To a certain extent, this is inevitable. We will naturally compare an unknown to what we know. Generally speaking, this is an effective aid to our understanding, but it isn't perfect. When we start probing too hard into the nature of God - His sovereignty, for example - this approximation will always be imperfect. To correctly understand the coexistence of God's sovereignty and man's free will, we need to look closer at who God is.
If any human were to be sovereign in the way God is, he would completely preempt free will. Humans can create systems over which they have a certain limited sovereignty, but only if certain conditions are met. The system must be deterministic (that is, for any given situation, given a unique input, there will be a unique output) closed (that is, free from outside influences), and it must be understood completely. Assuming a system meets all three of those requirements, a human could theoretically uniquely determine all events in the system by determining the starting conditions (making the system deterministic and closed allows the starting conditions to determine the course of events, and understanding the system completely allows the starting conditions to be manipulated to produce a given event). Unfortunately for "fortune-tellers" everywhere, the real world is nothing at all like this. At a very general level the purely physical world can be thought of as a deterministic system, but in actuality it is probabilistic. Even worse, humans aren't just probabilistic, they are free agents, and are not bound by external circumstances except in the most general sense. For this reason, if a human were sovereign, free will could not exist, and if free will exists, no human can be truly sovereign. This, in my opinion, is the source of much of the apparent conflict between free will and sovereignty.
This is only true if a human were sovereign - the solution to the contradiction lies in how God differs from us. For us, the contradiction exists because the world is not deterministic. We cannot possibly know exactly what the output will be for every input, and so we have no way of knowing how to manipulate the starting conditions to produce a desired event, even if we had the ability. What if we were omniscient, though? If so, we would know exactly what would happen in any given set of circumstances, which is simply another way of saying that for any given input, we would know the output - not because the system was limited to one output for that input, but because of our hypothetical omniscience. One could argue about whether this means that the universe is actually deterministic to an omniscient being or whether the universe is merely similar to a deterministic system, but that's not particularly important at the moment: what matters is that the universe is perfectly predictable for an omniscient being, and thus can be determined through setting the starting conditions.
We can go farther than that, though. Not only is it possible for an omniscient being to determine an unrestricted system by setting the starting conditions, since God is omniscient, He knew precisely what effect any variance in the starting conditions would have. Because of this fact, we can conclude that God decided what every event would be - had He wanted something else, He could have changed the starting conditions to produce a different outcome. Every molecule in the universe acts according to His plan.
As an aside, it should not be assumed from this discussion that God only acts by setting the starting conditions. Certainly, that is the way He usually chooses to work His will, but he can also intervene supernaturally if He chooses to. For the purposes of this discussion, since God is the only source of external input, the fact that setting the starting conditions requires that He be sovereign implies that He is sovereign. The fundamental point is that an omniscient creator God logically must be sovereign.
We've essentially arrived at the conclusion that those who argue for God's sovereignty support, but remember how we got there: we assumed free will in a probabilistic universe. We didn't arrive at God's sovereignty by limiting man in any way - God is still sovereign, but our will is free, at least to the extent that our nature and God's power (recall Pharaoh, whose heart God hardened) allows. This should not be taken as a license to lethargy or wrongdoing. Because our wills are free, we are still responsible for our actions. God doesn't preempt your will, rather, He uses it to work His ends. Both God's sovereignty and man's free will are important elements of the Christian worldview, and - far from being contradictory - they are perfectly compatible as long as we recognize who God is.
Labels: Theology
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)