Recently Tom Gilson of Thinking Christian made a comment to me about human freedom. I wish to follow up on it now. I'll pose my response as a dilemma.
First let me make my assumptions explicit. They are quite explicity Christian and thus the dilemma, if real, is a worry for Christians only.
1. We human beings were created by a God in a state of perfection, for all that God makes, all that God does, He makes or does perfectly.
2. We human beings were created free. Indeed our freedom was essential to that perfection we enjoyed before the Fall, i.e. a creature not free that is yet as much like us it can be is not as good as we.
3. We human beings brought about the Fall through a misuse of that freedom God bestowed upon us. So, then, responsibility for the Fall lies with us, not God. God acted as perfectly as He might, but we rebelled and brought evil into the world.
4. God, through Christ, will heal the breach created in the Fall. Through Christ He will raise we human beings to a state of perfection. (Whether it will be some or all that are perfected is irrelevant.)
Now, the dilemma is this. Human perfection, i.e. the greatest good that we human beings can exemplify, requires that we be free. But the possibility of the Fall was entailed by our freedom. Thus when the breach is healed, a new Fall is possible, for the perfected ones then alive will no less free than the ones who first fell.
Why then should we not expect that the history of the world will be a repetition of the sequence Fall, Incarnation and Redemption repeated ad infinitum?
Of course something must have gone wrong here. The saints in Heaven cannot fall again.
But why can't they? What virtue do they have that the pre-Fall human beings did not have? Why couldn't God have bestowed this virtue upon those who lived before the Fall? Surely He would have had to do so if that virtue is necessary to human perfection.
Again, if the saints in Heaven are not free, how can they be perfect? Do they merely have a certain measure of freedom but have been so transformed by God that they cannot rebel as did the first humans? But surely such partial freedom is an imperfection, for the highest expression of our freedom is to love God. How can a freedom be perfect that is free to choose only the small things but cannot help but choose the large, i.e. to love God? Musn't it be the case then that the saints in heaven have a complete freedom and so can both freely choose to love God and freely chose to rebel? But if this is so, the Fall can happen again.
At present I see only dimly a way out of this. It is to say that the first human beings could not have been created in a state of full perfection. Rather they had to first be as children. The world, then, is their school, and heaven is their full maturity.
But why couldn't God have created humans fully mature? Surely this does not lie outside His power. Perhaps, but might it be better to ourselves reach after perfection than to have it simply bestowed upon is?
One consequence of this line of thought it likely to disturb my Christian readers. It is this. On this line, 'The Fall' refers not to a certain event wherein we rebeled against God. Rather it refers to the moral and spiritual infancy of humanity. Moreover, on this line of thought Christ and Christ's death have a pedagogical role, not a redemptive one. Christ did not come so that sins might be forgiven. (Sin is an inevitable outgrowth of spiritual immaturity and thus is not to be condemned but corrected.) He did not come so that He might balance the scales of justice by His death. Rather He came so that He might provide a perfect example and so lead us to perfection.
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4 comments:
grace,
That I believe Jesus is a perfect moral example does not imply I must believe that the written record we have of his life is, as it were, God through and through, with no tincture of the human authors. As said in my post on Biblical inerrancy, I think it likely that God makes use of the whole man in revelation and does not treat the one to whom he reveals Himself as a human stenographer.
And I think it wrong to become angry at someone when they are not responsible for what they do. Of course we often do, but that seems irrational to me. (I don't mean that I don't do it. I do, but am always sorry.) And of course children might act contrary to the dictates of the moral law; but they know not what they do and thus are not really responsible for it. They have not sinned and we should not become angry.
I very much liked the passages from Augustine. It's remarkable how much they recall Plato's myth of the cave. I very much believe that what he says is true. But good Catholic that he was, we would say that Bible study alone cannot by itself provide the tools necessary to live righteously. One must also place one's trust in the authority of the tradition in which one works. The notion that Bible study alone is sufficient for righteousness was a much later development. It was bequethed to the world by Luther.
grace,
There is a space between deliberate fiction or outright lie and plain unvarnised truth that you seem not to admit.
My recall of events is often quite different than my wife's. This is often the case after an argument. It's not that either of us deliberately creates a fiction; and I would suspect that neither of us always says it exactly the way it happened. Rather both of us filter what happened and produce a truth-like story that each reflects our own unique personality and state of mind during the argument.
This is how I think of the Gospels. The Resurrection did happen, I think. But as for matters theological, the writers of course had a certain conceptual set by which to understand what had happened, and they surely put that to use in the writing of the Gospels. Is the result a lie? Of course not. Is it the literal truth as God Himself understands it? From my point of view, that's almost surely false.
Interesting stuff going on here!
Franklin, I think c grace is on the right track. If we don't rely on Scripture as authority, we're in a fog on these things.
Your most recent answer applies to the vast majority of human events--human memory is not always reliable, nor are human motives.
The main events of the Gospels are not the sort that are subject to these kinds of errors, however. If Jesus died on the cross and rose again, the disciples would not mis-remember it. There were too many of them in agreement, and it was (way!) too unique an event for them to have gotten cloudy on the main story.
I don't think it's psychologically credible that they made up the story. It would have required a conspiracy to hold together even while most of them were dying for an agreed-upon lie. Charles Colson of Watergate fame once spoke to this. He said he knew from experience how hard it was to hold a conspiracy together to save your skins; how much harder would it be when the point of the conspiracy was to put yourself on the executioner's block?
So if the Resurrection happened, Jesus has a great deal of authority. In several places, by his authority he endorsed the Old Testament as being the trustworthy and unending Word of God (although some of it, being fulfilled in him and its purpose being completed, is no longer normative).
This sets the stage for believing that God inspires human writers. There are other grounds for that belief, like the 300+ prophecies fulfilled in Jesus first appearance on earth.
Having that stage set, it is no great extension of thought to believe that he also inspired the human writers of the New Testament. The Holy Spirit guided them so as to write correctly, and to avoid the usual pitfalls of human memory.
So as c grace said, we have a trustworthy source that we should rely on to resolve the dilemma you've raised.
Beyond that, I think the answer is that the perfection of humans before the fall was a different sort of perfection than that after salvation and glorification in the final state. The pre-fall perfection was an untested innocence. The post-glorification perfection will be that in which believers will be allowed to live as they have chosen: in righteousness unsullied by sin. There is no longer freedom to sin, but this is not a lack of free will; it is the expression and completion of a decision freely chosen on earth. It is having a new nature, in which sin will not be a potential, but in which all kinds of freedom will.
After all, would we say God's freedom is limited because he can't sin? No! He is free to act in accord with who he is. Glorified believers will be free to act in accord with who they are: people who have chosen to pursue God and righteousness.
I'm going to take the large risk of posting it without editing... (scrunching up my eyes, I gingerly aim for the publish button and...
Tom,
I do agree with what you have to say about the saints in heaven. Sin is no longer possible for them. In this way, they are elevated morally above the first humans, and above us now.
The lesson I take from this that sin was just as much inevitable as is a child's arithemetical errors. The first humans were, as you say, untested. They were immature. They had to come to know just what the wages of sin are if they were to learn, to rise up to that state of which they were capable. But to know this, one must witness sin. One must see it and what it does. One must experience for oneself just how much one suffers if one sins. Thus sin was necessary to the fulfillment of the divine plan for humanity. It is a pedagogical device; or rather its wages are pedagogical.
Sin this was not an interruption in the divine plan. Rather it is the means whereby we are perfected. This seems to me to imply that sin should not be condemned. Rather one shows the sinner what the sin brings about and thus corrects them.
Jesus was the great teacher of the wages of sin and the means to escape sin. This, in sum, is my Christology.
Oh, and on a side note. As I said, Tom, I agree that the saints the heaven cannot sin. But they are free nonetheless, for they are not made to do what they by some power outside themselves but rather their acts are a pure and unsullied expression of their perfect nature. So, then, it seems that freedom does not require the possibility that one do otherwise than one did. As I said in a prior post, I think that the possibility to do otherwise than love perfectly is an imperfection. One should wish to escape that kind of possibility.
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