TomT: As you also point out, the fact that Paul never chose to receive a revelation of the risen Lord hardly entails that he could not have willfully chosen to misinterpret it. So are love, trust, and gratitude any more an explicit matter of will than simple empirical beliefs are?
TomB: You captured it well. That’s the key question.
TomT: Here is where my own view is probably more radical–more Augustinian, if you will–than many Arminians would accept…
TomB: This will likely mean that we each get to the same outcome (UR) via different routes. For you appear to be answering the question (“So are love, trust, and gratitude any more an explicit matter of will than simple empirical beliefs are?”) negatively. I think the role of the will with respect to loving relations is not just another example of empirical belief. I’ll want to argue that God ‘cannot’ get the relationship of love he desires with us if he doesn’t leave us enough room (via ‘epistemic distance’) to determine how we shall relate (what possible meaning we decide to attribute) to the world of our experiences, more precisely, God’s actions toward us.
Let’s take the example you give:
“I learned at a very early age, for example, to trust my mother implicitly–not because I decided to trust her, but because I discovered her to be altogether trustworthy. I also learned to love her–not because I decided to love her, but because she first loved me and demonstrated her love in thousands of ways. I have no doubt that certain free choices, if you will, were an important part of the process whereby I discovered my mother’s true character. For I was just as disobedient and snotty at times as any other child and just as rebellious during my teen years as many others are. But the free choices I made, both the good ones and the bad ones, merely provided my parents with additional opportunities to demonstrate their true character, and at no time in my life could I have freely chosen, so I believe, not to love them or to separate myself from them altogether. There was simply never any motive to spurn the love of someone who always put my own interests first.”
You end by saying “there was never any motive to spurn” your mother’s love, but you had just admitted to having spurnned that love by “free choices” you made to be disobedient and to misrelate to that love. So the fact that you were disobedient and freely chose to misrelate to love appears to make my point, viz., that when it comes to determining ourselves (in love) in relation to others we are inevitably free to do otherwise. However obvious was your mother’s love, you nevertheless found “room enough” (“reason enough”) to misrelate to it. You weren’t temporarily insane or otherwise irrational when you freely chose to misrelate, so it must have been the case that however obvious was your mother’s love on one level, there nevertheless remained a measure of rational “wiggle room” wherein you were capable of misapprehending, misconstruing, and misinterpreting (or whatever the case may be) that love and hence of misrelating to it. Otherwise, how DO you account for the responsible nature of your choice to misrelate to your mother’s love?
TomT: For even in the case of complex religious beliefs, which no doubt include elements of faith, trust, and love, the role of the will, as I now see it, is essentially this: It determines the conditions under which God can impart the gifts of faith and trust without bypassing our own reasoning processes and without violating our unique personalities.
TomB: I want to make sure I don’t misunderstand you here. If the role of the ‘will’ is to “determine conditions under which God can impart faith” (without objectifying us), then how are you Augustinian? It looks to me as if you here have the ‘will’ freely determining when and how it comes by faith in God, i.e., freely determining whether or not it receives the gift of faith (and salvation). That’s how I’m taking “can” in “…under which God ‘can’ impart faith,” i.e., we determine whether God ‘can’ or ‘cannot’ actually impart his life to us. But surely as an Augustinian here you must mean to say that our ‘will’ determines the conditions under which God “in fact does” impart faith. By “conditions” you don’t mean to say the impartation of faith is “conditional upon” the free exercise of the will. You mean to say the impartation of faith is always given “within the actual conditions of our lives freely determined.” We get to determine what kind of sinners we are, how screwed up we become, how fractured we are, etc., but we’re not free to say “yes” to God (except in the sense that our “yes” is just the effect of an irresistible impartation of faith to us).
Am I following you?
TomT: Otherwise, we can perhaps move to the controversial question of how it is that sin enters into the world. In particular, how are we to account for the near universality and seeming inevitability of human sin?
TomB: We can move on to that. Looks good. I’ll just not that your Augustinian understanding of salvation (though you universalize it unlike him so that eventually God determines all through the gift of faith) will likely turn out to be a kind of dividing fork in the road that takes you to UR one way and me another.
TomB
I need to take a step back.
