So a few people have been asking me about the theology of predestination. Below is a paper I wrote about it during my M. Div. Enjoy!(?)
Hooker and Predestination
Introduction
Among the many choices of contentious and controversial
topics which a theologian can choose to discuss, address or devote a large part
of their academic and/or pastoral careers to, predestination is perhaps one of
the thorniest, and yet this is precisely what Richard Hooker (1554-1600) chose
to address throughout his career. In the
past as today, the topic of predestination tends to embroil the theologian in
inescapable paradoxes and contradictions involving such diverse yet
inextricably linked concepts as free will, salvation, grace, sin and the nature
or will of God. Hooker was no exception
to this tendency. Hooker taught against
the theology of predestination which was current during his lifetime, claiming against
his opponents that God could be petitioned or swayed, that He had “a mutable
and occasioned will” (Neelands Hooker and
Predestination course notes 2008: 1).
Neelands (ibid.)
states that although Hooker “did not publish any treatise on
predestination…Hooker had, nonetheless, considerable interest in this important
and controversial topic, and referred to it throughout his public career”. It is interesting to note that Hooker’s
writings are indeed shot through with references to election, predestination,
free will, grace, salvation and a variety of other issues that are endemic to
the predestination debate, so it is indeed odd that Hooker never dedicated a
published work to the issue when so many of his sermons, debates and
publications touched on it in so direct a manner. Nonetheless, this paper will outline the
controversy over predestination and Hooker’s theology of predestination.
Predestination
It is of course necessary to understand some of the arguments
surrounding the theology of predestination in order to appreciate Hooker’s
stance on it. In its most general sense,
the theology of predestination concludes that God is omniscient, omnipotent,
has existed before time and in fact exists outside time. As such, He had already predetermined the
fate of the universe prior to His having created it. In broad terms then, this means that God had
foreknowledge of the Fall of humankind in Adam and Eve before He had even
created them. By extension, not only was
this event foreseen by God, but more disturbingly it was foreordained, willed and
even compelled by God to happen. More
specifically, predestination must conclude that as God is the author of all and
that He has full knowledge of the future, the eternal destiny of each
individual’s immortal soul is therefore foreordained and predetermined by God’s
decree.
Predestination is often subdivided into several
different categories based on somewhat nuanced theology, and typically these
are called single predestination and double predestination. Single predestination is the less stringent
of the two theories and is based on the idea that “God grants the gift of his
presence as an act of sheer grace…God's gift is independently willed by him and
is in no sense a response to some human act” (Encarta 2004 Predestination). In this
theology, the fate of an individual is not decided by God prior to their birth,
but God decides at some point over the course of their life whether or not to
grant them salvation through His free gift of grace. Therefore, God has nonetheless established
through His own decree that only some people are to be saved, and that those
people will be saved by a free and undeserved outpouring of God’s grace and
love.
The theory of double predestination is an inescapable
conclusion which stems from the concept of single predestination. It concludes that “because salvation and
glory are predestined, it follows that condemnation and destruction must also
be predestined” (ibid.). Augustine (354-430) was one of the first
theologians to develop and expound upon the theology of predestination, and
although his initial conclusions supported the concept of Double
Predestination, he softened his views later in life:
Although Augustine initially accounted for election
because of foreseen faith, he later came to see that it was entirely favour,
liberality and grace that determined the act of the will of God to elect some
and justice that determined the act of the will of God to condemn those not
chosen (Neelands Dublin Fragments course
notes 2008: 4).
Predestination did not seem to have become such a critical
theological issue or at least to have found wide find popular acceptance until
the Reformation when it was described by Swiss Reformer John Calvin (1509-1564). Unlike other theologians such as Augustine
who changed their stances on certain issues over the courses of the lives,
Calvin did not, and he was a staunch advocate of predestination throughout his
life. Calvin is associated particularly
with double predestination, stating that
We call predestination God's eternal decree, by which he
determined within himself what he willed to become of each man. For all are not
created in equal condition; rather, eternal life is foreordained for some,
eternal damnation for others” (Institutes 3. 21. 5).
In a Reformation-era atmosphere, Hooker would draw
criticism for his stance against many of the tenets of Calvinism including
predestination, and particularly for his 1585 sermon A Learned Discourse of Justification, Works, and how the Foundation of
Faith is Overthrown in which he defended the theology
of justification by faith, most often associated with Martin Luther (1483-1546). In the same sermon, he was also criticized
for extending salvation to Roman Catholics, whom many Reformation-era thinkers
deemed to be beyond the pale of salvation due to their superstitious ‘popery’. Calvinists would state that Roman Catholics
were not part of the elect due to the corruption of their practices and
beliefs, and would be disturbed by Hooker extending the possibility of
salvation to them. Needless to say, in
the Geneva-church setting in which Hooker found himself, such ideas did not go
over terribly well.
God: The Source of Evil?
The principle
difficulty which makes predestination theologically untenable, and one of the
points with which Hooker was therefore primarily concerned was the fact that
there is evil and sin in the world.
Followed through to its logical conclusion, predestination in general
and double predestination in particular result in the inescapable conclusion
that while God is the source, creator and author of all that is good, God,
through commission or omission of action, must also be the source, creator and author of all
that is evil. But this idea is
theologically and morally repugnant. As
Neelands (Hooker and Predestination
course notes 2008: 6) states,
On the contrary, God’s will delights only in good
things: we cannot always penetrate God’s will, but know that God does not will anything
unjust or evil; God’s commandments cannot be inconsistent with his own wisdom.
A belief in predestination would necessitate a belief in a God who
not only deliberately creates temptations in order to test humanity, but who
also deliberately creates evil itself and who generates a certain number of
people knowing, willing and in fact forcing them to be eternally damned from
the outset. Theologically, this poses an
enormous problem in that supposedly God is the very definition of good, the
very manifestation of love, kindness and compassion. How could believers possible reconcile the
goodness of a God who creates sin and evil, and who knowingly and willingly
creates untold numbers of people for the sole purpose of inescapable damnation? Simply put, the two notions are
irreconcilable.
Problematically
though, to not believe in predestination is to imply certain limits to God’s
abilities or at least His willingness to exercise them. To state that our destinies are either
undecided or unknown and that the course of history is not set by God is to
imply either that God is not omniscient or omnipotent. In an alternate scenario, God is both
omniscient and omnipotent, which would mean that He creates evil, wills it to
befall us and although He could do something to stop it, willingly allows it to
happen to us. This is not an easy
paradox to extricate oneself from, but Hooker attempts to do so admirably by
making a distinction between foreknowledge and foreappointment:
God must have foreknown that there would be evil, but
would this not compromise his goodness? Hooker takes a traditional theological
line on this matter. God’s foreknowledge depends, in part, on his perfect
knowledge of secondary causes; and God also foresees the possibilities that are
never actualized. But God’s foreknowledge does not come from any
foreappointment or predetermination of all things, as others have held. That
means that God foreknows sin, since sin is a possibility, but does not
foreordain it: God is not the author of sin, as he would be if it were
foreordained (Neelands Hooker and
Predestination course notes 2008: 6).
In this distinction, it becomes clear that while God knows we will
sin, He does not will or compel us to, nor does He want us to.
But what then is
the will of God? As noted earlier, God
was conceived as a being who was the very manifestation of goodness, who
delights in good and therefore His will must therefore always be for the
good. Certainly, Hooker must have
believed that some people would ultimately be saved and some would be damned,
so the concepts surrounding the will of God needed to be nuanced. Therefore, Hooker proposed several different
modes or expressions of God’s will:
Referring to Augustine’s De Trinitate, Hooker
distinguishes between God’s determinate (that is, as Hooker has established,
non-necessitated) will as it is positive, in ‘whatsoever himselfe
worketh’, and permissive, in that ‘he willeth by permission, that which
his creatures doe’. Hooker then goes on to add, unsupported by the quotation
from Augustine, a third form of determinate will, a ‘negative or privative will
alsoe wherby he withholdeth his graces from some’ (Neelands Hooker and Predestination course notes
2008: 6-7).
In this sense, God has a positive will in that He can and does
actively will and cause certain things to happen, a permissive will in that he ‘wills
by permission’ human beings to do certain things, and a privative will which is
not so much a commission of action on His part as it is an omission of
action. Indeed, Scripture would seem to
bear this out in that it portrays God as
casting some asleep, hardening some hearts, and taking
things away from some, which descriptions are to be understood in terms of
God’s withholding what he could give, for instance vigilance, a softening of
the heart, and a gift or grace. This interpretive
structure will become important later in diffusing alleged cases from Scripture
where God appears actively to make the reprobate obdurate (Neelands Hooker and Predestination course notes
2008: 7).
Hooker’s distinction still presents some difficulties though, for at
least in the case of the positive and privative manifestations of God’s will,
God still seems to be hopelessly manipulative in the case of the former and
hopelessly obstructive in the case of the latter. It is only in the manifestation of His
permissive will that He seems to allow for that which was so important for
Hooker to retain: free will.
Free Will and Grace
Philosophically speaking, the
notion of predestination is attractive in that it does away with the problem of
infinite regress one encounters when seeking the Unmoved Mover, but it
continues to be problematic in that it makes God the Unmoved Mover, thereby
obviating from the individual any and all responsibility for his or her actions. In brief, it negates free will. Key to Hooker’s theology of justification by
faith, as well as his understanding and refutation of predestination was his
concept of grace and how it related to the notion of free will. Hooker believed that grace was freely given
by God, but that there were three different senses of grace: “(1) God’s
undeserved love and favour; (2) offered means of outward instruction; and (3)
that grace that works inwardly” (Neelands Dublin
Fragments course notes 2008: 1).
According to Hooker, although grace is freely bestowed on us by God and
is necessary for salvation, we are equally free to refuse that grace or turn
away from it. In other words, grace is
not irresistible nor is it coercive: “Neither foreknowledge, nor predestination,
nor grace, impose necessity on human freedom; God’s grace, both external and
internal, draws us amiably not by force; grace perfects nature, it does not
destroy it” (ibid.). Therefore, for Hooker, human will was by
nature free, and even the free gift of grace could not disrupt that. One can and often does choose to withstand
that grace which is external, but if one accepts the external grace which is
offered by God, one is free to be saved by that grace which then becomes
internalized: “God makes free external offers of grace, but also inwardly
illumines us through grace; there is no free desire for heavenly things without
the grace of God working in us” (ibid.).
A dichotomy which
still existed in this aspect of the debate on free will was the notion that if
a human did anything good, it was God’s doing, but if that same human did
anything bad, then that human was responsible.
Yet Hooker believed that it need not be so simplistic: “Although the
state of glory will take away any possibility of sinning, in our present state
grace does not take away the possibility of sinning nor compel our wills to
good actions” (ibid.). Essentially, Hooker verifies that human
beings, by virtue of grace which manifests itself as reason, know the
difference between good and evil, but can exercise the option to choose not to
do the good. Whereby this may not
achieve them salvation, it restores free will.
Salvation
It was of course salvation
with which Hooker, his contemporaries and the average churchgoer were
ultimately concerned. Perhaps the
biggest question is the following: doesn’t the life, sacrifice, death and
resurrection of Jesus Christ as a propitiation for our sins obviate the need
for any and all discussion about salvation?
Furthermore, if Christ was a necessary and sufficient sacrifice for our
salvation, were not the sacraments, faith or works therefore rendered
moot? Not so, according to Hooker. In his view, salvation was not universally
distributed because it did require a minimal effort on humankind’s part to
reach out and receive it. This minimal
effort required was an “actual
participation in the Church, the body of Christ” (Neelands Book 5 course
notes 2008: 2). Hooker saw the
observance of the sacraments as participation in the church community, and necessary
to salvation in that they were vehicles of God’s grace: “Sacraments are
ordained by God as signs to help identify God’s gift and as conditional
promises of his grace…The sacraments are necessary but it is God who conveys
grace through them” (ibid.).
Therefore, it would seem that while Hooker was indeed a proponent of
justification by faith, that faith required action, and it was through the
sacraments that this action was taken.
For
Hooker, the sacraments were not all equal in terms of importance with regards
to salvation, it would seem. Even though
the authors of A Christian Letter (Neelands course notes 2008: 1)
include it as one of his ‘mistakes’, Hooker did indeed believe that “baptism (not just predestination) [is] necessary
to salvation”. For Hooker, although
perhaps faith makes us members of the church invisible, “Baptism is admission
into the visible church” (Neelands Christology and the Sacraments course
notes 2008: 3), and this admission was necessary although not sufficient for
salvation. Once again, however, we are
caught in a paradox:
But the doctrine of election is a
problem; for probably not all that are baptized are elect. Yet the converse is true: all of the elect
must be baptized. Election does not make
the means of grace unnecessary, and the sacraments are necessary to
sanctification and the path towards glorification. The means whereby we are
actually brought to enjoy what God has foreseen and decreed for the elect,
involves the very participation, by growth and degrees, in the humanity of
Christ, which the sacraments confer…Thus Hooker could say that all who receive
baptism receive grace, that all the elect receive baptism, and that not all
that receive baptism are elect (ibid.).
Hooker had to try to extricate himself from this
confusion, and he does so admirably:
Predestination bringeth not to life,
without the grace of externall vocation, wherein our baptisme is implied…Wee
justly hold [baptism] to be the doore of our actuall enterance into Gods howse,
the first apparent beginninge of life…but to our sanctification here a step
that hath not anie before it (ibid.).
Therefore in Hooker’s view, “It is wrong to conclude that because faith is
necessary, it is sufficient to attain all grace” (Neelands Book 5 course
notes 2008: 3), it would also seem to be wrong to conclude the same thing about
baptism. For Hooker, while the
sacraments in general and baptism in particular were both necessary for
salvation, they were not sufficient for salvation. In addition, faith was required, and this
faith was an inward grace which began with an acceptance of the tokens of signs
of outward grace, namely the sacraments.
Conclusion
It has already been mentioned as odd that
Hooker never published a work specifically addressing the notion of predestination. It is next to impossible to isolate and
discretely discuss any one theological issue without incorporating a number of
other issues, and predestination is no exception. As we have seen, any discussion of
predestination needs to include the topics of grace, free will, the will of God
and salvation. Perhaps Hooker simply
realized that as his other works touched on all of these issues and that they
were all interrelated, there was no need or utility in addressing
predestination separately.
One issue which has yet to be sufficiently resolved in
my mind involves an inconsistency in Hooker’s theology and indeed what I consider
to by an irreconcilable conundrum inherent to the theology of predestination,
salvation and the efficacy of the sacraments. Hooker opposed the idea of predestination on
the grounds that God has a “mutable and occasioned will” (Neelands Twenty-one Errors ascribed to Richard
Hooker by the authors of A Christian Letter course notes 2008: 1). In other words, one can petition God with
prayer and, I would assume, deeds and works.
As Neelands (Dublin Fragments
course notes 2008: 4-5) summarizes, “Of the necessity of labour to concur on
our part with the will of God in justifying and sanctifying his elect, that in
them they may be glorified. Yet we must
labour”. Did Hooker consider the
sacraments to be deeds and works? As we
have seen, Hooker was a proponent of salvation by faith, which concludes that
no amount or quality of works is sufficient to sway God’s will. Only faith is necessary and sufficient. Where then would he situate the
sacraments? Would they be ‘works’ or ‘faith’? As mentioned above, Hooker considered baptism
to be that first and necessary step in to the visible church, but that in and
of itself it was not sufficient to secure salvation. As Neelands (Hooker and Predestination course notes 2008: 23) rightly points
out, “this drives Hooker to the edge of contradiction: grace is offered to all;
grace cannot fail; but some, it seems, are not saved”. Hooker believed that the sacraments in
general and baptism in particular were necessary for salvation. This would seem to contradict the notion of
salvation by faith, particularly when one considers the fact that in infant
baptism, of which Hooker was a supporter, the infant has not achieved a level
of intellectual maturity where he/she can actually make an honest profession of
faith. Although Hooker admirably manages
to negotiate many of the conundrums surrounding predestination, it would seem
that some of them remain unresolved.
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