God’s Will and Ours

In the second volume of his Systematic Theology, Jenson raises pointed, Edwardsean questions about free will theodicies. Such devices suppose “that God once created and then somehow retreated, so that at least some things that happen within creation, those dependent on creatures’ ‘free will,’ he merely, as it were, observes” (22). That cannot be right because “in no present instant does anything happen outside the deliberate act of God.” But if that is right, then what becomes of our freedom, and how is God not the author of sin?

The standard answer, Jenson argues, is the right one, namely that “God’s sovereignty of human and other events does not foreclose human freedom precisely because God’s will is absolute, so that between God and creatures choosing is not a zero sum game. . . . just because God’s will is absolute, there is no . . . competition between his will and mine, no arithmetic within which a decision by me is one less for him to make or vice versa” (22).

He cites Thomas’s claim that not only “what God wills to happen does happen,” but “it happens in the way in which he wills it to happen.” If God wills something to happen contingently, it does. As Jenson says, “Thomas then applies this to God’s willing of those events that are contingent because they depend on human choice. If God ‘moves’ a human will to incline to some object or action, that will necessarily so inclines. Nevertheless, if God, in accord with the nature of what he in this case moves, wills also that this inclination be itself a free ‘movement,’ then that is the sort of movement it is.” “If” – or since – “there is the biblical God, there can be free creaturely choices only and precisely because God’s will is so entirely of another sort than ours that he not only can will us to choose this ratehr than that, but that our choice be in itself uncoerced by his.” This doesn’t absolve us of responsibility; but on the other hand, neither is God absolved of responsibility for what does happen (22).

As he puts it, “someone so utterly in control as the biblical God is supposed to be . . . cannot lack responsibility for what in fact happens, for the bad as for the good, including the boundary-conditions within which sometimes the bad may be necessary for the sake of the good, and including our standards of judgment of good and bad” (21).

Jenson concludes from this that “all theodicies must eventually fail. . . . The evil and sin in God’s creation will always be reason to deny him” (23). If we pronounce a “nevertheless” in defiance of this conclusion, it is a confession of a good Creator. We cannot know what might have been in another world. We do know that in this world “the actual life of the triune God with us is a true drama, and therefore conflicted and twisting,” a conflict of “death and life.” 

If Jenson sometimes sounds like an open theist, at other times he sounds like a high Calvinist. One is tempted to say: Just like the Bible.