Orthodoxy in Moose Jaw

Free will

RJB

August 18, 2023

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… the very concept of an “omnipotent entity” is contradictory. Real omnipotence would require a power co-terminus with the whole of being, from its innermost wellsprings and principles to its outermost consequences and effects; it would even require possession of the power belonging to the deepest source of all the acts of every rational will, without operating as a rival force in contest with those movements – the power, that is, of the one who is, as Augustine says, not merely superior summo meo (higher than my utmost), but interior intimo meo (more inward than my inmost). None of that would be possible for an “entity,” a particular discrete contingent being among other beings, who exists in the manner of a finite thing. But God is not an “entity.” Neither, for that reason, is he some sort of particular object that one could choose or reject in the same way that one might elect either to drink a glass of wine or to pour it out in the dust. He is, rather, the fullness of Being and the transcendental horizon of reality that animates every single stirring of reason and desire, the always more remote end present within every more immediate end. Insofar as we are able freely to will anything at all, therefore, it is precisely because he is making us to do so: as at once the source of all action and intentionality in rational natures and also the transcendental object of rational desire that elicits every act of mind and will toward any purposes whatsoever.
… the suggestion, then, that God – properly understood – could not assure that a person freely will one thing rather than another is simply false. Inasmuch as he acts upon the mind and will both as their final cause and also as the deepest source of their movements, he is already intrinsic to the very structure of reason and desire within the soul. He is not merely some external agency who would have to exercise coercion or external compulsion of a creature’s intentions to bring them to the end he decrees. If he were, then the entire Christian doctrine of providence – the vital teaching that God can so order all conditions, circumstances, and contingencies among created things as to bring about everything he wills for his creatures while still not in any way violating the autonomy of secondary causality – would be a logical contradiction. David Bentley Hart

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