Letters

Bait and Switch

Alvin Plantinga is a legend in philosophy of religion. But in an otherwise-devastating rebuttal of Sam Harris’ denial of free will [“Bait and Switch,” January/February], he misrepresents Jonathan Edwards’ account of the will.

Plantinga says that Edwards held that God is the “only real cause of whatever happens,” with two “substantial” consequences. First, God is the real cause of all sin, and second, human beings cannot be held responsible for their sins.

Plantinga’s suggestion that Edwards’ God is the only “real” cause of everything is probably based on Edwards’ occasionalist metaphysics, which posits that, in Edwards’ words, “God does, by his immediate power, uphold every created substance in being” moment by moment. But Edwards also insisted that humans sin voluntarily; their sin “is truly and properly theirs,” since they fully consent to their own sins. God upholds them in their being and therefore also in their sinning. Their sinning is no less voluntary and no less theirs simply because God sustains their (sinful) being every nanosecond.

In other words, responsibility for action (and therefore sinful action) is not a zero-sum proposition for Edwards. God’s upholding all and, in that sense, being the cause of all, does not rule out secondary causes such as human willing. Edwards famously wrote that “God does all and we do all.” God is the real cause of all in the sense of upholding all reality, which of course includes all sinning. Edwards wrote that God is the “author and fountain” of our acts, but that those acts are still ours. We are the only “proper actors.”

It is not, for Edwards, that God does some and we do the rest, as in zero-sum conceptions, but that human action must be viewed from different perspectives in order to capture the whole. As he put it, “We are in different respects wholly passive and wholly active.”

Therefore Edwards’s determinism was complex, as all notions of divine sovereignty must be if they are to make sense of biblical assertions that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart to sin (Ex. 9:12), turned the Egyptians’ hearts to hate Israel (Ps. 105:25), put a lying spirit in the mouth of the false prophets (1 Kings 22:23), led Absalom to lie with David’s wives (2 Sam. 12:11-12), decreed that Jeroboam and the ten tribes would rebel, decided that Judas be unfaithful, determined that Christ be killed, “gave the wicked Jews a ‘spirit of slumber’ ” (Rom. 11:8), and made “the Beast to speak blasphemies” (Rev. 13:5). In other words, God decrees evil events.

Yet Scripture also asserts that Pharaoh, the false prophets, Absalom, Jeroboam, Judas, and the Beast are responsible for their sins and will be judged accordingly. Just as Scripture makes God mysteriously responsible for evil events, it also holds human sinners responsible. How these two notions can be said to be compatible is finally a conundrum, and no sound portrayal of divine sovereignty can relax the tension between the two.

Edwards’ way of keeping the tension but making some rational sense out of it was to distinguish between moral and natural necessity or, as we might say, between determinism and compulsion. The false prophets lied both because of their own lying natures (moral necessity) and because it was decreed by God to serve his own providential purposes (divine necessity). Yet there was nothing in the biology of the prophets that would have compelled their tongues to form those lying words; they spoke voluntarily, without compulsion (natural necessity). They lied because they wanted to lie. Hence they spoke because of moral necessity but without natural necessity. This is divine determinism that includes human freedom, and therefore responsibility for sin.

So is God, for Edwards, the “only agent”—and therefore the only real cause—of the Holocaust, as Plantinga alleges?

No and no.

Enlarge the Place of Thy Tent

I respect Richard Mouw greatly, but his piece “Enlarge the Place of Thy Tent” [January/February] enlarged only my desire to ask, “Really?”

He may have been schmoozing with the Tabernacle Choir and drinking coffee (or not) with LDS academics for many years now, but Mouw pushes the Respect-Thy-Mormon-Neighbor shtick just a bit too far. The Book of Mormon belongs to all of us? Are we to suppose that he and Paul Gutjahr think Mormon Temple architecture belongs to all of us too, simply because temples’ unusual profiles shoot up from so many urban landscapes? Sorry, but no thanks. Though I am familiar with the Washington, D.C., and San Diego temples from their freeway vantage points, they and their Masonic rites will always remain very much foreign and in fact pagan maneuverings to me. Is Mormonism a cult? Of course not, if we are talking Jim Jones associations; by conventional standards the LDS are blue-chip respectables, witness Mitt Romney and Gladys Knight. On the other hand, of course it is, if we are talking bodies that insist everybody outside their ecclesiastical confines are deprived of Thus-Saith-the-Lord pronouncements. Show me a group that believes in living prophets and does not flirt with cultishness, and I will show you an unusual, somewhat healthy charismatic body. Sorry if that offends, given the ever-improving LDS profile, but a bit of reading in the history of Utah might enlighten the unpersuaded. (Samuel W. Taylor’s trilogy Nightfall at Nauvoo, The Kingdom or Nothing, and Rocky Mountain Empire is a good entry point for the uninitiated.)

Perhaps the Book of Mormon does belong to me, in the same sense that James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces also belongs to me and all of us living in Oprah Nation. How embarrassing. And Mouw must know he is writing for newbies when he attempts to score with his claim, “Much of the theological content [of the Book of Mormon] is basically evangelical.” The many credible evangelical works on Mormonism have for years gladly pointed this out: Smith began by recasting the basic doctrines he learned from competing Protestant denominations, lifted large portions from the KJV, and only then gradually began extrapolating his more outrageously heretical doctrines from simplistic and imaginative Scripture twistings. The Book of Mormon marked Smith’s earliest, sanest (and most plagiaristic) moments. And on that basis evangelicals are supposed to, what, warm to the text? All while they also insist on updated and gender inclusive translations of their own Bibles from the likes of Fuller faculty members? Forgive me if I am more than a little confused.

The fact that many find something meaningful—even the memoirs of a Nephi, Alma, or Moroni—hardly makes that something either true or meaningful for us all. Is it helpful to assign to the product of a fraud the status of “an important spiritual work”? L. Ron Hubbard and I are both anxious to know. Mouw claims the Book of Mormon’s “authoritative status derives from that of the prophetic office” that brought forth the book, but this is patently false. For Mormons, the book’s status derives from the fact they believe it is actual history. Smith, in their scheme, simply unearthed it. In this regard it provides a more accessibly concrete artifact than the dictated revelations of the later Doctrine & Covenants.

In sympathy with some Mormon friends I found the idea of a Book of Mormon musical offensive and not at all giddily charming. Millions take this book as scripture. If it is a lie, it is not a matter for silly Broadway broadsides: it is an uncomfortable albeit hard-to-explain reality (although Mouw might also have mentioned turn-of-the-century Mormon apostle B. H. Roberts’ convincing Devil’s advocate explanation of how a bloke like Smith managed such a book).

Certainly God can draw straight with crooked lines, and enough gospel is inadvertently crammed between the cover of Joseph Smith’s pastiche that many Mormons may grasp the truth he eschewed when, in his First Vision, he blithely wrote off all of Christendom as an abomination. After extensive personal contact with Mormons and readings in lds theology, I am convinced this is the case. I am equally convinced that claims that the Book of Mormon is a great book reflect our culture’s wrongheaded infatuation with knowledge and searching as satisfactory ends in themselves.

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