Tag Archives: Trinity

If God is Trinity, then Freewill for Humanity is Guaranteed

07 Sunday Jan 2024

Posted by in Adam and Eve, Freedom, Genesis, Scripture, theology, Trinity

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When we talk about detailed theology—not bland generalities—of Christianity like the Church Fathers, we arrive at some decisive conclusions on the freewill/determinism dilemma. I’ve solved this dilemma in a scholarly article going to publication soon, but I wanted to piecemeal it out in my blog too. For those uninitiated, Calvinism holds that humanity’s freedom to choose God is nonexistent (a form of determinism). This means that when God saves someone, He changes their nature so that they are enabled and will choose Him. Those holding that freewill exists for humans usually think that God provided a prevenient grace (a grace prior to saving grace) that allows humans to choose God, but it does not compel them to choose God.

To be clear, I think both sides are wrong even if it sounds like I am siding with those holding to freewill. My trinitarian theology precludes both based on Genesis 1:27 – 28. God makes humanity, male and female, in His image: “Let Us make . . . .” When the disciples ask Jesus to show us the Father, Jesus replies, “Have I been with you so long and you do not recognize me.” The inner life of the Trinity (John 17 really gets at this in a grand way) is one of love, joy, and freedom; recall although Jesus says He was charged to give His life by His Father, He quickly adds, no one takes His life from Him. The Trinity is an interrelationality qualified by love, joy, and freedom; humanity is made in this image—incidentally, this makes sense of God’s image entailing both male and female, and then the entire idea of a family unit.

Most of us know it already, but healthy human life is not coercive. In fact, most love that is forced is rejected, met with scorn, or the “forcer” now sits in prison. This makes sense if humans are made in the image of God, and if we are designed to represent it and respond positively to it. The takeaway is that freedom is constitutive to love. There is no fully mature love that does not entail freedom. Said differently, love without freedom, based on the Trinity, is no longer love. Our prisons are full of the truth of this claim.

This means that if humans are made in God’s image, the ability to freely choose to love God must be. The Persons of the Trinity freely choose to love One Another; God’s image bearers must be able to do the same. Love is so central to God: humans made in His image must represent this central feature. The New Testament is sometimes called the Testament of love because of the dominance and centrality of love as its major theme. God is love, as John writes. It is a sizable issue to say that God made humanity in His image, but humanity cannot love like God can love, freely and without compulsion. Obviously, our human experience teaches us that I can love like God loves, choosing who I will love freely and without compulsion. Calvinists might say that we can do that only towards other humans but not towards God. This seems so strange though; what is qualitatively and clearly a better form of love can be given only to other humans and not to God. Others might object that “the fall” eliminated human ability to choose God—I wonder where in Genesis 1 – 3 it is discussed that this is a consequence of the fall?

I’m sure there are questions swirling in your mind, but I can’t layout the whole solution here. If God is Trinity, and humans are His image bearers, then humanity must be able to freely choose to love God. The Trinity’s love is eternally a love centered on another Person of the Trinity, freely and without compulsion yet decisively “other-focused.” This means that humanity’s love must entail this ability to center its love on a Person of the Trinity if humanity will represent this central feature of God as image bearer. Notably, Genesis 9:6 reminds readers that humans are made in God’s image and therefore certain evils must be punished severely, and this is long after the so-called fall of mankind. If the image of God prevailed after the fall, then capacities proper to it retain too. This is why the whole framework of Arminianism versus Calvinism simply does not work. Both positions concede that humanity lost abilities it had presumably in the garden paradise of Eden. It is strange, isn’t it, that the garden of Eden is thought of as a paradise when we know there was a heavenly rebellion of angels going on in the background (or at the same time)? Further, how does a paradise have an option for evil (tree) and a serpent (profound evil) there to push them into taking that evil option? If this is paradise, I am not sure I like the parameters.

If God is Trinity, then humanity must have the capacity to freely love the Trinity. This is central to who God is, which means that humanity must be imbued with the ability to do this as an Image bearer. If the only love humans can give God is of the compelled type, I am shocked that humans rotting in prison are there now. If compelling others to love you is most representative of how God forces humanity to love Him, why do we imprison humans for forcing love on others? I am not misrepresenting here: I was a Calvinist for a long time. Based on that framework, humans only choose God because God first changes their nature to make it happen. Calvinists are emphatic that humans do not have choice and can do nothing else to solicit this change in nature performed by God. In short, humans are not responding to God’s overture of love; instead, God is responding to God by putting an overture of love out there but only allowing Himself the ability to respond to that overture. Many may not have studied Islam like I did in my dissertation, but the Calvinist position here is frighteningly similar to how Allah loves. The larger point, and I will close on this, if love of the compelled type is how God interacts with humanity, it is a radical departure of the love God shared eternally in the Trinity. That is a huge problem.

Dr. Scalise

Interpreting my wife’s pregnancy theologically: part II

15 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by in Genesis, Pregnancy and Theology, Trinity and Pregnancy

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I wish to return to a bit more down-to-earth reflection on Gloria’s pregnancy next time, but you’ll no doubt forgive me for allowing the theologian in me to think a bit this time. Christians believe that God is the Holy Trinity; we especially have our Greek and Russian Orthodox brothers and sisters to thank for their wonderful tradition of thinking hard on how God is Three in One, with an eye to the Three-ness. What does all this have to do with my daughter who is currently in my wife’s womb, you may wonder? The doctrine of the Trinity teaches that each Person (Father, Son, and Spirit) dwell in One Another perfectly–which is why we Christians can still rationally claim that They are One. Similarly, a baby dwells in her mother, my daughter in Gloria, during pregnancy. Now, we must be careful not to push the comparison too far as though a pregnant woman is a perfect or exact analogy for God the Trinity; she is not. Nevertheless, a pregnant woman, I argue, is perhaps the best analogy in all of creation for God the Trinity. Where else is there a consciousness dwelling within another consciousness? This is what the doctrine of the Trinity commends although never without its own proper mystery. Someone might object: but God the Trinity is three, not two. This is true, but we would be amiss is we didn’t recognize that the child, my daughter, carries me (the father) within her as well. There is no doubt that she does biologically, and given the regular fact that children share their parents personalities, we are not speculating to hold that she likewise carries my personality in her as well. Thus, there are three people represented in my daughter, herself, my wife, and me. I got this thought during my research for my dissertation, and there I discuss it in far greater detail than I want to here. The idea does not owe to me, to be sure, because I looked hard at Gen. 1:26-28 and 2:24. When God says He makes “man” in His image in 1:27, He clearly refers to both man and woman in this image.

It reads, from the English Standard Version: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

Thus, it would be better to translate the Hebrew word “adam,” at the beginning of verse 27 as humanity rather than man: “So God created humanity in His own image, in the image of God he created humanity; male and female he created them” (trans. mine from the Hebrew, italics and bold mine). Some might think this is reading into the text, but a common literary feature of Hebrew prose, and especially poetry, is that it uses parallelism, which is why, if you’ve ever read the OT at length, you always get the feeling that the authors are repeating themselves. They are! Thus, the final phrase, “male and female He recreated them,” is a parallel restatement of “in the image of God He created humanity.” This final line gives the most specific and detailed information about what the image of God is. For our word smiths and lovers of definitions, take heart because all Hebrew lexicons (dictionaries) relay that the Hebrew word, adam, has at least three meanings: one refers to the human being named Adam, the second to just man in the typical individual male sense, and finally, the one I am arguing for here, it can refer to all humans generally.

What do we find in Gen. 2:24? Verses 22-23 arguably give us a more specific account of how woman was created, by being taken from the rib of Adam. Then, God says, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (ESV). What we find is that God creates woman by taking a part of Adam that dwelt in him (part of him), his rib, and creating woman. Then, God says man and woman are to procreate (sex) by the phrase “shall become one flesh.” God chose humanity, both man and woman, to be His analogy (image; cf. Gen. 1:27). The sexual component to human generation is part and parcel to this image since in 2:24 it is the very first thing we find out about the male and female relationship (they shall become one flesh). It was therefore not happenstance that I saw a image of the Trinity in my wife’s pregnancy; the pointers were already there in the first Book of Scripture.

My wife’s pregnancy is fulfilling the purpose contained in Gen. 2:24, and, through it, modeling, in an imperfect way, God the Trinity. Woman was taken from within man; and a child is comes by man from woman. One person, my daughter, Lydia, dwells within my wife, Gloria, and that one person, Lydia, contains both me and my wife as well as beautiful uniqueness all her own. A child is, in a fascinating sense, three persons in one; God, on the Christian view is three Persons in One, the Holy Trinity.

Dr. Scalise

Infallibility of Scripture: Thinking about Truth

01 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by in Infallibility, Scripture, Trinity, Truth

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Continuing on from the last post on Origen’s views, what can we say about truth? There are three criteria by which to judge whether something is true or not: 1) does a statement match the facts, 2) does a statement cohere with a web of other known truths or person’s characteristics, and 3) does the statement produce the results which it promises? These there criteria are called, respectively, 1) correspondence theory of truth, 2) coherence theory of truth, and 3) pragmatic theory of truth. Most Enlightenment thinkers, or those of us today influenced by modernism, focus on 1) often to the exclusion of the other two. Postmodern thinkers will tend to focus on 2). Those involved in the physical sciences will frequently focus on 3). Most will think in terms of the old adage, “Just the facts,” concluding that if a statement does’t match what actually happened, then it isn’t true. If this is you, then please be aware that this is to reduce truth down to just one theory of truth. I can’t see any reason to opt for solely one theory; I prefer to see the truth as a tri-dimensional reality because of my belief in God the Trinity. Therefore, the truthfulness of some statement need not be judged merely according to 1), but, instead, I argue that we should be discerning to the context in which we hear a statement to judge it according to the emphasis on 1), 2), or 3) that the context suggests.

Imagine with me for the moment that you have done something inconsistent with your character, say lie, and your significant other knows that you are taking this inconsistency really hard. He/she might say to you in order to console you, “That wasn’t true to who are you; that wasn’t really you!” Notice here that this consolation uses 2) in opposition to 1). What you did was violate 1) by lying about some fact, but what your significant other is saying (assuming he/she is truthful in her statement) that you are not that action, appealing to 2), which says that your overall character, proven in many many actions, is what is true about you. I see no reason why 2) isn’t just as valid, if not more so, than 1). Basically, your significant other has tallied up your actions in the past and sees that as a cohesive set of truths that characterizes you, diminishing the potency of this one failure (lying).

Now this same type of process occurs all the time when someone speaks of someone else as “a good girl or gal.” Clearly, all have done some evil in their life; thus 2) is being used when the statement that someone is good is issued. These theories of truth pertain to the discussion about the infallibility of Scripture, especially the Gospels.

We get disturbed when 1) is violated because we are so prone to just assume that truth has only one emphasis, but this seems potently at odds with the fact that God is Trinity. We think this mainly because we understand that the original writer (John, Peter, Paul, or what have you) to have written just one manuscript in just one certain way, allowing for no variation by later leading by the Spirit. And if there is any doubt that the Spirit does lead different authors to describe the same event with various foci and presentation, look at the four Gospels, which describe many of the same events but with differences of focus and presentational order. Can the Spirit inspire different men to present the life of Christ (one life lived in a specific way) in differing fashions? The answer to this better be yes no matter who you are if a viable theory of inspiration is going to be able to be maintained. Notice, too, that the inspiration of the OT books requires an original speaking or writing with later adaptation to those original speaking events or writing. Most of the Prophets, for instance, are giving oracles, not writing Books as we have those today that bear their names. Are the prophets responsible for writing down their own sermons? Maybe, but who can say. In the Pentateuch, the first five books of the OT, the reference is made, “from Dan to Beersheba,” before Israel settles those lands and gives those names to those places. Clearly, a later editor has written in these names that could not be known to the original human author at that time, unless of course we just claim that God imparted knowledge to the writer to know those places and what the names of those places represent. This is too easy, however, and goes against the non-prophetic nature of those passages of Scripture (violating the context). Sure, we can claim God just told them, but this does little to satisfy the mind’s desire for an understandable and explainable theory of OT inspiration. Instead, we should formulate a theory of OT inspiration that is “gritty,” so to speak,” that accounts for the human process of knowing things, that is, through partial knowledge growing ever more complete. Such a theory will emphasize the preservational work of the Spirit as much as His original inspiring of the OT books. Moreover, we humans use the tri-dimensional emphases about truth noted above, so shouldn’t we see all three of those emphases in books written by men? Moreover, since God is Trinity, there is a place for such differing emphasis in understanding truth since God the Father is the truth, God the Son is the truth, and God the Spirit is the truth, although Each emphasize difference aspects of God who is the Truth. I’ve offered enough to think on here.

Til next time, Dr. Scalise

Establishing Libertarian Governance with Christian Trinitarianism

30 Thursday Oct 2014

Posted by in Christ and Culture, Government, Libertarianism, Trinity

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Given the formative role Christianity has had on Western civilization, we should ask the question of how much a Christian view of God played in the ideals that characterize Western governments. I intend to stay clear of philosophical libertarianism and theological austerity, instead focusing my attention on what the Trinity offers us as a theological foundation for government. I have developed a robust, complex, and what I consider to be a faithful view of the Trinity elsewhere: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OGSAX2W if anyone wants more data. The Trinity is a difficult idea, but it is rationally intelligible: God is one nature, Three Persons. Simply, one divine nature (what) expressed in Three distinct Persons mutually related (how). I will not unpack this now, but feel free to ask in the comments. The key to what I want to say in this post is that God is truly distinct Persons who are in communal loving relationships. Where love is, so also is freedom. Because all Three Persons are one in nature, there is no inequality among them. Because all Three Persons, Father, Son, and Spirit, are equal in nature, so must their relationships be loving and free. This is not to say that there cannot be genuine obedience in such love and freedom, but it is to say that such obedience is not forced in the Trinity. Probably the best text for making this point is John 10:17 – 18, where Jesus says that “For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father.” We see a clear order to the Persons of the Trinity, that is, the Father gives the “charge,” but clearly the Father doesn’t force the charge on the Son: ” . . . because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me.” This part of the verse doesn’t demand that we remove Jesus’ obedience or the Father’s commanding to protect freedom. Instead, we have to modify our understanding of obedience and commanding to match this heavenly reality; the Father’s commanding is not domineering, and the Son’s obedience is not fearfully or forcefully compelled. This is what we would expect love to do in situations where there is a commander and the commanded. The one who commands is no longer a tyrant, but lovingly, that is, non-coercisely, commands. The one commanded acts from love, affection, and trust, not from the instinct to survive or being forced. Love, then, is on both sides of this heavenly exchange because the Father commands without force or fear and the Son obeys without being compelled or intimidated into obeisance. What does this offer human governance? Can we set up libertarian policies in government that uphold the individual’s and community’s ability to say yes or no while similarly establishing policies that engender trust and lead to trustworthiness between government and the public? Such policies, informed from the points made about the Trinity above, could be structured to incentivize the public’s willing adoption and practice of them. These laws would offer some positive effects — fiscal, communal, moral, familial, et al. — but would leave it to individuals and communities to decide if they wanted to “trust” such policies. Such policies require certain embedded cultural values in order to entrust the public with responsible freedom and the public to entrust the government with certain powers to responsibly guide the nation. The current situation in the US, where little confidence in government competency is increasingly common, says that mutual trust is a distant cry. When there are two equal partners in a governing-governed relationship, it seems the test of leadership which reflects God the Trinity best is one that makes intentional room for freedom, not limitation to it. I have more to say on this, but this must suffice for now, drawing a summary principle in close: when both partners of a governing-governed relationship are sufficiently trustworthy or “mature,” there should be no force — other than that persuasiveness that is neither frightful or domineering — because such force is suggestive of distrust. A similar principle is that trust enables freedom; distrust is hostile to it.  I want to be clear in close, the Father isn’t “governing” the Son of God like the human government situation; indeed, it hardly seems accurate to use the word “government” at all among the Persons of the Trinity. I see Them as in covenantally relationships, lovingly related, intimately communal, and distinctly living in the tasks proper to them: the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.

Dr. Scalise

God the Trinity, Allah, Freedom, Godvernment, and Libertarianism: Part I

22 Wednesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Comparative Religion, Freedom, Government, Libertarianism, Trinity and Allah

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My dissertation was on a comparison between God the Trinity and lonely Allah. P.S., I have my shorthand of my dissertation available, which I use for my classes: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OGSAX2W/?tag=B00OGSAX2W . Allah is an Arabic word that means “the God” and is what Muslims call the Deity. When speaking about the traditional Judaeo-Christian view of God I will just use “God.” When speaking about the Muslim view, I will use “Allah.” During this study, it became increasing important to have a vision of God where He is related and in community for all eternity. Having something to compare such a Being (Trinity) draws this out decisively; Allah is utterly alone in “eternity past,” and rules alone presently. I don’t want to talk about this too much, but rather about the consequences these different visions of the Deity have on government (Godvernment), freedom, and libertarianism — a philosophy that states that humans truly have free choices, are not forced or made to pick one choice or another based on current circumstances or past  causes, should not be forced, and holds that any government should function to uphold and maintain a nation where free choices are possible. I will just handle the first of these (Government/Godvernment) in this blog. The pun in “Godvernment” is designed to draw out the frightful idea that a human — governor, president, congressman, et al. — can begin to function like a god and the more chilling thought that this should be so. By the way, I owe the pun to Aaron Gentles, a good friend. What I want to ask is what type of vision of the Deity more likely leads to such an idea? Is it a vision of God in community and related to equals — Father, Son, Spirit (Trinity) — or a vision of Allah utterly alone in His supremacy and rule? I hope that it is clear that it is a vision of Allah — and I am not attempting to attack Islam here, just thinking through consequences for differing views of the Deity. On the view of a lone Allah ruling, there is a model for hierarchal rule of a superior over inferior. I can’t make this point strong enough: in the Islamic view of Allah, there is no way to establish equality or community. Why? Forget about the world for a second and imagine Allah alone for all eternity. He is related to no one, distinct from no one, and has no community with anyone. When Allah creates, he creates a group or groups of inferiors. Thus, on this view, we establish in the very first relationship a model of inequality. Don’t miss that it is the very first relationship, and so acts as the pristine or primordial example of not just what is so, but what should be so. Someone might object here and say that the Christian view of God would have the same problem, but it would not. God the Trinity is a community of equals internally related and eternally existing one in the others. I know this is hard, but the Trinity is not illogical; indeed it can be rationally explained and has been many times — see chapter 4 of my dissertation when it is published for a contemporary example. The first relationship according to Christian Trinitarianism has always already existed among the Father, Son, and Spirit. This establishes equality among equals and community among equals as the very first relationship, and it should be this way.

If I am a human ruler and I view Allah as my example for life and rulership, then I place myself in the superior position over inferiors; equality is not the goal and relationships should function in terms of inequality. If I use God the Trinity as my example, then equality follows, and it should follow. If I want to establish an elitism as the ruler where others are viewed as less than me, I follow the example of Allah. If I want to establish seeing others as equal to me, then I would follow the example of the Trinity.

The command, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” is just an explanation of what is going on in the Trinity, but it makes little sense against the backdrop of Allah, the superior and supreme ruler.

If I want a Godvernment on earth run by a sole authority who is superior to me, follow Allah. If I want a government on earth run by those understanding themselves equal to me, then follow the Trinity.

Dr. Scalise

For more on the Islam, Christian comparison, see http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OGSAX2W/?tag=B00OGSAX2W

Theodicy, Part 1: Gregory Boyd’s Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy

20 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by in Problem of Evil, Satan, Spiritual Warfare, Theodicy

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I want to start with what I consider to be the most convincing theodicy, recently developed by a talented Ph. D. from Princeton Theological Seminary, Gregory Boyd. I’ve encountered no other theodicy that absolved God of moral guilt better. Let me lay out Boyd’s six theses first, and then I will unpack each a bit.

Thesis 1: Love must be chosen, Thesis 2: Freedom implies risk, Thesis 3: Risk entails moral responsibility, Thesis 4: Moral responsibility is proportionate to the potential to influence others, Thesis 5: The power to influence is irrevocable, and Thesis 6: the power to influence is finite.

Thesis 1: That love must be chosen, that is, that love requires freedom is experientially and intuitively clear; if someone forces me to love them, then morality and genuineness of that love is transformed into a matter of necessity and survival. Love, however, is about morality and relationship, not about survival and obligation.

Thesis 2: Freedom entailed in love implies risk. This is a non-compatalistic freedom framed within a future of partial possibilities and partial certainties. Non-compatalistic means that there is no coercion with God or “mysterious” freedom that God somehow controls. Moral agents are free, not controlled or coerced. It should not be missed here that traditional theology from Augustine forward (4 – 5 century c.e.) has assumed either determinism (meticulous control) by God or exhaustive definite foreknowledge. The problem with either of these is that moral responsibility with either traces back to God. I am persuaded that the Calvinists’ grounding principle is sound and forces any position of exhaustive definite foreknowledge to become determinism. The grounding principle states that there is always a necessary cause for every effect; if the effect is known by God, then the cause is guaranteed — I think Jonathan Edwards showed this in his dissertation on freewill. With this said, either simple foreknowledge (adapted Molinism, where God knows what will happen but cannot respond to it before it arrives in the present; I am unconvinced by this view) or a partial open future, where God knows all things perfectly, and so knows all possibilities, but not with certainty as to what truly free creatures will choose (non-compatabilistic). Many have confused this thesis thinking it an attack on God’s omniscience when it really is a revision of how time and the world is understood. Omniscience is about God’s knowing all things, including all possibilities (per middle knowledge), not about Him knowing what is yet non-existent like the outcomes of the choices free agents make.

Thesis 3: Risk entails moral responsibility for creatures with the capacity to love. Love itself is inherently relational, especially of the Christian worldview based on the doctrine of God the Trinity. Should God choose to create contingent agents with the ability to freely (non-compatabilitic) choose love, then such creatures have moral responsibility for how they operate as moral creatures. Thesis 3 here is intimately connected to Thesis 4, which is that these creatures’ morally responsible operation is proportionate to their potential influence. Thus a human’s moral responsibility is raised the greater their influence. For instance, a short tempered aunt can do more damage to her nieces than a friend of the family with the same temper because the aunt’s influence is greater. Because her influence is greater, so likewise is her moral responsibility. A powerful demon has greater moral responsibility because his ability to influence is greater than any human, and so forth, assuming Michael the archangel and Satan to be the two highest ranking moral contingent creatures.

Thesis 5 states that God’s giving moral agents the ability to influence is irrevocable. In other words, God does not say, “Here you go,” and then, taking it away when you step out of line, “Gotcha, you should not be doing that.” I know our philosophical naturalist friends will want to know why God sometimes intervenes then in Scripture. It is an acute question, but poses a question no creature can answer. When you walk out your front door today, and walk into a to-go mart, or what have you, why is the spacing between you and the next person in line the space that it is? Or between you and the cashier? To know the answer to this question we would need to know about sleep cycles, colds, alarm clocks, foot injuries, hang nails, and the list could go on, and not just for that day, but for many days, even months, even years before. Simply, the number of variables to calculate and explain this simple occurrence are so vast the it would require an omniscient mind. Important to note, however, is that the difficulty with the scenario is not with the mystery of God, but with the mystery or inscrutability of creation, at least to finite minds like ours. Thus for our philosophical naturalist friends to expect an answer to all the variables that goes into why or when God intervenes is unreasonable at least to the extent that they cannot explain simple events like the space between me and another person in line. Both answers require omniscience, and neither have it. Back to thesis 5, though, and we should add thesis 6 to it: freedom to influence (T5) is irrevocable, but it is also finite and limited (Thesis 6). God sets limits both in scope and time to all moral agents’ influence. Obviously, we do not have epistemic access (“know”) to these delimitations besides the rather plain exception of death. Let me go back to T5, freedom to influence: if God intervened more often than perhaps he does, then the world would no longer be a neutral environment for reality, but would become an environment charged with angst over God popping in. If this happens too much, natural laws would become regular anomalies: a frightful thought for sure. Further, if God did this often enough, the choice to be for God would become one of survival, not morality. We would choose God because it was necessary, not because we loved Him.

Let me say a few words in summary about these issues. First, since humans are free, and the future is not understood on the exhaustive definite foreknowledge or deterministic models, God does not know with certainty what a free creature will choose before he chooses it precisely because it is non-existent prior to this. Thus God’s omniscience is not threatened. God, on this model, is not responsible for making people go to hell (some forms of Calvinism; determinism) or for actualizing a world in which He knows beforehand that actualizing just that world will result in x amount of people in flames (exhaustive definite foreknowledge). The buck stops with the free moral agent’s choice because before they make that choice it is indeterminate (not-decided) what will happen. I agree with Alvin Plantinga that non-compatabilistic freedom requires significantly free creatures, that is, creatures who are influenced by foregoing causes and contemporary situations but their choices are not determined by those causes and situations. Thus, the only person ultimately responsible for his damnation is himself, not God.

Another point in Boyd’s Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy is that God’ gift of irrevocable freedom is a demonstration of God’s omnipotence, not a threat to it. God decided to give it; He was neither forced nor necessitated to give it. God’s omnipotence is illustrated by such a move, upholding its true marvel. As a Christian Theist, following Plantinga’s overtures at the end of God, Freedom, and Evil, Satan and demons constitute a real opposition to God, who can truly fight God by virtue of Boyd’s Thesis 2 (freedom implies risk) and Thesis 5 (power to influence for better or worse is irrevocable). The cosmic battle is real, not a dramatization; again, God’s power is not brought into question because He gave the gift and decided to offer the world the possibility to love (Thesis 1).

Is God’s goodness upheld through all of this? It seems to me that it is. God does not make or create people for hell, but for the possibility of fellowship with the Father, Son, and Spirit. God does not make a world knowing that certain persons will go to hell, and then actualize that world. God sometimes intervenes in evil action (as testified in Scripture), but knowing when and why is beyond the scope of any human. Given the real battle, however, between God and Satan — not in a dualistic fashion mind you — and the irrevocability of freedom to influence, real monsters, demons and devils, do influence for harm and evil on humanity, even to the opposition and interference with God’s will: as Jesus taught us to pray, “Let your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” If God’s will were always done on earth, why would Jesus teach us to pray in this fashion? Why is a child raped? On this theodicy, because of the evil of man against man or because of the underlying — or overarching if you prefer — cosmic powers of evil, both using their irrevocable power to influence for ill. Evil then is always traced back to humans or to Satan, but never to God. Likewise, God cannot be faulted for creating a risky creation because its creation includes as much potential for good as for evil (thesis 4), and, on this theodicy, what free creatures would do is indeterminate until they do it. The possibilities of what Satan or Adam or Eve might do with the ability to love God gave them is known to God, but what they will do is up to them, their “say-so,” not God’s, and so the outcomes are non-existent (unknowable) beforehand.

Christianity’s schema of spiritual warfare allows natural evil to be traced to Satan — except for cases where God makes it known that He has caused it, like the great flood. Boyd’s treatment of natural evil is exhaustive and illuminating. A read through this section of his book is well worth the time (Chaps. 8, 9, & 10, Satan and the Problem of Evil).

Dr. Scalise