It was a great honor for me to have the esteemed philosopher and theologian, Paul Helm, write the foreward to my forthcoming book. You can read the foreward below.
The road of the interaction of Christian theology with philosophy has been long and sometimes rocky. Maybe it began with Paul at Athens, with his assertion that the Roman poet Aratus, (315-240 BC), wrote that God is the one in whom ‘we live and move and have our being’ (Acts. 17.28). Augustine leant on Plato, Calvin cited the Stoics, the Reformed Orthodox were indebted to the medieval scholastics who relied on Aquinas, and Aquinas on Aristotle, and so on.
Mike Preciado’s splendid book continues this tradition. He uses contemporary work on determinism to elucidate the relationship of our wills with the decree of God, supporting the Reformed position. And particularly with the help of this work he offers elucidations of basic human moral responsibility in a deterministic world.
There is determinism, and there is compatibilism. The compatibilist is a determinist who argues that determined actions may be actions that the agent is responsible for, praised if good, blamed if bad. Mike argues that work done by two contemporary philosophers, John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza (SJ), as it happens supports the compatibilism of the Westminster Confession and of confessional Reformed Theology more generally in arguing that under certain conditions determinism is consistent with personal accountability, hence compatibilism. Fischer and Ravizza call their position ‘Guidance Control’. The first aspect of guidance control is ‘reasons-responsiveness’ the second is ‘mechanism ownership’.
Each of these positions in a more rudimentary form will be found by the diligent student of confessional Reformed theology. The purpose of the first chapter of his book is to familiarize the reader with Fischer and Ravizza’s unique brand of reasons-responsive theory. In chapter two, the author presents their conception of mechanism ownership, the second aspect of guidance control. These correspond to our intuitions that responsibility has to do with the degree of our responsiveness to reasons (a responsiveness that babies lack) and that we have an awareness of our ownership of our ‘mechanism’, our body and its connection to our mind. Though God may decree that we have lunch, it is not then God who has lunch for us, but we have it for ourselves. I cannot in raising my own arm raise your arm, and so on. These are features that ground our responsibility for our actions.
The author spends the first two chapters (and the Appendix) expounding this philosophical position, Guidance Control, in a purely philosophical way. These chapters are examples of contemporary analytic philosophy, neat and at full strength. They are executed clearly and with full knowledge of the discussion that has grown up around these proposals. Granted, this will not be every reader’s cup of tea. However for such readers Mike has provided a useful précis of the conclusions at the beginning, in his Introduction. It must be said, however, that his full exposition and a clear, step by step account, will enlighten any non-philosopher who is prepared to take their time over the technicalities. Mike suggests that the non-philosopher first skip chapters 1 and 2, until they have read the other chapters, 3-5. and this is probably wise counsel. In philosophy as in much else, practice makes perfect.
In these later, theological chapters, the author considers relevant parts of Reformed theology in the light of Guidance Control, showing his ability not only as a philosopher but a Reformed theologian. In these chapters he expertly shows how these contemporary developments of the philosophy of compatibilism can apply to Reformed theology, offering understanding of the Westminster Confession on the divine decree, divine foreknowledge, and providence, and the position of Jonathan Edwards in his book on the freedom of the will. He then applies this theology to illuminate a range of discussions on free will in Reformed theology by a critical consideration of Richard Muller’s view that compatibilism represents a ‘parting of the ways’ in the history of Reformed theology.
Philosophy is not divine revelation. For the Christian that revelation takes priority. Nevertheless philosophy can be an illuminating tool in understanding doctrines of the faith, and offering support for them. So long as it is not the master.
So the heart of the book centers on the claim that Reformed anthropology is deterministic, pivoting on the divine eternal decree. More exactly it is compatibilistic in that under certain conditions a deterministic action is praiseworthy or blameworthy, that is, a person has responsibility. In some sense the agent uniquely ‘owns’ those actions for which he is responsible, and which are not the result of coercion or mere reflexes, for example. One way that this can be illustrated, is in the Confession’s closing statement on God’s eternal decree:
Although, in relation to the foreknowledge and decree of God, the first cause, all things come to pass immutably and infallibly; yet, by the same providence, he ordereth them to fall out according to the nature of second causes, either necessarily, freely, or contingently. (V.II)
The decree of God, the first cause, is nuanced; it takes into account the natures of what is caused, and in the laconic wording of the Confession, God the first cause ‘rendereth them to fall out’ accordingly. It is the nature of human nature that we have responsive control. Of course not all the changes that we undergo are cases of responsive control. If I have lost a leg, I cannot respond to the command to run, but then I am not blamed when I stumble along. We can see here, incidentally, how the question of human responsibility connects with what both the Reformed Orthodox, and Jonathan Edwards as well, called cases of moral and natural ability and inability. These distinctions when they are worked out by them, can be thought of as their way of pointing to the kinds and limits of responsive control, and therefore of human responsibility.
Preciado examines the position of the WCF not only on the decree, divine foreknowledge, and predestination, but also on the creation of mankind with a sensus divinitatis, a topic that seems to be downplayed by Reformed theologians at the present. He commendably shows that the WCF and Jonathan Edwards both emphasise this as the locus of human responsibility, though I think this is frequently overlooked in Edwards’s case.
The sensus divinitatis is the evidence that as creatures in God’s image (though fallen) with particular ranges of responsiveness, the behaviour of the conscience is part of our creaturely endowment. Mike notes that besides his commitment to compatibilism (for which he is best known) in The Freedom of the Will Edwards has strong statements of the sensus divinitatis. His citation of Edwards’s Miscellany 533 is peculiarly apt, with its stress on personal accountability to God based on his law implanted innately in the conscience.
The chapter on Edwards also takes issue with Richard Muller’s view that Edwards’s compatibilism distinguishes him from his theological antecedents. In brief Mike argues that from a commitment to predestination and divine providence, human compatibilism follows, and that Muller’s attempt to find a mid-way position between libertarianism and determinism in what he refers to as our possession of ‘multiple potencies’ does not succeed in identifying a ‘third way’.
Mike Preciado is to be congratulated on his new book. It is a model of Christian apologetics, of an intensive examination of one set of interrelated topics in Christian theology by a person who knows what he is doing, both in philosophy and theology.