I am working on a couple blog posts on demons for later this week. Should be interesting. In the interim, I’m going to say a bit more about divine love.
I argued last week that God’s electing love on the Reformed view is arbitrary. I then added to the mix my lamely-named “Token Choice Claim”:
it is easy to envision cases where you have two tokens of a type which are functionally indistinguishable but where you select one over the other(s) for non-arbitrary reasons.
As an example I noted that if offered my choice of Ferraris I could choose the red one over the yellow one simply because I prefer red to yellow. Is this arbitrary? No, because it is based on color preference, and if every objective criterion by which to measure the cars is the same (e.g. price, performance, condition) and you are forced to decide then you are left with comparatively trivial distinctions like paint color.
Now let’s say that a king has a choice to commune the sentence of one or two criminals. They are identical twins — Joe and Moe — who committed the same crime. So what does the king do? He pardons Joe but sends Moe to the gallows. And the reason? Joe was wearing a red hat while Moe was wearing a yellow hat and the king prefers red to yellow. In point of fact this too is a reason to pardon Joe but not Moe no less than the choice of Ferrari. However, in contrast to the car situation it is not, under the circumstances, a good reason. Our intuitive reaction (certainly mine anyway) is that it is an arbitrary criterion to pardon someone based on the color of their hat. Assuming that the king’s decision was not forced (i.e. he had to pardon one and only one) the problem remains.
When we assess the charge of arbitrariness to the Calvinistic view of election it is not sufficient to say that God could have some sort of reason for election and reprobation. We should ask (and expect) that the Calvinist can provide a reason that doesn’t appear arbitrary. Barring that he could explain the decision as a forced decision due to some kind of external necessity that constricts the number of those who can be elect and reprobated.
So let’s consider the first option. What kind of reasons might one appeal to? I got the ball rolling by suggesting that one reason for election might be that God wants to elect x amount of Germans and x amount of Chinese to salvation and no more. Since he has already fulfilled his quota of Germans he doesn’t elect Mr. Braun. But since he has room for one more person he elects Mr. Wei.
It is one thing to suggest that. It is another to grasp what it really means. God’s choice to elect Mr. Wei means that Mr. Wei now becomes the object of God’s supreme self-giving love and God moves heaven and earth in the incarnation and atonement and sending of the Spirit to reconcile Mr. Wei to God and to enjoy the utmost bliss eternally. Meanwhile God’s choice to reprobate Mr. Braun (both as an initial decree that he be born fallen as well as the ratification of that initial decree by not electing Mr. Braun) means that Mr. Braun becomes the object of God’s supreme wrath and he will suffer the utmost torments eternally in hell.
There could be reasons why God chose Mr. Wei and not Mr. Braun and thereby loved Mr. Wei but not Mr. Braun with a supreme electing love. But reasons such as ethnicity appear to me (and I suspect to many others) to be inadequate. And this is where the concern of arbitrariness is not easy to shake. A natural response is to say “God elected Mr. Wei just because he’s Chinese? He loved Mr. Wei but not Mr. Braun because of ethnicity? But that seems so arbitrary!”
Since on the Reformed view God has decreed that all be conceived with an equal degree of reprobated fallenness, there is nothing external in the individual that distinguishes one as a fitting object of divine love and another an object of divine wrath.
This brings us to the other possibility. God might have a forced choice. His own internal necessity to maximize his glory entails that only a certain number can be elect while the rest must be reprobate. And since he must reprobate some to maximize his glory, it might as well be Mr. Braun that he reprobates. So long as there is a forced decision like this we do not face problematic arbitrariness because then we parallel the need to choose one car or another or, in the case of Sophie, one child or another.
But if the decision is not forced and the distinctions between persons are not internal to them, then we need some sort of explanation for why one is chosen and another rejected. Otherwise it might seem that we’re just talking about colored hats.
