PREDESTINATION CONSIDERED WITH REFERENCE TO DIVINE FOREKNOWLEDGE.
THE FOREKNOWLEDGE of God is held as evidence that He has
foreordained whatsoever comes to pass. He foreknows, so it is
argued, but He does so because He has foreordained. Calvin says,
"Since He (God) doth not otherwise foresee the things that shall
come to pass than because He hath decreed that they should so come
to pass, it is vain to move a controversy about foreknowledge, when
it is certain that all things do happen rather by ordinance and
commandment" (B. iii.) Toplady says "that God foreknows futurities,
because by His predestination He hath rendered their futurition
certain and inevitable." Bonar says, "God foreknows everything that
takes place, because he Has fixed it" (_Truth and Error_, p. 50).
The same doctrine is held by the younger Hodge--that foreknowledge
involves foreordination.
There have been some who have denied the infinitude of God's
knowledge, notably Dr. Adam Clarke. He held that God, although
possessed of omnipotence, yet as He chooses not to do all things, so
also although He possesses the power of knowing all things, yet He
chooses to be ignorant of some things. In refuting this notion, Dr.
Hodge remarks, "But this is to suppose that God wills not to be God,
that the Infinite wills to be finite. Knowledge in God is not
founded on His will, except so far as the knowledge of vision is
concerned--_i.e._, His knowledge of His own purposes, or what He has
decreed shall come to pass. If not founded on His will it cannot be
limited by it. Infinite knowledge must know all things actual or
possible" (Vol. I., p. 546). Although the motive underlying Clarke's
argument is good, yet it is not wise to sacrifice the Divine
intelligence to the Divine goodness. God is the infinitely perfect
one, but to suppose that He is ignorant of what will happen tomorrow
is to limit His perfections, and make Him a dependent being. But
neither can we accept the Calvinistic doctrine, that God foreknows
because He has foreordained. This, properly speaking, is not
foreknowledge, but _after_ knowledge, since it comes after the
decree. It is, moreover, simply assertion. It is not a self-evident
proposition, and is neither backed by reason nor Scripture. The
great difficulty, however, with our Calvinistic friends is regarding
certainty. If God is certain that an event will happen, then, so it
is argued, it must happen. If we deny that there is an absolute
necessity for the event as an event happening, then it is replied
that God in that case was not certain. But this is sophistical
reasoning--slipshod philosophy. God was certain that the event would
happen, but He was also certain that it need not have happened. The
Divine knowledge is simply a state of the Divine intelligence, and
never causes any thing. It comprehends all that is past, all that
now is, and all that will ever be. But it comprises more than this,
and herein lies the key of the mystery. It takes in the possible, or
that which is never realised in the actual. Human knowledge does
this--and how much more the Divine! God knows that the thief will
steal; He is certain that he will do it, but He is also certain that
he need not do it. His being certain that the theft will take place
does not necessitate the theft. It (the certainty) exercises no
controlling agency upon the wrong-doer. Dr. W. Cooke remarks, "What
is involved in necessity? It is a resistless impulse exerted for a
given end. What is freedom? It involves a self-determining power to
will and to act. What is prescience? It is simply knowledge of an
event before it happens. Such being, we conceive, a correct
representation of the terms, we have to inquire, where lies the
alleged incompatibility of prescience and freedom? Between freedom
and necessity there is, we admit, an absolute and irreconcilable
discrepancy and opposition; for the assertion of the one is a direct
negation of the other. What is free cannot be necessitated, and what
is necessitated cannot be free. But _prescience_ involves no such
opposition. For simple knowledge is not coercive; it is not impulse;
it is not influence of any kind: it is merely acquaintance with
truth, or the mind's seeing a thing as it is. If I know the truth of
a proposition of Euclid, it is not my knowledge that makes it true.
It was a truth, and would have remained a truth, whether I knew it
or not, yea, even, if I had never existed. So of any fact in
history; so of any occurrence around me. My mere knowledge of the
fact did not make it fact, or exercise any influence in causing it
to be fact. So in reference to the Divine prescience; it is mere
knowledge, and is as distinct from force, constraint, or influence
as any two things can be distinct one from the other. It is force
which constitutes necessity, and the total absence of force which
constitutes liberty; and as all force is absent from mere knowledge,
it is evident that neither foreknowledge nor afterknowledge involves
any necessity, or interferes in the least degree with human freedom.
Man could not be more free than he is, if God were totally ignorant
of all his volitions and actions" (_Deity_, p. 293). Calvinists
sometimes entrench themselves behind God's foreknowledge as behind a
rampart of granite, but it gives in reality no support to their
system. That God knows the possible, and the contingent, was
illustrated in the case of David at Keilah. He had taken up his
temporary residence in this town. Saul was out on the war path, and
David wished to know if he would visit Keilah, and if so, whether
the men of Keilah would deliver him up. The answer was that Saul
would come, and the people would deliver him up. Receiving this
answer from God, he left. This shows that God's knowledge does not
necessitate an event (see 1 Sam. xxiii.)
He knows what might be, but which never will be. He saw how men
would act in regard to David, but His knowledge did not make them do
it. And He knows how men will act regarding the rejection of
salvation, but this does not necessitate them to ruin their souls.
He is certain that they might have been saved. There was a perfect
remedy for their need; they had power to take it, and refused. The
lost might have been saved; or, in other words, every man in hell
might have been in heaven.
The late Lord Kinloch in his _Circle of Christian Doctrine_, has
several judicious remarks on this subject. In his chapter on
predestination he says:--"The choice of free agents cannot have been
predestinated in any proper sense of the word, that is, cannot have
been fixed beforehand so as to fall out in one way, and no other,
irrespectively of his own will. To say that it has been so, involves
a contradiction in terms, for it is to say that a man chooses and
does not choose at one and the same moment. The choice may be
foreseen, must indeed in every case be foreseen by God, otherwise
the government of the universe could not be conducted. But to
foresee and foreordain are essentially different things" (p. 121).
He says again, "What God appoints; He, to whom the whole of futurity
lies open at a glance, necessarily appoints beforehand. Hence arises
the axiomatic distinction which I find the key to the subject. All
that God is himself to do He not merely foresees but foreordains.
All that He does not do himself, but leaves man to do by the very
act of creating him a free agent, the choice, namely, between one
course and another, is foreseen but not predestined" (p. 124). The
ideas of Lord Kinloch are sound, and we deem them irrefutable.