the persuasion of a neighbor . . . Both, however, are voluntary.”24 Sin issues from within and
without. There are two mediums through which sin enters: (1) the bodily senses and (2) evil
desires (cf., I Jn. 2:14-15; Jam. 1: 14). In either case the will is utilized. “Sins . . . are to be
ascribed to nothing but to their own wills, and no further cause for sins is to be looked for.”25
That persons are both impotent and ignorant does not make them less guilty before God.
These are the conditions under which unregenerate creatures exist. Ignorance and impotence
are conditions, not causes.
Analogously, a drought is not the cause of hunger; lack of food is. The drought may be the
condition under which hunger occurs, but it is not the cause of hunger. So too, God created
the condition (viz., freedom) from which humans could move closer toward him. Adam
voluntarily chose otherwise and, hence, became guilty. The cause of the guilt is the misuse of
the condition (freedom). In essence, God caused the condition, Adam abused it and,
therefore, became guilty.
Why should not the Author of the soul be praised with due piety if he has given it
so good a start that it may by zeal and progress reach the fruit of wisdom and
justice, and has given it so much dignity as to put within its power the capacity
to grow towards happiness if it will?26
Though God gives freedom at creation he is not to be charged with its misuse. “The soul was
not created evil because it was not given all that it had power to become.”27 The purpose for
which God gifted his creatures with freedom was that they might live righteously. God is
exonerated and humanity, being the efficient cause of evil/sin, is guilty.
One might argue that “Freedom is not possible due to God having foreknowledge. Whether
freedom be defined as power to contrary or self-determination, the creature is certain to
choose what God has already known and, therefore, cannot be free in any sense. A
deterministic or even fatalistic view of God and his creation is the only possible alternative,
given the infallible foreknowledge of God.” Once again, the Bishop of Hippo provides a great
deal of aid in understanding the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom
(either definition).
In De Libero Arbitrio Evodius asks Augustine, “Since God foreknew that man would sin, that
which God foreknew must come to pass. How then is the will free when there is apparently
this unavoidable necessity?”28 Augustine is quick to point out the disjunctive thinking on the
matter. First, it assumes an either/or scenario (bifurcation) and doesn’t offer a third
alternative, viz., that God has foreknowledge of the power to will. Second, this disjunction
assumes, unnecessarily so, that foreknowledge is somehow causative. Once again, this
confuses conditions with causes.
Third, it makes foreknowledge out to be far more than is intended at this point. Augustine
clearly states that foreknowledge is prescience, or knowing beforehand. “God by his
foreknowledge does not use compulsion in the case of future events . . . God has
foreknowledge of all his own actions, but is not the agent of all that he foreknows . . . he has
no responsibility for the future actions of men though he knows them beforehand.”29 God
foreknew, for example, in 1899 that scores of Kosovo inhabitants would be brutely murdered in
1999. This knowledge does not implicate God as responsible.
The dilemma of foreknowledge and freedom has, for more than 17 centuries, troubled
philosophers and theologians to their grave and, no doubt, will continue to do so.30 Central to
both foreknowledge and freedom are (1) the infallible knowledge of God and (2) some idea of
human freedom other than a hard determinism.
Closely related to this problem is the question of God’s relationship to time. There is a sense in
which one cannot begin to wrestle with the dilemma of foreknowledge and freedom until the
issue of God’s relationship to time is resolved. The simplest form of the equation would be to
hold that God is timeless, which appears to be Augustine’s view.
For He [God] does not pass from this to that by transition of thought, but beholds
all things with absolute unchangeableness; so that of those things which emerge
in time, the future, indeed are not yet, and the present are now, and the past no
longer are; but all of these are by Him comprehended in His stable and eternal
presence.31
Certainly it would seem that if God has knowledge of all free choices, past, present and
future, then he would have to have a vantage point outside of time in order to not be
constrained by sequence. On this, Geisler is correct in saying that “God knows everything in
the eternal present but He does not know everything as the present moment in time; He
knows the past as past, the future as future, etc.”32 [italics his]. Therefore, it could be said
that God knows all things a priori, yet sees them as a posteriori.
But how does this position on foreknowledge and freedom cohere with Augustine’s view of
salvation? If it is true that God’s foreknowledge does not cause free decisions and humans are
incapable of coming to God on their own, how does anyone enter into the kingdom? At this
point it would be helpful to distinguish different categories of causes.
Aristotle points to four kinds of causes for any given effect: (1) material, (2) efficient, (3)
formal and (4) final or ultimate. God is the final or ultimate cause of all things but not the
material or efficient cause of all things. Put simply, God efficiently, materially and ultimately
causes regeneration of the soul. He creates the conditions under which humans can freely
love him (freedom = the material cause), lovingly persuades some to believe (enabling grace =
the efficient cause) and carries them on to completion in the eternal state (gift of
perseverance = final or ultimate cause).
Augustine, throughout his writings, exonerates God of being the efficient cause of evil. That
God decrees, in an ultimate sense, the means and the ends does not entail him being
responsible for them.33 Application of a singular causality principle to the metaphysical
problem of freedom and evil is short-sighted, not to mention an informal fallacy.
That freedom is, in itself, a good thing given by God to the creature. Augustine states “free
will, . . . is a good thing divinely bestowed, and that those are to be condemned who make a
bad use of it.”34 The cause of human freedom is God, yet the cause of sin and evil is the use
of freedom, which is in accordance with the antecedent inclination of the will. Augustine
illustrates the responsible/irresponsible use of a good thing.
If you see a man without feet you will admit that, from the point of view of the
wholeness of his body, a very great good is wanting. And yet you would not deny
that a man makes a bad use of his feet who uses them to hurt another or to
dishonour himself.35
Due to a sinful disposition or the bias toward evil no one can, apart from God’s intervening
grace, choose to enter the kingdom. “Good works do not produce grace but are produced by
grace.”36 And “calling [by God] precedes the good will . . . without his calling we cannot even
will.”37
Though God’s foreknowledge includes all free decisions, he does not share responsibility for
them all. God is no more responsible for the misuse of freedom any more than the giver of a
gift is responsible for how the gift is used. For example, one might receive a gift of $1,000 to
be used in helping an orphanage. If a high-powered rifle were instead purchased, then used to
assassinate the President of the United States this in no way implicates any guilt on the part
of the giver. Likewise, God gives the gift of freedom (and all things, for that matter), but he is
not morally responsible for how it is used (cf., 1 Cor. 4:7b).
God is behind all free decisions in an ultimate sense, behind free decisions in salvation in an
efficient sense and behind free decisions unto reprobation only in a material sense.
Consequently, “it is far from the truth that the sins of the creature must be attributed to the
Creator, even though those things must necessarily happen which he has foreknown.”38 The
ability to believe is the material cause of salvation.
For the effectiveness of God’s mercy cannot be in the power of man to frustrate,
if he will have none of it. If God wills to have mercy on men, he can call them in a
way that is suited to them, so that they will be moved to understand and to
follow . . . it is false to say that “it is not of God who hath mercy but of man who
willeth and runneth,” because God has mercy on no man in vain. He calls the man
on whom he has mercy in the way he knows will suit him, so that he will not
refuse the call [italics mine].39
God’s decrees do not entail him being the material, efficient, formal and final cause of
everything. It would be tantamount to blasphemy to assert that the perfect, holy and just
God is the author of evil or sin. Evil is a deprivation or a lack of something that ought to have
been otherwise. The lack of sight is, for a person, an evil whereas it isn’t for a tree. When the
Bible speaks of God creating disaster or clamity (evil in Hebrew, cf., Is. 45:7) it is in the
context of divine judgment upon a nation who ought to have behaved otherwise. He is the
efficient cause of judgment upon sin!
One other aspect of God’s omniscience must be broached as it relates to human freedom. This
is probably one of the most controversial facets of divine omniscience. It has been called
various things such as contingent knowledge or middle knowledge. Put simply, God knows not
only what will occur at all times by all people, but he knows what might occur given other
variables which may have been different. If God’s knowledge of all things actual and possible is
simultaneous, then middle knowledge is nothing more than a heuristic means for understanding
the logical processes of God’s thought. Whether or not Augustine held to any kind of middle
(or contingent) knowledge of God is difficult to know. It is only mentioned to illustrate the
scope of possible relationships between God’s knowledge and human choices. Craig says:
Since God knows what any free creature would do in any situation, he can, by
creating the appropriate situations, bring it about that creatures will achieve his
ends and purposes and that they will do so freely . . . Only an infinite Mind could
calculate the unimaginably complex and numerous factors that would need to be
combined in order to bring about through the free decisions of creatures a single
human event.40
Middle knowledge could serve to bridge the gap between God knowing all things simultaneously
and the order of events which occur in the world that God foreknows will happen.
Moreover, there are other kinds of relationships between subject and object than merely
cause/effect. Craig demonstrates the difference between cause/effect and
ground/consequent relationships that clearly show God’s foreknowledge of future events is not
causative. He does this by suggesting that God foreknows x, because x will take place.
The word because here indicates a logical, not a causal relation, one similar to
that expressed in the sentence ‘four is an even number because it is divisible by
two.’ The word because expresses a logical relation of ground and consequent.
God’s foreknowledge is chronologically prior to [x], but [x] is logically prior to God’s
foreknowledge.41
But this argument is a double-edged sword. If God foreknows x because it will take place,
then is it not equally true that x will take place because God foreknows it, given the same
relationship (i.e., ground/consequent) exists? In other words, the ground or basis upon which
free choices are made is God’s infallible foreknowledge and free human choices are the
consequent. God’s foreknowledge may be chronologically prior to the actualizing of a free
choice, but this in no way makes his foreknowledge contingent. Otherwise, he makes decisions
in the dark (cf., Eph. 1:11)!
Election and the sovereignty of God demonstrate that he uses the perdition of some as a
general deterrent from sin and the salvation of some as a general incentive for salvation (cf.,
Rom. 9:10-29). “The hardening of the ungodly demonstrates two things ? that a man should
fear and turn to God in piety, and that thanks should be given for his mercy to God
Bibliography
1.”On Free Will,” Book 1, 15, 34, Book II, 1, 1; trans. J.H.S. Burleigh, in The Library of
Christian Classics, ed. John Baillie, John T. McNeill and Henry P. Van Dusen, hereafter
called AEW, Augustine: EarlierWritings, (Philadelphia: Westminster), 108.
2.Cf., “The Spirit and the Letter,” introduction by John Burnaby, trans. John Burnaby, in
The Library of Christian Classics, ed. John Baillic, John T. McNeill and Henry P. Van
Dusen, hereafter called ALW, Augustine: Later Works, (Philadelphia: Westminster), 182.
3.Gordon R. Lewis and Bruce A. Demarest, Integrative Theology, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids:
Zondervan, 1990), 184.
4.Augustine, The City of God, XIX, 3, quoted in John W. Cooper, Body Soul and Life
Everlasting, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 11.
5.Augustine, On the Greatness of the Soul, Mll, 22, in Cooper, ibid.
6.”On Free Will,” Book III, xv, 46; AEW, 199.
7.Ibid., 200.
8.D. A. Carson, How Long, O Lord (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1990), 214-215.
9.Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom and Evil (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), 29.
10.Lewis and Demarest, Integrative, vol. 2, 96.
11.”On Free Will,” Book III, xviii, 54; AEW, 202.
12.Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 3, Nicene and Post-Nicene
Christianity, (Grand Rapids: Ecrdmans, 1910), 819.
13.”On Free Will,” Book III, xvii, 52; AEW, III.
14.William G.T. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, vol. 2, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, n.d.), 113.
15.Philip Schaff, History, 819.
16.Gordon R. Lewis, “Faith and Rcason in the Thought of St. Augustine,” Ph.D. dissertation,
(Syracuse University, 1959), 81.
17.”The Spirit and the Letter,” xxvi, 43 -45, ALW, 226-229.
18.”Grace and Free Will,” 14, 27; trans. Robert P. Russell, in The Fathers of the Church,
vol. 59, ed. Roy Joscph Deferrari, hereafter called GFW, (Washington: Catholic University
of America Press, 1968), 280.
19. Ibid., 285.
20. Ibid., 289.
21.”The Trinity,” ALW, 23, 122.
22.William G.T. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, vol. 2, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, n.d.),
113-114.
23.Lewis and Demarest, Integrative, vol. 2, 96.
24.On Free Will,” Book III, x, 29; AEW, 189.
25.Ibid., xxii, 63, 209.
26.Ibid., xxii, 65, 2 1 0.
27.Ibid.
28.Ibid., Book 111, ii, 4, 172.
29.Ibid., iv, 11, 177.
30.For a brief history of the problem see Linda Zagzebski, The Dilemma of Freedom and
Foreknowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), note 1, chapter 1, 189.
31.The City of God,” XI, 2 1, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: The Modem Library, 1950),
364. For an alternative view which holds that God’s relationship to time changed when
time came into existence see William L. Craig, “God, Time and Eternity” Religious Studies
14 (1978): 497-503.
32.Norman L. Geisler, Philosophy of Religion (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, n.d.), note 10,
chapter 14, 331.
33.Cf., Lewis and Demarest, Integrative, vol. 1, op. cit., 310-328.
34. On Free Will,” Book II, xv, 48, AEW, 166.
35. Ibid.
36.”The Simplican,” The Second Question, 3, ALW, 388.
37.Ibid., 12, op. cit., 394-395.
38.AEW, Book III, vi, 18,181.
39.”The Simplican,” The Second Question, 13, ALW, 395.
40.William L. Craig, The Only Wise God (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987), 135. Though Craig
holds to fallen creatures having power to contrary, it is likely that middle knowledge is
still possible given the alternative view of freedom offered here (viz.,