R. C. Sproul is somewhat infamous for the following quotation:
If there is one single molecule in this universe running around loose, totally free of God’s sovereignty, then we have no guarantee that a single promise of God will ever be fulfilled. (Chosen By God, pp. 26-27)
It occurs to me that if God’s sovereignty is threatened by a single molecule, it cannot be very robust. But obviously nobody who truly believes in the God of the scriptures sees anything as “totally free of God’s sovereignty.”
In the passage leading up to this quotation, Sproul says,
That God in some sense foreordains whatever comes to pass is a necessary result of his sovereigty. In itself it does not plead for Calvinism. It only declares that God is absolutely sovereign over his creation. God can foreordain things in different ways. But everything that happens must at least happen by his permission. If he permits something, then he must decide to allow it. If He decides to allow something, then in a sense he is foreordaining it. Who, among Christians, would argue that God could not stop something in this world from happening? If God so desires, he has the power to stop the whole world. (Chosen By God, p. 26)
Note that here Sproul presumes that God foreordains everything, at least in some sense. There are a number of biblical indications that this is not true. For instance, in Jeremiah 7:31 we read the following:
And they have built the high places of Topheth, which is in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind.
A New Testament example can be seen in Luke 7:29-30:
(When all the people heard this, and the tax collectors too, they declared God just, having been baptized with the baptism of John, but the Pharisees and the lawyers rejected the purpose of God for themselves, not having been baptized by him.)
Sproul goes on to quote approvingly the Westminster Confession:
At this point I should do for you what I did for my students in the evening class — finish the statement from the Westminster Confession. The whole statement reads as follows:
God, from all eternity, did by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatever comes to pass: yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.
Note that while it affirms God’s sovereignty over all things, the Confession also asserts that God does not do evil or violate human freedom. Human freedom and evil are under God’s sovereignty.
(Chosen By God, p. 28)
Later in the chapter, Sproul simply punts on the question of how God can “unchangeably ordain whatever comes to pass, yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin….” He says,
For years I sought an answer to this problem, scouring the works of theologians and philosophers. I found some clever attempts at resolving the problem, but, as yet, have never found a deeply satisfying answer….
… The Bible tells us that evil actions flow from evil desires. But the presence of an evil desire is already sin. We sin because we are sinners. We were born with a sin nature. We are fallen creatures. B ut Adam and Eve were not created fallen. They had no sin nature they were good creatures with a free will. Yet they chose to sin. Why? I don’t know. Nor have I found anyone yet who does know. (Chosen By God, pp. 29, 31)
One unfortunate feature of human language is that it allows you to say absurd things. I can say, “I want a square circle,” or “There are five of us and I have three dollars. I will now give one dollar to each of us.” Unless the latter statement is a description of some kind of magic trick, both are absurd, yet there is nothing that prevents you from saying them.
In similar vein, the Westminster Confession says that God ordains whatever comes to pass, yet is not the author of sin. It seems that you either have to deny that sin exists, or reject this statement. The latter seems easier.
Of course I do not argue that God is the author of sin. So then I have to deny that God “unchangeably ordain[s] whatever comes to pass.”
At this point we have to step into deep water and take a look at the nature of God himself. God has typically been defined as “unsurpassable perfection.” But if God is unsurpassable, then he must not be susceptible to change in any way, because if you are already at the ultimate of perfection, any change would be a come-down and you would be less perfect.
The effect of this way of looking at God is to say that God is fully actual. There is no potentiality in him. He cannot become anything; he is already “all that he can be.” And, since he knows all things, that means that his knowledge cannot change, and so everything must be pre-ordained. If Sproul’s rogue molecule were to start dancing in some unexpected way, it would contradict God’s knowledge and therefore his perfection.
But there are several problems with this. First, it implies that there is only one possible world, and that world is the best possible world by some metric. This is not a weird, little known idea. People as well known as John Piper believe this, with the metric being God’s glory. That is, this world as it is most glorifies God.
An example of how this works is put forth by Jonathan Edwards. He argues that God has elements of his character that must be expressed to make his glory fully known, such as his hatred for sin. So in order to make his hatred for sin known, sin must be present.
Thus God’s glory depends on sin. (If you have wound up thinking this, it is hard not to think that you have taken a wrong turn somewhere.)
But it gets worse. If God’s perfection is eternal, his knowledge must be eternally perfect, and so eternally unchanging. That means creation must be eternal. Otherwise God would have expressed some potentiality by creating, bringing something into being that was, before he made it, unknowable. It does not help to say that God knew it before it was created, because that would imply that God knew things that were not true if they had not yet been created.
But this implies that creation itself is necessary for God’s perfection, and so God is not fully perfect in his self-existence. Or at least he screwed up by creating. The Greek view of God actually seems to say something like this. It posits a God that is infinitely distant from creation. God gave out “emanations” and eventually one of those emanations, the so-called “demi-urge”, created the world. Oops. This is part of the Gnostic view, and in that view salvation involves escaping the trap of matter and becoming rejoined in spirit with the God who is the source of that spirit.
But the Bible teaches something different. It says that creation was good (in fact very good). But it is also not eternal; it happened at some point — there was a time before the world was (see John 17:5).
In order to make sense of this, we need to re-examine what it means to say that God is perfect. If God is “unsurpassable perfection” then it seems we are caught in some version involving God as the author of evil. But what if we allow potentiality in God? In other words, we say that God’s perfection is “unsurpassable except by himself.”
This notion that God has potentiality makes sense by analogy. When we look at a person, we say, “He has potential,” and such a person is better (in some sense) than one who has no potential or has “maxed out” his potential.
Compare an amoeba with a human at the moment of conception. Both have but a single cell. But we argue that the human cell is in some sense superior to the amoeba because the human cell has the potential for a far richer experience. The value in the human cell at that point is fully in the potential of what it may become.
But if there is value in potential, how can we argue that God is more perfect when he has no potential, that he can become nothing he is not already? Does it not make more sense to say that God has unsurpassable potential?
So we can see that God is unsurpassable except by himself in his actuality, and unsurpassable in his potentiality.
But for potentiality to be potentiality without being actuality, it must involve possibilities. That is, God could do one thing, or he could do another. God could create, or not create. Having chosen to create, he can create a world in one form or another. God could do anything that is not logically contradictory at any given point in time.
There are certain things that God must be in his abstract essence: necessary (that is, it is not conceivable that he not exist), all-knowing, all good and so on. But there are certain things that are potential in God’s actuality. That is, God must know all things that are true, but that knowledge is not fixed, but will vary with the state of reality.
Even more, if God is free, then he must be free to create, and he must be free to actualize many different versions of creation. He could have made things one way or another, according to his desire and choice. If he chose to create, he had to make the creation some way, but that choice to create was free and the implementation of creation was also free. To argue that God could have created in only one way is to argue that God was not free in his creation.
So we see that God freely created out of nothing. For this idea to be intelligible, we have to have some human analogy of creation. In other words, we have to see ourselves as expressing our potentiality by creating in some way — by choosing what we will become.
Now clearly we do not create ourselves ex-nihilo — out of nothing. We build on what we already are. But if we genuinely have potential, then we choose among possible becomings. Otherwise it would be wrong to say that we have potential — we are already actual, programmed to become whatever we will be.
So our potential is relative and dependent but nevertheless real, in some sense comparable to God’s own potential. The Bible gives us reason to believe this kind of thing when it says that we were made in the image of God and that Jesus was “firstborn among many sons” — implying that we are of common nature with Jesus.
Thus we wind up with the following:
God is unsurpassable except by himself in his actuality — his concrete existence.
God is unsurpassable in his potentiality — his ability to become what is newer, richer, more intense.
(Note that this helps us resonate with statements from the Bible such as Lamentations 3:22b-23a: “His compassions fail not; they are new every morning.” God is unchangeable in his compassion and that unchangeability is expressed in creative newness every day.)
We are of a kind with God both in our actuality and our potentiality. While relative and derivative, we share concrete actuality with God as well as potentiality. And our potentiality is expressed in the ability to creatively originate new things, things not completely contained in what has been up to that point.
If someone says that this cannot be possible — that God cannot make beings like him in that regard — I say that such a person has a low view of God’s sovereignty. God can do anything that is not logically impossible — so he can make beings like himself. We know that such beings are not logically impossible because God himself is such a being. And since God has made them, they are dependent and not self-existent or otherwise partaking any incommunicable aspect of God.
In fact, there is at least a hint in the Bible that creation involved a kind of self-emptying on God’s part. Philippians 2 talks of how Jesus emptied himself to die on the cross. And Revelation talks about “the lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” From this perspective, we can perhaps see creation itself as involving a self-emptying on God’s part to make room for free creativeness on the part of his creatures. This self-emptying is comparable to redemption. Certainly redemption is spoken of as a “new creation” and the celebration of the Redeemer in Revelation 5 is on a par with the celebration of the Creator in Revelation 4.
Having gotten to this point, the problem of evil becomes straightforward. The scope of potentiality in the creatures God made involved the ability to step outside his purposes. In fact, this notion is made concrete when God told Adam and Eve not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. By eating of that tree, they created a new reality of broken relationships that God never intended.
It is true that God made the act possible by creating. But because he made Adam and Eve capable of truly free “ex-nihilo” choice, he was not the author of their choice. By telling them not to eat of the fruit, he gave them sufficient guidance for them to do good — but the choice remained theirs.
The picture of God’s sovereignty that emerges from this line of thought is one that, in my view, glorifies God far more than one where he dictates the actions of every molecule, especially in light of the fact that evil exists and that hell is a possibility. If God has potential, and creation has potential, then reality becomes a dance of constant expression, enriching the experience both of God and of us. Note that this implies that God himself actualizes potentialities — that his state changes. He surpasses himself in his actuality, becoming greater and more glorious as creation itself expresses his goodness and lives out the potential he has given it. This makes sense of the notion that we can somehow glorify God.
But it also gives a view of God’s knowledge as encompassing both actuality and potentiality. God knows what is definite and what is possible. He has perfect knowledge of the completely definite past, and perfect knowledge of the future that is both definite in some aspects and possible in some aspects. He knows what will be and what may be. Not everything is certain — this is what potential means: some things are not actual yet. And the movement from potential to actual is the movement from possible to definite. We choose one thing from among many and so select one possibility to become actually real. And God responds to those choices with perfect wisdom.
The notion that a “rogue molecule” could somehow undermine God’s sovereignty is like saying that a chess master cannot win unless he dictates the moves of his opponent. If I were to play chess with the world champion, I would almost certainly lose even though every move I made was my own choice. Or to put it another way, the world champion could win even though he allows me to freely exercise my will in how I conduct my pieces. But it would be a travesty if he claimed that his position as world champion allowed him to dictate my moves, and that this somehow glorified his chess-playing ability.
In the same manner God interacts with his creation, allowing it full freedom to actualize creatively the potential he has given it. He responds creatively to it so as to ensure that his purposes will be fulfilled. His sovereignty is so great and glorious that he can “play fair” with creation, allowing it to be what it is, even to the point of allowing his Son to die on the cross, and still accomplish his good and glorious will.