Hodge and Simplicity Virtualiter

Takes the teeth out of the claim that Protestants are necessarily crippled by their view of Absolute Divine Simplicity:

…[S]tart with the revelation that God has made of himself in the constitution of our own nature and in his holy word.  This method leads to the conclusion that God can think and act, that in him essence and attributes are not identical (I: 564).

It’s also interesting to note Hodge’s comment about God constituting our nature in a certain way.  Shades of Thomas Reid.

To say, as the schoolmen, and so many even of Protestant theologians, ancient and modern, were accustomed to say, that the divine attributes differ only in name, or in our conceptions, or in their effects, is to destroy all true knowledge of God…If in God knowledge is identical with eternity, knowledge with power, power with ubiquity, and ubiquity with holiness, then we are using words without meaning (I: 371-372).
The attributes of God, therefore, are not merely different conceptions in our minds, but different modes in which God reveals himself to his creatures…just as our several faculties are different modes in which the inscrutable substance self reveals itself in our consciousness and acts (I: 374).

So what do we mean by simplicity?  Rome has a thorough, if ultimately chaotic, answer to this question.   Orthodoxy has an outstanding response to Rome, but nothing in terms of a constructive view of Simplicity.  Following Turretin, Hodge writes,
The attributes are to be distinguished not realiter, but virtualiter; that is, there is a real foundation in the divine nature for the several attributes attributed to him (I: 370).
What does virtualiter mean?

Richard Muller defines it as “literally, i.e., with virtue or power” (Muller 371).

It’s interesting that Muller mentioned “power.”  This corresponds with Radde-Galwitz’s interpretation of Gregory of Nyssa.  Alluding to Michel Barnes he notes that divine power is the causal capacity rooted in the divine nature; inseparable from the divine nature and gives rise to the divine energies (183; Barnes).  Further, each “Good” (or attribute, in our case) entails another.
Works Cited:
Hodge, Charles.  Systematic Theology, volume 1.
Muller, Richard.  Dictionary of Greek and Latin Theological Terms
Radde-Galwitz, Andrew.  Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Transformation of Divine Simplicity.

Notes on Muller, PRRD 3

Notes on Muller, PRRD 3

Simplicity in pre-Reformation

The scholastic understanding of “identity” assumes various levels of identity (essential and formal), so the term “identity” does not indicate radical equation in every sense posssible (40 n. 63).

The goal is “to argue a certain manner of distinction (for the sake of manifesting the three) while at the very same time denying other kinds of distinction (for the sake of confessing the one)” (41).

Normally speaking essence and existence are not identified. The essence “humanity” is not synonymous with any one human (52).

Simplicity and Predication

Many critique absolute divine simplicity as eliminating the possibility of any real predication (on our part) of the divine essence. But when medievals used this term, all they meant was that God is not composite (54-55)

Plurality in God is secundum rationem, not secundum re (55).

Development and Decline of late orthodoxy

Interestingly, the medievals viewed “space” and time,” not as things but as relations (148).

Existence and knowledge of God

The orthodox followed three ways of approach to the problem of the knowledge of God (166):

1. via causationes (a cause can be known in some manner from its effects)
2. via emimentiae(we attribute to God all the perfections known to creataures)
3. via negationis (we remove from God the imperfections known to creatures)

Rules of predication

“Predication is the logical act of attribution by which a subject is united with a predicate” (197).

Disproportionality between finite and infinite.

How does natura apply to God? Some qualities are considered “natural” in him (208).

The attributes of God are his perfections (213).

attribute: a characteristic or quality attributed to or predicated of an object, where as a property is a characteristic that belongs to an object (215). God can only have essential properties.

The Divine Essence

ens a se: self-grounded essence (237)

numerical unity: threeness of person does not contradict numerical unity of essence—there is no class of beings (whether genus or species) identifiable as “god” to which the divine persons belong and the divine unity is not a composite unity such as belongs to the several members of a genus or species (242).

genus: a universal or form, incompletely expressing essence, that can be predicated of specifically distinct subjects in species.

Species: a universal or form completely expressing essence, that can be predicated of a series of subjects distinct in number

Divine Names

The Reformed interest in the divine names is primarily exegetical and not nominalist (246).

see the note on Gillespie in PRRD II, 7.3B

Back to Simplicity

The point is to deny in God only those distinctions that imply composition and to point toward the proper distinctions that do subsist among the attributes and between the attributes and essence (278).

Persons are not distinct in essence, degree, condition, or dignity but they are distinct in order, number, manner of working, etc (281).

“three persons applied to the Godhead indicate the communicability of the sole, infinite, individual and singular divine essence to these three without division (283).”

transcendentals: the properties of being can be identified as “transcendentals.” These are properties which must be predicated of all and, therefore, also of each and every being. Being is transcendent: it is the ultimate principle and/or category of all beings. Being is not a “thing” and so there cannot be a “real” distinction between being and things (284-285).

• ens
• res
• aliud; other
• aliquid; being something
• unum; a being is one in itself
• verum; it is true in that it corresponds with its goal
• bonum; it is good because it moves toward its goal

This allows the Reformed to work through the problem of realiter predication: all of these “transcendentals” reduce to one another without becoming synonymous with one another. Yet they do allow distinctions—a being is other than not-being; a being is other than not-itself.

A realiter distinction is a distinction between two things. Being, though, is not a thing and so is not reduced to realiter distinctions. A virtualiter distinction …

Epistemology, Distinctions, and the Divine Decree

(The Reformed structure this discussion) “Around the epistemological problem of the finitum no capax infiniti and its resolution in the explication of the eternal decree and its execution of the sovereign will of God in and for the temporal economy. Here we see both a statement of the non capax and an approach to the divine relatedness: the mind cannot conceive of the way in which the attributes belong to the utter simplicity of the divine essence; nonetheless, the distinct attributes are coorectly distinguished by reason in the effects and operations of God in the world—and these effects and operations rightly and genuinely reveal the identity of God, indeed, the invisible essence of the utterly simple Godhead. The effect of this distinction, like the effet of the distinction between the decree and the execution, is to direct attention away from the divine essence toward the divine economy” (298).

Immutability

Does not imply that God is inactive, but that God has not been moved from potency to actuality (309). It is an absence of negative passions.

God and Time

“The denial of change and succession is made for affirming a specific relationship between God and the creatures—indeed, of affirming that both God and creatures have duration, the divine duration being non-successive, the creaturely duration, successive (355).

Divine Foreknowledge

Divine willing establishes freedom and contingency (402). Foreknowledge itself is not causal. Knowledge is related to causality by means of the divine will.

Necessary and Free knowledge in God

Necessary: the knowledge that God has of himself and all possibilities ad extra (407).

Free knowledge: knowledge of all those possibilities that God freely wills to actualize.

Problem of Middle Knowledge

definition: a divine knowledge lying between God's indeterminate knowledge of all possibilities and his determinate foreknowledge of the necessary and certain effects of his decree (417-418). God is reacting to the result of a finite contingency.

Reformed critique: the notion of a certain divine foreknowledge of future conditionals is a rather unstable concept: in order for God to know the conditional conditionally, he would have to be ignorant of its resolution in actuality. In short, there can be no being independent of the divine decree (421). The problem for such a view appears when the question is asked, “How shall such a thing exist?”

Will and Freedom

necessity and freedom are neither contraries nor contradictories: the contrary of necessity is impossibility; the contrary of freedom is coercion (434n. 360).

When God wills, the contrary remains possible—a resident possiblity in the divine scientia necessaria. God cannot equally will and not will a certain object; he can, however, will a certain object and know the possiblity of not-willing it (448).

The divine will is not determined by its objects. It was not necessary that God will object-a since the possibility of object non-a existed in God's mind (449).

Even God's necessary willing is free in a sense: it is not subject to external compulsion (455).

Review of Muller on Arminius

Muller, Richard. God, Creation, And Providence In The Thought Of Jacob Arminius: Sources And Directions Of Scholastic Protestantism In The Era Of Early Orthodoxy. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1991.

In this volume Richard Muller attempts to fill in a lacuna in the histories of Arminius and early Arminianism. Rather than focus on the debates of predestination, Muller notes that “[I]t must still be explained why Arminius’ doctrine developed along certain technical lines and with attention to such questions as the internal logic of the divine will, the character of human beings in their original created state, the relationship of the divine will, in its providential concurrence, to the acts of human beings, and the nature of the divine foreknowledge of future contingents (Muller, 10). Similar to Muller’s larger project (Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics), he attempts to set Arminius in a larger historical context, one that explores the connections between late medieval scholasticism and a burgeoning Reformed orthodoxy (or lack thereof).

Despite what many saw as his later theological errors, Arminius correctly placed his theological roots “in the presuppositional structure and foundational principles of [the Protestant scholastic] system, which is to say, in the definition of theology and in the doctrine of God, the so-called principium essendi of theological system” (Muller, 25).

The Method of Arminius’ Theology

Arminius follows the general outline of both Catholic and Protestant scholastics. He is perhaps a bit more metaphysical in his doctrine of God. Muller notes, “Arminius appears far more willing than Protestants of previous generations to draw ratinal metaphysics into the service of theology: (59). One should be careful, however, in inferring that this is or is not the cause of his theological downfall, so to speak. Arminius’s use of the scholastic method, particularly his emphasis on God as the principium essendi, stands in line with Reformed scholasticism. However, Arminius did phrase his method in such a way to deemphasize final causality, and hence to lessen a decretal theology (68).

After identifying the being of God as the ground of theology, Arminius makes the relationship between God and the world the “fundamental datum…rather than, as in the case of his Reformed contemporaries, a secondary issue predicated on the doctrine of God” (75). Perhaps this does condition Arminius’ later theology; Muller notes, “the conditions established by God in the act of creation become determinative of all subsequent discussions concerning God and the world.” Arminius has made the world a “subordinate principium essendi.” (Cf. pp. 100-101; 171 ff.). As Muller notes elsewhere,

“Whereas the theology of Arminius’ Reformed contemporaries tended to place the work of grace prior to the work of creation and, therefore, to understand creation increasingly as a means to God’s higher salvific end, , Arminius’s theology tends to conjoin nature and grace, to understand creation as manifesting the ultimate goodness of God, and therefore, to conceive of the divine act of creation as standing prior to all other divine acts ad extra and as establishing both the context and limitations within which those acts must occur” (233).

The Existence and Nature of God

On the surface level Arminius begins with the standard scholastic prolegomena, archetypal and ectypal theology, but as he expands it when begin to see his departure from Reformed theology. Arminus notes that existence (esse) and life (vita) must be the two fundamental categories for the essence of God (114). Arminius’s key point is in identifying these two terms as the “two moments” of God. His language is a bit confusing, for he isn’t using the word “moments” in the conventional use of the term. What does he mean by this? A sympathetic reading could simply gloss these terms as the traditional terms actus purus and actus secondus. It appears for Arminius that “there is no first moment of being in God without the second moment, life” (116).

As it stands this is not all that striking. He is not saying anything different from other scholastic theologians, whether Protestant or Romanist. The problem arises when Arminius applies this distinction to God’s will. As Muller notes, “If God is utterly simple, then the fact of God having a will and the divine willing must be identical” (117). Arminius’s distinction of “two moments” will posit a gap between what God intends to will and what he actually wills.

The Divine Knowledge and Will

Arminius does make a unique move concerning God’s knowledge: he refers knowing entirely to the intellect and misses an established Reformed point on the knowledge of God: God’s sapientia (144). Given that sapientia is a knowledge of purposes and goals, and that Arminus omits it, one must wonder if this will play out in his understanding of divine foreknowledge. Arminius further departs from Aquinas by taking the Boethian model that God knows future things because they are future (Muller1991, 152-153; contrast with Aquinas, Summa, Ia, q. 14, art. 8, ad obj. 1). As Muller notes, “[T]his provides a less than total conjunction between the divine will and the divine intellect” (153).

This novelty leads directly into Arminius’s use of the scientia media. After a lengthy discussion of how Aquinas and those following him dealt with “middle knowledge” (e.g., the idea that this knowledge of contingencies stands prior to any free act of God’s will), this means that for Arminius “God will, therefore, be able to ordain the means of salvation on the basis of a hypothetical or consequent knowledge of the creature’s free choice in a context of grace” (161).

The Object of God’s will

Arminius posited the divine goodness as the object of the divine will; this means that God could not have permitted evil, only permitting the free function of the created human will to evil. This raises one problem that Arminius easily solved: if the divine will is the simple essence, how can we speak of a multitude of objects? Arminius does so by noting that God wills the plenitude of his divine goodness. This raises another problem which he doesn’t solve as well, notes Muller: how do we then speak of “experience[s] of freedom, contingency, and, indeed, of evil running counter to the will of God, in the finite order” (175)?

Arminius makes another subtle move. Muller gives a brief but succinct summary of the ways in which Arminius discussed God’s will. At first glance it is no different from the typical Reformed and medieval scholastic discussions, except for one point. Muller notes, “Arminius emphasizes the way in which the divine opus alienum is a response to the willing of contingent beings—over against the opus proprium as an absolute will of God” (185). In short, and in contradistinction to his Reformed contemporaries, Arminius places God’s will (both antecedent and consequent) as standing in relation to and as a response to the creature’s willing (187). Interestingly, Arminius switches terms. Scholastics had tradtionally spoken of God’s will as voluntas, the facutly that exercises volition, which for God is always perfect and complete. Arminius changed it to velleitas, an inchoate and imperfect will, because incomplete (188).

Creation

This section is admittedly difficult. Muller gives a fine overview of the scholastic glosses on creatio ex nihilo, noting that the phrase ex nihilo does not mean “deriving its origin from the principle of nothing-ness,” but rather “an indication of the ontological and temporal limit and order of the creative process: first there was nothing and, then, after the creative act, there was something (216). The following, however, is not clear as to what Arminius and his contemporaries were aiming at, but given Arminius’s earlier contention of a connection between God and the world, seeing both in a reacting towards the other (75, 100-101; 171), it appears that one can reconstruct Arminius’s view. It seems that the concept of the nihil, rather than functioning as a “limit,” now functions as a material substratum, a realm of possible being existing independently of the realm of actual being (219).

Conclusion:

Muller effectively rebuts the common charge that Arminius rejected the scholastic method of his Reformed colleagues and chose rather a purer biblicism that rejected supralapsarian predestination. Arminius followed the method of numerous divines and gave careful attention to complex theological problems (26). In light of current intra-Reformed controversies today over the nature of election and the covenant—and this is my point, not necessarily Muller’s—we can see those who argue for a fresher, more biblical theology in contrast to stodgy Protestant Scholasticism, not only come to the same conclusions as later Arminianism, but they lack all of Arminius’ own theological strengths; they get all of his errors and none of this benefits, such as they may or may not be.

Arminius can be seen as a theologian who took some elements of Thomism and modifed them for his own use. As it stands that is not too remarkable. Most every early Reformed orthodox thinker did that. It is the specific modifications Arminius made that set him apart: the use of scientia media and creation as a temporal limit upon God’s power. For example, Arminius, like Thomas, placed God's intellect logically prior to his will. Thomas, though unlike Arminius, saw God's intellect as causal of future events.

Theologia Unionis

The Reformed do not deny a communication; we simply deny a 1:1 switch-over between the two natures.    If the Reformed (and generally Western) position is not held, and the two natures communicate their propria to each other, then they lose any real human or divine identity.   Sure, this is a Western Christology.  We don't hide it.  Unfortunately, we do not see anchorites trying to understand what legitimate concerns the Reformed have.  None has said it better than Richard Muller,

The Christological problem follows the [epistemological issue]:  if the human nature of Jesus, as finite, is in capable in itself of comprehending the infinite knowledge of the theologia archetypal [think of the simple divine mind, admitting no real distinctions], then any equation of the theologia unionis [for our present purpose, think the communication of attributes; ] with archetypal theology must involve some alteration of the human nature of Jesus.  For Jesus to be possessed of an infinite divine wisdom according to his humanity, there would have to be either a communication of divinity to humanity or a transference of divine attributes to Jesus' humanity within the hypostatic union (Muller, PRRD I: 250]