Gordon Clark on Necessitarianism

I wrote a post responding to a recent book defending necessitarianism (link) - the view that, as Amy Karofsky puts it, that "nothing could have been otherwise" (A Case for Necessitarianism, pg. 153) - and God willing, I plan to write more about why I no longer, as it once did, believe the position. Karofsky herself seems unaware of any defense of necessitarianism in the past "300 years" (A Case for Necessitarianism, pg. x), so the following should serve well to show that is not the case.

A large reason I originally subscribed to necessitarianism was due to Gordon Clark. I also have a larger project in mind in which I demonstrate the Clark's thought developed over time, so for these reasons, I wanted to highlight some of what Clark has said on the matter. It would also be a bit lengthy if I were to include the below quotes in a post whose main point would be to undermine necessitarianism.

The earliest mention of necessitarianism that I could find is from a letter from Clark to J. Oliver Buswell (February 9th, 1939), in which Clark writes: 

...whether God might have created some other sort of world is a slightly different question, on which Augustine and Anselm disagree. Talking about the plan of salvation (and if true here it is true everywhere) Augustine says that God could have ordered it differently but Anselm says an absolute rational necessity prevents any other mode of atonement and God could not have decreed otherwise. So far as I can see, both views are consistent with creation. Anselm is not forced to say that the world is “not created but merely derived” (your letter p.1, next to bottom paragraph); but I must confess that I am unable to decide between the two views. Very consciously I tried to avoid this particular problem in my paper. 

While this letter is about the atonement in particular, it is related to the question of what God either can or must decree. 4 years later, Clark wrote "Plotinus’ Theory of Empirical Responsibility" for The New Scholasticism (1943, Vol. XVII No. 1 Jan.):

...the Stoics intend to place some things in our power. Nonetheless the theory is a failure. It is necessitarian because, when all the causes are taken into account, nothing can be otherwise than it is. Our impressions and ideas result from antecedent conditions, and our initiative is governed by our impressions. To speak of anything being in our power is on this showing, a mockery. It is of no use to say the impressions and the initiative are ours, for this does not advance us beyond the level of children, of the insane, or even of the inanimate activities of fire.

Given the unqualified disparagement, I take the above to be an argument meant against necessitarianism in general as well as against the Stoics in particular. Then, further, the following was written in 1963, when I gather Clark still rejected necessitarianism:

Christian theologians have commonly pointed out that creation as a voluntary act is incompatible with Hegelian philosophy. Hegel can very sincerely say that the world depends on God or the Absolute, and to this extent he sounds like a Christian, but Hegel continues as no Christian can and adds that the Absolute conversely depends on the world. This mutual dependence is essentially pantheism. No single thing by itself, the Sun, the Moon, or John Doe, is God but the whole, not in its plurality but in its unity, is God. God and the universe are one reality. Barth’s rejection of this mutual dependence, of this reciprocity between whole and part, is clear cut: “God would be none the less God if he had not created a world and man. The world’s existence and our existence is no wise essentially necessary to God, even as the object of his love” (I, 1, 158) (Karl Barth’s Theological Method, 1997, pg. 36 – original date of publication: 1963)

While I will have more to say about this elsewhere, I agree with the above in bold. I would also include another citation from 1964 in which Clark seems to deny any doctrine which would lead to an affirmation that "creation would add to God by offering new relationship to Him, and thus become both a necessity for Him, if He is to be fully God, and also a limitation to Him in the sense He cannot be fully God without its existence" (link). However, without access to the original publication, I am not sure if Clark or an interlocutor is expositing Kant, agreeing with him, or responding to him.

Now, compare the above to later works in which Clark has - for reasons I again will address elsewhere - revised his view and come to accept necessitarianism. The first two citations are from Clark's books The Trinity (originally published in 1985) and The Atonement (originally published in 1987). Clark had finished both as early as 1977 and had hoped would be published as early as 1978 as parts of a larger book - a systematic theology (link). Some time in this timeframe between 1963 and 1977, it seems Clark's views changed. 

I'll cite relevant sections from The Trinity first, as that would have been an earlier chapter in Clark's systematic theology and it was published before The Atonement:

These are decisions of God's free will, free in the very definite sense of not having been imposed on him by an external power, but not free in the sense that anything could be otherwise. To hold the latter position would be to aver that God himself could be otherwise than he is, an "unnecessary" being...

...it is not true that the Father could choose to create or choose not to create. God did not have, from eternity, a blank mind, undecided as to whether to create or not. God's mind is, or, better, includes the idea of this particular cosmos, with Abraham, David, and Jesus at particular points in time. It was not external power that forced him to create, nor was there any such from which he was free, for there was no external power at all. But God, being God, was a God of such nature that a creation naturally resulted from such a nature. If there has been a God who might not have created, he would not have been the God described in the Bible. To suppose that God sometime or other finally made up his mind to create is to deny both his immutability and his omniscience, These fatal implications follow from the Arminian introduction of time into the Godhead, which wreaks devastation upon Scriptural theology. The immediate point is that the view which we repudiate assumes that an act of will must be limited to a finite, momentary bit of time. We reply that God's act of will is eternal...

Obviously the world is not related to the Father, nor to the Godhead as a whole, as the Son is to the Father. Created objects are not homoousionta with the Father. This point is fixed. Yet the world is not "voluntary," if this term is used to denote some irrational, unnecessary freedom. The idea of free will is so widespread that people often think there can be no will unless it is free. But though our wills may sometimes be free, unfortunately, from our rational control, just as our intellectual endeavors may be vitiated by fallacious syllogisms, yet none of these defects can be attributed to God. The eternal plan of God included the crucifixion of Christ, slain from the foundation of the world. Hence God was not "free" in history; that is, God was not so insane as to will historically anything that contradicted his eternal decree. The death of Christ was necessary and inevitable... 

If now, God is rational as the Bible teaches in many places, if he is omniscient, if he predestinates whatever comes to pass; if consequently the world itself is rationally organized, and if God's image in man is rationality, then consistency would require that one or the other of these contradictory positions, necessitarianism or indeterminism, must fit. Either the world is necessary and inevitable or it is not ... The necessitarian is willing to accept the burden of proof, and that burden is borne by the items mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph: God is truth, he is omniscient, he decrees whatsoever comes to pass. 

There is, however, a further phase of this subject that most people ignore. It is rather recondite and is mentioned only for completeness' sake. It has to do with the definition of "philosophical necessitarianism." The name can bear two senses, and the one which in all probability Sir William Hamilton used is that of factual inevitability. Events are inevitable in the sense that, given a set of conditions, the event in question must occur. A different set would have necessitated a different result. Such a necessitarianism may be called factual or hypothetical, for the result is inevitable only under the hypothesis of certain conditions, and other conditions might have prevailed. 

The second type of necessitarianism may be called logical rather than factual, and absolute rather than hypothetical. On this view of things no other conditions than the actual conditions are possible. This is not "the best of all possible world," as Leibniz claimed: It is the only possible world, as Spinoza claimed. Any other world, on this view, can be imagined only by failing to see that it contains a logical contradiction or impossibility. 

Now, Spinoza is in ill repute among orthodox theologians; and even non-christians classify him, if not as an atheist, at least as a pantheist. But it does not follow that every idea he suggests is wrong, for otherwise geometry would be false...

We must ask therefore whether or not this world is logically necessitated. The answer must take into consideration that God is truth and truth is rational. Does this mean that the universe is not a voluntary creation? Does it mean that the generation of the Son is not voluntary? Of course not. Both these items are both voluntary and necessary. Naturally they differ in other respects, but not in these two respects. Given then the immutability of God's mind and the eternity of truth, so-called philosophical necessitarianism seems to be quite Scriptural and with respect to the creation of the world conflicts in no way with the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son. Since God's mind is immutable, since his decree is eternal, it follows that no other world than this is possible or imaginary. (The Trinity, 1990, pgs. 135, 140, 142-143)

Again, while I do not endorse these arguments any more, the following found in The Atonement also shows that Clark came to accept necessitarianism: 

A. A. Hodge's repeated emphasis on justice, and his manner of doing so, almost immediately produces the impression that he is subordinating God to some superior law of justice, thus impugning God's sovereignty. This pinpoints the problem of absolute necessity.

Such an impression is supported by Hodge's later procedure. His early remarks on the governmental theory (58ff.) assert several times the intrinsic rightness of the moral law, an intrinsic rightness superior to the divine will: "He wills the precept because [italics his] it is intrinsically right." Hence there seems to be something superior to the will of God. But before quoting Calvin to the contrary, one may ask whether Hodge means only that God's will is subordinate to God's intellect, and that therefore there is no moral principle superior to God. Such a reply, however, entails a distinction between God's intellect and God's will, so that one "part" of God is subordinate to another part. Thus, combined with the separation of the divine attributes, raises difficulties with the simplicity of God's being. But we must proceed with the ultimacy of moral principles and the absolute necessity of one particular method of atonement.

No Calvinist claims that Calvin was infallible; but we all hold him in high regard, and we should not be ignorant of what he said on the subject. Beginning with the question of the necessity of the Atonement, Calvin asserts, "If an inquiry be made concerning the necessity of this, it was not indeed a simple, or, as we commonly say, an absolute necessity, but such as arose from the heavenly decree" (Institutes, II, xii, 1). Contrary to Anselm (Cur Deus Homo, I, 12), namely, "When it is said that what God wishes is just, and that what he does not wish is unjust, we must not understand that if God wished anything improper it would be just, simply because he wished it," Calvin writes,

How exceedingly presumptuous it is only to inquire into the causes of the divine will, which is in fact and is justly entitled to be, the cause of everything that exists... If you go further and ask why he so determined, you are in search of something greater and higher than the will of God, which can never be found (III, xxxiii, 2).

Then, further, "Here they recur to the distinction between will and permission, and insist that God permits the destruction of the impious, but does not will it. But what reason shall we assign for his permitting it, but because of his will?" (III, xxiii, 8). There is no mistaking Calvin's meaning. "The will of God is the highest rule of justice." A moral principle is "just for this very reason, because he wills it." Calvin and Hodge bluntly contradict one another; and if Calvin was a Calvinist, apparently Hodge was not...

One question previously raised was whether God could have sovereignly dispensed with justice. The two Hodges decide in favor of justice and reject sovereignty. Let the reader understand that this treatise maintains that Christ satisfied the justice of his Father. What the treatise aims to show is that the Hodges and others have formulated an incorrect disjunction between the two. Or, to anticipate, justice is itself based on sovereignty. This includes the idea that the atonement was absolutely necessary...

We may agree with the former that the decrees, including of course everything connected with the atonement, are “rational determinations.” By this phrase, I understand that the whole plan of history is teleological. Prior events prepare for later events. Judas’s betrayal prepared for the arrest and the crucifixion. But contrary to what Hodge says, this does not rule out “the doctrine of necessity.” While one must reject the idea that there is any development in God, there is indeed development in history. Nor is the word “mere” very clear, when Hodge says that God does not act by a mere necessity of nature. If the term nature is meant to indicate the physical universe - Mother Nature as some poets call it, and natura naturans as Spinoza said - of course we agree with Hodge’s statement. Furthermore, Hodge’s reference to Spinoza seems to support the idea that he is thinking of the universe. Spinoza was a pantheist who frequently used the phrase Deus sive Natura. But Hodge seems to me to have confused Mother Nature with the nature of God. The important question is whether God acts necessarily by his own nature. Could God have willed to save no one? Could God have willed Anthony should have been victorious, or that the Duc de Guise should have defeated Henry VI? If one says that the defeat of Anthony was necessitated and that God could not have willed otherwise, it does not follow - as Hodge seems to say it does - that God would have acted without design. Nor does the doctrine of necessity require that God's intellectual force be analogous to the instincts of irrational animals. At best Hodge has in his attack on Spinozism used language that can be applied to views that are not at all Spinozistic. And one of these views is the Christian doctrine of God and his decrees. 

One of the terms the Hodges use with confidence and satisfaction is freedom. God was free to create or not to create; God was free to save or not to save men; but if he freely chose to save any, he was necessitated to sacrifice Christ. In this he was not free. It is reasonable to suppose that this language somewhat reflects the discussions on the free will of man. At any rate, the idea of God's freedom should be clarified. Some types of freedom are obviously irrelevant to the present discussion: A man may be free from disease, free from prejudice, or free from his previous wife. Though these meanings are irrelevant, one notes that freedom is often - almost always - freedom from something. 

Spinoza is an exception, for his freedom is a freedom to. A grain of wheat is free to grow if it is planted in good soil rather than having fallen on a rock where a bird can pick it up. The bird is more free than a grain of wheat because, if this rock had no grain of wheat on it, the bird can fly and find food elsewhere. A man is more free than a bird because he can survive in many more circumstances, Thus, Spinoza says, freedom is not the ability to do either of two things in the same circumstance, but the ability to do the same thing in many circumstances.

Arminian and Romish freedom is the power of contrary choice. There is nothing - absolutely nothing  in any circumstance in heaven above, or earth beneath, or the waters under the earth - but especially in heaven above - that necessitates a given volition. The opposite choice is always as possible as the one chosen.

But what might divine freedom be? One thing is clear. There is no power, circumstance, or principle external to God that necessitates or even induces him to do anything. Of course, before the creation of the world there were no circumstances at all, though some philosopher might say that there were eternal principles external to him. But for the Christian there was nothing before he created something. But does this mean that God could have chosen no to create?

The confusion that permeates discussion on this subject arises from the rather natural impulse to understand the will of God as similar to the will of man, or, more accurately, similar to what many theologians think the will of man is. In particular, they picture God as earlier undecided, and later at a moment in time God makes a choice. The theologian may indeed recognize that there is no external motivation, but he still holds to the possibility that God could have willed otherwise.

This confusion is due to the fact that the authors often forget that God is immutable. Grotius seems to have argued that no one form of atonement is absolutely necessary. The law, he maintains, is a product of the divine will and not something inherent in his nature. Therefore God is free to enforce, to abrogate, or in any way to alter the laws. Grotius is not the only one who seems to assume that God’s will is free in the sense that he can change his mind at any time. Freedom, however, should be defined, and the implications of the definition should be stated. For example, human freedom may consist in the circumstance that one’s conduct is not determined by physicochemical law. From this definition, if accepted, it follows that the universe is not a mechanism. But, so far as this definition goes, human conduct can be necessitated by a divine teleological law. As for the freedom of God, he is surely free from control by any superior power, for there is no power superior to God. But as immutable by nature - see Grotius’s distinction between will and nature a few lines above - God’s will and action are unalterable.

Hodge - who rejects Grotius’s view of the atonement - is perhaps a little, but not much, better. God, he says, “wills the precept because it is intrinsically right.... There must be an absolute standard of righteousness.” Such a statement places a standard of justice outside of God. The standard is intrinsically right, hence independent of God’s sovereignty - indeed, sovereignty has been abandoned. Hodge, however, wants to avoid this implication, for unlike Grotius, Hodge immediately adds, “This absolute standard is the divine nature ... the divine intelligence.” This addition gives the impression of maintaining divine sovereignty as against any external power or principle. But it faces an equally difficult objection. It raises the question as to the difference between will and nature. What is nature? Do we not speak of the nature of God, the nature of God’s will, the nature of God’s intelligence? Nature is not a constituent of anything. It is simply the thing’s characteristics. God’s nature, like a dog’s nature, is such and such because such are the characteristics of the dog or of God. The nature is simply the way the dog or God acts. There is no nature that controls God’s will. As Isaac Watts once wrote, “Dogs delight to bark and bite, for ‘tis their nature to.”

In addition to examining the term nature, one must ask what is will? If we speak of the human will, we refer to a somewhat momentary act of choice. After having considered the relative desirability of this versus that line of action-or, what is the same thing, between an action and doing nothing-such as investing in AT&T or just leaving the money in the checking account-and having puzzled over it indecisively for a period of time-we come to a conclusion and make our choice: We decide and do it. Then when we start to study theology and to consider the will of God, we are apt to think, or subconsciously suppose, that God makes decisions. He willed to create, he willed - after some deliberation - to save some, and so on. Though we may not say so out loud, we suppose that God was puzzled: He could create or he could refuse to create; he could save or could refuse to save some; and if he decided to save some, he could use any means imaginable.

Now, although these choices are all of one nature, all subject to the same considerations, Hodge and others want to give the last question an answer different from their answer to the prior questions. This seems to me to be logically inconsistent, for if it relieves God of indecision on the last point, it pictures him as indecisive on the prior points and assigns to him a relatively momentary act of choice. This makes God a temporal creature - or if not a creature, at least a temporal being.

Such a view is utterly inconsistent with divine omniscience. The immutable God never learned anything and never changed his mind. He knew everything from eternity. This everything includes both the number of mosquitoes in Jackson Hole and the number of planets in the solar system. Underlying these two examples is the creation of a temporal universe. For time began with the creation of the first non-omniscient angel.

Without claiming infallibility, and certainly no omniscience, I believe the above to be substantially what the Bible implies...

Could anyone be bold enough to assert that there are some non creatures which might not be manifest in his sight? The following verses show that God’s knowledge neither increases nor diminishes because he is immutable and eternal...

From the immutability and omniscience of God, it follows necessarily that there is indeed no other possible method of salvation - not, however, for the reasons Hodge gives, but simply because of this immutability. In much of this discussion, the authors speak as if God on one occasion produced an act of will and on another occasion he made another voluntary act. The Westminster Standards, however, reproduce the Biblical position that God is immutable. Therefore, not only is the propitiatory method of atonement absolutely necessary, but also the number of mosquitoes in the world at any given instant. Every detail is a part of the all-comprehensive divine decree. God foreordains whatever comes to pass. Everything is necessary. This view exalts the sovereignty of God. This view exalts God...

This settles the question as to whether the method of the atonement is based on sovereignty or on justice, and the question whether God could have refused or neglected to save anybody. Not a chance. As previously asserted by the present writer, the sacrifice of Christ on the cross satisfied the justice of the Father. But now it should be clear that justice is one facet of sovereignty. There is no moral principle superior to God. I can say that there is no moral principle superior to the will of God. God’s will and God’s intellect are identical. Justice is what God thinks. To suppose that anything could have been otherwise is to suppose that God could have been otherwise than he is. The salvation of the elect is a part of the sovereign play by which the universe goes on. God had to create - not because there was some power external to him, but because he is God. A God who might not create, or would not have created, is simply not the Biblical God...

Some people argue that knowledge or foreknowledge does not necessitate anything. Even a man may know that an event will occur tomorrow, but this does not mean that he causes it to happen. Perhaps so. But if he does not cause it to happen, there must be some other cause which does; for unless it were certain, he could not know it. Now, then, since omniscience shows that all events are certain, it follows that if God does not cause them, there must be a cause external to and independent of God. In other words, God has ceased to be God...

William Cunningham, Professor of Church History at New College, Edinburgh, recounts an interesting attack on Dr. Chalmers by Sir William Hamilton. The latter denounced the former as a fatalist, a pantheist, and as being ignorant and suicidal in theology. His reason was that Chalmers taught the doctrine of philosophical necessity. Cunningham’s conclusion was that the Westminster Confession permits but does not teach philosophical necessity, that Chalmers not only was at liberty to accept that view, but that also his orthodoxy was impeccable. (The Atonement, 1996, pgs. 100-101, 125-136) 

Finally, in his 1981 Gordon-Conwell Lectures on "John Frame and Cornelius Van Til," he alludes to necessitarianism one more time. Here, Clark rejects (rightly) that God's intelligence is unconnected to His will but does not offer any pushback against the dichotomy as Frame frames it except to clarify his own understanding of divine "freedom" along the same lines as his above, general alignment with Spinoza:

This is Frame summarizing Van Til’s position. This is not a quotation from Van Til though I rather suppose from what I know that some of these phrases are Van Til’s words. But he’s put them together. This is what he says: “The necessity and freedom of God’s will are also paradoxically related. If God’s will is directed by His intelligence, then His free acts, creating the world for example, become necessary. God had to create. If, on the other hand God’s free acts are truly free, then it would seem that they must be unconnected with His intelligence and therefore random.”

...if you talk about freedom of God, I suppose what a person ought to mean is that there is nothing external to God that controls him. But that doesn’t seem to be what is meant here. Here, the idea that God’s will is independent of his intelligence. And this would make God schizophrenic. And I don’t think we want to say that.

... Frame falls into embarrassing language because after he talks about God’s freedom then he has to enforce it a little bit by saying “truly free.” Well, now that doesn’t add anything. That simply shows that the man is embarrassed. Now, I must make this statement with a little hesitation because I’m not quite sure of it. But so far as I know, the last philosopher who tried to keep God’s will and God’s intellect distinct was Descartes who lived in the seventeenth century. And this attempt on his part seems to have failed. And well, maybe some Arminians have tried to do it, I don’t know. But at any rate, I don’t know. That is the last attempt that I know to distinguish between God’s will and God’s intellect. So if you insist on a very unified personality you don’t have that duality.

I'm sure there are other relevant materials, but this should suffice to establish a baseline for development in Clark's thought over time on necessitarianism.