I still intend to give a fuller treatment of necessitarianism to which I have alluded in a couple other posts (link, link). But after recently finding another piece by Gordon Clark that had not yet been made available online (link), I am prompted to briefly mention two points on the subject:
Firstly, I believe the proposed timeline I constructed as to when Clark changed his mind on the issue of necessitarianism has been strengthened. I wrote:
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...
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.
For if one reads Clark's reply to Daane (whose thoughts, by the way, I am not intending to defend; while researching material on Clark, I stumbled across what I can only charitably describe as a haphazard, unhelpful "review" that Daane wrote against Clark's book on predestination), Clark appears to deny that divine freedom implies contingent truths. Leaving aside Daane's views in his book, note Clark's own position that he defends in the following quotes from his own 1977 book review of Daane:
Though it may at first be difficult to see what Daane meant by freedom, it soon becomes clear that he does not mean freedom from external control. No doubt God is free from external control, but for Daane this is by no means sufficient for the doctrine of God.
What is worse, or at least what is more obviously unscriptural, Daane argues: "In his freedom God decreed. As an unnecessary decree, as a decree that bears the pedigree of the historical, it might not have been" (p. 77). This means, does it not, that the truth, "Judas betrayed Christ," might never have become true? And though Christ was slain from the foundation of the world, historically Jesus might not have been crucified...
One must face the question, being the kind of God he is, could God have decided against Christ's being crucified before the foundation of the world? Presumably Daane says yes. But then Daane's God is not really the God whom the Bible presents. Omniscience makes Daane's God impossible.
On page 162 we read, "God's creation of the world as his free act is not contrary to rationality, but something other than his rationality requires." On the following page he continues: "Either alternative would accord with his nature." But this statement is something neither Daane nor anyone else can possibly know. Admittedly it seems very plausible to most people that God's nature does not require ten planets in the solar system rather than only six. So far as omnipotence is concerned God could have made this system with any number of planets. But though this is so plausible when omnipotence along is considered, the situation is different when we take omniscience into account. Since there is much that is not revealed in Scripture, our ignorance is such that we cannot know that "either alternative accords with his nature." Therefore, unless Daane can support his premise, there is no reason to accept his conclusion.
Clark intimates that because Christ was [decreed to be] slain from the foundation of the world, the eternal decree itself was or is necessitated (which does not follow). Clark then appeals to God's omniscience several times to support his view, as if Daane is on shaky ground for believing God's eternal decree is not necessitated - by anything external, of course, but also not by anything internal to God.
For whatever else Daane may have written, I believe he is well supported by Reformed tradition for implicitly distinguishing between God's necessary/natural knowledge and God's free/decretal knowledge. Read, for example, Richard Muller's Post Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. III, pg. 412ff. It is Clark who needs to elaborate on why he thinks omniscience precludes divine "free knowledge." He may do so in other place, but he did not do so in this article.
The second point I want to mention in this post is about the very motivation for eternal omniscience on a necessitarian view - or rather, the lack thereof. To do that, I will first quote a recent argument I made against necessitarianism:
Consider what it would mean for God and creation to be ontologically distinct yet for the latter to be necessitated by the former. This would be analogous to a particular understanding of the doctrine of eternal generation - which, even if untrue, highlights the point. If the Father necessarily generates the Son, the Father and Son would be mutually dependent upon one another. Obviously, the Son would depend upon the Father, being necessitated by Him. In turn, however, the Father could be who He is ("Father") without a Son.
So, too, a necessitated creation would mean that the Creator and creature are mutually dependent such that God cannot be who He is ("Creator") without a creation. If necessitarianism is true, then God not only needs to create to be Creator, He needs to be Creator. Creation is no longer contingent, so God as Creator isn't a contingent predicate either. Indeed, it's essential or necessary that He be Creator. There is, then, a real dependence on creation in order for one to be able to refer to God as what He essentially and necessarily must be - Creator.
The point needn't be that the Father-Son relationship is exactly the same as the Creator-creature relationship. One could maintain (as I did and do) that the Father and Son are of the same nature, whereas God and creation are not. In both cases, however, necessitation entails mutual dependency, and this is what changed my mind.
[Side note: on a theistic-contingentarian position, God is still the Creator, but such is not essential to who He is. There is no mutual dependency, guarding divine sufficiency. On theistic-necessitarianism, on the other hand, there is no apparent reason why being "Creator" would be any less integral to the essence of God than any commonly regarded divine attribute. Indeed, perhaps this line of reasoning begins to show that Karofsky's reductive monism does follow from necessitarianism (and, hence, why Christians must disagree with Karofsky).]
In short, for a Christian, theistic-necessitarianism is caught on the horns of a dilemma: 1) a pantheistic concession (such as a theistic-Karofskyan necessitarian would make) would salvage the doctrine of divine sufficiency at the expense of the Creator-creature distinction; 2) on the other hand, a concession that there is a mutual dependency between an ontologically distinct Creator and creation would salvage the doctrine of the Creator-creature distinction at the expense of divine sufficiency.
In bold is one argument I would present against Clark's necessitarianism. Now, further notice that because necessitarianism precludes divine sufficiency, there is less motivation to believe God is eternally omniscient.
What I mean by that is this: one reason I reject libertarian accounts of free will would be that I think such accounts preclude divine sufficiency, for God['s knowledge] would then be contingent on His creation. In fact, this was instrumental to my personal attraction to Reformed theology. To protect divine sufficiency, I would argue God's knowledge must be eternal and not contingent on anything external to His own nature and will (i.e. what I call "eternal omniscience" for shorthand).
But if divine sufficiency is denied (as a necessitarian must do to remain relatively consistent), then that is one less reason to believe eternal omniscience. Clark may argue for eternal omniscience on other bases, but significant portions of his book Predestination would have to be revised, such as:
In contrast with Calvinism the Arminian theory of the will may be called the theory of contingency. Or it may be described as the liberty of indifference: That is to say, no motives determine the will. It can choose the weaker motive over the stronger, or, what is more to the point, it can choose without any motive at all. This ability is frequently called the power of contrary choice. Given a set of antecedents, not only external but also internal, the will’s decision could have been the reverse of what it was. A contingent event is one which may or may not happen. It is devoid of certainty, and therefore cannot be foreknown or predicted. Thus the doctrine of free will is a denial of omniscience. (Predestination, Appendix on "Predestination in the Old Testament")
If necessitarianism allows that God necessarily depends on there being a creation to Himself be [Creator], then God is not divinely sufficient, and Clark's above argument is itself insufficient against Arminianism on this point. And while Clark does, in other parts of the book, certainly supports "eternal omniscience" exegetically, if we stop and think about it, rather than it being the case that the traditional Reformed view on divine free knowledge undermines "eternal omniscience," Clark's view undermines it.
For if God depends on creation to be [Creator], there can be no a priori reason for supposing it is wrong that God's knowledge also depends on creation. Indeed, it would seem that on necessitarianism, God's knowledge "I am Creator" does depend on creation. Thus, it doesn't appear that theistic necessitarianism can be consistent with eternal omniscience. On theistic necessitarianism, divine eternity and divine sufficiency are undermined.
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