SolaScriptura
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- Jul 20, 2021
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I am not trying to drag you back into the conversation.
Knowledge for anyone who is intereseted.....
Consider now the term permits. This is the preferred term in Arminian theology, in which it amounts to a denial that God causes sin. For the Arminian, God does not cause sin; he only permits it. Reformed theologians have also used the term, but they have insisted that God’s permission of sin is no less efficacious than his ordination of good. Calvin denies that there is any “mere permission” in God:
From this it is easy to conclude how foolish and frail is the support of divine justice afforded by the suggestion that evils come to be not by [God’s] will, but merely by his permission. Of course, so far as they are evils, which men perpetrate with their evil mind, as I shall show in greater detail shortly, I admit that they are not pleasing to God. But it is a quite frivolous refuge to say that God otiosely permits them, when Scripture shows Him not only willing but the author of them.34
God’s permission is an efficacious permission. Heppe describes it as voluntas efficaciter permittens and quotes J. H. Heidegger:
Nor whether He is willing or refusing is God’s permission like man’s permission, which admits of an eclipse which he neither wills nor refuses, as the Lombard and with him the Scholastics assert. It is effective, mighty, and not separate from God’s will at all. Otiose permission of sin separated from God’s will is repugnant both to the nature of the First Cause and to the divine and almighty foresight, to His nature and to Scripture.35
If God’s permission is efficacious, how does it differ from other exercises of his will? Evidently, the Reformed use permit mainly as a more delicate term than cause, suggesting that God brings sin about with a kind of reluctance born of his holy hatred of it.
This usage does reflect a biblical pattern. When Satan acts, he acts, in an obvious sense, by God’s permission.36 God allows him to take Job’s family, wealth, and health. But God will not allow Satan to take Job’s life (Job 2:6). So Satan is on a leash, acting only within limits set by God. In this respect, all sinful acts are similar. The sinner can go only so far before he meets the judgment of God.
It is appropriate, therefore, to use permission to refer to God’s ordination of sin. But we should not assume, as Arminians do, that divine permission is anything less than sovereign ordination. What God permits or allows to happen will happen. God could easily have prevented Satan’s attack on Job if he had intended to. That he did not prevent that attack implies that he intended it to happen. Permission, then, is a form of ordination, a form of causation.37 The fact that it is sometimes taken otherwise is a good argument for not using it, but perhaps not a decisive argument.
Because so called Reformed theology redefines the meaning of words to suit the theological system, like making FOREKNOW equivalent to FOREODAIN!