The discussion so far can be found here:

My initial article was Randal Rauser’s Mistake: A Defense of Calvin’s Doctrine of Election

Rauser’s response: Calvinism and the Arbitrary Camp Director Revisited: A Response to Andrew

Before I begin, I should point out that I have been on the Kapiti coast for the last week at a TSCF (Tertiary Student Christian Fellowship, a cousin of Inter-Varsity) retreat where I was without internet. Hence it’s only in the last day that I’ve learned that Professor Rauser has kindly taken the time to respond to my initial article. So I apologize for my delayed response.

I would also like to point out that while my intention was to provoke Rauser’s response, it was not to be rude, and I apologize if that’s the impression he has received. I have a great deal of respect for Rauser, particularly given (as I pointed out in my last article) that he is a Professor of Historical Theology with an obvious background in analytic philosophy, while I am a mere undergrad with far more ambition than actual ability. The last thing that I want is for this discussion to devolve into the kind of vitriol that plagues almost all other web based discussions of the philosophy of religion and/or theology. I say this, largely because I fear (from the tone of his response) that he has received the impression of ill intent on my part.

Secondly, I appreciate that Rauser took the time to respond to my article, and I appreciate that he also took the time to counter my personal testimony with that of his own.

But now to specifics: How does Rauser respond to my claim that the arbitrariness objection (at least if it is to be an objection) begs the question against Calvin’s doctrine of election? On the face of it, he doesn’t seem to challenge my point that God may not be acting unjustly if we are undeserving of salvation. To the contrary, Rauser seems to admit for the possibility that the tortures may be justly deserved. But if that’s the case, then, as I tried to point out in my first post, there’s no real injustice or immoral state of affairs that obtains if God so desires to instantiate those punishments. Paradoxically though, Rauser refers to my theology as “brutal” and “morally incoherent”. Both of these terms, emotionally provocative as they are, seem to suggest that there is something nasty, horrible, evil (whatever negative adjective your heart desires) about a God that selects some for salvation while selecting others for damnation. But if, as Rauser seems to allow, the tortures are justly deserved, then none of those adjectives can rightly be said to stick. After all, if the tortures are justly deserved, and God decides to carry out those tortures, then God can only be said to be doing what the demands of morality and/or justice require. So wherein does the moral incoherence obtain?

But according to Rauser, I would still be missing the point. After all, he (Rauser) says, the Camp Director Analogy was not intended to show that God, given Calvinism, is “unjust”, but rather that He cannot be seen as “maximally loving”. I see no real reason to deny Rauser the liberty to make this distinction, but its relevance is, at best, unclear.

Thankfully, Rauser does seem to hint at one possible way in which we could interpret this as an objection. He seems to engage in something of a pair-wise comparison between two possible scenarios that are supposed to be relevantly similar to the Arminian and Calvinist conceptions of election respectively.

• Scenario 1: The director arbitrarily selects some children for beatings and others for loving rehabilitation.
• Scenario 2: The director selects all children for loving rehabilitation.

According to Rauser, were God to bring about scenario 2, we would state that He is more loving were he to bring about scenario 1. There are three things that I have to say to this:

1. Even if I were to grant this assumption (which I don’t), the most it establishes is that the God who brings about scenario 1 is less loving than the God who brings about scenario 2. But notice that this is not equivalent to saying that God is “objectively unloving” in the sense that we are able to predicate of God (in that situation) terms like “cruel” and “brutal” et al. To get to the conclusion that God is “objectively unloving” which (given the words he has elected to use to describe my theology) is evidently his goal, Rauser would need to show that anything less than complete love for all creatures is tantamount to cruelty. Given what I have hitherto argued regarding the fact that God’s arbitrary choice may not necessarily be unjust or immoral if Calvinism is true, and given that he (Rauser) seems to allow for this possibility, I don’t see how he can plausibly do that.
2. Once again, it seems as if Rauser pre-supposes the falsity of Calvinism to infer to its falsity. The only way that I can see Rauser’s conclusion (that were God to bring about scenario 2 He would be more loving than were he to bring about scenario 1) would have a shot at truth, is if we assume that the “L” of the acrostic TULIP is false. If the scope of God’s love extends only to His elect, while the rest are totally depraved to the extent of total opposition to God, (the T of the acrostic TULIP), then for Him (God) to leave the elect to suffer the pestilence of the others, is cruelty on His part. Consider by way of illustrative analogy, a father who allows his small child to suffer continuous beatings from school bullies. For the father to fail to remove the child from that situation is for that father to shirk his responsibilities as a father, and to be downright cruel. Now note, I’m not saying that the God of Arminianism is crueller than the God of Calvinism (though that is an interesting idea), I am merely trying to show that the God of Calvinism is at least as loving as the God of Arminianism (a comparatively small task). To sum up then, to establish that scenario 1 makes God more loving than does scenario 2, Rauser has to smuggle in the assumption that the T of the acrostic TULIP is false. So unfortunately, it’s another case of question begging on Rauser’s part.
3. The final problem for Rauser consists in the fact that much of what he says entails Universalism. If God brings about scenario 2 AND God loves his children in the way that Rauser loves his daughter, then we are left, not with Classical Arminianism, but with Karl Barth’s Universalism. After all, it should be intuitively obvious that a good father will forcibly pull a child out of harm’s way, particularly if that harm is akin to the fire of hell. Suppose, for instance, that a child is sitting in the way of a stampede of elephants. A good father does not sit idly by, watching from the sidelines and protest that the child must freely get up and run. Rather, a good father sprints into the middle and hauls the child out of the way. This kind of causal sufficiency for salvation in conjunction with God’s salvific love for all humans entails Universal Redemption.

It’s not too late Rauser, you need not think of God as a bad father who stands idly on the sidelines while hell bears down on His children. To sinners like you and I, Calvin’s message of Irresistible Grace and the Perseverance of the Saints ought to be a great comfort. It means that Salvation is a guarantee, and that we needn’t rest on our own failing ability to trust in the Lord. In truth though, returning would be merely speeding up the inevitable. As my Pastor puts it, it’s determined that you will be a Calvinist even if it’s not in this life.

Thanks go to Matthew Flannagan for pointing me in the direction of this response to the problem.

A while back Professor Randal Rauser issued a blog entitled “Calvinism and the Arbitrary Camp Director” in which he criticised the Calvinist understanding of election.

For those of you who are unaware of the Calvinistic understanding of election, very roughly, it’s the idea is that God elected some for salvation and did not elect others for salvation. Now obviously there’s FAR more to Calvin’s doctrine of election than merely the claim that some are elected and others are not. But that at least, is the centre point of Rauser’s criticism, and more particularly, it’s that element of Calvin’s doctrine that I seek to defend in this article.

Before we begin, it’s interesting to note that barely three months ago I was a staunch Arminian when it came to soteriology. I reacted against Calvin’s doctrine with the greatest of revulsion. How could it possibly be, I thought, that God could be “good” and yet actively choose some for salvation while leaving others to die?! It made no sense to me! In-fact, I remember going to scripture one Sunday morning actively seeking to find that knock down scriptural blow against the Reformed understanding of election. Interestingly, the first scripture I read was the parable of the wheat and the tares Matthew 13:24-29/13:36-43. While I read it, it struck me that this challenged my Arminian understanding of Salvation. But I didn’t want to believe it, so I left it for a week hoping that there would be some other explanation. But none was forthcoming. Very quickly I found myself speaking in terms that a week earlier I would never have been revolted to hear myself say. I was not yet a practicing Calvinist. I was what you might call “soteriologically agnostic”.

Now the reason I say this is not because I hope to establish myself as any authority on the matter. To the contrary, Rauser, being a Professor of Historical Theology at Taylor Seminary is far more of an authority on the matter than I can hope to be at this stage of my life. So it’s with much fear and trepidation that I dare post this article contradicting Rauser’s arguments. So why do I give my testimony of how I came to Calvinism? Well I myself am a little unsure. Nevertheless, I suspect that the main reason I give such testimony is that I find it and irony worth sharing that I am writing an article that barely three months ago I would never have even dreamed of writing. If I was going to write anything, it would have been about how Calvinism completely destroys any sensible understanding of God’s justice and love.

But now let’s get down to business. Precisely what is Rauser’s objection? More than anything else, it appears to be a moral objection. The problem, Rauser urges, is that it makes God’s choice about who save entirely arbitrary. Why, he asks (referring to one of his dialectic opponents apparently named Tom) should God bring glory to him (Tom) and not another say Saddam Hussein? This picture, Rauser asserts, completely undermines the idea that God is loving. In order help us to see this point. Rauser entreats us to consider the following illustrative analogy:

“Imagine that there is a camp for troubled youth. The camp director has a rather unorthodox method of dealing with the campers. Some of them are beaten severely with whips in a wholly punitive or retributive (i.e. not restorative) manner while others are chosen by the director to receive care, love and nurture in a way that restores them.

You are contemplating sending your child to the camp but you want your child to be lovingly restored, not viciously beaten, even if the beatings are just. So you enquire: what is it that makes the director decide to beat the children rather than nurture them? Is it the nature of their crimes? Their race? Gender? What?

The answer comes back. There is absolutely nothing that differentiates the two groups. The bottom line is that for some inexplicable reason the director arbitrarily selects some children to be beaten and others to be nurtured.

Now imagine that somebody came up to you with a positive testimonial. “The director loved our child! He nurtured her. She’s much better now. He is very loving to those he chooses.” Wouldn’t you want to scream back “But what about the children he opts to beat? How can you call that loving? How can you focus only on those he nurtures and completely ignore those he beats? Doesn’t it bother you that his choice to nurture your child was wholly arbitrary?”

What Rauser neglects to include in his analogy, and truthfully it’s essential, is that humans do not deserve salvation. The Calvinist maintains that (in virtue of our Total Depravity) morality and/or justice does not impose on God a duty to save us from death. As such, if God is to save us, it is totally unmerited in all senses of the word. It goes, as it were, beyond the call of duty, and is as such, “supererogatory”. That is to say, it might be a nice deed for God to perform, but there is no obligation/duty on Him to do so. If it’s the case that any salvific work that God does is “supererogatory” in this sense, then it cannot be said that there’s any injustice associated with picking some and leaving others. Suppose by way of illustration, that some person S has many brothers. Suppose furthermore, that S (out of the goodness of his heart) decides to gift some money to but one of his brothers. Since S was under no obligation to give ANY of his brothers (let alone the one he actually gave it to) any money at all, there’s no injustice or objective unfairness in S benefiting one brother and not benefiting others. None of S’s brothers had done anything that placed a duty on S to provide his brothers with money, and nor was there anything about S’ brothers which meant that they were intrinsically deserving of the money. In a similar way, the Calvinist holds that because of our sinful nature, there is nothing about us or the way we act which means that we deserve salvation. Hence God has no duty whatsoever to save us. That God has no such duty entails that there is no injustice associated with God saving some and not others.

It is the fact that we don’t deserve salvation that Rauser unfortunately fails to include in his analogy. I have no doubt that he attempted to include this in the analogy (the fact that the children are referred to as “troubled” is indication enough), nevertheless it strikes me that what does most of the work in producing the intuition that the camp director’s actions were unjust, is not so much the fact that his actions were “arbitrary”, so much as that the children were not deserving of such treatment. As much as Rauser attempts to include in his analogy the un-deservingness of the children, he does not succeed. Troubled children, we perceive, are never so troubled and don’t commit crimes so horrific as to deserve the treatment they receive at the hands of the camp director in Rauser’s illustration. To the contrary, we are inclined to think that the children deserve better treatment. In Rauser’s analogy then, there is a duty on the camp director to treat the children in a more appropriate manner. It’s this that the injustice of Rauser’s analogy consists in. Not, as he asserts, the mere arbitrariness of the camp directors choice.

By failing to incorporate this aspect into his analogy, Rauser assumes what the Calvinist about election already denies, namely that we are deserving of salvation, and that God has a corresponding duty to save us. So in an important sense, Rauser assumes the falsity of Calvinism in an attempt to show its falsity. To put a long story short, he begs the question against Calvinism.

I am given to understand that Randal Rauser is a prolific blogger, and I sincerely hope for his response.

Back in 2009 I wrote “Abraham and Isaac – Did God Command the Killing of an Innocent?” This post addressed a dilemma several philosophers have raised for those Christians who take the patriarchal narratives in Genesis in literal manner. It seems plausible that Christians who do this are committed to an inconsistent triad,

1. If God commands an action x then x is morally required;
2. It is wrong to kill innocent human beings;
3. God commanded Abraham to kill an innocent human being.

These three propositions are inconsistent; 1 and 3 entail the denial of 2.

To respond to this triad, I appropriated a thought experiment provided by John Hare; I wrote:

One example Hare notes, is particularly interesting, “Perhaps (to get more bizarre) God could have willed that we kill each other at the age of 18, at which point God would bring us immediately back to life.” Hare asks us to imagine a world, in which, when people of a certain age are killed they immediately come back to life. He opines, quite plausibly, that if this were to be the case then killing people at this age would not be wrong or at least, not seriously wrong. One of the reasons that killing people is wrong in the world we live in is because people stay dead. If they were only unconscious for a split second and came back to life in full health then arguably killing a person would not be the serious wrong we believe it is.

I suggested that, a careful examination of the text reveals that Abraham’s actions occurred in a context where he knew his son would not stay dead but would come down the mountain with him and live on to adulthood to father children of his own. I argued this fact resolves the dilemma,

Once this is realised, I think it is evident that [1], [2] and [3] are consistent. If one assumes, for the sake of argument, that the Patriarchal Narratives are literally true then it follows that [3] is true only if a certain context is assumed. God commanded Abraham to kill his son in the highly unusual context where Abraham knew that his son would not stay dead but would come down the mountain afterwards and live on to adulthood to father children of his own. Proposition [2] is defensible only in a context where people do not know these sorts of things; the rule to not kill the innocent applies to a world where people do not come back to life after they have been killed. Hence, the story of Abraham and Isaac, if taken literally, does not entail that God commanded something immoral or contradictory.

What I later discovered is that Paul Copan sometimes reads this blog and he, on reading my post, summarised my argument and appropriated it (with acknowledgements)  in chapter 5 of his latest book Is God a Moral Monster: Making Sense of the Old Testament God.

Enter Randal Rauser. In the paper he presented for the SBL panel, Rauser made a remark on the Abraham and Isaac issue. Copan responded by summarising his argument, which was an appropriation of my argument. Rauser responded with an analogy, which he has since put up on his blog:

“Yeah, what if?” I thought cynically. But that was my inside voice. With my outside (audible) voice I replied: “So what if a virgin child could be raped and then miraculously made a virgin once again? Would the rape of the child still be evil?” That didn’t go over well, I think. But I don’t see the difference.”

Here was my point. Let’s grant, for the sake of argument, that God demanded the killing of a child and then immediately resurrected that child. Would that make it all better? Well there would still be that little matter that the child was killed by dad… “Dad, it’s good to be alive again and all, but you did decapitate me, and that kinda stinks, you know?” (Talk about an awkward moment at the Thanksgiving dinner table.)

And likewise a child that was devotionally raped and then had their virginity miraculously restored (physiologically and psychologically) could still say, “Dad, it’s great to be a virgin again and all, but you did rape me, and that kinda stinks, you know?”

My recollection is that Rauser’s comment did go down well initially. It was after a few exchanges that the audience became less enthusiastic. But putting audience reactions aside, does this response work?

As I noted in my response to Rauser on the night, I do not think it does. That is because I think there is a difference between killing someone and their being immediately restored to life and raping someone and their virginity being immediately restored. It is this: what makes rape wrong is not that it takes away a person’s virginity, the act is still a grave moral evil if a non-virgin is raped. What makes rape wrong is some other feature of the act. Killing is different. It is quite plausible to say that one of the major things that makes killing wrong is that when you kill someone you deprive them of their life. In fact, several of the most prominent analyses of the morality of killing in the literature make this point.

Michael Tooley and Peter Singer, for example, argue that killing is wrong because it frustrates a being’s desire to continue in existence. If a person is killed and yet continued in existence then this wrong-making property would not be instantiated and so, on this analysis, killing would not be wrong. Similarly, Don Marquis argues that what makes killing wrong is that it deprives a victim of a future of value, a future the victim would have experienced had they not been killed. David Boonin argues that what makes killing wrong is that it frustrates a being’s ideal desires to continue living. Some Kantian views assume this too; the reason killing is considered disrespectful or demeaning on their view is because it shows a desire to destroy the person, to deprive them of all the goods of their future and so forth. I am not endorsing any of these theories, I am simply pointing out that it is plausible to say that, whatever it is that makes killing wrong, is tied up with the fact that killing ends a life.

This fact makes all the difference because when you kill someone who immediately comes back to life, the property central to making killing wrong has been removed from the act – the person is not dead. When someone is raped and their virginity is restored the property that makes rape wrong is still there. This is why I think Rauser’s example does not work and this is what I said to him at the SBL panel; when a person is raped and their virginity is restored, they have still been subjected to a horrific wrong, the wrong of being raped. But when a person has been killed and their life has been restored, they have not been subjected to a great wrong — yes they have for a split second been killed but the act occurs in a context where the properties which make killing a great wrong were not present. So I think Rauser’s critique of Copan and myself on this issue fails.

There are numerous other issues here that I could go into such as the fact that raping a person and restoring their virginity is logically impossible in a way it is not with killing. Also, the fact that God intervened to prevent Abraham killing Isaac and so on but here I simply wanted to address the main difference between us.

The SBL Annual Meeting is the largest gathering of biblical scholars in the world. Each meeting:

• showcases the latest in biblical research,
• fosters collegial contacts,
• advances research, and
• focuses on issues of the profession.

At this meeting, scholars benefit from sessions on religion, philosophy, ethics, and diverse religious traditions.

You can register here.

If you would like to donate to help Matt get to America to speak at the SBL Annual Meeting please visit our support page.