A Book Review from Books At a Glance
by Ryan M. McGraw
John L. Girardeau was one of the most lucid and penetrating theologians of nineteenth-century America. This large book on the question of what free will means, primarily as it respected Adam’s pre-fall state in the Garden of Eden, stretched his abilities to their limits, addressing some of the most complex and vexed questions, both in theology and philosophy. Chief among these questions are, did Adam have genuine ability to choose good or evil, and how did his free election of sin related to divine action, the divine decrees, and divine sovereignty? This massive book grew from a series of essays Girardeau wrote against Jonathan Edwards’ assertions that God was the only efficient cause of all things and that Adam sinned against God necessarily. Though Girardeau noted that his topic was admittedly “abstract” in its “fundamental principles,” it remained “profoundly awfully practical in its applications” (16). Fundamentally, he believed that Adam, in innocence, had the power of contrary choice between good and evil, that his fall into sin was not necessitated by his will following his intellect, and that Edwards’ reducing all efficient causation to God made God the author and efficient actor of sin. This challenging book from the pen of a profound thinker, though not for the faint of heart, helps shed light on issues related to divine sovereignty and human responsibility
Girardeau divides his work according to Augustine’s classic fourfold state of mankind. Most of his attention goes towards the states of innocence and sin without regeneration, occupying eight massive chapters in four hundred and nine pages, while mankind’s regenerate and glorified states take up only three chapters in seventy-four pages. The chapters are long and challenging, some of them having a disjointed feel to them. For instance, the third chapter purports to defend Girardeau’s teaching against charges of being anti-Calvin and anti-Reformed (123), but shifts abruptly to other accusations, such as reviving Arminianism (166). However, he answered this second charge by appealing to various Reformed confessions on the freedom of Adam in having contrary choice, either for good or evil. One reason for such abrupt shifts is that Girardeau retained the debate format of his original articles, exchanging arguments with a respondent to his original work.
Chapters one through three state the question of the freedom of the will, setting the parameters for Girardeau’s differences with those following Jonathan Edwards. By itself, the first chapter comprises eighty-nine pages, in which Girardeau argues that Adam’s will was a subordinate efficient cause under the divine will, and that, contra Edwards, Adam had the power of contrary choice between good and evil. Chapter two refutes perceived absurdities in Edwards’s form of determinism, and builds positive arguments for Girardeau’s position from Scripture. The third chapter is a lengthy appeal to John Calvin and the Reformed confessions to the end that Adam sinned by God leaving him to the freedom of his will, to the end that his fall into sin was not necessary. In his historical introduction, Richard Muller helps outline some of the issues at stake. He notes that Edwards followed John Locke on the “identification of will merely as the individual’s activity of willing spontaneously – indeed, of freely being determined to one thing” (xxx). He summarizes the issues well by saying that compatibilists teach “absence of coercion” as compatible with “prior determination” of the will to one effect. Yet libertarians deny compatibility with “any prior determination” of the will. However, Reformed orthodoxy and Girardeau taught the “absence of coercion” with self-determination, “with the ultimate divine determination of all things (xxxviii). Put differently, Edwards and Girardeau agreed that the will acted spontaneously without coercion, but differed on whether Adam had the freedom of deliberate election between good and evil. Edwards, believing that the will always followed the last judgment of the intellect, made every human action, including Adam’s first sin, necessary and unavoidable via the harmony of the intellect and will. Girardeau and Muller argue, almost the entire Reformed tradition, argued instead that the will was a distinct faculty from the intellect, and that it could determine itself to action immediately by appeal to “blind impulses” in the soul (e.g., 106). Satan appealing to these blind impulses, in Girardeau’s view, is precisely what led Eve to fall under temptation, since the habits of her intellect remained holy and good.
In chapter four, Girardeau continued to defend himself against charges of being “uncalvinistic” by noting that even supralapsarians universally admitted a distinction, before Edwards, between God’s effective and permissive decrees. Supra and infralapsarianism represented a debate over the objects of predestination. Did choose some and pass by others out of the pure unfallen mass of humanity, electing some and reprobating others, without respect to the need for redemption from sin in Christ (supralapsarianism)? Or did he choose some to salvation, passing by others, from the lump of sinful humanity (infralapsarianism; 196-197)? His point here was merely that, contra Edwards’s denial of permissive decrees in God, both supra and infralapsarians historically admitted that God did not effectively work in every divine decree, resulting in secondary causes like human willing being true rather than imagined efficient causes. Amidst this discussion, appealing to Calvin again, Girardeau sounded like Richard Muller’s later assertions that Calvin was not the fountainhead of a theological tradition, which Reformed confessions define instead (194). Whether Calvin is on one’s “side,” his works are not “exclusively the norm of Calvinism” (193). Girardeau added that A. A. Hodge made similar assertions (194). This important assertion predated the trend in twentieth-century Reformed theology to use Calvin as the benchmark of Reformed thought. For Girardeau’s purposes, he sought to pit the Edwardsian school against the Reformed tradition regarding the necessity of Adam’s sinning, effectively reversing the charges levelled against himself. Chapter five continues engaging Calvin’s ideas, and chapters six and seven expand the discussion into the nature of divine foreknowledge.
Capping off part one, chapter eight, summarizing the entirety of the four hundred preceding pages, gives readers an easier way into the lines of reasoning present throughout the book even than wading through each chapter in turn. Here Girardeau reduced his arguments to three main points. First, we must distinguish between deliberate election and spontaneity (401). Second, man’s will in innocence had “self-determining” power. Adam’s habitus (or disposition) of moral spontaneity was right, but all true theology grants that his will was mutable, and his will would have been confirmed if he passed the probation of the covenant of works. He fell by Satan soliciting his “blind impulses,” and thus his choice of sin was not necessary (402). Third, in his fallen state, man no longer has self-determining power to choose between holiness and sin. He now has a sinful spontaneity that chooses sin freely (403). He cannot exercise “deliberate election” towards holiness. Only the grace of redemption can restore his deliberation for good (403). Fallen man has deliberate election only between sins, but “self-determining power” in civil and externally moral actions, at least to some extent (404). Regarding religious things, he can only try to learn truths and examine evidences, including reading the Bible (405). He can attend church and ask God to help him, and he is responsible for neglecting such things. Yet the power of conversion does not belong to him (405). Girardeau concludes this chapter with a lengthy citation from John Owen’s work on the Holy Spirit (406-409), giving exhortations related to following duties that might lead to conversion. Adding a final statement from Charles Hodge, he concludes that human beings are guilty of their unbelief and that God’s condemning them for their sins is just (409). The design of all of the above is to negate the ideas that human willing always follows the judgment of the intellect, and that God is the efficient cause of Adam’s sin, making him the author of sin.
Part two, being drastically shorter than part one, includes three chapters, treating the effects of grace on the will in each stage of the application of redemption, how holy and sinful spontaneity of will in regenerate people affect their movement from God’s sufficient to his determining grace in pursuing holiness by using means, and seven aspects of the will in mankind’s glorified state in heaven. The final two pages of the third chapter of this section summarize the book’s entire argument succinctly from another angle. Human beings as created had holy spontaneity with deliberate election to good or evil. His will was mutable and undetermined by divine influence. By the fall, mankind lost this deliberate election between good and evil (484). Regeneration results in a “dual spontaneity of the will, having liberty of “deliberate election between holiness and sin (485). His holy will always chooses holiness and his sinful will always chooses sin, but his renewed will remains immutably bent towards good. At the last day, the Holy Spirit will perfectly determine the will to good in Christ, making “his whole perfected and glorified personality” indefectible in serving and enjoying God (485). In the end, Girardeau’s case rested on examining primarily Adam and Eve’s wills prior to the fall, arguing that they lost genuine liberty to do good or evil through sin. By contrast, if the freedom of the will consists only in the will following the judgment of the intellect (via Edwards) then human beings would have lost no freedom of will by virtue of falling into sin (e.g., 135). The condition of the will would be exactly the same, though the heart would be bent towards sin.
Girardeau has eventually persuaded this reviewer that his conception of the freedom of Adam’s sinless will is correct and that Edwards’s falls short of Reformed principles. At least two minor flaws in his argument are worth noting, however. First, it is questionable whether Girardeau asserted correctly that the “consensus of the church” was that Adam was able to stand (by his own power), but liable to fall (67). Notably, authors like Thomas Aquinas, and later John Owen and certainly Jonathan Edwards, believed that Adam needed to depend actively on the Holy Spirit to prevent his fall. While Girardeau dismissed this idea as implying some metaphysical defect in created human nature, the opposite was the case for such authors. Owen, particularly, reverse-engineered man’s original state by examining what it meant for Christ to be filled with and dependent on the Holy Spirit. He concluded that perfect humanity depends on the Creator at all times, and Adam’s true fault in the Garden was ceasing to depend on the Spirit of God to persevere in holiness. This alternative viewpoint does not so much imply imperfection in Adam as it leads readers to reconsider what perfection for humanity meant. At the least, this shows that the “consensus” that Girardeau sought was not as uniform as he suggested.
Second, more seriously, Girardeau followed the standard nineteenth-century redefinition of divine attributes, particularly divine simplicity. Mainstream Christian theology explained divine simplicity as the identity of God’s being and attributes. Put differently, while human beings necessarily distinguish and speak of divine attributes, they are not real distinctions in God himself. The only real distinctions in God are the real subsistent relations between the persons of the Trinity. By contrast, Girardeau argued that there is a real distinction between the divine essence and attributes(329), otherwise, there would be no analogy between our souls and God. Just as the human soul is one with distinct faculties and properties, so it must be with God. He followed here the standard nineteenth-century appeal to human “consciousness” as testifying to unity and diversity in a single soul (330). His concern was to argue that knowledge and power are not identical in God (333-335).
Defending classic views of divine simplicity requires more space than a review allows. However, two things are noteworthy. First, Girardeau approximates John Duns Scotus’ modification of divine simplicity, who also maintained a distinction of attributes in the unity of the divine essence. While this was a minority view in medieval theology, it seems to have become mainstream in post-Enlightenment Reformed thinking. It is at least important to detect this ideological shift, especially since simplicity is frequently challenged today. Second, this position rests on misconstruing the nature of analogical language about God. Univocal language meant that we use words in exactly the same way for God and humanity, while equivocal predication meant that such terms had nothing in common when used of God and us. Analogical language assumed that human beings reflect the being of God, resulting in a real analogy between them, while noting that God remains transcendent and in a category of his own. Analogical language means that human beings are like God, not that God is like human beings. Similarity exists without identity. As Richard St. Victor and the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 put it well, where there is likeness between humanity and God, there is always more unlikeness than likeness. While Girardeau argued from humanity upward towards God, most Christians have, more appropriately, reasoned from God downward to humanity. Moving from created effects to the divine cause, theologians then saw attributes as eminent in God, adding negations to indicate where humanity’s analogous reflection of God broke down. Reasoning only from humanity upward seems, unintentionally, to mimic Scotus as well by implying that human and divine attributes are univocal, to some extent, rather than merely analogical. Girardeau’s way of reasoning towards his conclusions thus reflects a deeper problem than his position on divine simplicity, threatening to limit our understanding of God by our conceptions of humanity.
Studying divine and human willing is difficult, partly because it engages some of the hardest questions both in philosophy and theology. Given the widespread influence of Edwards’ views on the freedom of human willing, mediated largely through modern authors and speakers like John Piper, Girardeau’s assessment deserves a hearing. He notes concerning Edwards that he was “spellbound by his genius, which wielded over us the wand of a wizard, we bowed in allegiance to his sceptre, then doubted its legitimacy, and then declined subjection to its sway” (121). This aptly describes my own journey on this subject. It sounds compelling that the will always follows the greatest inclination of the intellect. However, this results in the dilemma that, because Adam’s inclinations and intellect were only good, how could his will choose sin? As the Westminster Shorter Catechism 13 answers, “our first parents, being left to the freedom of their own will, fell from the estate wherein they were created, by sinning against God.” The will seems to have gotten out of joint with the intellect, Eve and then Adam satisfying their curiosity despite their better judgments (so 157). Whether readers agree with Girardeau against Edwards in the end, avoiding a one-sided conversation is always fruitful. Girardeau’s views bolster Richard Muller’s persistent contentions that Edwards on the will marked a “parting of the ways” with earlier Reformed teaching. This book is likely the most robust Reformed response to Edwards existent, and it will likely challenge many assumptions in modern Reformed readers.
Ryan McGraw
Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary
Buy the books
THE WILL IN ITS THEOLOGICAL RELATIONS, by John L. Girardeau