Is God Actually “ For Us”? A “Chalcedonian” Note on Divine Freedom in Response to Steven J. Duby

Introduction

In recent years, Steven Duby has done a tremendous service to the nascent rehabilitation of classical Trinitarianism with its attendant assumptions concerning divine simplicity and aseity. ¹ Recently, he has augmented this with a formidably documented and detailed exposition of an unapologetically Chalcedonian Christology. ² This project is driven ultimately by a deeply biblical conviction that the transcendence of God is, in fact, the proper basis of Christian confidence in God's fidelity toward his creation, rather than something that is always threatening to undermine it. In his words, “God's aseity and transcendence are good news for us creatures.” ³

In seeking to uphold a doctrine of divine aseity, a repeated refrain throughout Duby's work is the inference that since “God enjoys fullness of life in himself,” he is “complete without reference to another.” In other words, “His being neither entails nor precludes the existence of the world.” ⁴ Any doctrine of aseity worth its salt surely has to state as much, and Duby has consistently sought to defend it through detailed exegesis of Scripture and a remarkable facility with the theological tradition.

At the same time, it is a claim that at least prima facie, sits in tension with the indelibility of what God has in fact done, which is to create and redeem a world extra se. This indelibility is most starkly apparent in the adverbial inseparabiliter, ἀχωρίστως, or “inseparability” of the hypostatic union, as Chalcedon has it. Irrespective of a temporal “before” and “after” to the Son's assumption of human flesh, it is equally true that from the eternally present vantage point of the Triune life, there never is, never will be, and, indeed, there never has been a “divine” “Son” existing “apart from” the hypostatic union of the two natures. ⁵ Duby is, of course, content to affirm as much. ⁶ Whatever else may be said about Karl Barth's famous equivocation over a so-called λόγος ἄσαρκος, or Logos in abstracto, there is no question of a Logos who is ever other than eternally incarnandus. This statement is as orthodox as the claim that God is the “eternal creator.” It need not entail a suggestion that the Son's person or divinity is somehow constituted, changed, or affected by the incarnation in any way. Nor does it necessarily threaten the logic of the so-called “extra calvinisticum,” or the principle that “finitum non capax infiniti.” But as important as those caveats may be, they do not subtract from what is also no less emphatically true: in the Son, the God who is eternally self-sufficient, independent, and immutable, has nonetheless eternally determined never to exist without us.

Duby is fully aware of the tension this presents and deeply appreciates the extent to which Barth himself felt the weight of it before him, even if he takes an emphatically different approach to its resolution. ⁷ To my mind, he has persuasive reasons for taking a different path, and here I will leave Barth's own way of navigating this tension, and the vigorous debate it has generated, to one side.

Rather, without seeking to question or diminish the scope of what Duby has managed to achieve, in this article I wish to raise a question about the way he characteristically conceives of the divine actus purus and freedom with respect to God's eternal decrees. The question concerns his claim that God's determination for one decretive “tendency” toward creation over another is not an ingredient of his pure actuality. It is a claim that appears to stem from a dilemma that, I suggest, might be resolved through a distinctively “Scotist,” synchronic “instants of nature” framework for conceptualizing the divine decrees. This framework clearly informs the way several of Duby's Early Modern Reformed interlocutors approached the matter of creaturely contingency. In labelling it “Scotist,” I do not intend to claim definitively that the framework is unique to John Duns Scotus, or that it is incompatible with, say, a more consciously “Thomist” account of God's knowledge and decrees. This is a contested question among intellectual historians, a debate I will not enter here. However, in dialogue with a number of Duby's Reformed sources, I will draw attention to this framework as a potential resolution to the tension I have raised. Such refinement is offered as a way of seeking to uphold the simplicity and aseity of God's essence, while at the same time maintaining that the future existence of creation is indefectibly determined by the same immutable essence. I will begin by attempting to summarize Duby's account of this relationship and let my question and resolution unfold in due course.

Duby, Divine Freedom, and Some Reformed Conversation Partners

As a function of the aseity and immutable simplicity of the divine nature, Duby shares with his Reformed forebears a fundamental conviction that the divine decrees are inseparable from God's essence, and consequently, entail no actualization of any unrealized potential, nor any physical or diachronic succession within that nature. ⁸ In that way, the decrees themselves, the act of decreeing, and the eternal counsel concerning all things as they are ordained to their ultimate ends, while distinguishable by us, are indistinguishably one with that essence. ⁹ Indeed, the very notion of a “divine decree” is really an anthropopathism. As the Reformed encyclopedist Johann Alsted explains, “God properly does not ‘decide.’ For someone who ‘decides’ at the same time ‘syllogizes.’ But God does not know anything through syllogism.” ¹⁰ In this respect, while the decrees concern contingent things—“creatures” ad extra—in themselves they are indistinguishable from the “immanent” and “essential” acts of God which “remain where they originate.” The actual “execution” of the decrees is, by contrast, a “transitive” act of God that occurs outside himself in the thing that is created. ¹¹

From this axiomatic observation, Duby will keenly insist that the decrees do not “add” anything new to God's essence, as if they represent some composition or movement from potency to act. In his words, this would imply a “diversity of parts in God by virtue of which passive potency and actuality could both be resident in God and […] some primordial idleness on God's part that is at odds with the doctrine of the Trinity.” ¹²

Alsted makes precisely this point too. In his Methodus, he writes, “Relations add nothing to the foundations. Therefore, the actions of God also add nothing to God.” If there is anything “new” that results from what is decreed by God, it is simply a “respect,” he says, or a relationship to something that arises externally (obiective) to God, not within (subiective). ¹³ Alsted is hinting at what Francis Turretin calls a “real” relation between the creator and the creature “as posited,” which “although it adds nothing new to God [...] describes an extrinsic habitude towards the creature.” ¹⁴ As Duby is aware, this “respect” or relation is synonymous with what is sometimes called the “tendency” of the divine decrees to this or that created object. Petrus van Mastricht defines the tendency of the decree as God's “relation to an object to be procured in time without any change in God or perfection of essence.” ¹⁵ It is necessary that a divine decree will result in a tendency or relation, or else it would be a decree that decreed nothing. ¹⁶ But since the tendency is merely a relation that a decreed object has toward God, it is not an ingredient of the divine essence itself. It is simply the divine “act of decreeing as it is conceived by us with relation to the thing being decided or decreed.” ¹⁷

A similar point can be made with respect to the knowledge of God, Alsted suggests. ¹⁸ God's knowledge is either “essential, decretive, or executive.” His “essential knowledge” consists in what God knows “of himself and other things in himself as their exemplary and efficient cause. For by contemplating himself, as most pure act God contemplates all things.” Alsted clearly considers God's so-called “natural knowledge” or “knowledge of simple intelligence” (his knowledge of all possibilities), and his “knowledge of vision” (his knowledge of all actualities), as falling under what he calls here his “essential knowledge.” He defines the “knowledge of vision” as his eternally present knowledge of himself, and of all other things that are, will be, or have been. ¹⁹ Indeed, it is not going too far to say that it is impossible for him to know another thing apart from the mediation of his essence, since that other thing is merely a “similitude” of his essence. ²⁰ But here Alsted distinguishes this essential knowledge from his “decretive knowledge,” which is “that whereby God foreknows that this or that will be or will not be.” Technically, this is not the “essence of God itself,” he says, “but merely a new respect attaching to the essential knowledge.” ²¹ As he later indicates, God knows nothing “newly” (de novo) in himself. All the things he is said to “foreknow and foresee,” he also knows “presently and formally in themselves and in his essence supereminently,” even “independently” of their actual existence. So, the only thing “new” in this decretive knowledge is a non-essential relative dimension that connects his essential knowledge to the things he knows will be ad extra. ²² As he goes on to imply, this “respect” or relative dimension is really another way of referring to his “providence.” Finally, the “executive” knowledge is that by which he knows such and such decreed has been accomplished. In other words, just as God's decrees do not “add” anything to the divine essence but simply introduce a respect or relation to what is created ad extra, the same may be said of God's foreknowledge of those decrees as they are actually accomplished.

Gisbertus Voetius aptly summarises the respect, tendency, or relation that arises from the essential and immutable decrees in this way:

[T]he decrees of God, as to their real existence and according to the perfection which they say is in God, are necessary, essential to God, and indeed one and simple act, and thus are God himself decreeing. But as to their aspect or termination, or according to their extension to this or that object distinct from him, these are free, and are neither essential to God, nor God himself. Briefly, the intellect and intellection, the will and the volition of God, are one and simple, admitting neither multiplicity, division, nor distraction—much less opposition—nor before and after or succession, nor dependence of causality and effect, or of any other order. But from the things understood and willed, which are really distinct from divine intellection and volition by essence, as they are its objects, all this must be attributed. ²³

I take it this nonessential relation is what Duby is attempting to capture when he frequently makes remarks such as this:

In his action ad extra, God applies or directs his prevenient actuality in diverse “egressions” that terminate on created objects. The actuality of the action is nothing other than God's essential actuality, but the egression of that actuality is located under a free application and relation of it toward us. Divine action in the former respect is God's essence and is thus eternal and necessary. Divine action in the latter respect (i.e., as egression) is contingent and diversified according to the circumstances of creatures. ²⁴

But if it is true that the decrees are one with the pure and undivided essence of God, the question that naturally arises concerns their “necessity.” Duby clearly wants to avoid any sense in which the eternity of the divine decrees might imply the absolute necessity of the divine nature itself, as if the existence of creation might somehow be necessary to the constitution of God's being. Here he draws upon a distinction in the divine volition between what God necessarily wills, and what he wills freely from no other cause than the sheer fact that he wills them. ²⁵ The former pertains to the essence of God himself ad intra, while the latter pertains to his decrees concerning contingent things ad extra. ²⁶ Differentiating between what is “absolutely necessary” and “free” like this does not abstract God's liberty concerning the decrees from the necessity of his essence. Rather, as Alsted puts it, “necessity and freedom are attributed to the divine will by reason of the objects, which are either necessary or free.” In other words, it is a “virtual, not a real distinction.” ²⁷

Moreover, the genuine contingency of those things ad extra implies that the volition of God toward them is characterized by “liberty of indifference.” ²⁸ Liberty of indifference is stronger than mere “spontaneity.” It is not just a freedom from coaction that is implied, but a divine freedom not to will something that he has in fact willed. ²⁹ From this it follows that the relation, tendency, or respect of the decrees which terminates ad extra in contingent objects is also entirely “free.” ³⁰ Critically, however, this does not mean that God's decrees are actually reversible or mutable. Once God decrees something, it is then characterised by a “hypothetical” or “suppositional” necessity where the outcome is necessary by virtue of the decree. This does not subtract from the genuine contingency of the event: without the supposition of the decree, God could equally have decreed otherwise. So, as an example, Turretin cites the predestination of Jacob. “It is necessary for Jacob to be saved, namely, on supposition of the decree,” he says, “because otherwise he could have been not predestined and not saved.” ³¹

This kind of necessity is sometimes called the “necessity of the consequence,” a mere relative necessity that is distinct from an “absolute” “necessity of the consequent” itself. ³² Therefore, in relation to the divine will, Alsted can say that “God wills himself according to a mode of necessity and wills other things according to a mode of liberty. But this latter act can be necessary from the hypothesis, arising partly from God's free volition and partly from the immutability of his nature.” ³³ This is why God, having decreed a creation, is called the “eternal creator.” For instance, Johannes Maccovius will point out that God has the name “creator” on account of the free God-world relation that arises from his decree to create. Neither this decree, nor its relation that gives rise to the name “creator” may be necessary in themselves (as opposed to something “simply necessary”). God could have, in fact, not been the “creator.” But given the existence of this relation from which he is called “creator,” and thus the existence of this “decree” to create, “he could not fail to be (non poterat non esse) the one to whom this designation of ‘creator’ applies.” ³⁴ In other words, this decree with its attendant relation—however free—is no less immutable than God himself.

Duby's exposition of divine freedom does not hesitate to ascribe this kind of hypothetical necessity to the outcome of God's decrees and their attendant tendencies. ³⁵ He can even say the tendency of the decree toward the world is “immutable and eternal.” ³⁶ However, it is at this point that an ambiguity arises in his analysis. To square the immutability of the decree with God's essential “liberty of indifference,” Duby posits that it is necessary to quarantine the fixed determination of the decree, and its attendant tendency or relation to the thing decreed, from the essential “indifference” of God's “actus purus”:

The decretive will of God is identical to God's essence only in respect of the act of decreeing or inexistentia ipsa of the decree in God. Thus, that God is actus purus and that his will is identical to his essence characterize and necessitate the decretive will only in this respect. The respect, tendency, habitude, relation, termination, or extension of this act to this or that object is not identical to God or God's essence and therefore the actuality of God does not characterize or necessitate this respect, tendency, habitude, relation, termination, or extension unto one object or another. ³⁷

This is a claim he repeats frequently, sometimes with an even more emphatic accent on the enduring “indifference” of the divine actus purus. ³⁸ In other words, there can be no sense in which the immutability of the relation between creator and creature is actually grounded in or fixed by God's pure essence itself, because that essence is “naturally indifferent” to the existence of creation and “self-referentially complete.” Duby clearly detects a certain tension in holding these together—the indifference of the essence and the immutability of the relation. But he insists on the point, it seems, because to ground the “specification,” fixity, or determination of the decree, and its attendant relation to one thing over another, in the essence itself would necessarily imply some composition or actualisation in God. ³⁹ Therefore, “God's decision for one tendency over another,” appears to be merely an “egression” of his “prevenient actuality” rather than something ingredient to that actuality itself.

Here, I suggest, Duby too readily implies a dilemma that may in fact be a false one. Referring to the specification of the decree and its attendant tendency to the fully actualized being of God need not render it “absolutely necessary” nor need it concede any passive potency in God. Indeed, there are good reasons why we can and perhaps should regard the settled specification of the decree as an ingredient of the eternally necessary actus purus.

Divine Indifference? Yes and No

So far, we have seen that it is perfectly correct to insist that the God-world relation or tendency arising from the divine decrees is not to be confused or equated with the divine essence itself. To introduce such a relation into the essence of God would be tantamount to suggesting that God himself is constituted by the existence of the world. But it is not true that the relation is either undetermined or unnecessitated by the “actuality of God,” because, as it turns out, the divine actus purus is not in fact “indifferent” to the existence of creation. This is a claim that many of Duby's Reformed interlocutors are perfectly content to make. So here, for example, is Alsted: “After God has absolutely determined his will, he is no longer indifferent to opposites, namely, from the hypothesis of the decree already made.” In other words, in Alsted's mind, the “hypothetical necessity” of creation that is evident from the immutability of God's tendency toward it has a foundation in the decretive essence of God himself. Yet it remains true that “absolutely considered that will is free and indifferent because it is constrained neither by natural or internal necessity nor by anything external or by force.” ⁴⁰ Mastricht will say much the same, as do Maccovius and Turretin. ⁴¹

In the section of Voetius's Selectarum Disputationum to which Duby frequently refers, ⁴² Voetius speaks of God's decrees involving a “termination of his active essence to producing creatures and thus governing them, or not producing and governing them.” ⁴³ As Voetius goes on to explain, “the termination upon these or those creatures such that they might exist or not exist, act or not act, is simply free, namely ‘dividedly,’ although it is necessary ‘compositely’ or ‘conjointly.’” In other words, it is possible for God freely to determine that this tree will exist or will not exist as two discrete poles of a contradiction, but having determined one way or the other, the termination is “necessary,” not in itself, but by virtue of the decree. ⁴⁴ In terms of modal logic, Voetius is indicating that when it comes to the decretive acts of God, they are characterized by freedom “in the divided sense” but not “in the compound sense”; or a “simultaneity of potencies” but not a “potency of simultaneity.” ⁴⁵ Duby refers to God's liberty of indifference as a “freedom of contrariety.” ⁴⁶ The qualification Voetius adds is that while this may be true in the divided sense, God's freedom does not entail the power of simultaneous contradiction. ⁴⁷ His will is such that it cannot actually be indifferent to the existence of creation and not indifferent to its existence at once. ⁴⁸ So, while the “terminatio ad creaturas” is itself a transitive relation between the decreeing God and the things ad extra he has decreed, and thus is always most free and non-essential, it is actually fixed and even necessitated by God's essence ex hypothesi decreti, such that it cannot fail to be. ⁴⁹

I take it this is why Mastricht indicates that because “intention” is an ingredient of the “definite decree,” whereby “one means among many is chosen for what it is intended,” “futurity (futuritio) exists from eternity,” even if “the thing that will be is born in time.” ⁵⁰ There is no question that by futurity, he is referring to that which God perceives through his “knowledge of vision” as “definite and determined” according to his decretive will. ⁵¹ Similarly, Turretin is content to say that “God foreknows those things that in himself and in his decree as the first cause, are, on the one hand, necessary on account of what has been decreed and the infallibility of being foreknown, but on the other hand in the secondary causes from which they proximately and immediately depend—which are in themselves indefinite—they are also contingent.” ⁵²

Consequently, these Early Modern Reformed voices emphatically agree with Duby that God is innately indifferent to creating or not creating. But since God has in fact decreed to create, they equally do not hesitate to insist that God is never actually indifferent to creation, and that through the free determination of his essence to create, the coexistence of creation necessarily ensues. Such necessity is certainly not “absolute,” or “of the consequent,” but it is most assuredly “of the consequence.” ⁵³ In other words, God's eternal and immutable non-indifference toward this creation does not mean that this creation is ever itself necessary to God's actual existence—as if creation might cease to have any authentic contingency, either in the mind of God or in itself. ⁵⁴ God would remain essentially identical had he decreed differently or not at all. At the same time, for these Reformed voices, the consequential (versus absolute) necessity of creation's existence is grounded not merely in the ex hypothesi immutability of the God-world relation (as Duby seems to suggest), but more directly in the ex hypothesi eternal knowledge and determination of the divine essence itself. Someone like Alsted knows exactly what is at stake in this claim—the very indefectibility of God's promises. “So, God rewards good works,” he says. Why? “1. Because he has freely promised to reward them. 2. The immutability of the nature does not allow (non patitur) the rescinding of what has been promised.” ⁵⁵

But exactly how is it possible to speak of the aseity and natural indifference of the divine essence to creation alongside an actual ex hypothesi determination of that essence to coexist with creation, without there being some composition or actualization within the divine actus purus? Here, I believe, the Reformed were able to bring clarity to this by utilizing a synchronic “instants of nature” framework through which they parsed the divine decree. Such framework is set out explicitly in Voetius's discussion of the simplicity of God's decrees to which we have already referred, especially in his third defence of this proposition against the Remonstrant denial of it:

The decree of God is able to be conceived by us according to three moments or instants of reason or of nature, not of time or duration because the decree is co-eternal with God.

As Andreas Beck suggests, Voetius is here likely trading on a conceptual breakthrough hatched by Duns Scotus who explicitly spoke of the divine decree in this kind of way. ⁵⁷ Some debate has emerged among intellectual historians about whether this sort of conceptually synchronic modality is a uniquely “Scotist” accent, as opposed to a “Thomist” one for instance. ⁵⁸ Indeed, one relatively recent article has drawn attention to the variety of ways Aquinas has been understood on this general issue among his older and more recent interpreters, finding itself unable to isolate any one reading as most authentic to Aquinas himself. ⁵⁹ However, leaving these disputed questions of provenance to one side, there is general consensus that something approximating this synchronic conceptuality is widespread in Early Modern Reformed conceptions of divine freedom. ⁶⁰

There are a couple of critical things to note from Voetius's remark. First, and most obvious, is a caveat that in God, everything has simultaneous and indivisible duration. Consequently, the distinction between the “indifference” of the first instant and the “non-indifference” and determination of the second implies no succession. However, the second thing to note, consistent with what Voetius has already implied, is that this statement rules out any actual contradiction, as if two antithetical states—actual indifference to creation and a decree to create—could simultaneously exist in God. ⁶¹ The first instant is simply describing what is always innately true of God's essence “in the divided sense,” where having determined to create, he remains equally capable of doing otherwise, albeit not in the same eternal instant. In this way, it takes a vital priority as it preserves the genuine contingency of what God actually decrees and the relation ad extra that ensues: he is innately capable of being indifferent to creation even as he is actually not. In other words, the priority is a purely structural one, since in actu he is not, never has been, nor ever will be indifferent to creation, where the actual free termination of the decree is supposed, hence the second and third instants. ⁶²

Even though Voetius is deploying this instants of nature framework in reference to the eternal essence and freedom of God, both Turretin and Mastricht can also readily apply something like it to the freedom of the human will, in fact, and thus regard it to be an inalienable feature of volitional “freedom” per se. ⁶³ The major dissimilarity is that the innate indifference and decisiveness of God's will is eternally self-originating, simple, and entirely unconstrained from without, while the human will contingently receives these powers from him. In other words, it possesses freedom only “dependently,” from God's predetermination. ⁶⁴

When divine freedom is parsed according to this sort of synchronic modality, Duby's dilemma turns out to be a false one. We are not “obligated to choose between reading the specification of the tendentia into the actus purus and rendering it absolutely necessary or conceding that there is a passive potency in God in order to maintain God's freedom.” ⁶⁵ To refer the concrete “specification” of the creator-creature relation to God's essence does not force us to choose between a “kenotic” self-limitation of God's free and independent essence on the one hand, and an “expansion” of it on the other. Rather, it turns out that the one, simple, and fully-actualized divine essence is “synchronically” capacious of both absolute natural indifference apart from what it eternally decrees, and a fixed, immutable decretive determination to do something it could always freely not do. This reality grounds the necessary, indefectible future existence of creation in God himself (consequentiae) without ever suggesting that creation is absolutely necessary in itself (consequenti), thereby threatening its genuine contingency and rendering it somehow necessary to the constitution of God's being. This means the relation, tendency, or respect that exists between God and his acts ad extra is always entirely free and non-essential—as we have seen—but at the same time it is no less necessary and determined by virtue of the decretive essence of God himself. It also means that Duby's repeated refrain that God's being is “complete without reference to another,” while critically true in a certain respect, is also no less critically untrue in another. It is true from the perspective of the absolute necessity of God's being, but it is untrue ex hypothesi or relative to what God's being has in fact eternally determined to do.

Conclusion

There may be reasons why Duby would wish to resist the sort of synchronic conceptualization of the divine will that I have outlined here. My aim, however, has been simply to draw attention to it as a significant, and perhaps underappreciated, theme in the Reformed sources he otherwise draws upon with profit. Without challenging the immense value of his contribution to the rehabilitation of classical Trinitarian dogmatics, I suggest this detail warrants serious consideration. While Duby unquestionably seeks to uphold the immutability of God's decrees, his construal of the divine actus purus as actually indifferent risks denuding the immutable determination of the divine decrees of any real foundation or “futurity” in God himself. If the immutable, God-world relation is undetermined by God's essence, it risks being defined out of existence altogether, reducing it to an illusory figment or projection. John Owen captures this fear exactly: “In brief, these future contingencies depend on something for their existence, or they come forth into the world in their own strength and upon their own account, not depending on any other.” As it happens, however, the eternal, free determination of God's being to be pro nobis necessitates this relationship, without in any way necessitating our contingent existence itself: “Thus it may be said of the same thing that it is contingent and determined, without the least appearance of contradiction.” ⁶⁶ Here is no figment or projection but a gloriously indelible reality that is most brilliantly encapsulated in the incarnation itself.