Tag Archives: philosophy

Continuing Thoughts Upon Necessity and the views of Lord Kames

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Having read Wesley’s “Thoughts Upon Necessity”, I decided to read more of Lord Kames’ essay “On Liberty and Necessity”. This post is a follow-up to the post Wednesday with Wesley: Thoughts Upon Necessity, which introduces us to both the essays.

In the last post, we highlighted portions of Lord Kames’ position to provide enough content in which to frame Wesley’s argument against it. We also provided a condensed format of Wesley’s argument. In this post we will focus on Kames’ view that we are given a “delusive Sense of a Liberty of Contingence, to be the Foundation of all the Labour, Care and Industry of Mankind” and the responses to that idea from both Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley.1

The position taken by Lord Kames
In the prior post we relied primarily on Wesley’s quotes from Kames’ essay. Here we will add a more expansive summary taken directly from Kames’ work “Liberty and Necessity“. 2

Lord Kames will assert a basic principle: “that nothing can happen without a cause” and that “nothing that happens is conceived as happening of itself, but as an effect produced by some other thing.” 3

This principle is applied to both the natural and moral worlds, however, it will be made clear that the fixed laws that govern each are not the same.

Taking a view of the natural world we find all things there proceeding in a fixed and settled train of causes and effects. It is a point which admits of no dispute, that all the changes produced in matter, and all the different modifications it assumes, are the result of fixed laws. Every effect is for precisely determined, that no other effect could, in such circumstances, have possibly resulted from the operation of the cause: which holds even in the minutest changes of the different elements [as these are the] necessary effect of pre-established laws.4

The result, Kames admits, is that “in the material world, there is nothing that can be called contingent but everything must be precisely what it is.” In the moral world, which is the realm in which “man is the actor”, we find things “do not appear so clearly.”

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Wednesday with Wesley: Thoughts Upon Necessity

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In 1774, Wesley wrote an essay titled “Thoughts Upon Necessity“.1 This essay dealt with arguments put forth by contemporary authors regarding what we would label determinism.

The opening paragraph states clearly the questions that Wesley will explore in the essay.

Is Man a Free-Agent, or is he not?
Are his Actions free or necessary?
Is he Self-determined in Acting; or is he determined by some other Being?
Is the principle which determines him to act, in himself or in another?
This is the question which I want to consider.

The work will critique and challenge the deterministic view that our actions are rendered certain by a causal chain.

[It has been] affirmed with one mouth that from the beginning of the world, if not rather from all eternity, there was an indissoluble chain of causes and effects, which included all human Actions. And that these were by fate so connected together, that not one link of the chain could be broken.

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Justin Martyr the Calvinist? (part 5)

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Summary

This post was not an attempt to examine the Reformed doctrines of grace in detail, nor to argue for or against them. It was written to share some research that was done examining whether the early church held these ideas. Ultimately this research and these posts form a rebuttal to those Reformed teachers that assert that the early church held to the Reformed doctrines of grace prior to Augustine.  In order to narrow the scope of this research, I focused on the quotes used to prove that Justin Martyr was a proto-Calvinist.

There is no problem with Reformed teachers that want to argue for their doctrines using their interpretations of Scripture and/or making a philosophical argument. In making this case, there can reject the teachings in the early church, arguing that the early theologians prior to Augustine were wrong because they incorrectly held that foresight, foreknowledge and freewill are compatible or that synergism is a basis for boasting.

However, it is rather troubling for these teachers to claim, using vague, spurious,  and misleading citations, that the early patristic sources affirmed TULIP and determinism. These claims have to ignore the context of the passages as well as clearer statements made by these writers in an attempt to make them out to be something that they are not. As Cottrell said: this is “extremely poor scholarship”. With a little research it should be clear that Justin, rather than being a confused or contradictory theologian, held to a view of soteriology that denied the very ideas these scholars boldly claim that he held.

I hope that this exercise will encourage readers to take the advice of McMahon and consult the primary sources. In doing so, they will find that the quotes taken from writings of the early church do not support the argument that the early church affirmed the Reformed doctrines of grace, but instead rejected them.

Contra Charles Spurgeon, who would write in his sermon Election (link), that Calvinism is the ancient faith,

It is no novelty, then, that I am preaching; no new doctrine. I love to proclaim these strong old doctrines, which are called by nickname Calvinism, but which are surely and verily the revealed truth of God as it is in Christ Jesus. By this truth I make a pilgrimage into the past, and as I go, I see father after father, confessor after confessor, martyr after martyr, standing up to shake hands with me. Were I a Pelagian, or a believer in the doctrine of free-will, I should have to walk for centuries all alone.

we will find that it is a synergistic understanding of faith and salvation that echoes throughout the centuries.

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