Taking on master theologians like Fr. Peter Lombard and Blessed John Duns Scotus [2] by someone far less erudite and intelligent with poor writing skills such as this blogger is not very smart at all, but since audacity is separable from ignorance and incompetence, this blogger will therefore dare comment on the theologians' arguments for predestination even though he is not so qualified.
The question John Duns Scotus asked was this: would the Son of God have come into existence had Adam not sinned against God? Scotus wrote [3]:
“Without attempting to settle the matter dogmatically, one may state in accord with the last mentioned opinion in distinction 41 of the First Book [of Sentences [written by Fr. Peter Lombard]] that, in so far as the objects intended by God are concerned, since the predestination in general of anyone to glory is prior by nature to the prevision of anyone’s sin or damnation, this is all the more so true of the predestination of that soul chosen for the greatest glory. For it appears to be universally true that He who wills in an orderly manner intends first that which is nearest the end. And so just as He first intends one to have glory before grace, so also among those predestined to glory, He who wills in an orderly fashion would seem to intend first the glory of the one He wishes to be nearest the end. Thus, He wills glory for this soul before He wills glory for any other soul, and for every other soul He wills glory and grace before He foresees those things which are the opposite of these habits [i.e. sin or damnation]…
“If man had not sinned, there would have been no need for our redemption. But that God predestined this soul [of Christ] to so great a glory does not seem to be only on account of that [redemption], since the redemption or the glory of the soul to be redeemed is not comparable to the glory of Christ’s soul. Neither is it likely that the highest good in creation is something that was merely occasioned only because of some lesser good; nor is it likely that He predestined Adam to such good before He predestined Christ; and yet this would follow [were the Incarnation occasioned by Adam’s sin]. In fact, if the predestination of Christ’s soul was for the sole purpose of redeeming others, something even more absurd would follow, namely, that in predestining Adam to glory, He would have foreseen him as having fallen into sin before He predestined Christ to glory.
“It can be said, therefore, that with a priority of nature God chose for His heavenly court all the angels and men He wished to have with their various degrees of perfection before He foresaw either sin or the punishment for sinners; and no one has been predestined only because somebody else’s sin was foreseen, lest anyone have reason to rejoice over the fall of another.
The arguments presented above seems on the surface to be logical, and if logical, they would apply to humans that exist in time but not necessarily to God Who exists in timelessness. In Heaven, things, whether destined or not destined for glory, do not have to be formed seriatum based on man's timeline and logic since they can also occur simultaneously, spontaneously, revertively, miraculously, timelessly and in ways beyond man's comprehension. Thus, any attempt to confine God to what humans know and can comprehend is wrong.
Also wrong is to limit God to a static existence of predestination, even if the predestination is God's and even if God has intentionally left parts unpredestined. For Peter Lombard and John Duns Scotus to conclude that God's work had to conform to what they believe to be their infallibility is to be God, even superior to God. They are not God and their conclusion that the predestination of Christ had to have preceded Adam's existence without leaving room for any other possibility is wrong.
One possibility that they precluded is that the Son of God requires no predestination since the Son of God is, in essence, God. "[T]he [Catholic] Church confessed at the first ecumenical council at Nicaea (325) that the Son is 'consubstantial' with the Father, that is, one only God with him. The second ecumenical council, held at Constantinople in 381, kept this expression in its formulation of the Nicene Creed and confessed 'the only-begotten Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father'. [4] Since the Son of God is consubstantial with God and there is no entity greater than God, both God and the Son of God cannot be predestined. God, in consubstantiation with the Son and the Son in consubstantiation with God can, however, will to have predestiny (the crucifixion was a "willed predestiny") but that is not predestiny--that is Free Will.
The Free Will that "predestined" the crucifixion came to life in the prayers of Jesus at Gethsemane. "[Jesus] fell with [H]is face to the ground and prayed, 'My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.'" [5] This is evidence that what Jesus knew to be "predestined" could be changed, and because He is consubstantial with God, He could change if He wanted to; yet, He gave God the choice with these words: "[N]ot as I will, but as [Y]ou will." In other words, Jesus' Passion was not the result of a predestiny but a revocable will. A revocable will is fluid, changeable at any moment. Therefore, it is wrong to conclude that the Son of God has a preassigned destiny that forecloses any change subsequent to the preordination.
The words spoken by Jesus during His second prayer at Gethsemane confirm the foregoing conclusion. They were: "'My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may [Y]our will be done.'" [6] This prayer, if prayed by this blogger, would be far less eloquent: "Father, if you really want me to suffer through the agony, the torture and the crucifixion, I will do it." This shows that the Son of God Who was given "the cup" is consubstantial with and not subordinated to God because the Son of God said, "[M]ay [Y]our will be done," meaning that He willed freely to do what God had willed ("predestined" if one wants to think that way), even though He had the Free Will not to comply with God's will ("predestiny"); or, it can be said that the Son of God being consubstantial with God had willed freely to do what He Himself had previously willed or "predestined" (again, if one wishes to think that way) even though He had the Free Will not to fulfill His Own will ("predestiny"). Here, also, the predestiny that Scotus referred to does not apply to the Son of God because He is consubstantial with God and can revoke at any time any "predestiny" and any semblance of it.
On a separate point, even though it is true to say that "the glory of the soul to be redeemed is not comparable to the glory of Christ’s soul," the implication here is that a redeemed soul (as opposed to a soul yet-to-be-redeemed) is never going to be comparable to the glory of Christ's soul. This implication diminishes the salvific value of Christ's Passion and invalidates Christ's own words: "Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them." [7]. Accordingly, in order to give meaning to Christ's Passion and Christ's words, one ought to conclude that upon redemption a redeemed soul is united with and shares in the glory of Christ's soul.
Returning to the conclusion that the "[i]ncarnation of Christ was not foreseen as something occasioned [by sin], but that it was foreseen by God from all eternity and as a good more immediately proximate to the end..." [8], John Duns Scotus wrote:
[T]his is the order followed in God’s prevision. First, God understood Himself as the highest good. In the second instant He understood all creatures. In the third He predestined some to glory and grace, and concerning some He had a negative act by not predestining. In the fourth, He foresaw that all these would fall in Adam. In the fifth He preordained and foresaw the remedy—how they would be redeemed through the Passion of His Son, so that, like all the elect, Christ in the flesh was foreseen and predestined to grace and glory before Christ’s Passion was foreseen as a medicine against the fall, just as a physician wills the health of a man before he wills the medicine to cure him.” [Emphasis original.]
This blogger understands and can accept the first four of Scotus' numbered statements. The fifth is somewhat difficult to digest. Scotus said, "like all the elect, Christ in the flesh was foreseen and predestined to grace and glory before Christ's Passion was foreseen...." First of all, Christ is not "like all the elect" that had been "predestined to grace and glory." Christ is consubstantial with God, not inferior to God; therefore, He can will His Own "destiny" if He so chooses, and He had done that in the flesh. The fact that the Christ's will was, and is, identical and coextensive with God's does not mean that Christ is a "yes man" Who does not have Free Will and Whose existence is conditioned upon fulfilling His predestiny. And the fact that Christ was not mentioned in the Book of Genesis, and that He is the Son of God, mentioned only in much later chapters in the Bible, do not mean that Christ was not present simultaneously and consubstantially with God at the beginning.
Secondly, it is quite strange for the omnipotent [9] and omniscient [10] God to be able to foresee Christ in the flesh being predestined to grace and glory (assuming for the time being Christ is not consubstantial to God) but not be able to foresee simultaneously Christ's Passion. What other possible event would have led Christ to grace and glory but for His Passion? Even if no reason is necessary to predestine Christ to grace and glory, why would God play such a silly game, deliberately closing off the mind's one-eye, willing the other mind's eye to foresee only part of the whole predestiny, as if God Who has prevision needs a mind's eye to foresee and more than one at that? Was it for Self-amusement? Does God have that much idle time even in timelessness? Seriously, if a predestiny--a finished plan from the beginning--is being foreseen and completed in bits and pieces then it is not really a predestiny, is it? If Scotus' conclusion that "Christ in the flesh was foreseen and predestined to grace and glory before Christ’s Passion was foreseen" turns out to be correct, then, in this blogger's opinion, it would have resulted more from God's spontaneous exercise of Free Will than from God's predestined plan with every eventual possibility considered and every eventual detail evaluated. In other words, the conclusion Scotus had drawn could not be a hundred percent correct because of God's omiscience, omnipotence and consubstantial existence with Christ, although it could arguably be correct provided that there exists the possibility of a fusion of antipodes, spontaneous Free Will and carefully considered predestiny, that only a consubstantiated omniscient and omnipotent God knows why and how it is done, not Peter Lombard, not John Duns Scotus and most certainly not this blogger.
Finally, the comparison of Christ in the flesh being first foreseen and predestined to grace and glory before Christ's Passion was foreseen to a physician willing the health of a man before willing the medication to cure him is a bit off. The first comparison between Christ's predestined grace and glory and a man's health seems fine, but when Scotus analogized Christ's Passion to a medication, he overdid it, since a man's medication does not require a man to suffer and be crucified, then go to Hell before he is "resurrected" to a state of "grace and glory" of a healthful being.
Ignoring consubstantiality [11], on the same topic Scotus continued to write and write. Perhaps he was uncomfortable with his own conclusions at the outset, yet he seemed determined to convince himself, and the (Christian) world, that he was absolutely right, but on this particular topic, he had not done enough to convince this blogger that he was right.
Of all of Scotus' statements, the following four (read together), from Scotus' Opus Parisiense (or Reportatio Parisiensis) [12], trouble this blogger the most:
First, God loves Himself. Secondly, He loves Himself for others, and this is an ordered love. Thirdly, He wishes to be loved by Him who can love Him with the greatest love—speaking of the love of someone who is extrinsic to Himself. And fourthly, He foresees the union of that nature that must love Him with the greatest love even if no one had fallen. [Emphasis original.]
Christ never talked about God the way Scotus had in the four sentences above. Simply, in Christ's Own words: "God is love." [13] Scotus must have skipped over those three words or had forgotten about them. Scotus must have also forgotten about these other words of Christ [14]:
“All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and no one knows who the Father is except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”
This blogger doubts that Christ revealed God's love to Scotus and asked him to turn God's unconditional and plenary love for all into a self-indulgent, selfish and segregated love in just four sentences. In this blogger's opinion, God's love cannot be categorized and ranked as Scotus had categorized and ranked it. Perhaps unfair, but this is how this blogger "reads" the four presumptive conclusions above: God loves Himself; God uses "others" as an excuse to love Himself; God loves Himself so much that God wants someone outside of God to love God with "the greatest love," a love that only God alone can give, thereby creating another distinct and "extrinsic" God that loves; and God loves Himself so, so much that God wants to unite with that extrinsic "nature" created by God for the sole purpose of loving God with a love so great that no other extrinsic entity can give (Scotus' fourth sentence is being read with Scotus' unstated assumption in mind, that "the greatest love" can only come from a "nature" that is "extrinsic" to God and predestined to love God, not from "fallen" sinners who are "extrinsic" to God and not predestined to love God but nonetheless exercise their individual Free Will to love God). This is definitely not the God this blogger knows through Christ.
In conclusion (disregarding consubstantiality), whether God made and predestined the Son of God to love God before Adam's creation, or whether the Son of God was created after the fall of Adam by a spontaneous act of Free Will or as a part of a preordained plan, are questions for the self-indulging, self-loving, unproductive idle mind's selfish self-amusement.
The human mind was not made for speculating on and blogging about abstract concepts; rather, it is to be used to find "the way and the truth and the life" through Christ. The ideal mind, therefore, ought to be a collection of thoughts, hopes and memories, the entirety of which, at all times, would form a continuous prayer of love, expressed in silence, or in any combination with words, with actions, with feelings, with images, with music, with songs, with dance and with art, as the individual person's mind sees fit. This blogger's mind is nowhere near its ideal and until it is there, as if it is even possible to get there, it would continue to idle and speculate, allowing its deficiencies to be revealed in this blog.
[2] This blogger is an admirer of Blessed John Duns Scotus who presented his arguments for the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. See http://www.christendom-awake.org/pages/marian/scotus&immac.htm His arguments for predestination, however, are not so convincing.
[3] http://absoluteprimacyofchrist.org/scotus-writings/
[4] http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p1s2c1p2.htm, Paragraph 242.
[5] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2026:36-56
[6] Ibid.
[7] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+6%3A56&version=NIV
[8] http://absoluteprimacyofchrist.org/scotus-writings/
[9] http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p1s2c1p3.htm, Paragraph 268: " Of all the divine attributes, only God's omnipotence is named in the Creed." That is enough since from omnipotence flows omniscience.
[10] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+139&version=NASB, line 4.
[11] http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p1s2c3a8.htm, Paragraph 689.
[12] http://absoluteprimacyofchrist.org/scotus-writings/
[13] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+John+4%3A8, and http://www.usccb.org/bible/1john/4, lines 8 and 16.
[14] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+10%3A22&version=NIV
[4] http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p1s2c1p2.htm, Paragraph 242.
[5] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2026:36-56
[6] Ibid.
[7] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+6%3A56&version=NIV
[8] http://absoluteprimacyofchrist.org/scotus-writings/
[9] http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p1s2c1p3.htm, Paragraph 268: " Of all the divine attributes, only God's omnipotence is named in the Creed." That is enough since from omnipotence flows omniscience.
[10] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+139&version=NASB, line 4.
[11] http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p1s2c3a8.htm, Paragraph 689.
[12] http://absoluteprimacyofchrist.org/scotus-writings/
[13] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+John+4%3A8, and http://www.usccb.org/bible/1john/4, lines 8 and 16.
[14] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+10%3A22&version=NIV
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