Free Will, Moral Responsibility, and Reformed Theology - Analytic ...

Reformed theologian countenance this?
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Paul L. Manata © 2011
It is therefore dubious whether we can assign to the Reformed tradition an
appropriation of Duns Scotus’ views on contingency. Carl Trueman offers another
perspective on the popularity of Scotus on the Reformers. Says Trueman:
For example, it has been argued with some passion by the Dutch scholar,
Anton Vos, that Reformed theology is essentially Scotist in its metaphysics,
but this approach seems to depend upon a narrow definition of Scotism
which restricts it to a particular view of the nature of contingency, rather
than the more obvious points of difference with Thomism . . . In fact, the
appropriation of Scotus even by those Reformed theologians who
emphatically denied Thomist intellectualism, was highly eclectic . . . my
own view is that [Vos’s] case for the absolutely fundamental importance of
Scotism, almost to the exclusions of other options, needs to be balanced
by other influences and issues. 78
On top of this is, apart from Trueman’s seeming concession to Vos’s
interpretation of Scotus as avoiding the “Scylla of determinism and the Charybdis
of human autonomy,” 79 the argument that Scotus was actually a compatibilist, or
the argument that he was simply inconsistent. But if Scotist contingency is of the
libertarian sort, there is another worry.
E.3.2 The foreknowledge argument
Troubles for this indeterminist view will arise when we ask about God’s
foreknowledge and try to stay consistent with the Reformed views on the matter.
Amazing, since God’s decree is part of this history! Our world comes attached with a
specific decree, as it were, and not another.
78 Carl Trueman, John Owen: Reformed Catholic, Renaissance Man (Ashgate, 2007),
pgs. 24 and 57. I should add here the Richard Muller is more in this vein, though he
is an advocate of what I am calling Reformed libertarianism.
79 Ibid. 57.