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

9
Paul L. Manata © 2011
seems to me that an introduction to free will and moral responsibility from a
Reformed perspective and to a Reformed audience would be helpful. 18 Such an
introduction for the Reformed community is the aim of this paper. This is an
introduction to what the Oxford Handbook of Free Will says is “perhaps the most
voluminously debated of all philosophical problems.” 19 I will claim that Reformed
theology is a kind of determinism and requires freedom and moral responsibility
to be compatible with this fact. I will not attempt to justify these claims, that is, I
will only argue that RT is committed to determinism and compatibilism, not that
(some kind of) determinism and compatibilism are true. I will assume as data the
Reformed confessional and expositional statements I cite, and then attempt to
explore the implications this has for human freedom and moral responsibility.
About the project of clarification, Scott MacDonald writes,
Now, it seems clear that in pursuing this general project, the philosopher
I’ve just described is not primarily concerned with the epistemic
justification of [a particular claim]. She is concerned instead with
understanding, developing, systematizing, and explaining it. It is possible
for her to do all these things without raising the issue of its truth or her
justification for holding it. The fact is that a very large part of philosophy
has nothing directly to do with the truth or justification of certain theories
or propositions. . . . Hence, clarification of theological matters is a
legitimate task for the philosopher. Philosophers have not only a
justificatory but also a clarificatory role to play in theology. 20
18 But see Cowan and Spiegel’s, The Love of Wisdom: A Christian Introduction to
Philosophy (B&H Academic, 2009), cf. section 5.3.
19 Robert Kane, “Introduction,” The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, ed. Robert Kane
(Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 6.
20 Scott MacDonald, “What is Philosophical Theology?,” in Arguing About Religion,
ed. Kevin Timpe (Routledge, 2009), p. 24.