Wilbur Fisk - Calvinistic Controversy

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Many objections have been made, by the reviewers, to my manner of stating the doctrine of predestination. It is objected, that the great body of Calvinists believe, no more than the Arminians, that God “efficiently controls and actuates the human will.” On a careful, and I hope, candid revision of the subject, however, I cannot satisfy myself that the objection is valid. I am quite sure God must control the will, or he cannot, as Calvinists teach, secure the proposed end, by the prescribed means. It is readily granted that Calvinists deny such a control as destroys the freedom of the will. But it is the object of the sermon and of the following controversy to show that Calvinistic predestination is, on any ground of consistency, utterly irreconcilable with mental freedom. How far this has been done, of course, each will judge for himself.

It seems, to the author of the sermon, but little better than trifling, to object, as some have, to this argument on foreknowledge, that “God must predetermine his works before he could certainly know what would take place; and hence, in the order of cause and effect, he must decree in order to know.” It is readily conceded, that, in the order of nature, the Divine Being could not foreknow that a world would certainly exist, until he had determined to create it. But was there no prescience back of this? Did he determine to create a universe, independent of a view of all the bearings in the case? If so, he created at random and in ignorance. If not, then a view of all the results preceded his determination to create; and thus we are led irresistibly to the doctrine of the sermon, that “God foreknows in order to predestinate,”

The review of the sermon, in the Christian Spectator, is understood to be from the pen of Doctor Fitch, professor of divinity in Yale College.