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Benjamin
B. Warfield
This is a sad state of mind that people
fall into sometimes, in which they do not know the
difference between God and Fate. One of the most astonishing
illustrations of it in all history is,
no doubt, that afforded by our Cumberland Presbyterian brethren,
who for a hundred years,
now, have been vigorously declaring that the Westminster Confession
teaches “fatalism.” What
they mean is that the Westminster Confession of Faith teaches
that it is God who determines all
that shall happen in his universe; that God has not — to use
a fine phrase of Dr. Charles Hodge’s
— “given it either to necessity, or to chance, or to the
caprice of man, or to the malice of Satan, to
control the sequence of events and all their issues, but has
kept the reins of government in his
own hands.” This, they say, is Fate: because (so they say)
it involves “an inevitable necessity” in
the falling out of events. And this doctrine of “fatality,”
they say — or at least, their historian, Dr.
B. W. McDonnold says for them — is “the one supreme difficulty
which it has never been possible
to reconcile,” and which still “stands an insuperable
obstacle to a reunion” between them and
“the mother church.” “Whether the hard places
in the Westminster Confession be justly called
fatality or not,” he adds, “they are too hard for us.”
Now, is it not remarkable that men with
hearts on fire with love to God should not know him
from Fate? Of course, the reason is not far to seek. Like other
men, and like the singer in the
sweet hymn that begins, “I was a wandering sheep,”
they have a natural objection to being
“controlled.” They wish to be the architects of their
own fortunes, the determiners of their own
destinies; though why they should fancy they could do that better
for themselves than God can
be trusted to do it for them, it puzzles one to understand. And
their confusion is fostered further
by a faulty way they have of conceiving how God works. They fancy
he works only by “general
law.” “Divine influence,” they call it (rather
than “him”): and they conceive this “divine influence”
as a diffused force, present through the whole universe and playing
on all alike, just like gravity,
or light, or heat. What happens to the individual, therefore,
is determined, not by the “divine
influence” which plays alike on all, but by something in
himself which makes him respond more
or less to the “divine influence” common to all. If
we conceive God’s modes of operation, thus,
under the analogy of a natural force, no wonder if we cannot
tell him from Fate. For Fate is just
Natural Force; and if Natural Force should thus govern all things
that would be Fatalism.
The conception is, we see, in essence
the same as that of the old Greeks. “To the Stoic, in
fact,” says Dr. Bigg, “God was Natural Law, and his
other name was Destiny. Thus we read in
the famous hymn of Cleanthes: ’Lead us, O Zeus, and Thou too,
O destiny, whithersoever ye
have appointed for us to go. For I will follow without hesitation.
And if I refuse I shall become evil,
but I shall follow all the same.’ Man is himself a part of the
great world-force, carried along in its
all-embracing sweep, like the water-beetle in a torrent. He may
struggle, or he may let himself
go; but the result is the same, except that in the latter case,
he embraces his doom, and so is at
peace.” When a man thus identifies God with mere natural
law, he may obtain resignation, but
he cannot attain religion. And the resignation attained may conceal
beneath it the intensest
bitterness of spirit. We all remember that terrible epigram of
Palladas: “If caring avails anything,
why, certainly, take good care; but if care is taken for you
by a God, what’s the use of your
taking care? It’s all the same whether you care or care not;
the God takes care only for this —
that you shall have cares enough.” That is the outcome of
fatalism — of confounding God with
Natural Law.
What, now, is the real difference between
this Fatalism and the Predestination taught, say, in
our Confession? “Predestination and Fatalism,” says
Schopenhauer, “do not differ in the main.
They differ only in this, that with predestination the external
determination of human action
proceeds from a rational Being, and with fatalism from an irrational
one. But in either case the
result is the same.” That is to say, they differ precisely
as a person differs from a machine. And
yet Schopenhauer can represent this as not a radical difference!
Professor William James
knows better; and in his lectures on “The Varieties of Religious
Experience” enlarges on the
difference. It is illustrated, he says, by the difference between
the chill remark of Marcus
Aurelius: “If the gods care not for me or my children, there
is a reason for it”; and the passionate
cry of Job, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him!”
Nor is the difference solely in emotional
mood. It is precisely the difference that stretches between materialism
and religion. There is,
therefore, no heresy so great, no heresy that so utterly tears
religion up by the roots, as the
heresy that thinks of God under the analogy of natural force
and forgets that he is a person.
There is a story of a little Dutch boy,
which embodies very fairly the difference between God
and Fate. This little boy’s home was on a dyke in Holland, near
a great wind-mill, whose long
arms swept so close to the ground as to endanger those who carelessly
strayed under them. But
he was very fond of playing precisely under this mill. His anxious
parents had forbidden him to
go near it; and, when his stubborn will did not give way, had
sought to frighten him away from it
by arousing his imagination to the terror of being struck by
the arms and carried up into the air to
have life beaten out of him by their ceaseless strokes. One day,
heedless of their warning, he
strayed again under the dangerous arms, and was soon absorbed
in his play there forgetful of
everything but his present pleasures. Perhaps, he was half conscious
of a breeze springing up;
and somewhere in the depth of his soul, he may have been obscurely
aware of the danger with
which he had been threatened. At any rate, suddenly, as he played,
he was violently smitten
from behind, and found himself swung all at once, with his head
downward, up into the air; and
then the blows came, swift and hard! O what a sinking of the
heart! O what a horror of great
darkness! It had come then! And he was gone! In his terrified
writhing, he twisted himself about,
and looking up, saw not the immeasureable expanse of the brazen
heavens above him, but his
father’s face. At once, he realized, with a great revulsion,
that he was not caught in the mill, but
was only receiving the threatened punishment of his disobedience.
He melted into tears, not of
pain, but of relief and joy. In that moment, he understood the
difference between falling into the
grinding power of a machine and into the loving hands of a father.
That is the difference between Fate and
Predestination. And all the language of men cannot
tell the immensity of the difference.
This article is taken from Selected Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield, vol.
1, Edited by John E. Meeter and
published by Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1970.
It originally appeared in The
Presbyterian, Mar. 16, 1904, pp. 7-8.
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