In Christian theology there is a recurring tension between “Because you have rejected knowledge, I reject you” (Hosea 4:6) and “Avoid foolish controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels about the law, for they are unprofitable and worthless” (Titus 3:15). On the one hand, we are exhorted not only to know God, but to know about God as a means to the former end – hence theology. On the other hand, becoming too pedantic is detrimental to the bigger picture.
But what exactly constitutes a foolish controversy? What seems logical and beautiful to one may seem to a simpler person to be idle speculation. Indeed, there is a strong anti-intellectual trend which treats any systematization of theology beyond what is necessary for daily life as a foolish controversy. But practical applicability to ethical situations cannot be the standard by which fruitfulness is decided, for is not an appreciation of the beauty of God an end in itself, without regard to behavior? God demands our affections, not just our behavior. To stifle the rigorous application of logic to scripture is to close an avenue by which God captures the imagination and therefore affection.
Instead, my goal here is to develop the Lutheran boundary between fruitful inquiry and worthless speculation, vaguely alluded to in Bondage of the Will, with Hayekian categories propounded in The Theory of Complex Phenomena – specifically with regard to questions probing into the will of God.
In the first place, we must be clear on what we are talking about. The moral will of God is perfectly clear in a way that the particular will of God is not:
We must discuss God, or the will of God, preached, revealed, offered to us, and worshipped by us, in one way, and God not preached, nor revealed, nor offered to us, nor worshipped by us, in another way. . . .
Now, God in his own nature and majesty is to be left alone; in this regard, we have nothing to do with him, nor does he wish us to deal with him. We have to deal with him as clothed and displayed in his word, by which he presents himself to us. That is his glory and beauty, in which the Psalmist proclaims him to be clothed (Ps. 21:5). . . . God preached works to the end that sin and death may be taken away, and that we may be saved. . . .
But God hidden in majesty neither deplores nor takes away death, but works life and death, and all in all; nor has he set bounds to himself by his word, but has kept himself free over all things.
. . . God does many things which he does not show us in his word, and he wills many things which he does not in his word show us that he wills. Thus, he does not will the death of a sinner – that is, in his word; but he wills it by his inscrutable will. At present, however, we must keep in view his word and leave alone his inscrutable will; for it is by his word, and not by his inscrutable will, that we must be guided. In any case, who can direct himself according to a will that is inscrutable and incomprehensible? (pp. 169-171)
The distinction seems to be that the will of God Preached, that is of the Word of God, is clear enough to be discussed, but that the secret will of God, by which all things pass, should be left quite alone. He continues shortly thereafter,
I say, as I said before, that we may not debate the secret will of Divine Majesty, and that the recklessness of man, who shows unabated perversity in leaving necessary matters for an attempted assault on that will, should be withheld and restrained from employing itself in searching out those secrets of Divine Majesty; for man cannot attain unto them, seeing that, as Paul tells us (cf. 1 Tim. 6:16), they dwell in inaccessible light. But let man occupy himself with God incarnate, that is, with Jesus crucified, in whom, as Paul says (cf. Col. 2:3), are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (though hidden); for by him man has abundant instruction both in what he should and in what he should not know.(pp. 175-176)
But Luther certainly says things about the secret will of God. In addition to the third paragraph of the first blockquote above, he says that “The Christian’s chief and only comfort in every adversity lies in knowing that God does not lie, but brings all things to pass immutably, and that his will cannot be resisted, altered, or impeded” (p. 84). Nor do the scriptures themselves shy away from making statements like “God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose,” which seems like a general statement about the secret will of God.
The difference, of course, will be noted. To inquire into the moral will of God Preached is to apply general principles to specific situations, which if they do not uniquely determine an answer at least suggest a course of action. It may be profitably asked, “what would it look like to turn the other cheek in this situation?”, or “would buying a larger house demonstrate a lust of the flesh?”. What we can say about the secret will of God, however, though substantial, is not of such an immediately applicable nature. Given the fact that the secret will of God works all things for good to those who love him, it cannot be assumed that this principle will work in any particular way.
This distinction comports well with Hayek’s distinction between simple and complex phenomena: “The minimum number of elements of which an instance of the pattern must consist in order to exhibit all the characteristic attributes of the class of patterns in question appears to provide an unambiguous criterion.” That is, the more variables involved in the application of a theory to a particular instance, the more complex it is.
Hence, given the relatively small scope of the information which the human mind can correlate at one time, the principles in the Word of God are relatively simple. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind” has no variables at all. If there is a question as to whether this command applies, the answer is yes. Even more difficult questions, such as the definition of murder (is killing in self defense murder?), at most add one more variable to a question which already involves only one. There may be debates on what precisely the variables involved are, but no answer will involve more than a few. The human cannot be morally responsible for what he cannot conceive.1
On the other hand, a more complex phenomenon than the operation of the secret will of God cannot be imagined. The relevant variables are, quite literally, all of them. To determine specifically, not only whose good any particular circumstance works for but in what manner it works that good, would involve vastly more knowledge than any human mind is capable of correlating.
Hayek notes that “Such a theory [of a complex phenomenon] will . . . be one of small empirical content, because it enables us to predict or explain only certain general features of a situation which may be compatible with a great many particular circumstances. . . . In any case the range of phenomena compatible with it will be wide and the possibility of falsifying it correspondingly small.” Thus, the more complex a phenomenon, the smaller the range of particular phenomena will be ruled out by a theory as to its operation. The inclusion of everything under the sovereign will of God, being the most complex imaginable phenomenon, must thus be tautologically compatible with every observed particular circumstance. This denies Romans 8:28 the title of a scientific theory, which it never purported to be in the first place, but merely shows that the applicability of Hayek’s principles do not necessarily limit themselves to the strictly scientific.
The takeaway then, is that though we can know (and scripture reveals to us) patterns which emerge in the operation of the secret will of God, this pattern will rarely be recognizable as such. Its application to particular circumstances constitutes prying, as Luther put it. In the first place, the good being worked for is a spiritual good. The working of the Holy Spirit makes that good independent of circumstance. Though God indeed often works through circumstance as a proximate cause, it is not a necessary cause. To misunderstand that good as a material or circumstantial good is to invite such errors as a prosperity gospel. Furthermore, to attempt an application to particular events is an irrelevant exercise in falsification. The good of the elect will be accomplished regardless of our ability to comprehend it, and to try despite our inability is only to invite disappointment when our expectations do not pan out. “The validity of this general proposition is not dependent on the truth of the particular applications which were first made of it.”2
Luther argued that there are knowable principles by which the secret will of God operates, yet strongly condemned inquiry into its particulars. It would seem then that Luther, in drawing the boundary between profitable and useless theological inquiry, abided by and roughly anticipated (even if he did not articulate) the distinctions which Hayek found necessary to draw between the methods of the sciences dealing with phenomena of varying complexity. This keen awareness of the limits of what knowledge the mind can synthesize gave Hayek “an attitude of humility and reverence towards that experience of mankind as a whole that has been precipitated in the values and institutions of existing society,” a reverence which Luther would more rightly direct to God.
- As Hayek notes in another work (The Constitution of Liberty (1960), p. 83), moral responsibility must “refer only to such effects of his conduct as it is humanly possible for him to foresee and to such as we can reasonably wish hum to take into account in ordinary circumstances. To be effective, responsibility must be both defined and limited, adapted both emotionally and intellectually to human capacities.”
- Hayek continues, with regard to the theory of natural selection: “If, for example, it should have turned out that, in spite of their structural similarity, man and ape were not joint descendants from a comparatively near common ancestor but were the product of two convergent strands starting from ancestors which differed much more from each other (such as is true of the externally very similar types of marsupial and placental carnivores), this would not have refuted Darwin’s general theory of evolution but only the manner of its application to the particular case.”
