Faith Presbyterian Church Reformed

The following is from Dr. Gary Crampton's review of Gordon H. Clark's book, God and Evil:  The Problem Solved:

Arminianism, as an ostensible Christian system, also fails to give us a biblical theodicy (12-19). Arminian theologians attribute the problem of evil to the free will of man. In his freedom, Adam chose to sin, apart from God’s will. Adam had a “liberty of indifference” to the will of God. God merely permitted man to sin.

The idea of God’s merely “permitting” man to sin, however, is wholly unbiblical and does not give us a solution (17-19). Clark explains: [4]

Somehow the idea of God’s permitting evil without decreeing it seems to absolve God from the charge that he is the ‘author’ of sin, but one must be careful, both with respect to the logic of the argument and to the full scriptural data. God ‘permitted’ Satan to afflict Job; but since Satan could not have done so without God’s approval, the idea of permission hardly exonerates God. Is perfect holiness any more compatible with approving or permitting Satanic evil? If God could have prevented, not only Job’s trials, but all the other sins and temptations to which mankind is subject – if he foresaw them and decided to let them occur – is he less reprehensible than if he positively decreed them? If a man could save a baby from a burning house, but decided to ‘permit’ the baby to burn, who would dare say that he was morally perfect in so deciding?

Such a view of permission and free will cannot coexist with God’s omnipotence. Neither is the Arminian view of free will compatible with God’s omniscience, because omniscience renders the future certain (31,32). If God foreknows all things, then of necessity they will come to pass; otherwise, they could not be “foreknown.” God foreknew, even foreordained, the crucifixion of his Son by the hands of sinful men. Yet, according to Scripture the godless men who carried out the act are responsible (Acts 2:22,23; 4:27,28). Could they have done differently? Could Judas Iscariot not have betrayed Jesus Christ? To ask the questions is to answer them; of course not (41). The God of the Bible, writes Clark, “determines or decrees every action” (20). Hence, Arminianism’s attempted refuge in free will is both “futile” and “false; for the Bible consistently denies [the Arminian view of] free will” (19).

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