A female pastor.

Occasionally a member of the congregation or sometimes even the wider public sends us a question about some aspect of the Christian faith generally or First Baptist Church’s more particular beliefs. Recently someone asked why Southern Baptist churches (like First Baptist here in Granada Hills) are opposed to the idea of women serving as pastors of churches. It’s a fair question, and one that has been thrust back into the consciousness of Baptist churches because of some recent events.

This summer the Surry Baptist Association of North Carolina voted to end its official relationship with Flat Rock Baptist Church in Mt. Airy after the church called a new pastor. A group of presumably pleasant Christians with a presumably pleasant pastor were given the associational boot. Why? Because Flat Rock’s new pastor is a woman.

Predictably, some have seen the association’s action here as a scandal: Doesn’t the Surry Baptist Association understand that all of us, both men and women, are made in the image of God? (Gen. 1:27) Doesn’t the association get that, in Christ, there’s neither male nor female? (Gal. 3:28) Don’t they know that Phoebe was a “diakonos,” that Philip’s daughters were prophetesses, and that Junia was numbered among the apostles? (Rom. 16:1, Acts 21:8-9, Rom. 16:7) And don’t those who voted for Flat Rock’s ouster see that God has blessed women with all sorts of gifts pertaining to administration, counseling, public speaking, and scholarship—the very qualities that make for good pastoral leadership?

The answer to each of these questions is “yes.”

The Surry Baptist Association, as an association affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, affirms article III of the Baptist Faith and Message, which in turn affirms that both men and women are made in the image of God. Likewise, the Surry Baptist Association, in a recently released statement on the controversy, wholeheartedly endorsed the authority of Galatians 3:28 and its teaching that, when it comes to salvation in Christ, distinctions related to gender have no standing. The association’s statement also revealed an awareness of the ministries performed by women in Scripture, and even went so far as to grant that there are female pastors in other denominations “who are kind and knowledgeable, and who work hard to care for the churches that have employed them.”

Despite all this, though, the great majority (80%) of the messengers at the Surry Baptist Association—in keeping with Southern Baptist views generally—still voted to cut ties with a local church that had called a woman as its pastor. The reason the association gave for its own actions should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with these sorts of disputes: even granting all of the above, Flat Rock Baptist Church’s decision to call a woman specifcially as a pastor was clearly unbiblical.

The association pointed to 1 Timothy 2:12 and 3:2, a pair of texts that state women ought not teach men within the context of a local church… and that pastors must be able teach. The upshot, as far as the association was concerned, was that, biblically speaking, women can’t legitimately be pastors over congregations, which generally include men. The association anticipated that critics would respond with arguments to the effect that the relevant commands of 1 Timothy were temporally and culturally bound, that they don’t necessarily apply today. In the face of such foreseeable objections, the association rightly noted that the Apostle Paul’s guidance in 1 Timothy 2 and 3 is rooted not in cultural contingencies but in human nature. Paul didn’t ground his authoritative teaching in the spiritual misadventures of Delilah, or Jezebel, or some other highly specific, thoroughly acculturated woman in Scripture; in 1 Timothy 2:14 Paul grounded his teaching in the misadventures of Eve, the archetypical woman, the everywoman. It was with this in mind that the Surry Baptist Association concluded that Flat Rock Baptist had indeed diverged from biblical guidelines, and then moved to disassociate itself from the church.

Echoing the sentiments of many progressive Baptists upset by the association’s vote, a commentator at Baptists Today lamented Surry Baptist Association’s “inerrantist, literalist interpretation of scripture.” The writer grumbled further that “inerrancy-fogged glasses” will prevent some from seeing all the good that is being done at Flat Rock Baptist Church. Be that as it may, such rhetoric essentially vindicates the association’s position and that of the SBC more broadly.

The doctrine of inerrancy is, after all, an affirmation of the truth and reliability of the Bible, not a statement as to how specific passages of scripture ought to be interpreted. So when critics condemn the Surry Baptist Association for its decision in this matter—all the while noting that that decision was fueled by a belief in biblical inerrancy—the critics aren’t claiming that the association got the Bible wrong; they’re claiming that the association dared to believe that the Bible itself was right.

I suspect that this latter charge is one to which the Surry Baptist Association—and Southern Baptists generally—would gladly confess.

The inquirer was struck by the fact that Colossians 3:1 tells Christians, ”Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.” Did you catch that? “Since, then, you HAVE BEEN raised?” It seems like Paul is talking about our resurrection as something past, not something future; as our life of discipleship and not some actual miracle in which the literally dead come to life again.

My questioner wanted to know how to understand this passage in light of Paul’s statements elsewhere (e.g. 1 Corinthians) in which the resurrection is forcefully described as a future miracle. Had Paul perhaps changed his mind? Was this evidence of a contradiction in Scripture? Is it the case, perhaps, that we are currently living fully resurrected lives and that this is exactly what the resurrection looks like?

To help set the question in a more informed context I mentioned the work of N. T. Wright. Wright is currently a professor of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and Newsweek once referred to him as “the world’s leading New Testament Scholar.” In his excellent book on the resurrection of Jesus, The Resurrection of the Son of God, Wright examines all the literature from the early Christian era (and before) that speaks of “resurrection” and delves into the specific meaning behind that word. When he considers the passage in Colossians 3, he writes that Paul is speaking metaphorically when he uses the term “resurrection” and that, in so doing, he was adapting a long-standing Jewish practice:

Question: Southern Baptists generally believe that a person who is truly saved simply cannot lose their salvation. But how do they reconcile that view with all the verses that seem to imply the exact opposite?

Answer: This question is a great one, but like a lot of great questions answering it takes a while. Our Wednesday evening study sessions focusing on this issue took a full three weeks to complete. I won’t go into all those details here but I’ll nevertheless try to give a good overview of my response.

First, it’s important to understand what the doctrine generally called the “perseverance of the saints” actually entails. Traditionally speaking, the doctrine runs something like this: All those who have genuinely come to know and love the Lord, accepting both his authority and forgiveness and receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit as a result will never be lost; they might drift away for a time into sin, but ultimately they’ll come back around to repentance. It’s important to lay this out because too often people assume that the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints simply asserts that everyone who at some time claims to be a Christian will be saved. But, as Jesus said, there are such things as false confessors; it’s only true believers that we are concerned with here.

So let’s list the verses that Southern Baptists (and others) believe indicate that a person simply cannot lose his salvation.  There are a bunch: John 6:39, 10:27-29; Romans 8:30, 8:38-39, 11:28-29; 1 Peter 1:3-5, etc. In these verses we’re told that nothing can separate us from God’s love, that God himself protects our salvation, that Christ will not lose any that are his, and so on. Taken together they are pretty impressive.

But hold on a moment, says a well-informed and thorough-going Arminian (let’s say an evangelical Methodist), what about the verses that point in the opposite direction? These seemingly counter-indicating passages are of two kinds: verses that seem to speak of people who have fallen away (or will fall away) from the faith (I Timothy 4:1; 2 Timothy 2:16-18), and verses that warn us against falling away ourselves (1 Corinthians 10:12; Hebrews 2:1, 6:4-6, 10:26-27).

Of course, these countering verses are nothing new, and as such there are conventional responses to both groups. Baptists and others sometimes try to explain the phenomenon of apostasy—either in scripture itself or in our own experience—with reference to 1 John 2:19: “They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us.” In other words, the very fact that a person “abandons” the faith merely reveals that they never belong to it in the first place—not really.

Similarly, the passages that warn us of the dangers of apostasy are explained as the very instruments by which the Lord helps ensure that we don’t fall away. Remember, the perseverance of the saints doesn’t say that believers logically can’t lose their salvation, just that they actually won’t. True apostasy is logically possible (in a strict sense); it’s just a logical possibility that will never be actualized because of God’s providential care for the believer.

Maybe a non-religious example would be helpful here: imagine that you are driving to some relative’s house you’ve never visited before. The relative lives out in some unfamiliar part of the country and you’re having a very difficult time finding your way. So, after some frustration, you pull into a gas station and ask for directions. The attendant (who knows the area like the back of his hand) says, “You’re a friend of Edna’s? Well, shoot, I know exactly where she lives. Here, let me show you how to get there. Now I know the roads are a bit confusing, but trust me: you are absolutely going to arrive!” With that the attendant takes your map, marks it in a few places with the appropriate turns and warnings against false trails, gives it back to you, and sends you on your way. The attendant has promised you’ll arrive, but the promise is made in connection with the map—the map is the very instrument by which the promise will be fulfilled. Similarly, those who would affirm the perseverance of the saints say that the warnings against apostasy are the very instruments by which God ensures that his children won’t apostatize.

Now this particular problem requires us to face the broader issue of confidence in matters of belief. The fact is, not everything in our theology is equally well and unequivocally supported by Scripture. When we look to the Bible, some things are undeniable (e.g. that Jesus will return someday in some capacity), but other things are less than entirely clear (e.g. the specific way we ought to correlate Christ’s return with the millennium described in Revelation), and some things are just flatly unknowable with the information we actually have in hand (e.g. what size shoes Jesus will be wearing when this all happens). Given, then, that the confidence with which we hold our beliefs ought to possess some relationship to the level of evidential support those beliefs enjoy, the more or less evidence we have for something the more or less confidence we can legitimately have in it. We can even draw up a graph that illustrates the matter.

The question now is, in light of all the pertinent verses listed above, what level of confidence can we have that a person truly saved will simply never lose his salvation? Can we be very confident, ought we perhaps be a bit more modest, or should we just drop the affirmative belief altogether? Well, if all we had were the first set of verses, those that initially ground the doctrine, I think that we could be quite confident. But there are those counter-indicating passages. Now I know that we have rebuttals to our Methodist friend’s interpretation of those passages, and I think that those rebuttals are good, but I don’t think that they’re great; the rebuttals leave something of a bad taste in my mouth—it seems sort of like I’m squirming to avoid the plain-sense interpretation. So while I’m not inclined to grant Mr. Methodist the full force of his objections, I’ll concede that he’s got something, something that makes me less than entirely confident in my belief in the perseverance of the saints. To refer to my chart above, Mr. Methodists objections aren’t enough to knock me from a high level of confidence down to no confidence at all, but they do force me to retreat down the arrow a bit nevertheless.

Ultimately I think that the balance of evidence favors a belief in the perseverance of the saints. I believe it. But, at the same time, I don’t hold my view with a sort of casual triumphalism; I hold the view humbly, recognizing that I might be wrong, and I’m willing to discuss the matter with an open mind.

Wednesday night’s study was the second installment of our renew series of “Questions from the Congregation.” In our first session we discussed the relationship between freewill and omnipotence. This time the topic was a bit more… theatrical, let’s say.

Question: In John 14:12, Jesus said, “anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.” So, why can’t we preform amazing miracles?

Here’s Pastor Eugene’s response…

Why indeed! Who wouldn’t like to be able to walk through solid walls, stride across sea water, give sight to the blind, and raise the dead? And here we have a passage that, at least on its face, seems to promise us that as Christian’s we should be able to do these very things—better things even! But for some reason miracles aren’t commonplace (to say the least) in our contemporary experience. Why is that?

Well, first let’s look at an answer to this question that probably won’t work: cessationism. Cessationism is the belief that while God gave the early Christian community the ability to do miraculous things (speak languages they never studied, heal the sick, etc.) this was a temporary thing. Indeed, cessationism often posits some specific restriction on who would be able to do these wonders: sometimes it’s just the Apostles, other times it’s the Apostles and those upon whom they laid hands, still other times it’s every Christian who lived prior to the canonization and dissemination of the New Testament. Regardless of the variant under consideration, cessationism says that eventually these abilities dried up and that ever since then the Church has had to get along through plain ol’ natural ministry (as opposed to supernatural ministry).

This sort of a theory makes sense of the disconnect between what seems to be the almost routine appearances of miracles in , say, the Book of Acts, and their scarcity in modern Christian experience. Also, to buttress their case, proponents of cessationism can cite at least one passage of Scripture which at least sounds like it supports their theory: 1 Corinthians 13:8-10. “Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.”

Now, regardless of the merits of cessationism more generally, it doesn’t seem particularly relevant to the question at hand. After all, in John 14:12 Jesus doesn’t say, “any of the Apostles who has faith in me will do what I have been doing.” Nor does he say, “anyone who lives in the first century who has faith in me will do what I have been doing.” Rather, Jesus’ promise is unconditional: “anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing.” “Anyone;” that’s pretty broad—and it would seem to include even those of us who happen to be Christians in the 21^st century.

So if cessationism doesn’t seem directly relevant, what are our other options?

There is, of course, the hard-nosed option. One can say that Jesus’ words are exactly what they appear to be—a promise of miraculous power to those with faith—and then go on to say that any lack of this miraculous ability in ourselves is a sign of our lack of faith. As even C. S. Lewis said,

“we ought all of us to be ashamed of not performing miracles and that we do not feel this shame enough. We regard our own state as normal and theurgy [i.e. miracle working] as exceptional, whereas we ought perhaps to regard the worker of miracles, however rare, as the true Christian norm and ourselves as spiritual cripples.” (“Petitionary Prayer: A Problem Without an Answer, ” Christian Reflections)

This approach has the strength of directness, but, still, it seems a little… off. After all, even if we look at the “canonical” (in the literal sense) spiritual giants of the New Testament itself, while we do find them working miracles, we don’t necessarily find them doing greater miracles than Jesus—as this approach would seem to require. Sure, Peter heals a lame man in Acts 2, that’s nice. But where in Acts does Peter not only raise a widow’s dead son but, then, to top Jesus, raise her entire extended family as well? Where are the stories of Paul feeding the 5,000 and then proceeding to feed the 50,000? Where is the biblical record of John not only giving sight to the blind but giving sight to a stone? These stories just don’t exist—at least not in the early documents that would eventually come to be a part of the Bible. So despite the initial appeal of this unflinching “tell-it-like-it-is” approach, it seems to have a serious problem: not even the men who saw the risen Jesus themselves and therefore presumably had unshakable faith were really fulfilling the words of Jesus in John 14:12—at least not if miracles were specifically what Jesus was talking about.

That then leaves us with the third option: that Jesus wasn’t actually talking about miracles per se.

In John’s gospel, the miracles that Jesus does are routinely referred to as “signs”, that is, as things which pointed beyond themselves to establish something about Jesus. The miracles that Jesus did were “signs” that he was on God’s team, that God was endorsing his ministry. And given that Jesus makes some very big claims about himself in John’s gospel (e.g. John 8:58), the miracles are thus signs that he wasn’t a blasphemer but that he was, in fact, telling the truth about himself. Jesus seems to discuss this very sort of thing in John 14, the immediate context of our “problem passage.” In John 14:9-11, Jesus says, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves.” In other words, there is some very intimate connection between the Father and Jesus, one that is demonstrated to the world by the amazing things Jesus has done.

It’s also interesting to note that our “problem passage” occurs in immediate connection with Jesus’ comments concerning his departure from his followers and the coming of the Spirit. In John 14:13 Jesus speaks of his departure but then goes on in verses 16-17 to say, “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever—the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.” Now think about that, our passage occurs immediately after a section in which Jesus once more affirms that the intimate connection between himself and the Father is demonstrated to the all by the amazing things God has empowered him to do. Then, on just the other side of our verse, there is another passage in which Jesus speaks of his followers coming to have an intimate connection with the Father (through the Spirit). There seems to be a parallel here: Jesus is God’s supremely special agent in the world, and this relationship is attested to by Jesus’ amazing deeds; the Church will very soon become (in a derivative sense) God’s supremely special agent in the world, and this relationship will likewise be attested to by our amazing deeds.

Once we understand the significance and function of the “signs;” it’s no longer clear that the signs absolutely MUST be supernatural in nature. Any truly amazing thing that indicates a genuine connection to God would seem to be sufficient, though miracles would certainly qualify. And with this idea in place, suddenly Jesus’ comment about “greater things” begins to make more sense vis-à-vis what we see in Acts and, indeed, throughout all Christian history.

Jesus’ three years of earthly ministry resulted in somewhere around 500 followers. That’s not too shabby, I guess; I’d love to be able to add that many people to the membership of FBC Granada Hills in the same period.  But Acts tells us that Peter, in a single afternoon, added another 3,000 to the Christian community through his preaching. Clearly that is a “greater thing,” to use Jesus’ words.

The Christian church has continued this work over the centuries, often in ways that dramatically “better” Jesus’ own results—just as he said we would. When Jesus stood before the Roman governor, Pilate, Jesus died; when Paul stood before another Roman Governor, Festus, Paul was merely mocked in a half-complimentary way; when certain later Christians stood before the Roman emperor, Constantine, Constantine converted. When Jesus preached in Israel, many listened and, in time, a few were convinced; when Patrick preached in Ireland, many listened and, in time, the nation was convinced. Century after century the Church in its multiform expressions has brought Jesus’ message of salvation to literally billions of people. What’s more, we’ve built hospitals, established orphanages, outlawed slavery, and founded universities. Indeed, that a tiny breakaway sect of 1^st century Judaism would prove so prolific and fundamentally good for humanity, ultimately coming to be the single most populous and geographically diverse faith in the history of the world, is powerful testimony to the fact that, indeed, God is with us—initially in Jesus, our Emmanuel, but even still today, through his Spirit. And it is this Spirit that has enabled us to do these “greater things.”

As J. C. Ryle wrote,

“The full meaning of this promise [i.e. John 14:12] is not to be sought in the miracles which the Apostles wrought after Christ left the world. Such a notion seems hardly borne out by facts. We read of no Apostle walking on the water, or raising a person four days dead, like Lazarus. What our Lord has in view seems to be the far greater number of conversions, the far wider spread of the Gospel, which would take place under the ministry of the Apostles, than under his own teaching. This was the case, we know from the Acts of the Apostles. We read of no sermon preached by Christ, under which three thousand were converted in one day, as they were on the day of Pentecost. In short, ‘greater works’ mean more conversions. There is no greater work possible than the conversion of a soul.” (Expository Thoughts on the Gospels, St. John, Vol. III)

We’ve begun a new round of “questions from the congregation.” Individuals in the congregation submit questions or issues that they’d like addressed and Pastor Eugene chooses one each week to discuss during the Wednesday evening study. A shorted version of his responses will be posted to the blog for the benefit of those who were interested in a given topic but unable to attend the study in person.

Last Wednesday’s question was as follows: Does the fact that human beings have free will, free will that is sometimes expressed with the commission of terrible immoral atrocities against other people, indicate that there are limits on God’s omnipotence?

Here’s Pastor Eugene’s Response…

The above question is a reworked and Christianized version of the old atheistic logical argument from evil. According to that argument, given that God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good, he wouldn’t allow evil to exist: he’d know about it, he’d have the desire to get rid of it, and he’d have the ability to follow through on that desire—thus, no evil. But, of course, evil does exist so, ergo, God must not exist, says the atheist. Our question, however, assumes that God does exist, and so it asks if we need to down-grade one of his classical attributes: his omnipotence. It’s a good question, I’ll admit. There is an intuitive tension between the reality of evil in the world on the one hand and God’s purported goodness and omnipotence on the other. What to do?

Well, one possible solution to this conundrum involves qualifying not God’s omnipotence but his goodness. According to this way of thinking one is simply mistaken in believing that certain realities exist that God doesn’t want. Our experience of genuine free will is illusory; our own choices are just echoes of God’s choices for us. In other words, everything that happens in our world, everything people do, happens because God wants it to happen, because he specifically desires it to happen. Did you have pancakes for breakfast? Well, then obviously that was God’s will. Did you decide to wear sandals today? Again, it’s the will of God.

Such a perspective maintains God’s absolute sovereignty and power. But it does so at a very high price. For while God’s omnipotence is thus secured, His goodness is at the very least radically reimagined: the world is full of more than just pancakes and flip-flops, after all. Did you rape and murder someone on the way to work? Well, again, according to this view, that’s obviously what God wanted you to do. The Holocaust, the Holodomor, Josef Fritzl’s lifestyle? All the suffering humanity has ever experienced—from the slightest inconvenience to the most terrible atrocities? All of it was willed by God, all of it conforms to his desires.

Some might be tempted here to point out that, according to classical Christian teaching, humanity is a pack of desperate, ungrateful sinners and to further assert that God is within his rights to subject such rebels to whatever ignominies he desires. Don’t forget, though, for this strongly predestinarian solution to the paradox to work, literally everything that happens must be God’s will… and that includes mankind becoming sinful in the first place. As John Calvin wrote in his Institutes of the Christian Religion:

“I again ask how it is that the fall of Adam involves so many nations with their infant children in eternal death without remedy unless that it so seemed meet to God? Here the most loquacious tongues must be dumb. The decree, I admit, is, dreadful; and yet it is impossible to deny that God foreknew what the end of man was to be before he made him, and foreknew, because he had so ordained by his decree. … Nor ought it to seem absurd when I say, that God not only foresaw the fall of the first man, and in him the ruin of his posterity; but also at his own pleasure arranged it. For as it belongs to his wisdom to foreknow all future events, so it belongs to his power to rule and govern them by his hand.” (Book 3, Chapter 23, Sections 7-8)

In other words, God made humanity sinners… then he punishes us for being sinners; in short, God punishes us for his choices.

Now while we might feel that this makes God immoral, proponents of this approach caution that our understanding of goodness is flawed. We’re broken, after all, and thus we simply can’t rely on our moral intuition as an infallible guide. For a long time Americans thought it was morally acceptable to own slaves. For a long time Indians thought it was acceptable to burn widows. Even today a lot of Africans think it’s appropriate to mutilate the genitals of young girls. Given humanity’s track record of getting it wrong, morally speaking, who are we to think that we can reasonably and reliably sit in judgment of God?

Still, even with this very sobering caveat in place, I think that this solution to the dilemma is off the mark. When this view is laid out clearly and all of its deep implication have been brought to the surface, it doesn’t seem to be asking for a modest adjustment in our understanding of goodness; it’s asking for a near total rewrite—at least as far as God is concerned. It seems to me that this solution only preserves God’s omnipotence by making claims of his “goodness” vacuous, or, at the very least, hopelessly cryptic. As many have said previously, making God ultimately and directly responsible for all human actions seems to lead to the conclusion that, however hateful we find the phrase, God is the “author of evil.” And that’s not something most Christians are prepared to accept.

Thankfully, though, for those who find this approach unhelpful, there is another option. It’s long been understood that omnipotence doesn’t entail the ability to do literally anything, only anything capable of being done. As such, God needn’t be able to do the logically impossible in order to be omnipotent. For example, a square, by definition, is a shape with four sides; having four sides is a logically necessary part of its nature. If a square ceased to have four sides, it would thereby cease to be a square. And thus the phrase “a three sided square” isn’t just some odd and very uncommon sort of square, it’s a logically incoherent bit of nonsense. And as a result, the fact that God can’t make a three sided square doesn’t imply that God is weak, it’s merely a function of the fundamental logical impossibility of the task. (A similar thing can be said about asking if God can make a rock bigger than he can lift: a rock bigger than an omnipotent being can lift is a logical impossibility and thus simply can’t exist.)

But this awareness has a direct bearing on our dilemma, for if, as the dilemma assumes, humanity possesses free will even as it applies to moral issues, then it’s difficult to see how even an omnipotent being could “force” us to do only good. As C. S. Lewis once wrote:

“We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of this abuse of free will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound waves that carry lies or insults. But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void; nay, if the principle were carried out to its logical conclusion, evil thoughts would be impossible, for the cerebral matter which we use in thinking would refuse its task when we attempted to frame them.” (The Problem of Pain, Chapter 2)

Surely, though, such thoroughly un-free free will is a logical contradiction (just like a three-sided square); free-will utterly prevented from being free isn’t free will at all.  And since it’s a logical impossibility, it’s something that even an omnipotent being could not bring about, as the philosopher Alvin Plantinga has pointed out to great effect against the atheist’s argument from evil.

So, according to this later approach, the answer to the initial question, “does mankind’s free will indicate that there are limits on God’s omnipotence,” is, “that depends.” If by “limits” one means that God is rendered weak or ineffectual then the answer is clearly “no”. But if by “limits” one merely means logical boundaries beyond which lie nothing but meaningless word combinations, then sure, God’s omnipotence is limited: he can’t make three-sided triangles nor can he make un-free free agents. Indeed, his decision to make and sustain in being genuinely free creature does, as a matter of logical necessity, constrain him to some extent.

But far from diminishing God’s power and thus his dignity (as some of a predestinarian stripe are inclined to believe) such a development is, interestingly enough, a testimony to the greatness of our God. Again, as Lewis has written, this time in connection with the ultimate end of those who steadfastly resist the Lord with their freedom:

“Finally, it is objected that the ultimate loss of a single soul means the defeat of omnipotence. And so it does. In creating beings with free will, omnipotence from the outset submits to the possibility of such defeat. What you call defeat, I call miracle: for to make things which are not Itself, and thus become in a sense, capable of being resisted by its own handiwork, is the most astonishing and unimagineable of all the feats we attribute to the Deity.” (The Problem of Pain, Chapter 8 )