voluntas Dei: will of God; i.e., the attribute of God according to which God may be said to have a potency or, more precisely, an appetitive potency (potentia appetitiva) ad extra that operates to bring about the good known to and desired by God as the highest end or greatest good (summum bonum) of all things; it also operates to defeat all evil in the created order. Since the divine essence is simple and the summum bonum is God himself, it is also correct to say that God is what he wills, in an ultimate sense, and that the divine will is both one (unica) and simple (simplex). Nevertheless, the scholastics do make a series of distinctions in the divine will as it relates either directly or indirectly to creatures and as it can be known or must remain hidden to creatures. The Protestant scholastics here draw directly on the language of the medieval doctors, modifying it to suit the needs of Protestant systems. The Lutherans and the Reformed agree in a primary distinction between God’s voluntas necessaria sive naturalis, necessary or natural will, and God’s voluntas libera, free will. The former term indicates the will that God must have and employ according to his nature and by which God must necessarily will to be himself, to be who and what he eternally is. Thus God wills his own goodness, justice, and holiness, necessarily or naturally so. The voluntas necessaria sive naturalis indicates the precise correspondence of the divine will with the divine essence. The latter term, voluntas libera, indicates the utterly free will according to which God determines all things. Since it is the voluntas libera that is operative ad extra, it is also the subject of further distinction.
A primary distinction in the voluntas libera may be made between the voluntas decreti vel beneplaciti and the voluntas signi vel praecepti. The former, the will of the decree or of (the divine) good pleasure, is the ultimate, effective, and absolutely unsearchable will of God, which underlies the revealed will of God. It may therefore also be called the voluntas arcana, or hidden will, and the voluntas decernens, or decisive, deciding will of God. Lutheran orthodoxy uses the term with reference to the work of salvation only in the sense that human beings cannot know the ultimate reason in the mind and will of God for the gracious salvation of some rather than others. The Reformed, by contrast, argue for a hidden will of God to bestow special saving grace irresistibly on the elect, a voluntas decreti sive beneplaciti arcana, more ultimate than the revealed will of God to offer salvation to all by means of a universal grace. This distinction is denied by the Lutherans as endangering the universal grace. The voluntas decreti vel beneplaciti, for orthodox Lutheranism, is not an externally effective will, but rather only a will to limit the extent of revelation. The Reformed make the voluntas decreti vel beneplaciti the ultimate, effective will of God. The voluntas signi vel praecepti, the will of the sign or precept, is God’s voluntas revelata, or revealed will, and his voluntas moralis, or moral will, according to which God reveals in signs and precepts his plan for human obedience and faith both in the law and in the gospel. Here, again, the Lutherans and Reformed differ insofar as the former deny the contrast between a universally offered salvation revealed in the voluntas signi and a secret elective will in the voluntas beneplaciti.
The distinction between the voluntas signi and the voluntas beneplaciti can be turned about into a distinction between the signum voluntas and the beneplacitum voluntas. The will of the sign or precept (voluntas signi) is also a revealed sign of the divine will (signum voluntatis), and just so the will of God’s good pleasure (voluntas beneplaciti) is the good pleasure of God’s will (beneplacitum voluntas).
A second set of distinctions can be made between the voluntas Dei absoluta et antecedens, the absolute and antecedent will of God and the voluntas Dei ordinata et consequens. The Lutheran orthodox argue for this distinction as a description of the effective will of God ad extra and juxtapose it with the previous distinction between the revelative will of God and the hidden will. The voluntas absoluta et antecedens, sometimes called voluntas prima, first or primary will, is the eternal divine will in and of itself, according to which the ultimate end or final good is willed by God apart from consideration of conditions, circumstances, and means to be encountered or used proximately in the achievement of the divine purpose. The voluntas ordinata et consequens, sometimes called voluntas secunda, second or secondary will, is the will of God according to which he orders proximate causes and effects both in terms of the universal order and its laws and in terms of the circumstances that arise out of the contingent events and the creaturely free wills resident in the order. The voluntas ordinata therefore corresponds with the potentia ordinata, or ordained power of God, whereas the voluntas consequens is a distinct willing that rests on the divine decree and foreknowledge. In the systems of Lutheran orthodoxy, the voluntas consequens is the will of God that elects intuitu fidei, in view of faith, a point rejected by the Reformed.
The Reformed also deny the Arminian form of a distinction between voluntas antecedens and voluntas consequens, according to which God antecedently and absolutely wills one thing, such as to save all of humanity in Christ, and then consequently and relatively or conditionally wills another, namely, to save some human beings because they have come to faith in Christ. In this form, the distinction assumes contradictory wills in God, renders God reactive, amounts to a denial of the freedom and independence of the divine will, and implies contingency in God himself. The Reformed thus deny the distinction when the consequent willing responds to the will of the creatures and stands contrary to the antecedent. They allow, however, at least two uses of the antecedent/consequent distinction. It can simply indicate a divine willing that follows as a consequence of the divine antecedent willing, as when God, having willed antecedently to punish unremitted sins, consequently wills the damnation of particular human beings because of their sins. Beyond this, as in the hypothetical universalist (see universalismus hypotheticus) formulation offered by Davenant, the antecedent willing is identified as a conditional willingness (velleitas)—i.e., not an effective willing, but an openness related to the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice for all sin—and the consequent will is identified as an absolute and effective will to save the elect. The Reformed accept, moreover, the distinction between an antecedent voluntas absoluta and a consequent voluntas ordinata (in conjunction with that between potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata), inasmuch as the antecedent absolute will is not an operational willing but a will in relation to all possibility, and the consequent ordained will is God’s utterly free willing to actualize certain possibles.
They further argue for the distinction of the voluntas decreti vel beneplaciti or voluntas decernens into the categories of voluntas efficiens, effecting will, and voluntas permittens, permitting will. Under the former category, God is viewed as directly, or indirectly through instrumental causes, effecting his positive will, whereas under the latter category God is understood as permitting both contingent events and acts of free will even when such events and acts go against his revealed will. Since God is not a Deus otiosus, or idle God, the voluntas permittens is typically called voluntas efficaciter permittens, an effectively permitting will (see concursus).
Finally, the Protestant scholastics argue for a series of distinctions in the voluntas signi vel praecepti. This phrase is, first, synonymous with voluntas revelata and voluntas moralis. As such, several of the Lutheran orthodox argue that the voluntas signi is not truly the will of God but an effect of his will or a subsidiary willing resting on the voluntas antecedens and, formally, on the voluntas consequens. In other words, it is an effect or object of the divine will that provides a sign of what is willed in and by God. The voluntas revelata can be distinguished into a voluntas legalis, according to which God demands obedience to his will, and a voluntas evangelica, according to which God wills to save through grace in Christ. Here the Reformed occasionally allow a distinction between voluntas antecedens and voluntas consequens. The former refers to the commands of God, the voluntas legalis, which ordains the conditions of human life absolutely; the latter refers to the voluntas evangelica, which establishes the conditions under which fallen human beings can be saved.
Richard A. Muller,
Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms: Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic: A Division of Baker Publishing Group, 2017), 399–402.
euarestia (εὐαρεστία): acceptance, approbation; specifically, the divine approbation, related to the preceptive will (voluntas praecepti) of God and distinguished from the eudokia, or good pleasure, of God in his decree. The divine euarestia refers to what is pleasing to God in the sense of his revealed will, as distinct from the divine good pleasure (beneplacitum) in the sense of the ultimate will of God.
Ibid., 110.
eudokia (εὐδοκία): goodwill, good pleasure, favor; used by the Protestant scholastics as a synonym for benevolentia or favor Dei in their discussions of the attributa divina and the opera Dei ad extra. In Reformed orthodoxy the eudokia, or beneplacitum, of God is the ground of God’s elective choice (Eph. 1:5). A contrast is therefore made between the divine eudokia, or decretive good-pleasure, and the divine euarestia, or divine approbation, or preceptive willing.
Ibid., 111.
velleitas (or velle): willingness; thus (1) the condition of having a capability of willing or the ability of a spiritual being to act without exterior compulsion; or (2) a general willingness or nonefficacious openness of will to the occurrence of something, as distinct from an actual or efficacious willing.
Ibid., 387.
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