Ronnie W. Rogers, “Taking every thought captive…”

Of course the answer to this question not only relates to the issues addressed, but also with the problem of evil, and every evil, harmful act…that is a part of our existence; however I have addressed that particular issue in another blog. This one seeks to explain my belief about the origin of sin as it relates to being a “minor calvinist”.  The following is a summary of what I affirm and disaffirm regarding this issue.

I affirm that sin and evil are the corruption of God’s good creation; further, this corruption is due to the act of free moral agents making free choices to choose contrary to what is righteous and good, when they could have chosen to do otherwise; moreover, Lucifer, Adam and Eve possessed the ability to have exercised their free choice of either obeying God or disobeying Him; therefore, sin is the result of God’s creatures, as free moral agencies,¹ making choices by exercising free will in the libertarian sense of free will,² thereby revealing sin to be deprivation not a part of creation.

I disaffirm that the origin of sin is due to God creating creatures to inevitably sin, withholding grace or ordering circumstances so that man had to sin³ or that sin was in any way caused by God; further, that sovereignty precludes Lucifer or man before the first sin from being truly free to sin or not to sin. Moreover, that compatibilism⁴ wherein man is free to act according to his nature or pleasure sufficiently answers where the first sin came from since Lucifer had no external or internal stimuli.

Next Topic: The Depravity of Man

1. “Technically, free will is not the efficient cause of a free act….The efficient cause of a free act is really the free agent, not the free choice. Free choice is simply the power by which the free agent acts….And once we have arrived at the free agent, it is meaningless to ask what caused its free acts. For if something else caused its actions, then the agent is not the cause of them and thus is not responsible for them. The free moral agent is the cause of free moral actions.” Norman Geisler, Chosen But Free, (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 1999) p176. [↩]
2. By libertarian, I am not implying that man, after the fall is fully free, but rather that before the fall Lucifer, Adam and Eve had “contrary choice.” [↩]
3. Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957) p413. [↩]
4. Edwards’ idea that, “if a person is able to do what he wills or chooses, he is free, no matter how he came to make this choice.” Freedom, p15, meaning regardless of the cause of the choice, which Edwards seems to mean “the ability to do what we will, or according to our pleasure” p11. Compatibilism is the view that man is free to make choices that are compatible with his nature. However, this leaves the question of what caused the first sin. In other words, if it is not the product of free choice in the libertarian sense, but only in the compatibilist sense, then did it arise out of the nature of Lucifer, which God directly created, or from overpowering stimuli from Lucifer’s environment, which God also directly created? Although Adam and Eve were tempted by the serpent, there could have been no reason that man would have had to freely choose sin (compatibilism) lest we have what God called “good” being by nature destined to sin. [↩]