Author of the World but Not of Sin and Evil?

Ch. 4 of My Master's Thesis on the God-As-Author Analogy

God, from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass: yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.

Westminster Confession of Faith, 3.1.

Dialogical Determinism

Is the authorial analogy for the God-world relation able to affirm, with the Westminster Divines, that while God ordains whatsoever comes to pass, He is neither the author of sin nor destroyer of creaturely wills? Do authorial analogies implicitly or even explicitly make God the author of sin and evil? While Vanhoozer’s authorial analogy certainly presents a strong notion of authorial sovereignty, he contends that it does not make God the author of sin and evil. This is a contention we share with him. Throughout the course of this chapter, we will raise the problem of authoring evil as it specifically presents itself to Vanhoozer’s authorial analogy and then explain, with the help of various tools from analytic philosophy and theology, how Vanhoozer’s analogia auctoris not only resists the charge of authoring evil, but also provides a helpful model for thinking through God’s relation to evil in general.

In the previous chapter, we expounded Vanhoozer’s particular conception of authorship, Triune dialogic polyphonic authorship. Vanhoozer opted for dialogism over the monologic authorship of Tolstoy, wherein characters are mere mouthpieces of their author’s message, and over the radical polyphonic authorship of the left-wing interpretation of Bakhtin, which serves to destroy the agency of the author. As we saw, Vanhoozer’s appropriation of dialogic polyphonic authorship for his authorial analogy allows him to affirm God’s sovereignty over the story of creation while also affirming the freedom – answerability – of God’s characters, His image bearers. In conceiving of the story of the world as a dialogue, Vanhoozer is able to explain the causal-joint between God and the world as divine interjection, which is a multi-perspectival endeavor. Vanhoozer explains that this model of authorship takes place on three different levels or dimensions, resulting in three types of dialogical authorship:

authorship1: God authors the created order as a whole from the “outside.”

authorship2: God authors history from within by speaking and acting.

authorship3: God authors Scripture by speaking and acting in, with, and through human authors who embody his voice at diverse times and places in diverse manners.[1]

Through His three-dimensional authorship of, in, and through the world, God exercises “dialogical determinism”[2] over the story of history. Whatever takes place in the novel of the world happens according to God’s decree, according to the plot as imagined by the Author beforehand. Through the three types of authorship listed above, God is able to accomplish His plans exactly how He intends.

In explicating his conception of dialogical determinism, Vanhoozer lists three pivotal tenets:

(1) The dialogue between God and human creatures is real- interpersonally genuine

(2) The effect is communicative

(3) The outcome is divinely determined[3]

While (3) explicates a divine determinism over the entire story, (1) and (2) together affirm the genuine freedom of the divinely determined creature to answer, or not answer, the Author’s call. Thus, Vanhoozer’s authorial analogy for the God-world relation is committed to both theological determinism and human responsibility. In defining theological determinism, Heath White explains that

Theological determinism is of course a form of determinism. Determinism is a form of conditional necessity: given these facts or events over here, some other fact or event over there must be the case or must occur. The “must” can come in different flavors, depending on the type of determinism in view… it is a further requirement on determinism that the determining facts explain the determined facts and not vice versa… theological determinism is a rather simple kind of determinism. The determining factor is God’s will, and the determined facts are every (other) contingent state of affairs.[4]

Thus, in picking out the “flavor” of Vanhoozer’s dialogical determinism, we note that in making use of - , God accomplishes the “must” of his divine decree through the mechanism of dialogical interjection. This then accounts for an interesting take on meticulous providence, but nonetheless, it is still a form of meticulous providence as well as divine determinism.

As a form of divine determinism then, we have to ask the question, if God determines everything that comes to pass, is He not morally responsible for the evil that takes place in His world? In authorial terminology, if God is the Author of the novel of history, doesn’t that make God the author of sin and evil? William Lane Craig certainly claims