Eddie Asks: Does God Govern Evolution?

Hi, Jordan. Glad to “meet” you.

I suppose it depends on what you count as “classical Arminian.” I once read an article on the internet by an Arminian who argued that the “classical Arminian” position, as understood by Calvinists, isn’t what Arminius actually held, and isn’t even what all Arminians today hold. So you might have to specify what Arminians do believe (or at least what you as an Arminian believe) about God’s relationship to the natural world.

As for “not very well-represented”, well, I’m not sure that is true, at least of past discussions; BioLogos used to be dominated by Arminians, often in the form of Nazarenes, who are significantly Wesleyan in their roots. Not only Falk and Giberson but several guest columnists brought in by them were Nazarenes. (I always found it odd that a site which purportedly dealt with “Christian theology and science” seemed to deal more with “Nazarene theology and science”.) And Oord was a “Wesleyan” of sorts, or thought he was.

It also used to be a common distinction on BioLogos that certain people preferred the “Wesleyan” to the “Calvinist” theology, and in terms of evolutionary biology, this cashed out (especially for Falk and Venema) as: “God would never be so tyrannical [sc. like that meanie Calvinist God] as to dictate exact evolutionary outcomes to nature; he would give nature its ‘freedom’” Do you see the implied comparison? Calvin teaches a tyrannical God, Wesley one more sensitive to the aspirations of his subjects. (Sounds a lot like the protest of the American colonies against British government, and indeed, the whole “freedom vs. authority” trope that pervades these discussions seems more motivated by American free-church cultural preferences than anything one finds in the Bible or the classical Christian writers.)

In short, I have always found the suggestion that Wesleyans think differently about evolution than Calvinists to be murky, and theologically and philosophically unclear. If you can be clearer than Falk, Giberson, Venema, etc., about how the actual teaching of Wesley (or of Arminius, if you prefer) would cash out in terms of God’s role in the evolutionary process, I for one would be very grateful.

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