Whitby and Taylor were benevolent men, and they could not allow the deity to be other than themselves. Hence their hatred of nice speculations that might uncover their secret delusion, "It is one great reason," said Edwards in his finest vein,"why speculative points are thought to be of so little importance, that the modern religion consists so little in respect of the divine Being, and almost wholly in benevolence to men." (p. 118)Some men are naturally benevolent. For them, benevolence is easy, and they do not object to God's commands that mandate it, but sternness is difficult, and so they do object to God's commands to be stern. They are just as disobedient as the temperamentally savage man who delights in condemning wickedness but who objects to showing kindness in situations where that is what God commands.
Anybody wishing to follow his own wishes and his own moral inclinations will naturally want to avoid thinking too hard, or studying the Bible, because he wants to avoid anything that will upset his own selfish desires. A related point is that if you are interested more in morality than in God, you will feel little need to look in the Bible, since the world provides lots of data on morality; and data on God, which is what the Bible is indispensable for, is of little interest to you.
Edwards most effectively assailed the Arminian theology ... by calling it an insult to
human suffering-- a charge that echoes down the intervening centuries as the implacable
comment upon the multitudinous forms of Protestant liberalism. (p. 120).
Liberals objected to predestination because it is "cruel"; yet the things we see and
know of mortality-- "the extreme sufferings of infants"-- ought by the same token to be
"objected mightily against, as inconsistent with God's moral perfections, not tending
towards amiable ideas of the Godhead."
This is a very useful point. The apparent cruelty of the predestination of some men
to Hell and others to Heaven is a mystery, but no greater a mystery than the unhappy
temporal lives of so many men. Thus, while the problem of pain may be an argument
against God's existence, or His benevolence, it is not an argument against
predestination.
Moreoever, it is quite true that liberal religion insults suffering people. It says that a person works his own salvation. The obvious conclusion is that if you are suffering, it's your own fault. Christian Science-- headquartered in boston and so popular with the descendants of the Puritans-- carries this to the logical extreme of saying that if you're sick, it's your own fault. It could be, of course, that this insult is justified. Hinduism, for example, suggests that if you are suffering, it is your punishment for the sins of your past lives. But such a belief is not a sign of the "nice" religion to which religious liberals incline. The Puritans give dignity to suffering: it is ordained by God for His divine purposes, and even the damned have the honor that their damnation is playing a part in God's plan. For the liberal, on the other hand, a person's suffering is an embarassment. The suffering person is a blot on God's nice world, a disgusting piece of dirt that He somehow omitted to wipe off.
[in full at 04.04.18a.htm]
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