1. People's beliefs and actions have their cause in their nature and motivations (Pink gives his examples of motivations such as "the logic of reason, the voice of conscience, the impulse of the emotions, the whisper of the tempter, the power of the Holy Spirit"). I think his basic point is right. We don't make our choices in a vacuum. You choose to open your umbrella because you don't want to get wet. You choose to tell the truth because you believe it is the right thing to do (or perhaps don't because you're trying to avoid getting in some trouble).
2. People do not choose the good and they lack any ability to do so. This denies the common experience of the good things that people often do. The Calvinist response is to either deny that those things are actually good or else state that they are outwardly good but lack any good motivation. Both responses seem to assume their conclusion by appealing to the agent's apparently unobservable "true" nature and motivation.
3. People have no ability to choose the good and they are morally responsible for not choosing the good. This also seems clearly wrong. Consider an analogous situation where you discover that a small child is drowning and that there is no way to save him except by swimming out to him. However, you can't swim and so he drowns. Can you be morally responsible for not saving him?
Taking a different approach to the essay:
ReplyDeletePink doesn't define what he means by good, but there is a definition along the lines that no behaviour or action is good in itself, but only those that are in accordance with the divine purpose. Some actions are so commonly good we call them such and almost think the goodness is intrinsic, yet actions must be taken in context, and in this case that context is the total vision of the divine.
So with this definition point 2 makes solid sense. We can guess at what actions are good or not, but without the specific guidance of the spirit any action we undertake thinking it is good may be against the divine will. In this framework, our will alone is not sufficient to choose a good act. This I assume falls within the "deny those things are actually good" you mention.
This leaves point 3, but I think the concept of per-action moral responsibility is not what Pink means. I understand Pink to mean that human's inclination is in a certain direction (acting without God) and continuing in this direction results in something like a default judgement. It is not a moral responsibility so much as a moral state: it simply is rather than being the result of something. This presumably becomes a discussion on original sin.
The wrinkle for Pink appears to be that a person can't contribute to their own salvation. It is granted by God, but God is not dependent on human action, so human action mustn't be a part of that granting. Jesus loved those who didn't yet love him: the action of God comes first.
My problem with this line of reasoning is that John the Baptist and Jesus both begin by calling upon people to repent. Why this emphasis if the listener is not able to repent? (The second last paragraph of Pink's seems to be an answer to this - that the call to repent is something to be said, because the word of the Gospel is itself God's power to the listener).
I think you're being very generous to the extremeness of Pink's views. :-)
DeletePoint 2 seems to imply that any human distinction between good and evil is pointless. It's not merely that people often behave badly or can make mistakes about what is good (which is true). It's that human nature makes any moral behaviour and moral knowledge impossible (except, it seems, of one's total depravity). As C.S.Lewis puts it, "There is a difference between imperfect sight and blindness. A theology which goes about to represent our practical reason as radically unsound is heading for disaster."
Point 3 is partly drawn from a footnote at the end of the essay in my copy of "The Sovereignty of God". Pink says, "The assumption that responsibility implies ability is a philosophical argument and not a biblical one." He also quotes Charles Hodge approvingly (from "Essays and Reviews") where he says, "It is one of the most familiar facts of consciousness that a sense of obligation is perfectly consistent with a conviction of entire inability ... It is a dictum of philosophers, not of common people, 'I ought, therefore, I can.' To which every unsophisticated human heart and especially every heart burdened with a sense of sin replies, 'I ought to be able but I am not.'"
The curious thing to me is that they both thought point 3 to not only be true but also obvious to everyone.