Episode 128: Interview with Dr. Ross McCullough

Ross McCullough comes on the show to discuss his new book Freedom and Sin: Evil in a World Created by God (Eerdmans Press). Although a bit more on the philosophical theology side, this podcast follows his argument of an asymmetrical approach to God's causality and human responsibility. I found his thesis very thought provoking. Thanks to Eerdmans Press for providing a copy of the book and suggesting such a great interview!

Timestamps:

2:30- Platonism and Christianity

10:32- The Separate Plane of God’s Action

21:07- Sin and Augustine

32:07- Free Will and Creation

42:59- Love and Self-Creation

46:50- Catholicism, Calvinism, and Platonism

Charles Kim 0:00

Hello and welcome to a history of Christian theology. My name is Chad Kim with me this week will be Ross McCullough. Ross McCullough has recently written a new book called freedom and sin evil in a world created by God with Erdman Press, Dr. McCullough explores the question of how it's possible that humans can be free, and God to not be responsible for sin, and a few other questions and a sort of similar vein. It is a kind of technical philosophical conversation. But I think it a very helpful and interesting proposal to try to solve some of these, you know, perennial problems in theology and philosophy. And so we're very grateful for Dr. McCullough for taking the time to talk with us, as well as for Eerdman's press for providing a copy of this book. I am sorry for the delay in getting out a new episode. I know it has been a while my, my assistant Grant has been out of the country. And he's doing some, some study abroad stuff. And also, I've just had a very busy semester of a lot of classes, and it's just been a little overwhelmed. So so thank you for bearing with me. You can find our more information about the podcast on a history of Christian theology.com as well as on Facebook. We appreciate all ratings and reviews on iTunes. And we appreciate you listening. So we'll see you next time. Anyway, I should say we have with us today on the history of Christian theology, Ross McCullough that I don't know how you pronounce the makalah. Yeah, okay. And there's a there's a episode of 30 rock that I was thinking of where Donaghy he talks about the different ways to pronounce Donaghy and donahey or something in the game. So I didn't know if there was some Gaelic pronunciation I was missing here but

Ross McCullough 1:53

I'm McCall's had been in America long enough that that's last time.

Charles Kim 1:58

Okay. Very good. And Ross has Dr. McCullough, Ross has written a book called Freedom and Sin: Evil in a World Created by God with Earth Eerdmins publishing company. And so we're grateful to Eerdmins for providing a copy of the book for the interview. And, and, and I think this is largely taken from your dissertation at Yale University. Is that correct? Like an edited form of that or?

Ross McCullough 2:27

That's right, it's a revised form of the dissertation. Okay.

Charles Kim 2:30

And but one thing that we were talking just as we were getting started, and it was interesting to hear your kind of notion of like interest in analytic philosophy alongside your, your Platonism. Right, so you have some self avowed Platonism, at the beginning, I so one of the other guys who has been on the podcast with me, is Trevor Adams, and he's doing his PhD in philosophy of religion, and sort of the analytic type. And he is very uncomfortable with calling himself a platonist. And my other friend who's on the podcast, Tom doesn't really like the Platonism thing. So I'm sort of surprised to hear and someone who's interested in analytic kind of theology be so a warm towards some Platonism. So how does that work for you?

Ross McCullough 3:17

Yeah, well, you know, Platonism is set in many ways. So I, I'm a Christian Platonist, I don't, I don't shy away from that label. For me, that represents the kind of broad stream of philosophical theology in Christianity, up until through the Reformation through the Protestant scholastics until maybe Schleiermacher, roughly speaking. And then and then it continues on after that, of course, too, but it becomes more disputed in that in the analytic world. Platonism is a is actually a fairly popular position, even among non Christians. So by that, by that philosophers tend to mean a kind of realism about universals in the way Plato did. So something like justice exists, how does it exist? You know, if you don't believe in God, so Augustine solution to this, how does it exist, it exists in the mind of God in some sense. And Christians generally take up something like that. The point is that it exists in some way independently of us. So we can we can true we can make true statements about justice and false statements about justice, that correspond to some some universal outside of our heads. And there's very strong reasons to want to say that right to say that there is some standard of justice that isn't just sort of what we invent as a society, or even as a whole species that that some things are just unjust, and that's a true statement. And so even non Christians, even non theists in the philosophical world will be Platonists about things like that. The other another way it plays it comes up with numbers. So math statements, like one plus one equal to that seems to be true in a way that's objective that is independent of our sort of social practices. And so So some people are Platonist in that sense, because there must be some truth of the proposition one plus one equals two that exists out there in some way. Of course, how it exists is very weird. If you're not a Christian, if you're a Christian, you just grounded in God, it's in the mind of God or something. And so non Christian Platonists have a kind of metaphysical problem. They're a problem of their ontology, sort of how these things exist, what kind of being they have, Christians, Christians could have solved that. And so in that, in that general sense, maybe even your friends would be Christian Platonists. That is follow the sort of basic stuff and Augustine. Now, as you alluded to, I'm a Christian Platonist in a slightly more robust sense than that, again, this more robust sense that that characterizes the tradition, the mainstream in the tradition, up for almost 2000 years. And that would be that would include things like the idea that evil is a privation that comes out of the Platonist tradition, the pre Christian Platonist tradition. Agustin famously gets it from the new Platonist before it becomes a Christian. But it's also picked, it's also used in the Christian tradition, even before Ausustine. So if you read much patristic theology, you'll know it's in Athanasius, it's in the Catholic oceans, it's in Augustine. And that's, that's an important, an important premise for kind of like basic Christian philosophical theology in my mind, and there's people who want to get rid of it. But I think you give up too much if you get rid of it. Other things, this is this gets in, again, closer to the argument of the book, or the structure of the book, things like the threefold God's threefold causality of of creation, that God is the efficient cause. God is the exemplary cause, and God is the final cause of all that exists. That's a plate that's a new Platonist idea. That's part of this broad Christian Platonism. And again, if you if you if you talk to the Protestants, if you talk to the Catholics in the 16th and 17th centuries, broadly speaking, they'll all agree with these things. So it's not really a confessional issue until later.

Charles Kim 6:57

Yeah. Well, yeah, that's it. And we've had we had Dr. David Bentley, Hart on talking a little bit about Aristotelian causes. And sort of, and others will know that in Aristotle, they're the four, you know, formal, efficient, material and final, I guess, right, something like that. So in the the Platonic concept you're in, that's what you're using in this book is primarily right, relying on this threefold notion of causation, right, rather than that in the more expanded version.

Ross McCullough 7:27

Well, so what happens the new Platonists take are sort of fusing Aristotle and Plato. And so they take Aristotle's fourfold scheme, and they add this sort of more platonic idea of an exemplary cause, which we can go into what exactly that is, and then also, so propolis does this most explicitly in his commentary in tomatoes, you also have the six cars and instrumental cars, it seems like maybe that's a species of efficient cars. But what you end up with is this is this more complicated scheme, where you have two kinds of causes two Aristotelian causes that are ingredient in the thing in the effect, that would be the material cause and the formal cause. So a thing has matter, a thing has formed, but those are part of the parts of the thing metaphysical parts, but parts of the thing. So, so external causes like God aren't going to be the material cause of the universe aren't going to be the formal cause of the universe, because that would be a kind of pantheism. But you have these other three causes the efficient cause, the final cause, and then this exemplary cause that the Neoplatonist bring in from Plato to supplement Aristotle's scheme. And that's, those get ascribed to God. So God is the threefold cause of the world God's not going to be because it's not pantheism God's only going to be those three causes. Does that make sense? You sort of tracking with you there. Yeah. And so so that's that, that's kind of how these things get Christianized. And then also, you know, the Muslims do a similar kind of thing. So it also gets, it just gets sort of monifieth stylized. Does it work?

Charles Kim 8:53

Right? Yeah, no, that's very helpful. And we'll and we could use that as a, as a stepping stone as a launching pad into the broader argument of the book. And one of the, like, sort of fundamental premises is this idea of God being non competitive with humans, right. So what kind of a cause God is and how that relates to human freedom and human action? is one of the one of the major working parts of this book, right. So if so, as I understand it, you say that, that God is non competitive with humans. And so I remember first encountering this with Herbert McCade just reading it sort of offhand, in, in my sort of PhD work, and I like so just as some background and some of the listeners will know this, like I was raised Southern Baptist and, and also, which were reformed high school, so I have kind of Presbyterian Baptist sort of roots. But this idea of noncompetition like the way that you stated in the book, like You know, I remember when when I kind of was like, first, it wasn't even till I was like in my late 30s, where I was like, Oh, wait, what does that mean? I just, I always just these took these two things to be necessarily competitive. And so it was kind of like an eye opening way to think about this differently. So can you say a little bit about that premise? Like, what and why, why that how that sort of changes the argument of this, the whole book, right? It leads into, as you say, into theodicy and into so many other realms. But it's but it's really important for how this argument works.

Ross McCullough 10:32

Yeah, that's right. So so the idea, the basic idea is that our action and God's action aren't on the same plane, it's not they don't form like a pie chart. And you can say, Oh, it's 50% us 50% God or 90%, God 10% us, there's not, there's not a kind of zero sum competition between the two. Instead, our action is 100%, ours and 100%. Gods, that's the idea. So it's non competitive, they're on different, they're on different levels, if you like, or sometimes one way of picturing it is that our actions are on this kind of horizontal plane. And then God's action is on a kind of vertical level, sustaining that or whole horizontal plane. So for any any particular thing in creation, it could be caused by us or by other creatures, right? By including by inanimate creatures, the sun warming a rock or something. So it's caused entirely, why is this, why is the rock warm, you can give an entire description of why the rock is warm, in terms of the sun and the other environmental factors. But then there's also an order of explanation that involves God doing it, God doing the whole thing God doing, sustaining the sun in existence, sustaining the rock and existence, and then moving the sun to act is somehow it's how it's sometimes it's described this way. So sustaining the sun's action of warming the rock, and then sustaining the effect of the rock being warm. So everything in that kind of horizontal chain of causes, which at one level is a kind of full description of what's going on. Everything there also needs to be explained in terms of God's action. And so that's, that's the basic non non competitive intuition. But like you say it, and it has huge, far ranging, far ranging consequences, because we have, we just sort of like, inevitably, we have this tendency to think of God as sort of the biggest thing in the universe sort and therefore alongside us in some way. And so God's doing it, so I'm not doing it right. God determined this thing to happen, therefore, I wasn't free. That's often that's one of the ways that means up and this is why, in the reformed tradition, you will get very strong defenses of noncompetition. Because for them, they'll say, No, you were totally free and doing it, and God totally determined it. That's not the position I end up taking. But that's the kind of danger when you go all the way down this non competitive route. That's the danger that I'm most worried about in the book, the book is trying to prevent that from happening. But you can see how if you go this noncompetitive route, which I think is very important to go, I think it's very important to make sure not to anthropomorphize God in this way that he becomes, you know, like the best Angel essentially. But that is the most powerful creature in some sense. And therefore, on our plane, it's very important that God not be that he's the creator, He's not on the plane of creatures. And but once you go that generate some, some worries, some problems that have to be have to be addressed. One other I mean, if you're, if you're still trying to get your head around is one other way, another analogy that some people have used, and all these analogies work to a certain extent, and then break down. But one other analogies is like an author of a book. So a book, you know, the characters in the book are fully doing, the actions that they that they choose in the book, they can choose those actions freely, some of their actions might not be free, some of their actions will be free. But everything in the book is caused by the author is written by the author is created by the author. And that's not it's just a different order of explanation. And it's not just a different order, but it's also the the, the order of explanation that attributes it to God to the author of the story to that vertical thing. That's the primary sense of causality. So that's prior to everything else. So for, for, for a character and a story, to do something to choose freely, is say, say to do a sin, even, potentially, is to is to be downstream of the the author of the character, right, or the author of the story, writing the character to do that. So God's isn't just a different order of explanation. God's causality is primary. And our causality is secondary is downstream of that.

Charles Kim 14:34

Yeah. Well, and Calvin uses that very language, the primary and the secondary. I mean, that's, that's every Yeah. And, and I guess, so to go into some of your worries. Part of at one point, you use the language of asymmetry, which I find very helpful. So you call well, you also call your position a incompatibilist. determinism, I guess, right? Did I get that right?

Ross McCullough 15:00

I'm just incompatible. So it's, it's a compatibilist indeterminism. Yeah,

Charles Kim 15:04

I got the end of the wrong compatibilist indeterminism. And it was. So it's very helpful though you, you sort of talked about this asymmetry. So one of the ways in which your argument plays out is that humans become responsible, in some sense for evil, while God is not. And so that's sort of one of the cars about God in the background, as you were saying, like, you want to press this God is not a being among beings, and that the greatest being in the world. So, so how, you know, so one of the ways that that you kind of worked through in this book is how God then can be said to not properly be, you know, the one responsible for our evil actions. So that creates a kind of asymmetry, I think, as I understand it, right. So we can say that God is the cause of what is good, but not evil. And that seems, you know, in a straightforward kind of layman's reading, you go, Well, wait a minute, how can that be possible? So I put it back to you. So how does that work out for you?

Ross McCullough 16:05

Yeah, yeah. So that's really the heart of what I'm trying to get out in the book, because it is, there hasn't really been a satisfactory account of how that works. So I'll give you the I'll give you the kind of standard, the standard existing account that I'm not that this is not my view, but this is this is the kind of this would be a compatibilist and determinist, or pre deterministic account, which would say, which would still try to get God off the hook. Right. So the Calvinists are these sort of a certain version of chemists, followers of Thomas Aquinas also take a view kind of like this. And it would be something like this like, well, we could use the analogy of the of the author and the story again, this isn't exactly the analogy that I'll use, but some of them will use this analogy, which is so Raskolnikov kills a guy in crime and punishment. Spoiler alert, if that happens, doesn't it's, it's fairly early in the book. He's responsible for that murder. He should feel guilt for it he should he any punishment that comes from it should be that he needs to be forgiven for it all this kind of stuff. Dostoevsky isn't a murderer, Dostoevsky isn't responsible for the murder, it's a different plane. Right? So yes, of course, Dostoevsky brings about the murder in the book because he writes it. He's the author of it. And there's no way there's no like, ability of risco McCobb, to do something other than Dostoyevsky wants him to do. He's just a character. That's what it is to be a character in a story. Similarly, we are just creatures, what it is, is to do the things that God writes us to do, as it were, that makes us responsible. It can make us free, it doesn't make God responsible. Because it's a different order of explanation, we sort of the like level of reality that we achieve isn't great enough to kind of incorporate God. And just the same way that the reality of a story is not really real, at the level that Dostoyevsky's real and so when he does something in the story, it isn't really real, that he's respond, he's not responsible for the the equivalent thing as if he really murdered a guy. So that's a kind of traditional explanation. And you can see how it might deal with some of those worries. Now you still have you still have certain problems, which is that it's, it's still God doing all the stuff. So the Holocaust is still God doing it. Now, he's just writing a story as it were about it, but he's still doing it. People going to hell, that's still God doing it, he writes them to make those not just, he doesn't just like punish them for the bad choices, he makes them do the bad choices, and then punish them for it. So you get into questions of how consistent this really is with the God of Scripture, you know, in Scripture says God wills that all men be saved. Seems like that's going to be the the reformed tradition has to tell a very complicated story that ultimately I find not that convincing about how that sort of stuff is gonna work. So I'm opting for a different solution. My solution? So my view is that actually, when we when we sin, we are that choice isn't actually totally written for us by God that we aren't determined to that are predetermined to that by God's decision to create God's will and creation, anything like that we can actually defect from what God wants us to do the story that God writes for us as it were, but we're still in this non competitive relationship. So what we what we can't do is like create our own little world for ourselves, what we can, what we can do is defect from in the sense that we can take away from God's action, God wants there to be some fullness to his story. And then we can sort of take away take away aspects of that. So God wants us to do some good action, and then we can defect from that good action and make it less good than it would otherwise be ultimately, so much less good that it is a sin. And that's, that's how I want to explain it. And this is this is a broadly Augustinian idea that we aren't efficient causes when we sin, we're deficient causes, right? So we we introduce defects into the act to which God moves us, and I'm just giving a kind I'm trying to take give a more developed account of the metaphysics of that, essentially, especially when I'm talking about efficient causality.

Charles Kim 20:06

Right? And I think you probably do quote this, although I don't remember the page. But yeah, it's one of those interesting passages in City of God, where Augustine essentially says, You can't give an explanation for evil. Because there would it wouldn't be rational So so how would it be possible to explain that which isn't explainable or rational, right? It's not reasonable to have done it. So I can't give you a reason for what's not reasonable. Which, at the one hand, when I tried to, when I showed this passages to undergrads, you know, that they're sort of like, I kind of get it, but like, I still want to know why you did it. Or like, you know, there's sort of that like, feeling of like, I feel like you're getting off too easy here. Augustine, you're just saying, I will give you an explanation. Because you know, that that, that that basically, how can you give a reason for what is unreasonable? You're calling it a contradiction or something. And so there's no explanation. And I mean, I think I think it's kind of clever, but I know that there is there's often a quite a backlash, like, Well, that just that just seems too cute to deal with this.

Ross McCullough 21:07

Yeah. I mean, this is where the like the pear, the pear, see the pear stealing scene and confessions and stuff is super useful. You get, if you ask you actually ask yourself why you sin? It's a it's a slippery, slippery question. I mean, you will, you will have reasons. At the kind of first or two reasons that you can give why you did something, you know, you why you steal, you steal, because you want the money, or you because you want the pair and they got stunts case, you want the deliciousness of the pear, but it goes against Right. Like when you actually think about it, sometimes you that's not actually why you do it. And when you think about why you do it, it's actually it's actually not clear that there is a reason, especially when you when you really zero in on not just that you wanted the money, but you wanted it in this way. And don't you realize that the things that you really want, you would, you would get more easily if you didn't sin, that the sin is actually counterproductive to the things that you want. And once you see that, and you realize that actually this is coming out of a place of either confusion, or in some cases, not even confusion, just kind of malice, just kind of like a an insufficient Wheeling of the goods that you say you want. And it kind of spied almost against the good. Once you see that, you'll realize that actually maybe there isn't a reason I can give for that. Now, it's a very, it's it's very complicated psychologically, but it's a deep and important point, also metaphysically because it means that we, when we act, we act for the good, always. But there are certain kinds of actions which are, in some sense, not actions there. It's sort of defections from action. And that this is this is one way you get at this idea that sin is a kind of defect because you're not actually acting for a positive good in any sense. The good, of course, is God. And in those moments, you're not actually acting for God, you're not desiring god, you're acting in this kind of spite, to kind of avoid God or get away from God in a certain sense.

Charles Kim 23:09

Yeah, yeah, that's very helpful. And I think to some, like, you know, I, I'm trying to remember the full structure of the book. And so at one point, you deal with the problem of freedom. And so what does it mean for God to be free? And what does it mean for us to be free? So there's another sort of worry here? You know, am I really free to do this thing? And so, you know, it doesn't, you know, the kind of the difficulty I find when, again, when teaching a lot of this stuff to undergrads Is that you, you know, you have to take the phrase, reasonable irrational in a way that they don't really like, which, and, and as if, like, anything, any explanation given is reasonable, or is a good reason or something like, and then in the case of freedom, you know, we tend to think of like, and you bring this up in the book, you know, I think I think the sort of 21st century notion of freedom is a choice among options, I always give the example of, you know, you go to the, you go to the grocery store, and you can pick a toothpaste tube of toothpaste, and it doesn't matter which brand you choose. And so you're free, because you get to choose from, you know, from crest and dentin and whatever else. So that feels like freedom to us is to have options. But your notion of freedom for God and for us is actually slightly different such that we can say we're free, but it's not in this kind of, it will at least exactly analogous to this one that I just stated. But so could you say something about how freedom works on your picture? Yeah,

Ross McCullough 24:39

that's right. So just to kind of tie it back to the structure of the book for a second. So the the kind of stuff you're talking about, with God causing our actions but us also causing them that was kind of I was describing it in terms primarily applicable to this level of efficient cause we're talking about within lateness or that's kind of what our everyday sense of what causing means we think tend to think in terms of have efficient cars. But then when we talked about the pairs and the kind of giving reasons that that is also a form of causality, it answers the why question, why did you do this, and then you give a reason why, in terms of what you want the kind of end or goal. And that's, that's the explanation in terms of final causality, right? That's Aristotle's idea. Also in these plate Neoplatonist. Now we're moving. So that is kind of the first two chapters. But now we're moving to this this third sense of causality, which I indicated at the beginning, which is exemplary causality. And that's a little more slippery, we're not used to thinking in terms of that as causing. But the basic idea is that, that the, the efficient cause of something has to contain in it, the the idea of the effect in some sense, in order to produce the effect, it's sort of like this idea of an artist has the idea of the painting he wants to make. And then he efficiently causes that idea to be present on the canvas. So exemplar causality is that that idea in the artists head as it were, or contained in the artist, it doesn't have to be intellectual in this way can also be like the form of, of humanity, my humanity is passed on to my kids, in me that humanity is the exemplary cause of the humanity in them of their human nature, right? They get it from me. And similarly with God God contains, in this exemplary way, all the goodness that's in creation, because it had to come from somewhere, you can't get something from nothing. It had to come. God caused creation into being and so they're pre exists in God in an eternal way, all the goodness, in a perfect form that's in creation, right? So we're all all our goodness are in our imitations of God's goodness, in some sense, or participations in resemblances. There's lots of language you can use for this. So that also includes our freedom, our freedom, to the degree that it's good, is an imitation of God's freedom or a participation in God's freedom or this kind of language? Right? It came from God, it preexisting God. Now, the tricky thing about that is that God can't do evil. Right. So you know, so you have this idea that, yeah, the the persons of the Trinity are freely loving each other. And that's the perfect form of freedom. That's the best kind of freedom. It's not like a less or a different kind of freedom than ours. It's the perfect ideal to which ours is just an approximation. They can't do evil. So how, why is it that our freedom should involve an ability to do evil, because you also have all this, you know, all these, everything I've said, is a very traditional set of affirmations. But you also have included in the Christian tradition, this appeal to freedom as an explanation for why evil exists in the world, right, Adam and Eve were free, they had to, they had to be free in order to really love God. And that meant they could say no to God. But that last little bit that freedom means they can say no actually isn't true of God's freedom. And it's also not true, interestingly, of Christ's human freedom. So Christ, if you follow the early counsels, Christ has a human will and a divine will. The human will of Christ is perfectly free. Because Christ is without sin. And that perfect freedom doesn't involve an ability to say no to God, it doesn't seem like least on traditional untraditional grounds, Christ couldn't say, as you know, as His Divine Will saying yes to the Father, and then his human will says No way. Actually, no father, that's, that's impossible on the class, right? On the classical view, and part of the reason for that is because his human freedom is perfected by saying yes to yes to God in this in this kind of firm, unswerving way. And that's not it. That's not like less freedom. That's more freedom. That's the point. And if you if you look at scripture to when scripture talks about freedom, it's, it's in this way, Freedom means the freedom from sin, right? Freedom means the ability not to deny God, the ability to affirm God. And the more the more firm you are, in your affirmation of God, the freer you are. That's that's how it works in the Old Testament. That's, that's what Exodus is about, right? The freedom from slavery, as this type of the freedom that Christ gives us is a type of freedom from sin. When Paul talks about freedom, it's all it's all about this kind of stuff. So, so it's also confirmed with how Scripture uses and that's part of the reason, you know, the early Christians are, are using this idea of freedom. And so on my view, I follow all that stuff in my on my view, you need something else, other than freedom, but kind of in the vicinity of freedom to explain why we can sin. And that's and that's where I build out this this other account of of self creativeness so what I call self, creativeness.

Charles Kim 29:31

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, and one thing I was just thinking of, as you were speaking, one, one other sort of, there's sort of two streams of the podcast, and then one of them where we read through ancient texts and kind of talk through them. And we've been working through some of the Christological debates. And one of the difficulties in trying to explain what's going on, you know, with Cyril, with Nestorius with these kinds of figures, is that we tend to think of ourselves as the exemplary humans and God is the exemplar Every God, whereas Christ is or you know, Jesus as human is actually the exemplary human, not us. And so the fullest form of what it means to be human is not found in sinful humans, but as found in the perfect Christ, and that can be a kind of difficult premise to begin with, or maybe not premise is not even the right word there, but way of thinking. And so and that's also one of the first things I find myself, you know, when I'm reading through this stuff, it's like, okay, I got to, I got to think differently, I got to realize that, you know, and, and in a sense, it can be sort of frustrating, because, you know, you want you actually want to say like, Well, really, humans are sort of less than human. Not and, and, and there's like a sense in which all of us fail to be human. And we, and there's, and we kind of balk at that. But then, you know, when you think about it, in terms of of the the Christian story, as you're just saying, like, well, actually, this is hopeful, in the sense that we're being drawn into this full humanity of Christ.

Ross McCullough 31:05

Yeah, that's right. That's right. And, you know, it's the it's the fall, right. And the famous phrase about the fall is sort of the one theological doctrine that is you can confirm empirically, I mean, just look around. Of course, we're less than human in some sense, right? Look at what happens in the world. So yeah, it is it is a measure of hope. And it's, it's frankly, deeply unrealistic to expect that we could get an account of the human without, without revelation without seeing it perfected in Christ. Yeah, because again, I you know, there's, there's lots of different there's lots of different varieties of human on offer. And they're constantly changing, there's a deep, there's a deep uncertainty about what actually constitutes the human, there's persistent, long running disagreements that don't seem resolvable, just by just by our fallen reason about what the human is. And so of course, we're gonna need, we're gonna need revelation first, first to Israel. And then, of course, finally, in Christ, to be able to see what the human is.

Charles Kim 32:07

Well, I want to move to talk a little bit about sort of God's creation and our self creation. And then eventually that moves into the question of analogy. So how do we, you know, make this leap from what we understand to what God understands. But I one question I like to ask, and I don't know, as we were talking, I was just curious, I'll often ask my guests, what is one thing through either in your life of sort of faith and theology, or just in this research, what is one thing you've changed your mind on? So this could be a hard shift? So through the argument of the book, but I'll make a hard shift, just just to switch things up? What's one thing that you have changed your mind on? In either either, like I had some guy talk about changes where he went to college, he thought he was destined for one place, he went to another, or it can be something like, as you're doing the research for this book, you realize that you had to have a different view on analogy or something? I don't know. You know, is there anything that you could think of where you could say, I once thought this thing was true? And I changed my mind? And now I'm going, you know, now, I think that that's false?

Ross McCullough 33:13

Yeah, well, I mean, the The easiest example, the starkest example is, is that I was more of a libertarian about freedom in the sense that I thought freedom had more to do freedom, in its essential definition, was about an ability to say no to God, and then I, you know, just sort of engaging with the text and thinking about the theological implications of that, I came around to this more compatibilist view, compatibilism being the idea that our freedom is compatible with being predetermined by God. And so if God moves us to choose him, he can do that in a way that totally preserves our freedom. So that was, that was a change I didn't putting it just like that that baldly overstates the difference, because I did, I still do hold on to some more libertarian sense of freedom, I don't think we should call it freedom. But I think that we need something like that to help with the problem of evil. So I don't I don't, I didn't leave that behind. But the kind of way I sort out my categories is pretty different than, than initially, I thought, in part because I again, I was I had this kind of analytic philosophical interest background, and for them, the vast majority of them. Christian philosophers, in particular, tend to think of freedom in this libertarian way, precisely because of the kind of problem of evil issues. So that's, that's one that's one there's other you know, there's lots of different things can change. So, yeah.

Charles Kim 34:43

And so for you, the change came about through reading the just the literature or was there something that you know, it worked better in your scheme or, or just what, what, anything in particular that made you change that perspective?

Ross McCullough 34:59

Yeah, thinking about how it how it works in the larger scheme of kind of Christian philosophical theology about what it what it means for freedom to be both a good thing and for all good things to be imitations of God or participations and God really taking that seriously. I mean, there is so this is a book about, you know, predestination and freewill in a certain sense whether God determines our choices, how that has to do with sin and evil. And in that world, there's a lot of attention given to God causing our choices as an efficient cause. So what that means for God to to be involved in AR X. And again, I, you know, I take a position on that, but that's, there's a huge literature on that in all the major confessions after the after the Reformation. You know, basically every major confession has a debate in the Lutherans in the reformed tradition in the Catholics, it's, and it's the same kind of stuff. It's the same set of issues in each one. But But what's what's less explored is this idea of exemplary causality. And I found myself gravitating more towards that as a serious issue that really hadn't been worked on sufficiently in the tradition. And this question of, well, what what does it mean to be free, if God is the kind of archetype ideal of our freedom, and then Christ, that is our freedom, just any possible freedom, angelic freedom, any kind of freedom, and then Christ as a human being is the is the perfection of human freedom. And neither of those involve inability to do evil. So just sort of sort of thinking through especially, especially that level of exemplary causality is what is what kind of ticked it off for me.

Charles Kim 36:40

Interesting. And well, okay, so let's, let's keep going then. So how is it that you understand this relationship between our freedom and divine freedom? So if we're imitating God's freedom, but we can choose to sin? How does that and that's, I think that's where your phrase of self created comes into play, right? So like, God can create X knee Hello. And I think the phrase you use is not a knee hilum or something, not into nothing? So can you talk a little bit how that how that works?

Ross McCullough 37:10

Yeah, so instead of, instead of locating our ability to sin to not sin, so instead of identifying that with our freedom, I want to say it's, it's a, it's a consequence of being free, in imperfect under imperfect circumstances. So in a sense, it's a it's a weakness of our freedom that we can sin. And this is picking up on stuff in in like Iran, as for instance, on Adam and Eve, being not totally perfect in the garden, right, even before the fall, there's a kind of weakness there, there's a kind of development that they're supposed to undergo an immaturity and the point is that they're supposed to grow, and then eventually become perfect. And so at the level of freedom, that means and Augustine has stuff like this to write the fourfold state of freedom, right? Post a Patkar, a non posting on Bukhari, this kind of stuff in Agustin it's a similar idea that you're supposed to progress from an ability to sin, ultimately into an inability to sin that perfects your freedom. So I'm picking up on that, but I but I want to say that this imperfect state of freedom also represents certain real goods, it makes certain goods possible and those goods are not goods of freedom. Their goods have this kind of self, creativeness. So they allow us to, to create ourselves in a certain sense, which, of course, is a weird phrase for somebody who has a non competitive account of divine and human agency, because it seems like any kind of self creation that we could do, is going to be downstream of God, and therefore up to God. In some sense, God's going to be the author of that. Whereas what I'm trying to say is that there's some kind of self creativeness that is up to us and not to God, be precisely because it's supposed to explain our ability to sin or not sin, and I don't want to I don't want God on the hook for our sinning and not saying, so on my view, with this kind of self creation, it's, you know, it's going to be complicated to work out the details, and to make sure all the i's are dotted and T's are crossed. So for that, you have to look at the book. But the basic idea is that when we when we could sin, that is we could create a kind of defect or a nothingness, a kind of absence in our acts, when we could do that. And we don't, that means we're not we're not sort of bringing ourselves to nothing to the nothingness out of which God created us. That's the idea. So, basically, you know, if you when you sin, you're, you're sort of destroying yourself in a certain sense. That's the idea. You're, you're bringing yourself back into the nothingness out of which God has created you, and out of which God called continues to call us. All right. God doesn't want us to sin. He wants us to live flourishing lives, right? The glory of God is man fully alive, as Uranus is famously quoted as saying, so. So God wants that, but we can we can reject that and we can, we can return to that nothingness. When we return to that nothingness that's a use of our imperfect freedom. As I said, and that's a bad thing, I don't want to say that's a good thing, I want to say that's really bad. But when we could do that, and we don't, I want to say that represents a distinct kind of good, the not going into nothing. That is a kind of imitation of God's calling us out of nothingness. And in that sense, there's a kind of self creativeness to it. And so it doesn't involve metaphysically, it doesn't involve giving up this non competitive account. So it ends up being very traditional, in the sort of Christian Platanus metaphysics of it. But it allows us to talk about sin in this in this way that that feels that feels true to what other people have said in this more libertarian tradition have said about, oh, well, we can still reject God. And when we don't reject God, there's a kind or like, our actions have a kind of independence of God in a certain sense and that independence is sort of like us creating ourselves so there is language in the tradition of us creating ourselves as well, although some people are, are wary of that. And, you know, in the, in the modern period, that that kind of language gets used very much to be a kind of We Are Rivals of God, we can create ourselves. So it's a certain kind of dangerous language and I'm trying to repressed unaided as it were to baptize it to put it back in the schema of this kind of Christian Platonism. while also holding on to all this, that's good in it.

Charles Kim 41:19

Yeah. Yeah, it strikes me the language of self creation, like there's a there's a fear, right that from from Augustine and others, right, that what Adam tries to do in the garden, is to make himself into the divine. And so it's sort of the, the, the, the flip side of, of Theosis, or divinization, or deification is the the sort of grasping at making oneself the divine. And so Augustine thinks that that's that's the root sin of pride is thinking that one could make oneself Gods so so this has to be a self creativeness at a secondary sense, that isn't the kind of Yeah, primordial sin of Adam.

Ross McCullough 42:03

Yeah, that's right. And there's a kind of, you know, for those who are into the sort of genealogies of modernity, how modernity destroys everything, there's one one way this is traced is sometimes like exactly this way, modernity is the is the sin of Adam repeated at this kind of like large scale level where we become self creators, over nature over ourselves, and, and that represents a defection from the beautiful medieval synthesis or whatever, I tend to be suspicious of those narratives, as you may be able to tell, and I want partly, partly, I want to hold on to some of what I think is good in that in that kind of modern sense that we are self creators. In some sense, we do some of this, like, sort of romantic and pre romantic notions of, of human agency and mastery and ability, I think are good, I think are ultimately Christian. I think they're rooted in, in Christianity. And so I want to, I want to try to hold on to that without making it without making it idolatrous. Right?

Charles Kim 42:59

Yeah, I think there's an art, there's a an article on love, it may just be called Love, I can't remember from Herbert McCabe, where he talks about love is sort of essentially doing what you say, which is releasing one to do some self creation. And so it's not pre determining every single sort of thing. Or, you know, I can't remember exactly the language. But it is interesting when I just I just think of, so I teach at a Catholic Jesuit university. So I teach at St. Louis University, but most of the students that I have, I'd say the majority probably aren't committed Catholics or Christians. And so, you know, historically, it's Catholic, Jesuit, but let's say, at least a large number, do not sort of think of themselves still in that tradition. And so it's interesting the kinds of things that appeal to them. And so sort of Augustine, fall in this sin, people don't tend to reject a lot of that. They don't like Augustine, usually. But when I have them read this article, some articles by Herbert McCade. There, they find some affinities and one of them is this sort of like recognition that there there is a sort of part of the love that God has for His creatures is a permission of some kind of self creation. So it's interesting that that that tends to resonate with some of my students. I wonder, you know, and so I think what's helpful and what I mean, what, you know, one way I guess I could turn them back into the great tradition is in a work like yours, where you're saying, Alright, let's think about okay, that's a good there's a good intuition there. But how do we get that set? Right?

Ross McCullough 44:33

Yeah, that's, that's right. I worry that, you know, there's the path back is so it's so long and difficult that it might not be for many, but it is I think there is something I think the basic intuition is good there. The more the more you want to have that kind of thing without the sort of fall stuff, the more suspicious I'm going to be. I think you need to you need to run them both up pretty high. In order for everything to work, like you need the you need the fallenness you need the disorder in nature, or else you're gonna, you're gonna end up with, with some of the errors, the ways that modernity has taken this stuff poorly.

Charles Kim 45:14

Yeah. Well, and that's I mean, you know, and I'm just speaking off the cuff about my experience of my students. So yeah, that's not to say that all of them or what have you, but it is just always, it's like, I feel like Ron, so I do a lot of feel 1000. And I feel like they're oftentimes like me running surveys on what do 18 to 22 year olds. And they're not often very talkative, which is the least amount of fun for me, because I feel like I'm up and I'm like, this is I feel like I'm sort of doing like market research. There's a little bit of like, what resonates and what doesn't, and, you know, how can I nudge them a little bit towards thinking and more sort of classic Christian terms? And so fine, fine. Okay, whatever, I could draw you in just a little bit. And say this, there may be more to this than you realize.

Ross McCullough 46:07

That's right. That's right. My students tend to be in a kind of different population, because they tend to be pretty committed, nondenominational sort of Protestant types. So and they Yeah, yeah. So they, they're receptive to the, to the notion of sin?

Charles Kim 46:25

Well, I mean, not we're moving away from the book a little bit, but I guess I am just sort of curious how is, so one thing you do call this book a Catholic essay? So you know, you sort of stayed up front, like, if you're a really determined sort of Calvinist, you're not going to find this persuasive, because you have sort of a large, I don't know, a larger sense of God's sovereignty or something to you know, so it's not going to be as you're not gonna be as amenable to it. But how do you find teaching sort of more nondenominational students in Oregon in the northwest, with your very strongly Catholic Thomistic intuitions? And like, Is that Is that difficult to try to like? Okay, do I have to sort of recategorize them in some of these ancient doctrines of the church? I don't know what, what does that like for you?

Ross McCullough 47:15

Ah, there's, there's some of that. I mean, so I teach at the honors program here, which is a, it's a great books program. And so we read a fair amount of primary sources throughout the tradition. And so even, even apart from my own kind of predilections, they're getting this stuff just by reading Augustine or reading efficacious. John of Damascus, and then all the way through, you know, we do Aquinas, we do Bonaventure. And so really all the way through the tradition or even just like I, like I kind of alluded to, before even reading some of the magisterial reformers, you know, the reading some of Luther stuff, it's very different than the kind of Protestantism they're used to, and much more traditional, much more classical Luther stuff, right? We don't read his like super high Mariology stuff, we should maybe, because he has a high view of Mary. So some of this stuff that like to an American Protestant is, is kind of shocking, right? Shocking. The Catholic or Lutheran the Eucharist for this? That's another great example, right? Luthers Luthers debates against Swingley. So, so yeah, some of my, some of my interventions are at that level, just kind of introducing them to a broader, a broader swath of the of the tradition and helping them see that, that you can't, you can't assume that, you know, Christianity was what some, some people in California in the 70s thought it was, you know, a lot of a lot of my students, it's like, they get it from their pastor and their parents, and they were trained to some, you know, they came out of Redding, California, in the 80s, or something like that. And actually, there's like a broader, richer tradition here, both in Protestantism and Catholicism. And so often it's at that it's at that kind of level that, that I'm working, but you know, it's not. It's like, it's like Kierkegaard says, like, you can't, you can't make people choose these things. All you can do is make them aware, you know, you make them aware, and then the choice is there. So it's up to them and the Holy Spirit, you know, so you kind of introduced them to this stuff, and some of them just like, don't resonate with it at all. And they're, like, forget that. I'm gonna be an evangelical or I'm gonna It's the northwest Pacific Northwest, it's very progressive area, broadly speaking with some of that seeped into the churches, including the evangelical churches. So there's a kind of progressive evangelicalism, not so much at Fox, but in the larger Millia. And so some of them will, some of them will just, you know, that resonates with them.

Charles Kim 49:33

Yeah. Well, I don't have much longer and I appreciate you. I mean, sometimes my interviews go a little further afield from the book, I feel like the book is, is very rich and and in a sense, difficult. You know, to some people who are, you know, my podcasts are not always as philosophical. And so I appreciate you being willing to kind of think through a lot of this, but you end with and one of the things Things That was sort of, you know, one thing that I realized more and more that that is at the center of a lot of theology, I guess also philosophy that the place where these two kind of intersect is this question of analogy. And so like, and how, how is that? You know, you talk a little bit about SCOTUS being a little more of a like having a univocal theory of language about the divine and told Miss Thomas having a more like sort of the analog via interest and these sorts of things, having more of an analogy. But But yeah, could you say something about how that helps think through the sort of final piece of your of your argument?

Ross McCullough 50:44

Yeah, so there's lots of debates about this, this was a very, very hot topic and 20th century theology to the idea that God is analogously related to us. And so essentially, that we this, this is this is the idea of exemplary causality again, then our goodness, our justice, our wisdom, our Analogously, related to God's justice, God's goodness, God's wisdom. And so we have kind of analogies in the in the world in creatures for what exists in, in God in the Creator. And that's all we have in this life. We don't have direct vision. So we can't see God's goodness, or God's justice. We only we can only make analogies from the goodness injustice that we see in this world. And then we say, okay, God's God's is like that. But of course, more perfect. God's is like that. But it kind of infinite version of that. God is God's wisdom is like our wisdom, but without any defects, right? So you scrub it of all of all in perfection, you raise it to this kind of like infinite level. And then that's maybe clear enough. But then it gets super weird, because actually, if you follow this classical tradition, God's wisdom isn't just infinite. And standing alongside God's justice, but actually, God's wisdom is His justice is His mercy is His truth. All these things are equal signs. They're, they're really identical in God. So we can make conceptual distinctions between them. But what they are what they're naming in God is only one is one simple thing, God's essence, which just is these things. And that and that means that whatever we mean by with, you know, what we mean by wisdom is not identical with what we mean by justice is not identical with what we mean by mercy. But in God's somehow these things are really identical. And that means that our conception of these things, which involves in part them being distinct from one another, our conception of them is, needs to be broken open in a certain sense when we apply them to God. And so I call this the kind of process of rupture, so we have to kind of like are a certain way, in order when we start applying them to God. And so the analogy, you know, in an analogy, there's going to be something that's similar elements that are similar, and there's gonna be elements that are different. And when we make this analogy to God, we always have to be careful that we're like breaking the stuff a little bit to make sure that it's different when we apply it to God. And the really tricky thing is, we don't get to see the other side of the analogy. So we don't get to know exactly how it's different. We know like we have certain techniques for breaking it, like like, we can say, oh, it's the same, it's it's really identical with these other perfections that are also in God. So we have or another technique we use for breaking it is we'll use paradoxes, right? So we'll say Gregory of Nyssa, in the life of Moses says he's, you experienced this dazzling darkness, it's a darkness, but it's brilliant. It overwhelms you. It's like the brightness of the sun. When you if you look at it, it blinds you. So use these kinds of paradoxical terms as a way of kind of breaking open your concepts so that they apply more adequately to God. Because what we can't do is we can't say, oh, look, here's wisdom in us. And look, there's wisdom in God. And look, there's an analogy between these two things. It doesn't work that way, we don't get to see God, we have to still think about God, we have to be able to have some grasp on what he's like so that we can love him. Right? Because we need to be out we need to have some cognitive content, something there cognitively, in order to elicit an act of love. But, but we have, but it's very imperfect. It's very imperfect in this life, even with faith, even with the grace of faith and, and revelation in Christ coming. You know, Christ doesn't come and give us immediately like the beatific vision, the direct vision of the Father, we see the father in Christ, and we see, we see the divinity of Christ in His humanity, right? That's when we touch. That's what we see. That's what we interact with. That's what's described in Scripture. We see the Divinity through that and we see the divinity of the Father through the divinity of the son the image of the Father, right? But that's what we've got in this life. And so it's this sort of steps upward that are analogous but not direct.

Charles Kim 54:58

Yeah, that's, that's Very well stated. And so as far as like so for you that plays into this question of our freedom, or, yeah, and so to kind of work out the end there, this is what makes it possible for us to say that we're free but not free in the same way that God is. And then our freedom can lead into the sin that we might call like, do but not God, but God not being responsible. Is that about right?

Ross McCullough 55:28

Yeah, in a sense that it means that so what I tried to do is develop out of a, an account of this analogy as this kind of similarity, but also there's this kind of rupture, something that has to happen to our concepts. I try to develop out of that and account both of how our freedom imitates God's freedom freedom will be another thing like, like wisdom or justice, our freedom is perfect and God but then also to give an account of how our self creativeness imitates God's uncreated pneus. So God is self created, God is uncreated. So our self created this isn't exactly analogous to God. It's not like there's some perfect self creativeness in God. There is this perfect self creativeness in the humanity of Christ. But that's because the humanity of Christ is created by the by the person, the divine person, that is the word right. So so if Christ is self created enough kind of more absolute sense than any of us can be because his humanity is entirely created by His Divine, the divine person that is the subject of humanity. For us, our subject can't be can't like create ourselves because God has to create the subject before we can self create in the sense and so ours is an imperfect imitation of Christ's self creativeness. But neither of those, this is where it's getting slightly more technical. The point is that neither form of those self creativeness is is is an analogy to God's self creativeness. Because there is no self creativeness and God God is uncreated. So the point is that, that there are certain features of God that aren't analogous to features and creation. They're just different than their their nature, they're negated, right, so that they indicate not an analogous relationship, they indicate the difference in every analogous relationship. So another example of this would be infinitude. There's God is infinite, right, it's a denial of limits of finitude in god Are we can be like bigger, bigger, bigger, as creatures indefinitely large if you want. But we can't be infinite in the way that God is infinite. And so there's a similar kind of thing there where it's not that like, by being really, really good at whatever, that we're analogous to God's infinitude. It's instead of this kind of approach, we approach God's infinitude in a certain sense by being more of what we are more good, more existent, whatever you want to say. And so that there are certain these were what are sometimes called Gods formal features, these kind of negative terms infinity, uncreated, minus a temporal era eternal outside of time, things like that. And those those are things that aren't analogies, they're built into the logic of analogy, but we imitate them in a different way than we imitate these analogous features. And so the, the basic, yeah, project of that of that kind of part of the book is to say, self, creativeness is one of these not analogous features, like freedom, it's a different kind of imitation of God imitates in the way that this sort of like, approach, we approach God's uncreated Ness by being more self created. So it's somewhat complicated, but it is it's sort of trying to develop this this more variegated sense of how we imitate God or resemble God instead of just having an allergy. It sort of looks at how the building blocks out of which analogy is built and talks about how different features can have its different forms of imitation not everything is analogous.

Charles Kim 58:57

Yeah, I think it just, it just strikes me having been reading a little bit of Maximus the Confessor and talking with Jordan Wood, I think he uses the tantum quantum principle I think that's comes from Maximus but where as as far as the The Word became human so far the human becomes God. And so there's there's sort of this I don't know how comfortable you are with deification language. But but so for Maximus, this is an important principle and my thought was like as much as whatever it means in the hypostatic union for the logos to be both fully God and fully human. It's that that descent into humanity so also our ascent into the divinity is basically as great as his descent was is our ascent is the idea of the principle but anyway, I don't I don't know how that would work within self creativeness because it seems there so well, but I guess that my thought was because we're so different. Right. So the the the essential difference Since between divinity and humanity being you know, uncreated versus created and whatever, whatever we want to say about the the, the incarnation and the hypostatic union, it is the thing that unites these two essentially different things.

Ross McCullough 1:00:17

Yeah, that's right. That's right. So I'm, I love to deification stuff I'm, I'm totally fine with that. And I think what I'm trying to do is just give him a more granular account of how of what that deification looks like, that doesn't cross any lines, right. So like one line that might be crossed is to say, well, actually, the humanity becomes uncreated. I say, No, no, no, no, no, that's, that's not what happens, right? So there is still this the fundamental distinction between God Creator and creatures, that distinction that, like you say, is preserved in Christ. That's part of the Charlestonians formula, right? So it's not that Christ erases that distinction. But he overcomes it in a different way, not by erasing it still preserved, but he overcomes it through through a union through a hypostatic union of these two things, that allows us to take on divine properties in a non divine way. That is, we get these divine properties by Grace rather than by nature. That's one traditional way of saying, right, we get it in this self created form rather than an uncreated form. And then just down the list, we get it in a finite way, rather than an infinite way, whatever, you can kind of go down the list on these on these sorts of things.

Charles Kim 1:01:28

Yeah, I think that's just like, I mean, you can now I'm having a conversation about another book that you haven't read. But I know that that's one of the concerns that that Jordan has in, or Well, that's one of the things that people have responded to Jordan, is that he seems you know, he's worried that or they're often people are worried that he's getting a little too close to just eviscerating this distinction.

Ross McCullough 1:01:51

Yeah, I don't know if you talked with David Bentley, hard about that. But I think there's been some worry with his most recent book on this topic about that, but I haven't I haven't read the book. So these people who do the, you know, the kind of Maximus, like turn up the Greek patristic stuff to 11 that can sometimes sound like that. I, I think it's fine. I'm usually okay with that. Usually, if you if you push them on it, they're careful to have some distinctions in the right places. And there it's a kind of rhetorical effect to a certain extent. So So I appreciate it.

Charles Kim 1:02:21

Yeah. Well, I when we talked with Dr. Hart, it was on tradition and apocalypse. So it wasn't on the the you are God's book. I actually haven't read the New York Gods yet. But I've been, you know, you could sort of tell where he was going, even in the previous book, that all shall be saved or something. So I I actually also work with Mike McClymont, at St. Louis University. And he wrote a big book on sort of the history of universalism, you know, the devils. He's called the devil's redemption. And but yeah, so he's really worried about the sort of implications of hearts theology so listeners can check out my conversation with Dr. McClymont, too, but, yeah, well, ultimately, I've kept you too long. And but I, I have, you know, learned a lot, both from this conversation, and from the book freedom and sin evil in a world created by God. So I just want to say thank you to Dr. Mercola for spending an hour with me and being a part of history of Christian theology.

Ross McCullough 1:03:25

Thanks, Chad. My pleasure.