Brent Roussin’s Blasphemy

Orthodox Christianity affirms both the truth that God is Sovereign Lord over all that is Who in His Omniscience knows the end from the beginning and the truth that man is a morally responsible being who has been given true agency and thus is accountable for his deeds.   For millennia, theologians have grappled with the tension between these two truths.   The theological dialogue on this subject overlaps in some ways the ages old philosophical debate between determinism and free will.   Periodically, it has erupted into controversy when someone sought to resolve the tension by emphasizing one of these truths to the point of denying, or at least being perceived to deny, either the other truth or other truths.    One such period was the fifth century.   In the third Ecumenical Council (Ephesus, 431) the early Church ruled that the Celtic monk Pelagius had taught heresy by emphasizing free will to the point of denying Original Sin (that the human nature we have inherited from Adam was broken in the Fall and became predisposed to sin) and the ensuing dependence of man upon grace (God’s freely given favour) for salvation.   While the early Church as a whole formed a consensus against Pelagianism, only the Western, Latin-speaking, Church united in favour of Augustinianism, the doctrine of Pelagius’ foremost opponent and critic, the Bishop of Hippo, and this became one of the factors, perhaps the earliest, that led to the Schism between East and West six centuries later.

 

Controversy over this matter erupted again in the sixteenth century.   In 1524, Desiderius Erasmus, the Dutch scholar and Christian humanist, wrote The Freedom of the Will, as a response to the strong Augustinian view of predestination in the works of Dr. Martin Luther.   Dr. Luther answered him the following year with On the Bondage of the Will.   At this point in the controversy where one stood on free will and predestination corresponded with which side of the growing Reformation divide one was on.   Those who remained under the authority of the Patriarch of Rome emphasized free will, the Reformers and their followers stressed God’s Sovereignty and predestination.   

 

By the end of the sixteenth century, however, it was no longer so simple.   In the Reformed Churches, which had broken with Lutheranism in the Continental Reformation over a number of issues, the strong predestinarianism of the leading Reformed theologian John Calvin had been magnified into supralapsarianism – the idea that God decided Whom He was going to send to Hell first and then decided to allow the Fall in order to have grounds to condemn them – by Calvin’s successor Theodore Beza, and this incredibly ugly portrayal of God naturally provoked a backlash in the opposite direction.   Jacob Arminius, assigned to write a thesis defending supralapsarianism, instead become a proponent of free will, and his followers, the Remonstrants, wrote a five-point repudiation of Calvinism called the Remonstrance, which was condemned as a form of Semi-Pelagian heresy by the Reformed Church at its Synod of Dort, which took place at about the same time the work on the Authorized Bible was being completed.   The canons of the Synod of Dort, five, one each in response to the points of the Remonstrance, became known as the “Five Points of Calvinism”, identifiable by the acronym TULIP (Total Depravity, Unconditional Election. Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, Perseverance of the Saints), although this does not follow their order in the canons.   These have, ever since, been more important to most Calvinists than John Calvin’s own teachings, which did not include Limited Atonement, a doctrine Calvin would almost certainly have burnt someone at the stake for blasphemy over, especially if he heard them attribute it to him, although Calvinists have turned a deaf ear to everyone from Moses Amyraut to R. T. Kendall, who has ever bothered to point this out.

 

Similarly the debate continued within the Roman Catholic Church.   Cornelius Jansen, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Ypres in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking region of what is now Belgium, taught a form of Augustinianism that closely resembled Calvinism in a book that was published after his death in 1638.   Although the book was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books by the Holy Office (Inquisition) in 1642, and condemned in a papal bull later that year, its teachings, dubbed Jansenism, began to spread, especially in France, where the local bishops sided with the Society of Jesus and the Roman Patriarch in condemning it as heresy.   Apart from the clergy who taught the doctrine, the most notable Jansenists were the philosopher Blaise Pascal, and his younger contemporary, the classical dramatist Jean-Baptiste Racine, both of whom were students in the Jansenist school at Port Royal.

 

If Jansenism was the predestinarian counterpart to Calvinism within the Roman Catholic Church, the free will counterpart to Arminianism could be said to have been Molinism.  Molinism takes its name from Luis de Molina, a Spanish Jesuit who died in 1600, making his the older of the two doctrinal movements.   Molina stressed free will to the point that he was accused of Semi-Pelagianism (the heresy that teaches that man is capable of taking the first step towards God, although he requires God’s grace to complete the journey, which is the reverse of Arminianism in which God must initiate salvation by His grace, but man must co-operate with his free will to complete it).   Among the ways that he sought to alleviate the tension between this strong view of man’s will and the Sovereignty and Omniscience of God, was by introducing the concept of scientia media – Middle Knowledge – in his commentary on St. Thomas Aquinas.   St. Thomas in his Summa had distinguished between God’s natural knowledge and His free knowledge.   The former pertains to things that must be because they could not be otherwise (that the sum of two and two is four, is an example), the latter to things that are because God has decided that they will be that way.   This distinction is not itself universally acknowledged, for there are those who believe that everything falls in the latter category and that two plus two make four because God willed it to be so when He could have easily willed two and two to make five, because they believe that for God’s will to be free and Sovereign it must not be subject to anything else, including God’s own immutable and eternal nature, which is the source of everything that falls into the natural knowledge category in Thomistic theology, but this is not a widespread view except perhaps among Islamic theologians.   What Molina described as Middle Knowledge was God’s knowledge of everything that depends upon the choices of created free agents.   God knows, Molina maintained, what any given person will do in any given situation, because He knows all counterfactuals for every contingency, that is to say, what would have happened if circumstances had been different and choices were otherwise.   To illustrate the idea from popular culture, it is similar to the way the Watchers in Marvel Comics What If series can see all alternative realities.

 

I have not brought all of this up in order to argue for or against the Molinist concept of Middle Knowledge, much less to try and settle all of the various disagreements about God’s Sovereignty and man’s free will.    The point I wish to make is that whether one holds to Molinism or regards it as rank heresy, that the kind of knowledge included within Middle Knowledge – the knowledge of what would have been – belongs to God and God alone, is surely something all orthodox Christians can agree upon.   Note the difference between “what would have been” and “what might have been”.   Knowledge of the latter is available to human beings, of the former only to God.   Indeed, if you think about it, the stronger predestinarians, the Calvinists, Jansenists if there are any left, et al., have even greater reason to think that knowledge of “what would have been” belongs only to God than Arminians, Molinists, et al.

 

To claim for yourself a quality or attribute that belongs only to God is to commit the sin of blasphemy.

 

On Saturday, the sixteenth of January, the Winnipeg Sun’s front page featured the face of Manitoba’s chief public health mandarin, Brent Roussin and the headline “1, 700 Lives Saved”.   The first paragraph of the accompanying story which could be found on page three read “Manitoba’s top doctor says the province’s most stringent restrictions to date during the pandemic likely saved 1, 700 lives between November and January”.

 

Well, and I mean this to be just as offensive as it sounds, I grew up on a farm, and am quite familiar with the smell of those words.

 

Even with his qualifiers like “likely” and “approximately”, Mr. Roussin – with all due respect to Joseph Epstein, he’s got it backwards, after their horrible behaviour last year it is the physicians who should be stripped of the honourific “doctor” from the perfect passive participle of the Latin verb for “to teach” because they have proven themselves to be completely unteachable – is basically claiming knowledge of what “would have been”.   What would have been had he not behaved like some kind of mutant offspring of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and stripped Manitobans of their fundamental and nominally protected freedoms of association, assembly, and religion, forbade them from visiting with anyone other than members of their own household, ordered their Churches and synagogues to close as if his orders were more important than God’s commandments, persecuted them if they attempted to express their right to protest against all of this , cancelled Christmas (and Diwali and Hanukkah and any other major religious festival that would normally have occurred in the last three months), shut down small businesses for the busiest shopping season of the year as if he had a contract from Jeff Bezos to drive all commerce online to Amazon, encouraged them to snitch on one another for violating these completely unreasonable new rules, programmed them to think of each other as sources of contagion rather than friends, family, and neighbours, and conditioned them to think of their basic rights and freedoms, not as belonging to them as free subjects of Her Majesty, but as belonging to the politicians and health bureaucrats to be dispensed to us and taken away from us as they see fit.     Well, knowledge of what “would have been” belongs to God, not Brent Roussin, who seems to be doing his worst to live down to the old the joke about how the difference between God and a doctor is that God knows that He is not a doctor.

 

The article went on to say that Roussin “based the number on the province’s modelling and the trajectory the province was on in early November” which is as much as saying that he pulled the number out of thin air.   Modelling is computer generated fantasy, not real scientific evidence.   The hard facts are that the survival rate for the disease he claims to have been trying to protect us from is extremely high, over 99%, for most people, and the demographic that produces the most fatalities for the same disease, is that of people who have already exceeded the country’s average life expectancy (81.95 years) and have over two co-morbidities, that is to say, serious health issues.   These facts strongly suggest that is presumptuous in the extreme for Roussin to be patting himself on the back over all the lives he has saved with his fascist restrictions.   Especially since he remains remarkably silent about all the lives and livelihoods that have been destroyed by the lockdown, for which he is morally culpable, and ought to be legally culpable as well.

 

It does not seem likely that he will be facing human justice for his brutal and inhumane trampling all over Manitobans rights and freedoms any time soon.   One day, however, he will face the Judgement no man can escape.   It will not help his case on that day, that in the here and now, he has blasphemously claimed the kind of knowledge that belongs only to the Judge, to justify his terrible deeds.