Truncated the above because of having too many characters to post.
Last night I was too sleepy to think I could reason well enough for this. Today, all day, I kept thinking how all I needed to do was to get done with the easy ones, so I could set my mind to this, but I wouldn't be surprised if I had over a hundred alerts to look at!
Maybe I can at least start on this, while I sip my tea.
You give the first of the readings according to the two definitions of contingency, with [determined conditions], i.e.
- God from all eternity did by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass; yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin; nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or [determined conditions] of second causes taken away, but rather established.
I would not call, 'contingency', "determined conditions", though in my take of 3.1 they certainly are determined conditions. As I see it, all things are determined. But that is not the point of the word, 'contingency', though it be determined. It, to me, is simply the logical order of causation. One thing is contingent on another, and God's ordaining does not do violence to that sequence —does not do violence to X coming to pass via causation by Y.
Now I will grant you that sounds/feels awkward, following the word 'liberty'. My view does not (yet) account for the question of liberty within the natural flow of causation. I don't know why they included it, unless your view is right, and contingency, there, only means the undetermined conditions of second causes. But, it would make me more likely to consider your view, if they had said, "liberty, or, contingency", of second causes, with the commas, because if no commas were there, all I see is tautology, which, while perhaps useful, does not lend itself to concision, which is what the authors of the WCF excelled at. (Yet,
with the commas, the one word still seems redundant, unless the one is explanatory of the other, and are not separate considerations.)
WCF is not scripture, and is not to me authoritative, so I do interpret it through the filter of my assumptions, since I don't have a lot of references to other thoughts of the authors impinging upon 3.1. —that is, my assumptions concerning the way of causation, and of what little I know about the thinking of the authors, who I had assumed thought pretty much how I do. To me, it is simply logical that Omnipotent God be necessarily causal of absolutely everything that is not himself. And by that I do not mean directly causal, (though there may be hints of that nature of thing within the study of the Attribute of Immanence.) I thought that was straightforward Reformed thinking. It took you, Josh, to wake me up to the possibility that there are better Reformed theologians than myself that actually think it reasonable that Sovereign God not be causal of all details. I still don't get how they can come to that. It makes no sense to me. But, apparently there are some. Whether or not the authors of the WCF are some of them, I don't know. But I think I can understand why you think that is what they meant.
Also, I will grant that it would seem more sensible for them to say that it does not do violence to the undetermined nature of conditionality, thought that too sounds strange —violating a lack of determining? But I see no information gained in saying that God's ordaining does no violence to what
is determined—it is still sure to come to pass. So, I don't know. In the end, I have to take "does not do violence to..." to mean that God does not (usually) interpose into the natural order of causation, which involves nothing undetermined, but rather that anything that comes to pass does so by his establishing it. And that word, 'establishes', necessarily implies causation. And how causation can happen apart from God determining it so, I don't know. But maybe the authors did.
What liberty there is in anything undetermined, I don't get, either, unless by 'second causes' are meant willed events. Regardless, though, it seems to me also possible that they are mollifying some protestors, to avoid conflict with them, by not being overly deterministic in their speech. That the liberty of second causes is not violated, but established, does make sense to me, though it is rather an ironic statement. I can only guess they mean that "second causes are established, thus the notion of violence against any supposed liberty or indeterminate conditions of those second causes is a bogus notion".
Now, on a different matter: You said that I see "history as a sequence of singular, linear causes and effects." I have heard the same from you before, though in different words, as I recall. I objected back then, and also now. I can only suppose that I don't know what you mean by that, because I do not see singular lines, but myriad lines, all crisscrossing one another, and so involved are they with each other that I could almost say that any one thing affects all other things (and some thinkers/ scientists have even said as much). I suppose you mean that I think that any one cause can be traced (by God, of course—not by man) back through lines of causation all the way back to First Cause, and that, I will grant. But this family tree is not just a pole. Jesus' genealogy can be traced back to Adam more than one way, and anything that comes to pass does so by myriad causes.
