WHAT FATALISM IS
Benjamin B. Warfield
This
is a sad state of mind that people fall into sometimes, in which they do not
know the difference between God and Fate. One of the most astonishing illustrations
of it in all history is, no doubt, that afforded by our Cumberland Presbyterian
brethren, who for a hundred years, now, have been vigorously declaring that the
Westminster Confession teaches "fatalism." What they mean is that the
Westminster Confession of Faith teaches that it is God who determines all that
shall happen in his universe; that God has not -- to use a fine phrase of Dr.
Charles Hodge's -- "given it either to necessity, or to chance, or to the
caprice of man, or to the malice of Satan, to control the sequence of events
and all their issues, but has kept the reins of government in his own
hands." This, they say, is Fate: because (so they say) it involves
"an inevitable necessity" in the falling out of events. And this
doctrine of "fatality," they say -- or at least, their historian, Dr.
B. W. McDonnold says for them -- is "the one
supreme difficulty which it has never been possible to reconcile," and
which still "stands an insuperable obstacle to a reunion" between
them and "the mother church." "Whether the hard places in the
Westminster Confession be justly called fatality or
not," he adds, "they are too hard for us."
Now,
is it not remarkable that men with hearts on fire with love to God should not
know him from Fate? Of course, the reason is not far to seek. Like other men,
and like the singer in the sweet hymn that begins, "I was a wandering
sheep," they have a natural objection to being "controlled."
They wish to be the architects of their own fortunes, the determiners of their
own destinies; though why they should fancy they could do that better for
themselves than God can be trusted to do it for them, it puzzles one to
understand. And their confusion is fostered further by a faulty way they have
of conceiving how God works. They fancy he works only by "general
law." "Divine influence," they call it (rather than
"him"): and they conceive this "divine influence" as a
diffused force, present through the whole universe and playing on all alike,
just like gravity, or light, or heat. What happens to the individual,
therefore, is determined, not by the "divine influence" which plays
alike on all, but by something in himself which makes him respond more or less
to the "divine influence" common to all. If we conceive God's modes
of operation, thus, under the analogy of a natural force, no wonder if we
cannot tell him from Fate. For Fate is just Natural Force;
and if Natural Force should thus govern all things that would be Fatalism.
The
conception is, we see, in essence the same as that of the old Greeks. "To
the Stoic, in fact," says Dr. Bigg, "God
was Natural Law, and his other name was Destiny. Thus we read in the famous
hymn of Cleanthes: 'Lead us, 0 Zeus, and Thou too, 0 destiny, whithersoever ye have appointed for us
to go. For I will follow without hesitation. And if I
refuse I shall become evil, but I shall follow all the same.' Man is himself a
part of the great world-force, carried along in its all-embracing sweep, like
the water-beetle in a torrent. He may struggle, or he may let himself go; but
the result is the same, except that in the latter case, he embraces his doom,
and so is at peace." When a man thus identifies God with mere natural law,
he may obtain resignation, but he cannot attain religion. And the resignation attained
may conceal beneath it the intensest bitterness of
spirit. We all remember that terrible epigram of Palladas:
"If caring avails anything, why, certainly, take good care; but if care is
taken for you by a God, what's the use of your taking
care? It's all the same whether you care or care not; the God takes care only
for this -- that you shall have cares enough." That is the outcome of
fatalism -- of confounding God with Natural Law.
What,
now, is the real difference between this Fatalism and the Predestination
taught, say, in our Confession? "Predestination and Fatalism," says
Schopenhauer, "do not differ in the main. They differ only in this, that
with predestination the external determination of human action proceeds from a
rational Being, and with fatalism from an irrational
one. But in either case the result is the same." That is to say, they
differ precisely as a person differs from a machine. And yet Schopenhauer can
represent this as not a radical difference! Professor William James knows better;
and in his lectures on "The Varieties of Religious Experience"
enlarges on the difference. It is illustrated, he says, by the difference
between the chill remark of Marcus Aurelius: "If
the gods care not for me or my children, there is a reason for it"; and
the passionate cry of Job, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in
him!" Nor is the difference solely in emotional mood. It is precisely the
difference that stretches between materialism and religion. There is,
therefore, no heresy so great, no heresy that so utterly tears religion up by
the roots, as the heresy that thinks of God under the analogy of natural force
and forgets that he is a person.
There
is a story of a little Dutch boy, which embodies very fairly the difference
between God and Fate. This little boy's home was on a dyke in
That
is the difference between Fate and Predestination. And all the language of men
cannot tell the immensity of the difference.
from Selected Shorter Writings
of Benjamin B. Warfield, vol. 1, Edited by John E. Meeter,
published by Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1970. originally from The
Presbyterian,