489. If We Had No Free Choice in Spiritual Matters, God Would Be the Cause of Evil, and We Could Not Be Credited [with Goodwill or Faith]

The notion that God is the cause of evil follows from the modern-day belief that was first hatched by those who participated in the Council of Nicaea. At that event a heresy was thrown together and cooked up that still persists today, which is that there are three divine persons from eternity, each of which is a God on his own. Once that egg was hatched, the followers had no choice but to turn to each divine person as an individual god. The participants at Nicaea put together a belief that the merit or justice of the Lord God the Savior is assigned to us. Then, to prevent the idea that we actually acquire the Lord's merit, they took away any idea that we have free choice in spiritual matters, and brought in the notion that we are completely powerless in regard to that faith. Because they centered all the spiritual teaching of the church on that belief alone, they declared the existence of a similar spiritual powerlessness in regard to everything the church teaches about salvation. As a result, horrific heresies came into being, one after another, founded upon that faith and the notion of human powerlessness in spiritual matters, including predestination, that most damaging of concepts, which was covered under the preceding heading [485-488]. All these teachings entail the idea that God is the cause of evil or that God created both good and evil.

My friend, do not put your trust in any council. Put your trust in the Lord's Word, which is high above councils. Look at all the notions hatched by Roman Catholic councils! Look at the egg the Synod of Dort laid from which the horrendous viper of predestination came forth!

[2] Now you might suppose that the free choice granted to human beings in spiritual matters is a mediate cause of evil, and therefore that if free choice of this kind had not been granted to us, we would not be able to sin. But, my friend, stop for a moment here and consider whether any human being could be created so as to be human without having free choice in spiritual matters. If this were taken away from us, we would be statues and no longer human. What is free choice except the power to will and do and think and speak to all appearances as if we did so on our own? Because this ability was granted to us so that we could live as human beings, two trees were placed in the Garden of Eden - the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This means that from the freedom that has been granted to us we can eat fruit from the tree of life and we can eat fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

23. There is one human God from whom springs all else. All powers of human reason join together and center, so to speak, on the existence of one God, the creator of the universe. Consequently any person possessed of reason, owing to the common sense of his intellect, does not and cannot think otherwise. Tell anyone possessed of sound reason that there are two creators of the universe, and you will encounter an antipathy to you because of it, even perhaps from just the sound of the words in his ear. It is apparent from this that all powers of human reason join together and center on the existence of one God.

For this there are two reasons. The first is that the very ability to think rationally regarded in itself is not a person's own, but is God's gift in him. On it depends human reason in general, and that dependence in general causes it to see, as though of itself, the existence of one God.

The second reason is that through that faculty a person either is in the light of heaven or draws the general tendency of his thought from it, and the universal precept of the light of heaven is the existence of one God.

A different circumstance occurs if a person has used that faculty to corrupt the lower constituents of his intellect. He possesses that faculty indeed, but by a twisting of its lower elements he turns it in another direction so that his reason becomes unsound.