Is belief that God intervenes in the world (through influencing actions, commanding, or answering prayer) compatible with free will?
I'm not quite sure why I can't reconcile those two thoughts, unless I'm misunderstanding what free will means. Perhaps I'm taking an overly reductionist stance, going back a chain of events and deciding if one of those events wasn't the result of a free choice, the subsequent events also cannot be considered a free choice.
So I guess, I'm not only looking for an answer to my question, but looking for what goes into the answer.
Well, first, you say that you're supposing that:
going back a chain of events and deciding if one of those events wasn't the result of a free choice, the subsequent events also cannot be considered a free choice
But what's that got to do with God's actions? If God acts, then God's acts are the result of God's free choices, aren't they? So if the causal history of my action contains divine actions, those are still the results of free choice, so it's hard to see how your principle here applies.
Perhaps you misphrased it, and what you mean is that any act of mine that contains within its causal history events
over which I have no control must not be a free act. That's a bit more plausible but it's still very problematic. It seems to me that if you take seriously the idea that any event which is caused or part-caused by a non-free event must itself be non-free, then you'd have to conclude that there are no free events at all, before you even bring God into it. I take it that you're imagining some situation like this:
(1) God performs some act.
(2) There is a chain of events.
(3) This chain of events ends with my performing an act.
And you're saying that because the chain begins with something done by God, i.e. something outside my control, it follows that my act at the end of the chain isn't free. But this would still apply even if God weren't involved. After all, the chain of events in (2) is outside my control as well. Does that make my act unfree? Or think of it like this: if God's actions make any subsequent events unfree, then wouldn't
anyone's actions make all subsequent events unfree as well? In the above, replace (1) with "Harry performs some act." I have no more control over what Harry does than I do over what God does. The conclusion would remain the same.
So I would say that your initial premise, that an act cannot be free if its causal history contains any non-free acts, must be wrong. In fact it's clear that the causal history of every single act I perform contains many events over which I have no control, not least my own birth. Yet we don't normally think that this makes my acts unfree. So I don't really see why there's a special problem with God's actions here.
Of course, there are other well-known problems with reconciling God's existence with free will, but these relate to other aspects of God such as his omniscience.
So I was reading about the Circumcellions on Wiki and found this quote:
Did these guys have any reasoning deeper than this about why bladed weapons ought to be condemned but clubs are okay or was that seriously the extent of it? I mean, that seems really superficial and insane, but this is a group known for a near-suicidal view of martyrdom.
Unfortunately I don't know the answer to this. I hadn't heard this claim before so I don't know its origin. Of course with people like the Circumcellions we don't have any primary evidence. All we have is the testimony of other authors, who are uniformly hostile to them. In fact the situation is worse with the Circumcellions than with any other heretical group, in some ways, because these people were heretics' heretics - they were persecuted by the Donatists, who were themselves being persecuted by the Catholics. So we see them even more indistinctly than we do normal heretics. It's very hard to say what they were really like at all. But it's a general rule with heretics that, even if we assume that reports of their beliefs and actions are accurate, we're pretty much in the dark about
why they believed or did these things, so your guess is as good as anyone's.
Also, have you ever read Being as Communion by John D. Zizoulas? Would you recommend it?
Not read it, I'm afraid. I don't really know about Zizoulas at all.
At what time did the majority of Christian theology become "Catholic", as in, similar to what the Catholic Church holds to today.
That is a very difficult question to answer, because it depends on what you take to be distinctive of Catholicism. You could go back as far as the first Council of Nicaea in 325, or even back to the New Testament, if you think that what you regard as distinctively Catholic ideas are to be found there. Or you could come as far forward as the first Vatican Council in 1870. I think it is usual to see modern Catholicism, or if you like "Catholicism as we know it", as coming from the Council of Trent in 1545-63. The adjective "Tridentine" is often used to refer to the Catholic Church after this council, to indicate that there was something particularly distinctive about this kind of Catholicism. Trent was held as the church's response to Protestantism, and so if you think that the Catholic Church is defined particularly by those beliefs or practices it has which differ from Protestantism, then this would be when those beliefs or practices were consciously articulated and defended over against Protestantism. However, even then this would not be the origin of them. Obviously they were present in Catholicism before this time, or all Catholics would have become Protestants. So one might see the roots of distinctive Catholicism in the later Middle Ages. Personally I would say that an awful lot of it emerged in the scholastic philosophy and theology of the twelfth century onwards, e.g. the work of people like Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas - but even there, these people may have been articulating ideas that were already floating about.
Are all of the church councils truly consistent with one another?
I'm not sure. I must say I find it hard to reconcile the condemnation, issued at the third Council of Constantinople in 680, of monothelitism with the insistence of the council of Chalcedon (451) that Christ is a single person. This is a problem many people have. On the face of it, dithelitism (the belief that Christ had two wills) seems much more heretical, and inconsistent with the assertion that he was one person, than monothelitism (the belief that he had a single will). It can be made consistent if you interpret "will" in a certain way, of course.
I can't think of any other inconsistencies, but that doesn't mean there aren't any. More worrying are the decrees in ecumenical councils which are regularly ignored by pretty much all churches. The
canons of the first Council of Nicaea forbid the transference of a priest or bishop from one city to another, and also decree that everyone must pray standing up, not kneeling. The
canons of Chalcedon ban priests from enrolling in the military or accepting any secular honours at all. I think most churches ignore all of these regulations.
And is it fair to say that Sola Scriptura could potentially be true even though its not in the Bible if Sola Scriptura is not necessary for Salvation, or is there still an inconsistency there?
If you define Sola Scriptura as the claim that "Everything that you need to know in order to be saved is in the Bible" and you also say that you
don't need to know this claim in order to be saved, then that's right, there is no overt inconsistency with also saying that this claim is not found in the Bible. That is, the following three propositions do not form an inconsistent set:
(1) Everything that you need to know in order to be saved is in the Bible.
(2) You don't need to know (1) in order to be saved.
(3) (1) is not found in the Bible.
(Whereas if you replaced (2) with "You
do need to know (1) in order to be saved" that would clearly be inconsistent.)
Of course you might have a problem if you believed the following:
(1) Everything that you need to know in order to be saved is in the Bible.
(2) There are no false claims in the Bible.
(3) The Bible makes a claim that is inconsistent with (1).
That would be inconsistent. Whether (3) is true or not, though, I'm not sure.
