On my last post I received a question about Bill Watterson, so here is some more of his background:
. . . when Watterson was coming up with names for the characters of his comic strip, he decided upon Calvin (after the Protestant reformer John Calvin) and Hobbes (after the social philosopher Thomas Hobbes) as a “a tip of the hat to the political science department at Kenyon College.” . . .
There is an ongoing argument on whether Watterson is a Christian or not. Over the 10 year period, many of his comics certainly echoed several of the philosophical debates that are present in Christianity. Certainly at Kenyon College he would have been exposed to more than one version of Christianity, since Kenyon began as an Episcopal College–and is still listed as such–but also has an extremely strong evangelical campus ministry in a college that only has a couple of thousand students in an isolated location. As you can tell from my last post, I come down on the “Christian” interpretation of Watterson, but I could be completely wrong. Nevertheless, his periodically posed questions in the strip certainly became useful for many a discussion among Christians during that era.
Yesterday, I pointed out that Watterson made a strong point about television and what was then its growing status in USA culture. The strip I have posted today, raises one of the important philosophical questions in Calvinism. Watterson was very good at being able to go from the very practical to the very philosophical.
And so, Calvin–who else?–asks about fate, which Hobbes turns into the word “predestination,” a nice turn of phrase on Watterson’s part, since the original Hobbes was a philosopher who had a “mechanistic” view of human beings and rejected “incorporeal entities.” He answers the question on predestination by having Hobbes say how terrifying a view it would be if predestination were real. You see, one of the great arguments against the Calvinists is precisely the issue of culpability. If everything is governed under the one decree–and you have to be a good scholar to know what Calvinists mean when they use that term–then not only is there the danger that free will is lost but also that God could be declared to be evil. It is an argument with which both Saint Paul and Saint James struggle.
Watterson reduces the whole argument to one simple question and Hobbe’s answer. And, his answer is that, yes, it would be a frightening world if all that happens to us is decreed before the foundation of the world, if all our choices are not choices, but that we nevertheless suffer the consequences of choices that we did not truly make. He does that simply by picturing Calvin and Hobbes in a wagon flying in the air, in the moments before it hits the ground and those who are in it are injured. If Calvin’s choice was fate, then it is indeed terrifying that when the wagon lands, they will both suffer pain as a result of a decreed choice.
And, so does Watterson take centuries of arguments–since the Reformation–and reduce one of the essential points to just one comic strip. In passing, the Orthodox would say that there is predestination but that it is based on foreknowledge, not simply on a decree which predates the choice to serve Our Lord. In extremely technical terms, the Orthodox would not be supralapsarians in the Ordo Salutis.
In much less technical terms, it means that we believe that God’s choice was based on his knowledge of who would accept His Son.
WW2 Marine Veteran says
Martin Luther started the Reformation. Many of my Roman Catholic friends told me that they were taught that martin Luther left the RC church because he wanted to get married. We Lutherans have been taught that Luther believed in Justification by Faith. He wrote many articles, pamphlets & books on the subject. At the diet of Worms he was asked to give up and burn all his writings, but he refused and stated that he believe from his reading the Holy Scriptures that his writings were true and he could not/would not submit to what the Pope, etc., commanded him to do.