He Shot the Sheriff, as God Knew he Would

Is there any difference between the predestination of Christianity and the fatalism of Islam? A question which arose from comments on my last QoL piece (“Beatified by an assassin’s bullet”). In fact, there is an unbreachable gulf. One is energising, the other enervating. The enervating nature of Islam is timelessly summed up by Churchill in The River War (1899):

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy… Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyzes the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.

That’s back in 1899. Has much changed? Look at the fanatical mob around the Sydney Opera House on October 8 last year. Insult the prophet in Pakistan and see what happens. Look today at the league table of GDP per capita and you find almost all of the 57 countries (including the fictitious state of Palestine) belonging to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) languishing in the bottom half of the GDP per capita league table. Unless, of course, they are the ones sitting on rivers of oil.

Christianity does not inculcate fanaticism among its followers nor, to the point, any fearful fatalistic apathy.

Christianity does not inculcate fanaticism among its followers nor, to the point, any fearful fatalistic apathy. Instead of inshallah, Christians tend to say that God helps those who help themselves. The parable of the talents is apropos. Hence, there is a strong positive correlation between Christianity and prosperity. As Rodney Stark (The Triumph of Christianity) points out, capitalism, the wellspring of prosperity, began in about the ninth century through the development of large Catholic monastic estates. Capitalism emerged from this development, as Stark says, “in all its glory.”

We should be clear. Free will is fundamental to Christianity. For example, Paul’s second letter to Timothy (4:1) – meant for the Ephesian congregation as a whole — explains that Christ will return to judge the living and the dead and, accordingly, that people should be encouraged to live godly lives. There is no sense to this and to numbers of other passages in the absence of free will. Predestination, which follows from God’s sovereignty over all things, must be retrofitted around God-given free will, not the other way around.

This is part of the definition of “predetermination” in the Catholic dictionary. It is insightful, without solving the ultimate puzzle:

From all eternity God has decreed the free assent of the human will to the efficacious grace, whereby he brings about salvation for those who fall within his decree.

There have been many “clever” ways suggested to solve the ultimate puzzle. One minister I knew told me he once thought “Middle Knowledge” to be an interesting approach, but had since rejected it. Middle Knowledge, developed by Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina, holds that God knew beforehand what every individual human, if created, would freely choose to do in all possible circumstances. It then holds that God elected from a number of these possible scenarios the one consistent with his ultimate will; to wit, the actual world we live in. The problem with this is that it contemplates God having control only by exception.

Having no pretensions of adding to theological wisdom on the matter, I like to think of predestination and free will in terms of a screenplay. Take the Clint Eastwood movie Unforgiven (1992). Among great westerns, it competes with John Wayne’s Rio Bravo (1959) for my affections. Eastwood plays William Munny, a reformed drunken violent gunslinger. His wife who did the reforming has died and he is scratching a living dirt farming with two young children to feed. He is offered a chance by the youthful Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) to share $1000 reward to kill the two cowboys responsible for cutting up Delilah Fitzgerald (Anna Thompson), a lady of the night, in the town of Big Whiskey. He declines the offer at first but changes his mind when some of his pigs get sick. Munny changes his mind freely, albeit under the weight of circumstances.

It is too much for him to bear. You can see him wrestling with his conscience.

Free will abounds. For example, Munny’s friend, sharpshooter Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), who joins Munny and the Kid in seeking the reward, can’t bring himself to shoot one of the offending cowboys. It is too much for him to bear. You can see him wrestling with his conscience. Scene direction: “Logan can see Davey [one of the cowboys] crawling for the rocks and it is an easy shot and he can’t do it and he looks up at Munny and the agony in his eyes says it all.”

Late in the movie, after Logan has been whipped to death by Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman), the sheriff of Big Whiskey, Munny decides to return to the town to seek vengeance. He could have rode off with the Kid and the money. He decides to turn back.

Munny could do no other than return to Big Whiskey to face down Little Bill and his deputies. It is in the screenplay. But the Kid isn’t in the know. Clearly Jaimz Woolvett knows. He’s read the script. The Kid hasn’t.

“Are you… Are you gonna kill Little Bill?”

(Munny Holding up the whiskey bottle.) “I guess you won’t mind me keepin’ the bottle.”

You’re gonna kill him ain’t you?

We haven’t read our script either. Like Munny we play our part. We freely decide what to do and when to do it. We have no way of knowing how it is all scripted by the Man in the Sky. Work that one out. I can’t. But I still find the analogy instructive. You might not.