An excerpt from Gardens An Essay on the Human Condition Robert Pogue Harrison
The Vocation of Care
.. all highlighting is mine ..
For millennia and throughout world cultures, our predecessors conceived of human happiness in its perfected state as a garden existence. It is impossible to say whether the first earthly paradises of the cultural imagination drew their inspiration from real, humanly cultivated gardens or whether they in fact inspired, at least in part, the art of gardening in its earliest aesthetic flourishes. Certainly there was no empirical precedent for the mineral “garden of the gods” in the Epic of Gilgamesh, described in these terms: “All round Gilgamesh stood bushes bearing gems… there was fruit of carnelian with the vine hanging from it, beautiful to look at; lapis lazuli leaves hung thick with fruit, sweet to see. For thorns and thistles there were haematite and rare stones, agate, and pearls from out of the sea” (The Epic of Gilgamesh, 100). In this oldest of literary works to have come down to us, there is not one but two fantastic gardens. Dilmun, or “the garden of the sun,” lies beyond the great mountains and bodies of water that surround the world of mortals. Here Utnapishtim enjoys the fruits of his exceptional existence. To him alone among humans have the gods granted everlasting life, and with it repose, peace, and harmony with nature. Gilgamesh succeeds in reaching that garden after a trying and desperate journey, only to be forced to return to the tragedies and cares of Uruk, his earthly city, for immortality is denied him.
More precisely, immortal life is denied him. For immortality comes in several forms—fame, foundational acts, the enduring memorials of art and scripture—while unending life is the fabulous privilege of only a select few. Among the Greeks, Meneleus was granted this special exemption from death, with direct transport to the gardens of Elysium at the far end of the earth, where there is made the easiest life for mortals, for there is no snow, nor much winter there, nor is there ever rain, but always the stream of the Ocean sends up breezes of the West Wind blowing briskly for the refreshment of mortals. This, because Helen is yours and you [Meneleus] are son in law therefore to Zeus. —(Odyssey, 4.565û69)
For all her unmatched beauty, it seems that this was what the great fuss over Helen was really all about: whoever possessed her was destined for the Isles of the Blest rather than the gloom of Hades. Men have gone to war for less compelling reasons.
By comparison to the ghostly condition of the shades in Hades, a full-bodied existence in Elysium is enviable, to be sure, if only because happiness outside of the body is very difficult for human beings to imagine and impossible for them to desire. (One can desire deliverance from the body, and desire it ardently, but that is another matter.) Even the beatified souls in Dante’s Paradise anticipate with surplus of joy the resurrection of their flesh at the end of time. Their bliss is in fact imperfect until they recover in time what time has robbed them of: the bodily matter with which their personal identity and appearance were bound up. Until the restitution of their bodies at the end of time, the blessed in Dante’s heaven cannot properly recognize one another, which they long to do with their loved ones (in Paradiso 14 [61û66], Dante writes of two groups of saints he meets: “So ready and eager to cry ‘Amen’ / did one chorus and the other seem to me / that clearly they showed their desire for their dead bodies, / not just for themselves but for their mothers, / and fathers, and the others who were dear to them / before they became sempiternal flames”). In that respect all of us on Earth, insofar as we are in our body, are more blessed than the saints in Dante’s heaven. It is otherwise with the likes of Meneleus and Utnapishtim and Adam and Eve before the fall. The fantastic garden worlds of myth are places where the elect can possess the gift of their bodies without paying the price for the body’s passions, can enjoy the fruits of the earth without being touched by the death and disease that afflicts all things earthly, can soak up the sunlight so sorely missed by their colleagues in Hades without being scorched by its excess and intensity. For a very long time, this endless prolongation of bodily life in a gardenlike environment, protected from the tribulations of pain and mortality, was the ultimate image of the good life.
Or was it? Certainly Meneleus is in no hurry to sail off to his islands in the stream. Telemachus finds him still reigning over his kingdom, a man among men. There is no doubt that Meneleus would opt for Elysium over Hades—any of us would—but would he gladly give up his worldly life prematurely for that garden existence? It seems not. Why? Because earthly paradises like Dilmun and Elysium offer ease and perpetual spring at the cost of an absolute isolation from the world of mortals—isolation from friends, family, city, and the ongoing story of human action and endeavor. Exile from both the private and public spheres of human interaction is a sorry condition, especially for a polis-loving people like the Greeks. It deprives one of both the cares and the consolations of mortal life, to which most of us are more attached than we may ever suspect. To go on living in such isolated gardens, human beings must either denature themselves like Utnapishtim, who is no longer fully human after so many centuries with no human companionship other than his wife, or else succumb to the melancholia that afflicts the inhabitants of Dante’s Elysian Fields in Limbo, where, as Virgil tells the pilgrim, sanza speme vivemo in disio, we live in desire without hope. As Thoreau puts it in Walden, “Be it life or death, we crave only reality” (61). If Meneleus took that craving for reality with him to Elysium, his everlasting life there is a mixed blessing indeed.
But why are we posing hypothetical questions to Meneleus when we can consult Odysseus directly? Kalypso’s island, where Odysseus was marooned for several years, is in every respect a kind of Isle of the Blest in the far-flung reaches of the ocean: a flourishing green environment with fountains, vines, violets, and birds. Here is how Homer describes the scene, which is prototypical of many subsequent such idyllic scenes in Western literature:
She was singing inside the cave with a sweet voice as she went up and down the loom and wove with a golden shuttle. There was a growth of grove around the cavern, flourishing, alder was there, and the black poplar, and fragrant cypress, and there were birds with spreading wings who made their nests in it, little owls, and hawks, and birds of the sea with long beaks who are like ravens, but all their work is on the sea water; and right about the hollow cavern extended a flourishing growth of vine that ripened with grape clusters. Next to it there were four fountains, and each of them ran shining water, each next to each, but turned to run in sundry directions; and round about there were meadows growing soft with parsley and violets, and even a god who came into that place would have admired what he saw, his heart delighted within him. —(5.63û74)
This is the enchanted place that Kalpyso invites Odysseus to share with her permanently, with an offer of immortality included in the bargain. But we know the story: cold to her offer, Odysseus spends all his days on the desolate seashore with his back to the earthly paradise, sulking, weeping, yearning for his homecoming to harsh and craggy Ithaca and his aging wife. Nothing can console him for his exile from “the land of his fathers” with its travails and responsibilities. Kalypso is incapable of stilling within his breast his desire to repossess the coordinates of his human identity, of which he is stripped on her garden island. Even the certainty that death awaits him after a few decades of life on Ithaca cannot persuade him to give up his desire to return to that very different, much more austere island.
What Odysseus longs for on Kalypso’s island—what keeps him in a state of exile there—is a life of care. More precisely, he longs for the world in which human care finds its fulfillment; in his case, that is the world of family, homeland, and genealogy. Care, which is bound to worldliness, does not know what to do with itself in a worldless garden in the middle of the ocean. It is the alienated core of care in his human heart that sends Odysseus to the shore every morning and keeps him out of place in the unreal environment of Kalypso’s island. “If you only knew in your own heart how many hardships / you were fated to undergo before getting back to your country, / you would stay here with me and be lord of this household and be an immortal” (5.206û9). But Kalypso is a goddess—a “shining goddess” at that—and she scarcely can understand the extent to which Odysseus, insofar as he is human, is held fast by care, despite or perhaps even because of the burdens that care imposes on him.
If Homer’s Odysseus remains to this day an archetype of the mortal human, it is because of the way he is embraced by care in all its unyielding tenacity. An ancient parable has come down to us across the ages which speaks eloquently of the powerful hold that the goddess Cura has on human nature:
Once when Care was crossing a river, she saw some clay; she thoughtfully took up a piece and began to shape it. While she was meditating on what she had made, Jupiter came by. Care asked him to give it spirit, and this he gladly granted. But when she wanted her name to be bestowed upon it, he forbade this, and demanded that it be given his name instead. While Care and Jupiter were disputing, Earth arose and desired that her own name be conferred on the creature, since she had furnished it with part of her body. They asked Saturn to be their arbiter, and he made the following decision, which seemed a just one: “Since you, Jupiter, have given its spirit, you shall receive that spirit at its death; and since you, Earth, have given its body, you shall receive its body. But since Care first shaped this creature, she shall possess it as long as it lives. And because there is now a dispute among you as to its name, let it be called homo, for it is made out of humus (earth).”
Until such time as Jupiter receives its spirit and Earth its body, the ensouled matter of homo belongs to Cura, who “holds” him for as long as he lives (Cura teneat, quamdiu vixerit). If Odysseus is a poetic character for Care’s hold on humans, we can understand why he cannot lie easily in Kalypso’s arms. Another less joyful goddess than Kalypso already has her claims on him, calling him back to a land plowed, cultivated, and cared for by his fathers and forefathers. Given that Cura formed homo out of humus, it is only “natural” that her creature should direct his care primarily toward the earth from which his living substance derives. Thus it is above all the land of his fathers—as Homer repeats on several occasions—that calls Odysseus back to Ithaca. We must understand the concept of land not merely geographically but materially, as the soil cultivated by his ancestors and the earth in which their dead bodies are buried.
Had Odysseus been forced to remain on Kalypso’s island for the rest of his endless days, and had he not lost his humanity in the process, he most likely would have taken to gardening, no matter how redundant such an activity might have been in that environment. For human beings like Odysseus, who are held fast by care, have an irrepressible need to devote themselves to something. A garden that comes into being through one’s own labor and tending efforts is very different from the fantastical gardens where things preexist spontaneously, offering themselves gratuitously for enjoyment. And if we could have seen Odysseus’s patch of cultivated ground from the air, it would have appeared to us as a kind of oasis—an oasis of care—in the landscape of Kalypso’s home world. For unlike earthly paradises, human-made gardens that are brought into and maintained in being by cultivation retain a signature of the human agency to which they owe their existence. Call it the mark of Cura.
While care is a constant, interminable condition for human beings, specific human cares represent dilemmas or intrigues that are resolved in due time, the way the plots of stories are resolved in due time. Odysseus experiences the endless delays that keep him from returning home as so much wasted time—for it is only with his return home that the temporal process of resolution can resume its proper course. His story cannot go forward in Kalypso’s earthly paradise, for the latter is outside both world and time. Thus it represents a suspension of the action by which his present cares—which revolve around reclaiming his kingdom and household—work toward an outcome. No resolution is final, of course, and even death does not put an end to certain cares (as Odysseus learns when he talks to the shades of his dead companions in the land of the dead). Yet in general human beings experience time as the working out of one care after another.
Here too we find a correlation between care and gardens. A humanly created garden comes into being in and through time. It is planned by the gardener in advance, then it is seeded or cultivated accordingly, and in due time it yields its fruits or intended gratifications. Meanwhile the gardener is beset by new cares day in and day out. For like a story, a garden has its own developing plot, as it were, whose intrigues keep the caretaker under more or less constant pressure. The true gardener is always “the constant gardener.”
The account of the creation of humankind in the Cura fable has certain affinities with, but also marked differences from, the account in Genesis, where the Maker of heaven and earth created a naive, slow-witted Adam and put him in the Garden of Eden, presumably so that Adam could “keep” the garden, but more likely (judging from the evidence) to shield him from the reality of the world, as parents are sometimes wont to do with their children. If he had wanted to make Adam and Eve keepers of the garden, God should have created them as caretakers; instead he created them as beneficiaries, deprived of the commitment that drives a gardener to keep his or her garden. It would seem that it was precisely this overprotection on God’s part that caused Adam and Eve to find themselves completely defenseless when it came to the serpent’s blandishments. Despite God’s best intentions, it was a failure of foresight on his part (a failure of gardening, as it were) to think that Adam and Eve could become caretakers of Eden’s privileged environment when he, God, went to such lengths to make sure that his creatures had not a care in the world.
Insertion : QUITE A STORY. God stuffed things up from the beginning.
Indeed, with what insouciance Adam and Eve performed the momentous act that gets them expelled from Eden! “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat” (Genesis 3:6). It was not overbearing pride, nor irrepressible curiosity, nor rebellion against God, nor even the heady thrill of transgression which caused them to lose, in one mindless instant, their innocence. The act was committed without fear and trembling, without the dramas of temptation or fascination of the forbidden, in fact without any real motivation at all. It was out of sheer carelessness that they did it. And how could it have been otherwise, given that God had given them no occasion to acquire a sense of responsibility? The problem with Adam and Eve in the garden was not so much their will to disobedience as their casual, thoughtless, and childlike disposition. It was a disposition without resistance, as the serpent quickly discovered upon his first attempt to get Eve to eat the forbidden fruit.
It was only after the fall that Adam acquired a measure of resiliency and character. In Eden, Adam was unburdened by worries but incapable of devotion. Everything was there for him (including his wife). After his exile, he was there for all things, for it was only by dedicating himself that he could render humanly inhabitable an environment that did not exist for his pleasure and that exacted from him his daily labor. Out of this extension of self into the world was born the love of something other than oneself (hence was born human culture as such). For all that it cost future humankind, the felix culpa of our mythic progenitors accomplished at least this much: it made life matter. For humans are fully human only when things matter. Nothing was at stake for Adam and Eve in the garden until suddenly, in one decisive moment of self-revelation, everything was at stake. Such were the garden’s impossible alternatives: live in moral oblivion within its limits or gain a sense of reality at the cost of being thrown out.
MYTHS ARE KINDA CAPTIVATING, aren't they. Am getting the feeling this is written to believe as non-fiction. Not sure.
But did we not pay a terrible price—toil, pain and death—for our humanization? That is exactly the wrong question to ask. The question rather is whether the gift of the Garden of Eden—for Eden was a gift—was wasted on us prior to the price we paid through our expulsion. As Yeats said of hearts: “Hearts are not had as gifts but hearts are earned / by those that are not entirely beautiful” (“Prayer for My Daughter,” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, 188). In Eden, Adam and Eve were altogether too beautiful, hence also heartless. They had to earn their human hearts outside of the garden, if only in order to learn what beauty is, as well as what a gift it is. Through Adam and Eve we lost a gift but earned a heart, and in many ways we are still earning our heart, just as we are still learning that most of what the earth offers—despite its claims on our labor—has the character of something freely given rather than aggressively acquired.
Insertion: Ok, if you say so. More ideas ..
Eden was a paradise for contemplation, but before Adam and Eve could know the quiet ecstasy of contemplation, they had to be thrown into the thick of the vita activa. The vita activa, if we adopt Hannah Arendt’s concept of it, consists of labor, work, and action. Labor is the endless and inglorious toil by which we secure our biological survival, symbolized by the sweat of Adam’s brow as he renders the earth fruitful, contending against blight, drought, and disaster. But biological survival alone does not make us human. What distinguishes us in our humanity is the fact that we inhabit relatively permanent worlds that precede our birth and outlast our death, binding the generations together in a historical continuum. These worlds, with their transgenerational things, houses, cities, institutions, and artworks, are brought into being by work. While labor secures our survival, work builds the worlds that make us historical. The historical world, in turn, serves as the stage for human action, the deeds and speech through which human beings realize their potential for freedom and affirm their dignity in the radiance of the public sphere. Without action, human work is meaningless and labor is fruitless. Action is the self-affirmation of the human before the witness of the gods and the judgment of one’s fellow humans.
Insert: Which God's is Robert Harrison talking about there?
Whether one subscribes to Arendt’s threefold schematization or not, it is clear that a life of action, pervaded through and through by care, is what has always rendered human life meaningful. Only in the context of such meaningfulness could the experience of life acquire a depth and density denied to our primal ancestors in the garden. To put it differently: only our expulsion from Eden, and the fall into the vita activa that ensued from it, could make us fit for and worthy of the gift of life, to say nothing of the gift of Eden. Adam and Eve were not ready—they lacked the maturity—to become keepers of the garden. To become keepers they first would have to become gardeners. It was only by leaving the Garden of Eden behind that they could realize their potential to become cultivators and givers, instead of mere consumers and receivers. t Adam, like homo in the Cura fable, was made out of clay, out Regarding that potential, we must not forget tha of earth, out of humus. It’s doubtful whether any creature made of such matter could ever, in his deeper nature, be at home in a garden where everything is provided. Someone of Adam’s constitution cannot help but hear in the earth a call to self-realization through the activation of care. His need to engage the earth, to make it his place of habitation, if only by submitting himself to its laws—this need would explain why Adam’s sojourn in Eden was at bottom a form of exile and why the expulsion was a form of repatriation.
Once Jupiter breathed spirit into the matter out of which homo was composed, it became a living human substance that was as spiritual in essence as it was material. In its humic unity it lent itself to cultivation, or more precisely to self-cultivation. That is why the human spirit, like the earth that gives homo his body, is a garden of sorts—not an Edenic garden handed over to us for our delectation but one that owes its fruits to the provisions of human care and solicitation. That is also why human culture in its manifold domestic, institutional, and poetic expressions owes its flowering to the seed of a fallen Adam. Immortal life with Kalypso or in Elysium or in the garden of the sun has its distinct appeal, to be sure, yet human beings hold nothing more dear than what they bring into being, or maintain in being, through their own cultivating efforts. This despite the fact that many among us still consider our expulsion from Eden a curse rather than a blessing.
When Dante reaches the Garden of Eden at the top of the mountain of Purgatory, he brings his full humanity with him into that recovered earthly paradise, having gained entrance to it by way of a laborious moral self-discipline that took him down through the circles of hell and up the reformatory terraces of Purgatory. Nor does his journey reach its endpoint in Eden, for it continues up through the celestial spheres toward some other more exalted garden: the great celestial rose of the heavenly Empyrium. Yet never once during his journey does the poet-pilgrim lose or forfeit the human care in his heart. Even in the upper reaches of Paradise, the fate of human history—what human beings make of it through their own devotion or dereliction—remains his paramount concern. In particular it is the fate of Italy, which Dante calls the “garden of the empire,” which dominates the poet’s concern throughout the poem. To speak of Italy as a garden that is being laid to waste through neglect and moral turpitude takes the garden out of Eden and puts it back onto a mortal earth, where gardens come into being through the tending of human care and where they are not immune from the ravages of winter, disease, decay, and death. If Dante is a quintessentially human poet, it is because the giardino dello ’mperio mattered more to him in the end than either Eden or the celestial Rose. If we are not able to keep our garden, if we are not able to take care of our mortal human world, heaven and salvation are vain.
To affirm that the fall was a repatriation and a blessing is not to deny that there is an element of curse in the human condition. Care burdens us with many indignities. The tragedies that befall us (or that we inflict upon ourselves) are undeniably beyond all natural proportion. We have a seemingly infinite capacity for misery. Yet if the human race is cursed, it is not so much because we have been thrown into suffering and mortality, nor because we have a deeper capacity for suffering than other creatures, but rather because we take suffering and mortality to be confirmations of the curse rather than the preconditions of human self-realization. At the same time, we have a tendency to associate this putative curse with the earth, to see the earth as the matrix of pain, death, corruption, and tragedy rather than the matrix of life, growth, appearance, and form. It is no doubt a curse that we do not properly value what has been freely given as long as we are its daily beneficiaries.
Insert; No doubt?
Achilles, who had a warrior’s contempt for life while he lived, must die and enter Hades before coming to realize that a slave living under the sun is more blessed than any lord of the dead. When Odysseus attempts to console him during his visit to the underworld, Achilles will have none of it: “O shining Odysseus,” he says, “never try to console me for dying. / I would rather follow the plow as thrall to another / man, one with no land allotted him and not much to live on, / than be a king over all the perished dead” (11.488û91). The slave is happier than the shade not because he is laboring under the sun but because he is under the sun, that is to say on the earth. To the dead Achilles, the former seems like a small price to pay for the latter (“I am no longer there under the light of the sun,” he declares regretfully [498]). That such knowledge almost invariably comes too late is part of care’s curse. Care engages and commits us, yet it also has a way of blinding us. Achilles’ eyes are open for a moment, but even in death they close quickly again when his passions are enflamed. In no time at all, while speaking to Odysseus, he imagines himself back in the world of the living not as a slave but as his former formidable and destructive self, killing his enemies and perpetuating the cycle of reciprocal violence: “[I] am not the man I used to be once, when in wide Troad / I killed the best of their people, fighting for the Argives. If only / for a little while I could come like that to the house of my father, / my force and invincible hands would terrify such men / as use force on him and keep him away from his rightful honors” (499û504). That our cares bind us so passionately to our living world, that they are so tenacious as to continue to torment us after death, and that they blind us to the everyday blessings we so sorely miss once we lose them—this suggests that there may be something incorrigible in our nature which no amount of self-cultivation will overcome or transfigure. It is impossible to know for sure, for the story of human care has not yet come to an end.
fuagf -- perhaps the ultimate source of that bit of modern mythology -- http://www.eyeonsoaps.com/croneofcawdor/myths.htm -- ?? -- sure wasn't able to find any 'original' version of that particular tale, lol
understood without good will and a basic reality-based metaconsciousness, e.g.:
=====
The Components and Regulation of Metacognitive Activities
This review briefly explores the different ways that metacognition has been defined; the cognitive, affective and person variables that are required for and that constitute metacognitive awareness and metaconsciousness; and the regulation of metacognitive activity.
General Metacognition
The concept of metacognition has been used to refer to a variety of epistemic processes (Brown, 1978; Flavell, 1978). It is best defined, loosely and broadly, as knowledge or cognition that takes as its object or regulates any aspect of any cognitive endeavor. Brown (1978, 1987) distinguished between two dimensions of metacognition, namely knowledge about cognition and regulation of it. She suggested that knowledge about cognition can be “stable, stable but fallible, or late developing”, remaining relatively consistent within individuals. On the other hand, regulation of cognition, according to Brown can be “relatively unstable, rarely statable and age-independent”, changing rapidly from situation to situation. Brown’s distinction suggests that the self-regulation of cognition is more context than age dependent; one may show self-regulatory behaviour in one situation but not another, and a child may show self-regulatory behaviour where an adult does not. Regulation may also be affected by patterns of arousal (anxiety, fear, interest) and self-concept (self-esteem, self-efficacy). Rarely statable refers to the general inaccessibility of regulatory processes to consciousness. Brown states that “conscious access to routines available to the system is the highest form of mature human intelligence”, which suggests that highly developed metacognitive skill or the ability to bring automated skills into consciousness, is characteristic of mature, developed human intelligence (Pinard, 1986).
Strategy Knowledge
For Flavell (1978), metacognition also involves both the knowledge and regulation of cognition. According to Flavell, knowledge of metacognition consists of : 1) person variables or knowledge about one’s self and others’ thinking ; 2) task variables or knowledge that different types of tasks exert different types of cognitive demands and; 3) strategy variables or knowledge about cognitive and metacognitive strategies for enhancing learning and performance.
Pinard (1991) extends Flavell’s definition of metacognitive knowledge by distinguishing between factual and strategic metaknowledge. For Pinard, factual metaknowledge incorporates the three variables proposed by Flavell but enlarges its scope. According to Pinard, knowledge of metacognition consists of : 1) Objectives variable which relates to the motivational attitudes that we maintain towards our own learning; 2) Task variable which he suggested had to be enlarged to include problem situations that individuals confront in their everyday lives; 3) Person variable, he suggests, also needs to be enlarged to include cognitive-affective components such as motivational style, attributional style, self-efficacy and the internal dialogue that one engages in. Pinard’s strategic metaknowledge, however, maintains a similar distinction between cognitive and metacognitive strategies to the one initially proposed by Flavell where cognitive strategies, or production strategies as suggested by Pinard, refers to the repertoire of executive strategies that we have at our disposal for producing a desired result whereas metacognitive strategies, or self-regulatory strategies, refers to the higher order strategies which serve to supervise and regulate these and other strategies.
Regulation of Metacognitive Activity
Although it might be an ideal scenario if metacognitive activity could be reduced exclusively to the simple enactment of metacognitive knowledge, this is not the case (Pinard, 1991). Rather, this activity remains subjected to certain pertinent factors which act as moderators of metacognitive activity and may include: attention, motivation, and the selection of goal congruent knowledge to be activated at the appropriate time in order to accommodate the current situation that presents itself. Pinard suggests that self regulation is the key to unifying and integrating the processes at work in metacognitive activity (1991) since it functions essentially to coordinate the multidimensional intervention of all the strategic and factual metaknowledge components.
Crowley, Shrager and Siegler (1997) demonstrated and studied the relationship between automation of cognitive processes and the emergence of metacognitive thinking. Their results showed that kindergarten children were most likely to think “metacognitively” when a lower level cognitive skill became automated. Crowley and colleagues suggested that strategies become “Associative Mechanisms”, which operate without conscious effort and allow children to devote more mental processing space instead to learning (Gay, 1999).
Veenman, Elshout and Meijer (1997) looked at task and domain variables in addressing generality versus domain-specificity of metacognitive skills in novices. They adopted what they called a “working model” approach. Individuals’ working methods (metacognitive skills) can vary in quality. Expertise is the height of quality, with optimized knowledge and automaticity, and a developed repertoire of self-regulatory skills in the domain of expertise. Such quality is the result of repeated practice, accumulation of related knowledge and general level of intelligence. Veenman and colleagues used think aloud protocols in problem solving simulations and coded them for orientation activities, systematic orderliness, accuracy, evaluation, and elaborative activities—together defining a working method. In opposition to the suggestion by Lucangeli et al. (1997) that metacognitive skills are affected by domain specific attitudes, results from the Veenman et al. (1997) study reveal consistent differences in the quality of working method in favour of higher functioning individuals and suggest the generality of metacognitive functioning across domains.
Like the working model, self-estimates are also shown to be positively correlated across domains. Scores on the General Monitoring Checklist (GMSC),which measures accuracy of confidence judgments, appear to be affected by general metacognitive knowledge (Schraw,1997). Results on the GMSC show that those with access to more metacognitive knowledge tend to be more accurate in their confidence judgments while those with less access to metacognitive knowledge tend to be less confident in their self-judgments, and tend to underestimate their abilities. These results further support the notion of domain general metacognitive processes.
Metacognition and Metaconsciousness
The development of metaconsciousness relies on a progressive capacity to engage in conscious and deliberate self-awareness while undertaking important cognitive and personal tasks, tasks that may promote what Ferrari and Mahalingham call personal cognitive development (1998). According to Pinard, there are three dimensions or levels which characterize metaconsciousness: functional autonomy, personal and social commitment and transparence to one’ s self and others.
The first level is characterized by a conscious and deliberate development of the functional autonomy needed to rationally and independently manage specific cognitive tasks. Two principal conditions are required for this autonomy. The first resides in a judicious estimate of whether: 1) one is motivated and interested in the task (Cordova & Lepper, 1996; Eccles, Wigfield, & Schiefele, 1998); 2) one has the capabilities needed for success at the task (Bandura, 1986,1996, Weiner, 1986); and of whether one knows how to be successful at the task ( Meichenbaum & Biemiller, 1998; Schunk & Zimmerman, 1994).
Bouffard-Bouchard & Pinard (1988) conducted a study designed to examine the degree to which an individual’s experimentally induced judgment about their cognitive resources may modulate and affect both their success or failure on the cognitive task and the overall management of the resources allocated to the completion of this task. College students were instructed to complete various concept formation problems constructed in such a way that the students would be unable to determine the correctness or incorrectness of their answers. Experimenters convinced students that their answers were either correct or incorrect, irrespective of the actual status (correctness or incorrectness) of their answers. Hence, some students were convinced that they had done very poorly when in fact they had succeeded while others were convinced that they had done very well when in fact they had actually failed the task. Radical differences were observed between the two groups not only in their performance on other equivalent tasks but also in the way that they managed their cognitive resources. The results depicted that for students with the same initial level of ability, those who were induced to believe that they had failed, hence with an induced level of low self efficacy, tended to plan their work more poorly, were less persistent in their efforts to find a solution to the problem presented and appeared less certain of their successes and failures.
The second condition required for an individual’s functional autonomy is a freedom from the automatisms that risk paralyzing intellectual development. This condition makes reference to the fact that even for extremely simple tasks and also for more complex tasks, one may become fully automated at a task but it is important to be aware of the steps involved in a particular behaviour and to be mindful of one’s performance on the task (Langer, 1989, 1992). Otherwise it becomes impossible to avoid sinking into a sterilizing and often dangerous routine which limits the possibility of constructive and innovative self-management.
The second level of metaconsciousness (Pinard, 1991) consists of an ever increasing capacity for personal and social commitment which refers to the higher form of consciousness that allows one to explicitly state the direction one wishes to give to one’s personal and social life (Cantor & Harlow, 1994; Ferrari & Mahalingham, 1998). Such metaconscious personal and social commitment is not innate but rather is learned progressively through a conscious reflection that is both affective and intellectual. However, they may also be unlearned and above all contaminated by motivations, that to say the least, are not always crystal clear.
It is this clarity, this transparence to one’s self and to others that constitutes the third level of metaconsciousness (Pinard, 1991). Transparence allows one to gain an even deeper access to what Harter (1998) calls one’s authentic self, an access that is important to feeling fulfilled and satisfied with one’s actions and one’s self. Consider two manifestations of this metamorphosis of consciousness: The first is freedom from a degrading artificialized intelligence. Indeed the most pernicious danger to individuals is not artificialized intelligence but what might be called artificialized intelligence, that is, natural intelligence rendered artificial, because it has become artificial, programmed, clouded, subjugated or dominated by an environment made ever more overwhelming, for example through the consistent bombardment that mass media provides of predigested information (Chomsky, 1997; Herman & Chomsky, 1988). The second manifestation of this level of metaconsciousness is its unmasking of the true motivations for one’s behaviour. This refers to when individuals are able to understand the underlying motivation behind their behaviour, making it transparent to themselves and to others through a conscious realization that allows a transition from having experiences to explaining why we have them (see Lazarus, 1987).
These three levels, according to Pinard (1991), allow an individual to have a far more autonomous, committed and transparent self-management of their cognitive, affective and social life.
References
Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundation of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice Hall.
Bandura, A. (l997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: Freeman.
Bouffard-Bouchard, T., & Pinard, A. (1988). Sentiment d’auto efficacite et exercice des processus d’autoregulation chez des estudiants de niveau collegial. Journal International de Psychologie, 23, 409-431. (Discussed in Pinard, 1991).
Brown, A. I. (1978). Knowing when, where, and how to remember: A problem of metacognition. In R. Glaser (Ed.), Advances in Instructional Psychology. New York: Halstead Press.
Brown, A. (1987). Metacognition, Executive Control, Self-Regulation, and other Mysterious Mechanisms. In F. E. Weinert and R. H. Kluwe (Eds.), Metacognition, Motivation, and Understanding, (65-116). Hillsdale New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Crowley, K., Shrager, J. & Siegler, R. S. (1997). Strategy Discovery as a Competitive Negotiation between Metacognitive and Associative Mechanisms. Developmental Review, 17, 462-489.
Eccles, J. E., Wigfield, A., & Schiefele, U. (1998). Motivation to succeed. In W. Damon (Series ed.), Handbook of Child Psychology. (Vol 3, pp. 1017-1095). New York: Wiley.
Ferrari, M. & Mahalingam, R. (1998). Personal cognitive development and its implications for teaching and learning. Educational Psychologist, 33, 35-44.
Flavell, J. H. (1978). Metacognitive development. In J. M. Scadura & C.J. Brainerd (Eds.). Structural Process theories of complex human behavior. Alphen a. d. Rijn. The Netherlands: Sijthoff and Noordhoff.
Langer, E. J. (1989). Mindfulness. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Lazarus, R. S. (1987). Response to Bowers. Canadian Psychology, 28, 105-106.
Lucangeli, D., Coi, G. & Bosco, P. (1997) Metacognitive Awareness in Good and Poor Math Problem Solvers. Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 12 (4), 209-212.
Pinard, A. (1986). ‘Prise de conscience’ and taking charge of one’s cognitive functioning. Human Development, 29, 341-354.
Pinard, A. (1991). Metaconsciousness and Metacognition. Allocution addressed to the Canadian Psychological Association in Calgary, Alberta.
Schraw, G. (1997). The Effect of Generalized Metacognitive Knowledge on Test Performance and Confidence Judgments. The Journal of Experimental Education, 65 (2), 135-146.
Seeratan, K. L. (2000). Motivation for Success: A new probe for investigating the Cognitive, Affective and Metacognitive profiles of individuals with Learning Disabilities. Thesis submitted in fulfilment of Master Degree, University of Toronto.
Veenman, M. V. J., Elshout, J. J., & Meijer (1997). The Generality VS Domain-Specificity of Metacognition skills in Novice Learning Across Domains. Learning and Instruction, 7 (2), 187-209.
Weiner, B. (1986). An attributional theory of motivation and emotion. New York: Springer-Verlag.
"...if anyone makes the assistance of grace depend on the humility or obedience of man and does not agree that it is a gift of grace itself that we are obedient and humble, he contradicts the Apostle who says, "What have you that you did not receive?" (1 Cor. 4:7), and, "But by the grace of God I am what I am" (1 Cor. 15:10). (Council of Orange: Canon 6)
The Parable of the Drowning Man
J.W. Hendryx Posted by John on March 14, 2006 05:46 PM
Dear Friends:
Perhaps you have run into an earnest Christian, that when opposing the biblical teaching of the "bondage of the will", "salvation by grace alone" and "election" will use the common salvation analogy which likens the unsaved to a helpless drowning man. That a loving God gives us free choice while drowning whether we will reach out and take His hand to be saved or not. That only an 'evil' God, they say, would leave or not attempt to save people who are drowning in a lake. "How could a loving God be so cruel just to leave them there drowning," they argue.
There are quite a number of things that might be said in response to this. First of all we must clarify that what distinguishes our tradition from freewillism is not that one God loves people and the other conception of God does not. No... the distinction is between an intensive and an extensive love, between an intensive love where God actually expresses His love by laying down His life to redeem His loved ones, and an extensive love that loves everyone in a generic sense but actually delivers no one in particular. Consider the parable of the drowning man again in light of these two perspectives:
(1) Your child is drowning off the edge of your boat. You are a great swimmer but the swells are high and it is risky. You call out to your child to use his willpower to swim back to the boat to save himself, yet he is entirely too weak to do so. You reach out your hand but it depends on whether your child is a good enough swimmer to get to you and has the strength in himself to reach out his arm. But you do nothing more than call for him to come and will only go as far as reaching out your hand since you wouldn't want to violate his free will to let him decide if he will swim back and reach for your help.
(2) Your child is drowning off the edge of your boat. You are a great swimmer but the swells are high and it is risky. But your love for your child outweighs all other considerations and without hesitation you leap into the water at the risk of your own life, due to the weather, and actually save your child from drowning. You drown in the process but your child is saved. In other words, you don't just wait to see if he is willing or has the strength. He doesn't. So you go in and save your child regardless of the cost to yourself.
Which of the two fathers is more loving I ask?
The first one, if you haven't yet guessed, is the Arminian "father". He sees his child in trouble and will only save him on condition that he has the capacity to swim through the waves and reach out and take hold of the father. The father will not, however, risk his life to actually MAKE SURE that the son does not drown. His love does not act so this love is ineffectual. It all depends on how the son responds. It is a love which is conditional. The Arminian gospel is just like this because if God violates the human will in any way it makes Him evil in their mind. [Note: I will tell you what. If I am stubborn and will not obey the gospel, afterwards I would be grateful if he "violated" my will to save me from drowning. What I want does not matter since I am only a child with reference to God. It is what God wants that matters. What I want will conform to what God wants when He opens the eyes of my understanding. This is not something I can produce naturally. The Holy Spirit must act or I die. If your child is to be hit by a car, do you wait to see what he will do or do you run out to save him? I don't care if the child did not want it at the time. I do it anyway if I love him. The fact is what kind of love just sits there and does nothing but woo and hope you will save yourself? Is that the kind of love we expect of a parent, let alone our Heavenly Father?]
The second analogy is the Augustinian father. His love is not weak-willed or ineffectual but he loves his children with a resolute will that accomplishes what His love dictates by actually saving his child, even by forfeiting his own life in the process. God is love, and God's love is like His Word ... He says of it, "It will not return to Me empty, without accomplishing what I desire, And without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it." This is beautiful and what love is all about because it means we can take God at His word and promises.
Again, which father in the story is more loving?
Of course the analogy is flawed since the son, in real life is already dead to the things of the father and due to his autonomy and pride, would never take his father's help to do what he knows (or thinks) he can do for himself.
Naturally the next question is why does God not save everyone then? That is a deep mystery but we know God conspires with His own goodness and wisdom and always does what is right whether we fully understand His reasons or not. The same mystery equally extends to the question of why He bothers to save anyone at all. Given our hostility toward Him it is even more amazing that He chooses anyone. Why not give us what we all deserve, which is justice? So while it is true we may not know why He chooses only some for redemption, the Scriptures do teach the "what" and the "how" ...that He, in fact, does save a partuclar people for Himself. But it is not for us to pry into the mystery of why (since He has not revealed it) except that it was His good pleasure ... And it is not for us to presume, as some do, that election means He must have bad motives in doing so. We know, from revelation, that the character of God is always good and trustworthy so we can know with certainty that He does His choosing for good reasons that are in Himself even though we may not fully understand God's purpose. But to conclude, therefore, that God must be evil if He chooses some and not others is presumptious at best. The very fact that He does it is the highest reason in the universe. That He has covenantally set His affection on certain persons but not others is His prerogative. There cannot be a better reason than "God wills it". Can you think of a better reason?
But to perhaps gain some understanding from what God has revealed to us, consider the following:
The Arminian calls a God who leaves a rebel behind as evil. To expose the fallacy of this argument we should respond biblically by asserting that God would only be "evil" in leaving them if people were undeserving of just punishment. By using "drowning in a lake" as an analogy, they are making it sound like our condition before salvation is innocuous. This logical fallacy is called an "appeal to pity" (ad misercordiam). "Look at the helpless person drowning and the Calvinist God does nothing. This God must be an ogre".
Perhaps if our problem were only of a physical disability or of an innocent man drowning then, of course, we might be more tempted to make God out to be an ogre. But this is not how the Scripture describes the disposition of a sinner's heart. The Scripture says the unregenerate are rebels, hostile to God by nature. Realizing that analogies are imperfect, this drowning analogy still depends on pity for it to work at all, but is actually imposing an alien presupposition on the Scripture that we were just helplessly, innocently in need and God is, therefore, obligated to reach out to save us, lest we drown. So according to this analogy the one condition for us to meet if God is to love us is to reach out our hand and take hold of His, which He is obligated to extend lest otherwise He must be evil, they reason. Not only is this kind of love conditional but this love does nothing to help the helpless except call to him from afar. I hope you are beginning to see the clear problem with this line of reasoning.
Lets get the facts straight: nowhere does Scripture even hint that man is just innocently drowning. Rather it describes us as willfully and purposefully hostile toward God like an opposing army, suppressing the truth and replacing God with our own idols, having a debt we cannot and will not repay. The Text says that we love darkness and hate the light - which means our affections are bent on fleeing from God. Michael Horton once described it like this: “We cannot find God for the same reason that a thief can't find a police officer.” It is not as though we just had a physical inability, but our condition is described as a moral inability with darkened affections (John 3:19) in need of a new birth (John 3:3-6), i.e. a completely new nature that we might desire and understand the things of God (1 Cor 2: 5-14). One thing to remember is that we are all debtors for willfully breaking God's holy Law. We owe a debt we cannot repay - the price is too high, and further, we are unwilling. This means that we justly deserve God's wrath - all of us. Unless we can say that we justly deserve God's displeasure, save in the mercy of Jesus Christ, then we have yet to truly understand the gospel. If God were to completely wipe out the entire human race in one fell swoop, it would be entirely just for that is what we rightly deserve. If we were all thrown into an eternal hell, we would merely be getting our just deserts.
But since we are using analogies here is another: if nine people owed me money, and I canceled the debt of seven, the other two would have no grounds for complaint. In the same way if God canceled no one's debt it would be entirely proper, but if He cancels the debt of some of them, the others have no ground for complaint. They are responsible to repay but do not have the ability to repay (see Rom 3:20). God is in no way obligated to to cancel anyone's debt, but because He is loving and merciful He paid the debt for those He came to save according to His sovereign good pleasure (Eph 1:4, 5).
We must remember also that God has more than just one attribute ... and we must also remember that God is infinitely holy, just and wrathful. When we say we are saved what do we mean? What are we saved from? We are saved from God. Yes, saved from God. If God is truly a just God, His wrath must be poured out on the guilty. God is holy and no sin can stand in His presence - His justice requires just payment, a payment we cannot repay.
So God gives one of two things to humans in this life: justice or mercy. Those in Christ have received mercy. It wasn't because God saw anything in us that recommended us to Him, or because of our great resume or skill but because of his mercy alone that he saved us.
He didn't love us because of our faith but loved and redeemed us UNTO faith. We are justified through faith alone but we didn't produce faith in our unregenerate, hostile fallen nature ... God mercifully granted that we would repent and believe the gospel (2 Tim 2:25, Eph 2:8). Apart from His grace, which He granted us in the new birth, we would never come to God on our own. Rather, God has set His affection on us from eternity. He came to find us and deliver us from death that we might worship and have fellowship with Him. So if men suffer in Hell it is not because God so determined that they would for no reason, but because of their sin, and if we are saved it is solely because of His grace.
In spite of ourselves God came in the person of Jesus Christ to bear the full brunt of God's wrath for His people. The punishment we deserved fell on Him. He saves many but passes over the rest. He leaves the non-elect to do what they will. They choose to rebel because this is their natural inclination - God did not have to coerce them. So is God an ogre standing over some poor helpless drowning man? No, He is faced with people who are wilfully trying to establish themselves against Him and do not want His help. In fact they take up arms against the King. They will do anything they can to flee from Him, to declare autonomy and mutiny.
God sends His servants and His Son but we kill them instead. Does God have the obligation to save those who killed His Son? Or those who conspire against Him as we once did? No, He is righteous if he casts them in the lake of fire. But in spite of all we have done against Him, He comes in love bearing the punishment we justly deserve on His own person. Great love. But He will have mercy on whom He will (Rom 9:15, 16). Who are you man to tell God He is evil or unjust for saving some and leaving others? We should marvel that He saves any. If anyone would agree that He is just in punishing us all (which Arminians do), how then can they be consistent to make Him unjust for punishing some and saving the rest for His own good and wise reasons?
We must ask ourselves in light of all this, what is love? What is a holy love? ... and which description most closely fits with true biblical love. Jesus said in John 10 that He not only "calls his own sheep by name and leads them out" (John 10:3) but that "the good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep." (John 10:11,15) but he says of others that they "do not believe because [they] are not of My Sheep." (John 10:26) . He lays down his life for the sheep but some are not his sheep, and that is the reason they do not believe, Jesus says.
GOD GAVE THEM A SPIRIT OF STUPOR, EYES TO SEE NOT AND EARS TO HEAR NOT, DOWN TO THIS VERY DAY." (Rom 11:8)
In their case the prophecy of Isaiah is being fulfilled, which says, 'YOU WILL KEEP ON HEARING, BUT WILL NOT UNDERSTAND; YOU WILL KEEP ON SEEING, BUT WILL NOT PERCEIVE; (Matt 13:14)
Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways! (Rom 11:33)
---
Comments
-
I would take it one step farther and say that all the people that are drowning are already dead. They are nothing but bloated corpses floating around.
It's a loving Father that gives his own beating heat to bring his son back from the dead.
Yes, my sentiments exactly! I guess this is what I meant to say when writing the following:
"Of course the analogy is flawed since the son, in real life is already dead to the things of the father and due to his autonomy and pride, would never take his father's help to do what he knows (or thinks) he can do for himself."
Indeed being dead to spiritual things is as good as being a corpse which needs resuscitation ...one which God actually saves, not merely offers to save apart from opening our heart supernaturaly. Yes God gives us the command to believe but also grants us the ability in Christ.
Posted by: J W Hendryx | March 14, 2006 09:53 PM
-
Another anaology is: The Arminian says the lost are sick and need a doctor, Reformed Theology says the lost are equivalent to those who have fallen from the top of the Sears Tower in Chicago and are spattered on the sidewalk. They need life, not a doctor.
Posted by: Mike Ratliff | March 14, 2006 10:19 PM
-
While I agree with most of what is said here I think we ought to caution against analogies too much (which has been done in part).
We have quite a more difficult time telling that story when we are talking about the Reprobate rather than the Elect.
I happen to like the analogy that puts the sinner in the shoes of a Death Row inmate who can only be saved by a Pardon. This captures the idea of the Justice of God in leaving the man. However, many problems exist in this analogy as well.
The point is ... lets not get into an analogy war with Arminians ... and if we do lets just use the Dead body of Ephesians 2.
Posted by: Anonymous | March 15, 2006 02:59 AM
-
To Anonymous poster:
re: You comments >>>"analogy war with Arminians"
I understand your sentiments yet this analogy is used about every other time someone is attemting to defend that position. The counter-anaology simply shows that true love actually does what it sets out to do. It does not remain idle when its objects of affection are in peril. When we open the Scriptures, this is the kind of love, I believe, God shows his children, not a love which leaves them to fend off the wolf on their own.
The analogy is very close to reality. One believes that Christ's work gives everyone an opportunity, that Christ's death does not, by itself save them, but makes salvation a possibility for them. The other believes Christ actually saves His loved ones. I believe this is an accurate description that even those who are synergists would agree with.
Since this analogy is used so often, I am merely providing what I think to be, a sound refutation of the very concept.
Posted by: John | March 15, 2006 09:46 AM
-
I think Ezekiel 16 paints a vivid picture of how we rebel against God. We deserve nothing but judgement yet he chooses that we should live and atones for us even after chasing after every lust.
6"And when I passed by you and saw you wallowing in your blood, I said to you in your blood, 'Live!' I said to you in your blood, 'Live!'
8"When I passed by you again and saw you, behold, you were at the age for love, and I spread the corner of my garment over you and covered your nakedness; I made my vow to you and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Lord GOD, and you became mine. 9Then I bathed you with water and washed off your blood from you and anointed you with oil. 10I clothed you also with embroidered cloth and shod you with fine leather. I wrapped you in fine linen and covered you with silk.[a] 11And I adorned you with ornaments and put bracelets on your wrists and a chain on your neck. 12And I put a ring on your nose and earrings in your ears and a beautiful crown on your head. 13Thus you were adorned with gold and silver, and your clothing was of fine linen and silk and embroidered cloth. You ate fine flour and honey and oil. You grew exceedingly beautiful and advanced to royalty. 14And your renown went forth among the nations because of your beauty, for it was perfect through the splendor that I had bestowed on you, declares the Lord GOD.
15"But you trusted in your beauty and played the whore{b} because of your renown and lavished your whorings[c] on any passerby; your beauty[d] became his. 16You took some of your garments and made for yourself colorful shrines, and on them played the whore. The like has never been, nor ever shall be.[e] 17You also took your beautiful jewels of my gold and of my silver, which I had given you, and made for yourself images of men, and with them played the whore. 18And you took your embroidered garments to cover them, and set my oil and my incense before them.
30"How lovesick is your heart,[g] declares the Lord GOD, because you did all these things, the deeds of a brazen prostitute, 31building your vaulted chamber at the head of every street, and making your lofty place in every square. Yet you were not like a prostitute, because you scorned payment. 32Adulterous wife, who receives strangers instead of her husband! 33Men give gifts to all prostitutes, but you gave your gifts to all your lovers, bribing them to come to you from every side with your whorings. 34So you were different from other women in your whorings. No one solicited you to play the whore, and you gave payment, while no payment was given to you; therefore you were different.
59"For thus says the Lord GOD: I will deal with you as you have done, you who have despised the oath in breaking the covenant, 60yet I will remember my covenant with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish for you an everlasting covenant. 61Then you will remember your ways and be ashamed when you take your sisters, both your elder and your younger, and I give them to you as daughters, but not on account of{i} the covenant with you. 62I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall know that I am the LORD, 63that you may remember and be confounded, and never open your mouth again because of your shame, when I atone for you for all that you have done, declares the Lord GOD."
Posted by: AC | March 15, 2006 09:51 AM
-
John,
How can anyone think they deserve salvation after reading that? It is clear that without God's grace we are all doomed.
Oh Lord, keep us humble and living for Your glory alone!
Posted by: Mike Ratliff | March 15, 2006 11:46 AM
-
Great article.
The only reason why I shy away from saying that we are "already dead and bloated" is because some can take it to mean that we believe men have no wills or that there is not activity on our part -which is not true. We are fully active... active in rebellion and suppression and hostility.
These analogies are difficult to use because of things like this. How can you model all aspects in one analogy? I don't think you can. You can model pieces of it, separately, I believe, but not as a whole.
Posted by: Tim McGilvreay | March 16, 2006 09:16 AM
-
I've been having debates on Christian messageboards concerning eternal security, free will, predestination, Arminianism, Pelegianism, Calvinism...most of which I was pretty ignorant of before these discussions. Since being saved, I'd known, learned in my spirit, the truth of eternal security. Since dialoging about these things, I've learned about the fallacy of the free will arguments. AND THEN! Very recently (this past week, in fact) I learned about Charles Finney!!! Well, what I'm trying to say is, thank you for your analogy, it is comforting to read, and after hearing all the disparaging things people having been saying to me that undermines God's sovereignty, it's refreshing to hear you say what you say, to remind me, there really are others that take God at His word. Thanks.
Posted by: Susan Phillips | April 25, 2006 06:48 PM
-
The Drowning Son analogy fails to account for one thing in either case. The boy who has fallen off the boat is aware that he used to be on the boat.
Furthermore, he sees his father, wants his father's help, and he is aware of his own peril.
Real unsaved people in the world, whether dead or alive, are none of these things. They are not aware that they are in danger. They are not aware that they need saving, and they are not aware that God's intention is to do just that.
It is my opinion that awareness of sin and reaching out for salvation are simultaneous events.
A soon as awareness of sin comes, real awareness, not simple "identification" (yeah, the bible does say that's a sin, and yeah, I do do that...), reaching out to be saved immediately follows. The two go together inseparably.
No one who suddenly is aware of the fact of sin in their life, and what it means, is not at the same time concerned about what to do about it.
I think that's commonly refered to as regeneration in Reformed Theology, and it certainly is true in my own experience. "Apart from the law, I would not have known what sin is..." And also, as soon as I had real, legitimate, revelation knowledge of what sin is, the yearning for salvation immediately followed. How could it not? That revelation came from God - there was nothing I could have done to effect it.
Posted by: Kirby L. Wallace | July 1, 2006 10:45 PM
-
Kirby, you said: It is my opinion that awareness of sin and reaching out for salvation are simultaneous events.
Yes, agreed. Those who teach the analogy fail to see that they not only must thank God for offering salvation, but for giving the new heart and eyes that desires to take hold of it. We thank God for our faith as much as anything else. Alternately (if grace was resistable) we would have to glorify God for all else except our faith. The humility required to receive the humbling terms of the gospel, recognition of sin and love for Christ are all the Spirit disarming and quickening our hearts with new desires. Left to ourselves we would never recognize our need nor could we love Christ or the gospel.
Knowing what sin is, that very knowledge is immediately granted by God. When Peter affirmed that Jesus was the Christ the Son of the living God, Jesus responded byu saying "flesah and blood did not reveal this to you but my Father in Heaven"...
Posted by: John H | July 1, 2006 11:08 PM
-
Perhaps this isn't the place for this topic, but...
One of the reasons I believe more along the lines of Reformed Theology/Calvin, is just because that's the way that it happened in my own experience. I can't really speak for anyone else. Only myself. But I know certain things about myself.
I have always known "the gospel." Who in America doesn't?
That Jesus loves you has been a matter of public record for every single person in this country since they were old enough to hear "Jesus loves me this I know...." and understand what it meant.
I've always known "the bible is God's word." And I also always known a bunch of other "crap" like "Mary is the mother of God."
By the time we reach adulthood, and sometimes earlier, we all know the matter of "Jesus Loves You."
But it didn't avail me much, didn't really mean a whole lot to me, never really changed much the way I thought about things.
Then, over a period of about six weeks, when I was in my twenties, something happened.
With no effort and no conscious will on my part, all these things began to take on a sense of urgency. Guys that used to give me tracts and "witness" to me were an annoyance before, but now they were an annoyance and they were also (I found myself knowing) ***RIGHT!***
It bugged the living daylights out of me that I KNEW they were right.
It's like a light went on. All the stuff about "Jesus loves you" was not just a "nice saying." It was really, really TRUE. And all those questions about "Why would God let YOU into heaven if you died tonight" suddenly were like "yeah, why WOULD God let me in? Maybe I can't GET in...."
I got detoured right away, when I got "saved", because I got "saved" in a Pentacostal church. I was drawn into the "Jesus loves you...Don't you just LOVE Jesus too?" doctrines. I was a tongue-talker from the beginning.
But all that "revelation" that brought me in continued right on working on me until I saw that I had to part ways with "Charismatica." And I did.
And that revelation STILL works today, pretty much ENTIRELY from my reading of the scriptures. Even in "church" in the early years, I spent most of my time during sermons reading something completely different in my Bible. I did most of my serious Bible Study in just two places - sitting in my car or my barracks, and sitting in the pew on Sunday morning. I sat through a thousand sermons and remember almost none of them because all the while I was reading about Jesus healing the sick, raising the dad, and Paul preaching to the Gentiles.
And it had real meaning, importance, and most of all, understanding. I found that whereas before, the Bible was a dusty book that I understood little of what I read, now it literally came alive before my eyes.
It has been clear from the beginning, in my own experience, that REVELATION is the very CORE of who I have become in Christ. Because I, like thousands of other men, had read the Bible before and got nothing. But now, I got everything.
And there was never any decision on my part. Not even any determination to TRY to understand it. I just suddenly did. And I've been understanding it ever since. More in some areas, less in others. Sometimes, 30. Sometimes 60, sometimes a hundred-fold... ;-)
Two doctrines that I can recall VERY clearly from my own initial study were 1) Imputation. This was an obvious thing to me. I was rather astonished to find that there were people like Charles Finney who actually disbelieved this. It seemed the most self-evident, most central theme of the entire new testament. And two, that this was a "by invitation only" party. "No man comes to the Father but by me" and "No man comes to the Son except the father draw him" were an obvious pair to me within the first year of my own reading and study. I was appalled that others I knew couldn't see this pairing - or didn't want to.
But anyway... I believe the core doctrines of RT/Calvin now because that just the way it happened for me. I can't live anyone else's experience. I don;t want to.
Posted by: Kirby L. Wallace | July 2, 2006 03:06 AM
-
Hi,
I'm an honest seeker when it comes to the differences between these two camps. I don't have a true position yet, although I have been brought up in Arminian camps. What I don't understand is the analogy might better be stated with the following details added:
- The Father has multiple children who are all drowning.
- The Father has the power to save all the children.
- The Father desires to save all the children.
- However, He chooses only a few of them, leaps into the water, saves them, and dies in the process, leaving His other children to die.
Can anyone explain this to me? Again I'm not sure I'm an arminian. I don't think I believe in conditional salvation (or lack of security), and I'm pretty sure I believe in the total depravity of man.
Tim
Posted by: Tim | April 19, 2008 04:02 AM
-
Hi Tim
Analogies, as you know, only get at a certain part of truth and only go so far as you mean them to. The problem with changing the analogy the way you have is that Jesus calls unbelievers children of the devil (see John 8&10) and children of wrath. IN other words, we are not God's children by nature but rather by adoption, as the Scripture teaches ... and he loves those who he has chosen to adopt (Eph 1:3-5) in spite of our open rebellion against him.
God desires that all be saved in the same way he desires that we obey his commandments. This is his preceptive will ... in other words his command. He does not desire that anyone break his clear commands but they do. How can that be? Because this is not his eternal decree. It is only talking about his desire to see no one rebel against him. So what his eternal decree is is not the same as his preceptive will. God's will is that we are 100% holy. Are we? No. God desires that we all come to a knowledge of him? Do we? No. He calls all persons to Himself. No one comes, because no one can believe in Jesus apart from the Holy Spirit. No one can come to Him (i.e. believe) unless God grants it (John 6:63-65) and all to whom God grants it will believe (John 6:37)
So if no one does God's will. If all disobey God's deires for us to come to faith ... he still yet has mercy on many, in spirit of that.
Posted by: John H | April 21, 2008 11:56 AM
---
Copyright 2006 J.W. Hendryx/ReformationTheology.com (emphasis in original)
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
