Read on Twitter
Invest in a good doctrine of primary and secondary causes. If you don't, you'll end up paying for it in repairs throughout the rest of your theological system.
Let’s say you try to save money and don’t buy it. Pretty soon you’re adjusting the human agency knob down because you want to adjust the divine sovereignty knob up.
Or, because you want to experiment with the full range of the human mind of Jesus, you decide to put his divine mind in a lock box—for just a little while.
Or you worry that you’re not using sanctifying grace enough when you’re operating human freedom, etc, etc. You might even start trying to engineer new models to make it all work because, hey, you’re handy around the house.
But your real problem is you didn’t invest in a suuuweet doctrine of primary and secondary causes, which runs into none of these all too common system errors.
In a proper doctrine, primary and secondary causes don’t exist on the same plane of being. Thus, because they don’t take up the same ontological space, they don’t compete. In fact they are designed to operate together.
Indeed because the primary cause gains nothing from the secondary cause, its relation to the latter is one of unconditioned generosity. And the dependence of the secondary cause on the primary cause, far from denigrating the former, is the necessary condition of its flourishing.
I know it costs a lot but it keeps things running across the system—in your doctrine of providence, in your doctrine of the hypostatic union, and in your doctrine of sanctification. Does it “explain” things? No. But we know not to try to explain things beyond our plane of being.
