In light of my opposition to Vincent Cheung, I received a feedback concerning this post. Specifically, this sentence was singled out: "We live in a fallen world, not in the realm of God's decrees and sovereign will." How can that sentence make sense if one believes that God is sovereign over the world?
Seen out of context, such a sentence does in fact undermine God's sovereignty. But this sentence has to be read in context. When I use the words "world" and "realm" here, I am not using this to be referring to the world in its cosmological sense. Rather, as it should be seen in context, the focus is on the world as conceptually perceived, the way "world" is used in Thomas Kuhn's analysis in his epistemic anti-realism. We do not live in the conceptual world of the decrees of God, in the sense that all these are hidden from us and are not on us apart from mediation. Since God does work through secondary causes, He is not directly acting on us. In Cheung's theodicy, since God is diretly acting on us, the only response is resignation. Whereas where there are real secondary causes, we can rage aginst the secondary causes while trusting in God the primary cause.
In life therefore, our faith in the sovereign God is meant to instill trust and confidence in our Lord. It is not meant for us to decipher into the mysteries of the sovereign will, to become fatalistic, or to become stoic in our emotions. Cheung's theodicy however fails to do either of these, and thus necessarily leads to fatalism and stoicism.
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