No Worries

“If we were maintaining that man is free and that man is not free, and we were using the word free unequivocally, then that would be an actual contradiction. We would be trying to square the circle. But if we say that God determined, for example, the treachery of Judas, and that Judas, in an entirely different sense, determined in his own heart what he would do, where is the contradiction? There is mystery, certainly, but no more contradiction that when we try to understand how God created the universe ex nihilo. We do not understand it, but our lack of understanding is very different from our lack of understanding round squares. Hamlet cannot do what Ophelia does; that would be a contradiction. But he can do what Shakespeare in a different way does, and when we come right down to it, cannot be found doing anything else” (From Whatever Happened to the Reformation, pp. 67-68).