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Bible Dictionaries
Hardening
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or The discussion of this subject relates to a single striking case, which St. Paul and later theologians have taken as typical. The dramatic interest of the legend of the Exodus (Exodus 5-14) centres in a conflict between the Divine and the human will. Pharaoh’s successive promises and refusals to let the Israelites go into the wilderness are the outward signs of an inward vacillation under the alternate influences of insensate pride and abject fear. It is stated that his heart was hardened (Exodus 7:13-14; Exodus 7:22; Exodus 8:19; Exodus 9:7; Exodus 9:35), that he hardened his heart (Exodus 8:15; Exodus 8:32, Exodus 9:34), and that Jahweh said He would harden (Exodus 4:21, Exodus 7:3, Exodus 14:4), and did harden (Exodus 9:12, Exodus 10:1; Exodus 10:20; Exodus 10:27, Exodus 11:10, Exodus 14:8), his heart. In the NT the proposition that God hardens the heart occurs only in quotations from the OT (πωρόω being used in John 12:40 and σκληρύνω in Romans 9:18).
Critical exegesis makes no attempt to soften or evade the natural meaning of this language, which affirms, not that God merely permits (as Origen and Grotius thought), or that He foreknows, but that He effects, the hardening of the heart. If such a statement is not to be explained away, can it be explained in such a manner as to be credible? The difficulty of accepting it is a particular phase of the general difficulty of reconciling human freedom with Divine sovereignty. It has been truly said that
‘the relation of man, as a free moral personality, to God is even more difficult to conceive than his relation to nature; theology has more perils for human freedom than cosmology. To think of God as all in all, and yet to retain our belief in human freedom or personality,-that is the real metaphysical difficulty’ (J. Seth, Ethical Principles3, 1898, p. 395).
The assertion that God hardens a man’s heart shocks our moral sense, because it seems to deny Divine love on the one hand and human freedom on the other. It is partly explained by the Semitic habit of recognizing the First Cause of all events and ignoring second causes. In Nature, history, and personal experience the controlling and directing hand of God was discerned by the Hebrews. Now, ‘piety demands such an emphasizing of God’s action as would logically take away man’s freedom. Moral consciousness, on the other hand, demands a freedom which, looked at by itself, would exclude all divine co-operation and order’ (H. Schultz, OT Theol., Eng. translation , 1892, ii. 196). The authors of the Exodus narrative, most, of which is by J or E, are typical OT writers, in that they set the doctrines of sovereignty and freedom side by side without betraying any consciousness of a conflict between them and a need to harmonize them. Their teaching is not fatalistic, for fatalism is the assertion of a superhuman activity which leaves no room for moral freedom. They take for granted that responsibility which the conscience, unless corrupted by sophistry, regards as the prerogative of every human being. The tyrant whom they depict is anything but a puppet in the hands of an absolute and arbitrary Will. The Divine sovereignty never excludes the possibility of initiative on his part. In every retrospect of his own conduct he feels that he could, and ought to, have chosen a different course. He knows that he has failed to ‘lay to heart’ the judgments of God (Exodus 7:23). He confesses again and again that he has sinned (Exodus 9:27, Exodus 10:16), and he asks Moses to forgive his sin and pray for him (Exodus 10:17). He might at any moment humble himself before God, but he stubbornly refuses to do it (Exodus 10:3). His will is never coerced; it is by his own deeds that he merits the penalty which is ultimately inflicted upon him. He sins and suffers, not as the victim of a Divine good-pleasure which hardens whom it will, but as a tyrant who, ‘being often reproved, hardeneth his neck,’ and who is therefore ‘suddenly broken, and that without remedy’ (Proverbs 29:1).
While the religions leaders of Israel assert the efficiency of God in unqualified terms, they lay no foundation for that high predestinarianism which maintains the Divine sovereignty and leaves only a semblance of freedom to man. The theology of the OT is not deterministic, as ‘the accepted Muhammadan theology is undoubtedly deterministic’ (H. P. Smith, The Bible and Islam, 1896, p. 137). All the prophets and prophetic writers, among whom J and E may be included, accentuate moral obligation; they regard virtuous and vicious acts as originating in the human will; their whole teaching is based on the conviction that men and nations deserve rewards or punishments, and are in a real sense the authors of their own destiny. The figure of the clay and the potter (Jeremiah 18:6, Isaiah 64:8, Romans 9:21), which clearly recognizes ‘a divinity that shapes our ends,’ says nothing of the principles according to which these ends are shaped (A. B. Davidson, Theol. of OT, 1904, p. 131), and all apparently predestinarian language is meant to be moralized.
‘Nor does any one doubt that it is an effect intended by God, when, at a certain stage in sin, His revelation makes the heart harder. God’s word can never return unto Him void. Where it is hindered from blessing, it must curse. Light must make weak eyes weaker; nourishing food must aggravate the virulence of disease. That is a necessary moral ordinance-in other words, one willed by God from eternity’ (H. Schultz, op. cit. ii. 207).
Moses’ experience of the hardening effect of Divine truth in the case of Pharaoh was one which almost all prophets have shared with him. There is biting satire, but not predestinarian doctrine, in the command which Isaiah (6:10) puts into the mouth of God: ‘Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears dull, and besmear their eyes, lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and their heart understand, and they turn again and be healed.’ This prophet’s language is quoted with approval by our Lord in Mark 4:12, Luke 8:10; and with an important modification in Matthew 13:14-15.
‘It is conceivable that Jesus might use Isaiah’s words in Isaiah’s spirit, i.e., Ironically, expressing the bitter feeling of one conscious that his best efforts to teach his countrymen would often end in failure, and in his bitterness representing himself as sent to stop ears and blind eyes. Such utterances are not to be taken as deliberate dogmatic teaching. If, as some allege, the evangelists so took them, they failed to understand the mind of the Master’ (A. B. Bruce, Expositor’s Greek Testament , ‘The Synoptic Gospels,’ 1897, p. 196).
The hardening of Pharaoh’s (or of any other guilty man’s) heart is a judicial, not an arbitrary, act of God, who never hardens a good man’s heart. The process is, in Western language, natural and inevitable. ‘By abuse of light, nature produces callousness; and what nature does God does’ (M. Dods, Expositor’s Greek Testament , ‘The Gospel of St. John,’ 1897, p. 812). If He gives men up to punishment, it is because they have deliberately given themselves up to sin (Romans 1:24; Romans 1:26; Romans 1:28). The story of Pharaoh’s overthrow has great and permanent value as a drama of freedom abused, and its moral effect would be ruined if we were to interpolate in it at any point the words of the Qur’än (x. 88):
‘And Moses said, O our Lord, Thou hast given Pharaoh and his nobles pomp and riches in this world, to make them wander from Thy path; O our Lord, destroy their riches and harden their hearts, that they may not believe until they see exemplary punishment.’
St. Paul uses the case of Pharaoh, as well as the figure of the clay and the potter, to establish his doctrine of God’s sovereign right and power of disposing of men’s lives as He will. In the keenness of his dialectic the Apostle employs expressions which seem harsh: ‘So then he hath mercy on whom he will, and whom he will he hardeneth’ (ὅν δὲ θέλει σκληρύνει, Romans 9:18). St. Paul
‘has none of that caution and timorousness which often lead writers perpetually to trim and qualify for fear of being misunderstood. He lays full stress upon the argument in hand in its bearing upon the idea to be maintained, without concerning himself about its adjustment with other truths’ (G. B. Stevens, The Pauline Theology, 1892, p. 120; cf. C. Gore, St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, ii. [1900] 37f.).
He approaches the painful subject of the hardening of the Jews under the preaching of the gospel from two different sides. When his object is to humble their pride and pretension, he emphasizes (what no Jew would deny) the absoluteness of God; when his aim is to silence their excuses, he shows them that it is for their own sins that they are rejected.
‘The hardening … against the gospel, which in Romans 9, 11 he considers as a divine destiny, he characterises in chap. 10 as the self-hardening of Israel’ (W. Beyschlag, NT Theol.2, Eng. translation , 1896, ii. 118).
There is, however, always a danger in the dialectical use of the language of absolutism. If the conversion of some and the hardening of others are ascribed to the mere will of God, it is clearly open to the hardened to say, ‘Why doth he yet find fault?’ (τί ἔτι μέμφεται, Romans 9:19); and if an inspired prophet is then quoted, ‘Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it (τὸ πλάσμα τῷ πλάσαντι), “Why didst thou make me thus?” ’ the answer must be that ‘a man is not a thing, and if the whole explanation of his destiny is to be sought in the bare will of God, he will say, Why didst thou make me thus? and not even the authority of Paul will silence him’ (J. Denney, Expositor’s Greek Testament , ‘Romans,’ 1900, p. 663). If the Potter is a God of infinite love, it is well with the clay, as Rabbi Ben Ezra sees; but if the Potter is a God who for His mere good pleasure makes ‘vessels of wrath,’ who would care to worship Him?
‘We must affirm that freedom is the fixed point that must be held, because it is an inalienable certainty of experience, and that predestination can be only such as is consistent with it; else there is no rational and responsible life.… Predestination in Other fields of existence need not trouble us; but perplexity and anguish unutterable enter if we admit the supposition, or even the genuine suspicion that God has so foreordained our actions as to take away our freedom. To this the history of Christian experience bears abundant witness’ (W. N. Clarke, An Outline of Christian Theology, 1898, p. 146).
It is certain that in his general teaching St. Paul held fast both Divine sovereignty and human freedom (see Philippians 2:12). It is equally certain that he left the speculative question of the relation of the two where he found it-as an antinomy which he could not transcend. Nor have any later theologians or philosophers solved the enigma. Finite thought is unable to comprehend that Divine activity which works in a higher way than any other energy in the world. But ‘even though the ultimate reconciliation of divine and human personality may be still beyond us’ (J. Seth, op. cit. 396), it is practically enough if Christianity maintains that in relation to free beings the will of God is never an arbitrary will, enforcing itself without moral means.
‘God shows respect for his creatures, and for himself as their creator, and upon the independence that he has given them he makes no attempt forcibly to intrude’ (W. N. Clarke, op. cit. p. 138).
While the Qur’än (xiv. 4) teaches that ‘God leads astray whom He will and leads aright whom He will; He is the Powerful, the wise,’ the God revealed by Jesus Christ ‘wishes not that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance’ (2 Peter 3:9).
Literature.-In addition to books named in the article See Calvin, Institutes, ed. 1863, i. 198ff.; B. Weiss, Bib. Theol. of NT, Eng. translation , Edinburgh, 1882-83, ii. 3ff.; A. B. Bruce, St. paul’s Conception of Christianity, do. 1894, p. 121ff.; F. Godet, Romans, Eng. translation , do. 1881-82, ii. 158ff.
James Strahan.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Hardening'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/h/hardening.html. 1906-1918.
