God's permissive will

from comment 180 here http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2012/11/do-you-want-to-go-to-heaven/#comment-50835

As a starting point, while it’s hard to remember as limited human beings, we have to keep in mind that God is not at all like us. The instinct when we see anthropomorphic language in Scripture is to latch onto it and to apply it as if we know God in the same way we would know another human, but that instinct must be avoided. When we speak of God’s “sovereignty” or God’s “purpose” or even God’s “will,” it’s no more literally true of God than saying that God has hands or feet. God as God does not operate in a human way in any sense; these are (poor) analogies that are nonetheless the best we can do.

You appeal to one of those analogies as follows:

The flaw in your argument is the failure to understand God’s “revealed will” as opposed to His “decretive will”. The result of this logic requires God to be subject to fate. Since God created everything, this obviously cannot be, as fate itself was created by God.

This is, I would submit, an anthropomorphism of what is otherwise a helpful analogy. Clasically, there is no distinction between God’s “revealed will” and God’s “decretive will.” That was an invention of the Reformation by analogy to human beings, and it is simply inapplicable to God; God only has a single, perfect will that cannot be divided. The Scholastic distinction, which instead draws distinctions with respect to God’s effects, is the appeal to God’s “permissive will,” and this distinction was rooted solely in the Biblical and philosophical fact that God cannot sin. As St. Thomas succinctly says, “God therefore neither wills evil to be done, nor wills it not to be done, but wills to permit evil to be done; and this is a good.” That does not create a (false) separation in the will of God; instead, it says something about the existence of created things (and in this case, evil in created things) relative to God’s eternal will.

So just as when we see Scriptures describing God’s hands and feet as not being literal, we have to do the same when God is described as actively or positively causing evil. God isn’t surprised by evil either, but He “plans around” it by willing good to come of it rather. To say that God positively wills evil goes beyond a “hard teaching” over to blasphemy, although I recognize that you would not intend it that way. We have to stop short at that point.