Calvinism
Years ago, when I was first exposed to an extreme form of Calvinism, I was shocked to learn that the doctrine of predestination was still alive and well. It hadn’t died out in the era of Jonathan Edwards, as I had thought. The idea that God would arbitrarily decide in advance who would be saved and who would spend eternity in Hell, without giving anyone a say in the matter, simply repulsed me. Not only was this doctrine alive and well, but it was, and still is, the predominant view in many mainline protestant denominations and even in the Baptist church, of which I was a member.
According to an extreme form of this system of thought, sometimes called hyper-Calvinism, Jesus only died for the Elect (limited atonement), and God only loves the Elect, and it is impossible to become saved by one’s own volition, because God decides in advance who is going to desire to be saved and who is not. When God calls you to be saved, His grace is irresistable. If He does not call you, then it would be impossible for you to come to repentance and be saved. The idea is that man is totally depraved and unless God intervenes and awakens in him a desire to become saved, then the result is a hardened heart that cannot be changed.
One of the main themes of this system of thought is the sovereignty of God. The idea is that God is all-powerful and completely sovereign over His creation and will absolutely accomplish all that He sets out to do. Because God is sovereign and does not save everyone, it must be assumed that God does not want everyone to be saved. Not all Calvinists are this extreme in their beliefs. Many do not believe in the limited atonement and many believe that God really does love everyone. He just loves the elect in a different way than those who are not of the elect.
All Calvinists teach that human freedom is an illusion. It only seems real, because God allows us to make our own choices in life, sometimes referred to as “free-agency,” to distinguish it from “free-will.” The idea is that we are free to do what we want, but what we want is not determined by us, but by God. So, we don’t really possess free-will, only free-agency.
Of course, there are many Scriptures that refute these teachings, but there is also much Scriptural support for them. In fact, if you read Calvinist literature and analyze their Scriptural arguments, their case almost seems irrefutable.
Arminianism
Arminianism came about as a reaction against Calvinism. Arminians believe that Jesus did indeed die for everyone, and that we are all genuinely free to make our own choices in life. While it is true that God decides in advance (elects, chooses, predestinates) who will become saved, His choices are based on His foreknowledge of who would be predisposed to receive the Gospel and who would not. According to Arminianism, human freedom is real, and God’s grace is offered freely to all.
The Arminian arguments seem sound enough at first glance, and there is much Scriptural support for this system of thought. However, as I pondered their arguments I came to a very disturbing realization. Human freedom must be an illusion, even if the Arminians are right and the Calvinists are wrong. If God doesn’t determine our desire to be saved or not, what does? Can any of our choices in life actually be self-caused? While it is true that we are free to make our own choices in life, we are not free to determine what our desires will be. All of our thoughts have an antecedent cause. The choices we desire to make in life, if not directly determined by God, are at least “indirectly” determined by Him. After all, it was God who created the universe and set in motion random processes which resulted in our birth, genetic, social, societal, and psychological make-up and environment. We didn’t choose where we would be born, or in what kind of family or social environment we would be raised. All of these factors combine to make each one of us unique and different.
The reason my choices in life are different from yours is that I am different from you. Did I cause myself to be different? Not really. I can change the way I feel about things if I make certain choices in life, but my desire to change was a result of antecedent causes over which I had no control.
So, whether you believe that your uniqueness was caused by God or by random processes, it is still not self-caused. If you choose to become saved, and I do not, who is to blame? Ultimately, we must “blame” God for all the choices we make in life. God is the one who started it all, knowing full-well what the result would be and how each individual life would be affected.
So, it doesn’t matter whether you take the Calvinist position or the Arminian position, God is still ultimately responsible for all that happens.
God’s Foreknowledge
and Human Freedom
It has been correctly argued, that if God has a perfect knowledge of all future events, then those events must be immutable, and all human actions leading up to those events must also be immutable and not subject to change. If this is the case, then human freedom must be an illusion. If all our future actions are known by God, they cannot be changed, or else what is known by God is not accurate. The arguments relating to the incompatibility of God’s foreknowledge and human freedom lie at the center of the Calvinism vs. Arminianism debate. The major thrust of the Arminian argument is that God knows in advance what choices man will “freely” make. But if those choices are known in advance, counters the Calvinist, then they cannot possibly be changed and human freedom must be an illusion. All of man’s future actions must be “cast in granite,” and man is not really “free” to change or alter that course. Even before you were born, your eternal destiny was sealed and it cannot be changed. The Calvinist concludes that your eternal destiny was predetermined by God, since God set in motion a sequence of events which cannot be altered, knowing in advance that the result would be the eternal damnation of some and eternal life in Heaven for only the “Elect.” The Arminian would argue that although the future cannot be changed, your future is the result of choices which are “freely” made, and that your actions, although “foreknown” by God, are not “predetermined” by God. But this argument only begs the question. None of man’s choices are “freely made,” if they are the result of events set in motion at the beginning of time and not subject to alteration. Your choices in life, if not determined by “direct” intervention or “orchestration” of God, are, at the very least, “indirectly” determined by God, because God set everything in motion, knowing the result of His actions in advance.
A third point of view, which is really a variant of Arminianism, is the idea that God does not have exhaustive, detailed, knowledge of the future, because even God cannot know what does not exist. This is sometimes referred to as “Open Theism.” The word “open” refers to the openness of God to change His mind in response to “new” information and change His behaviors, resulting in an altered future. Since future events technically do not exist until they actually happen, it can be argued that God can still be “omniscient” and not know the future in every detail. In other words, even an omniscient God cannot know what is unknowable. This is true of both past, present and future events. God cannot know that an event in the past, present, or future has occurred, if it has not actually occurred. God cannot know that something is true when it actually is not. For example, God only knows that four plus four equals eight. He cannot know that it equals nine, or any other number besides eight. According Open Theism, God, based on His exhaustive knowledge of the past and present, can only know what the “most likely” future outcomes will be, and the ways He intends to “shape” future events as He interacts with His creative beings in response to their choices in life, which, for the most part, are not directly coerced by God.
For me, Open Theism at first seemed to be an attractive alternative to the traditional Calvinistic and Arminian positions, and it harmonized beautifully with the way the Scriptures picture God’s interactions with his created beings. In the Bible, God is often “surprised” or disappointed by man’s moral and ethical choices and He changes His behavior in response to those choices. Examples of this kind of interaction are countless. The story of the Genesis Flood, for example, pictures God as being “grieved” that He had made man and decided, based on how corrupt man had become, to start over again. Many of the prophecies of the Old Testament were conditioned upon human responses and behavior. Even the most hard-core Calvinist must acknowledge that if God’s knowledge of the future is exhaustive and complete, God certainly does not behave as though this were true. In response to man’s choices, God decides what He is going to do next. The whole idea of prayer and supplication is to ask God to do something He would not otherwise do.
However, there are two major arguments against the notion of Open Theism. One has to do with the testimony of the Scriptures, and the other relates to science and logic.
Regarding the testimony of Scripture, while many of the Bible’s predictive prophecies may be understood to be contingent upon man’s response, and consequently subject to change, other prophecies are not so easily explained in this way. For example, how could Jesus know in advance that Peter would be tested three times, and deny knowing him three times, before the cock would crow the next morning? I’m sure you are well aware of many other similar examples. Regarding my understanding of science and logic, it has been pretty well established that space and time as we know it are interrelated and only have relevance within the bounds of the physical universe which God, himself, created. For God to have created the universe, would it not be logical to assume that He would not be subject to its limitations? Wouldn’t God have to exist in other dimensions which transcend our space-time continuum, and most probably be able to view His creation from all spatial and temporal points of reference?
Again the question arises, if God is able to view the future in every detail from a vantage point outside our space-time continuum, would not the future then be unchangeable and human freedom an illusion? The Armenian would argue that, even when viewed from outside the boundaries of our universe, the only future God can see is the one that currently exists, one that will happen if God does not interfere. After all, even an omnipotent God cannot know something that does not exist. However, as God interacts with humanity, the future changes. Hence, as man interacts with God, he changes his destiny. Thus, the future that God sees sometimes happens, and sometimes not, depending on how present circumstances change in response to God’s initiatives. The Calvinist would then counter with the argument that the future that “currently exists” includes God’s future interventions, hence we come right back to the same problem of the future that God sees being immutable.
What if, however, God deliberately chooses to see the future from only one perspective in time, the present, for the sake of preserving human freedom? In other words, what if God chooses to only view our space-time universe from within? Just as He “emptied” himself of certain Godly characteristics when He incarnated Himself as Jesus Christ, would not the same principle hold true as He incarnates himself at various times in history in order to interact with humanity. May we regard any act of God whereby He communicates directly with humanity as a form of incarnation? This would not necessarily prevent God from seeing the future, but the future that God sees would have to consist entirely of extrapolations based on current events. Of course this would not explain examples of predictive prophecy in the Bible such as Peter’s denials. In order to make accurate, immutable predictions such as this, Jesus would have had to rely on information from an “outside source,” hence his dependence on God the Father through prayer. Only God the Father could view things from this vantage point. I know this is speculative, but could this not possibly explain the need for God’s triune nature? Let’s assume that God’s ability to see the future is limited when He views it from within our current space-time continuum, but when He views it from outside He sees the final result, which definitely would be fixed and immutable. Would this negate human freedom? Not necessarily. The future that God sees from outside the universe would be the result of man’s ongoing interactions with a God who truly cannot see the future. In other words, God would be behaving in this world as though the future were not fixed. Man’s choices would be free in the practical, functional sense, yet they would still be fixed and immutable from God’s external perspective.
Universal Restoration
The obvious resolution to the Calvinism vs. Arminianism debate is the doctrine of Universal Restoration, which is plainly taught throughout the Scriptures. It doesn’t really matter if our choices in life are “freely” made or not. The truth is that God has already decided that eventually all will come to Christ, each in his own turn, some sooner, some later. All will receive the same reward in the end. Since God is the ultimate cause of all our decisions, it fitting that He gets ALL the credit.
Ephesians 2:8-9: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith–and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God–not by works, so that no one can boast.”
I love the Parable of the Vinyard. It beautifully illustrates the above principle.
Matthew 20:1-16: “For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire men to work in his vineyard. He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard. About the third hour he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. He told them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. He went out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour and did the same thing. About the eleventh hour, he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, ‘Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?’ ‘Because no one has hired us,’ they answered. He said to them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard.’ When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.’ The workers who were hired about the eleventh hour came and each received a denarius. So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. ‘These men who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.’ But he answered one of them, 'Friend, I am not being unfair to you. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the man who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’ So the last will be first, and the first will be last."
To God be ALL the glory! Amen.