Alan Roebuck writes:

Thank you for hosting the discussion (which can be found here and here) on Calvinism. It’s a big subject, and I hope you don’t mind a somewhat lengthy e-mail in response to what’s been said so far. 

First, some general comments, then my responses to some readers’ comments. 

The primary thrust of my initial comment on Calvinism was about free will with regard to becoming a Christian. Free will in general is a related, and more complex, topic. 

About becoming a Christian, Calvinism (and Lutheranism and some Anglican/Episcopal leaders) says what Scripture says: God in eternity past chose some to be Christians, and in the fullness of time He enables them to have saving faith. Without the decrees and actions of God, nobody would come to Christ. 

This doctrine sounds like a problem because we don’t feel predestined. When we come to Christ, we don’t feel like a cosmic force is overriding our normal faculties. We feel like we freely choose Christ. And the Bible, while it does not say [Quote] Man has free will [unquote], presupposes that we have free will in the sense that we can choose what we want (or perhaps what we don’t want but want to want), and are judged by our actions in a way that would be entirely unfair for an automaton. 

And yet the Bible also says God chose us. For example, Ephesians 1:3-5 (NASB): 

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him [i.e., reckoned righteous, i.e., Christians]. In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will… 

The Calvinistic theory of election [the theological term for being predestined to be a Christian believer] is in fact a solution, not a problem: it solves the problem of the Bible appearing to contradict itself in calling us predestined and free. 

In this, it resembles the doctrine of the Trinity which, as Greg Koukl points out, is also a solution, not a problem. That is, it solves the problem of the Bible appearing to contradict itself by saying that there is one God, and then saying that the Father, Son and Holy Ghost are three different persons Who are all God. The problem is solved by the orthodox Trinitarian formulation: God is one substance and three Persons. 

It is my understanding that all (small-o) orthodox Christian bodies have always affirmed predestination; where they differ is in how they explain just what this means. One of the main competitors to Calvinism is the view that God knows what we will choose, but He does not make us choose Him. But this is contradicted by the above passage, which says that God chose us, not that He knew what we would do. 

Not only does God predestine in the sense of making decrees in eternity past, He also makes His decrees come true by giving saving faith to those He predestined. This is why some non-Christians change their minds and come to Christ: God makes them do it. But He does not do it by pointing a gun at their heads, or by mesmerizing them, or by implanting chips in their brains, or some other such bizarre scheme. He does it by changing what the unbeliever wants. And the change seems so natural that the former unbeliever doesn’t know it was God’s working until he reads the Bible (and is properly instructed), whereupon he learns that God made it happen. 

This change is not caused by the non-Christian gaining more information: Non-Christians don’t want more information about Christ and they reject it if they should chance to hear it. (I include in this category liberal Pseudo-Christians and other apparently-Christian heretics. The Christ they want is a counterfeit that appeals to their particular species of unbelief.) And we also cannot explain it by saying that the individual finally had the right religious experience. Some other people who have the same religious experience remain unbelievers. 

We cannot explain why people change their desires and come to Christ except by saying “something changed,” or perhaps more elaborate words that amount to the same thing. But these words are a description, not an explanation. It happens, and we cannot know why. Only the Bible gives an explanation of how it happens: God gives saving faith to the elect.

But this saving faith does not occur apart from secondary causes. The predestined come to faith through hearing the Gospel of how Jesus died to take away their sins. The elect are enabled by God to believe; the non-elect remain unable to believe. To an outside human observer the difference is that some have the indefinable mental prerequisites to receive the Good News, and some don’t. But that’s not what the Bible (the highest authority on these matters) says.

You might say “Free will by definition is the opposite of predestination.” But it depends on your definition. If free will means “nothing bizarre is operating that would prevent me from choosing what I want (or want to want),” then we obviously have free will at least the vast majority of the time, and the Bible does not contradict this commonsense notion. The problem is: We cannot choose what we don’t want to choose. The non-Christian is a slave of sin. In that, we are not free to choose Christ until God gives us the freedom.

On to the comments:

mdavid said,

The problem with this question, of course, is that there is no provable Calvinist. 

“Calvinism,” more accurately called “Reformed theology,” is an easily-identified system. It is defined formally by the various Reformed creeds and confessions such as the Westminster Confession of Faith, or the Heidelberg Catechism. And it is intended to be an accurate summary of biblical teaching, not a collection of the “sayings of Chairman Calvin.” 

Kristor said, 

it seems to me that the notion that we don’t have the least desire to adore God unless he plants it in us must be in one sense trivially true, and in another probably false. 

The belief that only God can give one the ability to want Christ comes from Scripture, for example, Romans 3:11: 

there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. 

Aside from Scripture, we could not know that only those upon whom God bestows the gift of faith can believe. Certainly we were made to know and love God, but the Fall interfered. 

Kristor also said, 

The analogy to which Alan refers, of God setting up the action of the play “behind the scenes,” while we merely recite the lines, meanwhile laboring under the illusion that they are ours, seems to me to fail. 

It was only an analogy. Reformed theology says that man really is free in the sense that he does what he wants, without any sense of an external force overriding him. But God also predestines. What the actual mechanism of this is, nobody other than God can know. But this is what the Bible teaches, so we ought to believe it.

John E. wrote, regarding “wanting versus wanting to want,”

There seems to be a danger of infinite regress here, and sophistry. 

It seems to me there is a clear difference between wanting something that is not a want, and wanting to want something. But I think there is no difference between wanting to want, and wanting to want to want. If so, the regress stops after two steps. I wouldn’t be surprised of a Catholic philosopher has written on this. They’ve written about everything else. 

Brandon F. wrote: 

From what I understand Calvin teaches that God’s will is irresistible; that if we are called we cannot resist. That means that there is no free will for anyone called or not with regard to the calling.

True, we cannot resist that which we want, as long as another and greater want does not cancel it. But if a greater want cancels the first one, then perhaps we don’t really have the first want. Those who want to come to Christ cannot say no to what they want. 

Brandon also says

The Bible is full of people who resist God’s will…

 True. People often resist what they know God wants. But nobody resists God giving them a desire for Christ. These are different species of God’s will. God’s commands are one thing. His irresistible grace is another. 

Finally, Brandon says, 

An early teaching of many prominent church fathers was apocatastasis, the reconciliation of all to God at the end of days. There are diverse teachings throughout the history of Christianity but we should all take comfort that God will decide, not Calvin. 

But the Bible is a higher authority than Church Fathers, and it says not all will be saved. And “Calvinism” is not Calvin, it’s the Bible and, at least on this particular issue, the original view of the Reformation.

Laura writes:

Predestination was not the only, or even the most important, idea advanced by John Calvin, but it is certainly his most controversial one. Thank you to Mr. Roebuck for his concise and incisive explanations of Calvinist theology. 

Alan cites this passage from Ephesians as the crux and main support of election in the Calvinist sense:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him [i.e., reckoned righteous, i.e., Christians]. In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will… 

Is Paul saying that God predetermined those who would choose him or  that God chose to save those who would respond to grace? There’s an important distinction here. If God predetermined those who would choose him then he also predetermined those who would not choose him, thus creating evil. The latter sense of choosing those who would choose him (“He chose us in Him”) preserves a zone of human freedom; the former does not and the latter sense is a reasonable interpretation of Paul’s words. It is not a wilful distortion of these words. Mr. Roebuck’s point that we must accept a form of predetermination because of these words is not convincing. “He predestined us to adoption as sons” can refer to the final grace and salvation God would bestow on those who would choose him, of whom he had foreknowledge. “In love he predestined us” does not mean he selected some and rejected others in advance, but that he predestined those who would choose him to “remain holy and blameless.”

Here is a relevant passage by Patrick Henry Reardon, from his Daily Devotional Guide of February, 2009, that I think usefully addresses the distinction between predetermination in the Calvinist sense and predestination. He writes:

Although God certainly knows all things ahead of time, including each person’s eternal destiny, He does not predetermine those actions that lie within the realm of human freedom. Men make their own choices, for which they alone are held responsible. God foreknows these actions, but He does not predetermine them.

We do not understand how God influences the activities of history, but we do know that He never acts in such a way as to remove man’s freedom of choice. In the words of John of Damascus, “We should understand that while God knows all things beforehand, He does not predetermine all things. For He knows beforehand those things that are in our power, but He does not predetermine them. For it is not His will that wickedness should exist, nor does He choose to compel virtue” (De Fide Orthodoxa 2.30).

What, then, does Holy Scripture mean when it asserts that God “predestines”? The verb itself, proorizo, means “to arrange ahead of time. In the biblical context, where this verb appears with “foreknow” (proginosko, “to know ahead of time”), the verb signifies the providential arrangements by which He brings people to the grace of the Gospel. That is to say, predestination embraces the mysterious influences that God brings to bear on history, so that all things work together for the good of those who love Him.

This is very clear in the story of Joseph in the Old Testament. God made use of the sins of Joseph’s brothers to predestine—to arrange for—the deliverance of Joseph’s family: “And God sent me before you to preserve a posterity for you in the earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So now it was not you who sent me here, but God. . . . But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive” (Genesis 45:7-8; 50:20).

“To predestine,” as understood in the Bible (where, in fact, the noun never appears) has no reference to any alleged divine decree whereby some people are consigned to heavenly life and others to everlasting damnation. On the contrary, God wills all men to be saved. Indeed, in the Bible, predestination does not refer to any divine decree at all. It is a description, rather, of God’s providential activity in history, working to bring good out of evil.

Nowhere, therefore, does Holy Scripture hint even faintly at a person’s “predestination to hell.” In fact, this repulsive idea does violence to the Bible, in which predestination is always a category of grace, never of punishment. Predestination pertains invariably to the divine call, not the rejection of that call. It is always a description of the divine favor, not disfavor. It certainly does not include God’s arrangements to have someone damned.

In His providential guidance of history, God makes use of man’s sins. He never “prearranges” those sins nor wills those sins; He does not, that is to say, predestine men to sin. Even less does God predestine anyone’s damnation. Damnation was never God’s idea, and the majestic sovereignty of God receives no glory from anyone’s eternal loss.

Moreover, the Bible never speaks of predestination except in relationship to Christ’s relationship to the Church. The foreknowledge and predestination of God is Paul’s way of describing the priority of divine grace in redemption and justification. The initiative is God’s, not ours. We foreknew nothing; we prearranged nothing. God has done it all. He knows and He determines, ahead of time, what form His work in history (including the history of each of us) will take.

Those who truly experience His grace are aware of themselves as known by God (1 Corinthians 8:3; 13:12), loved by God (1 John 4:19), chosen by God. When he speaks of predestination, Paul is describing the experience of life in the Christian Church. That is to say, it is an existential concept. It pertains to spiritual experience.

Consequently, it has no dogmatic content. One cannot say, “I am saved” [in] the same sense he can say, “Jesus is Lord!” The latter is a dogmatic statement representing an absolute truth. The experience of being “predestined,” however, pertains only to the existential order. It cannot be an object of faith, and therefore it does not have the certainty of faith.

Christians, then, are “predestined to be conformed (symmorphous) to the image (eikon or icon) of His Son.” That is to say, believers are summoned to share in Christ’s own relationship to the Father, so that Christ “might be the firstborn among many brethren.” By divine grace—the infinite favor of God—they participate in the Son’s knowledge and love of the Father (Matthew 11:27), who regards them as His children, the younger brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ (John 2:17).

It is because these justified Christians have become, by virtue of their justification, “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4) that they can, in utter truth, look into the face of God and say, “Our Father.” They partake, already, of the divine glory (verse 30).

The purpose of these reflections, Paul says, is to bring hope and reassurance into our hearts. God will never back away from His grace and His call. For this reason, there is no force in heaven or on earth or under the earth that can separate us from the love of God in Christ (verses 31-39). God is permanently on our side. He will never betray us.

Moreover, if God has already given us His beloved Son, He will certainly give us everything else we need (verse 32; 1 Corinthians 3:22-23; Philippians 3:21). Paul has heard accusations brought against his Gentile converts, because the latter did not observe the works of the Mosaic Law. Paul will tolerate none of this criticism. These Christians have been justified through the grace of God received in faith, he says. Who dares to bring an accusation against them? (verses 33-34) And Paul’s defiance here includes Satan, that ancient accuser of the brethren.

Even less, then, will believers be accused by Christ Himself, whose blood purchased their redemption from the slavery of sin and death. Here Paul briefly mentions the Lord’s exaltation to the heavenly sanctuary, where He abides as our mediator and intercessor forever (verse 34; Hebrews 7:25; 9:24; 1 John 2:1; Revelation 5).

Likewise, those sufferings that Christians must sustain in the maintenance of their faith (verse 36) will not separate them from the love of Christ. Paul’s tone here is exhortatory as well as declaratory. That is to say, he declares that God will never be unfaithful to us, and he gently exhorts that we be never unfaithful to God.

The situation of the justified Christian may be likened to that of a man in a poker game, who has been dealt the royal flush. He did nothing to gain the royal flush. He did not work for it. It was freely given. He received it on the deal. He holds it in his hand. As long as he holds on to those cards, he cannot possibly lose, for no hand is greater than the royal flush. The one thing he must never do is to discard. All he must do is sit tight and keep a firm grip on those cards. No one, in heaven, on earth, or under the earth, can take them away from him.

                                                    — Comments —

Elle Bee writes:

I am not a Calvinist, but I am a Christian (I do not mean to imply that Calvinists are not Christians). Calvinists, and indeed most Christians, place an emphasis on the truth and authority of Holy Scripture. The problem with the Calvinist doctrine of irresistible grace, as I see it, is this: the Bible contradicts it directly. What does Holy Scripture say of grace? 

Titus 2:11 tells us that “the grace of God, which brings salvation, has appeared to all men.” All men, the Word of God tells us, ALL MEN. Not some men. Not simply, “those who are elect.” The grace of God, which brings salvation, has appeared to all men. It’s as simple as that. If grace were truly irresistible, then logically, since it has appeared to all men, all men would be saved. But what does Scripture tell us? 

The Bible tells us that many, dare I say most, men will not be saved! In fact, “few” will find eternal life. Matthew 7:13-14 says, “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” The world around us tells us that not all will be saved, but so does the Bible. 

If God’s grace has appeared to all men (Titus 2:11), and grace brings salvation (Ephesians 2:8), yet not all men will be saved (Matthew 7:13-14), it seems incontrovertible that some who receive this grace will resist it and will not be saved. Thus, irresistible grace is a doctrine that plainly contradicts the teaching of Scripture. Grace can be – and frequently is – resisted. The will of God is that none would perish, but because we have the free will, many of us actively controvert the will of God and perish. This is not a God who is out of control of His creation; there is no question of God’s sovereignty. Rather, according to the Scriptures, God has divinely – sovereignly – ordained a system of salvation that makes room for us to freely choose to live in Him, or to choose the opposite. On this much, I agree with the Calvinist: left to our own devices, we are totally depraved and incapable of choosing Christ. However, God’s grace goes before us (the Arminian doctrine of prevenient grace) and makes us able to accept His gift of salvation, free to us but costly to Him, if we choose it.

I do believe in predestination, but the word has quite a different meaning than when the Calvinists use it. Romans 8:29-30 tells us the correct order: God knows who will choose Him, then He predestines us (not to be saved, but to be conformed to Christ’s image), then to be called, then to be justified, and finally to be glorified. 

While it is true that doctrinal discussions like this sometimes divide more than unite us, we must still have them. Sound doctrine is important to God, and I for one find it contrary to Scripture (not to mention disturbing) to claim that the same God who is “not willing that any should perish” (2 Peter 3:9) also creates people with the express knowledge and purpose that they would perish. Calvinists, in response to this point, will often say that God has two wills: a revealed will and a secret will. That does not at all sound like the God I serve, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

But all our blathering is perhaps nothing to God, nothing but a sounding brass if without love (see 1 Cor 13), and not much more than that even with it. The key is humility. The truth is out there, even if we do not know it, and someday it will be revealed. For now, I think we can all agree with Romans 3:4: “Let God be true, and every man a liar!”

Brandon F. writes:

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