Another interesting short podcast from the late theologian RC Sproul, published by Ligonier Ministries, outlining Calvinistic and Reformed theology that is worth discussing. The transcript begins as follows:
“If God is not Sovereign, God is not God.”
Agreed—except that there is more than one way of defining “sovereign:” the Calvinistic way, or the biblical way. There is the Calvinistic definition of “sovereign,” which requires the predestination and predetermination of all future events, including all future choices and decisions of man (thus abrogating the free agency and freewill of man); and there is also the biblical version of it, which doesn’t result in predestination and denial of man’s freewill. In Calvinism, divine sovereignty and libertarian freewill are incompatible; you can’t have both. Whereas in biblical terms, they are compatible. He continues:
“When I was teaching seminary, I was responsible to teach a course on the theology of the Westminster Confession of Faith. The Westminster Confession of Faith is a 17th century theological document that was the confessional foundation for historic Presbyterianism.”
Presbyterianism, by the way, is the most Calvinistic of all Protestant denominations. The acceptance of Calvinism is not uniform across all Protestant denominations. Some are more devoted to it than others. Presbyterians are its strongest devotees. He continues:
“And we had come to the place in the Confession where I was going to have to teach chapter three the following week, and chapter three is entitled, On The Eternal Decrees of God. Now, I am among Presbyterians, so they know exactly what that means. They say, ‘Oh, now we are going to talk about predestination!’ And when you get a bunch of seminary students together, and there is nothing they enjoy better than to chew over questions about predestination, and have endless discussions into the night. They love it, and they love to debate that topic. So I said, ‘Next Tuesday night we are going to take up chapter three of the Confession.’
“Now you have to understand that this particular class was open to the public. And so people who were not enrolled as seminary students were allowed to come in and audit the class, or drop by to visit a particular lecture. So every one of my students who had a friend who didn’t believe in predestination, they went out and cornered them, and grabbed them by the throat and say, ‘You have got to come hear our professor, and he is going to play Paladin … He is going to teach us all about predestination.’ So we had about 250 students assembled, I guess, that night in the class.
“And I started the class by reading the opening lines of chapter three of the Westminster Confession. I don’t have them down verbatim, but I can give you basically what it says there. It starts off by saying something like this, ‘That God has or does from all eternity, immutably and sovereignly ordain whatsoever comes to pass, comma.’ I will say that again. ‘God does sovereignly, immutably, ordain whatsoever comes to pass, comma.’ I stopped right there at the comma, and I said, ‘Now, here is this statement: it says that from all eternity, God does freely, and sovereignly, and immutably ordain every single thing that comes to pass. How many of you believe that?’”
That is a nuanced statement. It can be understood in more than one way. One way of understanding it, which is the Calvinistic, Presbyterian way, would be that God has causally determined and predestined all future events, including all the future choices and decisions of man—both good and bad—which amounts to a negation of freewill. That is unbiblical and false. Another way of understanding it, which is the biblical way, is that God has granted man moral agency and libertarian freewill, to freely choose between good and evil, right or wrong, so that they can then be judged justly for all the good or evil they have done, and be rewarded or punished accordingly. That is the biblical doctrine—which does not in any way question or undermine divine sovereignty.
God is perfectly sovereign over all his creation, in that he is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. He has a perfect foreknowledge of all the future events, including all the freewill choices and decisions of man. He also has the power to prevent any future event from happening if he wanted to (and sometimes he does). Nothing happens by chance, or by the freewill of man that he is not aware of, and could not prevent from happening if he wanted to. But for the most part he allows the evil in the world to happen because that is the only way that man can be free, and be held accountable for his actions. In that sense of the term, you could say that God has “ordained” all things to come to pass. But it doesn’t mean that he has causally determined all the evil (or good) choices and actions of free moral creatures, including man. It happens by his permission. It happens because he allows it to happen, for the reasons explained above—so that man can be held accountable for his actions. But it doesn’t mean that he has causally determined all the freewill choices and decisions made by man.
The biblical teaching is that this world, this period of time in which we now live, is intended as a test, a trial, to see who will do good and who will do evil, and be rewarded or punished accordingly: “they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation” (John 5:28–29). That is the purpose of this (brief) mortal life. It is a time of test, a trial, followed by a day of judgement in which God will “judge the world in righteousness” (Psalm 9:7-8; 96:12-13; 98:8-9; Acts 17:31); and “reward every man according to his works” (Matt. 16:27; Rev. 2:23; 18:6; 20:12–13).
2 Corinthians 5:
10 For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad.
Revelation 22:
12 And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be.
That is the purpose of this (brief) period of mortal experience, to test our metal, to see whether we will choose good or evil, and be rewarded or punished accordingly. That is the clear teaching of the Bible. Calvinism’s twisted and false idea of “sovereignty,” resulting in predestination and predetermination of all future events, including all the future choices and decisions of man, is a heresy, and a complete rejection of the biblical doctrine as stated above. He then continues:
“I mean this was a Presbyterian seminary, and 200 hands went up in the air, proudly wearing the badge of their conviction of the sovereignty. They go, ‘Oh we believe that.’”
As misled by the Calvinists and Presbyterians, that is! That false belief, the heresy of predestination and predetermination of all future choices and decisions of man, is not a requirement of “sovereignty”. The fact that God has determined to grant man libertarian freewill and free agency, does not in any degree diminish from his “sovereignty”. God does not have to be a tyrant in order to be “sovereign”. It is the heresy of Calvinism that equates the two. He continues:
“50 hands didn’t go up. I said, ‘Okay, how many of you don’t believe it?’ I said, ‘It is okay, nobody is taking down names, and you are not going to get in any trouble, or we are not going to have a heresy trial here, or get out the matches, burn you at the stake.’ I said, ‘Let’s be honest, how many of you don’t believe that?’ About 50 guys raised their hand, ‘We don’t believe that.’ I said, ‘Okay, let me ask another question: How many of you would candidly describe yourselves as atheists? Again, no persecution going to be taking place here. Just how many of you would call yourself atheist?’ Nobody put up their hand.
“And I immediately went into my Lieutenant Colombo routine, ‘There is just one thing I don’t understand here; I don’t understand why those of you who did say that you did not believe in this statement, didn’t raise your hand when I asked you if you were atheist?’ Well, I mean, there was a hue and cry, and I was ready to be lynched. They said, ‘What are you talking about? Just because we don’t believe that God freely and immutably ordains whatsoever comes to pass, you are calling us atheist.’ I said, ‘That is exactly what I am calling you.’ I said, ‘If you don’t believe that God ordains everything that comes to pass, bottom line, you don’t believe in God. You don’t believe in God.’”
That is entirely false, and a perversion of the truth of course. God has foreseen, and also permitted all the evil that shall come to pass by the freewill and free agency of man, for the reasons explained above. If that is what he meant by “ordain,” that would be a true statement; but evidently that is not what he means by it. What he means is the absolute predestination and predetermination of all future choices and decisions of man, which of course is heretical and false, and unbiblical. The “sovereignty” of God is not in the least degree diminished by the libertarian freewill and free agency of man. He continues:
“I said, ‘You have to understand that this passage here in the Confession, that God ordains everything that comes to pass, there is not anything in that statement that is uniquely Presbyterian. There is not even anything in there that is uniquely Christian. That statement doesn’t divide Presbyterians from Methodists, or Lutherans, or Anglicans. …’”
Like I said, it all depends on how the word “ordain” is understood. The Calvinistic way is not the only way. God is omniscient, as well as omnipotent and omnipresent. His omniscience enables him to see and know all future choices and decisions of man (without having “caused” it); his omnipresence and omnipotence also enables him prevent any future evil choices and actions of man if he wants to (and sometimes he does). But more often than not he permits it for the reasons explained above—so that mankind can be held accountable for their actions on the day of judgement.
So there are two different ways of understanding the word “ordain” in that context. If you mean that it has happened by his permission, in the sense that he was aware of it before it happened, and he could have prevented it if he had wanted to, but chose not to for the reasons explained above, that would be a true statement. But if by “ordain” you mean that God has causally determined all the evil (or good) actions of man by a “sovereign decree,” thus cancelling out all of human free agency and freewill—thus attributing to God all the evil desires and actions of man—the answer is emphatically, No. That is the heresy of Calvinism. It is not biblical. He then continues:
“‘… And it doesn’t distinguish between Presbyterians and Islamic religion, or Judaism religions. It is a distinction between theism and atheism. It is a statement, simply a declaration of the absolute sovereignty of God.’”
Not true. I don’t claim expertise on every religion; but as far as I know, predestination vs. freewill has been a subject of debate in all major religions, at one time or another; and it certainly has had a long history in Islam. The ideological battle between the proponents of predestination and those of freewill goes back to the early history of Islam, and has had a long history after that. A Google search will provide much interesting information, such as in this link. I also found references to what looks like a very interesting book, titled: Free Will and Predestination in Islamic Thought by Maria De Cillis, which is very tempting to read. Here is a quote from the abstract:
“The subject of ‘human free-will’ versus ‘divine predestination’ is one of the most contentious topics in classical Islamic thought. By focusing on a theme of central importance to any philosophy of religion, and to Islam in particular, this book offers a critical study of the intellectual contributions offered to this discourse by three key medieval Islamic thinkers: Avicenna, al-Ghazālī and Ibn ʿArabī.” Link
He continues:
“What I tried to get these young people to see was this, very simply that if God is not sovereign, God is not God.”
This is getting boring. Denying predestination is not the same as denying “sovereignty”. God can be “sovereign” over his creation (and is), and still grant man complete libertarian freewill and moral agency to do as they please, so they can be held accountable for their actions on judgement day: “they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation” (John 5:28–29). He continues:
“If there is one maverick molecule in the universe, one molecule running loose outside the scope of God’s sovereign ordination, then ladies and gentlemen, there is not the slightest confidence that you can have that any promise that God has ever made about the future will come to pass.”
Another deceptive and misleading argument. Molecules don’t have wills. They don’t make choices. They can’t do right or wrong, and they can’t be rewarded or punished for doing either. You don’t compare the fate of a free moral agent with that of a molecule.
And God’s “promises” and “predictions” are two different things. When God promises that something will happen, it means that he causes it to happen (without overriding man’s freewill). But when God predicts that something will happen, it does not necessarily mean that he has caused it to happen. It means that he has foreseen, and has a perfect foreknowledge that it will happen. It also means that he has the power to prevent it from happening if he wanted to, but he chooses not to for the reasons explained above. But that is not the same as saying that he has caused it to happen; or even that he is pleased or happy about it to happen.
The Bible teaches that God is grieved at the wickedness and sinfulness of man (Gen. 6:6; Psalm 95:10; Jer. 32:35; Heb. 3:10); and that in him there is no sin (1 John 3:5). Why would he be “grieved” over something that he himself had “caused?” So the conclusion is that Calvinism is heretical, unbiblical, and false, and it is best to stir away from it as much as possible.
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