Going with yesterday's post, I just thought this looked pretty cool
The question regarding wills is always a difficult one and requires lots of nuance, I think, so that it does not drift or go astray. What I’m talking about is the issue of “free will” and the “sovereignty of God” in action. What does this all mean? To be clear, I’ll start off and say that I’m not going to give a flat answer, nor is there one to be laid flat (more on this later). We’ll first go through some of the pitfalls of traditional views, and then onto some of the newer views that have become moderately popular, and then onto a course that speaks more of what the True Living God does.
Let’s get started!
First off, there’s a tendency to make the issue black/white. Does god(s) intervene? And if He does, what does that mean? Now the two flips of this coin which assume that God uses His power like a hammer will result either in near-Islamic fatalism or Enlightenment deism. It asks, do we have wills that are free to make choices? Fatalism will say no, you’re determined on a certain course. Islam says that everything you do has been charted by Allah. Even your sins were willed to be, and your destiny is already pre-planned. The Christian versions of this come out as hyper-Calvinism. This is to say God has pre-destined His elect and the reprobate. So really, there’s no point to doing much of anything except some serious self reflective ‘navel gazing’ to investigate if you really are among the elect. No need to speak of the Gospel. It really doesn’t do much good–the reprobate are done for already.
But then on the other hand, the deist will come along and say all of this is absurd. There are many forms of deism that do not abide by the strict label–I’ll dig into this later. Anyway, deists say that God set this whole thing a moving, and now men are to act for themselves. There are also Christian forms of this, but this is the sneakiness of the thinking. When most Americans speak of miracles they assume God will hop right into this world, add a poof of whatever it is He does, and there, something right miraculous! Aha! This assumes that God is disconnected from creation–that it can stand on its own. This works itself out in the idea that we can validly live for the mysterious “self.” This is a deisitic construct that man can somehow stand on his own against the power of the divine. This implicitly states that Satan was indeed telling the truth! You are like God, self sustaining and all!
Both of these views are obvious pitfalls. They make the assumption that YHWH is somehow a hypocrite. How? Was it not clear that Jesus called for His disciples to be as He? Not lording as the gentiles, but rather leading through service? So both make God out to be a tyrant, like any old nasty European lord, brooding in a fortress. The way of sin, that which has enslaved man and this present world, is as Moses. When God asked him to speak to the rock for water, Moses struck it twice. God is not so petty. If He is in charge, that does not imply fatalism. Yet there is a new sort of tricky fatalism afoot.
Many of the neo-Calvinists of today still keep the filter of fatalism of the past but wrap it up in a bow. There is such an abuse of Romans 9 it makes me sad. Paul is painted up to be some incoherent rambler, bouncing from this to that, this objection to that. Read the whole of Romans. This whole letter speaks of the nature of Israel: Who is Israel–what was its purpose? This has little to do with men being arbitrarily selected. [Although the neo-Calvinists would deny it, hiding behind the unknowable will of God is foolishness. Paul (along with all the other Apostles and Evangelists) has instructed us of the mystery revealed: the will of God is Jesus--it is the Messiah and the Resurrection.]
Yet there is also a fad of Open Theism, that the future really isn’t known, or that there are many options available. This is tricky because it, partially, assumes that God is unable or unwilling to simply BE. God may be in this world acting, but He is also outside of this world. He is the agent who can step outside the very realm He is acting in. This has its inherent problems.
So how is it both that God is reigning and yet that man is still responsible for choices? The Calvinistic approach and the open theistic approach both have value in that each balances the other, making sure neither of the elements is forgotten.
I’d say that, indeed, both God and men have wills and make choices (along with angelic agents and all manner of choosing beings). Yet God is the real master of the whole show. The creation moves according to the Creator. He sustains reality by His very being. He moves in and out. This is how God can be said to have hardened Pharoah’s heart, and how it can be said that Pharoah hardened his own heart. How Satan tempted David, and yet how God made David force the census. How God is the Father of Heavenly Lights, and yet how He makes both light and darkness.
We first must establish an idea I have explained before. God’s wrath is not like man’s wrath. He simply leaves, and darkness comes swooping in. If you take a candle out of a darkroom, there is no longer light. His very being or not being is in a sense His doing, but in a sense not. He is not the author of sin, but He may leave if rebelled against. And what does that leave? Death.
Also I’d say that when God drops a word, everything reorganizes around it. When the prophets received a word from God, it changed the entire game. No matter what evil seeks to overrun, God flips things on their heads, and even the darkest night can be turned to day. And the greatest Word of all–the incarnation, atonement and resurrection–turned dusk to dawn. The sun was setting, and now it is rising!
Maybe a simple, and yet poor, analogy is that we’re a living adventure book. We are the ones coursing the way of the book, but it has been written, cover to cover, by the LORD. He still wrote it and is directing us, so to speak. And yet, we are the ones picking the paths through the book. Some of the paths are His will, others against, but it still turns out for good. It still says Jesus Christ at the end of the book. Don’t dig too deeply on this one, but it’s a simple example to help.
But I suppose the most you can take away from this is that the matter is purely a dialectical tension. There is no systematic way of resolving this. There is no way to box the I AM, the untameable Lion of Judah. And therein lies the problem with most of the approaches above. They attempt to reconcile this paradox. Yet it must lie in tension, for how can the finite seek to truly understand the infinite? And why should we want to seek out a system? You want to know the will of God? You want to know what Salvation means? Look no further than Jesus the Messiah, the Man of Nazareth. He is the complete image of God. He gave us Himself, not a list of doctrines and systematized formulae for figuring out the gnosis necessary to chart the cosmos.
God is sovereignly ruling in His church. His reign is over the world, and even the worst plots will be turned to good for those who love Him. And yet we are responsible for our actions and must seek to follow Him. We are predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son (ahh! a proper use of the word). He is the Way and the Shepherd–we walk after Him, and He guides us. Hallelujah it’s not up to us. By His sovereign grace, we’ve been reborn. Not by human decision, but the will of God. And yet we must repent and believe (trust) Him. So keep on walking the road. He’ll make sure you get there, and not by your own strength but by Him who lives in you! Truly, this is the hope of glory.
[Quick note: I use to be virulently anti-Calvin, but I've since learned that his mind was not so warped as many of the scholastics who claimed his name. The seeming heartlessness of his system comes from the very fact that his thoughts were made into a system by his successors (primarily Beza). Did Calvin have it all right? By no means, but he was Christ centered in a lot of his thought, even if his mind was warped to the point he thought it necessary to make a tyranny of Geneva and burn Servetus. He was a heretic in his orthopraxy (and we'll never know if he repented of this), but his work really did refocus on Christ. There were many in medieval Romanism who depicted a god of either vending machine quality (dispensing blessings of victory and wealth, hmm sounds awfully modern..) or even worse, the epicurean who has left all power in the hands of the bishop of Rome and his cardinals and gone elsewhere. This may not have been strictly on the books, but it was in practice. Many of the medieval popes of Rome really acted as the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov (it's a famous section of a massive book, you can probably find it free online if you've yet to read it). This short note became rather long, but yes, Calvin is a scholar of much help.]
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