Answering Objections to Predestination
(Written Oct. 11, 2022)
There are few doctrines more hotly contested than the doctrine of predestination. Within evangelical circles are denominations and groups divided over the topic, from Calvinists to Arminians and those who may land somewhere on the spectrum along the way. One may wonder what it is about the doctrine that causes such a divide, and why orthodoxy clings onto this particular tenet of faith so tightly. The Reformed tradition has always believed that the doctrine of predestination is vital to the believers faith, and while it may be difficult for some to digest, it is ultimately beneficial to all those who seek to be true disciples of Christ.
Defining the Terms
In order to discuss the modern qualms with the doctrine, one must define exactly what it entails. The word predestination is used in a variety of contexts, some broader or narrower than others. For the modern evangelical, the term most likely brings to mind God’s plan from eternity to save some while allowing others to be condemned in their sin. While this is certainly part of the definition, predestination deals also broadly with whatever comes to pass in creation. It does not deal only with the election and reprobation of mankind, but also with all of history as has been decreed by God.
These decrees and their execution in history are the foundation by which the doctrine organically flows from. The Reformed tradition has made distinctions in the works of God with respect to his creatures, laid out by the Westminster Shorter Catechism 7 & 8.
Q. 7. What are the decrees of God?
A. The decrees of God are, his eternal purpose, according to the counsel of his will, whereby, for his own glory, he hath foreordained whatsoever comes to pass.Q. 8. How doth God execute his decrees?
A. God executeth his decrees in the works of creation and providence.
These two distinctions have been traditionally labeled as opera ad intra, the decrees which are part of the divine counsel and decided in eternity, and opera ad extra, God’s work as it relates to creation. While what is executed by his decrees is not the sum total of the decree itself, whatever is decreed is executed, and will come to pass with certainty. Therefore, is temporal is ultimately rooted in what is eternal. Romans 9, though dealing primarily with the election of God’s people (which will be discussed at further lengths later), displays this with Scriptural clarity.
“though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad—in order that God's purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls— she was told, “The older will serve the younger.” As it is written, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.” (Rom. 9:11-13)
At the crux of the debate concerning predestination is a discussion about the character of God, whether it be on his sovereignty or even his self-sufficiency. The doctrine states that all that happens in history, whether in the earthly realm or the spiritual realm, has God as its primary cause. Romans 9 shows no favoritism, as if Jacob or Esau had done any particular works to produce a reason outside of God for Him to choose them. Not only would this suggest that God is dependent upon creatures for the outcome of His actions, but it would also suggest that there is a primary cause for the events in history other than the eternal purpose of God’s own glory. Herman Bavinck says, “God is self-sufficient: in him there is no need for compulsion to actualize any of his ideas in a world of creatures. He is perfectly free in his choices; it is only by his will that all things exist and were created”. If something is effectuated in history outside of God’s decrees, or if per se God relies on a mediate or middle knowledge that affects His decrees, then one can see how problems concerning His sovereignty and self-sufficiency might arise.
Objections to Predestination
However, it is primarily the narrower aspects of predestination, namely those concerning the salvation of man, that are the fuel of divide in the modern church today. The doctrine states that it is God who, from eternity past, elected some to salvation through the mediation of Christ, and some to reprobation and to the end of eternal damnation. And while Scripture is clear on this doctrine, certainly one can imagine the questions and objections that would arise when it comes to free will, man’s agency in sin, and even evangelism.
Is Predestination Pure Determinism?
The first objection that most will have to predestination is the accusation that the doctrine obliterates any sort of agency that humanity would have in its own decision making. According to their understanding of predestination, free will no longer exists, leaving man as a cold, mechanical victim of God’s decrees, especially in regards to his part in accepting or rejecting the Gospel. This perspective on predestination is one that accuses the doctrine of being pure determinism or fatalism.
Prior to understanding that such an accusation would be a misrepresentation of how the Bible actually defines predestination, one must first be able to define one’s own terms when it comes to free will. If by free will one means, “The ability to do what I want”, then even Augustine would agree on that common ground. However, the modern Western conception of free will nowadays is the human’s ability to make spontaneous choices that are not affected by any outside factors or influences.
RC Sproul says,
“Over against the Augustinian view of free will is the classical notion that describes the action or activity of choice in purely spontaneous terms. In this concept the will chooses and is free from not only external forces of coercion, but also any internal rule of disposition, or desire.”
Such a definition of free will is ultimately impossible. It would assume that man’s actions are capable of being an uncaused effect. This type of libertarian free will is not only incompatible with God, but cannot stand on its own terms. It would imply that there is one who can exist outside of the influence of external factors, whether they be from society, desires, or other persons. Yet, there is only One who is totally uncaused, whom all of creation receives its movement, causality, and actualization from, and that is God. Genesis 1:1 says, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” (Gen. 1:1) The only one in history who is able to make an uncaused decision is God Himself. When God created ex nihilo, He was not caused or coerced by any outside force or material other than Himself. Anyone else who believes that such an ability exists would be tempted to what the devil promised Eve in the Garden when he promised that “you will be like God” (Gen. 3:5)
But to guard against pure determinism, Biblical free will (also known as compatibilism), is again, as Augustine defined, “the ability to choose what one wants”. This means that mankind's actions are ultimately the product of his own will, heart and desires. The dilemma that man faces is that his will is corrupted from the sin of Adam. He does not desire God and therefore he cannot, out of his own volition, choose to worship Him. Mankind’s desires are not the mere product of a series of causations but also the exercise of his will.
Dr. Chad Van Dixhoorn says on the matter,
“That is to say, there is no action or decision of ours that can be reduced to some natural law, some kind of inevitable system of causation, some force of the universe, some biological inheritance from our parents. To consider one sort of influence, if a boy always wills very bad things, it cannot all be blamed on the father; if a woman grows up to will the best things, her mother cannot claim all the credit.”
Therefore, Biblical compatability asserts that both are true; that man is a responsible moral agent, all the while being divinely controlled. Scripture teaches that God orders and sovereignly ordains all things (Gen 50:20; Rom 9:20-21, Eph 1:11), but also asserts that man is responsible for his actions (Rom 2:1-16; Rev 20:11-13). AA Hodge has said that God has “endued the will of man with that natural liberty, that it is neither forced, nor by any absolute necessity of nature determined to good or evil”. And while the tension between these two truths may be mysterious, one must be reminded that oftentimes the mystery in certain doctrines is not one to be solved but to be maintained. The sovereignty of God as King, the One who rules over all creation, does not contradict His role as Judge, whom mankind is ultimately morally obliged to obey with his free will.
Is God the Author of Sin?
Following this understanding, the next question arises: What about the nature of sin? If all of creation is under the sovereignty of the Lord, then does that also imply that God is the author of sin?
The Westminster Confession of Faith 3.1 says,
“God from all eternity did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass: yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.”
The confusion often lies in the statement “yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin”. How can God, as the Shorter Catechism Q7 says, “foreordain whatsoever comes to pass”, yet not be the author of sin? In maintaining what has already been said about man’s free will, one must understand that the reality of free will implies the possibility of sin. Sin, as defined by 1 John 2:34, “Everyone who makes a practice of sinning also practices lawlessness; sin is lawlessness” (1 John 2:34), is the violation of God’s holy law. When Adam was created in the garden, he was created with what Augustine would describe as posse non peccare, the possibility of not sinning and posse peccare, the possibility of sinning. As such, he was created in a position of natural religious fellowship with God that would not flatten his ability to obedience into mere coercion.
However, one must not believe that the Fall of man somehow caught God by surprise, or that it was outside the scope of His eternal decrees. While maintaining that mystery is the “lifeblood of all dogmatics”, as Bavinck would say, Scripture is clear in stating that while sin has not dodged the sovereignty of His eternal decrees, it is also not authored or effectuated in the same way that the rest of history, especially the salvation of man, is effectuated. Distortions of this are displayed when the distinctions between the elect and the reprobate are made symmetrical, as if God predestined His chosen people in the same active way that he predestined those whom He will give over to their wickedness.
The doctrine of God foreordaining both the reprobate and the elect, termed as double predestination, is one that requires proper description to avoid harmful misrepresentation.
RC Sproul describes the common faulty distortion of it:
“God works in the same way and same manner with respect to the elect and to the reprobate. That is to say, from all eternity God decreed some to election and by divine initiative works faith in their hearts and brings them actively to salvation. By the same token, from all eternity God decrees some to sin and damnation (destinare ad peccatum) and actively intervenes to work sin in their lives, bringing them to damnation by divine initiative.”
Scripture is clear that man is ultimately responsible for his rebellion against God. If not, the moral will of God revealed through the law would have not been given to man with the intention of his obedience. The Reformed tradition has therefore made the distinction between God’s effectuation of his decrees through primary and secondary causes. While God’s decrees may be the primary cause of reprobation and sin, it is not the secondary. God does not actively produce sin in the heart of man in the same way that He actively regenerates the heart of the elect. Rather, it is a decree of permission, what one could describe as producing the foreordained ends through the means of negation. While God had foreordained the sin, He did so through the action (or lack thereof) of allowing the sinner’s natural state to take place. J. Gresham Machen says, “although God foreordains whatsoever comes to pass, he causes the bringing of those things to pass in widely different ways.” We see an example of this through the hardening of Pharaoh's heart, in which the text states that he had hardened his own heart, but then changes to state that the Lord hardened his heart in the final several plagues (Exodus 9:12; 10:20, 27).
Admittedly, one must continue to maintain a “limiting concept” in the area of double predestination, especially as further study will inevitably draw one into the discussion of God’s logical order in his eternal decrees. One should not seek to infer further than what God has revealed in His Scriptures. However, what one can confidently assert is that the doctrine of predestination in the light of sin gives hope to His elect that no matter the circumstances and evil that is present in the world, God will order it for the sake of His glory. Even when it comes to the reprobate, God’s glory is displayed through the enacting of His justice and wrath.
Bavinck states,
“Human beings resigning from the service of God, can become profoundly wretched, but they remain creatures and are therefore dependent. Sin does not make them less dependent but even more so. They cease to be children and become servants, slaves, powerless instruments used by God according to his will.”
As implied, all of creation, even the sinful actions of man itself, serve His will in one way or another.
Predestination and the Duty of Believers
That being said, the final question remains: Does the doctrine of predestination render man’s responsibility of obedience and even evangelism useless? As previously mentioned, had God intended for man to be merely a mechanical byproduct of His decrees, His law would not have been given to him with the intention that it could somehow be followed. The Reformed tradition has made the distinction between the decretive will of God and the preceptive will of God. As Deuteronomy 29:29 says, “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.” (Deut 29:29)
The answer to this question is simple: The doctrine of predestination does not change man’s responsibility of obedience because God has revealed precisely what He delights in through His precepts. The secret foreknowledge of God is not something that is accessible to His creatures, but what He has revealed binds and obligates all of humanity, especially His elect to worship and adore Him, especially through the fulfilling of the Great Commission. JI Packer states that the doctrine of predestination and the responsibility of evangelism “both unite to warn us not to pit these truths against each other, nor allow either to obscure or overshadow the other in our minds.”
The doctrine of predestination, despite all of its difficulties, is ultimately a doctrine that dedicates the utmost glory to God. It is the doctrine that places His sovereignty at the center of all subsequent theologies, all the while maintaining mankind’s obligation to obedience. Wherein objections put the power of salvation in the hands of humanity, predestination places redemption in the palms of God, and calls sinful man to tremble in fear and to kneel before the throne in repentance. It is a tremendous doctrine that must not be treated softly, but one by which believers should study with humility and awe, ultimately understanding that it is by the sovereign grace of God alone that the church is chosen from all eternity past.
Bibliography
Cassidy, James. 2017. “The Essential van Til — Common Grace and Common Wrath.” Reformed Forum. July 24, 2017. https://reformedforum.org/essential-van-til-common-grace-common-wrath/.
Hendryx, John. n.d. “Search | Monergism.” Www.monergism.com. Accessed October 11, 2022. https://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/sdg/hendryx/Augustine%27s%20Writings%20on%20Grace%20a%20-%20John%20Hendryx.pdf.
Packer, J I. 2012. Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God. Downers Grove, Ill.: Ivp Books.
Sproul, RC. n.d. “Is Double Predestination Biblical?” Ligonier Ministries. Accessed October 11, 2022. https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/double-predestination-biblical.
Sproul, RC. n.d. “The Meaning of Man’s Will (Pt. 2).” Ligonier Ministries. Accessed October 11, 2022. https://www.ligonier.org/posts/the-meaning-of-mans-will-pt-2.
“The Holy Spirit’s Work of Calling and Regeneration by Herman Bavinck | Monergism.” n.d. Www.monergism.com. Accessed October 11, 2022. https://www.monergism.com/holy-spirits-work-calling-and-regeneration-herman-bavinck.
The WestminsterStandard. 2016. “Westminster Shorter Catechism.” The Westminster Standard. March 10, 2016. https://thewestminsterstandard.org/westminster-shorter-catechism/.
Van, Chad B. 2016. Confessing the Faith : A Reader’s Guide to the Westminster Confession of Faith. Edinburgh, Scotland ; Carlisle, Pennsylvania: The Banner Of Truth Trust.