Dialecticism: Like a Rocking Horse
We have already seen how the Westminster Confessions embraces a system of ‘truth’ made up of two ideas diametrically opposed to each other: 1) the absolute determination of God over all events, and 2) the freedom of human will. Now observe the following quote by Reformed thinker Loraine Boettner, in his book,The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination, an older Calvinistic work of a few generations ago:2
But while the Koran and the (Mohammedan) traditions teach a strict foreordination of moral conduct and future destiny, they also present a doctrine of human freedom which makes it necessary for us to qualify the sharper assertions of divine Predestination in harmony with it. And here, too, as in the Scriptures, no attempt is made to explain how the apparently opposite truths of Divine sovereignty and human freedom are to be reconciled (emphasis added).xii
Here Boettner attempts a contrast between the Islamic Koran and Calvinistic doctrine. The statement above is his attempt to modify the absolute determination (sovereignty) of God so that people can be said to be the author of their own choices. Observe the language of Calvinism when Boettner says that predestination (i.e., for Boettner, the divine foreordination of everyone’s activity, moral content, and future destiny) and human freedom are “apparently” opposite truths. The reason he prefers not to say that they are opposite truths is because to do so would be to admit to a final contradiction. Instead, he qualifies his assertion by implying that these concepts are “apparently” a contradiction, i.e., that they are a seeming contradiction rather than an actual one. As a result, conclusions about God and man are never finalized in definition, since Boettner’s “divine Predestination” is ‘qualified’ with its exact antithesis. Thus, such an apparent contradiction that should be an actual contradiction to Evangelicalism is to Evangelical Calvinism only an “apparent” contradiction. In other words, for Evangelical Calvinists the ‘apparent’ contradiction is regarded as no real contradiction at all.
Calvinists attempt to solve their contradiction (as to who gets the final say in man’s choices) by doublethinking, the common type of solution applied in relativistic Hegelian philosophy. Georg Hegel (1770-1831) was a German philosopher who increased the pace of relativistic philosophy brought on by his predecessors, especially Immanuel Kant. Kant had appealed to reason rather than to revelation as the doorway to understanding. The problem with Kant’s philosophy from a biblical point of view is that man’s reasoning is often foolish and leads to the most outré results. As Hegel followed Kant he furthered the principle of irrationality by believing that opposing ideas are never either/or issues to be resolved but are equally true realities that are ‘qualified’ by each other. This means that Hegel believed that a person should not seek one true answer in religion or philosophy, as though one tried many shops in order to find the right shoes; rather, one ought to embrace the whole process of ’shopping’ itself. Thus, one shop is selling the idea that O’Brien is holding up four fingers, while another shop is selling the idea that O’Brien is holding up five fingers. “So what?” says Hegel, in effect. “Embrace the whole.” Philosophically speaking, Hegel called this cultural process of ’shopping’ the Spirit of History [Zeitgeist, literally Ghost (Spirit) of History]. Generally, philosophers refer to Hegel’s concept as dialecticism. When seen for what it is, Hegelian dialecticism is nothing more nor less than an endorsement for relativity of viewpoint. Yet it is not fair to lay the blame for the beginnings of Western relativism at Hegel’s feet alone, given the prior relativistic pantheism of Spinoza and German Idealism (or, arguably, even Heraclitus, et al.). And it is hard to say how much Hegel’s philosophy was influenced by remnants of the sovereignty/determinism ideas of the influential German Lutheranism of Hegel’s German predecessors (Luther was more of a ‘Calvinist’ than Calvin), or whether Hegel simply fertilized the ground in which the already existing Calvinistic contradiction lay planted (though rather dormant) in German congregants’ minds. At any rate, it all has proved consequential to Evangelicals in the West, who have largely failed to understand the roots of their culture’s philosophical relativism. Had they understood these roots, Evangelicals might have spotted the same dialecticism when it began appearing inter-denominationally within their own culture. Though saints we Evangelicals are, as sinners we ought to recognize how susceptible we remain to combining contradictory ideas with our faith. (As Jeremiah said—”The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can comprehend it?”).
My own personal experience (years ago) in embracing the doublethink of Calvinism was a frustrating one. I would liken it to riding a rocking horse. As a rider, I would throw my weight forward toward my belief in the absolute sovereignty of God until I could go no further, whereupon I would recoil backwards toward my belief in human freedom. Thus I would go back and forth in seesaw motion, lest on the one hand I find myself accusing God of insufficient sovereignty, or on the other hand find myself accusing God of authoring sin. All the while, there remained an illusion of movement towards truth, when in fact there was no real movement at all. Calvinist riders still ride out this scenario. This is why, among the Calvinistic writings of Van Til, Sproul, Boettner, etc., there are no unqualified statements about the absolute sovereignty of God or the free will of man. If one reads long enough, all forthright statements about them are eventually withdrawn by qualifying each statement with its exact opposite thought. This explains why every book and article advocating the absolute sovereignty of God ends with its terms unconcluded. Thus, Boettner, bold enough to open the main body of his text by saying that God’s sovereignty includes “all the activities of saints and angels in heaven and of reprobates and demons in hell”xiii is found later to say that the Koran’s belief in “strict foreordination makes it necessary for us to qualify the sharper assertions of Predestination,” so that God’s absolute sovereignty will be in ‘harmony’ with human freedom (emphasis added).xiv Boettner’s ‘harmony,’ of course, is his attempt, witting or not, to stake the tent of Evangelical apologetics within the camp of Hegelian dialecticism.
Like Hegelians, Calvinists simply say that their diametrically opposed principles are true. This ‘affirmation’ of all phenomena occurs in Calvinism because God in His sovereignty has to approve of all history. Like Hegelians, reality is rationality; Whatever is, is right. Consequently, all Calvinistically-oriented, ‘biblical’ exegesis is aligned with contradictory ‘proof-texts’ to support both sides of the dialectical argument. This way Calvinists can claim that God has ordained everything that has ever happened in history which men have chosen freely to do. When Boettner turns his attention from the sovereignty of God to the free will of man, man’s freedom, despite the author’s intense rhetoric, is shown to be just as inconclusive as God’s sovereignty. Thus in one section about human freedom Boettner even remarks that, “In his fallen state he [man] only has what we may call the freedom of slavery” (emphasis added).xv To further this argument about ‘the freedom of slavery,’ Boettner also quotes Martin Luther:
In another place [Luther] says, “When it is granted and established that Free will, having lost its liberty, is compulsively bound to the service of sin, and cannot will anything good; I from these words, can understand nothing else than that Free-will is an empty term, whose reality is lost. And a lost liberty, according to my grammar, is no liberty at all . .. . Free-will is thrown prostrate, utterly dashed to pieces . . . . it follows unalterably, that all things which we do, although they may appear to us to be done mutably and contingently by us, are yet, in reality, done necessarily and immutably, with respect to the will of God.”xvi
After these strong statements about ‘the freedom of slavery,’ which stress theimpossibility of people ever authoring their own choices, one would think that the matter is settled for Boettner. But when such a destruction of human freedom is about to make God into the author of everything, including sin, Boettner retracts (i.e., ‘reconciles’) his position 16 pages later. Apparently, human freedom exists, after all:
A partial explanation of sin is found in the fact that while man is constantly commanded in Scripture not to commit it, he is, nevertheless, permitted to commit it if he chooses to do so. No compulsion is laid on the person; he is simply left to the free exercise of his own nature, and he alone is responsible.xvii
This seesawing language in Calvinism is why the terms ‘free,’ ‘freedom,’ and ‘choice’ are all defined (though in appearance only) not merely along their ‘proper’ lines but also according to their ‘opposite’ meanings; consequently, they become meaningless terms.3 How free, for example, are people in authoring their own choices in Boettner’s following citation of B.B. Warfield?:
It is He (God) that leads the feet of men, wit they wither or not; He that raises up and casts down; opens and hardens the heart; and creates the very thoughts and intents of the soul.xviii
As read, Warfield makes no concession to human freedom or even human thought. Yet, Boettner’s approval of Warfield’s freedom-of-slavery statement does not prevent Boettner from later saying that “God sets at nought the counsel of the nations.” One wonders, in passing, how this counsel is said to be of the nations, since God is said to be creating the very thoughts and intents of souls. In fact, at one point Boettner himself says that “God rules and overrules the sinful acts of men.”xix Thus, natural questions arise. Why would God create the very thoughts and intents of all people only to later overthrow them? Note that Boettner is not saying that God merely rules over the sinful acts of men, but that God rules the sinful acts of men, i.e. He commands them. Why God would rule and then overrule Himself, much less rule sinful acts, is never explained by Boettner. Needless to say, in Boettner’s model, God must also rule the sinful acts of Satan and demons, or else God could not be sovereign. So the question remains: Is God set against Himself that He ordains that which He comes to abrogate? If so, then how do we understand the principle that “God rules and overrules” in the area of Christ’s opposition to demon possession? If language means anything, ‘rules’ and ‘overrules’ ought to be a contradiction for the Calvinist, for if God rules, how is it that He ever needs to overrule?
This view, that an absolute sovereign God rules, and yet overrules, produces a fundamental crisis in Calvinism. It is a crisis of God’s identity. For example, we have already noted that Boettner believes that God foreordains all the activities of “reprobates and demons,” yet Christ showed that He consistently stood against demon possession whenever He encountered it. In fact, Christ pointed out that demon possession was always the opposite of God’s desire for an individual by rebuking those religious leaders who thought he was casting them out according to the will of the Devil. Christ also reproved these detractors because they failed to understand that consistency of behavior is a characteristic even of Satan, i.e., when He stated that if Satan were divided against himself then Satan’s kingdom could not stand. The obvious implication is that neither is Christ divided against His kingdom. Despite such Scriptures, Boettner, since he claims that God ordains “all the activities of reprobates and demons,” must ascribe to God both demon possession and exorcism. Boettner is no renegade Calvinist here; he is simply following his dialectical principles as far as he dares. Consequently, Boettner must view demon possession and exorcism as the ordained purposes of God. The freedom, then, that Boettner’s Calvinism allots to God is really a freedom for God to act against Himself. The question here begs itself: Which group—the supporters of Calvin, or the detractors of Calvin—is maintaining a fictional theology with unbiblical statements about Christ’s attitude (properly speaking, attitudes) toward demon possession? Apparently, for Boettner, God must ordain the demon possession that he might ordain its exorcism, that he might ordain its possession, that he might ordain its exorcism, etc., ad infinitum. We must ask, then, how God’s attitudes towards demon possession can claim to be finalized or ‘unified’ apart from contradiction? To maintain the Boettner/Calvin model, God must be Someone who seesaws back and forth in a good/evil and love/hate relationship with man, since He ordains both the possession and exorcism of demons in regards to people. Thus, since God’s actions are contradictory, nothing conclusive can be said about God’s character. Now observe that this ambiguity in God’s character is exactly the component of Christianity that Herman Melville was criticizing in “The Whiteness of the Whale.” And what a shame it is that it takes a secular, mocking author to show the vast majority of Evangelicals what their God’s character ought to be, and what the fundamental problem of their theology is!4 If Boettner’s Calvinism is to believed, God even furthers the absurd by then insisting that men act according to concepts and ideals of absolutism and exclusivity, principles to which God does not even subject Himself. And even if, in defense of his view, Boettner were to quote, say, Psalm 100:5 to defend God’s character, i.e., that “the Lord is good,“ his argument would be meaningless, since the term ‘good’ ultimately finds its definition in God’s character. And since God’s character is revealed in His actions, the statement, “God is good,” can have no meaning, since under Calvinism God’s moral character is itself contradictory and therefore inconclusive.
Despite Boettner’s willingness to qualify Calvinistic statements in subsequent pages, paragraphs, or even the next sentence without showing a real sense of dilemma, other Calvinists have been more hesitant about the ’seeming’ contradiction in Calvinism. R.C. Sproul, for example, also believes that the ‘freedom of slavery’ is due to the predetermination of God. Yet, Sproul knows that if men are not able to create their own choices, then a problem arises as to the origin of sin. For if God is truly the foreordainer of all events and experience, Sproul knows that God must “in some sense” be the agent responsible for sin.xx Sproul, it is assumed, would not be satisfied with the kind of arguments that Boettner proposes in a chapter sub-division called, “Calvinism Offers A More Satisfactory Solution of the Problem of Evil Than Does Any Other System,” in which Boettner makes an assertion which seems incredulous even for him:
. . . and while other systems are found to be wholly inadequate in their explanation of sin, Calvinism can give a fairly adequate explanation in that it recognizes that God is ultimately responsible since He could have prevented it.xxi
Thus Boettner actually states that God is responsible for sin! A few sentences later, however, Boettner again retracts his position on the absolute sovereignty of God in order to ‘reconcile’ his statement so that God is not responsible for sin:
In regard to the first fall of man, we assert that the proximate cause was the instigation of the Devil and the impulse of his own heart; and when we have established this, we have removed the blame from God.xxii(author’s emphasis)
So the reigns are pulled up after all, and we recoil back upon personal freedom, lest we jeopardize God’s holy character by implicating him in sin. We are on the rocking horse in to and fro motion, but we fail to move because we are haltered between two opinions. This to and fro motion that Boettner demonstrates in the same paragraph is a never-ending ride. The tension of qualifying coils always limits the movement of the horse from going too far in either direction, and because the horse cannot stop to rest at either of its polar positions it must stop in the middle. Thus the Calvinist continues his ridead infinitumuntil he has exhausted his energy in trying to ride out the contradiction. Finally, he declares the polar positions of the horse to be reconciled by tension, brings the horse to its synthesized (dialectical) center, and gets off. These long rides of to and fro motion is why Calvinistic treatises on the subject of predestination tend to be so repetitive. With the problem of evil, then, readers go back and forth while Boettner tells them that “we have removed blame from God” even though four sentences earlier he said that “God is ultimately responsible for it”!
The problem of keeping God’s holiness intact is thus a problem taken more seriously by R.C. Sproul in his book, Chosen By God. Although I cited a more complete quote earlier, I think part of it is worth repeating:
I am afraid that most Christians do not realize the profound severity of this problem. Skeptics have called this issue the “Achilles’ Heel of Christianity.” . . . For years I sought the answer to this problem, scouring the works of theologians and philosophers. I found some clever attempts at resolving the problem, but, as yet, have never found a deeply satisfying answer.xxiii
No doubt Sproul recognizes that such statements as Boettner’s simply state that the contradiction is true rather than demonstrate it from the Bible. In passing, one should note that other analogies have also been devised to explain Calvinism: thus a coin, or a cross with a sign on it, is said to have on one side, “whosoever will may come,” yet on the other side, “foreordained before the foundation of the world.” Nevertheless, the problem with such analogies is that a two-sided coin, like a six-sided die, is not a contradictory object at all. Rather, in order to solve the standing contradiction one would have to devise a fictional object and explain it as (for example) one separate coins that are two separate coin in which the heads and tails are both on the only side! Did the syntax of that last sentence throw you for a loop? That was because the singular and the plural were indistinct in their reference to the nouns and verbs. This is actually the language hidden in Calvinism and in any other theology or ideology that builds itself around a contradiction. Regarding the dialectical method of Calvinism that we have been examining here, the concept of God’s absolute sovereignty is grasped by the mind long enough so that even when synthesized with its exact opposite thought, i.e., man’s free will, there is enough memory activated in our minds to imagine the premise of each idea, even though each premise logically cancels the other one out. Thus, it seems as though the two concepts exist as proofs against each other while remaining coexistent in the mind. The reason, then, that many Christians do not feel the pressure of their Calvinistic theology is because Calvinism’s synthesis is presented slowly enough to facilitate memory. In effect, they are imagined to be true by being held in the mind by a multi-task mental operation, as though that act itself proved the principle of dialecticism. Jarring contradictions in Calvinistic statements are avoided (such as, “God causes all events, but not sinful events,”) and so people are lulled to a rock-a-bye sleep on a dialectical seesaw instead of being jerked off the board.
In the Synod of Dort (ca. 1618, when the five points of Calvinism were codified) and in the Westminster Confessions (1647), this mistaken assumption, i.e., that because both sides of the contradiction can be separately imagined they are somehow proved, was aided by clever language. Notice, for example, the rather passive phrase, “whatsoever comes to pass,” in the statement, “God from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass…” As written, the statement, “whatsoever comes to pass” sounds like whatsoever happens by itself, as though whatsoever was a 3rd party besides God and man. Thus, the sovereignty of God is diminished lingually enough to allow for the free will side of the equation. I’m not saying here that the Westminster Confessors sat around consciously conspiring about what language to use. But certainly the natural tension of their ideological synthesis would have led them toward phrases that sounded less definite than those which could have been used. The phrase “God did…ordain whatsoever comes to pass” could have been put stronger, i.e. that “God causes everything that happens.” But the game would be up with language so blunt, because Christians would reject that kind of theology out of hand. All of the Calvinist authors whose books or articles I have read use language that often avoids the word “cause.“ Instead, they usually bring to bear nearly every other possible word and phrase that means cause, but in a less direct way (i.e., as implied in the words controlled, determined, ordained, decreed, etc.). For to consistently use the word cause for the purpose of audience persuasion would mean rocking forward too hard on the rocking horse and ending one’s ride with an embarrassing frontal somersault over the horse’s head. No one (we certainly hope) would believe the Calvinists’ contradiction if such unmitigated language was consistently used to support their doctrine of an all-sovereign God. Consequently, the language used is often subtler. Small wonder, then, that the Bible so strongly condemns the wrangling of words which brings destruction to its hearers.5 xxiv
2 According to Discipleship Journal Magazine, Joni Eareckson (popular Christian inspirational speaker who, as a teen-ager, became a quadriplegic after a diving accident), when asked what one book besides the Bible she would recommend that someone read, answered, “The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination, by Loraine Boettner.” Eareckson says the book gave her great comfort following her accident.
3Please see p. 459, footnote 140, which discusses more exactly what I mean, in saying that the Calvinist’s terms aremeaningless.
4And what solution, on the whole, have Evangelicals offered in the 150 years since Melville has pointed out this fault?
5One marvels at the absence of dilemma which seems to attend (Calvinist author) Jerry Bridges’s statement on page 84 of his book: “The second observation we can make is that God sometimescausesgovernment leaders or officials to make foolish decisions in order to bring judgment upon a nation.” If Bridges is right, by what moral authority does God Himself judge foolishness?
xiiBoettner, Loraine.The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination.
(n.p.: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1968, 14thprinting). p. 319.
xiiiBoettner, p. 13: “God is seen as the great and mighty King who has appointed the course of nature and who directs the course of history even down to its minutest details. His decree is eternal, unchangeable, holy, wise, and sovereign. It extends not merely to the course of the physical world but to every event in human history from the creation to the judgment, and includes all the activities of saints and angels in heaven and of reprobates and demons in hell. It embraces the whole scope of creaturely existence, through time and eternity, comprehending at once all things that ever were or will be in their causes, conditions, successions, and relations.”
xivBoettner, p. 319.
xvBoettner, p. 212.
xviBoettner, p. 213.
xviiBoettner, p. 229.
xviiiBoettner, pp. 31-32.
xixBoettner, p. 228 “And while it is not ours to explain how God in His secret counsel rules and overrules the sinful acts of men, it is ours to know that whatever God does He never deviates from His own perfect justice.” It remains a mystery to me why Boettner would feel that God’s “perfect justice” involves the determination that men sin, regardless if God later “overrules” the sin.
xxSproul, p. 31. As noted later regarding how James Spiegel states that the Bible student must not back away from either statement within the “compatibilist” view (but then immediately violates his own statement by using backpedaling language so that God’s sovereignty is at first calledcomplete,but immediately afterward merely calledstrong), so Sproul, too, as soon as he states that God in some sense has foreordained sin, backpedals to stating that this merely means that God has “allowed” sin. Says Sproul: “We know that God is sovereign because we know that God is God. Therefore we must conclude that God foreordained sin. What else can we conclude? We must conclude that God’s decision to allow sin to enter the world was a good decision. This is not to say that our sin is really a good thing, but merely that God’s allowing us to do sin, which is evil, is a good thing.”
xxiBoettner, p. 251.
xxiiBoettner, p. 251.
xxiiiSproul, p. 28.
xxiv 2 Timothy 2:14.