Framing the Debate
There is one truth that applies to all debates: consistency in itself is no real test of the truth. In one sense this is maddening. We naturally think that if we present enough evidence for our view the other person will eventually come around. We hope not only to survive a point/counter-point discussion to outlast an opponent’s best arguments, but also to one-upmanship him into a corner until he concedes that ours is the correct view. Setting aside for the moment whether we should even have such a competitive spirit, let us at least note that debates in real life seldom turn out so tidy. Most people are stubborn in their views and resist the idea of changing their minds even in trivial matters. When people are wrong they tend (wittingly or not) to adopt an additional lie to support the first lie, a.k.a. ‘maintaining the fiction.’ Reformed thinker Cornelius Van Til rightly points out how this additional lie is the adopting of a deeper, consistent irrationality in order to support an existing ‘rationality.’vi
Consider the following example of maintaining the fiction. Suppose you meet someone who carries around an exact copy of your Bible and tells you he believes in God and everything written in God’s Word. To your alarm, however, you discover that he thinks nearly every word in the Bible means the concept God is a purple turtle in the sky. Every word from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22 means this same thing to him except one verse, John 4:24: God is a spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. This verse troubles him. You point out that the word ‘God’ in the Greek is the same word used in other verses in the Bible, and so ‘God’ must be understood to be a spirit in other Bible verses where He is mentioned. Your new acquaintance faces a choice. Either he must believe the truth you’ve shown him and move toward a better understanding of the Bible, or he must adopt a deeper irrationality to support his existing irrationality. Suppose he chooses the latter. Instead of conceding your point, he decides at length that every word in John 4:24 means the same thing as all the other words in the Bible. Consequently, every word of the Bible to him now means God is a purple turtle in the sky. He has moved to a position where he is now totally immune to your argument that God is a spirit. So here’s the question: Is he any less consistent in his theology than you are in yours, even if you believe the truth of the Bible at every point, and he believes a lie? No, he is not less consistent. Both of you can cite chapter and verse, discuss hermeneutics, profess to believe in the plenary inspiration of God, etc., and yet be equally consistent in presenting your opposing views.
As we delve, then, into the remainder of this book it should be remembered that both supporters and critics of Calvin can make rebuttals to every major and minor point the other side makes. Verses are interpreted with different meanings, and even the most fundamental qualities of God, including His moral character, are understood differently. As both sides offer opposite definitions of God’s sovereignty, both sides cannot be right. I find it personally discouraging to think that either side has built an edifice of error, i.e., that one group is furthering the fiction each time their system is challenged. One would have hoped professing Christians would be of the same mind and arrive at the same definition regarding God’s sovereignty, but such has not been the case since at least the time of Augustine in the 4th century. I urge my readers to therefore prayerfully consider the arguments in this book, since they will decide for themselves what is the Spirit of truth, and what is the spirit of error.
He Loves Me. He Loves Me Not.
My own journey in working through the issue of divine sovereignty took years. After graduating from a Reformed Christian college where I had come to believe that God could only foreknow history if He had predetermined it, I proceeded to graduate school where I soon faced a quandary. Periodically, I sat at a cafeteria table across from a friend of mine I’ll call ‘Susan,’ and this young woman asked the same vexing question of us Christians every time we urged her to consider Jesus. Knowing we were Calvinists she concluded every discussion in the same melancholy way: “But what if I’m not predestined to be saved?” Her gaze was penetrating, a bit exasperated, and she always spoke with a dead earnestness that belied the possibility that her skepticism was tinged with any secret hilarity. What was I to say?—Yeah, Susan, maybe you’re right; maybe you are damned for all eternity and there’s nothing you or I can do about it. In fact, all of this was settled long before you and I were born.
Needless to say, this unsettling experience helped me to eventually make a de novo review of everything I believed about the sovereignty of God. And in the process of studying this issue I learned something else: I decided every Calvinist ought to forge his views while sitting across from someone claiming to represent the majority—i.e., the warm-blooded damned who may be no more worse than himself, before he accepts Calvin’s theology in the detached, cooler climate of a seminary classroom. And so at length I began asking myself questions: Was God’s control over all persons, events, and history as absolute as I had been taught? Was that idea really represented in the Bible? Or again, would God cease to be God if He allowed someone to supersede His will? Who indeed was God in the plainest terms, and how did He interact with His creation and people?
Despite being raised essentially as a free will Baptist in a Methodist-background church, I eventually came to understand as an undergraduate student why someone would become a Calvinist. The Scriptures supporting John Calvin’s view of God seemed ironclad and inescapable. The list of passages teaching God’s total and absolute sovereignty was a long and compelling list: God worketh all things after the counsel of His will; All things work together for good to them that love God; For whom He foreknew He also did predestinate; Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will? Nay but, O man, Who art thou to reply to God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?; I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will harden whom I will harden; …vessels of wrath fitted for destruction; As many as were ordained unto salvation believed; etc. I had conceded in my early 20s that Calvin must be right, for how else could God foreknow history unless he had already predetermined what events should transpire? Ironically, after a handful of years I left Calvinism after examining more carefully this same ‘reason.’ I eventually came to understand that predeterminism, at least as John Calvin and his disciples understood it, led to a theology of inconclusiveness. By taking into account all of Calvin’s statements about God’s sovereignty, and not just some of them (here and then there), I found that nothing conclusive could be said about the moral character of God, the moral and existential statuses of man, or even whether good and evil were morally separable. As I now hope to show, the reason Calvinists do not come to these same conclusions is because they embrace a theology whose fundamental component is a contradiction that cannot lead to conclusions. As this statement is a serious charge against Calvinistic theology, we must see if it can be reasonably sustained.
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vi Van Til, Cornelius. The New Modernism. (Philadelphia: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1947; 2nd edition). In his evaluation of Kierkegaard’s effect on Barth and Brunner, Van Til notes that Kierkegaard intensified the pace of irrationalism brought on by Georg Hegel by a more consistent application. Says Van Til: “It follows that Kierkegaard’s charge against Hegel, that he had placed movement in logic or formed an existential system, is tantamount to saying that Hegel had, in spite of his best effort, not made brute fact brute enough, or contingency contingent enough. And this logically includes the charge that Hegel had not made abstract logic abstract enough. That is to say, Kierkegaard sought to cure what he called Hegel’s rationalism by an administration of still more irrationalism; but in order to make this administration, he must himself be a still greater rationalist than Hegel was.” (p. 54). Hence, Van Til sees in the neo-orthodoxy of Barth the carrying through of Kierkegaard’s consistent application of irrationality: “Each time a philosopher or theologian becomes more irrationalist than his predecessors, he becomes also more rationalist. Such, we have noted, was the case with Hegel and with Kierkegaard. Such is, we think, also the case with Barth.”(p. 68).