hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu (11/25/89)
You may have noticed that I have been unaccustomedly silent in the renewed discussions on Law and predestination. I can't imagine what I have to say on the Law that wasn't said in the discussions before. I would have preferred not to renew that discussion. I have some of the same feeling about predestination, but I'm more amenable to a discussion of it because my views on the subject are changing. This particular posting is taken mostly from something I posted to talk.religion.misc. I was responding to a discussion about "irresistible grace". The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that this term is an unfortunate one. I think it is the result of trying to answer a question that was incorrectly posed. To make this clear, let me start with the basic question: whether people have any choice in the matter of being saved. I think the correct answer is both yes and no. While it is true that man has no choice in being elected or not, it would not entirely accurate to say that man has no choice in being saved or not. Whether to respond to God is a choice. Predestination does not deny that people make that choice. Rather it says that God's grace is (or is not, as the case may be) guiding the person in making the choice. I've chosen the word "guide" with some care. Based on some of the statements made by both Luther and Calvin, one might be inclined to use the term "coerce". However coercion implies either external constraint, as in holding a gun on a person, or perhaps using drugs or some other method of internal coercion. Augustine, Luther, and Calvin all intended to avoid this implication. The idea was to hold together two different things: - that God is in control, and is ultimately responsible for what happens - that people make real choices In my opinion many (perhaps most) of those who believe in predestination were unsuccessful in maintaining both of these things simultaneously. Generally it is the reality of the decision that lost out. They didn't *intend* it to lose out: the writers were all clear that people were still responsible for their choices. It's just that their comments about God's responsibility often make human choices look rather empty. In some sense I think the disagreement over predestination is more a matter of perspective than of any disagreement over what actually happens. Everyone agrees that God does various things to call people to himself. These include such diverse mechanisms as setting up a Church that preaches the Word, to the presence of the Holy Spirit in us. Everyone also agrees that these things are sufficient to convince some people and not others. The real question is whether God *intends* that to be the case, and in particular whether he intends certain people to be convinced and others not to be. Those who believe in predestination believe that God does in fact intend the results that he accomplishes. Those who don't, don't. Predestination does not imply any additional kinds of compulsion or constraint. Frankly, I think the term "irresistible grace" is misleading. It suggests that those who believe in it believe in some extra kind of compulsion that God uses on the elect. In fact I think that predestinarians and anti-predestinarians agree on the methods God uses. Predestinarians simply believes that God intends the results that happen. His will is irresistible, in the sense that what he intends to happen, happens. But the term is unfortunate, because it suggests that it happens through some kind of compulsion, which is set against some attempt to resist. Hence concerns such as "but if I'm not one of the elect, this means I can't be saved no matter how much I want to. This is unfair." The point is that situations like this do not come up. If you want to be saved, then you *are* one of the elect. You want to be saved only because God's persuasion got to you, and it got to you because he intended it to. Terms such as "irresistible grace" arose in the context of disputes, and frankly I think many of them resulted from attempting to answer ill-posed questions. Generally those who do not believe in predestination acknowledge that God is able to predict who will respond to his attempts at persuasion. He knows that if this and that happens to a person, and if the Holy Spirit speaks to him in just this way, how he will respond. I don't necessarily mean to imply any specific kind of determinism in human affairs. But I think that one way or another, Christians normally assume that God knows what is going to happen. Those who believe in predestination simply choose to believe that God not only forsees but intends the results. That is, he set up the universe, and acted in history, in specifically the way that he did, intentionally. I do not intend this mechanistically, though it is often explained in a way that sounds mechanistic. I think what Calvin intended people to get out of predestination was in fact a great feeling of thankfulness to God. God created the universe, and gave his Son, to save me. Not just to provide the opportunity for people to be saved if they want to be, but specifically to save me. Contemplating this creates a sense of awe and thankfulness. The fly in the ointment is the concept of reprobation. I'm not sure why this didn't cause Calvin himself any problem. Perhaps he was simply supremely self-confident. But it certainly caused the people who came after him problems. How can you be thankful for God's salvation when you know that most people are not saved, and that probably many of those who are thankful to God for salvation are in fact deluding themselves? Historically this was more of a problem than the more abstract question of how a just God could decide to damn people. Much of the effort in later Calvinism went into figuring out signs by which people could detect that they were elect. Most of this effort would probably have been horrifying to Calvin himself, but it is easy to see how it arose. My own feeling is that ultimately predestination stands and falls on the basis of whether it can deal with the problem of the reprobate: both the theoretical problem of how one reconciles the Biblical picture of a God who wants to save all mankind with the concept of a set of people that he intends to damn, and the existential problem of how people can get any sort assurance from predestination when they can't be sure that the assurance applies to them. I don't think the attack based on free will is as serious as this problem. I think one can adequately account for human decision and responsibility within the framework of predestination, as I have attempted to show above. [For those who want to know my own resolution of this problem: Although I believe in predestination, I believe that everyone is elected. I believe that God intends everyone to be saved, and that he will find some way to do so. That doesn't mean that I deny judgement, nor that I am committed to any specific view of how this will happen. Yes, I believe that God has some way to deal with Adolph Hitler. "If any man's work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire." (I Cor 3:15, though I admit that this is a non-standard application of that passage.) I have give details on this position in a previous posting, so I will not say any more here.]