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Predetermined or Predestined
November 28, 2010

Alan Roebuck writes:

Thank you for hosting the discussion (which can be found here and here) on Calvinism. It’s a big subject, and I hope you don’t mind a somewhat
lengthy e-mail in response to what’s been said so far.

First, some general comments, then my responses to some readers’ comments.

The primary thrust of my initial comment on Calvinism was about free will with regard to becoming a Christian. Free will in general is a related, and
more complex, topic.

About becoming a Christian, Calvinism (and Lutheranism and some Anglican/Episcopal leaders) says what Scripture says: God in eternity past chose
some to be Christians, and in the fullness of time He enables them to have saving faith. Without the decrees and actions of God, nobody would come to
Christ.

This doctrine sounds like a problem because we don’t feel predestined. When we come to Christ, we don’t feel like a cosmic force is overriding our
normal faculties. We feel like we freely choose Christ. And the Bible, while it does not say [Quote] Man has free will [unquote], presupposes that we
have free will in the sense that we can choose what we want (or perhaps what we don’t want but want to want), and are judged by our actions in a way
that would be entirely unfair for an automaton.

And yet the Bible also says God chose us. For example, Ephesians 1:3-5 (NASB):

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He
chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him [i.e., reckoned righteous, i.e., Christians]. In
love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will…

The Calvinistic theory of election [the theological term for being predestined to be a Christian believer] is in fact a solution, not a problem: it solves the
problem of the Bible appearing to contradict itself in calling us predestined and free.

In this, it resembles the doctrine of the Trinity which, as Greg Koukl points out, is also a solution, not a problem. That is, it solves the problem of the
Bible appearing to contradict itself by saying that there is one God, and then saying that the Father, Son and Holy Ghost are three different persons Who
are all God. The problem is solved by the orthodox Trinitarian formulation: God is one substance and three Persons.

It is my understanding that all (small-o) orthodox Christian bodies have always affirmed predestination; where they differ is in how they explain just
what this means. One of the main competitors to Calvinism is the view that God knows what we will choose, but He does not make us choose Him. But
this is contradicted by the above passage, which says that God chose us, not that He knew what we would do.

Not only does God predestine in the sense of making decrees in eternity past, He also makes His decrees come true by giving saving faith to those He
predestined. This is why some non-Christians change their minds and come to Christ: God makes them do it. But He does not do it by pointing a gun at
their heads, or by mesmerizing them, or by implanting chips in their brains, or some other such bizarre scheme. He does it by changing what the
unbeliever wants. And the change seems so natural that the former unbeliever doesn’t know it was God’s working until he reads the Bible (and is
properly instructed), whereupon he learns that God made it happen.

This change is not caused by the non-Christian gaining more information: Non-Christians don’t want more information about Christ and they reject it if
they should chance to hear it. (I include in this category liberal Pseudo-Christians and other apparently-Christian heretics. The Christ they want is a
counterfeit that appeals to their particular species of unbelief.) And we also cannot explain it by saying that the individual finally had the right religious
experience. Some other people who have the same religious experience remain unbelievers.

We cannot explain why people change their desires and come to Christ except by saying “something changed,” or perhaps more elaborate words that
amount to the same thing. But these words are a description, not an explanation. It happens, and we cannot know why. Only the Bible gives an
explanation of how it happens: God gives saving faith to the elect.

But this saving faith does not occur apart from secondary causes. The predestined come to faith through hearing the Gospel of how Jesus died to take
away their sins. The elect are enabled by God to believe; the non-elect remain unable to believe. To an outside human observer the difference is that
some have the indefinable mental prerequisites to receive the Good News, and some don’t. But that’s not what the Bible (the highest authority on these
matters) says.

You might say “Free will by definition is the opposite of predestination.” But it depends on your definition. If free will means “nothing bizarre is
operating that would prevent me from choosing what I want (or want to want),” then we obviously have free will at least the vast majority of the time,
and the Bible does not contradict this commonsense notion. The problem is: We cannot choose what we don’t want to choose. The non-Christian is a
slave of sin. In that, we are not free to choose Christ until God gives us the freedom.

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On to the comments:

mdavid said,

The problem with this question, of course, is that there is no provable Calvinist.

“Calvinism,” more accurately called “Reformed theology,” is an easily-identified system. It is defined formally by the various Reformed creeds and
confessions such as the Westminster Confession of Faith, or the Heidelberg Catechism. And it is intended to be an accurate summary of biblical
teaching, not a collection of the “sayings of Chairman Calvin.”

Kristor said,

it seems to me that the notion that we don’t have the least desire to adore God unless he plants it in us must be in one sense trivially true, and in
another probably false.

The belief that only God can give one the ability to want Christ comes from Scripture, for example, Romans 3:11:

there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God.

Aside from Scripture, we could not know that only those upon whom God bestows the gift of faith can believe. Certainly we were made to know and
love God, but the Fall interfered.

Kristor also said,

The analogy to which Alan refers, of God setting up the action of the play “behind the scenes,” while we merely recite the lines, meanwhile
laboring under the illusion that they are ours, seems to me to fail.

It was only an analogy. Reformed theology says that man really is free in the sense that he does what he wants, without any sense of an external force
overriding him. But God also predestines. What the actual mechanism of this is, nobody other than God can know. But this is what the Bible teaches, so
we ought to believe it.

John E. wrote, regarding “wanting versus wanting to want,”

There seems to be a danger of infinite regress here, and sophistry.

It seems to me there is a clear difference between wanting something that is not a want, and wanting to want something. But I think there is no
difference between wanting to want, and wanting to want to want. If so, the regress stops after two steps. I wouldn’t be surprised of a Catholic
philosopher has written on this. They’ve written about everything else.

Brandon F. wrote:

From what I understand Calvin teaches that God’s will is irresistible; that if we are called we cannot resist. That means that there is no free will for
anyone called or not with regard to the calling.

True, we cannot resist that which we want, as long as another and greater want does not cancel it. But if a greater want cancels the first one, then
perhaps we don’t really have the first want. Those who want to come to Christ cannot say no to what they want.

Brandon also says

The Bible is full of people who resist God’s will…

True. People often resist what they know God wants. But nobody resists God giving them a desire for Christ. These are different species of God’s will.
God’s commands are one thing. His irresistible grace is another.

Finally, Brandon says,

An early teaching of many prominent church fathers was apocatastasis, the reconciliation of all to God at the end of days. There are diverse
teachings throughout the history of Christianity but we should all take comfort that God will decide, not Calvin.

But the Bible is a higher authority than Church Fathers, and it says not all will be saved. And “Calvinism” is not Calvin, it’s the Bible and, at least on
this particular issue, the original view of the Reformation.

Laura writes:

Predestination was not the only, or even the most important, idea advanced by John Calvin, but it is certainly his most controversial one. Thank you to
Mr. Roebuck for his concise and incisive explanations of Calvinist theology.

Alan cites this passage from Ephesians as the crux and main support of election in the Calvinist sense:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He
chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him [i.e., reckoned righteous, i.e., Christians]. In
love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will…

Is Paul saying that God predetermined those who would choose him or that God chose to save those who would respond to grace? There’s an important
distinction here. If God predetermined those who would choose him then he also predetermined those who would not choose him, thus creating evil.

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The latter sense of choosing those who would choose him (“He chose us in Him”) preserves a zone of human freedom; the former does not and the
latter sense is a reasonable interpretation of Paul’s words. It is not a wilful distortion of these words. Mr. Roebuck’s point that we must accept a form of
predetermination because of these words is not convincing. “He predestined us to adoption as sons” can refer to the final grace and salvation God would
bestow on those who would choose him, of whom he had foreknowledge. “In love he predestined us” does not mean he selected some and rejected
others in advance, but that he predestined those who would choose him to “remain holy and blameless.”

Here is a relevant passage by Patrick Henry Reardon, from his Daily Devotional Guide of February, 2009, that I think usefully addresses the distinction
between predetermination in the Calvinist sense and predestination. He writes:

Although God certainly knows all things ahead of time, including each person’s eternal destiny, He does not predetermine those actions that lie
within the realm of human freedom. Men make their own choices, for which they alone are held responsible. God foreknows these actions, but He
does not predetermine them.

We do not understand how God influences the activities of history, but we do know that He never acts in such a way as to remove man’s freedom of
choice. In the words of John of Damascus, “We should understand that while God knows all things beforehand, He does not predetermine all
things. For He knows beforehand those things that are in our power, but He does not predetermine them. For it is not His will that wickedness
should exist, nor does He choose to compel virtue” (De Fide Orthodoxa 2.30).

What, then, does Holy Scripture mean when it asserts that God “predestines”? The verb itself, proorizo, means “to arrange ahead of time. In the
biblical context, where this verb appears with “foreknow” (proginosko, “to know ahead of time”), the verb signifies the providential arrangements
by which He brings people to the grace of the Gospel. That is to say, predestination embraces the mysterious influences that God brings to bear on
history, so that all things work together for the good of those who love Him.

This is very clear in the story of Joseph in the Old Testament. God made use of the sins of Joseph’s brothers to predestine—to arrange for—the
deliverance of Joseph’s family: “And God sent me before you to preserve a posterity for you in the earth, and to save your lives by a great
deliverance. So now it was not you who sent me here, but God. . . . But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, in order
to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive” (Genesis 45:7-8; 50:20).

“To predestine,” as understood in the Bible (where, in fact, the noun never appears) has no reference to any alleged divine decree whereby some
people are consigned to heavenly life and others to everlasting damnation. On the contrary, God wills all men to be saved. Indeed, in the Bible,
predestination does not refer to any divine decree at all. It is a description, rather, of God’s providential activity in history, working to bring good
out of evil.

Nowhere, therefore, does Holy Scripture hint even faintly at a person’s “predestination to hell.” In fact, this repulsive idea does violence to the
Bible, in which predestination is always a category of grace, never of punishment. Predestination pertains invariably to the divine call, not the
rejection of that call. It is always a description of the divine favor, not disfavor. It certainly does not include God’s arrangements to have someone
damned.

In His providential guidance of history, God makes use of man’s sins. He never “prearranges” those sins nor wills those sins; He does not, that is to
say, predestine men to sin. Even less does God predestine anyone’s damnation. Damnation was never God’s idea, and the majestic sovereignty of
God receives no glory from anyone’s eternal loss.

Moreover, the Bible never speaks of predestination except in relationship to Christ’s relationship to the Church. The foreknowledge and
predestination of God is Paul’s way of describing the priority of divine grace in redemption and justification. The initiative is God’s, not ours. We
foreknew nothing; we prearranged nothing. God has done it all. He knows and He determines, ahead of time, what form His work in history
(including the history of each of us) will take.

Those who truly experience His grace are aware of themselves as known by God (1 Corinthians 8:3; 13:12), loved by God (1 John 4:19), chosen by
God. When he speaks of predestination, Paul is describing the experience of life in the Christian Church. That is to say, it is an existential concept.
It pertains to spiritual experience.

Consequently, it has no dogmatic content. One cannot say, “I am saved” [in] the same sense he can say, “Jesus is Lord!” The latter is a dogmatic
statement representing an absolute truth. The experience of being “predestined,” however, pertains only to the existential order. It cannot be an
object of faith, and therefore it does not have the certainty of faith.

Christians, then, are “predestined to be conformed (symmorphous) to the image (eikon or icon) of His Son.” That is to say, believers are summoned
to share in Christ’s own relationship to the Father, so that Christ “might be the firstborn among many brethren.” By divine grace—the infinite favor
of God—they participate in the Son’s knowledge and love of the Father (Matthew 11:27), who regards them as His children, the younger brothers
and sisters of Jesus Christ (John 2:17).

It is because these justified Christians have become, by virtue of their justification, “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4) that they can, in
utter truth, look into the face of God and say, “Our Father.” They partake, already, of the divine glory (verse 30).

The purpose of these reflections, Paul says, is to bring hope and reassurance into our hearts. God will never back away from His grace and His call.
For this reason, there is no force in heaven or on earth or under the earth that can separate us from the love of God in Christ (verses 31-39). God is
permanently on our side. He will never betray us.

Moreover, if God has already given us His beloved Son, He will certainly give us everything else we need (verse 32; 1 Corinthians 3:22-23;
Philippians 3:21). Paul has heard accusations brought against his Gentile converts, because the latter did not observe the works of the Mosaic Law.
Paul will tolerate none of this criticism. These Christians have been justified through the grace of God received in faith, he says. Who dares to
bring an accusation against them? (verses 33-34) And Paul’s defiance here includes Satan, that ancient accuser of the brethren.

Even less, then, will believers be accused by Christ Himself, whose blood purchased their redemption from the slavery of sin and death. Here Paul
briefly mentions the Lord’s exaltation to the heavenly sanctuary, where He abides as our mediator and intercessor forever (verse 34; Hebrews 7:25;

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9:24; 1 John 2:1; Revelation 5).

Likewise, those sufferings that Christians must sustain in the maintenance of their faith (verse 36) will not separate them from the love of Christ.
Paul’s tone here is exhortatory as well as declaratory. That is to say, he declares that God will never be unfaithful to us, and he gently exhorts that
we be never unfaithful to God.

The situation of the justified Christian may be likened to that of a man in a poker game, who has been dealt the royal flush. He did nothing to gain
the royal flush. He did not work for it. It was freely given. He received it on the deal. He holds it in his hand. As long as he holds on to those cards,
he cannot possibly lose, for no hand is greater than the royal flush. The one thing he must never do is to discard. All he must do is sit tight and keep
a firm grip on those cards. No one, in heaven, on earth, or under the earth, can take them away from him.

— Comments —

Elle Bee writes:

I am not a Calvinist, but I am a Christian (I do not mean to imply that Calvinists are not Christians). Calvinists, and indeed most Christians, place an
emphasis on the truth and authority of Holy Scripture. The problem with the Calvinist doctrine of irresistible grace, as I see it, is this: the Bible
contradicts it directly. What does Holy Scripture say of grace?

Titus 2:11 tells us that “the grace of God, which brings salvation, has appeared to all men.” All men, the Word of God tells us, ALL MEN. Not
some men. Not simply, “those who are elect.” The grace of God, which brings salvation, has appeared to all men. It’s as simple as that. If grace
were truly irresistible, then logically, since it has appeared to all men, all men would be saved. But what does Scripture tell us?

The Bible tells us that many, dare I say most, men will not be saved! In fact, “few” will find eternal life. Matthew 7:13-14 says, “Enter through the
narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road
that leads to life, and only a few find it.” The world around us tells us that not all will be saved, but so does the Bible.

If God’s grace has appeared to all men (Titus 2:11), and grace brings salvation (Ephesians 2:8), yet not all men will be saved (Matthew 7:13-14), it
seems incontrovertible that some who receive this grace will resist it and will not be saved. Thus, irresistible grace is a doctrine that plainly contradicts
the teaching of Scripture. Grace can be – and frequently is – resisted. The will of God is that none would perish, but because we have the free will,
many of us actively controvert the will of God and perish. This is not a God who is out of control of His creation; there is no question of God’s
sovereignty. Rather, according to the Scriptures, God has divinely – sovereignly – ordained a system of salvation that makes room for us to freely
choose to live in Him, or to choose the opposite. On this much, I agree with the Calvinist: left to our own devices, we are totally depraved and incapable
of choosing Christ. However, God’s grace goes before us (the Arminian doctrine of prevenient grace) and makes us able to accept His gift of salvation,
free to us but costly to Him, if we choose it.

I do believe in predestination, but the word has quite a different meaning than when the Calvinists use it. Romans 8:29-30 tells us the correct order: God
knows who will choose Him, then He predestines us (not to be saved, but to be conformed to Christ’s image), then to be called, then to be justified, and
finally to be glorified.

While it is true that doctrinal discussions like this sometimes divide more than unite us, we must still have them. Sound doctrine is important to God,
and I for one find it contrary to Scripture (not to mention disturbing) to claim that the same God who is “not willing that any should perish” (2 Peter
3:9) also creates people with the express knowledge and purpose that they would perish. Calvinists, in response to this point, will often say that God has
two wills: a revealed will and a secret will. That does not at all sound like the God I serve, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

But all our blathering is perhaps nothing to God, nothing but a sounding brass if without love (see 1 Cor 13), and not much more than that even with it.
The key is humility. The truth is out there, even if we do not know it, and someday it will be revealed. For now, I think we can all agree with Romans
3:4: “Let God be true, and every man a liar!”

Brandon F. writes:

Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled
with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
—1 Peter 1:8-9

Stephanie Murgas writes:

Clearly it has been settled that IF we are predetermined, then we are so beyond our own choice. The goal then is to attain the prize, to press ever onward
towards our crown and predestination as to which we have claimed we have a right. We have then entered, passed the through gentile gates into the
inner court. Every choice we make, every decision we repeat will thus reflect what we have professed. I believe that Isaiah, chapter 55 addresses nicely
the promises to those who claim to be barren to God’s blessings, if they acknowledge that. Again respecting the three-fold “Godly” relationship,
chapters 56 and 57 then expound on the 55th chapter, which I believe is important to always keep in mind when studying the Bible. For if we are to
attempt in studying and understanding God’s way and his will, we must attempt to conform to the “image” of God we are professing to study, which we
will attempt to assume while studying (and judging) sacred and secular texts. This is how wisdom is attained, the essence of the Judge, a person who is
able to examine situations from any particular point-of-view and still see Truth. The inherent problem with this concept is that little is known about the
Holy Spirit aspect of the Trinity, for it seems to be the variable factor in God’s expressed equation. Furthermore, men have continually remained
focused on The Father and Son aspect of the Trinity, while confusing luck, destiny, fate or any seemingly “variable” influence with the Nature of the
Holy Spirit. As a concluding remark for now, I bring up one of my favorite quotes from the Christian Bible:

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“You are out of your mind, Paul!” he shouted. “Your great learning is driving you insane.” “I am not insane, most excellent Festus,” Paul replied. “What
I am saying is true and reasonable. The king is familiar with these things, and I can speak freely to him. I am convinced that none of this has escaped his
notice, because it was not done in a corner.” –Acts 26:24-26

John E. writes:

Thanks to Mr. Roebuck for the time and thought he put in his responses.

Mr. Roebuck wrote, “It seems to me there is a clear difference between wanting something that is not a want, and wanting to want something.” Perhaps
I can envision this by using an action that may or may not be wanted, like going for a jog. I can see a difference between desiring to go for a jog, and
wishing I had the desire to go for a jog. In theory, I can imagine someone wishing he had the desire to desire going for a jog, but it seems absurd for
anyone to actually think this way, whereas people do actually desire going for a jog, and people also actually wish they desired going for a jog. If this
illustrates your point, then I can see it. The three scenarios: 1. Wanting to jog; 2. Wanting to want to jog; or 3. Wanting to want to want to jog; are all
distinct and possible, but the third is rather absurd to conceive in practice, whereas the first two often occur in practice with many people. But I question
what is really happening in the human soul when a moral choice is made, and I am not convinced that Mr. Roebuck’s answer reflects what is really
happening. If we assume for purposes of illustration that taking a jog is a morally good thing, I may choose to take a jog even when I don’t have the
desire to do it. Isn’t it true that in reality, I chose what was good, in spite of what I wanted or desired, and for that matter, whether I desired to want it or
not?

I think there is also something important to point out in Mr. Roebuck’s responses in general. I illustrate it with his response to Brandon, but it can be
illustrated elsewhere also. When Brandon referred to the Church Fathers, Mr. Roebuck said, “But the Bible is a higher authority than Church Fathers,
and it says not all will be saved. And “Calvinism” is not Calvin, it’s the Bible and, at least on this particular issue, the original view of the
Reformation.” Here Mr. Roebuck risks talking past serious Catholics like me, who acknowledge that understanding what the Scriptures say is not
always simply a matter of reading them. He treats the Church Fathers (at least those with whom he disagrees) as though they were either unaware of
what Scripture said, or that they were indifferent, as though they said, “While we know Scriptures say such-and-such doctrine is true, we chose to
ignore it and propound this doctrine, which is contradictory to what Scripture teaches, as true instead.” Understanding the Scriptures requires
interpretation, and while some teachings are perspicuous and easily understood, many teachings are not, but are prone to misinterpretation,
overemphasis, underemphasis, or other misunderstandings. Catholics, and some other Christian traditions, recognize the need for Sacred Tradition, of
which the wisdom of the Church Fathers plays an important part, in order to grasp truths which would otherwise be inaccessible, or at least only
perilously sought after. This is not to say that some Church Fathers weren’t mistaken in their own interpretations, but rather to place a weighty emphasis
on our need for help from others, most specifically the ones who have come before us, to understand the truth presented by the Scriptures. If I read the
Scriptures on my own, and conclude from my reading something that is contradictory to what the Catholic Church understands to be true, I then
conclude that my original conclusion was flawed. Mr. Roebuck mistakes this to mean that I do not care what the Scriptures say, or that I do not believe
that truth can be found in the Scriptures. In his understanding of how Catholics, and other Christians who have a concept of Sacred Tradition, approach
the truth and how we come to know it, he mistakenly assumes that we hold to this Tradition, even when it contradicts Scripture, and fails to see that we
hold to the Tradition as helping us to apprehend the truths of Scripture, which we hold in the highest esteem. Whether Catholics are correct in this
approach of knowing the truth can be debated, but Mr. Roebuck makes a mistake in saying “Calvinism (and Lutheranism and some Anglican/Episcopal
leaders) [say] what Scripture says,” as though Catholicism is indifferent to what Scripture says, or discerned what Scripture says, but decided to take
another path instead. If Mr. Roebuck doesn’t know it, he needs to become aware that Catholics have at least as much appreciation for the truth as it can
be discovered from Scripture as he does.

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