One of the theological questions that has the potential to cause the most concern for some Christians is the relationship between God’s sovereignty and our freedom.
It is an issue that I have wrestled with a good deal myself as well as being asked about it by concerned members of my church. I remember being at University studying law (but interested in theology) and worshipping at a moderately Calvinistic Baptist Church. The prevailing view in that congregation was that Calvinist understandings of predestination were correct. The most popular articulation of that how was the high evangelical Calvinism of John Piper and the movement around him in the US. This caused me a tailspin- what if I was not really ever choosing anything? Was I really free? Did I even exist as a mind or soul in any meaningful way? I was profoundly unhappy for and while before resolving some of these questions in prayer and reading.
Years later I flirted with the Open Theism of Greg Boyd and others but soon found a similar level of anxiety and dissatisfaction with the exegesis I was being urged to accept. I ended up realising that I did not fully accept the exegesis or synthesis of either the rigorous Calvinists or the Open Theists. I went away and did some more reading (and praying) particularly in the Church Fathers, Reformers and Eastern Orthodox writers. In the rest of this article I want to explain my conclusions in case they are helpful to anyone else who is wrestling with this issue. In keeping with the ether of this blog, I have tried to be as un polemical and consensual as I can while also saying what I think is true.
The first part of this article outlines a classical Christian understanding of the relationship between God’s sovereignty and human freedom, ultimately arguing that John Wesley’s synthesis of these ideas is the most helpful, but not necessarily the only correct, way of seeing this question at least within the limits of actual lived human experience. The second part will focus on how we can read the Bible well when these issues come up.
Thinking About Free-will and Predestination
The question of free-will and predestination is a massive one and I’m not sure I will be able to answer it satisfactorily. In some ways, that is part of the key to coming to peace with it. We have minds designed to operate within time and to perceive it as acting in a linear way. Then when we try to work out how God (who exists above and beyond time) acts in relation to us we become confused. That confusion is inevitable – it flows from the natural limitations of our present existence; we can’t expect to understand it because it is a question that is by its nature not one that can be grasped by us. I don’t think that this is a cop-out but rather recognises that there is a fundamental difference between ourselves and God that prevents us from even imagining the answers to certain questions (another, related, example is what was there before the beginning / big bang etc? We can’t even properly conceive of an answer because in our experience everything has a prior cause and everything exists within creation – beyond that we can’t speak).
With that said, there are certain propositions that orthodox Christians have generally held to be true whatever background they come from (ie Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant etc).
- God is free to do whatever he wants.
- God knows the future.
- As we perceive it, we are free to act in the present.
- Without God’s prior grace that freedom does not extend to choosing him (ie he has to act first).
- There is (at least as we perceive it) the possibility of anyone coming to Christ.
- Our grace-enabled freedom (as we perceive it) continues after we come to Christ into the choices we make to become like him.
- While we have faith in Jesus God will keep us to the end.
Different groups have explained how we can hold all of these ideas together in different ways. On a fundamental level, as long as one is able to affirm all of them the explanatory net underneath doesn’t matter as much as we sometimes imply.
My own preference is for Wesley’s framework which fuses (in my view) the best of Eastern and Western Christianity. In this model, all humanity is fallen and therefore tends by nature to do wrong, all are experiencing the grace of God in some way and this grace is intended to enable them to respond to Christ in a way that is appropriate for them (commonly called prevenient grace), we come to Christ when God’s Spirit opens our hearts to enable us to respond (providing us freedom) and we then choose to respond. At that point God freely and totally forgives us in a way we could never contribute to or merit (justifying grace). Thereafter we have freedom to become like Christ insofar as we remain in relationship with God’s Spirit (sanctifying grace) and God then leads us to glory (glorifying grace).
Throughout all of this I want to affirm that God is sovereignly in control of the future but makes space within his plans for us to have true, grace empowered freedom. In the past I have used the (limited) analogy of a sat-nav in which the destination is programmed but the driver has freedom to keep turning off the route, although I wouldn’t want to push this too far.
Reading the Bible
Having thought about the overall framework Christians might use when discussing these questions, we can now address how we can read Scripture when the topic or language of predestination or election comes up.
We have to be aware when we read Scripture that we often unconsciously read it with a particular set of prior ideas in mind. In my experience this is nowhere better illustrated than in relation to predestination.
‘Predestination’
Throughout the Scriptures the writers are trying to balance these truths:
- God is free;
- God knows all things;
- God loves humanity; and
- human beings are (as we perceive it) free;
In any given chapter one or other of these themes may be more prominent than the others but this will nearly always be balanced out somewhere else. This is why it is important to (as you very commendably have) get familiar with the whole of Scripture.
With that caveat, in the New Testament references to predestination are nearly always to the end state of believers ie what is the final fate of those who are in Christ? The answer is their final salvation and transformation. Thus in Romans 8:29-30, God foreknew those who would respond to Christ and the destination he chose for them was justification and glorification. Predestination refers to where believers are going (ie if we hold to Christ God has chosen a wonderful destination for us, he isn’t leading us nowhere).
‘Election‘
When we’re reading references in Scripture to ‘election’ or something similar, it is important to remember two distinctions that are very easy to forget:
- There is a difference between corporate and individual election.
In corporate election a group can be chosen because they all fulfil some other criteria. An example would be choosing to cheer for a particular football team. My (undoubtedly wise) choice to cheer for Spurs means that I will also cheer for each of their players, whoever those players happen to be at the moment.
In individual election a particular person is chosen without reference to their membership of a group or their relationship to an individual.
The distinction is complicated in Scripture when one person can be chosen (like Jesus or Abraham), which is individual election, and then others are chosen because of how they relate to that individual (like Israel or the church).
We always need to ask what type of election is being referred to and in reference to whom. - People can be chosen for a particular purpose or task without that referring to their eternal salvation. For this reason we always need to ask what the person or people are chosen for.
In the New Testament, references to election are nearly always corporate. They refer to God’s plans for a particular group (Israel, the church, or those in Jesus Christ). Reading them as referring (at least in the first instance) to individuals is misreading them. The question of who is a part of that group is a separate one which is nearly always answered in respect of the church by pointing to those who have faith in Christ.
For example, Romans 9 is part of the overall argument from 8-11 about the relationship between Israel and the Gentiles in the church. Paul wants to answer the questions, are the Gentiles part of the elect group? If so, how? What about the Jews? His answers are ‘yes’, ‘by faith’, and ‘also by faith.’ The argument proceeds through chapter 9 by pointing out that God determined the criteria by which the Jews were elect (they were children of the promise given to Abraham). Note this refers to Israel as a group rather than the salvation of any particular Jew. God’s choice was sovereign – it wasn’t because Abraham was good or his descendants were good but because God gets to set the entry criterion: 9:14. They then complain that they haven’t done anything wrong; they kept the law so why should the Gentiles be included by faith? Paul’s answer is that membership of the elect group has always been by faith and now it includes the Gentiles: 9:30-33.
The overall point of the argument is that God determines the group that he justifies. Individual membership of that group is by faith (implying freedom and response, v.32) and not by works. Far from teaching that God predetermines and elects certain individuals prior to any faith of theirs, the chapter teaches that God determines that all who have faith will be part of the elect group whether they are Jew or Greek. The question is then what about Israelites who don’t believe in Jesus and this is what Paul deals with in chapters 10 and 11, a flow that only makes sense if 9 is about the group rather than the individuals.
I point this out because we get so used to reading chapters out of the stream of the overall argument of the letter that we assume they are talking about us (as individuals) rather than us, the church, (as a group). God has chosen the church – we (together) are elect. On a deeper level this is because he has chosen Jesus and we are in him (this is the point of Ephesians 1). None of this necessitates that human beings are not (as far as we perceive it) free. In fact it implies exactly the opposite – that by God’s grace we are free to enter the elect group through Christ.
One solution to this is wherever you come across a passage that seems odd in its predestinarian thinking, try reading the chapters either side as one block and see if that changes how it comes across.
Further Reading
I would start by checking out Thomas C. Oden’s The Transforming Power of Grace which manages to be steeped in consensual, ecumenical exegesis of Scripture and yet also readable and enjoyable (and thin!).
For commentaries on this issue, particularly in the context of Romans, there is a deeper and balanced discussion in Ben Witherington III with Darlene Hyatt, Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p.236-259 which I found very helpful. Slightly different perspectives can also be found in Douglas M. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans (part of the more Reformed NICNT series) and Scott W. Hahn, Romans (part of the Catholic Commentary of Sacred Scripture).
Deep Church 