Free Will? Election? Predestination? Does it Matter?
Dec 27th, 2007 by Nathan White
The other day I was listening to the podcast, The White Horse Inn (program 11-11-2007), and Mike Horton repeated an excellent quote from Martin Luther. I am assuming that it was paraphrased, but I’m not exactly sure. Consider it:
[This quote came from the book, The Bondage of the Will, by Martin Luther, and involves a discussion between Luther, who was arguing for predestination, and Erasmus, who was arguing for free will.]
Erasmus said: “Luther, we really don’t need to know about these issues like Election –whether we’re saved because God chooses us or we choose Him. [Or] Whether it’s grace or free will.”
Luther thundered back:
“Erasmus, if I don’t know that, even back into eternity, it is God’s move toward me, not my move toward Him; if I don’t know that even that decision is preceded by God’s decision for me, [then] I will never know how much I should worship myself, and how much I should worship God. To whatever extent I have contributed to my salvation, to that extent I must bring glory to myself.“
Amen. What a message fit for the church today!
Who wants to talk about free-will? In the Catholic Church’s endorsement of the Golden Compass, the agreeable issue was free-will. Interestingly, it is this and not the blatant anti-Christian bent of the film that was the focus. It was publicized that the film, expunged of its anti-Catholic themes, was still an attack on Christianity, but then received the CC’s endorsement despite the fact that the Magisterium remained. Of course, the vile Magistrate in the film is one John Calvin.
If the issue of free-will is not central to the Christian message then Luther wasted his nails. His response to Erasmus’ Diatribe reads like a modern polemic against the “moderating” voices of the non-Calvinists. We, however, fight against a secular/religious establishment paradigm that includes athiests, whose central tenet is the free-will of man. Bondage of the will, is precisely why athiests reject the existence of God, in that it requires that they are not free. To the teachers of the Law Christ asserted that they were slaves. Their response was that they were children of Abraham. They however did not know Abraham, or would have rejoiced in Jesus’ claims that they were indeed slaves to the will of their father the Devil, and that He had come as Truth, the righteous will of His Father, to set them free. To be free in Christ is to do the will of the Father, something that only Christ can do. And, not even Christ claimed autonomy of will.
Our freedom consists in that we do the will of God: “Our Father, who is in Heaven, Holy is your Name, your kingdom come, your will be done in Earth as it is in Heaven.” This doxology is not a petition but a declaration of propostitional truth about God. It is Our Father you: are in heaven, Holy. And similarly it is His kingdom and his will that is done according to who he is in Heaven. To that, each of the “petitional” parts are not requests, but are instead in the imperative. They are commands. Our Father command and it is done on Earth as it is in Heaven, and we are given our daily bread, we forgive as we are forgiven, you will not lead us into temptation, and you will deliver us. To the men who criticized His anointing for His burial, he said, “Those who have been forgiven much love much”, to us James says that God temps no man, and David’s claim, repeated in the NT is that he has never seen the righteous forsaken, nor God’s children begging for bread. If it is a petitional prayer then it is, on this account, that God in his sovereignty wills that these thing are done and that is why we can be comforted in him as our Father knowing that if we ask he will not give us a serpent, but as he is, he gives himself the Bread of life.
Then why are we so ashamed of the Gospel and its necessary message of the sovereignty of God? If indeed it is the Holy One and not ourselves that we are to look to for salvation, if indeed all worship, honor and glory is His, if indeed it is his power and kingdom as the closing doxology commends, why then do we diminsh it by any claims to our free will?
Yes, Luther saw this as the difference between true Faith, and the false religion of the world and of the Catholic Chuch that believes it can choose between good and evil, the very essence of the lie, the very pride of rebellion. He knew full well his depravity, meaning that out of his flesh he could not will to do the least good toward salvation, that his will was opposed to the will of God. To him, the perfect will of God come in the flesh of Christ was the only means of freely willing salvation. It is God’s free will in Christ that of those given to him by the Father, Christ would indeed draw to himself, and he would loose none of them. What arrogance is there in the creature that says God cannot stop me on the road to Damascus? For the world David’s psalms of God’s immediate presence in our thoughts, actions and speech is repugnant. Yet in that, though a man of sorrows, deeply grieved at his own sinfulness, he knew God to be faithful in his willing, and drew upon that benefit, the meal prepared for him in his sin, in the midst of his enemies, God would anoint him and he would from the abundance of God’s provision dwell in the House of the Lord forever.
Thank God He knows forever. For in His unchanging knowledge we have peace and assurance he will never leave us nor forsake us. To him alone be the glory forever.
There’s another quote from BOTW in which Luther says to Erasmus that, and this is a paraphrase, “If these issues are not fit for the persons in the pew to know or discuss, then I what, pray tell, is fit for that purpose?” He said this in response to Erasmus saying that discussion of this and other like topics should be confined to clergy and scholars. Does Erasmus statement sound at all familiar? It has been stated by none other than some SBC leaders in recent history, including, if my memory serves, Dr. Morris Chapman himself.
So, okay, there’s no free will. This means that all the wrongs you have committed and will commit have been decreed by God, and you have had no capacity but to choose other than what you’ve done.
Now, even the courts, with their imperfect methods of defining justice, differentiate between voluntary and involuntary manslaughter, for example. Would it be “just” to sentence a man to death because he passed out from a medical condition while driving and ran over someone, killing them accidentally? Would it be “just” to sentence a woman to be stoned to death for being raped since she had sexual relations outside of marriage? (This still happens in some Islamic states, btw.) What difference does “will” or “consent” have to do with anything? The act happened, right?
If God sentences men to eternal punishment for doing things He himself has decreed, why should we not then imitate that sense of justice by executing people without regard to whether they had “consented” to the act or not?
Why must our sense of justice be so much more lenient than God’s, who is supposedly inifitely more merciful and “fair” than we wicked and sinful humans? I don’t see how we can be “conformed to His image” when the standards we apply for what is expected of human behavior have no consistency or coherence.
James-
Well, if God were a human, and you had been created by humans then human reasoning would follow from your presumptions. But, to further your analogy, no human court would let another die in your place for the premedidated murder you commited, but the Father not only permitted it to be so but planned it all through the choices of men who did not know what they were doing, yet Scripture declares that they plotted and planned and murdered the Christ according to God’s premeditated plan, “It pleased the Father to bruise the Son.” Go figure. So, nothing you have said lines up with the Truth.
But, let’s see: God whose ways are not our ways, and whose thoughts are not our thoughts but are far beyond ours, surpassing finding out, expects us to act like him. What if God made man in his image, would that image be able to choose to do sin according to free-will, human style? Or, to put it another way, could Jesus have contradicted the image of the Father in him by sinning? Now, it was Jesus the Son of Man who said, “I do nothing but what I see the Father doing.” Did Christ, think, contemplate sin, as a possibility that he could choose? If so, then the Father, is Yin Yang, good and evil, light and darkness and attains virtue by choosing the good and denying the evil. Is that the God of Scripture? If the image that we are being comformed into is Christ crucified and resurrected and his life perfected before the cross is being given to us as our eternal reward, and we will never again know evil, think evil, and therefore never again be able to choose evil, is the eternal state exclusive of free-will? Or, is that a false teaching added to Scripture by redactors?
When some of us in the reformed camp speak of free-will, we do not speak of it as free to choose evil and merely by the infusion of grace able to abstain. We speak of it as being freed from the necessity of choosing, as in God’s image. God chooses for us the choices we choose and has freed us from the condemnation for the wrong choices that we make due to sin in us. To know God in Truth is to know him as David in Psalms 139, knew him. For in Christ, all answers are yes and amen. It is he who has decreed all things whatsoever come to pass, every day written in his book before one comes to be, knowing our thoughts from afar (eternally) even creating the fruit of the lips before one of them is formed. There is no darkness in him. And, if you have the capacity to choose to do evil, John says you’re not in him, a son cannot sin for his seed remains in him. A son, by nature does not practice sin. Now, the remaining question that you have is: then why do I still have temptation to sin and succumb? Well, the simple answer is that you are not yet perfected, none of us are, but we do know this, that when he appears we will be like him, perfected. For now, your new man cannot sin, but sin in your members can, and you are responsible for the sins of another as if they were yours, just like, let’s see, who was that guy…..
But this is not my blog, so I defer to the expert.
Gene, you got rain, hallelujah, may God more abundantly bless y’all.
Yes, Chapman said that, as well as others. It seems to be one of the talking points in the “Can’t We All Just Get Along” peace by silence apartheidist party.
Thomas writes: “no human court would let another die in your place for the premedidated murder you commited”
I think you missed my point. The question is: should they? If not, why? I think you would suggest that such a ruling would be unjust (at least I would hope you would). But why? Where do your standards of justice come from? Scripture?
Yes, man is not God. But to suggest that “justice” can be defined with a strict set of criteria when it’s applied to man but that those rules can be jettisoned when referring to God is to suggest that Justice (at least in terms of God) has no meaning. It’s just a gobbledy-gook term to mean “I know not what”.
In that case, we know not what we worship. He may be “good”, but you may as well say that He is “kerxipyysx” and we should worship Him because of it, since it would be as relevant to our understanding.
I don’t think I’m explaining this well, but perhaps you see my point: it seems that the Calvinist can only worship God because He has all the power, because all notions of “just” and “merciful” and “loving” have no meaning to us. With all due respect, this seems to be a form of moral cowardice. Would we bow to a despot simply because he has usurped authority and threatens us with torture if we do not?
If our sense of justice is derived strictly from the Scripture, and I believe it is, why don’t we let another die in someones place and declare the guilty guiltless?
You didn’t address the issue of Christ’s crucifixion. Does Scripture say that it was God’s choice that the men would do what they did, or, was that choice a free contingency without the knowledge of God nor or his decreeing it? In other words, can predictive prophecy be predictive prophecy if it is left to the free-will of the creature to bring it about? And, was it just, if the men could not do otherwise?
I am not a theologian, so I am sure that I have gotten much here not quite right. But, I can tell you this, for years I was not told there was any other way to think than as an modified Arminian. I am SBC and long steeped in the status quo. My question has always been, why have the authorities sheltered us from history? Is it not better to fully instruct than to keep in darkness? Doesn’t a man light a light and place it on a table in the middle of the room to illuminate all. Then why? The SBC was founded upon these doctrines. Shouldn’t it be then, even if they were wrong, that the SBC would be proud to proclaim that they had finally found the light? But instead, as Gene stated, the powers, fearful of history, of all things, choose silence rather than proclamation, darkness, rather than light. Very curious, huh?
The rest of my response can be found at my site. If Nathan wants he can bring it back over here. It is quite long.
[...] following is the continuation comments of that belong to a post at Shepherd the Flock on free-will. Does it really matter that this single issue which Luther thought to be the [...]
Thomas, you pose numerous questions in your post that are quite good, even if they were posed as rhetorical ones. However, it seems to imply that there is a certain randomness (for lack of a better word) in God’s judgments. They are certainly beyond our understanding and are frequently inconsistent with our notions of right and wrong, justice and mercy.
If that is the case, the Calvinist stands not on solid but thin ground in his confidence. God could, if He is indeed sovereign in all of His judgments, decide to allow only Catholics into Heaven, or only Buddhists or perhaps even Hari Krishnas. On what basis would we object? His chosen are known to Him for reasons known only to Him and despite any merit or lack thereof in the person in question.
James-
I quite understand, from a human perspective that it appears random. Let me do it this way. The Church was given the keys of the kingdom for the binding and loosing in judicial matters that come before the church. Paul’s instructions are given to us to further illuminate matters of discipline. We can gather from that, that there are clear cut lines in matters of justice. On the other hand, Paul also instructs us not to judge based upon outward appearances. There too, we can see that there are judgements that we cannot make, but still, the inferrence is that there is an absolute standard of justice known only to God.
So in both cases, the Upper, and the Lower to borrow from F. Shaeffer, justice is set against a backdrop of the absolute.
Why should this be comforting to man? Especially a Calvinist? If justice is extracted to mean that sin must be dealt with on the basis as it affords each man his due punishment, then each sin will be held to our account. There is no qualitative difference between Adam’s sin and any sins we commit, and since we sin even after we are saved, each sin being adjudicated independently of any other, would require the sacrifice, repeatedly. But, Christ died for our sins, once. And that before either you or I were born.
That would appear to be quite unjust. It is unprecedented in human courts that another could, even before our birth, secure our innocence before any opportunity to sin ever existed for us. That is, however, exactly what Romans 9 says about the twins; that before either had done good or bad, that God’s election and calling stands.
What makes that very solid ground is that our salvation is in no way affected by our decisions. It is purely grace. We have no objections, no rights, as creatures, as the Apostle Paul declares, who is the clay that he can speak back to his maker? There are qualifications to salvation, in that unless one confesses with his mouth that Jesus Christ is Lord and believes in his heart, et cetera, but that is another discussion on regeneration, and not the justice that is of justification. And, with the case of Jacob, and his father and his father’s father, in their flesh, they were continually doubting God’s ability to save them. But, Scripture declares that in spite of the decisions of their flesh they were men of faith, and declared children of Abraham who believed God and it was credited as righteousness.
According to the laws of men, it is what men do that makes them who they are, but according to the law of God, it is what he does that make men who they are. By the grace of God, I am what I am. In both cases, it is just, for God, and God alone is just and the justifier of sinners. And, there is nothing more to it. It is not arbitrary, for God is a God of perfect purpose, and his motives, which are without question Good, are hidden from us. Yet, we know by what is done, as Jesus told Nicodemus. We cannot see it coming and we do not see where it goes, but we do know it because we hear. The sound is done to us, the ears are created for us, the understanding created in us, (Romans 10:17) all this just as a man is born, not by his will, but by the will of another. And, it is because of that, because we are born from above and not below that we have the greatest confidence. If it were from us, from our decisions, then we would be subject to our reversal of it. But, since it is a creation of God, and only God has the power of life and death, and because he has promised and cannot lie, we have our assurance not in the vain hopes of man that perhaps we will will the will of God, but, that he has willed that we will.
Let me leave you with this. Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling because it is he who is working in you both the willing, and the doing of his good pleasure (his choices). That is the rock, the solid ground, the firm foundation that cannot be removed, in that it is God who works all things after the council of his own will together for the good of those who walk not according to the law of men, which is death, but of the law of the Spirit of life in Christ who has done all things for us, so that we need not be ashamed and can come boldly into the thrown room of grace and will because it was the Father who gave us to the Son, not we. So, we are now, and for ever more, seated with him in heaven, heirs for ever.
Randomness can never exist is eternal knowledge. Randomness is chaos, and God is not its author. It is because God from all time knows everything that will come to pass that it is not random in the least. He knows those who are his, not as an observer watching random selections made by falible creatures, but intimately as his elect.