Predestination: Trampling the Tulip

In this final blog post, I would like to conclude my extended look at a Reformed view of predestination.  There are certain aspects of it that fly in the face of much Biblical teaching.

       In classic five-point Calvinism on this subject, we find a five-fold assertion, each of which is a consistent conclusion from all the other four.  These points are summed up in the acronym “TULIP”, which stands for “Total Depravity, Unconditional election, Limited atonement, Irresistible grace, Perseverance of the saints”.  The basic assertion is that fallen man is completely helpless and utterly incapable of even beginning to begin to begin to repent or turn to God.  God therefore does it all.  (This is sometimes referred to as “monergism”.)  God therefore chose before the foundation of the world whom He will save, and irresistibly draws that person to Himself.  God doing everything, the saved sinner must inevitably persevere and cannot fall away or apostatize.  This change of sinner to saint is accomplished by the death of Christ, so that Christ died only for the elect; the atonement was limited to and offered only for those who chosen to be saved.  It is this teaching that I would like to address here.

       I suggest that the upshot of this teaching, though quite unintended by its Reformed promoters, is that God’s sovereignty replaces God’s love—or, to nuance it somewhat, that God’s love is subordinated to His sovereignty.  In its understanding of unconditional election it declares that God unconditionally (some would add “arbitrarily”) chose to save some to the praise of His grace and to damn others to the praise of His justice (thus the Westminster Confession, chapter 3).   

To be fair, they also declare that the damned are condemned justly for their sins so that they have nothing to complain of.  And they also declare that those sins were freely committed; the sinners chosen to be damned were not thereby reduced to automatons bereft of free will and rejecting Christ somehow against their will because they happened to be on the “wrong” list.  It is easy to caricature Reformed teaching and many people do.  One needs to be fair and not misrepresent what Reformed teachers actually say.  But at the end of the theological day they do say that what ultimately counts is the praise of God, so that God’s unconditioned choices about who to draw and who to harden redound to His glory.  Some are saved from the start, while others are damned from the start, irrespective of their divinely-foreseen characters.

One wants to ask:  wouldn’t His glory have been equally served if He chose to save and draw everyone?  After all, the saved still confess that they deserve to be damned, so that God’s justice could still even so be praised.  But since it is taught that God did not choose to save and draw all, but to reject and harden some (maybe the majority?), one wonders how the Biblical declaration that “God is love” in 1 John 4:8 can still stand.  If God has chosen to reject, harden, and damn large numbers of His creatures when He could’ve done otherwise, what kind of love is that? 

The question still stands, and replying from Romans 9:20, “Who are you, O man, that you answer back to God?” is not sufficient to sweep the question off the table.  First of all, as we saw in a previous blog post, Paul’s rhetorical question is not dealing with this issue, and secondly, exegetical conclusions cannot be avoided simply by telling the exegete to shut up and sit down.  If we really are called to worship God with our understanding (see Mark 12:33), a legitimate question deserves a proper answer.

The main problem with the “tulip” plant is that it contradicts so many other Biblical passages.  Indeed, to preserve the Reformed vision of God’s sovereignty, one has to twist a number of passages completely out of shape into a kind of exegetical pretzel—which is hardly sound exegesis.  If so many passages are found to be so deeply problematic to this vision, maybe it is the vision itself that is problematic.

Which passages?  Let’s look at a few.

First of all, there is 1 Timothy 2:3-4, which says that “God our Saviour…desires [Greek θέλω /thelo] all to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth”.  The word θέλω means “wish, will, desire, take pleasure in”.  In 1 Corinthians 7:7 Paul uses it to mean that he wishes that all were celibate like himself; in 1 Corinthians 14:5 he uses it to mean that he wishes that all would speak in tongues.  Obviously wishing that something was so does not mean that it will be so, for in both these passages Paul admits that not all are called to be celibate and that all do not have the gift of tongues.  But θέλω clearly indicates a wish or a desire.  Presumably then God desires that all be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth, even if some will use their free will to frustrate this divine desire.

The Reformed vision of God’s sovereignty seems to in fact deny that God desires all to be saved.  Instead, He desires many not to be saved, but rather to be damned for the praise of His justice, for (unlike Paul and situations regarding celibacy and the gift of tongues over which he had no control) God’s sovereignty means that He could do it if He wanted.  Since He did not choose to do it, He apparently didn’t want to do it.  In this vision, God does not desire all to be saved, the apostolic declaration to the contrary notwithstanding.

Or take such passages as John 1:29 which declare that Jesus is “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” or 1 Timothy 4:10, which declares that God “is the Saviour of all men, especially of believers”.  If the Reformed vision is correct, Jesus is not the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, but only the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the elect.  Jesus is therefore not “the Saviour of all men”, but only of those chosen by God to be saved.

It is the same with other passages which loudly declare that God’s amnesty is offered to all because Christ died for all.  Thus to the Romans Paul wrote that Christ’s death “resulted in justification for all men”, not just the elect, and that God had consigned all to disobedience that He might how mercy to all (Romans 5:18, 11:32).  To the Corinthians he wrote that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19).  To the Colossians he wrote that “through the blood of the Cross” God had “reconciled all things to Himself” (Colossians 2:20).

In this Reformed vision of salvation, the Biblical picture of universal embrace and cosmic cleansing is shrunk to a comparatively small cleansing of the few.  In this reduced picture, the charter verse of evangelism “God so loved the world that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life” could be revised to “God so loved the elect that those chosen by Him should not perish and everyone else is doomed”. 

The ringing and triumphant universalism of the New Testament and the historic Church is watered down significantly.  God no longer sets His sight and His heart on all the creatures He has made, but only upon the select few that He has arbitrarily chosen for salvation.  The apostolic Gospel was that Christ had died for all men, and in so doing had reconciled the world to God.  In the Reformed view, Christ had done no such thing, but had reconciled only the chosen elect.  I leave the reader to decide which view is the more consistent with grace and the eternal love of God.