Seven FAQ's about Christian Faith (and Seven More for Good Luck) 03
Ch.3:
Is God in Control? Why Predestination Does Not Have to be Depress-tination
What
Do You Mean By “Control”?
Is God
in control of the direction and actions of history? Yes? No? Maybe? It all
depends on what you mean by control.
-if you mean total control via a pre-scripted invariant plan
drawn up by God before history began, No.
-if you mean that God is directing history to a
preordained end through the real and responsible actions of creatures he has
enabled to make their own actions and decisions, Yes.
The
first is not love. Love creates new possibilities, growth, and futures. God’s love
is both the expansive power of our growth toward new futures and that new
future itself which brings each of us individually and as a whole to the fulness
that is in Christ. Thus, the second option seems preferable. God establishes a
good end for his creation and creatures and journeys with them in real
relationships (in all their ups and downs) trusting his love to bring all
things to that good end.
Because
it’s love no causal or mechanical models will help us understand it. Love means
relationship and relationship works on a different logic (if that is the right
word) altogether.
“Here is God’s covenant with Abraham that
is unconditional and unilateral.
Here is God’s covenant with Moses and Israel that is bilateral and conditional. They are
there together, and that interface of contradiction may offer us the most work
to do but also the most honest disclosure of the truth of our life. The full
tradition asserts that all of our relationships, including that with the Holy
One, are an unsettled mix of unilateral
and bilateral, of conditional
and unconditional.”[1]
Just the
brew we find pictured in the Bible’s portrayal between God and humanity. God’s
full unilateral control and power over all his creation is everywhere asserted.
Yet human beings must respond and act properly for God’s creation to be what
God wants it to be. Somehow, these two realities, both ordained by God,
interact in sometimes surprising and volatile ways, all the time working out
and leading us to God’s settled end for us. Nothing is prescribed for us in a
way that renders us automatons or puppets.
The story of
the “hardening of Pharaoh’s heart” in Exodus is instructive here. If we read
the story carefully we learn that both God and Pharaoh are agents who harden
Pharaoh’s heart, neither alone. God acts sovereignly, Pharaoh acts freely. God’s
declared intention to harden Pharaoh’s heart is achieved yet without bypassing
the responsibility and response-ability of Pharaoh. An incalculable quality
attends relationships. And it’s that quality that keeps us from “smoothing out”
it’s logic in intellectual terms. That is, neither determinism nor free will is
appropriate to the reality it seeks to explain. Intellectually, there’s “white
space” between the two realities scripture requires us to hold together.
Instead of filling it in with explanations which distort, we best leave it
blank and persist in affirming both parts of what scripture affirms. And allow
the mystery of how that happens to remain the prerogative of God.
Predestination/Election/Providence
Predestination/Election/Providence
(PEP) are not synonymous terms but do converge in that each of them deal with
the relation of divine action and human action. Election is the primary
term biblically but predestination is what most people usually call this
issue. I call it PEP here.
And
I claim there is no reason why we should consider it depress-tination or be
frightened at it.
Three observations about the
relation of divine and human action. First, PEP is not fatalism (a pagan
Greek doctrine often confused with it). PEP has nothing to do with a
pre-scripted history that unfolds as foretold and cannot be changed. Rid
your minds of this notion if you hope to understand PEP.
Second, God’s thoughts and
ways are not our thoughts and ways: Just because we cannot imagine how
God’s sovereignty and human freedom can both be real without one canceling out
or overriding the other does not mean God cannot manage it!
Third, the relation of divine and human action in PEP is
asymmetrical. Divine action is prior and primary, human action
responsive to divine action.
My five rules for understanding PEP are
these:
1.
PEP is the most radical way we have to say “grace.”
From creation to consummation and at every
step in between the Bible affirms and proclaims that God acts first in gracious,
creative and generative ways towards us.
2. PEP is the most radical way we have to say “love.”
God is for us. From all eternity God has determined to
be for us, not against us. What God is himself – an eternal communion of
love given and returned between the Father and the Son in the Spirit – he is
toward us.
3.
PEP means “victory/justice.”
God will prevail. Somehow and in some
way God will take this tale which so often seems “told by idiot, full of sound
and fury signifying nothing” (Shakespeare, Macbeth) and
bring it a fitting and flourishing end. All things will be set right,
judgment (however we envision it) will be executed, and shalom will reign
throughout the ages of ages.
4. PEP means “gratitude.”
Our lives are gifts, received with
gratitude and lived with thanksgiving and generosity. The primal human
response to God is to say “thanks” (instead of the “You’re not the boss of me” our
first parents offered their creator).
5.
PEP means the “courage to live by the cross.”
All of this means that when
the rubber hits the road we can and will “take up our cross” and follow Jesus
wherever he goes and whatever he asks us to do.
Karl Barth calls the
doctrine of election “the sum of the gospel,” the best of all words that can be
said or heard! As such it ought to inform and undergird all we are and
do. I hope some of my observations and rules help us recover the substance
and vitality of this often wrongly maligned central truth of the Bible.
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