Theological Journal - May 6: Why God Is Not in Control - And It's a Good Thing Too! (7)

 

Here are my Five Rules for Understanding Predestination/Election/Providence.[1]

1.       Just because we cannot imagine or figure out how something could be doesn’t mean God can’t do it that way.

-“God’s thoughts are not our thoughts and his ways are not ours” (Isa.55:8). That we creatures should expect to know or feel we have a right to know how the Creator organizes and administers his world is an act of hubris on our part. 

-“The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the revealed things belong to us and to our children forever, to observe all the words of this law” (Dt.29:29). What we need to know to live faithfully to God is made known to us in scripture. But every detail of how God runs the world and directs history are things we do not need to know and, indeed, probably cannot understand.

What God does and how he does can only be partially known by us. As creatures we operate on a need to know basis and what we need to follow God he has told us in scripture.

2.       Notions of pre-scripted scenarios of unalterable decisions and destinies is a pagan notion called “fate” not a biblical one.

-Fate is often misunderstood as predestination but it is completely different. It is a Greek philosophical idea, not a biblical, Christian one. 

-Fate robs both the deity, the creature, and history of freedom, creativity, and spontaneity beyond the initial act of the deity planning and kicking the whole thing off. After that things unfold as they have been programmed to.

3.       A “God” so uncreative and uninvolved that he must “stack the deck” by determining everything in advance is hardly worthy of the name.

-Most of us long for a greater power with whom we may have a real relationship and feel as though we are part of something larger and more significant than ourselves to which we contribute and make a difference. Just playing a scripted role in someone else’s story does not suffice. If our God cannot have such relationships that God is not worth the time. 

4.       The “pre” in predestination is the most radical way we have to say “grace.”

-God’s gracious initiative to be for us and act to save us before and in spite of our unwillingness to turn to him rather than some metaphysical determinism is behind the scripture’s strong affirmation of predestination and election.

-this is why Karl Barth can declare the election is “the sum of the gospel”!

5.       Any view of this prior gracious determining action of God that diminishes or denies the necessity, freedom, or responsibility of human action is not biblical. 

-This prior gracious action of God is the basis, impetus, and motivation for human action, even costly human action in the Bible. Because God has or will win the battle before we fight, therefore we fight!

The upshot of all this: when the Bible insists on both God’s undisputed sovereign control of all things and free and responsible human action it affirms the asymmetrical yet non-determinative relation of the two. To wit, God hardens Pharaoh’s heart and Pharoah hardens his own heart and, thus, God’s will is done. Remember #1 above!

Reformed theologian Donald Bloesch gets it right: “God rules . . . by working in, through and sometimes over and against human decisions to bring about a world in keeping with his purposes . . . the mysterious working out of God’s purposes in human history in conjunction with and through human actions, both good and evil.”[2]

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[1] Though different, each of these realities is enacted prior to human action.

[2] Bloesch, 2005, 257