In high Calvinism God predestines the elect to salvation and the non-elect to damnation. Some Calvinists do not believe in double predestination; instead they believe in “single” predestination. Roger Olson, however, argues (along with many Calvinists) that single predestination necessarily entails double predestination. Then Olson probes into the doctrine to say it makes a mockery of God’s love and goodness, and offers instead an Arminian approach to election. So, he argues “Yes to election; No to double predestination.”
Calvinism’s commitment to its form of election creates theological and logical problems for Calvinism. Do you think double predestination ultimately shakes confidence in God’s love and goodness?
As you may know, we are this series on Roger Olson’s Against Calvinism and Michael Horton’s For Calvinism. One of the most admirable characteristics of Roger Olson is his candor about what he thinks and what he thinks of others, seen for instance in his recent criticisms of JI Packer’s understanding of Arminianism. When Arminians criticize like this it is seen as arrogance or a lack of charity while when Calvinist theologians go after Arminians it is perceived as commitment to the truth and a willingness to defend the hard doctrines (of grace). Baloney on that one. Olson is simply being a good, sharp-minded theologian and is always open to discussion — and his recent public debates with Michael Horton, who like Olson is charitable and civil even when they disagree firmly and say strong things, are a good sign of this commitment to public civility. I digress.
Olson’s chp on election is admirably clear about what Calvinists believe and at the same time firm in disagreement. Olson is against double predestination for individuals; he is for “conditional election” for individuals. He is firmly against “unconditional individual election’s inevitable correlate — reprobation” (104), and he sees it contrary to God’s love.
Calvin believes in double predestination; so does Boettner, Edwin Palmer (“choosing implies leaving others unchosen”) and Palmer throws up his hands at times when it comes to the logicality of this viewpoint. Sproul believes in double predestination (though he sees one as positive, the other as negative; active vs. passive, etc.). And James Daane argued that it was double or nothing when it comes to predestination of individuals.
Olson: this makes God morally ambiguous or worse, even monstrous.
The standard Calvinist response to criticisms is now called divine command theory, or that whatever God does is good and it is not ours to question it. This was seen recently in both Francis Chan and Mark Galli’s response to those who want to probe into the theodicy question of the morality of eternal punishment. Calvinists have often pushed back this way, and Olson argues this shows they believe their view of God is God as God is, while he wants to argue that their view (not God) is wrong. Another point made is that Calvinists, like Boettner and Piper, often contend doctrines like these ultimately glorify God even if we cannot comprehend how or why. Olson contends such ideas often turn God into being arbitrary.
The issue here is how to square belief in God’s love and double predestination. Pushing back by saying we aren’t to question simply doesn’t do it. This is why some today see God’s love at several levels (Piper, Carson) or say God has two wills.
Olson argues there are strong Calvinists theologians who have completely contested double predestination, including G.C. Berkouwer and James Daane. Then he sketches the powerful responses of John Wesley to Calvinism, where you will hear ideas very similar to what we have heard from Olson in many contexts (mainly, this stuff cannot be squared with a God of love without diminishing God’s love, which is exactly what is often seen in some Calvinists).
The alternative? Election is corporate (those in Christ, who believe in Christ, are elect because Christ is the Elect One). Arminians, too, believe in the priority of grace in prevenient grace, in spite of what its critics often repeat. And with Jack Cottrell, Roger agrees God made a world in which God acts with self-limitation because God values the freedom of those whom God has created.
Olson speaks a lot of sense! The high Calvanism has a cold beauty in its logic, but it has no heart – unlike the God it claims to define.
The closer I get to this debate the more I am convinced that underneath it is the ongoing issue of realism vs. nominalism. Luther was a nominalist, a strong and growing movement of his time. Nominalists believe that attributes like love, goodness, beauty, etc. are not real existences. They are only names we give those attributes, hence nominalism. When applied to God categories like the good, the true and the beautiful are not real in and of themselves, as if for God to be those things he has to meet a standard outside of himself. This would seem to make God less than God since he is subject to a measure and it would seem to make God less free since he is constrained by that measure. Luther’s response? He glories in the God who simply is apart from categories that do not arise from his own being. What this can lead to is an arbitrary God, who no matter what he does is always glorious. Therefore, God can be exalted for what on the face of it would normally be considered horrendous evil – i.e., damning people you could save. So we can end up with the strange configuration of being willing to go to hell for the glory of God as a sign of true salvation. To which I respond, huh? In fact, the more arbitrary God seems to be, the more glorious he is. And in some of the Reformed circles I have been exposed to, moral categories for God can seem unstable. And in such a case arguing as Olson does seems to diminish God’s glory. This is always the Reformed response. Olson is simply pleading for the existence of real moral categories. If these are thrown out, there is nothing left to discuss anymore and moral debate becomes senseless. So, to sum it up, I am not so sure that the debate is primarily about free will in man. It might be more about free will in God. I think pursuing the debate along these lines would be more fruitful. I am hoping that Olson presses this trajectory a bit more.
“Do you think double predestination ultimately shakes confidence in God’s love and goodness?”
Yes!!!
Don,
“I am not so sure that the debate is primarily about free will in man. It might be more about free will in God.”
I’ve never heard anybody frame the debate that way.
That sheds some light on why it seems Calvinists hear any other perspective as diminishing God’s glory…interesting.
Don, i think you are right. Moltmann contrasts God’s freedom thought of as absolute power of disposal (metaphor of a property owner) with freedom in relationship. It is the difference between God as Monarch (which Calvin was all about) and God as the Father of the crucified Son. Neither God’s freedom nor ours is a libertarian freedom between options, but a quality of relationship. There is a sense in which God is not free; he “cannot deny himself”. But this is because God loves with the love which he himself is, not by obeying some external standard.
This seems like a never ending Christendom debate even as Christendom itself IS ending! Both “sides” assume that calling, predestination, being chosen is all about our destiny in the afterlife. This seems less than biblical to me. Calling and chosen-ness seem to be about mission. In other words, Israel was chosen FOR THE SAKE OF OTHERS. . . “all the nations”. They were chosen not to go to heaven, but to take light to the Gentiles. And so us as well. I believe the whole debate is not nearly grounded enough in 1) understanding “chosen” biblically and 2) getting rid of our afterlife fixation and getting fixated on this life, as the Scriptures and Jesus seem to be.
Scot,
Great post and excellent explanation and evaluation of Roger Olson’s content and approach to the subject matter.
Thank you.
A couple years ago my youngest son had a problem on the go kart. He told me that the front wheels were stuck and would not go. I went down, examined the front wheels and they looked fine to me. So I started and tried to go, only to find out that there was a problem with the drive (it is rear wheel drive). He was being perfectly logical, from where he was sitting it looked like the front wheels were not able to move, and he was right, but he was missing the big picture.
The Calvinism seems to be this way to me. They string together a bunch of true statements but come away with an answer that does not make sense. In any quantitative discipline the most important thing you can do is check to see that the answer you have reached makes sense. Calvinism seems to fail in this regard.
I think the root of the problem is that lack of recognition that the words used to communicate are, at best, a model of the reality that they represent. If that idea is kept in mind it leads to a humility that forces one to recognize that they may not be able to represent the actual thing wholly and this forces a checking of the adequacy of the answer. It makes checking the answer even more important.
don bryant#2 seems to be saying this too in the first part of his response.
I, too, am drawn into thinking more about this from Don Bryant’s perspective. The idea that we’re really debating free will in God – which also brings us back to our old tendency to be anthropomorphic whenever we’re discussing the nature of God.
BTW, in reading part of Piper’s book on justification this morning he repeated was calling NT Wright’s view unreflective. He repeated says that his Calvinism is much more intellectually rigorous than unreflective Tom Wright. Really, he says that.
Good article, but I disagree with Olson and many Calvinists that states single predestination necessitates double predestination, if we are defining predestination according to many modern day calvinsts such as Piper. From my understanfing, the hyper-calvinists believe in “total depravity” yet at the same time believe that God has to pre-determine the path of both as if man was a blank slate (these two ideas cancel out each other), so If man was born in a neutral state, then yes, I would agree. But man, of his own volition is in opposition to God. If, and I stress, “if” predestination simply means to “pre-determine”. Then God is not taking a neutral (blank slate) man and pre-determining his path to destruction. Rather, God is honoring the self-volition of some, and choosing to rescue others from their blinded/broken volition.
So, while God is pre-determining who not to save, he is NOT pre-determining the path they choose, he is simply pre-determining the path of the ‘elect’ while leaving some to the consequences of their own will. So, if that is double-predestination, okay, but that is not the understanding I get from many modern Calvinists of their idea of “double-predestination”
#6 Dru – I’m with you! This Arminian vs. Calvinism debate used to be fascinating to me, but now I realize its rooted in the eternal destination fixation. Jesus was Immanuel, God with us, here and now.
“Election is corporate (those in Christ, who believe in Christ, are elect because Christ is the Elect One)”
wow!! Never heard it framed quite that way before. Awesome!
I think the big problem here is that Calvinism and Arminianism both attempt to explain something that happens in eternity. I think by definition we, in our time-bound, non-eternal state, cannot grasp these truths because our perspective is limited.
I love the analogy a friend of mine gave–imagine some Martians came to earth on a singular quest: to discover what a “watermelon” is. They land in Indiana (good place for that particular quest), and the first person they encounter is a farmer. They ask him, “What is a watermelon?” The farmer replies, “Oh, it’s part of my crop. It comes from a seed and grows on a vine. It’s oval-shaped, hard, and is a splotchy kind of green color. Here–I’ll draw you a picture.” And the farmer draws a picture of an oval, green watermelon sitting in a field. The Martians thank him and continue down the road.
The next person they run into is a child playing in her front yard. So they ask the child–”What is a watermelon?” And she replies, “Watermelon is a treat! It comes from the store and mom gives it to me after school. It’s triangle-shaped, squishy with dark seeds in it, and a beautiful shade of pink. Here–I’ll draw you a picture.” And the child draws a picture of a pink wedge of watermelon with seeds sitting on a plate. The Martians thank her and return to their spaceship.
On their way home, they ponder the two drawings they have in front of them. “How can both of these be watermelon?” they wonder. And they will never know completely because they don’t have the proper perspective. So it is with us when we try to ponder God’s election and our free will, and how both play into salvation. Without an eternal perspective, all of our musings will ultimately fall short.
I choose to accept the mystery and do what the Bible says–tell others of Jesus’ love for them and let God figure out the rest.
“Roger agrees God made a world in which God acts with self-limitation because God values the freedom of those whom God has created.” Does anyone know where the idea (God’s self-limitation) and the reason for it (God values freedom) can be found in the Bible?
“But man, of his own volition is in opposition to God.”
Did I choose to be born in opposition to God? Or did God choose to have me born that way?
#6, #12:
Exactly! The conversation between Calvinists and Arminians occurs within (to borrow Scot’s term) a Soterian framework.
The beauty of Scot’s “King Jesus” framework is that these kind of problems mostly just go away!
I agree that corporate election is something to deeply consider. Olson’s work in the Theology of the Community of God (and other volumes) and the work of William Klein both give strong evidence to viewing Christianity at its core as communal and corporate, and centered on Jesus Christ. Election is really no exception, especially considering that the vast majority of election texts are plural in nature.
Matthew: I agree with Fish’s question: how is it that human beings come to have their wills turned against God? Traditionally, in the Calvinist scheme, this is has something to do with Adam and Eve, but then, how did Adam’s or Eve’s will end up turned against God?
Did Adam/Eve decide on his/her own? Then there is at least one instance of God not being meticulously providential.
Or was Adam’s/Eve’s decision caused by God? Then God is the author of evil.
So yes, appealing to “original sin” may lessen the current problem, but all it really does is move the whole discussion to the start of original sin, at which point all the same issues come into play.
Good thoughts though.
@Peter G,
Off the top of my head, Phil 2 talks about Christ voluntarily assuming human form. That seems to be the most clear point of where God has voluntarily been self limiting. Another place is Jesus talking about not knowing the time of of the second coming. Christ is God and as God it would seem God would have access to something that God the Father knows unless God the Son has chosen to self limit himself or another purpose.
I know that some will say that God the Father cannot be self limited even if God the Son is, but in my mind unless we discount the concept of the trinity being one, then if one part of the trinity is demonstratively been self limiting, then I think it is difficult to argue that the other two members of the trinity cannot by definition be self limiting.
Hi Adam (#20),
The trouble I have is that the self-limiting of the Son was part and parcel of the mystery of the incarnation. It’s difficult for me to see how, apart from the incarnation, there would be self-limiting by God.
@Bill Crawford,
But isn’t that the point? The Son was self limited because it was part of the plan of God. And any other self limitation would also be part of the plan of God. I am not suggesting that God is limited because of some objective outside force, but because God has self limited himself because of his own purposes. To argue it is not possible for God to self limit would be to argue against the possibility of Christ being fully God. I will not suppose that I understand it, but it just doesn’t seem reasonable to argue that God cannot be self limited as a definition of God, which is what several of the Calvinist theologians seem to be arguing.
Honestly, I think the single vs. double predestination debate isn’t a very useful debate. As many have pointed out, in practice they mean the same thing. I believe that God chooses to save the elect and passively allows the non-elect to go unsaved, so call that what you like.
Contra what a lot of others are saying here, the issue is NOT whether or not God is a moral monster. We all deserve damnation due to our sinfulness. God would be perfectly moral and just to damn us all. Rather, the issue is how do we reconcile God’s revealed will that He desires all people to be saved with the fact that He chooses not to save all people? Right now, I’m convicted that Scripture teaches these two facts, but try as I might I can’t figure out an answer to that question.
Stephen, I like the humility of your comment, but I don’t understand your premise. There is a difference between us deserving damnation and God actually condemning us.
You suggest that God would be perfectly moral and just to condemn us. I agree with the second (just) but I would fiercely disagree with the first (moral). God’s moral goodness is not reducible to his justice. There is his generousity, his graciousness, his slowness to anger…ect. What non-Calvinists object to is the idea that God COULD have saved some (i.e., there is no reason Christ’s death could not have been applied to them) but chose deliberately not to. Although this would not seem to violate God’s justice, it certainly seems to cast doubt on a bunch of other perfectly “moral” attributes of God.
I appreciate your comment, because I think it illuminates a big difference between Calvinists and others. I wonder if other Calvinists would also prefer to reduce God’s moral nature into God’s justice? It does seem like that’s a necessary move in order for this argument to work.
What do you all think of this quote? Any guess as to who said this? I must say that I can’t find anything here to disagree with and I’m not sure how to handle that…
“A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man’s nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code. Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a ‘tendency’ to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free”
@Andy W,
according to google the quote is from Ayn Rand. So what is your point?
Adam #26,
An agnostic friend of mine sent me this quote and I can’t say I find anything to disagree with about its logic. I find it quite devastating to both the Calvinist and Arminian positions regarding free will and God’s sovereignty. I know next to nothing of Ayn Rand and have not read any of her works. I was wondering what the smart folks at the Jesus Creed thought about it. What do you think about it?
@Andy, I have two basic issues with that quote. One, my understanding is that Rand doesn’t really believe in sin (at least by a Christian definition). I may be wrong about that, but if that is true, then I don’t know what he really means.
But beyond that, she is playing with a level of determinism on both sides. On the one hand (the election/Calvinist side) she is making people into automatons and no Calvinist would say we are automatons. I think she has a point, and that is one of my issues with Calvinism.
On the bottom of the quote she is still understanding tendency to mean a level of determinism that most Arminians would disagree with. Because someone has a tendency toward sin does not mean that they will sin. All it means is that they have a tendency. There seems to be a biological factor in alcoholism, but the presence of those genes does not make a person an alcoholic, it just makes them more likely to be an alcoholic.
My reading of scripture is that there is actual value in the struggle against sin, value that we receive spiritually when we overcome. So I think that her assumption on the end of the quote is just wrong.
But in the end it is basically the problem of evil (why are some born with birth defects and others not, or some born poor and others not.) We don’t really have a solution to the problem of evil that everyone agrees on.
So
It is not devastating to the Calvinist and Arminian positions, because it ignores grace. And, it ignores the imago dei. It is, therefore, a misunderstanding of total depravity and free will.
Interesting to see how this issue commonly focuses upon either a Calvinistic or Arminian approach, but as Don touches upon (in comment 2), there has to be a richer manner to approach this, and Luther’s thoughts here certainly seem to be much more in the right ball park. It’s also been interesting reading Robert Farrar Capon on this recently, particularly regarding the chapters in Romans on Election – whilst I’m not sure I agree with his conclusions, it certainly made me re-consider the way I approach and unpack such materials. What is clear is that what may be defined as the ‘standard’ views here certainly need to be questioned.
Adam, good points…thanks. Regarding tendency…besides JC, have you met or heard of another human that has not sinned? It’s a tendency we all fail at! It’s not the same thing as a tendency toward Alcoholism. Agree?
Jason, I agree with you about grace and the imago dei but quite honestly your response writes this off way to easily without actually engaging it. To an agnostic these concepts are smoke and mirrors, while the logic of that quote seems clear.
@Andy W,
No I think you are missing the analogy. Whether you or not you have sinned (and I am agreeing all have sinned), we all have a number of factors that influence our sin tendency. In the alcoholic issue, some that have genetic tendency toward alcoholism actually become alcoholics. Some of those that become alcoholics are then able to become clean. If we followed Ayn Rand’s understanding then those that have a tendency toward alcoholism are locked into their tendency and how would they get out. We that people become clean (no matter how hard it is or how many that actually are able to) so my point is that it is the fight that matters. Rand wants to suggest that tendency is determinism. I want to say, tendency mixed with grace is not available to Rand’s way of thinking.
@Adam,
tendency mixed with grace is not available to Rand’s way of thinking. That makes sense.
I think one of the main problems with Rand’s analysis is that it insists on a very radical notion of libertarian free will that almost no one is talking about, Calvinist or Arminian or even most non-Christians. She is basically saying that morality is impossible if human beings are influenced or have a “tendency” towards anything. But this is way overblown. I would agree morality is impossible if everything is COMPLETELY determined, but to say that we need to be free of influences of any kind simply flies in the face of everyday experience.
Or consider Rand’s moral frame: that of rational self-interest. If it can be shown that human beings have a tendency to sometimes act in pro-social ways that disadvantage the individual (and it can), than “sin” in Rand’s system is influenced by our human nature as well. Unfortunately for Rand, and fortunately for the rest of us, we have a “tendency” to sometimes act against our self-interest. So even in her moral system, people’s tendencies lead them to make immoral decisions.
Does she excuse this pro-social behavior because it is influenced by biology? No, she seems pretty dogmatically opposed to it in her books.
First, a quick comment. Dru, how can anyone take seriously someone who thinks Christendom is ending? I only hear this from people that a part of very dreary, boring, dead churches. We see growth all around us, though nothing like the wildfire in China, Africa, and many other places.
To the topic at hand, I still can’t understand how Arminians actually think their position is any less morally challenging to human thinking, with a God who, knowing billions will not choose him, creates them anyway, in bodies destined for death and lives that He knows will live in eternal punishment away from His presence. Amazes me.
Lastly, what is the best thorough exegesis of Romans 9 you know of, from an Arminian position? I haven’t read a responsible one.
Dru, a follow-up to a harsh sounding question….I believe the church in America is in desperate need of revival. It is not something complicated. Idols abound. Jesus is a category of people’s lives, not the center. I love the heart of what God has done in places like Willow, Northpoint, and Saddleback. But the issue is not method. And it is not about theology, except for those who drift from the absolute authority and infallibility of Scripture. So in that sense I believe a lot of Christendom needs to die. Couple that with the fact that probably half the churches in America are led by men who have never been born again, and you have your explanation for any legitimate criticism. Just sayin’
Scott, if I understand your “harsh sounding question”, we may be using “Christendom” in two different ways. I’m way optimistic on the future of Christian faith and the church. I use Christendom to mean the combination of church and culture that reigned for hundreds of years in Europe and the U.S. Where we all just assumed that we are all somehow “christians” by virtue of being born in the West. And we Christians got used to a power position in the culture.
That arrangement is gone in Europe and is going, going, gone in the U.S. And a lot evangleicals are having withdrawal pains . . .
And I’d suggest this is crucial to the issue at hand, as Reformation theology, both the Calvinist and Arminian kind, arose in a static, Christendom worldview. The whole debate was framed in assumptions that made sense in medieval Christendom/Europe. That’s not to throw them under the bus, none of us have any choice but to do theology-in-our-culture. That’s what they did. That’s what we need to do, and not just keep rehashing their work.
@ Don
The nominalism (voluntarism) vs. realism debate has been brought up on Olson’s blog. He has cited C.S. Lewis as one of the clearest voices for ‘realism’ and Luther as a strong voice for ‘nominalism.’
I affirm the realism approach but believe it needs to be kept in check. The ‘God is love’ phrase, though scriptural, can become a mantra for taking a warped-worldly view of love and projecting it onto God.
A Biblical definition of love needs to be established a priori for the realism approach to have any kind of evangelical merit.
I believe that Olson’s approach and Lewis’ approach to realism do have evangelical merit. I am less convinced that Rob Bell’s view have that same kind of merit. I am nearly finished reading his book ‘Love Wins’ and it is coming across that his theological/philosophical underpinnings are all over the place.
Matt: Good thoughts.
I think the very act of ascribing attributes to God points very strongly in a realist direction. For example, if biblical love is so truly different from the “warped-worldly view of love” than wouldn’t it have been better for the biblical writers to have invented totally new terms?
For example, the distinction could be much better maintained if the Biblical writers said that God is “blart” and went on to describe what that means. “Blart”, might have said, means that God will do XYZ in these situations and ABC in these.
So I think the biblical writers made it impossible for us to arrive at an “a priori” biblical definition of love, or even justice, for that matter, because they deliberately entangled God’s attributes into existing categories (at least in Hebrew and Greek categories).
I think there is certainly a tension that needs to be maintained, so that there is always room for God to tutor us in what love, justice, ect. really means, but as Lewis points out, we should never be suspicious that we will come upon something completely different.
I think Don (#2) is spot-on re: nominalism vs. realism. High Calvinism is nominalist; so are Chan and Galli’s contemporary evangelical efforts, IMHO.
Any meaningful attempt to address human freedom and moral accountability, election, and Divine sovereignty — all clearly scriptural themes — must start with the truth that God’s love and justice as substantive and real, and not just arbitrarily commanded. Elsewhere ultimately lies blasphemy and heresy, IMHO.
But a related question is whether God’s justice is knowable or inscrutable. Even if substantively real, it may be that we humans simply cannot comprehend God’s justice. There is a very strong Biblical thread in support of the ultimate inscrutability of God’s justice: it is a major theme in the theodicies of Job and of Romans 1-11.
BUT, there also is a very strong theme in support of the disclosure and knowability of God’s justice (at least in part): indeed, a proof text often mistakenly used by Calvinists to argue inscrutability, “should not the judge of all the Earth do what is right” (Gen. 18:25), actually demonstrates precisely the opposite. In that narrative, Abraham holds God to account, and God responds!
It seems to me that throughout scripture there is an ongoing argument between humans and God about justice. There is a dialectic in that justice can substantively both be known and and yet cannot be known by us humans.
All of this ultimately points us to where it eventually pointed St. Paul, John the Evangelist, and John the Seer of the Apocalypse, who eloquently address God’s love and justice in the New Testament scriptures: to the incarnation, cross and resurrection of Christ.
In the incarnation, cross and resurrection of Christ, everything about the true substance of God’s love, justice, and mercy is revealed. At the manger, at the foot of the cross, and at the mouth of the empty tomb, we know in fact and in experience what God’s love, justice and mercy are.
And so I’d agree with Olson, channeling Barth, that the focus of election must be Christ and the corporate election of humanity in Christ. And in the euangellion of incarnation, cross and resurrection we can know that real love and justice do not countenance the grim logic of High Calvinism.
@Tom F: Thanks for the appreciation. You raise some good points. I guess I tend to equate “morality” with “justice”, as I don’t really see morality as a distinct category in the Bible. The closest we get is “righteousness”, and in both the Old and New Testaments that’s a translation of the same word as “justice.” So for me saying God is “in the right” or “just” or “morally justified” in condemning all of humanity, it’s all the same thing.
I see God’s grace as something that transcends His justice/righteousness. As as the great theologian Bono once elegantly put it, “Grace travels outside of karma.” The grace God has shown us in Jesus in astonishing, tremendous, and beyond what our human minds can really comprehend. We can understand justice, but grace is a sheer, beautiful mystery.
Even apart from the doctrine of Election, there MUST be such a thing as Double Predestination if God actually knows what is going to happen in the future! Because, if God knows that person A will go to heaven a thousand years from now, and person B will not, tell me, is there any chance that person B will end up in heaven? NO! Thus both are predestined. The only alternative is to claim that God does not know the future, but if you do that you are an open theist
Stephen (#41) — I’m not sure you want to say that God’s grace “transcends” His justice. That would set up a conflict in God’s own nature or being. Whatever God is, He is all at once, without any tension, conflict, or contradiction. This is what Christian theology classically meant by God’s “simplicity.”
God’s grace neither transcends nor overrides nor contradicts His justice. He is, all at once, loving, gracious, just, beautiful, benevolent, good and true. And this important classical doctrine of God’s simplicity is another reason why any nominalist account of God’s justice must fail. If God can simply command anything and call it “just,” then all of God’s being is collapsed into raw power. If God can deny justice and simply call it “grace,” then again God’s being is collapsed into raw power. This is also why the incarnation / cross / resurrection is central: it is the tangible expression and revelation of all God’s perfections.
I am an exitentialist [Mainline] Lutheran. This Double-Predestination idea always dumbfounds me. If God is “soveriegn” and is all of the “omnis [per Berkhoff, Kyper and all the Calvinist dogmaticians],” then he has necessarily created people to be “damned.” They had no other choice, otherwise Free Will “trumps” God’s election,this is closer to the Arminian position. If God is the one who does Double Predestination, then it would be like God creating a monkey, placing him or her in a banana forest. As God is commanding the monkey not to eat the fruits, God hardens the monkey’s heart to ignore the prophets. God then damns the monkey to Hell because the monkey is doing what God created the monkey to do what monkey’s do…eat bananas! This makes no sense to me.