Arian Predestination

In a 1976 issue of the Scottish Journal of Theology , F. Stuart Clarke examines Athanasius’ doctrine of predestination, and ends with the comment that Athanasius would have rejected the predestination doctrines of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther and Calvin “as being, in principle, Arian, because they do not recognise the full Godhead of the Son in election, but ascribe election to what Calvin calls a ‘secret counsel’ ( arcanum consilium ) of God, a will of which Christ is the agent but not the foundation; not present, as Professor J. K. S. Reid says, when ‘God frames his purpose to elect.’  There is a parallel between this and the Arian doctrine of the person of Christ.”  He suggests that Athanasius would have seen the continuity between the Westminster doctrine of the decree and the Arian views of the person of Christ that arose in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  He doesn’t find mind to choose from in the tradition: “The Augustinian doctrine of predestination is, in principle, Arian; the Cassianite doctrine avoids Arianism only at the cost of ceasing to be a doctrine of predestination.”

Clarke’s account of the Reformed tradition is hardly fair; as Richard Muller has shown ( Christ and the Decree ), the Reformed tradition has always affirmed that election is “in Christ.”  Yet, Clarke may be right to wonder if, when the doctrine gets translated into preaching and popular teaching, that in Christ gets communicated just as strongly as the sovereignty of God’s will.  Popular Reformed theology could certainly take a cue from Athanasius, who declares that Christ the eternal Son is the “living will” of the Father, and as such His Advent is the advent of the decree, God’s choice, in human flesh.