Freedestination

“Most of what I am, I get from my genes, right? Which is you. And the rest of what I am, I get from my environment. Which is you. So, whichever way you look at it, everything I do is down to you … including all the naughty bits.”

Outnumbered S3 E6, ‘The Hospital’ (2010)

Many thanks to the Christian Memes Facebook page for this wonderful creation. Do take a look at their other offerings; you will not be disappointed: https://www.facebook.com/MemesForJesus/?fref=ts

Yes, that’s right. Predestination versus free will. That’s where we’re going today. Buckle your seatbelts and hold on tight, folks.¹

The ever-raging debate goes something like this. One possibility is that God, having sovereign power over everything, decides in advance (pre-destines, see?) whether or not any given individual will come to know and love the Lord Jesus. A second possibility is that God allows each individual a free choice about whether or not he or she wants to come to know and love the Lord Jesus. The first point of view is often termed ‘Calvinism’, after the early-sixteenth-century French Protestant Reformer John Calvin. The latter one is often termed ‘Arminianism’, after the late-sixteenth-century Dutch Protestant Reformer Jacobus Arminius. This is, of course, a gross and highly problematic oversimplification, but if you really have a desperate urge to know the minutiae, then the theology section of your nearest decent library is almost certainly a better source of information than that great encylopædia informally known as My Brain.²

The trouble is that both points of view have a lot of rather good evidence behind them. Shall we allow each side three witnesses?³ In favour of predestination:

“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.” John 6:44

“For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.” Romans 8:29-30

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.” Ephesians 1:3-6

And now in favour of free will:

“I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live.” Deuteronomy 30:19

“Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” 2 Corinthians 9:7

“This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Saviour, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” 1 Timothy 2:3-4

But each line of argument raises problems as well. If predestination is a thing, does that mean God predestines some people to face eternity without him? Why doesn’t God just cause everybody to accept Jesus as Lord and Saviour? In fact, scratch that, why is the world so completely messed up that there was ever a need for Jesus’ sacrifice? Was human sin – the cause behind everything that’s distressing and painful and wrong – all part of God’s grand plan from the beginning? In which case, what kind of sadist does that make God? And how unjust does that make him, to blame us for our sins when we never had any choice in the matter? On top of that, what exactly is the point of telling people about Jesus if every human being’s eternal fate is already set in stone?

Opting for the free-will argument would seem to solve these kinds of problems, which, I hazard, is probably why that argument pops up so frequently in the field of Christian apologetics. As well as dodging the whole God-is-a-sadist accusation, it spares one the rather depressing duty of having to tell one’s opponent that he is in fact incapable, of his own volition, of changing his mind. But, as YouTuber Kevin McCreary notes in his hilarious and accurate review⁴ of God’s Not Dead (a film which provides a quite stunning example of preaching to the converted, although, being one of the converted, I rather enjoyed it), free will perhaps isn’t the best concept to use as a major support of an argument in favour of Christianity, when many Christians aren’t too convinced by the idea themselves.

The thing is, the free-will argument presents its own set of problems. If we have free will, can God really be sovereign? If the introduction of sin into the world was never part of God’s plan, does that mean we are able to use our free will to disrupt God’s plans? Who’s to say we won’t disrupt them further in future? Plus, if we choose salvation for ourselves, does that allow us to take some of the credit for it? And does that mean that some of the responsibility is ours, in a kind of back-door version of salvation by works?

In short, the predestination argument robs God of his justice and his love; the free-will argument robs him of his power and his grace. Yet both are clearly attested in scripture. And that’s the only possible solution: both are true.

It might seem nonsensical, but think about it: a pretty sizeable proportion of Christian doctrine consists of apparently incompatible truths. Is Jesus human or divine? Both. Did Paul write the Epistle to the Romans, or did God? Both. Is God Father, Son, or Holy Spirit? All three. We really ought to be used to having to hold these kinds of opposing strands together.

To borrow a metaphor from Krish Kandiah,⁵ it’s a lot like the nature of light. Not without reason did I drop Physics after AS-level, but, as I understand it, it’s possible to do one set of experiments and prove that light has all the properties associated with a particle, then to do a different set of experiments and prove that it also has all the properties associated with a wave. So, after a few moments of head-scratching, scientists came to the only logical conclusion, that light is both a wave and a particle, even though such a thing doesn’t really seem to make a lot of sense, and everybody moved on with their lives.

Give it some more thought. You would never say that you follow Jesus against your will, and yet you would also never claim the credit for making the choice. You recognise that you owe your salvation entirely to God, and yet you remember personally making the decisions that led you to that salvation. You only repented and believed because you wanted to, and yet you know that you only repented and believed because God wanted you to.

The evidence allows neither predestination nor free will to be discarded. And if that’s mind-boggling, then good – God wouldn’t be all that impressive if he weren’t capable of boggling our tiny minds. And ultimately, that’s where wrestling with this paradox should bring us back to, standing in awe of God and the fullness of his justice and his love and his power and his grace. Make the decision of your own free will to follow the God who predestines all things, and never go another day without having your mind boggled. Shall we call it ‘freedestination’?

Footnotes

¹ I’m not going to talk about Captain America: Civil War any more – that was just a fun meme to get things started – but here’s a link to the trailer if you wanted to watch it again. (Which you did. Obviously.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnv__ogkt0M.

² If plumbing the depths of your local library’s theology section sounds distinctly unappealing, but you still feel as if you really ought to know more about theological history, I recommend A Nearly Infallible History of Christianity by Nick Page (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2013) on the grounds that it is extremely informative about the historical development of various theological ideas, completely hilarious with it, and an awfully good reminder of the unfortunate kinds of things that tend to happen when Christians start caring more about a particular side in a debate than they do about knowing Jesus better and becoming more like him. You can get it really quite cheaply on Amazon, http://www.amazon.co.uk/A-Nearly-Infallible-History-Christianity/dp/1444750127, but if you’d rather support your local Christian bookshop, I would consider that admirable.

³ Of course, you don’t make much of a jury if you don’t familiarise yourself with the verses’ surrounding context. Here’s the Ephesians one to get you started: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=eph+1&version=ESVUK.

⁴ The YouTube version of the video is unfortunately blocked in the UK, but Kevin helpfully posted a link to a Vimeo version in the description: https://vimeo.com/139840667.

⁵ In fact, you might think that quite a lot of this post was borrowed from Krish Kandiah, considering that I’ve recently been reading his book Paradoxology (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2014), which contains a chapter called ‘The Judas Paradox: The God Who Predestines Our Free Will’. I actually reckon I’d reached the main gist of my argument here before I got to that particular chapter, but all the same, Paradoxology is definitely worth a read. Again, it’s available pretty cheaply on Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Paradoxology-Krish-Kandiah/dp/1444745360/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1449366815&sr=1-1&keywords=paradoxology.