Vanhoozer writes,
“To live, says Bahktin, ‘means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth.’..The God-world relation is similarly dialogical – a dialogical (i.e., covenantal) unity within an even greater dialogical difference (i.e., authorial outsideness).” (RT, 331)
Didn’t we know this even from a cursory reading of Scripture? Also, isn’t this dialogical nature of reality inconsistent with Calvinism which is a monolithic and monological determinism? Vanhoozer simply tags on “an even greater dialogical difference (i.e., authorial outsideness), by which he means a theistic determinism, to the lesser “dialogical God-world relation” by which he attempts to preserve a semblance of genuine human freedom. But the two are incoherent. He simply ignores this problem in his theology.
Footnote 154 on page 384 confirms the type of intellectual dismissal and the insistence of belief in theistic determinism and unconditional election. In conflict to all he seems to claim for human freedom Vanhoozer’s theology dead ends at,
“As to why some people do not respond to God, it is a deep mystery; as to why some do, it is a deep grace.” (RT, 384)
What is he talking about!? On Calvinism it is no “deep mystery” as to why some people do not respond to God. Some people don’t respond to God because God has not predestined them to salvation and therefore he does not cause them to respond to God. He does not “effectually call” them. He does not grant them “irresistible grace.” His Spirit does not move upon them, regenerating them so that they believe. Doesn’t Vanhoozer know his own theology? I can only conclude that he is being disingenuous here.
Furthermore, this flight to “deep mystery” tells us that Vanhoozer refuses to face the moral problem of his theistic determinism. This flight to “deep mystery” tells us he cannot be intellectual honesty and admit that he cannot reconcile what he knows, not only of human freedom but also human morality, with his universal divine causal determinism. Inherent in this conclusion is an ultimate theistic determinism and unconditional election that requires the suppression of his moral intuitions and renders incoherent all that Vanhoozer is striving to retain about the God-world relation being “dialogical,” that is non-deterministic. He wants so much to recognize human freedom, but he cannot do so with intellectual integrity for he feels compelled to hold onto his Calvinist deterministic doctrines. I cannot escape the conclusion that Vanhoozer, as a theistic determinist (i.e., Calvinist), speaks incoherently and unconvincingly about the nature and reality of human freedom as well as our moral intuitions.
The Truth of the Gospel 