Vanhoozer writes,
“The problem of evil, of course, remains…. (RT, 502)
But why does it remain, and with what logical, moral, and biblical implications? Do the Reformed Calvinist theological and soteriological propositions exacerbate or lend satisfactory resolution to the logical and moral incoherence surrounding the problem of evil? The Westminster Confession of Faith provides the answers.
The clear teaching of the Confession is an inevitable theistic determinism that logically places “the problem of evil” squarely upon God. This determinism runs us right back into the problem of evil and only exacerbates the issues of logical, moral, and biblical incoherence. Calvinists unabashedly hold to a divine determinism and the Confession itself acknowledges this because it is the basis upon which the disclaimer of chapter 3, section 1 rests. The Confession, after stating that “God from all eternity did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass” seeks to escape the necessary conclusion that God has also decreed and brought about the existence of Satan, evil, and the Fall of man into sin. This makes God the author of sin and evil. Hence chapter 3, section 1 follows immediately with “…yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin…” This defensive clause is necessary precisely because the Confession teaches a comprehensive theistic determinism that logically and morally lays the cause of sin and evil upon God. That is clear from the former sentence. The question we must ask is whether the Confession has led us into logical, moral, and biblical incoherence and whether that is significant for determining whether this theological position is a valid biblical interpretation.
It is made abundantly clear that “God from all eternity did…by his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass…” Furthermore, so as not to think that man in any way influences what God determines “of his own will,” section 2 states “…yet hath he not decreed anything because he foresaw it as future…” The concepts here pile up into an impregnable deterministic fortress. What occurs in the world is not based upon anything God foresaw would occur or anything anyone would do as the sole author of their actions, but solely upon an absolute, eternal, divine decree that it be so. God, “from all eternity,” and “of his own will,” has “unchangeably ordained whatsoever comes to pass.”
But the Confession seeks to play both sides of the deterministic dilemma it finds itself in. In chapter 6, section 1 the Confession attempts to soften this determinism by the use of the word “permit” with reference to the Fall of man into sin. In this section the Confession states that, “Our first parents, being seduced by the subtlety and temptations of Satan, sinned, in eating the forbidden fruit. This their sin, God was pleased, according to His wise and holy counsel, to permit, having purposed to order it to His own glory.” But now God’s “wise and holy counsel” does not ordain “of his own will” but rather “permits” something to occur by the will of another. It so much as states that something occurred that was not ordained by the will of God alone. And if the Calvinist says God used the “means” of human willing to accomplish his will, we still have God somehow moving man’s will to do his will making this “secondary causality” as opposed to God’s “primary causality” a distinction without a difference.
Therefore, these two claims that God eternally ordained by his own will “whatsoever comes to pass” and that God was pleased to “permit” man to sin are in contradiction and leave us confused. To be consistent the Confession should read “Our first parents, being seduced by the subtlety and temptations of Satan, sinned, in eating the forbidden fruit. This their sin, God was pleased, according to His wise and holy counsel, to ordain, having purposed to order it to His own glory.” But we can sense that the monolithic, theistic determinism of the Confession and the elements in the account of the Fall that speak of the existence and presence of evil, moral responsibility, and “permission,” generate a profound incoherence. In Calvinist determinism, God is the sole mover or cause of even Satan’s Fall, and also his temptation of the human creatures. God determines everything. History becomes a drama in which the Author writes the script, and all the characters perform as he has determined (i.e., Vanhoozer’s literary paradigm). Note that when the Confession states in chapter 3 section 1, “neither is God the author of sin,” that does not make it so. It is merely a bald assertion. It does not relieve the problem of Calvinist determinism.
And again, did God “permit” or “ordain” the fall? To “eternally ordain” “whatsoever comes to pass” must mean that God actively willed and therefore causes “whatsoever comes to pass” to actually occur. “Whatsoever comes to pass” cannot occur in any other way. Surely these words and concepts have very different meanings and ramifications. “Permit” implies granting a certain course of action to be determined by another’s will, not the realization of one’s own will through another however that might be accomplished. For God to “permit” certainly does not imply his predetermination and necessary causation of the action. The very implication of God permitting anything introduces a dynamic that is incompatible with a comprehensive theistic determinism. In the theological context of Genesis, the use of the word “permit” can only mean that one person (God), who in some capacity is in a position of authority or restraint (i.e., sovereign) over another person (Man), allows the other to exercise their will, bringing into reality a result different than that intended by the authoritative person in that relationship. What is “permitted” may be intended or unintended by the one permitting. From the context of Genesis 1-3 we know that what God permitted was unintended. Our first parents ate from the tree that was forbidden by God for them to eat from. The prohibition to eat of that tree was the clear expression of the will of God. This is hardly coherent with the claim that this same God ordained and therefore brought it about “of his own will” that they would also eat in contradiction to his own prohibition. Neither can it be said that this was “the means” by which God brought about his predetermined plan defined in an absolute sense, for to have predetermined “whatsoever comes to pass” is also to have predetermined “the means.” Everything is included in “whatsoever comes to pass” so the determinist can no longer speak genuinely of “means.” There is no “means,” there is just what is; that which must occur. Everything is the predetermined will of God. “Means,” in order to be genuine, implies a conditional or contingent action that may be used by God for the accomplishment of his purpose. But this is very different than actions that are predetermined by God. Such actions cannot coherently be called conditional or contingent. Things also occur that may not be used of God for the accomplishment of a specific divine purpose. The Fall was not a “means” to an end for God in the sense of him willing, planning and causing it to occur. It was a dynamic occurrence in the relationship between God, Satan, and man in their respective freedoms. Yet because God is God in the universe, the Fall and sin are taken up by God’s love for mankind and by his grace in his sovereign working to provide the way of reconciliation and salvation from sin. In accord with his nature and attributes God uses this “opportunity” to demonstrate his love and grace to his human creatures.
So, the Confession does not free us from the theological determinism that eliminates any genuine human freedom. The Confession attempts to have God ordain all things but not be responsible for sin and evil. To do so it uses the word “permit” with respect to man’s action of disobedience against God’s clear word. But “permission” implies that the possibility of choices and circumstances contrary to the will of God may obtain, but that is contrary to Calvinism’s theistic determinism. In contrast to Calvinist determinism is important to recognize that even though these are choices and circumstances contrary to the will of God, that God can still incorporate them into the workings of his sovereign love and grace. Permission is neither the abdication of divine sovereignty nor the same as the preordination from all eternity of “whatsoever comes to pass,” which, again, can only amount to a decreed predetermination of all things solely by the will of God. This comprehensive causality of “whatsoever comes to pass” is what the Calvinist requires for God to be sovereign. But the reality of conditionality and contingency, potential and possibility due to the actualization of another person’s will is the teaching of Scripture, and yet this does not nullify the sovereignty of God. It is the biblical testimony that human freedom does not nullify the sovereignty of God. It is logically necessary that it cannot, otherwise God would not be God. Whatever sovereignty is, God retains it always, even in the midst of human free will. If we allow God’s own historical “speech-acts” recorded in Scripture to define God’s nature and ways for us, as Vanhoozer encouraged us to do, we find that they testify to a God that is free to ordain to permit that the will, decisions, and actions of others to affect circumstances and fashion reality as a differentiated, responsible moral agent, without threat to his sovereignty. We must attend to offering up a careful biblical exposition for what it means for God to be sovereign. The real presence in God’s universe of other creatures that can, by the use of their own wills, freely decide, and cause “certain things to come to pass,” need not be construed as God’s self-limitation in a negative sense. Such only presupposes the Calvinist’s view of divine sovereignty as necessitating an absolute decree, that is, that God’s default mode must be the absolute assertion of his will in all things otherwise he fails to be God. The presence of another will is always fatal to a deterministic definition of sovereignty. But God is not “limiting” himself. He is exercising his prerogative as God. He has decided to function in a relationship he designed and respects. He himself has created humans with wills by which they may substantially determine their own actions and certainly their own destiny because of his sovereign grace and purposes brought about by his sovereign loving determinations. Obviously no “limitations” are placed upon God (Rom. 11:33-36) except those of his own character. Rather, he chooses to define and enter into genuine relationship with creatures of his own making. They are made such that they may do what is forbidden. This is not to “subject” God in any way to man’s will or establish a “mutuality” that threatens his divinity. The fear that the Creator may be held captive by the creature if the Creator has not predetermined all things is puerile. The incarnation and crucifixion demonstrate the “unless God chooses to do so” element of a forever retained sovereignty of God. It was always for God to determine whether to redeem man from the error of his ways and how to do so.[1] It was always for God to show love and mercy in the midst of sin. For the sake of mankind’s salvation God chose to act sovereignly and authoritatively in history in genuine relationship with mankind to establish both justice and forgiveness. By virtue of his love, foreknowledge, wisdom, and power he appropriated or caused certain events for our salvation. God is directly involved and omni-capable regarding any circumstances to accomplish what he wills in the world. Rather than depicting God as limited and weak or absolutely “controlling” (predetermining) every person’s actions and eternal destiny, we should be informed by Scripture as to what he has determined to do to remedy our situation of hopelessness and helplessness, defining true strength and sovereignty accordingly. What God has decreed is what defines how he relates to human beings. God has decreed man to be who and what he is as a willing, personal being, and God involves himself in various ways in the activity of men. God can still work his will amidst contrary wills and also through the circumstances that result (Rom. 8:28). Yet there are times that God may not involve himself in what he otherwise would desire to see happen. He simply chooses not to intervene directly in the circumstance. God certainly works his will amidst cooperative wills. This willing response to God’s communicative actions is what God desires. But all of these modes of divine interaction are very different than God determining “whatsoever comes to pass” and therefore causing all things to occur as they do. Of course, it is God’s prerogative to decree and therefore cause certain actions and events. Human freedom is not absolute. By virtue of the Creator / creature relationship absolute human freedom never has been nor can be a reality. Man is not God. Yet, relative human freedom is still within God’s freedom to grant, and he has granted free moral agency to his human creatures. Human creatures have the capacity of being the sole authors of their acts with the ability of contrary choice. By virtue of God being the Creator and having created creatures distinct from himself yet made in his image, a certain independence is implied, even while the creatures remain in complete dependence on their Creator for life and hope.
Hence it is more plausible and experientially evident to believe that God has determined to permit certain actions and events that spring from the will of the creature according to how God determined to make that creature in his own image. Indeed, it is undisputable phenomenologically that much of what happens in daily life springs from the will of the creature contrary to God’s will and is left unchecked by him. It is obvious that the lawlessness, evil actions, and moral perversions of our day that only seem to be increasing are not caused by God as the outworking of what he predetermined to occur. If these are caused by him, this places him in conflict with his own sinless nature and revealed will for us Once the Confession uses the word “permit” it has tacitly admitted that for God to “ordain,” and that “from all eternity,” “whatsoever comes to pass,” is simply unbiblical and wrong. It is incoherent to have God causing all things, and also to speak about God permitting another to do what they will contrary to God’s own will. On the other hand, it is a perfectly reasonable, and a biblically viable explanation, that the meaningful will of the creature is also present and active, a will that is not “communicatively” determined by God’s will, yet God remains “communicatively” sovereign in his world given these characteristics of will, freedom, contingency, conditionality, etc. This is so because God is free to establish such a world and impart such characteristics to his creatures and “plays a part” as the personal, sovereign God in it. In that it was not the will of God for man to sin, it is reasonable to hold that God did not decree the Fall and that the desire of God to prevent the Fall was held “in check” by God himself. Why he acted in this way is rooted in all that God is in his nature. It is something to think about whether God could have created us differently or not have acted in any other way with respect to the Fall. Was God free by his nature to act to prevent the Fall, but he chose not to do so? Did he permit the Fall in respect to his decision to make man in his image? What is clear is that God communicated his will to Adam and Eve and they disobeyed. There was no “dialogical determinism” here, just the simple disobedience of what Vanhoozer would call an “Authorial communicative act.” Therefore, God was free by his nature to “permit” it, and he did so in his wisdom. God was not free by nature to predetermine it. How can I say that? Because we know from Scripture that God cannot be the source or cause of evil. In “permitting” it we can conclude that he did not cause it. Therefore, he did not will it in the deterministic sense that the Confession affirms. When we speak of God’s freedom, therefore, we do not mean that God is ‘free’ in the sense of being arbitrary. It’s not as if “anything goes” with God because “God’s ways are higher than our ways.” God too is tethered, not to our logical and moral expectations, but to his own nature; the divine nature from which we inherit our logical and moral values as made in his image. God is free to act without being subject to external constraints, yet God also acts in accord with his internal constraints, that is, his nature, which involves him, by virtue of his own decision, in the affairs of mankind. Adam and Eve were permitted, not predetermined by God to do what they did. Permission and predetermination are mutually exclusive concepts with regard to the will of persons when speaking about a single human act. Of course, one might say that God is negatively “willing” the Fall by permitting it. But more accurately one should use the word “allow.” God “allowed” the Fall, he did not actively “will” the Fall. The problem in Reformed determinism is that it is all and only about divine positive willing and causation. For the Calvinist is clear that God actively wills all things. Given theistic determinism, God allows nothing. To “allow” is incoherent in theistic determinism. In contrast, as reality bears out, a person’s acts may not be the will of God, yet God allows them to occur. The dynamic and definitions required by the Calvinist doctrines of an eternal decree and God’s sovereignty would not be properly represented in a concept of “negatively willing” or “allowing.”
The point is that on Calvinism Adam and Eve would hold no moral responsibility for their actions, for the act would not have been theirs in any sense that makes moral responsibility meaningful. The point is that the Calvinist understanding makes the Genesis account logically and morally incoherent. Under what paradigm of justice, equity, or wisdom is man held culpable for the evil God predetermined he would irresistibly enact? Not any biblical teaching or experiential paradigm of justice I know of. In contrast we can plausibly and biblically maintain that God’s decree established the creation as it stands with the characteristics of freedom that obtain. In doing so he allowed for the possibility of the Fall. But this was not intended by God, let alone determined by him. Nor was it inevitable. Adam and Eve could have obeyed God by resisting the temptation of Satan. It obviously does not threaten God’s sovereignty for the world to have taken this course without him predetermining that it take this course, for it is impossible for God to “find himself” in a situation through which he may become less than God. Although sin obtains apart from God ordaining “whatsoever comes to pass,” God’s sovereignty is not threatened. This is obvious in that he brought about the remedy for sin in Christ Jesus.
We must conclude that the biblical record contains a dynamic that cannot be accounted for given the Reformed Calvinist theological presuppositions. Although all theologies have their particular challenges, the lines certainly fall in more pleasant places for a biblical, evangelical theology of the non-Calvinist sort. Calvinism reduces the dynamic of life to God’s implementation of a predetermined plan for all things which included the Fall. In having to maintain its deterministic doctrinal presuppositions it creates the problem of evil for itself.
Again, this exemplifies what I believe to be the core issue dividing Calvinist interpretations from non-Calvinist interpretations. That issue is whether the interpreter acknowledges and incorporates the criteria of rational and moral coherence for establishing the validity of their interpretive conclusions. I submit to you that ultimately the Calvinist does not acknowledge or incorporate such criteria.
Bruce A. Little, in his essay “Evil and God’s Sovereignty” identifies this concern as essential to dealing with the question of evil.
“…to my knowledge, no one propositional statement in the Bible sets forth an unambiguous full-orbed answer to this question of evil. Therefore, constructing an answer involves drawing inferences from what the Bible states clearly, a procedure not foreign to the Church. In drawing these inferences, the theological inference must neither deny what God affirms nor affirm what God denies; it must strive for internal consistency. Any answer to the question of evil will touch many different doctrines, but however the answer is framed, it must reflect (1) consistency within one’s theological system, (2) avoidance of logical fallacies or inconsistencies, and (3) a balanced application of all the acknowledged attributes of God. Method, or what is known as hermeneutics, is, therefore, important, as are all prior theological assumptions with which one comes to the discussion.” [2]
He also states that,
“While theological systems play an important role in doing theology, at the end of the day, one’s commitment must be to come to the truth, not simply defend the system.”[3]
I for one cannot avoid the conclusion that Vanhoozer’s use of “speech-act theory” in conjunction with an “effectual call” is more geared to defending the Reformed Calvinist system than striving to recognize truth. I say this because if we read Vanhoozer with an eye for rational, moral, and biblical coherence, what Little called “internal consistency,” we can see that his concepts and language are lacking that consistency. He is inconsistent with his own theological beliefs, and at times nebulous and double-sided. I have tried to touch upon these various problems in these essays. I contend that we cannot come to know truth if we do not acknowledge that the logical, moral, epistemological, and biblical coherence of a theological system, not simply within itself but within the full scope of the canon of Scripture, is a reliable indicator of its biblical validity. Interpretations that incorporate logical, moral, epistemological, and biblical considerations with coherence, consistency and non-contradiction are the interpretations that we can be confident are closer to the biblical truth. Little points out that,
“The questions from evil are difficult and complex. All views have some weaknesses to them. In the end one should go with the answer that embraces the largest amount of biblical material consistently and with the least amount of appeal to mystery.”[4]
Given this criteria, Calvinism fails.
Back to “The Vanhoozer Essays”
[1] This perspective gives us greater insight into the meaning of election. Part of God’s “purpose in election” (Rom 9:11), that is, making choices and distinctions, was to establish salvation on the grounds of God’s promise – on his own plans to have an “Elect One” (Jesus Christ) in whom salvation is found. Salvation would be by grace (God’s act of accomplishing our undeserved salvation in Christ) through faith (the way we appropriate that salvation) in contrast to Jewish privilege as the descendants of Abraham or possession and practice of the Law of Moses. These expectations would be nullified by God through his “purpose in election.” Through the way of “promise” he would reveal his salvation. Now, Abraham’s faith was counted to him as righteousness (Rom. 4) before he was circumcised for the purpose of making him the father of “all who believe” without being circumcised, “so that righteousness would be counted to them as well…” (Rom 4:11) Both Jew and Gentile (everyone) are now saved upon the basis God has established, not man, that is, Jesus’ death on the cross. And having established salvation upon a gracious promise – Jesus Christ – it was to continue to be appropriated simply on the basis of faith. “That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring – not only to the adherents to the law but also to the one who shares the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all…” (Rom. 4:16) If “grace” is defined as predestination and faith is only caused by God in certain elect individuals, the grace God demonstrates “in Christ” is rendered void and faith is made redundant and rendered superfluous. The whole plan and purpose of God as Paul lays it out in this passage is thrown into confusion. Therefore “God’s purpose in election” cannot be defined as his predestination to salvation of a limited number. A proper historical, contextual, and theologically informed view directs us away from that Calvinist interpretation of the exclusion of a non-elect class of mankind from God’s saving grace “in Christ,” to a breaking of the boundaries of human expectations, and placing salvation on a distinctly universal, spiritual plane. Indeed, this is the opposite of Calvinism. Promise and faith are the complements of an eternal destiny as decreed in God’s saving work “in Christ.” God is the God and Savior of all sinners. And all sinners may be saved because of the way of gracious promise and faith that God has established. Election has primary reference to God’s way of salvation and secondarily to those who have the faith of Abraham. In believing in God’s “Elect One” they too are “the elect.” They become the New Testament “people of God.”
[2] Bruce A. Little, “Evil and God’s Sovereignty,” in Whosoever Will: A Biblical-Theological Critique of Five Point Calvinism (ed. David L. Allen and Steve W. Lemke, Nashville: B&H Publishing Group, 2010), 277.
[3] Ibid. 277.
[4] Ibid. 283.
The Truth of the Gospel 