Theistic determinism is the clear teaching of the Westminster Confession. Calvinists unabashedly admit this and the Confession itself acknowledges it 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 the existence of Satan, evil, and the Fall of man into sin. Hence the disclaimer of chapter 3, section 1 follows immediately with “…yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin…” This defensive clause is necessary because a comprehensive determinism is clearly meant in the former sentence. Again, iIt 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 to occur “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 based upon an absolute, eternal, divine decree.
But the Confession also seeks to play both sides of the deterministic dilemma it finds itself in. It attempts to soften this determinism by the use of the word “permit” in chapter 6, section 1. 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 “unchangeably ordain” “of his own will” “whatsoever comes to pass,” but rather “permits” something to occur. But these two claims of God eternal ordained by his own will of whatsoever comes to pass and that “God was pleased…to permit” man to sin, are incoherent and leave us confused. First, simply by stating in chapter 3 section 1, “neither is God the author of sin,” does not make it so, nor does it relieve this problem of Calvinist determinism. This is simply a bald assertion. Secondly, the Confession is contradictory here. In the above section regarding the Fall of man into sin we read, “This their sin God was pleased…to permit…” Yet previously in chapter 3, section 1 it has already been established that “God from all eternity did…by his own will…ordain whatsoever comes to pass.” Did God “permit” or “ordain” the fall? Surely these words have very different meanings and implications. “Permit” implies granting a certain course of action to another’s will, not the effecting or imposition of one’s own will on another however that might be accomplished. “Permit” certainly does not imply predetermination or a necessary causation of events. Within the eternal ordination of all things by God’s will alone (predetermination / predestination), to then state that God permitted, introduces a dynamic that is incompatible with the former comprehensive predetermination.
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 over another (Man), allows the other to exercise their will, bringing into reality a result different than that desired by God in that personal relationship. Note that how Adam and Eve would exercise of their wills was not unknown by God, but their acts were different than that desired by God, which just is what it means to “permit.” Our first parents ate of a fruit forbidden by God for them to eat. This is hardly coherent with the claim that that same God ordained and therefore brought it about that they would do so. Neither can it be said that this was “the means” by which God brought about his predetermined plan defined in an absolute, exhaustive sense. For to have predetermined “whatsoever comes to pass” is also to have predetermined “the means.” The concept of “means” is no longer available to the Calvinist. 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 – and that solely by the will of God. Everything that happens is caused by the will of God alone. There are no other wills for him to “permit” to act on their own. In contrast, the Fall was not a divinely predetermined “means” to a divinely predetermined end. The Fall and sin, as permitted by God, become the “opportunity” for God to demonstrate his love, justice, mercy, and grace.
So the Confession, by mere assertion, cannot free itself from its theological determinism that eliminates any genuine free will of the creature. 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 a contrary circumstance to the will of God obtains. “Permission” is not the same as the ordination 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 complete causation of all things and events is what the Calvinist requires for God to be sovereign. But does the existence in the world of a creature with genuine free will threaten to nullify God’s sovereignty? It appears that the biblical testimony is to a God that can decree to permit another’s action to come to pass in a truly genuine independent fashion, that is, by their own willing and acting, without threat to his sovereignty. Even if the Calvinist theologian stresses man’s total depravity after the fall as requiring his effective action upon the sinners will (i.e., the “effectual call”), what is to be said about the relation between God as sovereign and man as free in his innocence? Surely the freedom which Adam and Eve enjoyed was never a threat to God’s sovereignty prior to the fall. An inherent human freedom that still obtains in that God made man in his image need not be a threat after the fall either. The only ones they injured by the sinful use of their freedom were themselves. This still obtains with respect to the acceptance or rejection of the gospel.
The fact that God invested man with true freedom need not be understood as God’s self-limitation in any negative sense, that is, that the limitation alters or lessens who God is as God. Calvinists have a vested interest in this concern of God’s self-limitation given their deterministic definition of his sovereignty. The Bible does not presuppose Calvinism’s absolute decree, that is, that God’s default mode is the absolute assertion of his will in all things. Without this presupposition there is no need to understand the Fall and the redemption to come as God limiting himself in a negative way, that is, that he is now subservient to man in the sense of having diminished power and sovereignty. The Calvinist fear is that man now has some kind of control over God. But this is nonsense. Even though God limited himself in determining that he would not determine any person’s eternal destiny, this is not a negative self-limitation. Even though it is God who places this limitation upon himself, God can do nothing to make himself cease being truly and fully God, Therefore, this self-limitation is not a problem for God. Indeed, along with human freedom, the incarnation was an instance of self-limitation, and yet it serves to highlight his grace and love for mankind. It actually serves to exalt his sovereignty, love and justice.
If we do not prefer to talk of God limiting himself, we can think of it this way too. God is not “limiting” himself, but rather deciding to function in relationship in which he respects the way he has created his human creatures with wills by which they may substantially determine their own actions. No limitation is placed upon God, as if he was surprised by man’s freedom and his use or misuse of it, but rather, God chooses to enter into the nature of 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 actions, for it is always for God to determine how to create man and whether or not to redeem man from the error of his ways. It is always for God to show love and mercy in the midst of his just judgment upon sin. For the sake of mankind’s salvation God chooses to act sovereignly and authoritatively in genuine relationship with mankind for his salvation. God is directly involved and omni-capable in any and all circumstances to accomplish what he wills in the world for reasons that are understandable in light of God’s infinite nature in contrast to the finite nature of man. God is the Creator, man the creature, and nothing will change that relation. Yet man is created in God’s own image so that God could be what he is to man and man could know God and respond in return. Rather than depicting God as limited and weak 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. Even Jesus, in his “self-limitation,” when he ‘made himself nothing” and took “the form of a servant” and “humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross,” that “limitation” was also an exaltation by God – a bestowal upon him of “the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God.” (Phil. 2:7-11, ESV)
What God has decreed is what defines how he relates to human beings. God’s determinations are all of God himself and include the good for human persons who remain finite human persons before him. God’s methods are in accord with God’s decrees and God has decreed man to be who and what he is as a willing, personal being. God can still work his will amidst contrary wills and also through the circumstances that result (Gen. 50:19-20; Rom. 8:28).[1] But this is very different than God determining all actions and circumstances thereby causing them to occur. 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 it never has been nor could be. Yet also by virtue of the freedom of God as Creator, having created creatures distinct from himself and made in his image, a certain independence is not only implied but made explicit in the cultural mandate (Gen. 1:26, 28, 2:19), even while the creatures remain in total dependence on their Creator. Hence it is most plausibly and experientially evident to propose 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 that much of what happens in daily life springs from the will of the creature as contrary to God’s will due to man’s fall into sin and is left unchecked by God. It is obvious that the daily evils that occur are not the outworking of an eternal decree of God that ordained “whatsoever comes to pass.” Rather, sin is at work in us (Rom. 7), but also the power to overcome sin (Rom. 6 and 8). Furthermore, there are evil forces – Satan and his demons – at work in the world and they affect people when people allow them to do so. As sinners we are prone to be influenced by evil spirits, that is why we must be on our guard (1 Pet. 5:8). But to maintain the Calvinist’s determinism is to indict God as the cause of evil and therefore hold him responsible for all evils.
Once the Confession uses the word “permit” its Calvinist supporters should acknowledge that to “ordain,” and that “from all eternity,” “whatsoever comes to pass,” simply will not do. It is incoherent to have God ordaining and causing all things, and also to speak about that same God permitting another to do what they will, especially 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” (i.e., per Vanhoozer’s theology) determined by God’s will despite God’s communication to persons, yet God remains sovereign in his world because that is the way he designed it. His sovereignty is to be understood along the lines of his active ruling and reigning over the affairs of men. He decreed to impart to his world the characteristics of will, freedom, contingency, conditionality, possibility, potentiality, etc. 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. God was free by his nature to act to prevent the Fall, but he did not do so. Yet God was free by nature to permit it, and he did so. God was not free by nature to predetermine it, thereby causing it. That would have been a violation of his nature as perfectly good. In permitting it we can only conclude that he did not cause it, and therefore he did not will it in the deterministic sense that the Confession speaks of God having eternally ordained, and therefore causing, whatsoever comes to pass. Clark Pinnock observes that,
“The Fall demonstrates conclusively that God’s will is not something that is always done regardless. On the contrary, it is something that can successfully be rejected and contravened…The Fall simply cannot be interpreted deterministically without contradicting the character of the God of the Bible and making him the cause of sin.”[2]
When we speak of God’s freedom, therefore, we do not mean that God is ‘free’ in the Calvinist sense of being arbitrary, but free to act without being subject to external constraints, yet, God always 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. Man is permitted, not predetermined by God to do what he does. Permission and predetermination are mutually exclusive concepts when applied to a single human act. Of course one might say that God was negatively “willing” the Fall by permitting it. But this would not provide coherent support for a theistic determinism. Again, the appropriate language would be to use the word “allow” to properly portray the fact of the involvement of another’s will that is genuinely freely deciding things on their own. Again, the dynamic and definitions required by the Calvinist doctrines of an eternal decree and God’s sovereignty would not be coherently represented in a concept of “negatively willing,” “permitting,” or “allowing.” Therefore, God did not positively “will” the Fall by decree, otherwise, contrary to the biblical account, Adam and Eve, as persons, would have no will of their own, the Fall would have been inevitable, God was certainly the cause and, therefore, the author of evil and sin. Adam and Eve could not justly be judged. They would hold no moral responsibility for their actions, for the act would not have been theirs in any sense meaningful for moral responsibility to obtain. We can see that Calvinist determinism runs roughshod logically and morally over the Genesis account. For how then is man held culpable for the evil God predetermined he would do? In contrast we can plausible and biblically maintain that God’s decree established the creation as it stands with the characteristics that obtain. In so doing he allowed for the possibility of the occurrence of a 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. We must conclude that the biblical record contains a dynamic that cannot be accounted for given the Calvinist presuppositions. Calvinism reduces the dynamic of life to God’s implementation of a predetermined plan for all things which includes the Fall. In having to maintain its deterministic doctrinal presuppositions it creates the problem of evil for itself.
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[1] These premundane decisions of God to be what he is by nature to his human creation, especially man as a sinner in need of a Savior, is the essence of the doctrine of election. The profound reach of the doctrine into the mind and heart of God in eternity past to bring his divine plans and purposes in Christ to fulfillment through his distinct choices of certain people for service, Israel to be “the people of God,” and the making of certain covenants and promises, is essential to the message of “good news” for all sinners. It is unfortunate that the biblical doctrine of election has been so distorted by Reformed Calvinist thought and eisegesis that it has been transformed in a dark, shadowy, mysterious doctrine that is incompatible with and unserviceable in the proclamation of the gospel as “good news” to every sinner.
[2] Clark H. Pinnock, “Responsible Freedom and the Flow of Biblical History” in Grace Unlimited, ed. Clark H. Pinnock, (Minneapolis: Bethany Fellowship, 1975), 101.
The Truth of the Gospel 