In my previous article on Calvinism (see the link below to “Calvin’s Pendulum”), I quickly made a point in a sub-section called “Total absurdity” that discussed how God’s sovereignty involves boundaries being set for us, but within those boundaries a certain freedom is ours.  Also in a sub-section titled “It’s not what you know, but Who you know,” I touched on the idea of how a relationship with God is a real, two-way relationship, with a certain interplay between specific components, namely our free will decisions, the foreknowledge of God about those decisions, how God allows our free will to become a factor in how and what He predestines for us, and where our “wiggle room” is.  This may seem to be going the long way round, but it is crucial to understand these items so we can see the difference between what God makes to happen and what He allows to happen.

            A philosophy such as Calvinistic predestination can rightly be termed “theistic determinism,” akin to the materialistic determinism of Thomas Hobbes or psychological determinism of B. F. Skinner.  In any of these systems our power of choice is not considered to be genuinely free, but merely a reaction to a set of stimuli, either external or internal, which influenced the decision in such a way as to give us an illusion of making a free decision but was in fact a mere product of the many inclinations which constantly affect us.  Calvin predates the other two mentioned above, but the debate is a very ancient one.

            But why debate this at all?  What is the point of making the difference between acknowledging a spontaneous free will and the belief that we already have our entire journey mapped out for us?  There have been some who actually assert that there is no difference in the long run—that at the core of it Arminians believe the same thing as Calvinists, but simply won’t admit it.  But Arminians acknowledge several reasons why the indirect causation of God, which includes consideration of human will, is an important factor when seen in opposition to God’s supposed direct causative force that ignores our desires—which we may identify by the term predestination.

            Historically, the Calvinist position insists that God is the micro-manager of all human affairs, and that sin exists because God actively created it.  Many Calvinists do allow for the concept that God permits us liberty of choice in minor, non-moral matters, such as what color shirt to buy or which vegetables to order from the menu—which they describe with the term “volition.”  This seems to be a reluctant accommodation to such references as the free-will offerings mentioned in Exodus 36, etc.  But we must ask what good such an allowance does for us if it does not cover the types of choices that really matter, such as obedience vs. disobedience.

            This all plays well into the hands of atheists such as the famous existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, whose reason for non-belief was based upon the idea that if an omnipotent God did exist, He could and certainly would exert enough control over His creation to prevent human free will, and therefore evil, from existing—therefore since evil exists, and persons are free moral agents who can participate in that evil, then God does not exist.  It seems obvious from our modern vantage point that Sartre’s notion of God depends somewhat upon Calvin’s, for if he had held to the more even-handed concept that God allows a limited amount of free will for His creatures and that He would remain sovereign despite the consequences for us of such liberty, Sartre would have had to dream up some other excuse for his narrow-mindedness, otherwise he might more closely have adhered to the philosophy of his predecessor Soren Kirkegaard.

            This is by far not the only problem with the Calvinist concept of whom the God is that we serve.  When God is seen as the type of divine Being whose control of us is so all-pervasive that we are rendered incapable of making our own moral choices, any appeal that we might wish to initiate for a chance at reconciliation with Him could be as likely to fall on deaf ears as on compassionate ones.  Certainly man is incapable of saving himself, but that does not mean that man cannot instigate a heavenward plea for the correction of his broken status with God, once the Holy Spirit has made man aware of the offer of the grace of Jesus.

The fallacy of the one-way relationship

            Our God is a God who is interested in healthy relationships.  Let us explore the possibilities of the kind of relationship that is available with the God of Calvinism, who is described as a regulator and manipulator of all the minutest details of our lives.  I can do so, appropriately, with five points (I apologize that they do not spell out an acronym):

1) Man wouldn’t really matter.  The Scriptures are clear when they assert that God’s ultimate intent for man is that we should enjoy fellowship with Him.  Clearly such a bond would be enhanced by giving us an independent volition and a spark of creativity, which are the results of being made in His image.  But the God of the theistic determinist can only get back from man that bit of Himself which He extracts out of man.  There is nothing at all special about a speech that you say to yourself through somebody else’s mouth.  There is nothing wonderful in the making of a thing of your own design by the manipulation of another pair of hands which could not repeat the act unless the designer repeated the manipulative deed as well.

            Perhaps when a child is looking through the toys in his toy chest, he or she will be more interested in the dolls or the action figures than in the dominos or the building blocks.  A toy that closely resembles the image of a human is always fun to play with—you can smash it, throw it about, or bend it around in ways that you could never do to yourself, and it can’t talk back to you for doing so unless you pull the string in its back.  It may be your favorite toy, but can you really call that a relationship?

2) We could never know whether God is merely being flippant or capricious concerning the fate of mankind.  Believers are assured in the Bible that God has a purpose for each of our lives, and that ultimately God will take us beyond that to serve a greater purpose that will benefit Him and His glory.  But for those who choose not to follow Him, the concept of someone being predestined to hell comes across as a very casual thing from a supposedly loving God.

            God does not have to explain Himself to us, therefore we are left to assume that there is some rhyme or reason behind God’s choices for our lives.  However, we will always be left with those nagging questions of why this one and not that one, what was the point of being here and not there, how can we really know that it worked out for our good when it feels so bad?

3) God’s judgment would be unjust, and the punishment of unbelievers constitutes an unwarranted cruelty.  People are going to hell daily, and the Bible explains that their lack of belief is the grounds upon which they deserve it, while “the just shall live by faith.”  So if some are predestined to have no chance to believe, and even if they are presented with the Gospel yet by a divine directive are prohibited from making a positive response, wouldn’t fairness be mocked?

            The same would be true of the heavenly rewards for the saints.  We are to be rewarded according to our works, yet some would be predestined to do more or greater deeds, and some to do less.  If we are locked into performing those things which we were programmed to do in our “bio-spiritual software,” then the concept of the merit behind such rewards loses all its meaning.  We cannot help but miss out on the good works which we were pre-planned to avoid, nor can we help but do (by some mysterious compulsion) those which we actually manage to perform.  Fairness again becomes a mockery.

4) Our learning of life’s lessons would be in vain.  Why must we mature and grow if we are only destined to follow the predeterminations laid out before us?  Even if it is to help us to understand the path we are on, it is still irrelevant because we will follow that path whether we gain any wisdom from it personally or not.  Neither the cleverest among us nor a complete moron could stray away, so why go to the bother to unlock the novice, the craftsman or the genius within ourselves?

5) Our love for God would be meaningless to Him.  He commands it, and He tells us that we can love Him because He first loved us.  But when there is nothing originally heartfelt behind it, the purpose of our offering is defeated.  The point of our even saying that we love God would be analogous to a ventriloquist telling himself through his dummy that he loves him.  Perhaps it is entertaining to spectators, but how real could such “love” be?

            If mankind is thus incapable of instigating a genuine love toward God, or any genuine feeling for that matter, then that which is to us an authentic sentiment becomes a sham delusion of importance on the part of God.  There remains then no purpose for us in God or to God—and subsequently there is no real humanness in our humanity.

Freedom within boundaries

            Having examined the culture and sociological conditions surrounding the origin of Calvinism in a little more depth now than I had when I wrote the previous article on the subject, it seems more obvious that his ideas of what sovereignty entails were greatly affected by the times.  Kings, lords and princes had always been absolute rulers of their domains, and certainly the pope stood as an example of a religious sovereign.  Hardly if ever had it occurred to the rulers of the day that the hearts, minds and consciences of the people cannot be governed by physical force.  Soon the concept of individual liberty ushered in by the Age of Reason would instruct men further about their own nature, but the deeply entrenched though outmoded concept of the absolute control exercised by potentates has held on in Reformed thinking.  Despite the clear need for modification, the Calvinists remain as staid and monolithic today as they were at the Synod of Dort.

            My next-door neighbor has a fenced-in back yard, and she also has a dog that she lets out into her back yard occasionally.  While he is out there, the dog can do as he pleases, but he cannot escape the boundaries set by the fence.  My neighbor is no less the dog’s master because she does this—he still shows all the signs of being a faithful and good dog.  But she doesn’t lead him around on a leash while he is inside the fence; there is certainly no need for that.