My wife and I discuss Biblical perspectives and doctrines quite often, and one of the big topics lately has been that of Calvinism and the whole matter of free will – or the lack of it. It came up most recently because she was reading a book about Wycliff given to her as a gift. She came to a certain point of the book where she could read no further, because she felt that the author was using Wycliff as an excuse to push his view of free will, namely that there is no such thing when it comes to salvation.
It may come as a bit of a surprise to some of you, as it did to me, that Martin Luther’s position, as Calvin later taught, was that we Christians have no free will in respect to faith: we come to faith in Jesus Christ only because God gives faith to us. On the face of it, we might all agree. Faith is indeed a gift from God, and salvation isn’t something we deserve. But Calvinism goes much, much further with this view than most of us realize, and you should be aware that a large percentage of the theological world, at least in some of the official doctrine of the denominations we belong to, holds this view.
DEPRAVITY
The view, simply explained, is that all humans are totally depraved. Any Bible believer might go along with this: we have all fallen short of the glory of God, and we need a savior. However, the adherent to Reformed and Calvinist theology is that we are so depraved that we can’t even choose to have faith for ourselves.
WE HAVE NO CHOICE?
This view states that we cannot believe because we want to, or even if we want to. We cannot “come to God” or to salvation in Christ unless He makes us come. He chooses us: we cannot choose Him. He chose long before we were born whether we should come to faith or not. Some have been chosen to have faith, and some have been chosen to not come to faith. If we were to “accept Christ”, or to decide to follow Him on our own decision, this would be a “work”. And since we are not saved by works, according to Paul, it is not possible for us to choose to accept Christ unless He makes us accept Him, according to Calvin and his adherents.
FOLLOWING A MAN
Some followers of the Calvinist perspective are so enamoured by his teachings (and Luther’s) that they are literally obsessed with proving to you that you are utterly depraved-wicked-disgusting in God’s sight and cannot follow Christ of your own free will. You have absolutely no goodness in you apart from what God imparts to you. They look for every opportunity to impress these things upon you, and if you don’t accept them, you “don’t know the Bible”.
I’ve written several posts before on the subject of free will. It’s a subject which I find fascinating, and I’m likely to write several more. This post is not at all intended to be a detailed critique of the view that there is no free will-instead I want to share a few observations from logic alone, and I will continue the subject soon, next time from Scripture.
GOD THE MONSTER
My first observation is that if this belief were indeed true, then of the eight billion people alive on planet earth today, at least five billion people have been brought into the world by God so that He can send them to an eternal hell (1). In digits that’s 5,000,000,000 people all going to hell, with no chance or hope whatsoever of salvation or redemption. Add up all the people who have ever lived, and you will find that tens of billions of people have been brought into the world who were already consigned to hell forever without so much of a chance to avoid it.
Ah, says the ardent Calvinist, but God has still demonstrated His love for these tens of billions of people by giving them life in His world and by showing them His Son.
Here’s my view of this. A God who would bring billions of people into the world in order to send them into the pits of hell for ever is not a God of love at all. He is, as Erasmus observed in his debates with Luther, a monster. I for one would not want to go to His heaven, and His Christ is a charlatan. Count me out. I’ll go with the other scum where I’ll be with my own kind.
EDEN: A SHAM?
My second observation from logic is that the entire narrative of Eden and what transpired there, found in the early chapters of Genesis, when taken from the no-free-will perspective, is a sham. It’s a deceit cooked up by God to make it appear that Adam and Eve had a choice when in fact they did not. The Lord put the tree of the knowledge of good and evil there in the garden, and told these people not to eat the fruit of it or they would die. Why did He do that, if He knew they had no free will? Why does His Word lead us to think they had a choice when they did not? Isn’t this a deception by God, if this theory is true? Is God, then, a liar? No, He is perfect in all His ways.
LOST IN CHURCH
Many pastors, churches and even denominations conceal their views of predestination and the lack of free will. Why? What do they have to be ashamed of? My guess is that they know how utterly abhorrent their beliefs are. Calvin himself constrained-forced-the townspeople of Geneva to attend his church, believing that the majority of them were eternally and helplessly lost anyway (2). His attitude is etched on the portrait of him above.
NOTES
1 https://goodfaithmedia.org/global-christian-population-projected-to-reach-3-3-billion-by-2050
2 BBC “In Our Time” episode “Calvin”.
Fuel for Faith 