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Predestination is a controversial subject. Some people—including Calvinists—say that God arbitrarily predestines certain people to eternal salvation and other people to eternal damnation.
But the same people often go further than that. They claim that God arbitrarily predestines absolutely everything that happens!
Is that true? And can you prove it from the Bible?
In this episode, Jimmy looks at the most common arguments for the idea—including the most popularly cited Bible verses for it. Together, you’ll see why these don’t prove what a Calvinist needs them to prove.
Transcript:
Predestination is a controversial subject. Some people—including Calvinists—say that God arbitrarily predestines certain people to eternal salvation and other people to eternal damnation.
But the same people often go further than that. They claim that God arbitrarily predestines absolutely everything that happens!
Is that true? And can you prove it from the Bible?
Underdetermination
For some time, I’ve talked about a concept known as underdetermination. This happens when someone uses evidence to prove something, but the evidence is compatible with more than one solution.
What we want is for the evidence to point to one and only one solution. In that case, the evidence determines which solution we should select.
But if the evidence is compatible with several different solutions, then it doesn’t tell us which we should pick. And so it underdetermines any single solution you might propose.
You run into that problem in a lot of areas, and one of them is Calvinism’s claim that God arbitrarily predetermines everything that happens, so let’s talk about that.
Predestination and Free Will
The term predestination is used in the Bible, so all Christians believe in some form of it.
However, there are different views about how predestination works.
One of the key questions is whether predestination is based on God’s foreknowledge. We talked about how God’s foreknowledge works in Episode 2, so you can check that out for more information.
One thing that classical theism—the classical view of God—teaches is that he is outside of time. He lives in an eternal now where time does not pass.
As a result, all moments in time are equally real to God. The past is just as real to him as the present and the future.
You can picture this as God existing in his eternal now, where the past, present, and future wrap around him like a circle with God at the center.
As a result, when God sees something happening at any time—past, present, or future—he knows it in the eternal now.
From our perspective inside of time, this makes it look like God knows things before they happen. For example, if God sees someone do something in the future, he could tell us about it in the present, so we know about it before it happens.
So predestination might work like this: God sees that—at the end of a person’s life in the future—the person cooperates with his grace, and so God determines that this person will receive the gift of salvation. God also could tell us in the present that the person will receive the gift of salvation, and from our perspective inside of time, it looks like God has pre-determined or predestined that person to be saved.
This model of predestination receives support in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. In discussing the fact that Jesus was predestined to go to the Cross, the Catechism says:
To God, all moments of time are present in their immediacy. When therefore he establishes his eternal plan of “predestination,” he includes in it each person’s free response to his grace (CCC 600).
So it wasn’t that God caused Judas to betray Christ or caused Caiaphas the high priest to convict him or caused Pilate to order his execution. Instead—from the eternal now—God saw them freely doing these things and incorporated their free will decisions into his predestination of Christ.
However, the Catechism seems to be stating a more general principle here. It says God incorporates “each person’s free response to his grace” in “his eternal plan of predestination,” and that’s how many Christians understand God’s predestination to work in general.
In other words, a person is predestined to be saved or to be lost based on God foreseeing whether they will freely cooperate with his grace or whether they will freely reject it.
But not all Christians agree.
Predestination Without Free Will
Some Christians—particularly in the Calvinist tradition—believe that God predestines people to salvation or damnation without this kind of libertarian free will.
Instead, he predestines them without looking at whether they will freely cooperate with his grace. He makes a basically arbitrary selection of some people—based on nothing but his own choice—and assigns them the destiny of heaven. Calvinists refer to this as Unconditional Election.
God then does the same thing for other people and assigns them the destiny of hell based on nothing but his own choice. This is sometimes called Unconditional Reprobation or Double Predestination.
But Calvinists don’t stop there. They don’t just hold that God predestines the fates of human beings. Instead, they hold that he predestines everything that happens—based on nothing but his own choice. God chooses everything that is going to happen—from the salvation or damnation of an individual soul to the motions of the smallest grain of dust in the air. He chooses it, and then it happens.
In fact, Calvinists often see this as a general argument for the Unconditional Election of individuals. If God chooses everything that happens, then it follows axiomatically that he must choose the fates of individual people to be saved or to be lost. You could put it this way:
- God chooses everything that happens.
- The salvation or damnation of every individual is something that happens.
- Therefore, God chooses the salvation or damnation of every individual.
We can talk another time about Unconditional Election, but what I’d like to discuss today is that initial premise—that God chooses everything that happens.
How would we know if that’s true?
The Sovereignty Argument
One argument some Calvinists make is that God must choose everything that happens because he is sovereign.
The word sovereign refers to the highest ruler of a land, so the king in a kingdom is the sovereign over the territory that he rules.
Well, the Bible describes God as a king, so he has sovereignty, and Calvinists sometimes argue that this must mean that he chooses everything that happens. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be sovereign.
One objection to this argument is that it presses the concept of sovereignty beyond its normal meaning. Think about an earthly king: Does he personally choose everything that happens in his kingdom?
Of course not! The king has lots of subjects, and they make choices too. In fact, they may make choices that the king definitely does not want them to make. They may—for example—choose to commit crimes—actions that violate the laws established by the king. Yet the king is still the sovereign of the land, and he may punish those subjects who make choices he doesn’t approve of.
This is very much the picture that the Bible presents us with for God. He’s the king of the whole world, but within his world he has a bunch of rebellious subjects. God established laws—“Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not lie,” and so forth. When we sin, we break these laws, and God may punish us.
That understanding of God’s sovereignty—where he sets laws for his kingdom but doesn’t choose everything that happens in it—is fully consistent with both how the term sovereign is normally used and with the picture that the Bible gives us of how God acts as the world’s sovereign.
It’s taking the concept of sovereignty in a new and unprecedented direction to say that sovereignty involves making every choice that happens in a kingdom. That doesn’t apply to any earthly sovereign.
Of course, a Calvinist may say that this is the point. God is not like any earthly sovereign. They have power—they’re potent—but God is all-powerful. He’s omnipotent. Consequently, God has an ability that no earthly sovereign has.
Because of his omnipotence, God could intervene in the world to stop any event from happening. It doesn’t matter what the event is; God could stop it. Therefore, God must at least allow everything to happen that does happen.
And this is true! God’s sovereignty is greater than that of any earthly king in that he could stop any event from happening if he chose, so he must at least allow everything to happen that does happen.
But allowing something to happen is not the same thing as choosing for it to happen. You may choose to allow something, but that’s not the same thing as choosing the event itself.
The Bible also says God is a father—and fathers are the sovereigns of their families. Fathers may choose to allow their children to make certain decisions, but that doesn’t mean the father makes all of the child’s decisions for him.
For example, if they go out for ice cream, a father may allow his son to pick chocolate or vanilla, but that’s the son’s choice. The father doesn’t pick chocolate or vanilla for his son.
Consequently, the concept of sovereignty—whether of a king in a kingdom or a father in a family—does not mean making all the choices yourself.
The concept of sovereignty thus underdetermines the theory that God chooses everything that happens in the universe. If you want to hold that he does, you need more than just the concept of sovereignty.
Appealing to Scripture
Now, Calvinists are supporters of the doctrine of sola scriptura, which is the idea that Christians should base their doctrine on scripture alone. So if it’s true that God chooses everything that happens, he will need to show it from Scripture. There need to be verses in the Bible that either say or imply that God chooses everything.
So what verses do Calvinists propose to back up this claim?
A couple of helpful resources are the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith.
The Westminster Confession of Faith was written by the Westminster Assembly, which was a group of Anglican clergymen trying to reform the Church of England. In 1646, they drew up a confession of faith, and afterwards they added footnotes that contained proof texts from Scripture.
The Westminster Confession fell out of favor in the Church of England, but it continues to be used in Calvinist churches, especially in Presbyterian ones.
By contrast the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith was written by a group of Reformed or Calvinistic Baptists in England. It was drawn—indirectly—from the Westminster Confession, so it is very similar except where Baptist teaching differs from Presbyterian teaching.
This confession was originally written in 1677, but it’s often attributed to the year 1689, when a new preface was added to it. It’s still used by Reformed Baptists, and—like the Westminster Confession—it includes footnotes that have Scripture verses.
So let’s look at these two confessions and see what verses they use to prove that God chooses everything that happens.
First, the Westminster Confession of Faith says this:
God from all eternity did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass (Westminster Confession of Faith 3:1).
When we examine the footnote documenting this claim, we find the following verses:
- Ephesians 1:11
- Romans 11:33
- Hebrews 6:17
- Romans 9:15, 18
Turning to the parallel passage in the Second London Baptist Confession, we find this:
God hath decreed in himself, from all eternity, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably, all things, whatsoever comes to pass (London Baptist Confession of Faith 3:1)
The attached footnote then cites these verses:
- Isaiah 46:10
- Ephesians 1:11
- Hebrew 6:17
- Romans 9:15, 18
The two lists are almost identical. The Westminster Confession lists Romans 11:33, which the London Baptist Confession omits, while the London Baptist Confession has Isaiah 46:10, which the Westminster Confession omits.
Since these are the verses that the leaders of these Calvinist groups agreed to cite to prove their view that God chooses everything that will happen in the world, they ought to be the verses that best support this doctrine.
So let’s combine the two passages into a single list, put them in canonical order, and then go through them to see whether they really prove the doctrine or whether they underdetermine it.
Combined Passages
- Isaiah 46:10
- Romans 9:15, 18
- Romans 11:33
- Ephesians 1:11
- Hebrews 6:17
Isaiah 46:10
For Isaiah 46:10, we’ll actually back up into verse 9 so that we can get a complete sentence. Here’s what the passage says:
I am God, and there is none like me,
declaring the end from the beginning
and from ancient times things not yet done,
saying, “My counsel shall stand,
and I will accomplish all my purpose” (Isaiah 46:9b-10).
So this passage says that God declares the end from the beginning and that he declares from ancient times things that have not yet been done, and that’s true. Through the prophets, God did tell the Israelites things that would happen in the future.
The passage also says that God’s counsel or plan will stand and that he will accomplish all his purpose—or in some translations, all he wishes. That’s also true.
The problem is that this passage does not refer to everything that happens. God certainly did not tell the Israelites about everything that would happen in the future of the world. He only told them about some things that would happen.
In the same way, just because God says his plan will stand and that he will accomplish everything he wants, that doesn’t mean he chooses everything that happens.
His plan may be to allow people to make some of their own choices, and that plan will stand! They’ll get to make their own choices! He may then include their choices in his overall plan—like we heard from the Catechism, earlier.
Similarly, when the passage says God will accomplish everything he wishes, that doesn’t mean he has a wish for every individual thing that happens. He may wish to let people make their own choices, in which case, he’ll accomplish that! He’ll give them the free will needed to make those choices!
We also have to be careful here about what God wants, because it’s obvious that he does not want everything that happens. He’s already told us that he doesn’t want murder, adultery, and lying to happen, and yet they do. So a natural reading of the text is that there are some things that God wants in a special sense, and he will accomplish those. But that doesn’t mean he wants everything that happens, because that would mean God wants evil to happen, which he does not.
There are some things that God plans and wishes on his own, and those will happen. If God decides that he wants Christ to come back on a certain date, then Christ will come back on that date. But that doesn’t mean God wants all the evil that happens in the world.
All you can safely infer from this passage is that God told the Israelites about some things that will happen in the future—he didn’t tell them about everything—and that he wants some things to happen—and that he’ll make sure those things are accomplished.
The passage simply does not address everything that happens in the world, and thus it underdetermines the idea God chooses everything that happens.
Romans 9:15, 18
Our next text is from Romans 9. It combines verses 15 and 18 from that chapter. Once again we’ll back up a verse before verse 15 to get the context. Paul writes:
Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means!
For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” . . .
So then he has mercy upon whomever he wills, and he hardens the heart of whomever he wills (Romans 9:14-15, 18).
The subject of God hardening people’s hearts is broader than we can discuss at the moment, so we’ll leave that to a future episode. We don’t need to cover that here to see whether this passage shows that God chooses everything that happens.
The reason is that the passage simply does not refer to everything that happens. Instead, it refers to God having mercy on some people and hardening the hearts of other people.
Properly speaking, it doesn’t even refer to all people. It says God has mercy upon whomever he wills, and it says he hardens the hearts of whomever he wills, but it’s going beyond the text to say that all people must either receive mercy or be hardened. That’s an assumption that is not stated in the text.
Calvinists also assume that this text is speaking about salvation, that those who have mercy are the saved and those who are hardened are the lost. But that’s actually not what this text is speaking about at all. In fact, the text and its surrounding context don’t even mention salvation and damnation.
We don’t have time to go into it in this episode, but the mercy that the text refers to is the mercy of being God’s chosen people, and the hardening refers to individuals like pharaoh, who opposed God’s plan for his chosen people.
But even if this passage were talking about salvation and damnation, it would not prove what a Calvinist wants, which is that God chooses to save or damn people without any basis for the choice.
And the text does not say that. God may very well save people because—under his grace—they freely choose to believe in Jesus, and God may very well damn people because—despite his grace—they freely choose to reject Jesus.
The text thus does not prove what a Calvinist wants it to, and so it underdetermines the Calvinist proposal.
Romans 11:33
We now come to Romans 11:33. It says:
O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! (Romans 11:33).
Frankly, I can understand why the London Baptist Confession left this one out, because it’s by far the weakest text we’ve encountered.
All you can infer from it is that the wisdom and knowledge of God are deep and rich and that he has unsearchable judgments and inscrutable ways.
All that’s true! God’s infinite mind cannot be fully comprehended by any finite, human mind.
But the text doesn’t say anything about God choosing everything that happens. It’s just an expression of praise and wonder about how far God transcends us.
This text thus very clearly underdetermines the idea God chooses everything that happens.
Ephesians 1:11
Now we come to Ephesians 1:11. This part of Ephesians gets translated different ways, but here it is how it’s rendered in the English Standard Version, which is a common and widely respected translation:
In [Christ] we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will (Ephesians 1:11, ESV).
The first thing to say about this passage is that finally—at long last—we have a verse that actually refers to “all things.” It says that God “works all things according to the counsel” or plan “of his will.”
But we need to be careful how we understand this. Taken literally, “all things” is a universal category, and whenever you see a statement about a universal category, you need to ask what universe of discourse it applies to. A universe of discourse is the set of things that the author has in mind—the set of things he is discoursing about. The statement he is making may apply universally to things in that category but not to things in other categories.
For example, in Matthew 17:11, the disciples have asked Jesus about the coming of the prophet Elijah, and Jesus replies that “Elijah does come, and he is to restore all things.” The disciples then understand that Jesus was speaking of John the Baptist.
But neither John the Baptist nor the prophet Elijah literally restored “all things.” For example, neither restored the dead to life. Neither brought about the resurrection of the dead. So we need to understand “all things” as a restricted set of those things that he was meant to restore. That’s the universe of discourse in this passage. The prophecy of Elijah envisioned the restoration of certain things, and John the Baptist accomplished this prophecy for everything in that set.
Restricted universes of discourse like this are not unique to Matthew 17:11. Many passages in Scripture that use universal-sounding language fall into this category. For example, in Ephesians if we read the previous two verses, we find this:
[God made] known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth (Ephesians 1:9-10, ESV).
So here we’re told that it’s God’s plan to unite “all things” in Christ, and Paul names things in heaven and things on earth. But unless you’re a universalist and think absolutely everyone is going to heaven, Paul must have in mind a restricted universe of discourse, because the lost are not going to be united in Christ. When Paul says “all things” will be united in him, he must mean something like all kinds of things or all those things that are meant to be united in Christ.
Thus, when we read in the very next verse that God works all things according to the counsel or plan of his will, he may not be referring to every event in world history. We’ve already seen how—in the immediate context of this verse—Paul is using the phrase “all things” to refer to a more restricted class of things.
So when he says God works all things according to the counsel of his will, Paul may mean that he works all kinds of things or all things that are to be united in Christ according to his will.
However, let’s set that aside. Let’s suppose that in verse 10 “all things” do include every event in world history. Would that prove what the Calvinist wants—that God chooses everything without any basis other than his own choice?
The passage does say that God works all things according to “the counsel of his will” or the plan of his will. It also says that we have been predestined “according to the purpose of him” who does this.
But the problem is that it doesn’t tell us what the counsel or plan of God’s will is or what his purpose is.
As before, God’s plan may be to save those who freely choose Jesus, and his purpose may be to predestine those who freely choose Christ and are in Christ.
In fact, I should point out that the other place where Paul mentions predestination in Ephesians 1 does not refer to us being predestined to salvation. Instead—in Ephesians 1:5—Paul says that God “predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ.” So that’s predestination to sonship, which we have now, not predestination to salvation on the last day.
We find the same concept in Romans 8:29, where Paul says that God predestined those he foreknew to be “conformed to the image of his Son”—and that’s a present reality in the lives of Christians. We’re being conformed to the image of his Son now. That’s not just something that happens on the last day.
Fundamentally, though, Ephesians 1:11 just does not tell us that God’s plan and purpose lacks any basis other than his own choice.
Instead, the New Testament contains a bunch of texts that tell us that God’s plan is to save those who choose to believe in Jesus Christ, that it’s those people who become sons of God and become members of the body of Christ. So a non-Calvinist can read this passage and say, yes, God has predestined us to become sons of God through having faith in Jesus, according to the counsel or plan of his will.
The passage thus, once again, underdetermines the Calvinist proposal.
Hebrews 6:17
We now come to our final passage, which is Hebrews 6:17. This verse says:
God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, [so] he interposed with an oath (Hebrews 6:17).
Here the author of Hebrews is referring to an event back in Genesis 22, where God swore to Abraham—by himself—that he would bless Abraham and multiply his offspring.
So God took an oath, and by that he showed Abraham he was serious about carrying out his purpose. He was going to bless Abraham; he was going to multiply his offspring; and—eventually—he would bless the nations of the world through Abraham.
God’s purpose in doing this was unchangeable, and he showed this to Abraham by an oath. And this demonstrated the same thing to the later heirs of this promise, whether they be Jews or Christians. They also can have confidence that God’s purpose in these matters was unchangeable because of the oath he took.
The problem is, this doesn’t say anything at all about God choosing everything that happens in world history. Much less does it say that God makes this choice with no basis.
Once again, the text underdetermines the theory that the Calvinist is advocating. In fact—since this passage doesn’t even refer to “all things”—it’s even weaker than the previous text we looked at.
Conclusion
We’ve now taken a look at each of the passages cited in favor of the Calvinist proposal in the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith.
None of them prove what Calvinists want them to prove. That’s not to say that you can’t read them in a way that is consistent with the Calvinist proposal that God chooses everything that happens with no basis.
You can read them that way, or the authors of the two confessions wouldn’t have picked them. So they are at least consistent with the Calvinist view.
However, they don’t prove the Calvinist view. They all underdetermine it.
None of them eliminates the possibility that God’s plan involves giving libertarian free will to man and letting man make his own choices, which God takes into account in his overall plan of the ages. As the Catechism says:
To God, all moments of time are present in their immediacy. When therefore he establishes his eternal plan of “predestination,” he includes in it each person’s free response to his grace (CCC 600).
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