I would suggest that the long and sometimes acrimonious arguments about predestination and free will within Western Christianity (for the former has never had any following in Eastern Orthodoxy) come under eight main heads:
1) Bible
Biblical passages can be deployed in support of either argument, and both sides suffer from passages they find ‘difficult’.
On the one side, 2 Peter 3:9 (“The Lord is ... not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance”) and 1 Tim. 2:3-4 (“God our Savior ... wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth”) are particularly hard to square with predestinarian doctrine.
On the free will side, Romans 9:11-20 has frequently been found particularly problematic.
Nevertheless, both sides have found their way around, or through, their exegetical difficulties at these and many other points. Such wrestling might reasonably be pronounced a draw, or a tie.
If, however, the focus is pulled back from those texts which might be thought explicitly to endorse a predestinarian or a free will view, to look at wider issues, then the advantage passes decisively to the free will side.
For the Bible is stuffed full of moral exhortations to people to do x, or else to refrain from y, as well as conditional promises (“If you do this, then...”) — exhortations and conditional promises which are pointless if their outcome is already assured. Further, God is described constantly as ‘patient’, or ‘angry’, or even ‘laughing’ — all of which make little sense if the future is not merely known to Him, but fixed by him. (Just think about what you mean when you describe yourself as ‘being patient’; it is in respect of an outcome which is unsure, either in its result or at least in its timing. It is almost impossible to be ‘angry’ unless at least some element of surprise or disappointment is entailed — at people who should have done other than they did, or at things which ought to have happened otherwise. Similarly, a joke is seldom funny twice — unless one had forgotten it.) Most of all, God is described on several occasions as changing His mind, or regretting having made man etc. — all of which are not merely incompatible with the view that God has determined everything, but actually offensive to such a view.
In consequence, Calvinists have standardly argued that such biblical language is an ‘accommodation’ to purely human ways of talking and is not to be taken literally. This might be plausible if such references — to moral exhortations, conditional promises, to God being ‘patient’, or changing His mind — were rare. And of course, there certainly are places in Scripture where we need to do precisely this. In fact, however, the examples we have just mentioned litter every chapter. It seems that the language of Scripture must be read a particular way in order to safeguard a particular doctrinal view — because reading it straightforwardly leads to a very different conclusion, namely that God does not, after all, predetermine all events. In that case, doctrine is not being derived from the Bible (exegesis) but imposed upon it (eisegesis).
2) Philosophy
This is an area in which the predestinarian view is relatively strong. Calvin himself sought to be at least somewhat systematic in his theology; his successors, yet more so. Even they failed, of course, for it is simply not possible to construct a completely self-consistent theology or philosophy; the world as we actually find it is too complex and puzzling — and, from a Christian point of view, God is too big and “past finding out” — to allow of it. At several points where his exposition gets to paradox, Calvin declares “This is a mystery into which we may not look” (or something similar) — and moves swiftly on!
That said, there is something intellectually satisfying about identifying a single source — God — as the explanatory cause, not merely for everything that exists (a point all Christians are agreed upon), but for everything that happens (which is the issue in question here). But the point is not whether it is satisfying: Is it true?
A strength of Calvinist determinism is its congruence with secular views. If, for example, there is no God and matter is all that exists, then all events are simply determined. This moment in time, across the universe and in your kitchen, is what it is because the previous moment was as it was. And the next moment will unavoidably be a product of this moment. People act as though freely, but actually in ways that are determined by their body chemistry, their inherited genes, their socialisation, and by instinctive or habituated impulses to events around them. And those events around them are, in turn, caused by similar factors. (This is partly why secular campaigners demand light prison sentencing, on the one hand, and incessant governmental controls on our behaviour, on the other. The criminal is scarcely to blame for what he did, being a product of blind forces, primarily social and hereditary. And government should exert supposedly benign pressure on us to act like thus and thus, for the sake of a supposedly desirable state of society.) Even those ‘advanced’ thinkers who chatter about ‘randomness theory’ (butterflies flapping their wings in China and causing storms in California etc.) do not actually abandon determinism; they mean merely that physical processes are far too complex for us to predict — a conclusion I suppose almost any of us could accept.
Of course, few Calvinists endorse these secularist ways of thinking. But they are at one with the seculars in thinking that all that happens is determined and that free will is an illusion.
For free will to be ‘really real’, and not just an illusion, we need to accept other postulates — postulates which, it turns out, only Christianity can give us.
3) Ecclesiology
Christian predestinarianism originates with Augustine (a point to which we shall return) as part of a project to ‘explain’ Christianity in relation to its new status around the year 400 as the compulsory religion of the late Roman Empire. Augustine was neither the only theologian, nor even the earliest, to justify this immense change theologically, but he was by far the most important and influential for subsequent centuries. (And he was certainly the first to teach predestination.) In the process, much of early Christianity was tipped on its head, particularly in the area of hermeneutics (the established principles by which Christians had always interpreted the Bible, and most especially in the relationship between Old and New Testaments).
A number of important new doctrines emerged; important historic ones were quietly shuffled aside. And predestination was an important part of this huge shift. For if the church was not a voluntary association of committed disciples, as it had been for the first three centuries when it was persecuted, but embraced the entire population of the Empire, then it followed that not all professing Christians were, in fact, saved. So who is saved? The answer is that we cannot know. Indeed, we cannot even afford to know — for if we ever do, then only they are the real church, and we are back to a voluntary community of disciples.
There must, then, be two churches, argued Augustine: the ‘visible church’ of all who profess faith (and, we might add, who profess it because they are required by law to do so), and an ‘invisible church’, known only to God. The latter are those whom God has chosen — individually predestined. No one should presume even to know whether he himself was among this elect (though, 1100 years later, the Protestant Reformers added that one could, after all, make an exception of oneself).
To underscore this, Augustine stressed that all of us are born in a state of damnation, because we are sexually procreated. (Again, Reformed leaders would much later ‘tweak’ him on this point, and coin legal terminology about ‘federal headship’, ‘covenantal headship’ and the like.) Because we are born sinful, we never had any choice but to sin — or choice about anything else. Governmental compulsion in the matter of faith, then, is entirely reasonable, and for our own good. After all, government exists to uphold the good, as per Romans 13!
With the aforementioned slight exceptions, the Protestant Reformers a millennium later upheld all of this. The sixteenth-century evangelical Anabaptists, though, rejected it — partly because of their strong biblicism and partly because they could see the connection between predestination and a compulsory church. Anabaptists, who disagreed with one another on so many things, were united in rejecting predestination.
The Reformers, by contrast, needed predestination more than ever. That is because their own central doctrine — that of ‘justification by faith’ — threatened to undo a compulsory, state-required church. For if Person X knows he has saving faith and Person Y does not, why should the latter even be allowed in church, still less be forced to it? And if that happened — i.e., if there was no longer a compulsory church — Protestants and Catholics alike assumed that society would break down into moral anarchy. This was the central argument made by Catholic spokesmen against Martin Luther in the years after 1517. So the renewed stress on predestination came in handy here; it was the glue that stuck together two incompatible things: ‘justification by faith’ and a state-enforced church. Yes, you could know yourself to be saved; No, you could not know the same about any other person. So a whole-population-embracing church could continue as it had done before in the Catholic Middle Ages. Predestination made Protestantism possible!
This is why the Puritans made a fetish of ‘the doctrines of grace’. For they understood that if they let them go and consented to a doctrine of free will, they must either abandon ‘justification by faith’ and go back to a works-oriented medieval Catholicism, or else abandon a compulsory church and become Anabaptists! And they wanted to do neither. They wanted to have their cake and eat it too. It is no accident that, even today, Reformed Christians revere the Puritans....
4) Consciousness and self-consciousness
Quite simply, it is strongly arguable that, if all events are determined, then neither consciousness nor self-consciousness are possible. For anything that looks like ‘self-consciousness’ will be an illusion, since all responses have been decided by the Creator in advance, and are no more evidence of a self-conscious being than our most advanced computers are. Garbage in, garbage out. What we call our ‘consciousness’ and ‘personality’ are no more than the self-perpetuation mechanisms of amœbae, plus complexity.
The same is true of atheist versions of determinism. If there’s no God, then we live in a material universe in which all events are ‘caused’ by some previous state of material affairs, so the ‘thought’ that (for example) there is no God is merely the result of random collisions of atoms in the brain, or physically caused connections resulting from inherited traits, stress at work, lack of coffee etc.. All attempts at determinism are merely examples of the thought-that-there-is-no-thought — and thereby self-invalidating.
C.S. Lewis pointed out, in an early section of his Problem of Pain, that if only two beings existed, and one caused all things to happen such that the other could never be hurt, it is doubtful whether that other could ever be aware of anything: “freedom, like self-consciousness (if they are not, indeed, the same thing) ... demands the presence to the self of something other than the self”. And this in turn demands God — but not an all-determining one, or else we are back with the problem we had as atheists.
Lewis posits himself as an all-determining God and then speculates: “If you were introduced into a world which thus varied at my every whim, you would be quite unable to act in it and would thus lose the exercise of your free will. Nor is it clear that you could make your presence known to me — all the matter by which you attempted to make signs to me being already in my control and therefore not capable of being manipulated by you.”
5) Problem of suffering
If God makes all things that happen, happen, then He is the cause of all suffering. Not merely ‘by permission’ (for that point comes along with any belief in one Creator God), but by direct ordaining.
On this point, Christian predestinarians have engaged in endless evasions, ever since Augustine first introduced the doctrine. Called upon to explain why God allowed the Christian women of a nearby town to be mass-raped by barbarian invaders, he speculated that the women may have been proud, or that God could foresee that they would eventually have become proud had this awful event not intervened. (Not sure what that ‘would have’ is doing there: if God has ordained all from before the foundation of the earth, then hypothesising about what ‘would have been’ is ridiculous.) To describe such argumentation as ‘offensive’ is an understatement! The point here is that his doctrine made such arguments necessary. If God causes everything that happens to happen, then He ordained that, too. So why? (Hint: He didn’t.) Ever since, predestinarian preachers and exegetes have dived out immediately into mystery, or else rushed in to acclaim some disastrous event as divine retribution. God’s ‘sovereignty’ and ‘providence’ (terms unknown to the Bible or the Church Fathers) have been invoked endlessly — and equally quickly shuffled off as ‘inscrutable’.
In the earliest period of the church, heretics and gnostics attacked the idea of a good Creator because of all the suffering in the world. As Tertullian summarised their arguments:
“These are the bones of contention, which you [heretics] are perpetually gnawing! If God is good, and prescient of the future, and able to avert evil, why did He permit man ... to be deceived by the devil, and fall from obedience of the law into death? For if He had been good, ... and prescient, ... and powerful enough to hinder its occurrence, that issue would never have come about.... Since, however, it has occurred, the contrary proposition is most certainly true, that God must be deemed neither good, nor prescient, nor powerful.”
The Christian answer in those early centuries was clear and unanimous. The puzzle was solved by the fact of human free will. God was good and had created a good world. But he had made humans as autonomous beings. And we have misused that autonomy such that human sin has caused devastation — and now, we can barely stop ourselves. Humans were not prevented from sinning, but neither were they forced to it. The world was fallen because of them, but God had reached out to them in Christ.
6) Created in the image of God
Being “created in the image of God” is a central Christian doctrine, but there is widespread lack of clarity as to what, precisely, is meant. What distinguishes us from cats and dogs? Why is an unborn baby worth more than an antelope?
Sometimes people suggest that it is intelligence. (But what of dolphins? Or human imbeciles?) Others suggest that it is a moral sense. If true, that in itself implies that we are capable of choices — actual, not merely illusory-because-fixed-by-God ‘choices’ — between possibilities.
Finally, it comes down to autonomy. Nothing else in the material world is created in God’s image. Because non-human actions (if any) are all fixed by a given nature. What we mean by human godlikeness is our ability to choose between alternatives and to impose our will upon our environment. To deny this point in the interests of divine determinism and (excuse me, but) empty rhetoric about ‘God’s sovereignty’ is to deny the real content of the crucial doctrine that we are created in God’s image.
7) Dualism
There was indeed a body of religious support for predestination before Augustine. But it was entirely the province of heretics. For them, the material world was evil, and the creation of an evil (or, as with the Marcionites, at least an inferior) god. Jesus was the son of a superior deity, bringing a salvation that was purely spiritual. The heretics could see as clearly as any modern rationalist that, left to our material circumstances, our lives are bound, their course predetermined. That was why, according to them, salvation consisted in being rescued from materiality. For that reason, it was a salvation available only to a predestined elect, in whom magical particles of light had been implanted.
As a young man, Augustine belonged to just such a group, though the Manichees are best described, not as a heresy as much as an entirely separate religion (for they did not even pretend to be Christians). Even so, Manichæan precepts were about the same as just described. Spirit, good; matter, bad. Fatalism about the world. When Augustine was converted to Christianity in 386, he at first rushed to embrace all the historic Christian doctrines, and even wrote a book, On the Freedom of the Will, expounding the traditional Christian viewpoint. But some years later, he slid back to many of his pre-Christian opinions, including on this subject. In reacting against the British monk Pelagius, who was taking Christian arguments about free will to an excess by saying that people could save themselves without divine grace (at least, that is what he is alleged to have argued), Augustine became the first Christian predestinarian. For reasons described above, this move fit all too well with ‘explaining’ the need for a compulsory church, and suppression of misbelievers. It also fit well with the overwhelming fashion for neoplatonic philosophy, which had underlain the gnostic and Marcionite heresies in the earliest Christian centuries, a philosophy which Augustine himself had always admired, and with which he sought to reconcile Christian teaching. But it also led to the neoplatonisation of much Christian theology. Even today, most western Christians mistake the Platonic doctrine of the immortality of the soul for the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, little realising the enormous gulf between the two ideas. And, though Augustine was certainly not guilty of that mistake, at least, nevertheless the general tenor of his influence — his fatalism; his pessimism about the material world and the human body; his highly negative views about sex — is in no small part to blame.
8) History
Finally, we have to mention history. Whatever we make of the biblical texts in making up our minds about predestination and free will, we are being simply dishonest if we do not give full weight to what the earliest Christians made of them. What did the first readers of the New Testament writings believe on this subject?
And this is the simplest question of all. Many of them expressed a view. And all of them — every last one — expressed a belief in free will, and a rejection of predestinarianism. There is quite simply nothing to be said on the other side of the argument.
As if to reinforce this point, predestination has never found any support, down to the present, in the East. And that is for the simple reason that Augustine wrote in Latin, and did not know Greek. (Did not know Greek. Let that sink in. Do we still want to take our authoritative exegesis of Scripture from a man who did not know Greek?) Consequently, Augustine was very little read in the Orthodox world and, on this subject as on several others relating to anthropology (doctrines of humanity) and theology narrowly defined (doctrines of God), the Eastern Orthodox continued teaching what Christians had always taught: free will.
To accept predestinarian readings of Scripture, it is absolutely necessary to believe that no one understood the Bible correctly for the first 350 years of Christianity — a period that includes all the people who knew the apostles and gospel writers personally. Neither Augustine, nor the Protestant Reformers, nor any of their supporters during the centuries since, has been able to find anyone (not counting gnostic heretics) who accepted their reading of Scripture.
Slam dunk, I think.
Absolutely loved this Meic
Very well argued. I did my dissertation research on how NK Christian refugees understand Evil, and it was interesting that, though they came from controlled atheistic backgrounds and came to faith later in life, almost all of them were both taught and then rejected predestination here in SK- rejected on Scriptural, philosophical, and moral grounds. Simply put, the idea of predestination and God as revealed in the Bible (and Jesus) does not make sense in a NK context.