Articles
False Notions of God's Sovereignty
You might think that the Calvinistic position on God’s sovereignty is just a matter of theological argument. But here’s a real life application of how damaging this doctrine can be: A young woman recently told about a session with a denominational grief counselor. The counselor related her own story of being raped several years ago. The woman actually said that God had sent the rapist to assault her so that she would suffer and thus be able to relate to people and help them through their own grief. Her view of divine sovereignty effectively rules out human free will and attributes everything that happens in this world to God’s sovereign causation.
When the Christian woman replied that she didn’t believe that God was directly responsible for such acts, the counselor suggested that she was a Deist. A Deist is someone who believes God exists but has no interaction with His creation. This is a monstrous doctrine which makes God responsible for every act of evil that occurs. But Calvinism wants to have it both ways, and theologians will argue that God’s determinism and man’s free will are both equally operative in everything that happens.
“God causes all things to happen, but he does so in such a way that he somehow upholds our ability to make willing, responsible choices, choices that have real and eternal results, and for which we are held accountable” (Grudem, Systematic Theology 321, emphasis in all quotes his). This brings up an obvious question: “Does God cause the evil that happens on earth?”
Grudem affirms that “God did, indeed, cause evil events to come about and evil deeds to be done. But we must remember that in all these passages it is very clear that Scripture nowhere shows God as directly doing anything evil, but rather as bringing about evil deeds through the willing actions of moral creatures” (ibid 323).
To explain this obvious contradiction Grudem postulates the idea of “concurrence”: “God cooperates with created things in every action, directing their distinctive properties to cause them to act as they do” (ibid 317). So God “causes all things to happen, [even] evil events to come about” but sin is somehow blamed on man’s free will. Thus we have this nonsensical assertion: “(We) affirm that in one sense events are fully (100 percent) caused by God and fully (100 percent) caused by the creature as well” (ibid 319).
Thus, there are two ways of looking at this:
1) God’s sovereignty includes the independent functioning of natural law as well as the free will of mankind to generate events upon the earth. However, God – who is the ultimate authority as sovereign Creator and Manager of worldly events – has the right to use both nature and human behavior, including sin, to foster and achieve His will. This means that not every single act on earth – one’s every breath; the growth of a flower; the genocide of a people – is specifically caused by God.
2) God’s sovereignty does not allow for the independent functioning of nature or mankind; everything is the result of what God wills to happen. Every rape, murder, lie, theft, etc. has God as its ultimate author, yet man participates in such evil acts by free will. But God wills such evil in order to bring about good: “Thus, when evil … trouble(s) us, we can have from the doctrine of providence a deeper assurance that ‘God causes all things to work together for good …’ (Rom. 8:28 NASB)” (ibid 327).
I hold to the first proposition for several reasons, but one of them involves the very first sin. Though it is hard to do, try to imagine a world newly minted by God. The earth, including the garden of Eden, is pristine, sinless and nonviolent. If, as Calvinism posits, God’s sovereignty is the ultimate cause of all things, sin must enter the world through God’s will; it is God’s desire that Adam and Eve sin so that He can bring good out of it.
It is not anti-Scriptural to say that God created Satan originally as a benevolent being; that Satan became corrupt in circumstances not explained to us; that God allowed Satan access to Eve in order to test both her and Adam; that God knew what they would do; that God already had a plan in place to provide atonement for sin; that God acted out that plan through Abraham’s descendants resulting in Christ coming into the world; that God allowed sinful men to react with violent opposition to Jesus and allowed their violence to succeed in the crucifying of Jesus. The problem arises when one asserts that all these things were predetermined by God, not merely foreknown and guided by the sovereignty of God to the outcome of redemption.
Though they deny it, Calvinists are stuck with making God responsible for sin – in spite of their attempt to blame sin on “secondary causes”: “Human beings do cause evil and are responsible for it. Though God ordained that it would come about, both in general terms and in specific details, yet God is removed from actually doing evil, and his bringing it about through ‘secondary causes’ does not impugn his holiness or render him blameworthy” (ibid 328). Why not, since sin, from the very first one to all that have occurred in history since, was determined by God?! This is madness, and it paints God in the worst possible light, all to preserve the ill-conceived notion of the all-encompassing sovereignty of God. It reduces the human experience to a cosmic charade in which God has predetermined everything yet holds man responsible for what God ordained must happen. Then man is judged to be evil and worthy of eternal damnation because he carried out the sins God predetermined must occur. This is head-spinning nonsense.
A note on Rom 8:28: The word “all” or “all things” is a hyperbole which is always defined by the context. In Romans 8 Paul is summarizing the wonderful things God has done to help sinful man overcome both his weakness and the guilt of his sin. Paul’s anguished cry in 7:24 – “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” – is answered in chapter 8: the effects of sin have been overcome by Christ (8:1-3); God’s people have help from both the Spirit and Christ (8:9-11); we can call upon God as “Abba, Father” (8:15-17); the Spirit aids us in prayer (8:26-27); etc. Thus, all these things God has done for us work together for our good; they secure for us victory over the flesh and sin. God does not send a rapist to savagely abuse a helpless woman to “make her better.” What an abominable doctrine.
