By Grace Through Faith

A response to the Calvinism-Arminianism debate

Friday, Jun. 26, 2009 Posted: 10:34:38AM HKT

The ultra-Calvinistic position, as laid out in A W Pink’s classic Sovereignty of God, makes an extremely convincing case for the overriding sovereignty of God. Technically speaking, it is indeed possible for God to have chosen to govern human beings in this way. And yet, what God is able to do is not to be confused with what God has chosen to do. Scripture abundantly attests to the fact that while God, being who He is, could have done things in countless different ways, yet chose to do them in a way that radically respects His personhood and that of the human race. We only need to consider how God took great pains to be incarnated as a human being in the person of His one and only Son Jesus Christ, teaching and loving human beings, as opposed to coming in the form of a mighty angel demanding and compelling obedience from them, to be given to the view that God highly values real human freedom.

Returning to Scripture, mankind was commanded not to eat from one particular tree. They were told that they could, and were supposed to, eat from all the other trees, including the tree of life. The act of eating is an interesting symbol of human responsibility in that, on the one hand, it is a channel through which God’s purpose is fulfilled in the human being and, on the other hand, it does not require an impossible amount of effort; indeed, it requires minimal effort.

Believers are required to fulfill love toward their neighbours, that is, everybody else. Yet this ethical demand does not come first, according to the Lord Jesus Christ. When He summarised the whole of God’s requirements of mankind, He put forth “love God” before “love your neighbour”. The Son of God, having come from heaven and being the very essence of God, understood the impossibility of keeping the royal law by human effort alone.

Thus, He commanded the Jews to love God before loving His ethical injunctions. And the Israelites, schooled as they were from childhood in the ways of obedience, understood what this meant. Where is God revealed? Surely in His creation, but perfectly in His Word. They were to meditate on His Word. It is instructive that the longest chapter in the Bible is a Psalm extolling the virtues of loving the Word of God. The Jews also knew to pray to the God the Bible revealed, since God relates to His people not merely as objects of instruction but as His children whose presence He enjoys and whose cries for heavenly provision He heeds.

Perhaps it is the case with the people of God that He does not do anything in and through His people except when they hear the preaching of and read His Word and pray to Him. And yet when they actually devote themselves to a life of meditation on the Scriptures and prayer, He works world-changing miracles through them and through His obedient bride and Church consummates His Kingdom on earth.

Such a view preserves both the sovereignty of God – in that it is God’s unstoppable power that is doing the work through the little channels of faith set up by His people and making it possible for them to keep the ethical injunction to love their neighbours and bring salvation to the world – and human freewill – in that it is the believers that must choose to give themselves to the discipline of a regular meditation of His Word and of prayer, a doable and effort-wise insignificant thing – combines the advantages of both viewpoints and avoids the difficulties of either one.

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