By Grace Through Faith

A response to the Calvinism-Arminianism debate

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

Go up to any Christian at random and ask what he or she thinks about Calvinism and Arminianism and you will most probably receive a look of puzzlement.

Even so, the debate, which can be recast in terms of that over the tension between the doctrines of God’s sovereignty and human freewill, carries major practical implications for the assurance of believers of their salvation.

And understanding the centrality of God’s unconditional justification and the eternal security and perseverance for the people of God the topic cannot be brushed aside as a specialised one and therefore unimportant for most practical purposes of the laity.

This is not a professional attempt to deal with the issue, but merely some of the writer’s thoughts on a possible way forward in the apparently incontinent debate, based on the little that he knows about the subject in particular and about theology in general.

Much less is this an attempt to take one side over the other. Both the Calvinistic and Arminian positions on God’s sovereignty and human freewill have positive aspects not to be rashly undermined. Indeed, both positions will be able to find equally substantial justification in the Scriptures, which do not emphasise God’s sovereignty in such a way that it overrides human freedom and vice versa.

Among other things, the Calvinistic viewpoint of predestination holds that human beings have no real freedom but that everything that has happened, is happening and will happen has been eternally decreed by God. This viewpoint holds that since God is directly responsible for every event in history true Christians may rest secure in the knowledge that if they have been chosen for salvation they will surely persevere to the very end by the grace of God. The difficulty with this position is that it makes suffering and evil in a certain sense necessary for the fullness of God’s purposes in the history of mankind. As can be seen, this viewpoint emphasises God’s sovereignty.

In contrast to that, the Arminian viewpoint among other things speaks of real human freedom in the sense where human beings make choices independently of their Creator and hence God cannot expect all His plans for mankind to succeed – indeed, He may persuade and coax human beings but the final outcome rests in the hands of people rather than God. The advantage of holding this view is that it promotes individual responsibility in Christian living and discipleship. This viewpoint emphasises human freewill. Nonetheless, it seems to be antagonistic to the idea of an unfailing providence of God in which believers can rest eternally secure.

A biblical response, however, would have to find a middle way between the two viewpoints, since the Bible so abundantly and clearly attests to the reality of God’s sovereignty and at the same time man’s freewill.

An insight can be gained from reexamining the passage in Genesis 2 depicting the sovereignty of God and yet the responsibility of mankind. The whole context makes it clear that the Lord God is directing and governing everything, including the fact that mankind is allowed the freedom to choose between God and self as when Scripture states that it was God who planted the tree of knowledge of good and evil and afterward commanded mankind not to eat from that particular tree.

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