Note for Mods: I did originally post this in the "
Denomination Specific Theology" section but was advised I'd get a better response in this section. I apologise if I have broken any rules by reposting my question here, please delete the other thread if you need to.
Hi everyone!
I recently met a Calvinist and they were talking about their belief in predestination, I didn't really understand the teaching, I should have asked more questions! Anyway it did seem like a very important part of their beliefs. I was hoping there were some Calvinists on here that could offer some insight into the doctrine for me? I'd like to understand from a Calvinist point of view, if someone wouldn't mind explaining it to me, that would be awesome.
Thanks so much for reading.
3. That they make God the author of sin
To this we reply:
(a) They make God, not the author of sin, but the author of free beings who are themselves the authors of sin. God does not decree efficiently to work evil desires or choices in men. He decrees sin only in the sense of decreeing to create and preserve those who will sin; in other words, he decrees to create and preserve human wills which, in their own self-chosen courses, will be and do evil. In all this, man attributes sin to himself and not to God, and God hates, denounces, and punishes sin.
Joseph’s brethren were none the less wicked for the fact that God meant their conduct to result in good (Gen. 50:20). Pope Leo X and his indulgences brought on the Reformation, but he was none the less guilty. Slaveholders would have been no more excusable, even if they had been able to prove that the negro race was cursed in the curse of Canaan (Gen. 9:25—“Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren”). Fitch, in Christian Spectator, 3:601—“There can be and is a purpose of God which is not an efficient purpose. It embraces the voluntary acts of moral beings, without creating those acts by divine efficiency.” See Martineau, Study, 2:107, 136.
Mat. 26:24—“The Son of man goeth even as it is written of him: but woe unto that man through whom the Son of man is betrayed! good were it for that man if he had not been born.” It was appointed that Christ should suffer, but that did not make men less free agents, nor diminish the guilt of their treachery and injustice. Robert G. Ingersoll asked: “Why did God create the devil?” We reply that God did not create the devil,—it was the devil who made the devil. God made a holy and free spirit who abused his liberty, himself created sin, and so made himself a devil.
Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:299—“Evil has been referred to 1. an extra-divine principle—to one or many evil spirits, or to fate, or to matter—at all events to a principle limiting the divine power; 2. a want or defect in the Deity himself, either his imperfect wisdom or his imperfect goodness; 3. human culpability, either a universal imperfection of human nature, or particular transgressions of the first men.” The third of these explanations is the true one: the first is irrational; the second is blasphemous. Yet this second is the explanation of Omar Khayyám, Rubáiyat, stanzas 80, 81—“Oh Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin Beset the road I was to wander in, Thou wilt not with predestined evil round Enmesh, and then impute my fall to sin. Oh Thou, who man of baser earth didst make, And even with Paradise devise the snake: For all the sin wherewith the face of man Is blackened—man’s forgiveness give—and take!” And David Harum similarly says: “If I’ve done anything to be sorry for, I’m willing to be forgiven.”
(b) The decree to permit sin is therefore not an efficient but a permissive decree, or a decree to permit, in distinction from a decree to produce by his own efficiency. No difficulty attaches to such a decree to permit sin, which does not attach to the actual permission of it. But God does actually permit sin, and it must be right for him to permit it. It must therefore be right for him to decree to permit it. If God’s holiness and wisdom and power are not impugned by the actual existence of moral evil, they are not impugned by the original decree that it should exist.
Jonathan Edwards, Works, 2:100—“The sun is not the cause of the darkness that follows its setting, but only the occasion”; 254—“If by the author of sin be meant the sinner, the agent, or the actor of sin, or the doer of a wicked thing—so it would be a reproach and blasphemy to suppose God to be the author of sin.… But if by author of sin is meant the permitter or non-hinderer of sin, and at the same time a disposer of the state of events in such a manner, for wise, holy, and most excellent ends and purposes, that sin, if it be permitted and not hindered, will most certainly follow, I do not deny that God is the author of sin; it is no reproach to the Most High to be thus the author of sin.” On the objection that the doctrine of decrees imputes to God two wills, and that he has foreordained what he has forbidden, see Bennet Tyler, Memoir and Lectures, 250–252—“A ruler may forbid treason; but his command does not oblige him to do all in his power to prevent disobedience to it. It may promote the good of his kingdom to suffer the treason to be committed, and the traitor to be punished according to law. That in view of this resulting good he chooses not to prevent the treason, does not imply any contradiction or opposition of will in the monarch.”
An ungodly editor excused his vicious journalism by saying that he was not ashamed to describe anything which Providence had permitted to happen. But “permitted” here had an implication of causation. He laid the blame of the evil upon Providence. He was ashamed to describe many things that were good and which God actually caused, while he was not ashamed to describe the immoral things which God did not cause, but only permitted men to cause. In this sense we may assent to Jonathan Edwards’s words: “The divine Being is not the author of sin, but only disposes things in such a manner that sin will certainly ensue.” These words are found in his treatise on Original Sin. In his Essay on Freedom of the will, he adds a doctrine of causation which we must repudiate: “The essence of virtue and vice, as they exist in the disposition of the heart, and are manifested in the acts of the will, lies not in their Cause but in their Nature.” We reply that sin could not be condemnable in its nature, if God and not man were its cause.
Robert Browning, Mibrab Shah: “wherefore should any evil hap to man—From ache of flesh to agony of soul—since God’s All-mercy mates All-potency? Nay, why permits he evil to himself—man’s sin, accounted such? Suppose a world purged of all pain, with fit inhabitant—Man pure of evil in thought, word and deed—were it not well? Then, wherefore otherwise? “Fairbairn answers the question, as follows, in his Christ in Modern Theology, 456—“Evil once intended may be vanquished by being allowed; but were it hindered by an act of annihilation, then the victory would rest with the evil which had compelled the Creator to retrace his steps. And, to carry the prevention backward another stage, if the possibility of evil had hindered the creative action of God, then he would have been, as it were, overcome by its very shadow. But why did he create a being capable of sinning? Only so could he create a being capable of obeying. The ability to do good implies the capability of doing evil. The engine can neither obey nor disobey, and the creature who was without this double ability might be a machine, but could be no child. Moral perfection can be attained, but cannot be created; God can make a being capable of moral action, but not a being with all the fruits of moral action garnered within him.”
(c) The difficulty is therefore one which in substance clings to all theistic systems alike—the question why moral evil is permitted under the government of a God infinitely holy, wise, powerful, and good. This problem is, to our finite powers, incapable of full solution, and must remain to a great degree shrouded in mystery. With regard to it we can only say:
Negatively,—that God does not permit moral evil because he is not unalterably opposed to sin; nor because moral evil was unforeseen and independent of his will; nor because he could not have prevented it in a moral system. Both observation and experience, which testify to multiplied instances of deliverance from sin without violation of the laws of man’s being, forbid us to limit the power of God.
Positively,—we seem constrained to say that God permits moral evil because moral evil, though in itself abhorrent to his nature, is yet the incident of a system adapted to his purpose of self-revelation; and further, because it is his wise and sovereign will to institute and maintain this system of which moral evil is an incident, rather than to withhold his self-revelation or to reveal himself through another system in which moral evil should be continually prevented by the exercise of divine power.
There are four questions which neither Scripture nor reason enables us completely to solve and to which we may safely say that only the higher knowledge of the future state will furnish the answers. These questions are, first, how can a holy God permit moral evil? secondly, how could a being created pure ever fall? thirdly, how can we be responsible for inborn depravity? fourthly, how could Christ justly suffer? The first of these questions now confronts us. A complete theodicy (Θεός, God, and δική, justice) would be a vindication of the justice of God in permitting the natural and moral evil that exists under his government. While a complete theodicy is beyond our powers, we throw some light upon God’s permission of moral evil by considering (1) that freedom of will is necessary to virtue; (2) that God suffers from sin more than does the sinner; (3) that, with the permission of sin, God provided a redemption; and, (4) that God will eventually overrule all evil for good.
It is possible that the elect angels belong to a moral system in which sin is prevented by constraining motives. We cannot deny that God could prevent sin in a moral system. But it is very doubtful whether God could prevent sin in the best moral system. The most perfect freedom is indispensable to the attainment of the highest virtue. Spurgeon: “There could have been no moral government without permission to sin. God could have created blameless puppets, but they could have had no virtue.” Behrends: “If moral beings were incapable of perversion, man would have had all the virtue of a planet,—that is, no virtue at all.” Sin was permitted, then, only because it could be overruled for the greatest good. This greatest good, we may add, is not simply the highest nobility and virtue of the creature, but also the revelation of the Creator. But for sin, God’s justice and God’s mercy alike would have been unintelligible to the universe. E. G. Robinson: “God could not have revealed his character so well without moral evil as with moral evil.”
Robert Browning, Christmas Eve, tells us that it was God’s plan to make man in his own image: “To create man, and then leave him Able, his own word saith, to grieve him; But able to glorify him too, As a mere machine could never do, That prayed or praised, all unaware Of its fitness for aught but praise or prayer, Made perfect as a thing of course.” Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 268–270, 324, holds that sin and wickedness is an absolute evil, but an evil permitted to exist because the effacement of it would mean the effacement at the same time both for God and man, of the possibility of reaching the highest spiritual good. See also Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:108; Momerie, Origin of Evil; St. Clair, Evil Physical and Moral; Voysey, Mystery of Pain, Death and Sin.
C. G. Finney, Skeletons of a Course of Theological Studies, 26, 27—“Infinite goodness, knowledge and power imply only that, if a universe were made, it would be the best that was naturally possible.” To say that God could not be the author of a universe in which there is so much of evil, he says, “assumes that a better universe, upon the whole, was a natural possibility. It assumes that a universe of moral beings could, under a moral government administered in the wisest and best manner, be wholly restrained from sin; but this needs proof, and never can be proved.… The best possible universe may not be the best conceivable universe. Apply the legal maxim, ‘The defendant is to have the benefit of the doubt, and that in proportion to the established character of his reputation.’ There is so much clearly indicating the benevolence of God, that we may believe in his benevolence, where we cannot see it.”
For advocacy of the view that God cannot prevent evil in a moral system, see Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 17; Young, The Mystery, or Evil not from God; Bledsoe, Theodicy; N. W. Taylor, Moral Government, 1:288–349; 2:327–356. According to Dr. Taylor’s view, God has not a complete control over the moral universe; moral agents can do wrong under every possible influence to prevent it; God prefers, all things considered, that all his creatures should be holy and happy, and does all in his power to make them so; the existence of sin is not on the whole for the best; sin exists because God cannot prevent it in a moral system; the blessedness of God is actually impaired by the disobedience of his creatures. For criticism of these views, see Tyler, Letters on the New Haven Theology, 120, 219. Tyler argues that election and non-election imply power in God to prevent sin; that permitting is not mere submiting to something which he could not possibly prevent. We would add that as a matter of fact God has preserved holy angels, and that there are “just men” who have been “made perfect” (Heb. 12:23) without violating the laws of moral agency. We infer that God could have so preserved Adam. The history of the church leads us to believe that there is no sinner so stubborn that God cannot renew his heart,—even a Saul can be turned into a Paul. We hesitate therefore to ascribe limits to God’s power. While Dr. Taylor held that God could not prevent sin in a moral system, that is, in any moral system, Dr. Park is understood to hold the greatly preferable view that God cannot prevent sin in the best moral system. Flint, Christ’s Kingdom upon Earth, 59—“The alternative is, not evil or no evil, but evil or the miraculous prevention of evil.” See Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:406–422.
But even granting that the present is the best moral system, and that in such a system evil cannot be prevented consistently with God’s wisdom and goodness, the question still remains how the decree to initiate such a system can consist with God’s fundamental attribute of holiness. Of this insoluble mystery we must say as Dr. John Brown, in Spare Hours, 273, says of Arthur H. Hallam’s Theodicæa Novissima: “As was to be expected, the tremendous subject remains where he found it. His glowing love and genius cast a gleam here and there across its gloom, but it is as brief as the lightning in the collied night—the jaws of darkness do devour it up—this secret belongs to God. Across its deep and dazzling darkness, and from out its abyss of thick cloud, ‘all dark, dark, irrecoverably dark,’ no steady ray has ever or will ever come; over its face its own darkness must brood, till he to whom alone the darkness and the light are both alike, to whom the night shineth as the day, says ‘Let there be light!’ ”
We must remember, however, that the decree of redemption is as old as the decree of the apostasy. The provision of salvation in Christ shows at how great a cost to God was permitted the fall of the race in Adam. He who ordained sin ordained also an atonement for sin and a way of escape from it. Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:388—“The permission of sin has cost God more than it has man. No sacrifice and suffering on account of sin has been undergone by any man, equal to that which has been endured by an incarnate God. This shows that God is not acting selfishly in permitting it.” On the permission of moral evil, see Butler, Analogy, Bohn’s ed., 177, 232—“The Government of God, and Christianity, as Schemes imperfectly Comprehended”; Hill, System of Divinity, 528–559; Ulrici, art.: Theodicée, in Herzog’s Encyclopädie; Cunningham, Historical Theology, 2:416–489; Patton, on Retribution and the Divine Purpose, in Princeton Rev., 1878:16–23; Bib. Sac., 20:471–488; Ward, The Witness of Sin.