© 2012 by Cory Hartman.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author, except in the case of brief quotations with proper and adequate citations of the source. Requests for permission to reproduce may be submitted to the author at pastorcory@gmail.com.

Scripture quoted by permission. All scripture quotations are taken from the NET Bible® copyright © 1996-2006 by Biblical Studies Press, L.L.C. www.bible.org All rights reserved. This material is available in its entirety as a free download or online web use at http://www.netbible.org/.

Cover design by Cory Hartman.

ISBN-13: 978-1468150308

ISBN-10: 1468150308

dedicated

to Drs. Win Corduan, Ted Dorman, and Jim Spiegel

for being nice guys

and to Kelly

for being chosen for me before she was chosen by me

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Why I Wrote This Book

Part One: Freedom and Destiny Defined

Chapter One: God and Time

Chapter Two: God’s Will and Ours

Chapter Three: Freedom and Choice

Chapter Four: God and Personal Relationship

Chapter Five: Moral Freedom

Part Two: How Dare God?

Chapter Six: Evil and Guilt

Chapter Seven: God and the Damned

Chapter Eight: Conflict in the Will of God

Chapter Nine: God and Evil

Part Three: Freedom and Destiny Applied

Chapter Ten: Living Your Destiny

Chapter Eleven: What Difference Does It Make?

Chapter Twelve: Freedoms of the Free Churches

Postscript: How I Got Here

Appendices

Appendix A: Biblical Terms for "the Will of God"

Appendix B: Comparison of Calvinism, Arminianism, and Semi-Pelagianism

Appendix C: Freedom and the State

Notes

Acknowledgments

Thanks to my wife, Kelly, for believing in this project all the way and sometimes wanting its publication more than I did, and for being my biggest fan. I love you.

Thanks to those who read all or part of the manuscript in some version of its development, including Jim Spiegel and Ted Dorman and especially Ben Winters and Kevin Moore. Thanks also to the last of these for inadvertently inspiring the entire monstrosity.

Thanks to Robbie Halstead for asking me about the progress of the book enough to push me to finish it.

Thanks to Ted Kluck for believing in me as a writer and wanting to do whatever he could do to make the publication of this book a reality.

Thanks to my parents, Daryl and Gloria Hartman, for offering to finance this book’s publication.

Thanks (again) to the people on the dedicatory page for the reasons cited.

And thank you for reading an acknowledgments section of names you don’t know. That’s impressive to me; I never do that. You’re one thorough cat. I think you’re going to like this book.

Introduction

Why I Wrote This Book

Tell me if this has ever happened to you: you’re in a social gathering with some good friends and new acquaintances. Everybody is warm and open and relaxed, because they know that they are in the company of like-minded people. So everyone at the gathering, including you, is speaking candidly and unguardedly, without fear of offending anyone or putting their foot in their mouth.

At a brief lull in the conversation, you reach for the chips and salsa on the coffee table just as one of your newly-met fellows says, “Did you hear what [presidential candidate] said today? Is he a boob or what?” Your stomach and throat tighten, because you made a small campaign contribution to Candidate Boob last week, and you’re looking forward to your complimentary campaign bumper sticker arriving in the mail. Suddenly you’re grudgingly thankful that the sticker wasn’t already on your car when you pulled up to the house. To your consternation and disappointment, the others gathered around the coffee table take up the taunt against Candidate Boob. You’re the sole exception. And you wonder, how did this happen? Ten seconds ago I thought I was in the company of friends. I thought I was accepted. Now I find out that if they know who I’m voting for, they’ll think I’m an idiot or something worse.

Maybe you’ve never experienced this unsettling feeling around a political candidate, but you’ve probably felt it in some context. There’s nothing that feels quite like other people assuming they know what you think, because everybody thinks that, or because only morons or infidels would think the opposite. Or maybe they neither endorse nor deny your position but simply ignore it because they have never considered it before.

I felt something like this where-do-I-fit-in feeling when I read an essay by a friend a few years back. A portion of his essay read: “Underlying all of Judeo Christian [sic] theology is the concept of ‘free will,’ which essentially means that every person is free to choose right or wrong.” This statement and others like it make me rather uncomfortable, because though I am a Christian, I am not sure I can sign onto it. It all depends on how one defines “free will” and “choose.” I had a hunch that what I mean by those things aren’t what my friend had in mind. Apparently my beliefs on free will weren’t even on my friend’s radar screen, or if they were, he believed at the time that they are outside the bounds of Judeo-Christian theology. Now if this were one essay by one guy, this would not be a big deal. But I know dozens of Christians who would agree with the statement I quoted above without a second thought. It would not even cross their minds that there are concerns about it from within the historic Christian faith. Or if they do know there are concerns—well, the people who came up with them must be way out in left field.

This book contains what I think regarding freedom and destiny and why I think it. Admittedly, it is written to persuade, but it is also written to explain. I cannot count the number of times I have encountered an opportunity to express my beliefs on these issues and have totally failed—either by mixing up my words, or by starting in the middle instead of at the beginning, or by not having enough time to express myself, or by being easily offended, or by avoiding discussion altogether. This book is first of all my opportunity to explain myself thoroughly to all my friends and relations in a way that I cannot possibly do in conversation.

Yet I also write because I feel like I have some obligation to do so. See, I have changed my mind radically on these matters, and I think a radical change like that carries with it a special responsibility to explain the new thing in a way that’s comprehensible to people who know only the old thing.

So what are we talking about? The answers to a number of questions:

• How does God relate to time (ch. 1)?

• How does God get his way (ch. 2)? (A.k.a., what’s the deal with predestination?)

• What does it mean to have free will, and how is it compatible with predestination (ch. 3)?

• Is it possible for people to have a personal relationship with God if their lives are predestined by him (ch. 4)?

• What does it mean for Christ to set us free and how does he do it (ch. 5)?

• What is the nature of evil, and what is necessary for someone to be guilty of it (ch. 6)?

• Does God’s plan force people into hell (ch. 7)?

• If God wants everyone to be saved, why aren’t they (ch. 8)?

• Why is there evil in the world (ch. 9)?

• If God predestined everything, why would we do anything (ch. 10)?

• Do the answers to these questions make any practical difference (ch. 11)?

• What makes “Free Churches” free (ch. 12)?

Before we dive in, a couple of disclaimers. First, I’m a pastor. In my preaching and teaching and writing for my church I spend almost all of my time talking about non-negotiables, things that are clear from Scripture that are necessary for us to know and act on for our salvation, things that if someone disagrees with they are risking the state of their soul. This book is different. Don’t get me wrong—I think the issues contained in this book are important or I wouldn’t be writing about them. However, there are other things that are more important. A person can thoroughly disagree with a whole lot of what I write here and still be saved. I don’t believe that a person can thoroughly disagree with the Nicene Creed and still be saved. So let’s keep this stuff in perspective. But if the things in this book are important but not that important, why am I taking the trouble to write about them at all? Exactly because there is room for a diversity of opinion on these questions, and many American Christians don’t realize that. They think their answers are as non-negotiable and straight-ahead obvious as John 3:16, and I’m writing to demonstrate that that’s not so.

Second, I am an evangelical Protestant Christian assuming that most people reading this are something like me. Therefore my work carries certain unargued presuppositions (for instance, about the divine inspiration and reliability of the Bible) that I share with most of my audience. Christians from other branches of the faith (and even some from my own) may not share all of these assumptions with me; nevertheless, I expect them to be able to enjoy this book as well because of the common ground we do have. I even believe that non-Christians may enjoy this book, as long as they keep in mind that I have made little attempt to meet them where they are. In any case, if something here sets you thinking in a profitable direction on the road to knowledge and life, more power to you.

Finally, I opted not to use footnotes or endnotes because this is not intended to be a treatise primarily for academic types and I didn’t want to clog up the text. Nevertheless, I thought it necessary to point out some of the influences behind my argument in a prose-style Notes section at the end of the book.

Part One:

Freedom and Destiny Defined

Chapter One

God and Time

The Creation of Time

I once had a theology professor who said, “Every good theology lecture starts at Genesis 1.” So, following his lead, I start at Genesis 1 too: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” There are two things in this seemingly simple statement that I want to point out. First, “in the beginning.” In the beginning of what? It would seem to be “the heavens and the earth.” If God created something “in the beginning,” that “beginning” presumably does not mean the beginning of him, but rather the beginning of the thing he created. Second, “the heavens and the earth.” What is that? Well, from the perspective of an ancient Middle Easterner, there were three components to the universe: the earth, what was above the earth (i.e., “the heavens”), and what was below the surface of the earth (subterranean ocean and/or the place of the dead). So “the heavens and the earth” is an ancient Middle Eastern way of saying “the universe.”

So, what’s the universe? There a number of valid ways to answer this question, but let me suggest this definition: the universe is the Land of Space and Time. We don’t know what it is like outside the universe, but we do know that inside it there are three dimensions of space (length, width, and height) and a fourth dimension called “time” that allows for change through the same point in space. There may be even more dimensions than these, but for most of us these four are the only ones that matter.

As I observed previously, God existed before the universe. Therefore, God existed before space and time. Maybe “before” is not quite the right word, because “before” implies time! But the point is that God exists independently of the space-time continuum that is the universe. He is outside its bounds. Then again, “outside” doesn’t work either, because “outside” implies space! But I think you get my drift. Those metrics of space and time don’t apply to God; he isn’t characterized by them or bound by them.

Now, when we think of God creating the universe out of nothing, we have no trouble conceiving of him creating everything that fits within its entire span of space at once. This is corroborated by the First Law of Thermodynamics, which states that as long as the universe has existed, there has always been the same amount of matter and energy in the universe that simply gets transformed into different combinations and arrangements and modes. Thanks to the Big Bang, the amount of space that this matter and energy inhabits has increased immensely (and still is increasing). But I think we can safely say that in creating the universe (Gen. 1:1), God created all of its matter and energy at once, and what follows from Genesis 1:2 to the end of the chapter is simply his transformation and organization of that matter and energy from chaos into order.

So, thinking about God creating the extents of all the spatial dimensions of the universe at once is easy. But have you ever thought about God creating all of time at once? You may have thought of God snapping his fingers and creating all the matter and energy from here to the furthest galaxy at once. But have you thought of God creating every moment from the first nanosecond to the last at once too? This might seem hard to imagine, but it follows directly from God being independent of the universe. If he is independent of its space, he is also independent of its time. And if he created its breadth of space at once, isn’t it probable that he created its breadth of time at once too?

God, the Novelist

Let me give you an analogy that might make this easier to picture. Imagine a brilliant novelist who was able to write an entire novel in an instant. In a single moment, the inspiration of every word said by every character and every narration jumped to his mind in a complete package, and in the same moment it jumped from his mind to paper. From the perspective of the novelist, he created the first chapter and the last simultaneously. But would it seem that way from the perspective of a character in the novel? Not at all. A character stuck in the timeline of the story has to slog through every chapter, from the first page to the last, in order to reach the story’s conclusion. Whereas for the novelist the beginning and the end came in a single instant, for the characters in the story the plot unfolds gradually over a single day, or a year, or thousands of years depending on how long the novelist dictated the story should go.

In our world, God is like the novelist, and you and I are two of billions of characters in his story. We experience the story as a succession of events that must be experienced through time. But God experiences the story as something he created, entire and intact, at once. We only experience the part of space and time that we happen to inhabit. God on the other hand sees spread out before him the entire map and timeline of everything, and he views it simultaneously.

Before I move on to discuss why I think this concept is important, I want to make a couple of comments. First, I should point out that if this is true, we have no idea what existence is like on God’s side of the equation, outside of our space and time. Some have speculated that outside this universe, there is no space and time, and that God exists unchanging in a single eternal moment, an idea inherited from the ancient Greeks. Others believe that God does inhabit time, but that his abode is an alternate and infinite time—a separate timeline from ours stretching forever in both directions. I don’t think we can really know either way.

Second, this story of God is told in the first person; in other words, God himself is one of the characters! He is both outside the story as the author and inside the story as its principal character. This makes the Incarnation even more profound. Jesus, the assistant of the author (“All things were created by him”—John 1:3), took on the form of a human character. Like us, he had a birth and a death and only experienced one thing at a time. This is truly mind-boggling.

Third, if this analogy is accurate, that means that our story will come to a final conclusion someday. But of course, this is what the Bible says. As Peter puts it, “the heavens will disappear with a horrific noise, and the celestial bodies will melt away in a blaze, and the earth and every deed done on it will be laid bare” (2 Pet. 3:10). It sounds like the end of the book is also the End of the Book, that the book itself is tossed into the fire when it is through being read. The Bible also says that God will create “new heavens and a new earth”—a new story, The Universe, Part Two. The characters that he loves he will carry over into the sequel. As for those whom he rejects . . . who knows? Perhaps he will create a different, dark story for them. Or perhaps they will remain trapped in the ashes of the first book in God’s fireplace as it were, where “the fire that consumes them will not die out” (Isa. 66:24).

An Out-of-Time God Makes Sense

The Bible never comes right out and gives the explanation about God and time that I have just given, and I may very well be mistaken. Nevertheless, I find that this way of looking at things makes sense of many things in Scripture that otherwise are harder to understand. For instance, take the “omnis”—God’s omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience. By “omnipresence” we mean that God is accessible everywhere at every time, and “omniscience” means that he knows everything about everything in the universe. These make perfect sense if God sees everything at every time and every place simultaneously. This also gives new meaning to God’s omnipotence. If God created all things in space and in time, it shows he has ultimate power over every molecule and every moment because he put it there. Or to go back to the novelist analogy, can you imagine a novelist not having unlimited power over his novel to do with it as he wished?

I have also puzzled over the doctrine of God’s immutability—that is, his changelessness (as in, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever”—Heb. 13:8). God’s changelessness makes a lot of sense if he looks down on his entire creation through time as well as space. This means that your prayer and a prayer of King David are heard by God at the same moment, from his perspective. For us characters in the story, 3,000 years have elapsed between you and David, but from God’s perspective, we all exist simultaneously, albeit on different pages of the same book, so both prayers reach him at the same time. Thus, you and David are praying to literally the same God.

This also makes sense of another curious statement of Peter: “[A] single day is like a thousand years with the Lord and a thousand years are like a single day” (2 Pet. 3:8). If we and God are on separate timelines, one can see how this is true. God can meditate on one day of our story for a thousand of his years, or he could skim through a thousand years of our history in one divine day, just as if you were quickly rifling through the pages of a huge history textbook. Or to use another analogy, God can rewind and replay one day of the video of our history for a thousand years, or he could spend a day fast-forwarding through a thousand years of ours.

As another example, this model explains how anyone before Christ’s coming could have been acceptable to God. Though Jesus died on a certain day in our history, from the perspective of God, that day was created simultaneously with all other days when he created the universe. Thus, from God’s perspective, Christ’s sacrifice for our sins has existed from the beginning. So for example, one person Christ’s sacrifice applied to before he died was Abraham, who “believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness” (Gal. 3:6). I have often wondered how God could consider Abraham to be righteous when the sacrifice that made him righteous wouldn’t be offered for another 2,000 years. God could do so because when Abraham believed on one page of the story of the universe, God saw the sacrifice of Christ already accomplished in a later chapter, which made Abraham righteous, along with all others who share his faith.

I have sometimes daydreamed about what it would be like to be a character in an epic story like The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars (the original trilogy, at any rate). It always looked so exciting to be one of those heroes. Even in the worst times in those stories, when hope seemed dimmest, there is this inexorable momentum toward a thunderous and glorious conclusion, because that’s the way great stories end. I felt like those fictitious heroes had such meaning in what they did because it was part of a great, well-crafted narrative that was larger-than-life and so made them larger-than-life. It took a long time for me to realize that I am a character in a story far greater than any epic work that humans have ever produced. Shakespeare could not have written more truly that “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” But there is nothing “mere” about it. I always used to think of the Bible as a book from back then; I didn’t realize that I am living in it now. For surely the Bible describes many chapters before our time, but it also describes a chapter yet to come. And we are acting out the middle. We ourselves are part of the great story, the Greatest Story, the story from which all other great stories derive their greatness, and so from which we derive our greatness as the offspring of the mind of the Great Storyteller (Acts 17:28).

Chapter Two

God’s Will and Ours

The Novelist and Providence

I’d like to introduce you to a theological word that you have probably heard, but you may not know what it means. That word is “providence.” The doctrine of God’s providence is the teaching about how God maintains an active, governing presence in the world that he created and how he directs it toward his desired end. One biblical comment about God’s providence is: “The Son [of God, i.e. Jesus] . . . sustains all things by his powerful word” (Heb. 1:3). In other words, God hasn’t simply designed the world like a watch, wound it up, and let it tick. Rather, he continues to sustain the world to keep it together. If you agree with my model of God and time above—the model of the novelist—this concept is self-evident. According to that scheme, creation and providence are not separate activities of God, but rather providence is one aspect of creation. “Providence” simply expresses that every day, not just the first, is a direct product of his once-for-all creative power, because his creation encompasses all of space and time.

If indeed providence is a part of creation, then this tells us a lot about God’s foreknowledge—that is, about how he knows things before they happen. God says in Isaiah that he “announces the end from the beginning” (Isa. 46:10), and so a significant portion of the Bible involves predicting events before they happen. But if all time was created by God in an instant, then God created the future when he created everything. He planned it, made it, and owns it. Therefore, he foreknows all things because he foreordains all things, like the novelist who knows the last chapter of his own book. In fact, if God wrote the whole story, and did so in an instant, he cannot know anything without having made it so. As David put it, “All the days ordained for me were recorded in your scroll before one of them came into existence” (Ps. 139:16). Everything happens as he wrote it, even as we characters experience it one page at a time. Everything that you or I do or that anything in all creation does was predetermined by God. This all flows necessarily from the idea that God created all of time as well as space at once and is outside it, an idea that, as we have seen, seems to make a lot of sense of the Bible.

This way of looking at providence is also in perfect harmony with its goal-oriented aspect. Despite disagreements among orthodox Christians over how much of a role God plays in the world, all agree that he is somehow directing it toward its appointed end—the new creation. If God created the end at the same divine moment that he created the beginning and everything in between, it is easy to understand how God makes the creation move in the direction he wants it to. The direction is part of the creation itself. He didn’t just point the gun at the target, close his eyes, and fire. He deliberately chose the bullet’s trajectory across each nanometer, past each molecule, all the way to the bullseye.

Nevertheless, the idea that God determines everything that happens makes many people anxious, even irate. I hope to address all of the reasons that this is so in this treatise. For now, let’s just look at one objection to this view: “If God ordains everything that happens, doesn’t that seem a bit counterintuitive? Let’s say I go to McDonald’s and choose the Big Mac instead of the chicken sandwich. If God ordains everything, that means he made me choose the Big Mac. But that doesn’t make sense. Nobody ordered the Big Mac but me. I didn’t feel anyone force me to choose it. I didn’t feel anyone pick up my legs and force me to walk into the restaurant. The only one who wanted to go in there was me, and I chose the Big Mac without interference. How could God have predestined a choice that I wanted all by myself? In short, how could my actions be predetermined without me feeling it?”

God’s Determination and What I Want

Before I give you my answer, let me offer an answer that some atheists might give. Some argue that everything that happens in the world is predetermined and inevitable, not because God ordained it, but because of the laws of nature. If you take a billiard ball and roll it into another billiard ball, the resultant trajectories of those two balls can be predicted by the laws of physics. These people believe that what happens inside a person, or between a lot of persons, is basically an extremely complex series of collisions of billiard balls! Every thought, every emotion, and every decision happens as a direct and necessary result of what came before it. Theoretically, you could predict anything anyone does, if only you knew all the influences on that person.

With reference to the Big Mac, this kind of person—let’s call the person a “determinist”—would answer that you were predetermined to choose the Big Mac not in spite of your desires but because of them. By virtue of your genetic makeup that caused your taste-buds and the taste region of your brain to be formed in a specific way, and/or because of the aggregate result of marketing ploys, past experiences, and friends’ recommendations, you inevitably wanted the Big Mac more than the chicken sandwich. You chose it because you desired it; you desired it because of your biological nature and the influences of the world around you that combine to produce your desires. We cannot be predetermined to choose against our desires, because our desires are how our predetermining natures and external influences express themselves.

Do I agree with determinists? Not with the atheist kind. First, these folks believe that the human person is nothing more than physical matter, that a person has no spiritual nature. I believe that human beings have both a physical and spiritual nature. Consequently, when I consider the influence of “nature” on our desires, I am not just considering our DNA but also our spiritual essence.

Second, I don’t believe that one’s nature and external influences are the ultimate causes of our actions. Rather, I believe that God is the ultimate cause, and nature and external influences are means he uses to direct one’s behavior. And because he is sovereign, God can override the effects that natural causes typically produce and replace them with effects that he as a divine cause produces—that is, he can work miracles. In this way he can make people to desire to do things they would not naturally desire to do, just as he can heal people from sickness who would naturally remain sick or make what would naturally remain water to become wine (or, depending upon your religious tradition, grape juice).

Most importantly, because God is the ultimate cause, our predetermined actions have meaning and purpose. Our steps were planned by a personal God. This is a far cry from the universe of the atheistic determinist. For that person, our actions are determined without purpose and are meaningless. Spiritually (if not metaphysically) that view is akin to that of the ancients who believed that the movements of the stars dictated the destinies of gods and men for no purpose. By contrast, I believe that God ordains our steps for a reason.

But aside from these corrections, yes, I basically agree with the determinist. As a Christian, though, the way I put it is, “God achieves his will through our wills.” He does not jerk our limbs independent of our mental control as if we were marionettes. Rather, he accomplishes his sovereign purposes through what we ourselves want, which is a result of our natures and our external influences, both of which he made and governs.

There’s an example from the Bible that illustrates this well. When the people of Israel were slaves in Egypt, God sent Moses to tell the Pharaoh of Egypt to release his people from slavery. Pharaoh was, shall we say, reluctant. Every time Moses told Pharaoh to let God’s people go, his heart became “hardened,” a Hebrew idiom for stubbornness. What is interesting is who did the hardening. Sometimes (Ex. 7:3; 9:12; 10:1, 20, 27; 11:9; 14:8) God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Other times (Ex. 8:15, 32; 9:34) Pharaoh hardened his own heart. Still other times (Ex. 7:13, 22; 8:19; 9:7, 35), Pharaoh’s heart just became hard, seemingly of its own.

What does this indicate? Were God and Pharaoh taking turns making him stubborn? Possibly. But I think we are to see all of these examples as a whole. I conclude that God and Pharaoh were making Pharaoh stubborn together. God’s desire was for Pharaoh to keep Israel in Egypt to give God an opportunity to show his power. God accomplished this desire by means of Pharaoh’s desire to hold on to his slaves. He made Pharaoh stubborn through Pharaoh’s own desire to be stubborn. Thus, God achieved his will through Pharaoh’s will.

The Problem of Adam and Eve

Now, all of this is great, but there is one very disturbing problem that may already have crossed your mind—Adam and Eve. There are actually two problems connected with these two, and the first is this. God created Adam and Eve “good” with pure, godly natures. They were not tainted by sin and obeyed God naturally. They were located in an environment that was also “good,” and they had intimate communion with God. So, if people inevitably choose according to nature and external influences, then how could Adam and Eve possibly have chosen to disobey God willfully? On the face of it, there seems to be nothing in their nature or environment that could possibly eventuate in such a choice. Therefore, Adam and Eve’s fall seems to be a strong argument against my thesis that our choices are determined through nature and external influences.

To answer this objection, we need to dig into Adam and Eve’s nature and external influences a little more deeply. First, doubtless their natures were morally pure and naturally did the right thing. However, there were some good desires that arose from their natures that could be manipulated to evil ends. “[T]he woman saw that the tree produced fruit that was good for food, was attractive to the eye, and was desirable for making one wise” (Gen. 3:6). We see in this sentence three of Eve’s desires that are good of themselves. First, Eve was physically hungry, which was part of her good biological nature that God had designed. Second, she had a God-given aesthetic sense—she was attracted to beauty within God’s creation, which is also good. And third, she was intellectually curious, desiring wisdom, which also is good. So her desires in and of themselves were good, arising as they were from her good nature.

However, the external influences on Eve, though good overall, were corrupted by the existence of the serpent (Satan). In the conversation she had with Satan, Eve was suddenly in an unaccustomed environment. Rather than all her external influences being positive, she was now encountering a profoundly negative influence on her behavior, the Tempter. He was able to persuade her to direct her basically good impulses towards a forbidden object, thereby disconnecting her God-given desires from the God-given instructions that limited and guided them. When Eve took the bait, she became the newly negative influence in Adam’s environment, and he too made the wrong choice.

I contend that the reason that Adam and Eve fell is that the desires arising from their good natures were manipulated by an unexpectedly negative environmental influence. So it was the combination of good nature and a momentarily yet profoundly bad environment that led to their fall. Now, this does not of itself eliminate the mystery. It is still very strange that anyone with the spiritual and moral advantages that Adam and Eve had could be compelled by their own desires to sin against God. Nevertheless, I think that when we look at the whole system of their innate desires plus the outside influence of Satan, it is a bit easier to believe that they too chose according to their desires, which arose from nature and external influences.

That’s the first problem with Adam and Eve. The second is much worse. If nature and environment are the instruments in the hands of God for achieving his will through ours, then God was ultimately behind Adam and Eve’s sin. He was the one who built Adam and Eve and set up their interview with the devil so that they would sin and plunge the entire creation into ruin. It was his plan. So how on earth could a good—even a halfway-decent—God do such a thing?

That’s a toughie, but you’ll have to wait for a later chapter for us to talk through the answer.

Chapter Three

Freedom and Choice

Defining Freedom

Now, at this point, you may think that you’ve figured me out: “I believe in free will; this guy doesn’t.” Now, if I were an atheistic determinist, I’d say you’re right; most of them admit that they don’t believe in free will. But I am a Christian, like my other Christian brothers and sisters the kind of person that believes that God is one being in three persons and that Christ is one person with two natures, so I can’t be pinned down that easily.

Before you conclude that I don’t believe in “free will,” let me carefully define the words “freedom” and “choice” my way, and then we can examine if these definitions are viable. I define “freedom” as “the ability to do what you want to do.” “Choice” to me is “two or more actually doable options.”

I hope that you noticed the common denominator of my two definitions. They both involve “doability” not theoretically but actually—can it happen in flesh and blood, in space and time. Now, when you think about it, this is how we commonly use the word “free.” If I call you up and say, “A bunch of us want to go to a movie on Friday night; are you free?”, what I’m asking is, “Is there any force that would keep you from coming?” Are you healthy? Do you have no prior commitments? Are you going to be in this geographical area? Will you be physically safe if you come? Are you going to be out of prison? This is what I mean by “free.”

FDR’s “Four Freedoms” also involve freedom from outside constraints. “Freedom of speech” means no one can use the threat of violence or other sanction to keep you from speaking. So also with “freedom of religion” regarding worshiping. “Freedom from want” means that you are not forced to endure the privations of poverty against your will. “Freedom from fear” is a bit more cerebral, but in the practical circumstances of 1941 FDR meant that you are not compelled to be terrified about your own survival, because there will not be a huge army of fascists massed at the border of your nation—again, an external influence on behavior.

Based on this definition of freedom—“the ability to do what you want to do”—I certainly believe in free will, because I believe that lots of times we can do the things that we want to do! But in keeping with this definition, I don’t believe freedom to be absolute. For example, I have free will when it comes to choosing where to go grocery shopping, because I have a number of options to choose from. Nevertheless, I do not have unlimited free will, because I am limited by geography and finances. I cannot afford to travel to Tibet to buy some fresh yak and bring it home for dinner, and even if I could, I doubt that Customs and Border Protection would be thrilled about me bringing two-day-old yak meat across the border. So my freedom of shopping is limited. Similarly, I have free will when it comes to choosing my career, but not unlimited free will. I am not free to pursue a career as a professional basketball player. I probably have never had the natural talent for it, but even if I have, I already took away my freedom to be a basketball star by choices I made as a child and teenager to read books and play the piano instead of shoot a hundred free throws every day. (Not that you need to be able to make free throws to make it in the NBA, but you see my point.)

Importantly, this way of talking about freedom is not merely semantic; it coincides with what it means to feel free. The proof consists in the times that you do not feel free. When you do not feel free, what is going on? Is it not that you have a desire that you are unable to satisfy? Is it not that forces outside your control are preventing you from doing what you want to do? (Admittedly, it’s a bit more complicated than this. We’ll talk more about not being free in a later chapter.)

“Free will” according to my definitions of freedom and choice is perfectly harmonious with my view of God’s providence. God’s providence involves where my will comes from. Freedom involves whether my will can be accomplished. If my will is completely determined by God through my nature and external influences, I am still entirely free if the right conditions exist for my will to be done.

A Different Definition of Freedom

Admittedly, these definitions of freedom and choice do not correspond to those held by the sort of people that say, “I believe in free will.” These people are sometimes known as “indeterminists” or “self-determinists” because they believe that nothing determines the will outside the will itself (if that). Indeterminists define freedom differently than I do. For me, “Are you free?” means, “Is it possible to do it?” For the indeterminists on the other hand, “Are you free?” means, in effect, “Is it possible for you to want to do it?” See, to an indeterminist a person is free if there is no influence on a person’s will inside or outside the self that necessarily compels a person to choose one thing over another; there is no motive in a free person so strong that it inevitably drives a person to act in such and such a way. So a truly free person is at least to some extent indifferent as to whether to do this or that, and the function of a free will is to choose an option in the absence of a determining preference. It is the will’s choice coming out of basic indifference that determines what a person wants. But if the person wants something to a determinitive extent before the choice is made, that person lacks free will. Thus, indeterminists cannot abide the thought of a God who predestines human choices, because if God forces us to do something, even if God forces us to want to do something so much that we actually do it, then that is slavery. That makes us robots, automata. What do I think about this? Well, first of all, I don’t see anything in the Bible that says that we are not robots or automata (though neither does it say that we are). But second of all, I don’t think that the indeterminist definition of freedom is sensible or as attractive as it seems.

From an indeterminist perspective, if you are irresistibly compelled by God, nature, or nurture to choose only one option of a whole set of options, you are not free. But does this make sense in the real world? Let me give you an example. I hate ordinary yellow mustard. It makes me gag. Dijon mustard, great; honey mustard, certainly; but ordinary yellow mustard like you put on a hot dog? Never. In fact, I have never had mustard on a hot dog in my entire life. I would say that if you offered me a hundred hot dogs with a choice of ketchup or mustard, and there was no threat or bribe associated with making one choice or the other, I would choose the ketchup one hundred times. I don’t say this based on theory, but on actual experience! Now in that scenario of a hundred hot dogs, would you say I lacked free will? I don’t think you would. But an indeterminist would. According to the indeterminist definition of freedom as the absence of determining desire, I lack free will because I always and inevitably desire ketchup over mustard. But by any reasonable, true-to-life, real-world definition of freedom, this is absurd. No one would consider me a “robot” because I hate mustard that much.

Maybe the hot dog illustration isn’t convincing to you. Well, let’s raise the stakes. Let’s think about the glorious afterlife of the saints as depicted in the Bible. The beautiful last two chapters of Revelation describe the future of the saints in “the new heavens and the new earth” as being free of all evil, free of pain, free of sorrow, and free of death—in fact, it is not unlike the first heavens and earth as God created them in the first two chapters of Genesis (no coincidence, I think). What fouled the first creation up was the introduction of sin—willful rebellion against God. So if there will be no evil in the new heavens and earth, then there must be no willful rebellion against God. As St. Augustine put it, humanity will be characterized as non posse pecare, or “unable to sin.” But if humanity is unable to sin, that means that we will lack the desire to disobey God. We will have as much desire to sin as I have desire to eat mustard. There will be a choice that we will never want to make. Does this mean that in the new creation we will lose our free will? If it does, and if “free will” is all that great, then it seems very wrong that as we enter the glorious paradise of God, the destiny of the saints, God’s first act will be to strip us of our freedom and make us animatronic toys. Because this doesn’t seem right to me, I think it more likely that the indeterminist definition of “free will” is a sham and that whatever freedom we have now, we will have at least as much in the new creation.

But for the sake of argument, let us say that indeterministic free will is something we currently possess and will not lose in the new creation. That means that in the new creation we will have the potential to want to sin just as Adam did, just as Satan did. If this is so, then Revelation 21-22 is not what we have to look forward to for all eternity. Wouldn’t it be likely that in an infinite amount of time—try to imagine how long that is—one of the millions of saints would rebel against God? Don’t think that just because the new creation will be really great that that would be a sufficient disincentive. Adam lived in Eden, Satan in heaven itself, yet they willfully rebelled. If a future saint were to turn away like they did, sin, evil, pain, sorrow, and death would re-enter the equation. Christ’s death would not be “once for all.” Again part of the universe would break away from obedience to God. If that is the result of what true free will is, is it really that attractive for us to possess and defend so zealously?

What Is the Will?

I have another objection to the indeterminist view of freedom. According to my view, the will’s choice is the net result of our many desires that arise from nature and nurture, ultimately determined by God. In other words, if you calculated all influences on a person, the thing (or combination of things) that proves to be the most powerful motivator to the person is how the will invariably chooses. According to the indeterminist view, on the other hand, the will isn’t pushed around like that. The will is like a person in one’s head who sifts through a variety of requests (not compulsions) from the rest of the self as to what to do, eventually choosing one to implement of its own accord. (I do not use this illustration to lampoon the indeterminist view but to help us to evaluate it more concretely.) So, if the will is like a person in one’s mind who chooses one path among many, how does that person make his decision? Is he determined by nature or external circumstances? For the indeterminist, neither will do. In fact, being determined is the very thing we’re trying to avoid. Therefore, one must posit that the person inside one’s head has another little person inside his head to sort it out for him. But then . . . you guessed it: he must have a little person inside his head. And on it goes; each human being is like an unending Russian doll, with little persons inside little persons stretching into infinity. Each person possesses wills within wills within wills.

But to view the human will as an infinite series of decision-makers within your mind raises a big problem: as you look backwards to how your choice came about through all the little people inside your head, you never make it back to Person No. 1, the decision-maker that starts it all. Now, this might not seem like a big deal at first. Who says there has to be a beginning? What’s wrong with a series of persons that stretches back infinitely? Well, let’s look at it this way. Can you count to infinity? No, right? You can always add one number to the number you currently have; you never reach a point where you can say, “Okay, I’ve made it to infinity.” Now, you can count infinitely in the sense that you can always keep counting, forever. But if you pause at any point to check your progress, you will find that you have only counted to a finite number. Now, let’s imagine that you had a job to do—say, assembling one of your kids’ Christmas presents—that had an infinite number of steps. When you complete every one of the infinite number of steps, then the toy will be assembled. Could you ever actually assemble the toy? No, because even though you could be in the process of assembling the toy forever, you would never actually complete it, just as you cannot count to infinity. And this reveals a profound truth about infinity: an infinite span (whether of time or of steps or of integers) cannot have both a beginning and an end. It can only have one or the other or neither. But this is a big problem for assembling the toy with the infinite number of steps, because in order for the toy to be assembled, we have to both start and stop assembling it. But since the assembly has an infinite number of steps, we can start assembling the toy, but we cannot stop, so the toy will never be assembled.

Now, we have been considering an infinite series that has a starting point and no stopping point. But in the case of the infinite series of wills within one’s mind that eventuates in a decision, we are looking at an infinite series that has a stopping point and no starting point. But the same dilemma applies. In order to make a decision, like assembling the toy, you need both to start and to stop the process. We have a stopping point—the decision itself—but we cannot start the decision-making process because there are an infinite number of steps before the decision. And since we cannot start the decision-making process, the decision is never made. Therefore, if a decision is made, that proves that there is not an infinite series of steps (or wills inside one’s mind) leading to the decision. An infinite series of wills that eventuates in a flesh-and-blood decision is impossible.

But let’s say I don’t know what I’m talking about, and an infinite series of wills within one’s mind is possible. Even if this is true our choices are still determined by something. The only differences are that the something is solely located within the self and that it is buried infinitely deep there. But doesn’t that mean that our choices are completely disconnected from our conscious reason and understanding, emerging from forces in hidden depths of our psyches completely outside of our control? To me, that actually sounds less like freedom than if one’s choice is determined by God through nature and external circumstances. At the very least, it is no more free.

Cause and Effect

But some indeterminists might respond that the flaw in my logic is that I assume that the will is bound by the law of cause-and-effect. I assume that an effect (the will’s decision) must have a cause that precipitates it. But what if it doesn’t? What if there is no “why” behind the will’s choice; it just happens? The scientific basis for the idea that the will is uncaused is in quantum mechanics. At the subatomic level, experiments have shown that identical causes do not have precisely identical effects. This should not be. In classical physics, if you do the same thing every time, you should get the same result every time, like if you let go of a ball at sea level a thousand times, a thousand times it should fall to the ground at the same rate. But at the subatomic level, the same cause does not always have the same effect; rather, for any cause there is a range of possible effects of varying probabilities. We do not know exactly why this is. But that is the point, some claim. We do not know why because there is no why. Causality is not universal. And if there is no strict causality among subatomic particles, perhaps there is no causality in our minds either. We can therefore be free from all influences, internal and external, when we choose.

Since I am not a physicist, I cannot argue directly with this objection. However, I can point out that though equations of quantum mechanics are universally accepted, there are many sharply contrasting interpretations of what quantum theory means in the real world. Some interpretations of quantum theory coincide with indeterminism and either throw out or radically alter the meaning of causality while other interpretations coincide with determinism and maintain causality, and at this point none of the interpretations is a sure thing. So insisting that my view of God’s will and ours is flawed because of quantum mechanics still requires a hefty amount of proof.

Other indeterminists insist that the will’s decisions are uncaused because the will is a spiritual object, not a physical one, and therefore is not bound to the laws that govern physical objects. The will may very well be non-physical, but is cause-and-effect a law that only applies to physical objects? Is there no cause-and-effect in the spiritual realm? There is enough spiritual cause-and-effect in the Bible (like Jesus casting out a demon with a word) to make me pretty hesitant to accept that.

Regardless of how one may argue that the decisions of the will are uncaused and whether the reasoning is valid or not, the premise itself raises two serious concerns. The first is this “robot” notion. I mentioned earlier that some indeterminists claim that my point of view about how the will works makes humans into robots, automata, machines. Well, if the decisions of the will are not definitively caused by anything because cause-and-effect simply does not apply to them, then one’s decisions also cannot be caused by one’s reason. Thus your mind is completely impotent to influence your decisions. No matter how much time you take thinking something through before choosing, it is actually an illusion, because your decisions ultimately are made completely at random, with no cause, for no reason whatsoever. And if that’s the case, then as Jonathan Edwards said, robots actually have it better: “Whereas machines are guided by an understanding cause, by the skillful hand of the workman or owner; the will of man is left to the guidance of nothing, but absolute blind contingence [i.e., accident].”

My second and greater concern about believing that there are places in visible or invisible realms in which there is no causality is what that says about God. If there are effects that God cannot produce because any causes he might apply do not predictably produce them, is he really all-powerful? Is it true that “nothing is impossible” for him? I don’t want to live in a world where the answer to that question is “no,” nor do I believe that’s what God has revealed about himself (see, e.g., Jer. 32:17; Luke 1:37). But if even a small part of reality—and how much more so the decisions of human beings—is uncaused and uncausable, then “no” is what that answer must be.

Chapter Four

God and Personal Relationship

There is another objection to my understanding of God’s will and our wills that is raised by specifically Christian indeterminists. They say that if my view is true, then human beings cannot truly have a personal relationship with God. They argue that God created and saved human beings to be in a personal relationship with himself. If humans have indeterministic free will, such a relationship is possible. If humans don't have “free will” as indeterminists define it, then humans don't really have a personal relationship with God—the robot thing again. Therefore, if God created us to be in personal relationship with him, then he also created and maintained in us the indeterministic free will to make that possible.

Investigating Personal Relationship

I agree wholeheartedly with indeterminists that God created human beings to be in personal relationship with himself and that he sent Jesus to reconcile us to himself and restore that relationship, which was broken by our fall into sin. Where I have trouble is the assertion that only beings with “free will” as defined by indeterminists are capable of being in personal relationship with one another. Now to settle this question adequately we ought to define “personal relationship.” That’s hard. But as if that’s not hard enough, it is probably impossible to define “personal relationship” adequately without first defining “person.” And “person” is an extraordinarily difficult term to define. (Go ahead; try it.) While we all sort of instinctively know what a person is, it’s really hard to come up with an objective definition (or definitions) that covers all the examples we want to include in “person” while excluding everything else and then grounding that definition in anything other than, “Just because; that’s why.”

Defining personhood is over my head and beyond the scope of this book, but we still might be able to sort this out. Both indeterminists and I agree that God desires a personal relationship with human beings. We also agree, I presume, that there are numerous examples of God entering into personal relationships with humans in the Bible. Perhaps if we look at these examples and ask ourselves, “What happens in these relationships that tell us that they are personal?”, we might be able to conclude whether indeterministic free will is an essential component of a personal relationship with God or not.

Let’s examine this question in two biblical laboratories, Genesis and John. I select these two books because I believe that they have the thickest interpersonal content of any book in their respective testaments. Unlike most of the Old Testament, Genesis is dominated by God’s relationships with individuals as opposed to the whole nation of Israel (except inasmuch as God was relating to the embryonic nation of Israel through its individual patriarchs). God also relates to these individuals in a more or less unmediated fashion, not through a legal code or prophets. To find intense God-and-human personal interaction in the New Testament, the best place to look is the Gospels, where Jesus, God in the flesh, is talking to people on every page. And of the Gospels the most intensely relational is John, not because the stories of Jesus’ conversations and healings there are more personal than in the other Gospels, but because Jesus spends a great deal of time talking about the nature of his personal relationships themselves. In short, I don’t believe there is anything the Bible says about God’s personal relationships with people that can’t be found in some form in Genesis and John.

In these two books I find five qualities that mark a personal relationship with God. No one of them alone makes the relationship personal, but the combination of some or all of them reveals the relationship’s personal nature.

Characteristics of a Personal Relationship with God

First, when God is in a personal relationship with someone, he establishes the parameters of the relationship. In John God the Son—Jesus—talks with his disciples at length about the nature of their relationship. He said that if they do what he commands, then they are no longer his slaves but his friends, because he told them everything that the Father told him (John 15:14-15). Indeed, Jesus repeatedly compared his relationship to God the Father with the disciples’ relationship to himself—for example, “Just as the Father has sent me, I also send you” (John 20:21).

Often when God establishes a relationship with someone he does so by making promises to that person. For example, after the flood God made a covenant with Noah, promising not to destroy the earth by flood again (Gen. 9:9-17). God promised Abraham many things, including showing him where to go (Gen. 12:1), blessing those who bless him and cursing those who curse him (Gen. 12:3), and giving his descendants the land of Canaan (Gen. 12:7). God confirmed his promise with an oath (Gen. 22:16) and kept that promise even after Abraham’s death (e.g., Gen. 26:4-5, 24). Likewise in John Jesus promised his disciples that he would do anything that they ask in his name (John 14:13-14) and that he wouldn’t leave them alone like orphans but would come back to them (John 14:18).

In a personal relationship with God, God establishes the parameters of the relationship, often with a promise. Abraham, Noah, and Jesus’ disciples didn’t have to have indeterministic “free will” for God to establish a relationship with them and to be the recipients of God’s promises. Those are all things God does. So this quality of a personal relationship does not conflict with my view of God’s will and our freedom.

Second, when God is in a personal relationship with someone, he takes care of their weaknesses. This is because a personal relationship with God is a relationship of love. Jesus loved Mary, Martha, and Lazarus (John 11:5). He loved the disciples too, and he urged them to remain in his love by keeping his commands (John 15:9-10). And God the Father and God the Son express this love by meeting people’s needs at the point of their tenderest weaknesses. God calmed Abraham’s fears by telling him not to be afraid since he is Abraham’s shield and very great reward (Gen. 15:1). Jesus calmed the disciples’ fears when he walked over the water to them (John 6:19-20) and when he greeted them after his resurrection in the Upper Room (John 20:19-20). He assured them that they didn’t have to be upset or afraid by his departure (John 14:1-3, 27). In fact, Jesus spoke to them to give them his joy and to complete their own (John 15:11).

When Ishmael was dying in the desert and Hagar was distraught, God heard Ishmael’s cry and supplied Hagar’s need (Gen. 21:17-19). When Abraham was on the verge of sacrificing Isaac, God provided for Abraham’s need by supplying the ram as the substitute at the critical moment (Gen. 22:8, 13-14). While Jesus was with his disciples he “guarded” them (John 17:12), and even as he hung on the cross he took care of his mother Mary by giving her into the custody of the disciple that he loved (John 19:26-27).

In all these ways God took care of the weaknesses of those with whom he had a personal relationship. None of these people had to have indeterministic “free will” for God to provide for their needs, calm their fears, and give them joy. Those things were all up to God. So this quality does not conflict with my view of God’s will and our freedom.

Third, when God is in a personal relationship with someone, he is close to them. God was “with” Isaac (Gen. 26:24) and Jacob (Gen. 28:15; 31:3; 35:3). Jesus, the Word come in the flesh, “took up residence among us” in our human community (John 1:14). When Jesus called the disciples, he invited them to come with him where he went (John 1:38-39, 43). One of the disciples experienced the presence of Jesus so closely he actually rested his head on Jesus’ chest (John 13:23). Indeed, the presence of God in Christ is so close to Jesus’ disciples that “with” isn’t a strong enough preposition: “in” is more accurate. Jesus tells the disciples to remain “in” him and he will remain “in” them (John 15:4). Jesus made the Father’s name known to the disciples so that the Father’s love for Jesus and Jesus himself might be in them (John 17:26). He prayed that people like you and me who believe the disciples’ message would be in Jesus himself, that he and the Father would be in us (John 17:21, 23), and that we would be where he is (John 17:24).

God’s closeness to the people he is in relationship with is illustrated in the Bible in amazing ways. God engages in direct conversations with people. He revealed to Cain his danger and his opportunity to do what was right (Gen. 4:6-7). He talked to Hagar because he saw her situation, and he allowed Hagar to see him (Gen. 16:8, 13). God warned Isaac to alter his plans by appearing to him and talking with him face to face (Gen. 26:2-3). And of course the face-to-face conversations of God the Son with people are legion. But God’s closeness takes even more striking forms. God put clothes on guilty Adam (Gen. 3:21). He even wrestled with Jacob (Gen. 32:24-30)! And the risen Jesus invited Thomas to put his fingers in the holes in his hands to prove who he was (John 20:27).

All these examples demonstrate that God is close to the person he has a relationship with. But none of these individuals needed to have indeterministic “free will” for God to be close to them. That was God’s choice through and through. So this quality doesn’t conflict with my view of God’s will and our freedom.

Fourth, when God is in a personal relationship with someone, he reveals himself and others. God enters relationships on a first-name basis. The moment that Mary recognized the risen Christ was the moment that he called her by name (John 20:16). God also has a penchant for changing people’s names, such as Abram to Abraham (Gen. 17:5) and Jacob to Israel (Gen. 32:28; 35:10). In doing so he actually reveals to that person what their true nature is as the “father of many nations” or as the “one who strives with God.”

But God doesn’t just expose others; he exposes himself. God told Noah what he was planning to do in the flood to prepare Noah for it (Gen. 6:13, 17; 7:4). Likewise he revealed to Abraham his plans for Sodom and Gomorrah specifically because of the intimacy of their relationship (Gen. 18:17-19). Jesus repeatedly explained to his disciples what was important to him and what he was doing (e.g., John 4:31-34). And Jesus promised his disciples that he discloses himself to and lives with the person who loves him by keeping his commands (John 14:21, 23).

When God is in a personal relationship with someone he also introduces that person to others. God introduced Eve to Adam (Gen. 2:22), and Jesus, God the Son, made the grand introduction of God the Father to humanity by “making him known” (John 1:18) and “showing” (John 14:7-10) him to us.

A personal relationship with God is one in which God reveals himself, reveals us, and reveals others. But no one needs to have indeterministic “free will” for God to make these revelations to them. God does it by himself. So this quality doesn’t conflict with my view of God’s will and our freedom.

Bilateral Responsiveness and the Freedom to Love

Lastly but perhaps most importantly, when God is in a personal relationship with someone, each responds to the other. For one thing, God is responsive. In Genesis, God responded to Cain’s concern and fear for his safety with a promise of protection (Gen. 4:15). God was pacified by Noah’s offering and committed not to flood the earth again as a result (Gen. 8:21). God responded to Abraham’s concerns about whether God would keep his promises (Gen. 15:2-5). He responded favorably to Abraham’s request that he bless Ishmael (Gen. 17:18, 20). He even indulged Abraham with some old-fashioned bargaining about the future of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 18:23-33). When Rebekah asked God why the twins were wrestling inside her, God answered her question (Gen. 25:22-23). Likewise Jesus engages in back-and-forth dialogue throughout John such as with Nicodemus (John 3:1-12), the woman at the well (John 4:7-26), and Martha (John 11:21-27). In all cases he answered their questions with clarification and explanation. In the same way Jesus answered his disciples’ many questions in the Upper Room (John 13:36; 14:5-10; etc.), including John’s question about who would betray him (John 13:25-26). Jesus even reasoned with Peter when the latter resisted Jesus washing his feet (John 13:6-10).

God also creates opportunities for the persons he is in relationship with to respond to him. God gave Adam the option of what to call each creature (Gen. 2:19). When Adam was hiding from God, God asked him to expose himself (Gen. 3:9, 11). God gave Cain the chance to confess his murder (Gen. 4:9). When God wanted to see whether Abraham really feared him, he tested him by ordering him to sacrifice Isaac (Gen. 22:1-2, 12). Likewise, Jesus tested Philip by asking him what they should do about the multitude of hungry people even though he already knew what he was planning to do (John 6:5-6). Jesus asked the crippled man if he wanted to be healed (John 5:6). He asked Mary Magdalene why she was crying at the empty tomb (John 20:15). And he asked Peter three times if he loved him, even though, as Peter noted in exasperation, Jesus already knew that he did (John 21:15-17).

The other four qualities of a personal relationship with God are all about God’s activity. But this final quality involves both God’s activity and the activity of the person he is in relationship with. But as we look carefully, even this quality does not conflict with my view of God’s will and our freedom. God’s responsiveness to our questions does not necessarily mean that our wills are not ultimately determined by him. If we ask God a question because we don’t understand something, that doesn’t mean that he didn’t plan for us to ask the question. There is no intrinsic logical problem with God predestining us to ask him a question that he has chosen from eternity to answer. Likewise, there is no inherent problem with God predestining us to ask him for something that he has chosen from eternity to give us—he can choose to make something happen in space and time and make our request a step in accomplishing that if he wishes. Similarly, when God gives people a chance to respond to him that isn’t necessarily the same thing as giving them indeterministic “free will.” God can provide an opportunity for us to respond to him according to our natures and environments that he designed. He can “test” us to uncover in us what he already chose to be there; even if he already saw it, now we see that he sees it because we see it ourselves.

Nevertheless, even if reciprocal responsiveness doesn’t logically contradict my view of God’s will and ours, it still seems strange. If God is already planning to tell us something, why does he predestine us to ask? And if God has already predestined what we’re going to do or say, why does he ask us to do or say it? Even if he logically can do these things, why does he choose to do them? The answer, in short, is that God wants a personal relationship with us that much, which we’ll look at in a bit more depth in a later chapter.

But another, related question still nags us. When some assert that without indeterministic “free will” a person can’t have a relationship with God, they are thinking about a particular quality in that relationship: love. Even if God determines on his own to love us, as I talked about previously, is it logically possible for him to determine that we love him? Or in other words, if God predestines us to love him, is that really love? Many say no: unless a person can choose to love someone else on their own, it isn’t really love. So if the love-relationship we have with God is really a two-way street, then God cannot possibly predestine it.

You may have heard people say (or have said yourself), “Love isn’t a feeling; it’s a choice.” This may have been spoken in the context of marriage, for example, either as an admonition to a couple getting married or as counsel to a couple in a marriage that is falling apart. It’s good advice, no doubt. But it doesn’t stand up very well as a philosophical argument because the meaning of the word “love” is so broad, so vague, and so slippery. If by “love” you mean the actions of love, the behaviors that demonstrate regard and concern for someone else in a practical way, then love is definitely a choice. We choose to engage in that behavior. But if by “love” you mean the motivation of love in human emotions, then love isn’t a choice at all; it precedes choice. What motivates most of the actions of love most of the time is affection or (especially in the case of romantic love) desire, and the whole experience of love in this sense is something that is out of one’s control. Songs abound that describe this. (Ever heard, “You made me love you, I didn’t want to do it”?) Though these songs pretty much uniformly refer to romantic love, nonetheless friendship-love, love of one’s child, and the like proceed from a similar gut-level impulse. Even if we’re not motivated to love in action by affection or by desire but rather by duty, even then love as motivation is not a choice. We are not motivated by duty itself but by our sense of duty—that is, our feelings of shame should we not do our duty and our desire for some positive outcome that results from us doing our duty. This sense of duty is not something we choose; we simply find it within ourselves or not.

And this brings us right back to where we were in the preceding chapters. Our freedom to love God is the freedom to take the actions of love, which involves making choices to do so. This is indeed essential for a personal relationship with God. But our motivation to make the choices to love God is entirely in his hands as he shapes our nature and our environment to birth the motivation within us. How this happens and why we rely on him alone to do it is the subject of the next chapter.

Chapter Five

Moral Freedom

So far we have been thinking about freedom in philosophical terms, trying to discern just how much of human decision-making is self-willed or predetermined. But this is not the only kind of “freedom” there is. Other kinds of freedom are socioeconomic (such as freedom from indentured servitude or slavery, which incidentally is the main way that the Old Testament speaks of freedom) or political (freedom as experienced in democracy and/or civil liberties). (For an exploration of both of these see Appendix C.) Yet another kind of freedom is behavioral—do you have the strength of will to engage in the behavior that is good for you and refrain from what is bad for you. A subset of behavioral freedom is moral freedom—in other words, do you have the strength to do what is good not just for you (like going on a diet) but for the whole world before a righteous God (like loving your neighbor), and avoid what is bad. While arguably all of these different kinds of freedom are related, in this chapter I am going to shift gears from the first kind (philosophical) to the last kind (moral). This means that even if you don’t accept my conclusions in the previous chapters, you may be able to accept my argument here on its own, even though I believe the philosophical stream and the moral stream flow nicely together. It is important that we get a handle on moral freedom because moral freedom is the kind that dominates the New Testament.

Unfreedom

To begin, I would like to return to something I touched on in chapter three—specifically, having discussed what it means to be free, what does it mean not to be free? Let us recall my definition of freedom: “the ability to do what you want to do.” What’s the opposite of this? “The inability to do what you want to do.” So, if you unequivocally desire to do something (like fly), but external forces (like gravity) are preventing you from fulfilling this desire, you are not free with respect to what you want to do. Here’s a second type of “unfreedom” that stems from the first: the compulsion to do what you don’t want to do. If you don’t want to do something (like fall), but external forces (again, gravity) are compelling you to do it, you also are not free with respect to what you want to do. These two examples of unfreedom are clearly understood and easily accepted, I think, but they don’t really apply to freedom in the moral sphere. This is because if you are prohibited by external forces from doing something good (for instance, you can’t help your buddy move out of his apartment because you have two broken arms) or are forced to do something evil (for instance, ordered to kill someone while under hypnosis), you cannot be held morally responsible for those actions. Your will is completely dissociated from your actions (or lack thereof). So since these two types of unfreedom don’t work for us, let us examine two other kinds of unfreedom that might apply to the moral realm.

Another type of unfreedom is illustrated in the movie The Matrix (spoiler alert!). In The Matrix, the overwhelming bulk of humanity is enslaved in a prison that they cannot see, feel, hear, taste, or smell. They are bound in pods operated by machines who are converting their body heat into energy to power their robotic civilization. But the humans don’t realize their predicament, because the machines have fed substitute sensory information directly into their brains. Thus, instead of feeling the goo in which they float inside the pod, they feel shoes on their feet, clothes on their bodies, and wind blowing in their faces. Instead of seeing their pod, they see a city, and they see images of one another. An entire sensory world, called the Matrix, has overridden the senses that ought to come to their minds through their physical bodies.

Most of the humans in the Matrix are comfortable there. These people believe they are able to do what they want to do—go to a baseball game, eat spaghetti, get married—and therefore one might claim that they are free. But they are not. Why? First, because they are not actually doing any of those things. Secondly, and more importantly for our purposes, they do not desire to be released from their pods because they do not know that they are in pods. Facts have been withheld from them. Though they appear to be able to do what they want to do, “what they want to do” would be different if they had all the facts. So this is another kind of unfreedom; you are not free if you are deceived into wanting what you would not want (or not wanting what you would want) if you had all the facts.

There is yet another type of unfreedom. Note that the previous examples assume an undivided will—that is, the person is wholeheartedly in favor of or opposed to the proposed action. But do we always feel that way? Certainly not; actual experience is more complicated. Take an addict. Some addicts are in fact wholehearted in their pursuit of their addiction. Others, however, grasp that their addiction is destroying them. It is consuming their money, their credit rating, and their possessions. It is inflicting immense damage on their most treasured relationships. It is costing them their job, their prestige, their health, their purpose, their future. They wallow under a dark cloud of guilt because of their moral ineptitude. They desperately want to stop. But they can’t. Why? Because they are being forced by their will to go against their will to stop. Their desire for self-preservation is grinding up against their desire for their “drug” (be it an actual drug, sex, food, gambling, work, shopping, or whatever) so that they can’t live with it or without it. The addict is unhappy when he is using and unhappy when he is not. Neither alternative is fulfilling. And if he does believe that there is a hopeful future for him if he gives it up, nevertheless he is unable to do so because his desire for the drug roars back again. This too is unfreedom. One is not free when one’s desires are so conflicted that the pursuit of either produces dissatisfaction, or if one has an ongoing, conscious, and settled preference for one thing, but at particular moments finds oneself uncontrollably preferring exactly the opposite, to one’s own anguish.

Freedom from Sin

These last two kinds of unfreedom—being deceived and being divided—are primarily what the New Testament (especially Paul) refers to when it talks about not being free. As Paul looks at things, freedom is not freedom from (or despite) all determining influences, internal or external. For Paul, freedom is freedom from sin, death, and the devil. For instance:

For when you were slaves of sin, you were free with regard to righteousness. So what benefit did you then reap from those things that you are now ashamed of? For the end of those things is death. But now, freed from sin and enslaved to God, you have your benefit leading to sanctification, and the end is eternal life [Rom. 6:20-22].

We are all born enslaved to sin, and whenever its desires within us tell us to do something, we cannot help but obey them. But for Paul, the beautiful irony is that once we are united with Christ, we give up being slaves to sin and become slaves to God, and it is only by being a slave to God that we experience true freedom: not having to obey sin’s desires anymore.

Sin keeps us from being free like the last two of the four kinds of unfreedom described previously. First, sin keeps us in bondage by deceiving us, like the Matrix. When we are apart from Christ and the truth of God, our latent sin, aroused by the temptations in our morally polluted environment and coaxed by Satan and his minions, deceives us into thinking that our immoral desires and behaviors are acceptable and enjoyable. Like the people in the pods, we know no other way and desire nothing else, ignorant of our own bondage. As Paul put it, “I would not have known what it means to desire something belonging to someone else if the law had not said, ‘Do not covet.’ . . . I was once alive apart from the law” (Rom. 7:7, 9). Nevertheless, ignorance was not bliss. Again Paul: “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of people who suppress the truth by their unrighteousness” (Rom. 1:18). Unlike the Matrix people, we are culpable for our ignorance, because we ought to know better. Even though we are deceived, there is a huge part of ourselves that wants to be deceived and that is complicit in our own deception. The devil and the world tells us that sin leads to pleasure, and we hungrily gobble up the lie. Sin is our slavery to ourselves; we suppress the truth to ourselves, and this suppression becomes our shackles to ungodly behavior. If we sin without inner conflict, we are nevertheless not free, because we ignore the awful punishment that will come upon us for our actions. We are traveling the road to hell in a limousine with no windows.

Sin is also addictive, especially when we open the door of our windowless limousine and find out where we’re going. Like the addict, we realize that we are destroying ourselves by our behavior. But when we begin for the first time to try to change course, we find that we can’t . . . or won’t. No one is forcing us to sin; no one puts a gun to our heads and says, “Tell that fib. Visit that website. Spread that gossip.” But we do it anyway. Our will is divided. The thing that we most want to avoid is the thing that we most want. As Paul reflected,

For I don’t understand what I am doing. For I do not do what I want—instead, I do what I hate. . . . So, I find the law that when I want to do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God in my inner being. But I see a different law in my members waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that is in my members [Rom. 7:15, 21-23].

Even when we desire to escape it, sin is a prison from which we cannot break free.

But the good news is that God grants us freedom in Jesus Christ. He wakes us up from our delusion, and he gives us the power to be single-minded again.

Let’s think for a moment what it means to be set free from sin. Sin enslaves us by deluding us. Does anyone by force of will become undeluded? Of course not. If you recognize that you are deluded, at that very moment you become undeluded. The nature of delusion is that you do not know that you are deluded, and therefore you cannot choose to be free of delusion by force of will. Freedom comes from outside yourself, when you are confronted by the truth in spite of yourself. Likewise, can anyone by force of will become single-minded in desire? Again, no. The very definition of a divided will is that one part of one's will cannot overcome the other. Therefore, by definition one cannot become undivided in will by force of will. If the will was strong enough to overcome its own division, it never would have become divided in the first place. For these reasons, we cannot free ourselves from sin. We do not of ourselves come to our senses or make the right choice wholeheartedly. We are set free from without, by the Holy Spirit, who enlightens our eyes and converts our will. Paul again:

For the outlook of the flesh is death, but the outlook of the Spirit is life and peace, because the outlook of the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to the law of God, nor is it able to do so. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. Now if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, this person does not belong to him. . . . For you did not receive the spirit of slavery leading again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry, “Abba, Father” [Rom. 8:6-9, 15].

We make the right choice because the Spirit comes to us from without and alters the direction of our lives.

If you accept my view of God’s providence, this makes perfect sense. As you recall, I wrote that God predestines everything that happens, but he predestines through our wills. Our wills arise from our nature and our nurture (environment), which are both predestined by God. Now, consider our nature. As David put it, “Look, I was guilty of sin from birth, a sinner the moment my mother conceived me” (Ps. 51:5). And our environment? Our society is completely made up of innately sinful people, and so our social environment is inevitably sinful. (The social system of sin in which we live is one meaning of the phrase “the world” in the New Testament—as in, “Do not love the world or the things in the world” [1 John 2:15].) The prophet Isaiah put it eloquently when he confessed, “Too bad for me! I am destroyed, for my lips are contaminated by sin [nature], and I live among a people whose lips are contaminated by sin [environment]” (Isa. 6:5). But God has all power over our nature and environment and can transform them so that we finally see the Light of the World—Jesus Christ—and accept him.

Some claim that before we can choose to follow Jesus, the Holy Spirit enters our hearts and already begins to do his work of changing our nature so that we can make the right choice. (The theological word for this work of the Spirit is regeneration.) Another possibility is that God moves us to choose Jesus by contriving our environment so that the reality of Christ is unmistakably obvious (as with Paul’s vision of Christ on the road to Damascus) or is the only way out of the bind we’re in (as with the addict who “hits bottom”), and then he fills us with the Holy Spirit after we believe. Perhaps God alters both nature and external influences for some people, or uses one approach for some and one approach for others. How exactly he changes our wills to repent and trust him is a mystery, but that he does it is beyond question in my book.

I should make one clarification about the activity of the Holy Spirit. I do believe that, by the grace of God, the Holy Spirit directly influences those whom he regenerates, as the Romans passage above indicates. However, this influence differs from the Satanic counterfeit—demon-possession. The possessed person is dominated by forces outside herself—demonic spirits. These spirits hijack her mental faculties to some extent, forcing that person to do what she does not want to do, overriding the connection between her will and her behavior. A graphic illustration of this is the man possessed by the “legion” of demons that Jesus casts out (Mark 5:1-20). This man cried out in anguish and cut himself with rocks. This kind of behavior is self-destructive; either the demons were forcing him to do it against his will, or he was trying to commit suicide to escape the living hell that was his mind. Demon-possession is a smothering of human will. By contrast, when the Spirit controls us, it is a merging of wills; he conforms our will to his. He makes us to desire what he desires by transforming our nature. So rather than being dominated by the Spirit as one might be dominated by demons, the Spirit changes us so that we willingly cooperate with him. We become like a symbiotic organism with God himself, such that when we act, one cannot easily separate what is God’s action and what is human action, because they are in tandem. C. S. Lewis pointed out that Paul wrote, “[C]ontinue working out your salvation with awe and reverence,” which sounds like we do all the work, “for the one bringing forth in you both the desire and the effort—for the sake of his good pleasure—is God,” which sounds like he does all the work (Phil. 2:12-13). But once we become regenerated by the Spirit, we and God do all the work together, inseparably. Thus, while in one sense we are impelled by God, at the same time we have never been more free.

Part Two:

How Dare God?

Chapter Six

Evil and Guilt

There are several serious objections that people have to the position that I articulated in the previous chapter: namely, that we humans are unable to be good, then God changes us, then we believe, then we are free to be good—in that order. I would like to address some of these objections in this chapter and the next.

But before I deal with the objections, I would like you to consider something. Have you ever prayed for anyone to be saved? If so, what does that imply? One of two things. One implication is that God directly changes someone’s heart-attitude towards the gospel. But if God did this, wouldn’t he be meddling in someone’s ability to choose? Perhaps you are more comfortable with the alternative implication—that God manipulates circumstances to bring about his desired goal, like a researcher with a mouse in a maze who so arranges the electric shocks that it becomes inevitable that the mouse will take the path toward the cheese. This way, God brings people to salvation, but he stays out of people’s heads. But isn’t this also an abridgment of self-directed will? Isn’t this also an example of God forcing people into a direction that they would not otherwise choose to go? Recall what I said in chapter two: God directs our wills, but he uses nature and external influences to do it. The first implication I mentioned here involves God manipulating our nature (by the Holy Spirit), and the second implication involves God manipulating the external influences on us (our environment). But either way, isn’t he the one pulling the strings of our will? Either God intervenes to move people toward salvation despite how their wills are set, or he does not. If he does not, then why pray for it? If he does . . . well, I guess we agree that God directs our choices, right? Unless you think that we’re really not that bad without him.

How Evil Are We?

See, some might have a difficult time with my assertion that human beings are unable to be good before being regenerated by the Holy Spirit. Some who disagree with me on this point may accuse me of believing that humans are “basically evil” and insist that, to the contrary, humans are “basically good.” Personally, I shy away from judging whether humans are “basically” good or “basically” evil, because “basic” can mean just about anything depending upon how you use the term. On the one hand, one can argue biblically that humans are basically good, because we were created “very good” at the beginning (Gen. 1:31), and only after that were we perverted by the Fall. On the other hand, one may argue biblically that we are basically evil with the argument I used in the previous chapter: on our own we are all enslaved to sin, and apart from Christ we cannot but act as it demands us to act. I think the question of which is more “basic” is unhelpful. The biblical witness insists that we are created good yet born enslaved to sin. Some people are so buried in self-loathing that they cannot believe the former. Others are so enveloped in self-righteousness that they are offended by the latter. Paradoxically, many are scandalized by both.

Yet even many who believe that unsaved people are inherently sinful would not go so far as to say that they are absolutely incapable of being and doing good. After all, are there no unsaved people who help little old ladies across the street? We all know unbelievers who give generously, who have treated us kindly, and who speak honestly. It seems extremely counterintuitive to suggest that such people are not somehow “good,” alienated from God though they may be. For those of you who hold this opinion: I agree with you! The existence of unsaved do-gooders requires us to look at what good and evil are with more sophistication than we have thus far.

What is evil? Though there are many ways to define it, let me suggest the following definition: evil is the perversion of something good. By this definition, evil is a thing that is dependent on something good for it to exist; there can be no evil without something good to be warped, like a parasite that needs a host. So vice is taking God’s creation, which he made “good,” and relating to it outside God’s intention, which fouls it up. For example, God created each of us “good” as a bearer of his image on the earth—a very lofty status. But become fixated on one’s status, forgetting that it is entirely dependent on and subject to the majesty of the Most High God, and you get pride. Likewise, we were each created as unique individuals with our own peculiar way of enjoying and glorifying God. But turn that individuality into a justification for seeking one’s own ends while ignoring everyone else’s and you have selfishness. God made us with an instinct for life that causes us to seek our own biological survival and our spiritual nourishment in him. But seek life at any cost when God commands one to take a risk and you get cowardice. God made us with physical appetites that give us with health and joy when they are satisfied. But if one seeks physical satisfaction from any source, by any means, as an end in itself, one lives in lust. In all these examples, evil requires something good to distort in order to exist.

Now if evil is the perversion of good, and it requires something good for it to exist, then there is no limit to how perverted that good thing can get. You never get to a point of “perfect perversion” where something can’t be fouled up any more than it already is. And that means that no matter how perverted something gets, it never becomes “pure evil” the way an unblemished thing could be pure good. Let me illustrate. Let’s say that you buy a package of tube socks put into plastic fresh off the loom. They are perfectly clean; there is not a speck of dirt on them. But as you wear them and don’t wash them they get dirtier and dirtier. Can you ever get to a point where the socks are utterly dirty, where you just can’t squeeze any more dirt onto them? No. Even if you were to pack so much dirt onto a sock that it eventually became the center of a dense asteroid of dirt with its own gravitational pull, you could still put more dirt on top. So while there is a limit to how clean a sock can be—no dirt at all—there is no limit to how dirty it could get. And yet, no matter how much dirt encrusts that sock, at the center of it all there is still a sock, which itself is not dirt. Now if you can imagine a world where dirt was found only on socks, in that world there could be no pure dirtball the way that there could be a pure sock. In the same way, since evil can only be found befouling otherwise good things, there is no complete evil the way there can be complete good.

If there was such a thing as “pure evil,” then good and evil would be equal and opposite realities, and if that were true, we would expect that the ultimate personal exemplars of good and evil—God and Satan—would also be equal and opposite realities. But the Scriptures are emphatic that this is not the case. Satan is a being created by God, who, like all other created beings, has and is no more than God grants him to have and be. He is not like God, who is independent of and unlimited by all things. If Satan, the most evil being there is, requires a good God to exist, but not the other way around, then it stands to reason that evil requires good for it to exist too.

Let us return to the original question (can unsaved sinners be good?). Let us say that God wears perfectly clean socks, which means that he is perfectly good. Every human being apart from him wears socks that are more or less dirty—not so good. Now, Jen might wear socks soiled by a gram of dirt. If the socks I wear are soiled by two grams of dirt, Jen’s feet look pretty good. She’s certainly better than I am. She is capable of doing more good and possessing more virtue than I am. And so, as humans compare themselves to each other, she is good. But she is not perfectly clean. She is still morally flawed. And thus, she is evil. This fundamental flaw—this inability to clean one’s socks by one’s own efforts—is what the Bible means when it says that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). Even soiled human beings can do some good from time to time, just as a soiled sock still fits on one’s foot. We are indeed capable of being “good” of ourselves, as humans measure goodness. But no human being is capable of being good of herself as God measures goodness. No human, by her own efforts, willingly abandons all of her inclination to run her own life for herself. To the extent that one does not give up this inclination to God is the extent to which God is not one’s Lord. And the extent to which God is not one’s Lord is the extent that one sins and is evil. And the only way for that inclination to be given up is for the Holy Spirit to change one’s heart. Indeed, “the flesh has desires that are opposed to the Spirit, and the Spirit has desires that are opposed to the flesh, for these are in opposition to each other, so that you cannot do what you want” (Gal. 5:17). If this is how the sinful nature behaves in those who have the Holy Spirit, what do you think happens in someone who does not have the Holy Spirit at all, even (or perhaps especially) when offered the grace of God in Jesus Christ? This is why, without the Holy Spirit, no one repents of sin and confesses “Jesus is Lord” (1 Cor. 12:3, emphasis mine) and then acts in accordance with his Lordship.

But some might object that human beings cannot be this helpless to choose good because of all the exhortations to do good in the Bible. It really is full of them: “I have set life and death, blessing and curse, before you. Therefore choose life so that you and your descendants may live! I also call on you to love the Lord your God, to obey him and be loyal to him” (Deut. 30:19-20). “Choose today whom you will worship” (Josh. 24:15). And there are hundreds or thousands more besides. If human beings are unable to choose what is good to the measure of God's standard, then why would he continually be urging people to do so?

First, in fancy language, we must not mistake an imperative for an indicative. In plain language, “Do something!” does not mean, “He does something.” (Anyone who has children knows this to be true.) Just because God urges people to choose what is good throughout the Bible does not mean that God is saying that people can or will. But if people can’t or won’t do the right thing—at the very least, not with any consistency—then why would God waste so much breath urging people to do it? In part that depends on the audience. People who have been regenerated, who have the Holy Spirit as discussed in the previous chapter, have a new nature, power, and outlook on life. These commands serve to spur them on to good deeds that they, having been united with Christ, actually have the willingness to do. But what about the others who receive God’s urgings—for example, the vast majority of Israel during the Old Covenant? Martin Luther compares God’s motive in that relationship to situations we encounter all the time:

How often do parents thus play with their children, when they bid them come to them, or do this or that, for this purpose only, that it may plainly appear to them how unable they are to do it, and that they may call for the aid of the parent’s hand? How often does a faithful physician bid his obstinate patient do or omit those things which are either injurious to him or impossible, to the intent that, he may bring him, by an experience, to the knowledge of his disease or his weakness? And what is more general and common, than to use words of insult or provocation, when we would show either enemies or friends, what they can do and what they cannot do?

In other words, it is precisely because human beings are morally incapable of doing the right thing up to God’s standard that he tells us to do it. We are so prone to self-delusion and inward division that we think we are healthy when in fact we are sick, capable when in fact we are weak. We lie to ourselves about our goodness and moral fortitude so much that we require the stark gap between God’s commands and our execution of them thrown into our faces to bring us to our senses to plead for a Savior. In sum, God’s biblical injunctions to “choose life,” rather than insinuate that we will do so by ourselves, actually bring the exact opposite into sharp relief.

God’s Judgment Is Fair

A second objection to the position I articulated in the previous chapter is that it makes God atrociously unjust. If God predetermines our thoughts and actions through nature and external influences, does that not release us from all responsibility for our actions? If God compels me to cheat on my wife, then how is it my fault for doing so? If God then condemns me for something he predestined me to do, then he is monstrously unfair. In the minds of many, you cannot have total predestination, human culpability, and a just God. One of them has to give.

Given this choice, some atheists, who have already thrown out God, throw out human culpability, believing that no one can be objectively guilty of anything if all one’s actions are determined. Christian indeterminists toss out total predestination in order to maintain the existence of good and evil and of a just God. For all their differences, these two groups agree on this principle: if one’s nature, environment, and/or God determinitively influences one’s choices and behavior, there is no guilt.

But my question is, who says? Where did we get this understanding of guilt? Is it a sacred, God-breathed truth that guilt requires that the guilty has the ability to desire something different? Is that written in the Bible anywhere? Nowhere that I know of.

We see in the Bible the existence of guilt. We see in the Bible a God who predestines all things (as previously argued). We see in the Bible a God who is just. In order to be faithful to the biblical witness, our understanding of guilt has to account for all three of these things, not just the one or two we’re comfortable with. So let me suggest this principle: If a person who ought to have a developed moral sense (e.g., a sane, mentally developed human adult) desires to commit wrong and acts on that desire, that person is guilty of sin. (Compare with James: “[E]ach one is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desires. Then when desire conceives, it gives birth to sin, and when sin is full grown, it gives birth to death [1:14-15]. . . . So whoever knows what is good to do and does not do it is guilty of sin” [4:17].) Whether he was able to desire otherwise or not or whether God foreordained his desire or not is irrelevant so long as he had the desire to do wrong and acted on it. If we understand guilt this way, then the existence of guilt is preserved and God is still just, and yet we can acknowledge that God predestines all things.

I appreciate how repulsive this might seem—a God who predestines people to sin then condemns them to hell for sinning. But let us consider the alternative by means of an illustration.

Have you ever watched a TV show or a movie with a Bad Guy so bad, so dastardly, so skin-crawlingly, infuriatingly awful, that you growled, “That dude is Pure Evil”? I know I have (notwithstanding what I wrote earlier in the chapter)! Now, when we say something like this, what do we mean? We mean that this fellow is wicked in the core of his being; his evil deeds arise from his perverted nature. We do not expect this Bad Guy to do anything that isn’t bad, because his deeds proceed out of his intrinsic badness.

Now, if the kind of atheistic determinist that denies there’s such a thing as guilt is right, then that Bad Guy is not guilty of any wrongdoing. Why? Because he when he chooses to do evil he is choosing exactly what his nature (and external circumstances) determined he would do. And if an indeterminist consistent with his or her principles is correct, then the Bad Guy is also innocent. Why? Because he lacks “free will,” being no more free to choose good than I am free to choose mustard on my hot dog (remember from chapter three?), because he has no desire to do what is good. But of course, this flies in the face of anyone’s moral sense. Rather than the Bad Guy being less guilty because his nature was so disposed toward evil, we naturally consider him, if anything, more guilty. This is not a man who does something wicked in a momentary lapse of judgment under severe temptation. This is someone who does what is wrong habitually and even, in a sense, gladly. What is more despicable than that?

Now, you may consider my example to be artificial and inapplicable because it involves a fictional character created by human authors that has no correspondence to an actual, real-life person. But a short review of the last 100 years reveals how true-to-life my example is. Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein—does anyone believe that these men were less guilty of their crimes because they were more predisposed by their evil natures to commit them?

The conclusion is this: despite what first appears to be the incompatibility between predestination and human guilt, we actually find that those whose natures unavoidably produce evil behavior are exceedingly guilty according to the reasonable moral sense of all humankind. And in fact, the more bent toward evil their natures are (which may be outside of their direct, conscious control, but are firmly within the hands of God), the more guilty in God’s sight they are.

So this is my moderately sophisticated answer to this objection. If this offends you, trust me, it could be worse. Check out the apostle Paul’s blunt response: “You will say to me then, ‘Why does he still find fault? For who has ever resisted his will?’ But who indeed are you—a mere human being—to talk back to God? Does what is molded say to the molder, ‘Why have you made me like this?’ ” (Rom. 9:19-20).

Chapter Seven

God and the Damned

At the end of the previous chapter, I began to touch on another—perhaps the biggest—objection to my view that God takes all the initiative in regenerating the individual. Because I believe that God needs to act first in order to save someone, that leaves me with a choice. Either God acts to save everyone, or he willfully chooses not to save some. In other words, if God makes it all happen, then he chooses either for everyone to go into eternal life or for some to go into eternal punishment.

Given these options, some people (including some indeterminists who deny that these are the only two options) reject the concept of eternal punishment and maintain that one way or another every person who has ever lived will end up in eternal life with God, a view also known as universalism. I think these people are wrong. To be fair, the question deserves much more treatment than is within the scope of this book, but here is a brief summary of why I think that universalism is not a legitimate option for Christians who take the Bible as their knowledge base on this issue.

Justice in Eternal Punishment

Before getting into some of the Scripture texts that universalists employ to validate their position, I want to address one of the arguments universalists make against the idea of eternal punishment. Justice requires that the punishment for a crime fit that crime. As a matter of fact, God himself gave us that idea. When God set “a life for a life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise” (Ex. 21:23-24) as the standard, severe as it sounds to us today, it actually prohibited punishments more severe than the crimes as well as less. One question that universalists raise is, if God doesn’t punish people more severely than their crime deserves, then an eternal punishment would only be a just punishment for an infinite crime. But how can finite beings like us possibly commit an infinite crime? No matter how evil we might be, we are not, so to speak, “big enough” to do anything that bad.

Though universalists are right about the finitude of the criminals receiving God’s punishment, the capacity of the offender is not the only factor in the severity of a sentence. There is also the importance of the victim. If someone kills a dog, the person is punished. If someone kills a human being, the person is punished more severely. If someone kills a head of state—someone whose person represents an entire nation—the person is punished more severely still. So how severely should a person be punished who kills God, an infinitely important victim? One would think that eternal punishment would be pretty fair.

But no one has actually killed God, right? God’s still around, and who could possibly kill him? But of course, we already have. When God became human in the Son, Jesus Christ, the human race finally got our chance to do to God what we wished. And what we wished was to kill him. Now, the typical individualistic American reply is, “Hey, I wasn’t there. I didn’t do that.” But that’s not entirely how God looks at it. For example, when Peter delivered his first public message after Jesus’ ascension, he drilled his hearers, most of whom were recent visitors from out of town and didn’t even know Jesus, with this accusation: “Therefore, let all the house of Israel know without a doubt that God has made this Jesus whom you crucified both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36, emphasis mine). All Israelites were implicated in the crime of their leaders whether or not they collaborated with it. One might speculate that all Gentiles were similarly implicated in the injustice of the Gentile government that put Jesus to death.

But then again, why speculate? Our sin was the reason that Jesus died in the first place. And what exactly is the nature of our sin? At root, it is our unwillingness to treat God as God. Everything that we do that is contrary to what God wants says, in effect, “God, I wish you weren’t God. In fact, as far as I’m concerned you’re not.” How is the wish that God not be God anything other than attempted murder? This is the desire and intention within every one of us, the spit and image of the first sin of our race to attempt to be like God apart from God (Gen. 3:4-6). Our self-centered lives act this intention out and, within the small space of our minds, make it real. Our crime is, as far as we can possibly commit it, deicide, the murder of God. So yes, this crime against an infinitely important being does deserve a punishment that is at least in some sense infinite.

It should also be pointed that people who go into eternal punishment get what they want, at least at some level. If people spend their entire lives trying to get rid of God, then God will eventually allow them to succeed. Whether or not they like that once they get it is another matter.

Universalism and Scripture

But for some universalists the question is not so much, could God justifiably send people to eternal punishment, but rather, would he? After all, God could punish all of us immediately, but he sent Jesus instead and continues to be patient and kind, allowing people to repent. So, some universalists argue, if God is willing to do this for some, why not for all? Some of these universalists agree with my view that everything happens as God determines it. At the very least they agree that God gets his way about certain things including the salvation of all people, and they find corroboration in Scripture that they believe backs this up. Oft-cited, representative texts include the following (underlining by me): “For since death came through a man, the resurrection from the dead also came through a man. For just as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:21-22). “Consequently, just as condemnation for all people came through one transgression, so too through the one righteous act came righteousness leading to life for all people” (Rom. 5:18). “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in the Son, and through him to reconcile all things to himself by making peace through the blood of his cross—through him, whether things on earth or things in heaven” (Col. 1:19-20). “ ‘And I [Jesus], when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ (Now he said this to indicate clearly what kind of death he was going to die)” (John 12:32-33). Taken together, these texts seem to lend fairly strong, even cut-and-dried support to the universalist position, but there is more going on with each than meets the eye.

The texts from 1 Corinthians and Romans are similar in that both make a comparison between Adam and Christ. In both cases, Adam is portrayed as the individual whose first sin was the gateway for death to invade the human race. Christ, by contrast, is the individual whose supreme act of obedience—his death on a cross—and subsequent resurrection became the gateway for life to reenter humanity. On the surface and out of context, it appears that just as all humans die because of Adam, all humans live because of Christ. But the main thing missing in this interpretation is recognizing that in Paul’s thought all who die because of Adam’s sin are people who are in Adam, and all who live because of Christ’s obedience are people who are in Christ. Indeed, 1 Corinthians 15:22 could arguably be translated, “For just as all who are in Adam die, in the same way all who are in Christ will be made alive.”

This begs the question, what makes a person “in Adam” or “in Christ”? Paul never makes explicit what makes a person in Adam, but he does indicate in Romans 5 that everyone who dies is in Adam—that is, the entire mortal human race descended from him. However, Paul does talk about how someone becomes a person in Christ. The person in Christ was chosen to be adopted by God before the foundation of the world (Eph. 1:4-5) and as a result was created anew in Christ to do good works (Eph. 2:10; 2 Cor. 5:17). The person heard God’s plea to be reconciled to him in Christ so that the person’s sins would no longer be counted against that person anymore (2 Cor. 5:19-20). The person responded by placing complete faith in Christ, the faithful mediator between God and humanity, and thereby became a child of God (Gal. 3:22, 26). The person ratified and confessed their faith by being baptized in the name of Christ, thereby being united with Christ (Rom. 6:3-11) and clothed with Christ (Gal. 3:27).

I think it is fair to sum up the difference between being in Adam and being in Christ as the difference between two births. Every human who is born naturally is in Adam. Every human who is reborn spiritually is in Christ. We prove our affinity to Adam by our sin. We prove our affiinity to Christ by our faith. Everyone on earth sins, and the proof is easy to find. Not everyone on earth has faith in Christ, however; not everyone has responded to God’s plea to be reconciled to himself, and not everyone has been baptized into Christ’s name. Truly all who are in Adam die and all who are in Christ will be made alive. But just as truly (and sadly), not all people are in Christ by repentance, faith, and baptism.

So what about Paul’s assertion that God is reconciling “all things” to himself through Christ (Col. 1:19-20)? Reconciling “all things” could mean reconciling each thing, but it could also mean reconciling the totality of things. I think the latter is what is going on here. God reconciles “all things” to himself and provides atonement for “the whole world” (1 John 2:2) like a surgeon restores a body by cutting out the cancer or like a home refinisher restores a home by scraping wallpaper off a wall. You don’t heal a body by helping every part of it, including tumors or viruses or a ruptured appendix, and you don’t renovate a home by retaining every element, structural and cosmetic, of the house. Reconciling all things is not exactly the same as reconciling each thing. Indeed, in the very section of Colossians where Paul talks about the reconciliation of all things he also indicates that a person may end up on the exclusionary side of that reconciliation: “[B]ut now he has reconciled you by his physical body through death to present you holy, without blemish, and blameless before him—if indeed you remain in the faith, established and firm, without shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard” (Col. 1:22-23, emphasis mine).

But what about that passage in John about Jesus drawing all people to himself if he dies on the cross (John 12:32-33)? That’s probably the trickiest of all these passages when taken in isolation. One could argue that by “all people” Jesus means the human race generally but not each individual, similar to the “reconciling all things” phraseology in Paul. One might also argue that “all people” refers to all kinds of people—that is, not just Jews but all sorts of Gentiles too. But “draw all people to myself” is a strange way of saying either one of those things. Probably the best way to look at this text, however, is to recognize that it doesn’t stand on its own but sits in a book where Jesus says numerous things like:

I tell you the solemn truth, the one who hears my message and believes the one who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned, but has crossed over from death to life . . . [A] time is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear [the Son of Man’s] voice and will come out—the ones who have done what is good to the resurrection resulting in life, and the ones who have done what is evil to the resurrection resulting in condemnation [John 5:24, 28-29].

Some universalists, when faced with passages like this or like Matthew 25:46 (“And these will depart into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life”), admit to a division of ways at the last judgment, but they also argue that those ways will merge again at some future point. They argue that “eternal” in “eternal punishment” doesn’t actually mean “forever” but instead “a long age of time.” If they are right, then nothing is more distressing. Because if eternal punishment isn’t really eternal, then what is the duration of eternal life? Or how long is the eternal kingdom, eternal inheritance, eternal covenant, eternal gospel, and most gravely of all, the eternal God?

If we’re to take the Bible as our basis for knowledge on this issue, we must conclude that ultimate punishment for the wicked is eternal. That’s not to say that we’re entirely clear on what the nature of that punishment is. The most common understanding is “eternal conscious torment”—that is, that the conditions of punishment are eternal. Others, called annihilationists, contend that the punishment is God revoking the existence of the wicked. In that case, the effect of punishment is eternal. This debate gets into another topic entirely, but what the two models have in common is that both insist that God’s final judgment on sinners is, in a basic and uncompromising sense, eternal and permanent.

Now as it happens, most Christian indeterminists are not universalists, and they agree wholeheartedly with my defense of eternal punishment. It is agreement on this point, however, that makes it so hard from them to agree with what I’ve said in prior chapters about how God alone takes the initiative in saving each individual. As I stated at the beginning of this chapter, if God chooses to save some, then he chooses not to save others. If he predestines some to eternity in the new heavens and new earth (Rev. 21:1-22:5), he predestines others to eternity in the lake of fire, the second death (Rev. 20:14-15). Many Christians believe that it is unconscionable, unbiblical, and immoral to believe that God does this. Therefore, they conclude, my conviction that God does everything to save the people that he saves so that their salvation is entirely up to him must be wrong.

Salvation-History

In order to address this objection, I’d like to take a look at what scholars call salvation-history. Salvation-history is the chronological account of the steps that God has taken, is taking, and will take to save the world from sin, from Genesis 3 to Revelation 22. The conclusions I draw from these events at the end may be controversial, but the events themselves, I think, will not be controversial to all of us who believe that what the Bible says is true.

The beginning of our human problem came when Adam and Eve disobeyed God in Genesis 3. The result of their sin was death. Further, they passed their sin—both the guilt of their sin (though this is somewhat controversial among Christians) and the tendency to join them in sinning (not so controversial)—down to all their descendants, the entire human race. Thus, from the moment of the first sin, every human who would ever live was destined to do, think, and speak evil, to endure life with others just as evil under the tyranny of Satan, to die physically on a corrupted Earth, and to be alienated from God forever. God was determined not to let that happen. But here’s how he did it.

First, he did basically nothing. For centuries. Though he appears to have interacted with those few who wanted something to do with him, he did not fundamentally change the human condition. As a result, by the time of Noah, the world had grown so violent that God felt that the only just thing for him to do was to kill everyone off by means of a flood. Noah, his wife, his sons, and their wives were the only ones spared this disaster.

Next, after the flood, he did basically nothing again. For centuries, again. And by the end of this period, there was not even a Noah left. It appears that no one knew who God was anymore, having invented their own gods to replace him.

And then, God did something. Out of the blue, he introduced himself to a guy named Abram (later Abraham). He told Abraham that if Abraham trusted him and did as he said, he would be unimaginably blessed and would become the forebear of a great nation. And something incredible happened: Abraham believed God. And then something more incredible happened: God considered Abraham to be morally blameless just because he believed him (Gen. 15:6). After centuries upon centuries—millennia, even—here one guy has a one-on-one relationship with God where God accepts him even though he hasn’t done anything to merit that acceptance. Now we’re getting somewhere.

But we’re not getting there fast, because God only has this kind of relationship with one man. (To the extent that God has relationships with others—e.g., Abraham’s wife’s servant, Hagar—it is almost always because they are related to Abraham.) When Abraham dies, God has this same kind of relationship with one of his sons, Isaac. When Isaac dies, God has this relationship with only one of his sons, Jacob (a.k.a. Israel). To Jacob, God promises that this relationship would extend to all of his descendants—and then God appears to say nothing for four centuries, while the descendants of Israel languish in slavery to the Egyptians.

Then, out of the blue again, God introduces himself to one of these Israelis, a guy named Moses. Using Moses, God brings the people of Israel out of Egypt and, for the first time that we know of—ever—he gives some humans a detailed description of who he is, what he is about, and what he requires of people, both in the laws he gives to his people through Moses and in his mighty acts of rescue on their behalf. He explains that Israel is his people, and he is their God. This means that as a collective body the nation of Israel was related to God the way Abraham was related to him as an individual. Again, we seem to be making progress.

But again, the progress is slow. For the next twelve to fifteen hundred years (depending upon when you think the Exodus took place), God lavished his attention on this single, tiny ethnic group, Israel, and basically let the rest of the world do what it wanted to do. A few occasional foreigners would latch themselves onto Israel’s God, but no one was going to come to know this God except through Israel. And that itself would prove exceedingly difficult. Because for about six to nine centuries after Moses, Israel consistently failed to demonstrate that their God was any different from the gods of the nations that surrounded them. As a whole, the people frequently served other gods alongside or in place of their own, and many even assigned an idolatrous image to God just as all the pagan deities were represented in statue form. Their moral conduct did not distinguish them as the followers of a different kind of God either. In fact, although Israel was the one group of people in the entire world who knew who God was and how he wanted them to behave, they were constitutionally unable to live accordingly. And although at any given moment there was a small fraction of the people whom God had somehow moved to love him with all their heart, soul, and strength, for the nation as a whole no amount of pleading or punishing by God or his human messengers seemed to make any difference.

No difference, that is, until the land that God had promised to Israel was repeatedly invaded and sacked with most of its people deported by 586 B.C. That finally seemed to get some people’s attention. Those Israelis who later returned to Israel’s home territory seemed to keep their eye on the ball a bit better than their forebears had done. Nonetheless, for many, keeping God placated involved little more than a strenuous program of religious ritual that was disconnected from moral and spiritual fidelity to him. In other words, they were going through the motions. They were careful to obey his decrees about what foods to eat and what days to work, but like most of their ancestors, they lacked the fundamental faith of Abraham and his individual acceptance by God.

It was in this situation, six centuries after the deportation, twelve to fifteen centuries after Moses, twenty centuries after Abraham, God-knows-how-many centuries after Noah, and God-knows-how-many-more centuries after Adam and Eve themselves, that Jesus showed up. And those of us who believe in Jesus know what happened, though that itself could be told in many volumes. He was the Son of God and God-the-Son, but fully human as well; he lived a sinless life; he was killed without just cause by the Jewish religious leaders and the Roman political leaders; he rose from the dead to new life; he promised he was coming back. Therefore those who turn from their dead-end, sinful lives and trust him to be saved are saved. As with Abraham, God considers those who believe to be morally faultless despite sins they have committed. Those who are saved also receive the Holy Spirit, who, rather than imposing an impossible burden of commands from without, changes the inclination of the heart within and transforms the very nature of the saved person. And above all, this salvation in Jesus Christ enables a true one-on-one relationship of love with God. And the result of all of this is that death itself is dead for the one who believes, who will live forever with God in the kind of new and indestructible body that Jesus had when he rose from the dead.

So, it looks like God’s plan is finally accomplished, right? Wrong, because when Jesus returned to heaven, only a few people knew and had experienced any of this stuff! And Jesus’ command to them was to tell the entire world about it, so that everyone else might believe too. And two thousand years later, that instruction is still in the process of completion, though its completion comes closer every day. But one day soon, Jesus will come back and set up visibly his kingdom that is now invisible. The dead will be judged. Everyone will admit the authority of God and his Christ. “The wicked will go into eternal punishment and the righteous into eternal life” (Matt. 25:46). And “the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Isa. 11:9).

I think that my description of salvation-history—the biblical Story—is something all of us Christians can pretty much agree on, no matter how much we may disagree on the other things I have written in this book. But now let us consider the implications of this story that we are characters in.

The Hard Truths of God’s Plan

The first hard truth that we must acknowledge is that not every human individual in history has had the chance to be saved. Let’s look backwards. Today, there are many who still have not heard about Jesus, which is why global evangelism is forever relevant. As the apostle Paul put it,

For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. How are they to call on one they have not believed in? And how are they to believe in one they have not heard of? And how are they to hear without someone preaching to them? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How timely is the arrival of those who proclaim the good news” [Rom. 10:13-15].

We send out missionaries because everyone living today who has not heard about Jesus cannot call on him; therefore, they cannot be saved and are headed for destruction. But the spread of the good news has been slow. Consider all the human beings in the last 2,000 years who never heard about Jesus. There have been millions all over the world who have had no chance to believe in him because they never knew whose name to call on. Is this because the church has failed to live up to its missionary mandate? That is assuredly part of the reason. But consider: if the church from Pentecost on had been absolutely perfect as a missionary movement, how long would it have taken for everyone on earth to hear? There have been a number of limiting factors that have nothing to do with the church’s obedience—for example, the development of transoceanic travel. Even if the church had been perfect in proclaiming the gospel, it seems exceedingly unlikely that everyone on earth would have heard the good news within several centuries after Christ, much less within one generation. Those people were lost.

But the situation was even worse before Christ, for two reasons. First, the knowledge of God was confined to one ethnic group—the Israelis—so all other peoples in the world, except potentially for Israel’s neighbors, had no chance of knowing God intimately and serving him faithfully. Second, as we have seen, the covenant that God made with Israel through Moses was not even effective for Israel, because it imposed external regulations without dealing with the fundamental problem of the wayward human heart that has only been dealt with in Christ. So before Christ, virtually everyone outside Israel, and most within Israel, had no chance to be saved.

But even that was better than before Abraham, because for centuries before him, God was silent and let everyone on earth go their own way. Generations with no chance to be saved, going back to Noah. And before Noah, it appears that a narrow lineage of humanity knew God while he left the rest of the world to their own devices, going all the way back to the fateful divide between Seth and Cain. Again, no chance for who-knows-how-many.

We must acknowledge that an enormous part of humanity—in fact, overwhelmingly most human beings who have ever lived—has had no chance to know God, no chance for their hearts to be changed, and thus no chance to be saved from their sins. For them, eternal damnation was a sure thing. This is indeed a hard truth, but the second hard truth is even harder: God wanted it this way.

I know it’s not pretty, but the conclusion is inescapable. God is all-powerful and can do whatever he wants. It was by free choice that he designed his salvation-plan as he did; he could have done it any other way, but he did not. He could have intervened immediately after Adam and Eve sinned—perhaps Jesus could have been their firstborn son, not Cain, for example—but he did not. He chose not to intervene salvifically thereafter, instead choosing to kill everyone with a flood. After the flood he could have intervened and given a fresh chance to the new earth, but he did not. When he met Abraham, he could have told Abraham to be his prophet and preach his experience of belief and righteousness to everyone, but he did not. He could have directly revealed himself to thousands, millions of Abrahams, but he did not. He could have maintained a relationship with all of Abraham’s sons, or with both of Isaac’s, but he did not. He could have revealed himself to any number of nations in the world besides Israel, but he did not. He could have skipped the first covenant altogether and gone straight to the new covenant in Jesus (somehow), but he did not.

And then, after Jesus suffered and died and rose again, Jesus could have supernaturally revealed himself to the entire world, but he did not. In fact, he could have supernaturally revealed himself just to the people of Jerusalem, but he did not except to his disciples. Then even if the apostles and their followers had been perfect, tireless evangelists, still it would have taken generations for the word to go forth to all corners of the world. And this was God’s plan. He didn’t have to do it this way, but he did.

Even if God had to design his plan with all of these steps, why did he have to take so long between the steps? Why did he wait so long before the flood? Why wait so long before picking out a guy like Abraham to reveal himself to? Why wait so long to send Moses to redeem the Israelis from slavery? Why wait so long to end the Israeli kingdoms with exile? Why wait so long after the exile to send Jesus? If any of these steps had been moved forward even one generation—just a few years—how many more might have been saved? For some reason, God wanted to wait just that long. The timing of his plan was somehow more important to him than the souls that would be sacrificed while it came to fruition.

These hard truths force us to one conclusion. Even if you are an indeterminist, you must accept that God predetermined that many people would go into eternal condemnation—perhaps not on an individual basis, but with no less certain, willful decision on God’s part. There is no escaping it. Even if you maintain that God does not initiate individual salvation, you have to admit that God designed his salvation-plan so that multitudes had no chance to believe and be saved.

There are many who reject the ideas I’ve argued for in this book because they cannot accept that God would predetermine that people would be damned forever. On the surface, there seems to be no way to reconcile this with the conviction that God is love (1 John 4:8, 16), an issue we will deal with in a later chapter. But what we’ve seen here is that every orthodox Christian, even an indeterminist, has to reckon with this reality. The indeterminist and I both have the same problem, so you must choose some other basis to decide between us. If you set aside the predestination-to-hell issue, whose case is stronger? If you say that the indeterminist’s case is stronger, so be it. But please don’t reject my case because you can’t believe that God would predetermine that people would enter eternal punishment. If you believe the biblical Story, doesn’t it lead you to believe that already?

Chapter Eight

Conflict in the Will of God

God’s Multiple Desires

Now, at this point, I know that there’s a Bible verse that is just driving you crazy—1 Timothy 2:4: “[God] wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.” Now, how on earth could I claim to be a Bible-believing Christian and yet claim that God predestines people to eternal punishment, given how obvious this verse is? Well, the problem is another obvious Scripture written by Paul—Romans 9:18: “So then, God has mercy on whom he chooses to have mercy, and he hardens whom he chooses to harden.” How can this same God want everyone to be saved but also choose to harden the hearts of some people?

To solve this dilemma, let us first note that God is unique in that he alone can always achieve what he wants. The rest of us can’t do that. If I want my favorite professional football team, the Pittsburgh Steelers, to win the Super Bowl, that will not necessarily happen. There are many factors totally outside my control that could prevent that from happening. But God is omnipotent—or, as I put it earlier, he has total control over the course of the “novel” he writes. So if God wants the Pittsburgh Steelers to win the Super Bowl, there is nothing to prevent him from achieving this desire but himself. Even Christian indeterminists—at least, orthodox ones—admit this. According to them, it is not that we have free will because our wills are inherently outside God’s control (which would make him less than omnipotent) but rather because God purposely holds himself back from interfering with them.

God wants everyone to be saved, yet it is clear (again, to the orthodox among us) that not everyone is saved. The only thing that we can conclude is that there is something else that God wants more than everyone’s salvation. Indeterminists claim that God wants human beings to have what they call “free will” (which includes the ability to reject the offer of salvation) more than he wants everyone to be saved. But whatever God’s superior motive is, all of us can agree that there is some inner conflict in God. He wants mutually exclusive outcomes and therefore prioritizes one over the other. God wants everyone to be saved, but he wants something else more, and that something-else is what compels him to set up a sequence of events in which not all people are saved.

If this seems strange to you—well, it is. But it may be more believable to you as you meditate on Christ’s cross. The torture and murder of Jesus Christ is, bar none, the absolute worst deed ever done in the history of humanity. It was the worst act perpetrated against the infinitely most important person who ever lived, who also happened to be the least deserving victim who ever lived. If you were one of the chief priests, and you woke up on the morning of Jesus’ betrayal, and you humbly and sincerely prayed, “Lord, I am your obedient servant; I want to do your good, pleasing, and perfect will today; what would you have me do?”, and your heart was open to whatever God wanted to say, I feel confident that he would not have told you to condemn his Son to death unjustly and hand him over to the Romans. Or if you were Judas, and you prayed the same prayer in the same way, I am confident he would not have told you to betray his Son for thirty silver pieces. In the sense that “the will of God” is the good thing that God desires us to do—which is how the term is very frequently used in the Bible—the murder of his Son could not possibly be his will. God desires that we love him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength; it is the greatest commandment. It is fairly obvious that falsely condemning God and killing him is a major violation of that commandment.

And yet, when Jesus was praying in the garden, he said, “Not my will, but yours be done.” And as Isaiah prophesied, “[T]he Lord desired to crush him and make him ill” (Isa. 53:10). Did God want his Son to suffer? Did he want Judas to give him up to the chief priests, the chief priests to Pilate, and Pilate to the executioners? No! But . . . yes! He wanted us not to kill his Son, but more than that he wanted our salvation, his Son’s glory through his victory over death, and his own glory through extending his mercy to sinners. So here, in the cross of Christ, the most awful and most glorious event in world history, we see the paradoxical intersection of God’s two desires, each of which might be called “the will of God.” On the one hand, the cross was the most brazen rejection of God’s will ever, but on the other hand, it was the climax of God’s will that had been prophesied for centuries. I think that when we look at the salvation of humankind, we see a similar conflict between God’s two “wills.” That all humanity is not saved is a bitter frustration of God’s “will,” but it is a frustration of his own doing, because he wants a greater good even more that cannot be if everyone is saved. (More on this in the next chapter.)

All of this could be summed up rather simply by saying that God is like us. Each of us has a variety of desires that clamor for our attention. Each of us has a number of options of what to do. Each of us makes a choice between those options, and that choice is the victory of one desire over the other desires within us (like the desire to retain one’s job overcoming the desire to sleep in on a Monday morning). That desire that wins out I called “the will” in chapter three. God is no different. He too has many desires, sometimes (from our point of view, at least) in conflict. (For example, the book of Hosea is a poignant depiction of the conflicting desires of God toward his adulterous people.) But one of those desires (or some combination of them) wins out, he chooses accordingly, and that becomes the will of God. God’s desires include many “shoulds”—this should happen, or his people should do that. But because he can do whatever he wants, God’s will is what does happen, what he decrees, what is. So, although it is a bit clunky, it might be most precise to discriminate between God’s “is”-will and his “should”-desires. So, to be more clear, we should talk about Christ’s crucifixion this way: God had two “should”-desires—first that we should honor his Son, and second that we should be saved through his death—but only the latter was his “is”-will. Fortunately, because God is exceedingly clever, the former “should”-desire actually will become God’s “is”-will at the end of the age, whether everyone likes it or not. God often manages to have his cake and eat it too.

Fuzzy Language

At this point we run into a problem that isn’t really philosophical or theological—it is a language problem. Throughout this book I have generally used the term “desire” to refer to some yearning within us and “will” to refer to the net result of those many desires as they work out in our actual behavior and choices. I’m making the words “will” and “desire” into semi-technical terms just so that we can keep our thoughts straight as we examine this subject. But in ordinary, everyday English, these words aren’t so neat and tidy. It is true that, unless you are intentionally using archaic English, you would probably not use the word “will” to mean “desire.” But in modern English, it would not be strange to use the word “desire” to mean “will.” One way to demonstrate this is to note that just about every time in the Scriptures we find the phrase “God wills” we can substitute “God desires” without losing much, if any, of the meaning. “Not as I will, but as you will” is essentially synonymous with “Not as I desire, but as you desire.” So the English language is inherently fuzzy when it comes to discussing the will.

But if English is fuzzy, then the original languages of the Bible—Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek—are a downright blur. The Bible contains many words (both nouns and verbs) that can rightly be translated into English as “will,” “desire,” or “want” as they pertain to God: five in Hebrew, one in Aramaic, and nine in Greek (see Appendix A)! Now, it would be quite convenient if some of these words always meant what I mean by “is”-will and others always meant what I mean by “should”-desire. But the reality is anything but. Some of the words do appear to be specific, but many (including the most common ones) are all over the map. The best example is the common Greek verb thelô (see Appendix A for pronunciation). Thelô is the word that is translated “wants” in both 1 Timothy 2:4 and Romans 9:18 as quoted above. Not only does thelô apply to mutually contradictory “should”-desires in those passages, one of which actually becomes God’s “is”-will, but it is also used in Matthew 9:13 (quoting Hos. 6:6) to refer to what God wants us to do—“I want mercy and not sacrifice.” And then, to make matters worse, these many biblical words are translated indiscriminately in our English Bibles, sometimes “will,” sometimes “desire,” sometimes “want,” and more.

The upshot of all of this is that we cannot take a single verse of an English Bible that contains the word “will” or one of its synonyms and construct from that an entire theology of the will of God. The words the Scriptural authors used are not built to hold that much weight. The way we learn about the will of God from Scripture is not by taking a verse and saying, “Aha! That’s what the will of God is.” Instead, we must take what all of the Scriptures say about God’s will and desires and use our minds as the Spirit guides us to make sense of the big picture.

Chapter Nine

God and Evil

The Problem of Evil

There’s a question that is repeatedly thrown in the faces of us Christians that I have gotten close to a few times in this book—namely, if God is completely good and all-powerful, why is there evil in the world? One would think that the good thing is to stop evil if one can. And if one is all-powerful, one can by definition. So, they say, either God is not completely good, or he is not all-powerful, or he does not exist.

Now, before I try to answer this question, I should point out that the “problem of evil” is usually presented as a problem for Christians, but this is not entirely the case. Atheists themselves have some explaining to do. For instance, if there is no God, whence comes the universally inborn concept of “evil” from which the problem of evil gets its name? What makes one thing “good” and another thing “evil”? Granted, there are some who claim that there is no such thing as good and evil, but why then do nearly all humans have a moral sense? Where did it come from? Some answer that it is a product of the evolution of our species, that morality is a conditioned set of reactions designed to minimize behavior that would destroy us as a species and maximize our survival. But if this is the case, then why do humans universally and continually transgress this evolutionary impulse? No other creature on earth betrays its instincts for survival. Even we humans never fail to eat when we’re hungry, drink when we’re thirsty, sleep when we’re tired, fight or flee when we’re threatened. If what we call “good” is actually a survival instinct, then how can we so routinely ignore it?

This is a sample of questions that the atheist must answer about the problem of evil, and my only point in posing the questions here is to demonstrate that the problem of evil is everyone’s problem. It is not the Christian Problem. It is the Human Problem. So if a particular philosophy cannot give a definitive answer to the question, that does not necessarily invalidate it—especially if no better explanation exists.

That said, Christians are the favored target of the problem because we make the most ambitious claims of any religion or philosophy in human history. We argue for the existence of a God who is greater and better than any god of any other religion—a God whose very Trinitarian nature is an intellectual quantum leap beyond the runners-up, Judaism and Islam. And we proclaim the most epic ending of the human story—the remaking of the universe, the end of evil, the death of death, the fusion of spirit and matter, and the reconstitution of human beings to be something like gods themselves. So we’re setting ourselves up to get beaten over the head with the problem of evil.

For me in particular, the problem of evil centers on God’s goodness, because I make such a strong claim about God’s power. How can God be so powerful that he actively determines literally everything that happens (as I argued in chapter two), including really heinous, horrible things—like the Fall of humanity itself—and still be good? Well, I make no claim to have the answer to this question; I only have an answer, and it might not be very convincing to you, but here goes.

The Greater Good

Let’s start by thinking not about what is evil, but about what is really good. What is the ultimate, fabulous destiny of the people of God? Perfection (another way to translate the underlying Greek word is “completion”) in every sense. One aspect of this perfection is physical. The prototype is Christ, who, when he rose from the dead, possessed a “spiritual body” that cannot suffer, die, or decay. The exact nature of this body is mysterious—“what we will be has not yet been revealed. We know that whenever it is revealed we will be like him, because we will see him just as he is” (1 John 3:2). Another aspect of this perfection is moral, as was mentioned in chapter three. We will be characterized as non posse pecare—unable to sin. Not only will we have achieved the natural inclination to do right that Adam and Eve had before they fell, we will have surpassed it. In fact, I propose that in all ways the new creation will not merely be a restoration of the original creation but will exceed it in glory. It will be, as it were, expanded perfection, “more perfect” than the original perfection, like a hitter in baseball who once went 4-for-4 in a game but who now bats 1.000 for an entire season. My guess is that Adam and Eve could not appear in a locked room from thin air in an eyeblink. Jesus did. We will.

This raises an interesting question: is the current imperfection and evil of the world the necessary ingredient for the fuller glory yet to come? My answer is yes. The evidence is in the nature of virtue.

Let’s try a little experiment. When you get to the end of this sentence, without reading ahead, put the book down and take a moment to think of every virtue you can that could exist in a world where no evil had ever entered—go! Are you done? What did you come up with? Here’s my list: love, chastity, sobriety, humility, peaceableness, honesty, kindness, generosity, piety, faithfulness, wisdom. Those are some considerable virtues, no doubt. But now let’s try the experiment again, only this time, when you get to the end of this sentence, think of every virtue you can that can only exist in a world with evil—go! Now what did you get? Here’s my list: courage, patience, fortitude, self-control, self-sacrifice, mercy, grace, compassion, contentment. These would not exist in a perfect world. For example, in a perfect world there would be no danger that required courage or sin that required mercy, and so on. But on top of these, how much more excellent are the previous virtues if they exist in an evil world—love in a world of hatred, chastity in a world of promiscuity, sobriety in a world of intoxication, humility in a world of arrogance, peaceableness in a world of violence, honesty in a world of deceit, kindness in a world of cruelty, generosity in a world of greed, piety in a world of profanity, faithfulness in a world of treachery, and wisdom in a world of folly? These are all virtues (and qualities of virtue) that we who are in Christ possess that Adam and Eve before their fall did not. The ironic conclusion is this: we are made more perfect people as a result of evil in the world. As Paul wrote, “Not only this, but we also rejoice in sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance, character, and character, hope” (Rom. 5:3-4).

But this is just considering things from the perspective of our perfection. Think about how much more the depths of God’s character are revealed as a result of evil in the world. Would we have any concept of how holy he is were there not awfully unholy things to compare him to? Would we grasp how righteous he is were there not unrighteous things for him to judge in wrath? And could we possibly even conceive of “mercy” and “grace,” let alone the extent to which God possesses them, without the cross, which would never have happened without evil? God’s glory is increased because of evil in the world.

Furthermore, this sheds light on some curious statements in the book of Hebrews: “[I]t was fitting for him, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, to make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings” (Heb. 2:10); “Although [Christ] was a son, he learned obedience through the things he suffered. And by being perfected in this way, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him” (Heb. 5:8-9). Is the author of Hebrews implying that Christ was not perfect before his suffering? I don’t think so; at the beginning of his letter he called Christ, “through whom [God] created the world . . . the radiance of his glory and the representation of his essence” (Heb. 1:2-3), which sounds a lot like perfection to me. What he’s saying, I think, is that Jesus is like the hitter I mentioned earlier; he was perfect coming into the game, but in this game that he played in human flesh, he faced fearsome pitchers and an impenetrable defense that he never would have encountered had he remained at his Father’s side. Christ was perfect before the Incarnation, but the Incarnation provided the opportunity to increase, so to speak, not only his own perfection and his glory but also the perfection and glory of the Father who sent him and of us for whom he died and rose again.

But the existence of evil not only increases the ultimate perfection and glorification of all the things in Christ, but it also increases the ultimate joy of all things as well. St. Augustine points out that the soul

is more delighted at finding or recovering the things it loves, than if it had ever had them. . . . The conquering commander triumphant; yet had he not conquered unless he had fought; and the more peril there was in the battle, so much the more joy is there in the triumph. The storm tosses the sailors, threatens shipwreck; all wax pale at approaching death; sky and sea are calmed, and they are exceedingly joyed, as having been exceedingly afraid. . . . Yea, the very pleasures of human life men acquire by difficulties, not those only which fall upon us unlooked for, and against our wills, but even by self-chosen, and pleasure-seeking trouble. . . . Everywhere the greater joy is ushered in by the greater pain.

In the same way, the party of the kingdom of God at the end of this age will be so much more rockin’ because of the horrible night of evil we will have passed through before the breaking dawn.

But none of these things—not God’s glorification, nor Christ’s, nor ours, nor the immensity of the joy in the new creation—would be possible without evil in the world. Evil is actually the ingredient that leads to far greater good than would have been possible without it. The first creation was good, but the second creation will be inconceivably better, which would not be possible without the interregnum of evil in between. “I consider that our present sufferings cannot even be compared to the glory that will be revealed to us” (Rom. 8:18). This is how a good God could ordain evil to enter our world.

The Indeterminist Answer

Before I discuss a major objection to my view (which I will do at the end of this chapter), I would like to contrast it with how Christian indeterminists generally approach the problem of evil. Christian indeterminists usually center their argument around their understanding of free will—namely, the potential to want to do one thing or another. The idea is that God initially created humanity with free will in order to have a personal relationship with them (see chapter four), and free will requires that the person be able to desire to choose two or more alternatives to anything. For Adam and Eve, that meant that they needed to be free both to desire to choose to obey God by not eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and to desire to choose to disobey God by eating it. If they could not have desired to disboey, these folks argue, then Adam and Eve would not truly have been free. They would have been “robots,” as it were. So their free will was God’s gift to them, a sign of his great love for the human race. Unfortunately, this great gift intrinsically carries within it the possibility of horrendous evil. But there is no way around it. To restrict the possibility of awful consequences is to restrict free will. Therefore, as a byproduct of God’s good gift to humanity, evil entered the world. God is now graciously renewing the world in Christ, but it was from Adam and Eve’s initial sin that all earthly evil came—even natural disasters in a corrupted nature. And even now God continues to allow us to sin as a result of his gift of free will—either the same as that which he gave Adam and Eve or a graciously restored free will after their Fall, depending on whom you ask—which he does not revoke for our sake.

Let me make a few observations about this argument.

First (obviously), the argument assumes the existence of the indeterminist definition of “free will,” which I have challenged previously. So the merits of that definition are not determined by this argument, but rather the argument is acceptable only if the definition is also on other grounds.

Second, some Christian indeterminists also believe my argument for the greater good—they are not entirely incompatible—but doing so raises other problems. For God to intend the greater good, evil had to enter the world through the Fall. Now if God intended the Fall to happen in a world where humans have “free will,” then how could he make the Fall happen? The only way would be to set up the human race to exercise their freedom in a way that would lead to the Fall. This is certainly possible. But my question is, how does this differ from determinism? If God gave humans the potential to want this or that, but he created the circumstances that made it inevitable that they would want one of those options, that annuls indeterministic “free will.” “Free will,” in the indeterminist definition, means that God does not manipulate human choices. So if God manipulated humanity into the Fall in order to make way for a greater good, then God abridged “free will.” Now, that’s exactly what I am saying did happen. But that means that Adam and Eve did not have “free will,” as the indeterminists define it.

Otherwise, if a greater good is coming as a result of the Fall, but God did not intend for that to happen, then by disobeying God we lucked into something great that he never intended. But that doesn’t seem right either. Indeed, it makes Christ’s sacrifice God’s Plan B—he never intended that the Son would take on human flesh, die, and rise again as King of Kings and Lord of Lords for the salvation of everyone who believes, but when we sinned he had to find some contingency plan, and that is it. The third option is to deny that a greater good could come out of the Fall, and thus the new creation will be equal in greatness and goodness to the first one. Therefore, at the end of the day, Christ’s suffering and ours is all just to break even. To me, not only is this unpalatable, but also unbiblical.

My third observation is that the indeterminist argument appeals to those who believe that indeterministic “free will” really is worth all the horrors ever seen in the world. In the United States—possibly the most individual freedom-loving people the world has ever seen—it is pretty appealing. But that might not be persuasive to everybody who has ever lived. I suspect that there are many people—including here and now in the U.S., not to mention in other cultures and eras—who do not feel like God’s gift of “free will” is worth the undying hatred from their mother-in-law or their husband being gunned down in a convenience store robbery or their child being born with a terminal brain disorder or an entire ethnic group being systematically raped and murdered. They would much rather not have free will than live with these things. This doesn’t mean they are right. It just means that the indeterministic explanation of evil is not as attractive to some as it is to others. To be fair, the greater-good argument suffers similarly. There are probably many who would rather not experience greater good in the future than live with evil in the present—although one could reply that that’s because they can’t grasp how great the future will be.

Fourth, the argument raises the question of how an all-powerful God interacts with human free will that he himself cannot or will not touch. The traditional and orthodox indeterminist response is that God “limits himself” from interrupting human free will, but this raises further questions. First, does this mean that God never interrupts free will, never directs human choices? What about Pharaoh, whom I discussed in chapter two? Aren’t there others in the Bible that God meddled with? What about biblical proverbs like Proverbs 21:1: “The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord like channels of water; he turns it wherever he wants,” or 16:9: “A person plans his course, but the Lord directs his steps”? If we can agree that there are at least some times that God directs human choices . . . well then, how many times? Why some times and not other times? Why not all the time? If God would intervene to harden Pharaoh’s heart and bring catastrophe on Egypt and deliverance for Israel, why not intervene at the moment of Adam and Eve’s temptation? You see, if God ever intervenes at all, for any reason, it raises the question of why he did not intervene at the very beginning, or why he did not intervene to prevent the Holocaust or 9/11. It keeps God on the hook, because it raises the question of his goodness again, which the indeterministic argument is supposed to preserve. Also, if God is willing to compromise his gift of free will, what does that say about it? Is it really such a high and untouchable good? When God interferes with free will, is he hurting us? Do we need an explanation for that?

On the other hand, some indeterminists might answer that God never intervenes in human choice at all, and that any biblical examples I might raise to the contrary I am misinterpreting. In fact, they say, God would never step in and interrupt someone’s choice, even if that person were to do a dastardly thing. 9/11 is the perfect example. In the days and weeks following 9/11, many clergy were asked by reporters, “Why would God let such a terrible thing happen?” And the answer of the clergy (that I saw on TV, anyway) almost uniformly was the indeterministic free-will argument—God let it happen because he does not interfere with human choice, because he has given us the gift of free will, because he loves us. Okay, let’s say he doesn’t interfere; let’s say he would never have intervened to change Mohammed Atta’s mind and the minds of his comrades. As you know, various American intelligence and counterterrorism agencies, especially the FBI, had pieces of information about the impending attack, but that information was never consolidated in such a way as might have revealed what would happen. Why didn’t God intervene to consolidate this information? When an FBI agent discovered that suspected al-Qaeda operatives were receiving flight instruction, why didn’t God put the thought in the mind of his or her superiors to take it seriously? Or why didn’t God allow there to be trouble with a particular terrorist’s visa that might have cast suspicion on him and caused his cell to unravel? Why didn’t God intervene in any number of small ways that do not infringe upon human choices or motives but would allow the plot to be discovered and stopped?

If one agrees with me that it was fully within God’s normal behavior pattern to do this kind of thing, then why didn’t he do it before 9/11? Again, it puts God back on the hook and challenges his goodness if he would refuse to intervene in such unobtrusive but effective ways. It strongly insinuates that God desires particular evil events to happen. On the other hand, if even these interventions are undoable for God because they would interfere with human free will, can God do anything at all? I mean, if God would not make a particular memo stick out to an FBI chief, what will he do? What can we pray about? Physical ailments perhaps, and natural disasters. But in terms of human behavior, God is in handcuffs of his own making. And that kind of a God seems to me to be a lot more like deists’ Divine Watchmaker, who winds the world up and lets it tick down on its own, than like the boldly interventionist God of the Bible. I don’t find a whole lot of comfort in a God like that.

It Breaks Down at the Beginning

The indeterministic free-will solution to the problem of evil is unsatisfying to me. I believe that God ordains everything that happens, including awful things, for the greater good yet to come. But I don’t believe that I’ve figured everything out. In fact, this is where we come to the weakest link of the entire chain that I’ve been forging through this book.

Remember how we talked about Adam and Eve in chapter two? I proposed that Adam and Eve sinned because their good natures could be co-opted by a bad environment—that is, their conversation with Satan. But this reminds us of a far more serious fall: that of Satan himself. Our information is fuzzy, but the best indications from the Bible are that he was the foremost of all the angels of God, but at some point he proudly coveted the glory of God himself and became the enemy of God, taking other angels with him in his rebellion. Now, Adam and Eve’s fall I can partly explain away by appealing to external influences (namely, Satan himself). But before Satan became Satan, so far as we know, there were no external influences towards evil. Satan had no tempter. His rebellion came entirely from within himself, despite that he was created perfect and good, as Adam and Eve were. And, this being the case, there are only three conclusions one can draw. The first is that my entire theory about choice emanating from nature and nurture as predestined by God is wrong, because Satan’s choice came from another source entirely. In light of all the arguments I’ve raised throughout this book, I’m reluctant to accept that. The second is that evil, in some form or another, has existed eternally, just as good has, and it somehow infected Satan before our history. This dramatically decreases God’s power and glory, because it means that there is a segment of reality that has coexisted with him forever outside his sovereignty and nature, and it is also unbiblical. God would thus not be an all-powerful and unlimited God. The third conclusion is that God took Satan’s good, pre-fall nature and purposely changed it to be evil so that he would sin. Why God would do this (i.e., for the greater good) is hard enough to accept. That God would do it is virtually impossible. That makes God the source of evil—not just the one who uses it for his purposes, but its inventor. At least on the surface, and probably all the way down, this idea contradicts everything the Bible says about God. James writes that “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am tempted by God,’ for God cannot be tempted by evil, and he himself tempts no one” (Jas. 1:13). It stretches this verse enough to suggest, as I have, that God sets up the circumstances in which people will fall when tempted by Satan and their own evil desires. But it blows it apart completely to suggest that God himself is the one doing the tempting or implanting the evil desires in the first place.

For myself, I can’t accept any of these alternatives. So, where does this leave me? Quite simply, here: I don’t believe that what I’ve written here in this book is The Truth. Rather, I believe that it is about as close to the truth as we finite humans can get in this world. It’s kind of like those multiple-choice tests that you take in school. Do you remember how savvy teachers would put in the instructions at the top, “Choose the best possible answer”? That was a disclaimer so that some smart-aleck kid who gets an answer wrong can’t probe the encyclopedias and with his brilliant legal mind argue that in one circumstance in human history, answer “B” was correct, not answer “A,” so he deserves credit for the question. Because if he did, the teacher could always “tut-tut” and say, “Yes, but it is not the best possible answer.” I feel like a kid taking a multiple-choice test, and when I look at the questions of freedom and destiny, none of the answers look exactly right. But it’s not my job to pick the exactly right answer, just the best possible one. And I think this is it. I do think, though, that at the end of the exam I will be able to go up to the Teacher and ask him all about it and understand what’s really going on.

So to you I say this: if you’re going to reject the thesis of this book, Satan’s fall is the reason to do it. The end of this chapter has a huge bullseye on it, because the logic collapses. But before you write it off entirely, I have one request: please be sure that your multiple-choice answer is better.

Part Three:

Freedom and Destiny Applied

Chapter Ten

Living Your Destiny

So far, we’ve talked about the issues of freedom and destiny rather theoretically. And as is by now clear, I happen to think that my angle on these issues stacks up pretty well in theory. But when a person who believes these ideas puts them into practice in life, there can be problems. I don’t think that there must be problems (which I hope to demonstrate in this chapter). But I have to admit that the attitudes of many who believe as I believe are as persuasive an argument against my position than anything an opponent could come up with.

Fatalism versus God’s Means

Let’s take, for instance, the fatalist. The fatalist is someone who believes that, because God has foreordained everything that will happen, there is no use trying to do anything. Why bother telling anyone about Jesus? If God has chosen them to be saved, they’ll be saved whether I tell them about Jesus or not. Why bother praying? If it’s God’s will that something happen, he’ll make it happen whether I pray for it (or against it) or not. Why wipe the spaghetti sauce off the side of my face? If God has chosen for it to come off, it will come off whether I wipe it or not. And so on.

Now, no one wants to be around a spiritual couch-potato like the fatalist. The people that we admire (especially we Americans) are those who have done something, without whose effort we would still light our homes with candles or not be allowed to vote or not know Jesus ourselves. If the ideas that I have proposed lead to this sort of complacent person, that alone calls into question the veracity of my doctrine, because I think we all rightly expect that people who know the truth are more likely to make the world around them a little better.

But isn’t there something to what the fatalist says? If indeed God has planned everything that is to come, does that not quench personal initiative? If, no matter what I do or don’t do, the same outcome occurs, why do anything at all?

To answer these questions, let’s begin by examining the fatalist’s background. The fatalist comes from an august lineage of thinkers, including the poets, playwrights, and philosophers of the great ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome. Do you remember the story of Oedipus? He was the guy who was prophesied to kill his father and bed his mother. The tragedy of Oedipus is that he cannot escape his destiny no matter what he does. Oedipus has no idea that he was left exposed as an infant but was raised by another family, so when he kills his father, the tyrant of Thebes, and takes his widowed mother to be his wife, he doesn’t know what he’s doing until the painful truth is slowly revealed. That story, poignantly told by Sophocles, exemplifies the worldview of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Everyone’s fate is set. Do whatever you want in the meantime—try to escape it or rush to meet it—you will arrive at your fate in the end. The myths also told of beings called the Fates who wove a tapestry made of the lives of gods and men that none could escape, a tangle of destiny that could be read in bird innards and the movements of the stars. This is the basis of astrology. The classical purpose of astrology is not to give vague advice for how you can better your life; it is for parsing out where your life is going whether you try to better it or not. Shakespeare called Romeo and Juliet “a pair of star-cross’d lovers” because the stars had foretold their unavoidable, tragic destiny.

Do you yet see what distinguishes fatalism from what I have proposed in this book? In the worldview of the fatalist, destiny is set regardless of what people do. But I have argued that destiny reveals itself in what people do. For the fatalist, the ends come about regardless of the means. For me, the ends come about because of the means.

Let me cite some biblical examples of this. As I was putting words in the mouth of the fatalist earlier, I said, “Why bother telling anyone about Jesus? If God has chosen them to be saved, they’ll be saved whether I tell them about Jesus or not.” Let’s contrast this attitude (which, to my total befuddlement, has been expressed many times in the history of the church) with the words of the apostle Paul that I quoted in chapter 7:

For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. How are they to call on one they have not believed in? And how are they to believe in one they have not heard of? And how are they to hear without someone preaching to them? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How timely is the arrival of those who proclaim the good news” [Rom. 10:13-15].

Paul’s point is that there is a direct causal chain from the Lord sending out preachers through the church to people being saved, with several intermediate steps in between. People don’t just “get saved” in a vacuum, spontaneously. It is a result of other steps that prepare the way. This causal chain is God’s plan. It means that not only has God predestined people to be saved, but he has also predestined the means for their salvation to take place: sending, preaching, hearing, and believing. God predestined Paul’s hearers to be saved because he predestined Paul to go and preach to them.

Predestined Relationships

The same is true of prayer. Throughout the Bible, when God’s people pray, he does incredible things. As Jesus said, “[W]hatever you ask in prayer, if you believe, you will receive” (Matt. 21:22). James pointed out that “[t]he prayer of a righteous person has great effectiveness. Elijah was a human being like us, and he prayed earnestly that it would not rain and there was no rain on the land for three years and six months! Then he prayed again, and the sky gave rain and the land sprouted with a harvest” (Jas. 5:16-18). In short, God has ordained that there be a connection between our prayers and his actions. It is unbiblical in the extreme not to pray because God has already predestined what is going to happen. God not only predestines what he will do, but also that his people will ask him to do it in prayer. This was his idea.

In fact, the power of prayer may extend even further than that. Do you remember how I used the analogy of an author and his novel in chapter one to illustrate the relationship between God and history? What if the “book” of the history of the universe that God “wrote” in the first creative instant is actually just the first draft? And what if in the draft God intentionally created characters (Abraham and Elijah and you and me) who would ask him to revise it in just the ways he wanted it revised as it goes along? Is it not possible that when we pray we are co-authoring the history of the world with God, making suggestions of revisions to him which are exactly the suggestions that he created us to make?

To some, this idea of prayer might seem absurd. If indeed God predestines everything that will happen, why bother predestining people to pray for it? And if God knows what he wants the final draft to look like, why write a first draft with a built-in editorial committee? It appears both unnecessary and inefficient. And to task-oriented people like me, so it is. But God is not only concerned with accomplishing tasks; he is interested in people. I believe that God set up the system this way because he gets enormous pleasure out of it. I think God absolutely relishes telling Abraham what his plans are for Sodom and Gomorrah just so that Abraham will negotiate with God to change it (Gen. 18:17-33). I think God savors giving Solomon the chance to ask for anything he wishes and hearing him reason through what his wish should be till he arrives at what the Lord is already prepared to give him (1 Kings 3:4-15). I think Jesus tremendously enjoys his reparté with the Canaanite woman that results in the healing of her daughter (Matt. 15:21-28). In all these cases God could have just plopped on humanity what his will would be. Sometimes he does this. But in these cases he did what I think is the deep desire of his heart, his true preference. He uses his task of ordaining history as an avenue to build relationships with us. He acts like a father who can fix a creaking door much more quickly and easily by himself, but who solicits his little son’s “help” so that they can do it together, each enjoying the presence of the other—and the father helping his son to grow up along the way.

Fellowship between God and his people: this is what prayer is all about. And evangelism is similar. Just as God ordained prayer to accomplish his ends so that we might have an intimate, personal relationship with him, I believe he ordained evangelism so that we might have intimate, personal relationships with each other. God could have just decreed that people would come to faith and be saved spontaneously, in isolation. But God finds it much more appealing (and I daresay it is more healthy for us) to require some people to connect with other people at the deepest level of spiritual need for this wondrous transformation to happen. The apostle John understood it well: “What we have seen and heard we announce to you too, so that you may have fellowship with us (and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ). Thus we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete” (1 John 1:3-4).

Doing Something

But while this counters the fatalist’s belief that God’s predestined ends will happen apart from his predestined means, we may still have the creepy feeling that our initiative is irrelevant. For instance, I might know that my unsaved friend cannot be saved unless she hears the good news. But couldn’t I say, “Hey, if God wants me to be the one to tell her then he’ll predestine me to do so; so, no worries”? I still have an excuse to sit on my behind, a disincentive to help my friend.

To overcome this lethargic tendency, it’s important to remember some ideas we’ve discussed earlier. In chapter six I talked about what was necessary for there to be guilt. I proposed that guilt requires a motive to do wrong (or, in connection with this problem, no desire to do something right that is in one’s power), but it does not require that the person have the power to desire something else. Therefore, if someone desires to do wrong (or does not desire to do right) and acts accordingly, that person is guilty even though God ordained it. “So whoever knows what is good to do and does not do it is guilt of sin,” period (Jas. 4:17). God’s sovereign plan has nothing to do with it. We can’t cop out of what God has commanded us to do by pleading that he did not predestine us to do it, as much as we might like to.

Another idea that helps us overcome complacency I stressed in chapter two: God wills through our wills. If God predestines me to do something, I will not find my arms and legs moving and my mouth flapping of their own accord, detached from my mental control. If I am predestined to tell my friend about Jesus, there will be a significant part of me that wants to tell my friend about Jesus. So God’s plan will express itself in my personal motivation (still bearing in mind that a lack of motivation on my part does not let me off the hook).

In practical terms, here’s how I deal with the interplay between my motivation and God’s predestination when faced with a dilemma like talking to my friend about Jesus. I begin by admitting that I do not know what is God’s “is”-will in this situation. In other words, I don’t know whether, before all time, he predestined me to talk to her or not. Only he knows. But after that admission, I try to sort out what God’s “should”-desire is—that is, what the right thing, the moral thing, is to do, what he has commanded me to do. That’s not always easy to figure out. For instance, I know that we’re supposed to tell others about Jesus as a general principle, but exactly what to say and how and when and where and to whom to say it I only know by following the Holy Spirit (see e.g. Acts 16:6-10). In this case, let’s say the Spirit indicates that I need to tell my friend about Jesus in such-and-such a way, and I need to tell her right now. Well, if I’m to be obedient to God, there’s only one thing to do, and that’s to tell her. So I do. And then, you’ll never believe what I discover: apparently God had predestined me to tell her all along. How about that!

See, when faced with a choice, we never know what God has predestined us to do until we actually do it. So if we do nothing in the name of predestination, we’ve essentially fulfilled our own prophecy—we’ve assumed that God has predestined us to do nothing, and then we prove it by doing nothing. But if our choice is going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy anyway, why not do something instead? Do you see? Because we cannot know what God has predestined us to do until after we’ve done it, we have the paradoxical freedom to “decide” what God has predestined us to do! It’s as if, by our ignorance of his plan, our choice “determines” his predetermination. We can say, “Well, Lord, I don’t know what you’ve predestined me to do, but I really wish it were this”—so we do it. And, lo and behold, we find that that’s what God had predestined from before all ages! It is a crazy puzzle, and if you spend too much time thinking about it, your brain will melt. But the bottom line is this: predestination must never be an excuse for inaction, because it is in our action that what is predestined becomes apparent. So if we are committed to choosing the right actions, I think we will be pleased with what God has predestined for us. In fact, I think we will find that we are “created in Christ Jesus for good works that God prepared beforehand so we may do them” (Eph. 2:10).

The Perversion of Eternal Security

There’s another misapplication of the ideas that I’ve proposed that I’d like to talk about. However, unlike fatalism, this position is very attractive among evangelicals. It’s called “eternal security.” In its most basic form—pithily summed up, “Once saved, always saved”—eternal security is the observation that because God takes the initiative to save us, and because God is more powerful than anything else (including us), and because God foreordains outcomes that no one can change, therefore when God regenerates someone, he regenerates him permanently. He does not “unregenerate,” because his salvation does not rest on his own aimless whims outside God’s control. Before the phrase “eternal security” was coined, this was called “the perseverance of the saints,” and I have no problem with it. However, this core definition of eternal security has mutated into something that has had widespread acclaim among American evangelicals, including among millions of indeterminists, but I cannot stomach it. The leading brand of eternal security goes something like this: if at one point in your life you were at an evangelistic gathering, or someone shared with you “The Four Spiritual Laws,” and you believed, and to manifest this belief you “prayed the prayer” or “came forward to the altar” or “put up your hand with every eye closed and every head bowed,” then you will go to heaven no matter what you do thereafter. I have grave concerns about this kind of eternal security. (Hereafter, for the sake of clarity, I will call this view “eternal security,” while the “core definition” of eternal security that I described formerly I will call “the perseverance of the saints.”)

One of my professors in seminary knew a Roman Catholic priest who for a while was his mentor in the classical spiritual disciplines. One day the priest said to my professor, “You evangelical Protestants are always jumping on our backs for saying that a person is saved by receiving the seven sacraments. Well, at least we have seven sacraments; you evangelicals have only one!” My professor was at a loss to know what he was talking about. Then the priest continued, “ ‘Repeat the “Sinner’s Prayer” after me.’ One sacrament.”

Some important things changed in the evolution from the perseverance of the saints to eternal security. The first is the subtle change from faith to sacrament. All of us children of the Reformation would subscribe to the doctrine that we are declared righteous (i.e., justified) by faith alone. We all agree with the prophet Joel that “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Joel 2:32), quoted and interpreted by Paul in Romans 10:13 to refer to faith in Jesus Christ. So as a result, when we tell someone about Jesus, the thing we are looking for from them is an expression of faith—hence the “Sinner’s Prayer” or coming forward or whatever. The problem is that that act, while it may be an expression of genuine faith, is not faith itself. In fact, we really don’t know what’s going on inside of the person—whether it’s the result of social pressure or emotional volatility disconnected from the Spirit’s work or what. Very possibly someone who comes forward is indeed taking a genuine step toward faith in Christ but may not quite have reached it yet. In any case, if we focus on the act of response rather than the inward reality, we accidentally convert faith into a sacrament, and we make “praying the prayer” as magical as clicking one’s heels three times and saying, “There’s no place like home.”

As a result, when those who appear to be believers cite (or seek) assurance of their salvation, it often goes something like this: “I know that I’m saved, because thirty years ago I heard such-and-such an evangelist preach, and I went forward at the altar call.” Is there any parallel for this kind of statement in the New Testament? I cannot think of a single instance in which assurance of salvation is based on a solitary event in the believer’s past. There are certainly examples of believers whose faith was demonstrated to be genuine in the past, but if it is genuine, the faith will continue into the present. For instance, Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, “We know, brothers and sisters loved by God, that he has chosen you, in that our gospel did not come to you [i.e., in the past] merely in words, but in power and in the Holy Spirit and with deep conviction” (1 Thess. 1:4-5). But later he continues, “But now Timothy has come to us from you and given us the good news of your faith and love. . . . For now we are alive again, if you stand firm in the Lord [i.e., in the present]” (1 Thess. 3:6, 8).

The basis for our assurance of salvation is that our faith was not once-and-done, but ongoing. And as faith goes on, it produces visible results in every aspect of our lives. This is why James says, “[F]aith without works is dead” (Jas. 2:26), and why John says, “We know that we have passed over from death to life, because we love our fellow Christians” (1 John 3:14). So often eternal security is used to provide assurance to the family of, say, Uncle Lou, who went forward at a campfire at age ten but who got drunk, swindled, fornicated, and generally lived like hell for the rest of his life. But not once do Jesus or the apostles give us assurance about a guy like Uncle Lou. To the contrary, to warn the Corinthian Christians, who considered themselves quite secure, to stop their immoral ways, Paul wrote, “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?” (1 Cor. 6:9).

Future Security, Present Faith

Because of the once-and-for-all sacramental nature of eternal security, its adherents continually look to their past for assurance. But the writers of the New Testament, when they are not emphasizing the sufficiency of the cross in the past or the preserving power of God in the present, constantly point us toward the future. An enormous amount of New Testament exhortations have to do with sticking with the faith all the way to the end because of the future hope that awaits us. As Jesus put it simply, “[T]he person who endures to the end will be saved” (Matt. 24:13). An entire biblical book—Hebrews—is about this. The author writes, “[R]un with endurance the race set out for us” (Heb. 12:1). In fact, the author is notorious for giving grim warnings about what will happen if we do not run the race with perseverance. Perhaps the most famous (and trickiest) is Hebrews 6:4-6, which states,

For it is impossible in the case of those who have once been enlightened, tasted the heavenly gift, become partakers of the Holy Spirit, tasted the good word of God and the miracles of the coming age, and then have committed apostasy, to renew them again to repentance, since they are crucifying the Son of God for themselves all over again and holding him up to contempt.

Now, gallons of ink have been spilled trying to explain this passage, and I’m not going to do it justice here. But I understand the passage basically like this. The author is writing to a group of believers (according to their own self-concept) who are tempted to throw in the towel on this Jesus thing. They’ve “put up their hand,” so to speak, but now they’re not so sure about what they signed up for. The author doesn’t know on a person-by-person basis who has been regenerated and chosen by God and will endure to the end and who has not. So his warning to the group as a whole is this: “Because in your life as a church you have witnessed and experienced the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit and the gospel in operation to work miracles and change lives, if you guys jump ship you will demonstrate the hardness of your unregenerate hearts. And in fact, because you have claimed to be disciples of Jesus, you would demonstrate to the whole world that Jesus is not the real deal if you don’t stick with him, so as just punishment God is going to let you wander your own way without trying to change your minds.” The author of Hebrews is deadly concerned that those who have claimed to be followers of Jesus hang in there and see it through to the end, because the consequences for not persevering in the faith are so awful. Now, if eternal security is correct, how could the book of Hebrews possibly have been written? If assurance of salvation was truly based on the outwardly observable decision the readers made when they first believed, why does the author write such frightening stuff about giving up down the road?

Now, you may be thinking, “If there is no eternal security, does that mean we constantly have to be afraid of falling away and going to hell? If I sin too many times after I get saved, will God kick me out?” No, I don’t think so. This is where the perseverance of the saints comes in.

The first thing to understand about the perseverance of the saints is that perseverance entails persevering faith. This is not salvation by works. This is not a legalistic code where if you smoke 235,490 cigarettes you’re okay, but if you smoke 235,491 then you’re going to hell. No sir. Doing what God wants in increasing measure—no matter how gradual or with how many temporary setbacks—is critical as an indicator of genuine faith, but it is through the faith, not the good deeds, that we are made acceptable to God on the basis of Christ’s death. So perseverance is about continuing to trust in Christ’s death for salvation every bit as much—if not more so—today as you did when you first believed. We never outgrow that. Trust in Christ for salvation is not an act that we do once and then move on to the next thing. Rather, it is the ongoing attitude that undergirds all things in the Christian life.

The second thing about the perseverance of the saints is that our full assurance comes from the end of our Christian walk, not from the beginning. The proof that God has called us only comes in a complete, no-ifs-ands-or-buts way when Christ returns and we are transformed or when we die and our spirits go to be with the Lord. Therefore, we don’t say, “I’m a saint; therefore I will persevere.” Rather, we will say someday, “I persevered; therefore I’m a saint.” Now I don’t mean to overemphasize this point, because assurance of our holiness in the sight of God is possible and real right now. But that assurance does not come from where we began; it comes from where we are today. “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved,” but the right way to appropriate this great promise is to say, “I continue to call on the name of the Lord to this day, and therefore if he should return today I know I’ll be with him.” And we keep saying this every single day of our lives. And if we keep doing this, lo and behold, one day it will be the last day, and we will have persevered, and we will be saved, and we’ll find that we are saints after all. And so our assurance comes from our faith expressed through love at the present time, founded on the work of Christ in the past, pointing toward our hope in the future.

The 15th-century saint Thomas à Kempis illustrated true assurance of salvation with the following story:

When one that was in anxiety of mind, often wavering between fear and hope, did once, being overcome with grief, prostrate himself in a Church before a certain altar in prayer, and pondered thus within himself, saying, “O if I knew that I should yet persevere!” he presently heard within him a divine answer, “If thou didst know this, what wouldest thou do? Do now what thou wouldest do then, and thou shalt be perfectly secure.” And being herewith comforted and strengthened, he committed himself wholly to the divine will, and that anxious tossing ceased. And he willed not to search curiously, to know what things should befall him; but rather labored to seek out what was the acceptable and perfect will of God for the beginning and the accomplishing of every good work.

So, to sum up, the ideas that I’ve presented in this book do not require us to be inactive and complacent. They do not require us to be lazy either because of God’s predestination of events like the fatalist or because of his predestination of our perseverance like the devotee of eternal security. God has indeed planned all such things. But he accomplishes his aims through our wills, which express themselves in our actions moment by moment and day by day. Therefore, we do not merely receive our destiny passively. We actively live it.

Chapter Eleven

What Difference Does It Make?

After reading the last chapter, in which I described two applications of my views that one should not make, you might wonder, what applications should one make? In fact, does any of this actually matter in the real world, or is this just an abstract intellectual exercise, like trying to figure out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? I don’t think it’s just an intellectual exercise. I believe that these concepts of freedom and destiny do make a difference in life, and in this chapter I would like to tell you how they have affected mine.

Knowing and Enjoying the Truth

The first and humblest benefit I have reaped from these ideas is the joy of finding out how stuff works. If you are the kind of person who doesn’t have an enormous amount of curiosity as to why things work the way they do, be it the Atonement or a can opener or a butterfly or a government, you might not appreciate this. In fact, you might even resent people like me who “have to understand everything” and can’t just “accept things as they are.” Or you might be one of those who, for reasons unknown to me, have loads of curiosity about the can opener or the butterfly but disdain such cognitive investigation of God as being sacreligious or unfaithful or useless. Well, all I can tell you is that some of us do accept everything God has done for us as it is, but for whatever reason he has also built in us a hunger to know and understand it better that just doesn’t rest until it is satisfied. And because of this I have found great satisfaction the better I have understood God, time, predestination, freedom, the will, sin, and hope, insofar as I have actually understood them and not just gotten completely confused.

A second and related benefit is not being afraid of the Bible anymore. I was never afraid of the whole thing, but there were certain Scriptures that I really didn’t like reading—they were very uncomfortable. For example, there was Romans 9; the whole thing could be quoted, but how about verse 18: “Therefore God has mercy on whom he chooses to have mercy, and he hardens whom he chooses to harden.” Creepy! But now none of these scary predestination passages are scary anymore. I’m at peace with them and I don’t find myself either running away from them pretending they aren’t there or immediately rushing to “interpret” them without being prepared to accept whatever they say. I also don’t get hot under the collar when people quote them. Whether they agree with me or not, I’m no longer on the defensive, hostile to what the people quoting them might be implying.

Pastoral Ministry and the Power of God

A third (and rather more lofty) benefit is peace about my ministry as a pastor. Pastors are like everybody else in that we want to see results from our labors. But in our business, the results are usually fuzzy and not easily measured. We tend to be idealists, so we talk a good game about being willing to do the Lord’s will and be satisfied even if we never see the harvest of the seeds that we’ve planted in our lifetimes. But that’s a hard row to hoe. Some get disillusioned, and as they get further along in ministry they “phone it in” and set the bar as low as they can, trying to convince themselves that the week-to-week management of a this-worldly ecclesial kingdom is what they were ordained to do. Others, desperate for some quantitative validation of their efforts, get obsessed with what Jim Cymbala sardonically calls “the new holy trinity”: attendance, buildings, and cash (A B C). They desperately hope that the answers to questions like “How many people showed up last week?” or “How much has come into the building fund?” will also be the answers as to whether the kingdom has spread through their ministry and whether they have personally succeeded.

Despite genuine wisdom it contains, the church growth industry—that mixture of books, celebrities, conferences, and buzzwords familiar to the pastoral realm of contemporary evangelical culture—is fed by a combination of the desperate idealism and worldly cynicism of pastors. It is fed by the hope that we who get paid to accomplish the supernatural have the power to usher in another Great Awakening, ideally with its epicenter in our church’s sanctuary, if we can just get our technique right. It is fed by the fear that if we do not, or cannot, then our life’s work is meaningless.

The Bible has given us pastors words of encouragement about our struggle: the encouragement of the farmer. Paul, in describing his ministry and that of his colleague Apollos wrote,

What is Apollos, really? Or what is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, and each of us in the ministry the Lord gave us. I planted, Apollos watered, but God caused it to grow. So neither the one who plants counts for anything, nor the one who waters, but God who causes the growth. The one who plants and the one who waters work as one, but each will receive his reward according to his work [1 Cor. 3:5-8].

Paul reminds us pastors that our job is not to guarantee growth. If it were, we would fail, because we are utterly unable. Farmers can’t control the weather, and they have only limited control of bugs or blight or soil quality (and in the first century they had even less). In the same way, we pastors can’t directly alter people’s natures or skillfully orchestrate their external circumstances to make people trust and obey. All we can control is our own decision to plant the seed of the word and tend whatever shoots it sends up in people’s lives. That’s it. On that basis alone we will be rewarded by God at the end, not by what we naively see as the end result. That’s because all results ultimately come from God. He is the only one who makes the soil of people’s hearts hard or stony or thorny or good. He, not we, determines how the word will be received by its hearers.

Nevertheless, God’s determination does not excuse us pastors from neglecting our assignments. Planting goes better when the soil is tilled than when it is not and likewise when it is fertilized versus when it is not. Watering is better when one uses water, preferably with some kind of plant food, rather than using alcohol or brake fluid. In the same way, when we preach the gospel and take care of souls, we pastors are required to do the best we can with the best methods known so long as we do not corrupt the gospel, our hearers, or ourselves. Leaving the results to God does not mean that we do things the way we have always done them because they are comfortable, familiar, easy, or personally or culturally preferable. It does not mean that we leave the scraps of our workweek for sermon preparation, prayer, and fasting, expecting God to pick up the slack (even though sometimes he does). In short, we are not to become fatalists; rather, we acknowledge the weighty honor and responsibility of being God’s means. But it also means that if we do the best possible and still appear by human valuation to come up short in results, we maintain the faith to remain faithful and not cut corners to make converts that haven’t been converted.

I’m sure that Paul himself ran into times of discouragement, times he hoped for a big response to the preaching of Jesus and didn’t see what he wanted. Indeed, the ex-Pharisee who inaugurated each foray into a new city by preaching in the Jewish synagogue—often followed by getting beaten—confessed,

I am telling the truth in Christ (I am not lying!), for my conscience assures me in the Holy Spirit—I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed—cut off from Christ—for the sake of my people, my fellow countrymen, who are Israelites [Rom. 9:1-4].

And yet, as the rest of Romans 9-11 bears witness, he believed that the generally negative response of his Jewish hearers was not his fault but rather was part of the grand purpose of God by which the Gentiles would be brought to repentance until eventually “all Israel will be saved” (Rom. 11:26). This is why, after Paul and Barnabas were rejected by most of the Jews in Antioch in Pisidia but believed by many Gentiles, Luke writes that “all who had been appointed for eternal life believed” (Acts 13:48, emphasis mine).

I don’t go so far as to claim that unless a pastor believes as I do on freedom and destiny he or she is destined to fall into despair or to corrupt the gospel with slick, feel-good marketing strategies. But I do claim that this pastoral encouragement and my understanding of God’s sovereign will at work in our natures and external circumstances go hand in hand. God uses me as a means, so my work does matter. And yet the number of souls saved through my preaching does not rest on my eloquence, persuasiveness, or marketing savvy—not “on human wisdom but on the power of God” (1 Cor. 2:5). He is the one who leads people to believe. I do my work with the confidence that God is doing his.

Coping with Disappointment

The fourth benefit I have received from these ideas about freedom and destiny is about handling times of disappointment.

I was desperate coming out of seminary. It beat the snot out of me—not academically, but personally and financially, and not the school alone but the entire complex of my life at that time. As a result of those trials, my relationship with God was thin, my moral conduct shaky, and my marriage fragile. So I felt something like a castaway when my young family and I took refuge at my parents’ house the fall after I graduated. I didn’t know how I was going to do ministry or pay bills. But then a week or so after we had settled in I was on the phone with an old friend who just happened to be on a search committee looking for a minister of music for his church, and he wanted my résumé.

He gave me the job description. I couldn’t believe it. The church looked healthy and compatible with me, and I already had positive relationships with some people there. They were looking for a leader, a musician competent in a variety of styles, and a theologically educated minister. There aren’t many people out there who happen to combine those traits, but I happened to be one of them—and I grew up two miles down the road. I thought, isn’t God great? Here I am, desperate for income, desperate for an opportunity to minister, and here he’s put it into my lap, better than I could possibly have imagined!

And so began two months of interaction with the search committee, the senior pastor, the associate pastors, and so on as we inched closer to me being named the new minister. And on one snowy Saturday morning I drove to the church for yet another meeting with the pastoral staff. But a few minutes into the meeting the senior pastor gravely told me that I was no longer being considered for the position. A few weeks before I had unwisely but well-meaningly divulged some details to him about my life that I thought would be valuable for our collegial relationship moving forward. Though he assured me that those details did not incline him to reject me, they did incline him to do a massive reassessment of my qualifications for the position, at the end of which he found me lacking.

I was stunned, angry, and scared. Stunned because I naively thought the job was mine, and some church participants in the process had carelessly indicated as much. Angry because I felt that I had been strung along just to be rejected. And scared because my money had almost run out, my temp job didn’t cover all my expenses, and I didn’t know how I was going to keep my family afloat. In short, I was devastated.

At this heartbreaking time my friends and family rallied around to comfort me. But something weird happened: my comforters told me contradictory things. Some people attempted to console me by saying, “God always achieves his will; therefore this rejection must be his doing, which means that he has something even better in store for you.” Others attempted to console me with exactly the opposite: “God doesn’t always achieve his will; therefore sometimes people (like this church) disobey God, which thwarts what God wanted for you, but it isn’t your fault.”

If you were in my shoes, what would you make of these contradictory consolations? Does God always achieve his will, or not? I was actually encouraged by both encouragements. First, it was good to be reminded that God does always achieve his will—that is, his “is”-will. I could be certain that even in this awful situation, God was in control; this pain was an intentional part of his purpose and plan, and those were good. But on the other hand, it was good to be reminded that lots of things happen that God does not “will”—that is, people don’t always obey God’s “should”-desire for how we ought to behave. It was quite possible (though by no means certain) that this church was not following the Lord’s direction. Therefore, even if I was affected adversely by someone else’s disobedience, I didn’t need to internalize the problem and constantly question how I had screwed up or why I deserved this turn of events. Believe it or not, these seemingly contradictory encouragements—that a loving and faithful God was in charge, even if that meant that others in my life might wrong me—got me through.

A year and a half later I reflected on that dark time. I had been the solo pastor of my first church for about nine months. I realized that the pastor of that church in my hometown had been right. I hadn’t been ready—I was not yet mature enough emotionally or spiritually to assume that burden. And regardless of my musical ability and leadership, I found that I wasn’t called by God to be a music leader. And I didn’t have the gifts (and they are gifts) to serve as a good associate pastor to another. In short, I wasn’t supposed to be there. I was supposed to be where I was. And if I had gone there, I wouldn’t be where I should have been. So I finally became ready to forgive and let it go.

So as it turned out, whether the pastor and the church had done the right thing for the right reasons was ultimately irrelevant to my life. What mattered was that God was in charge. What mattered was that he always gets his way in one sense, even if he doesn’t in another. What mattered was that his plan cannot be compromised, and that even if he chooses that I get hurt for a time his plan is better than mine. And in all disappointments those convictions sustain me between the first raw flash of suffering and the time that it all makes sense.

I Did My Best

My fifth and final practical benefit of these ideas is the curious relief—and humility—that comes from recognizing that my behavior inevitably results from my nature plus external influences.

I spent a lot of my adolescence and early adulthood trying not to remember parts of my past. I was ashamed of things that I had done and things that had been done to me, so when reminders of episodes that I was embarrassed about came to mind I would try to push them down and flee. Without realizing it, I was running scared from myself. But eventually I came to a point where in order to regain some sanity, grow up, and improve my conduct, I had to face the parts of the past that haunted me. When I took stock of my life and actions, staring at my behavior without blinking, I found that some of what I had been ashamed of wasn’t my fault—rather, it was the misdeeds of others that I was the victim of. But unfortunately most of what embarrassed me were stupid and sinful things that I had done, and I had to own up to them.

That’s when my beliefs about freedom and destiny shed wholly unexpected light on my past. If indeed my actions arose necessarily from my nature and my external circumstances, then it meant that my life up to that point had been my highest moral effort. It was also my lowest moral effort; in fact, it was necessarily my only moral effort! It was logically absurd to think that I could have done better. While it was certainly physically possible for me to do things differently, nevertheless if one were to simulate my life with exactly the same self in exactly the same environment, I would do exactly the same things that I had done the first time.

This led me to the astonishing conclusion that I had done the best I could. On the one hand this was an enormous relief. I didn’t have to keep beating myself up about wouldas, couldas, and shouldas. I didn’t have to keep fantasizing about what I would do differently if I only I could go back and do it all again. I did the best I could. I could take comfort in that, close the book, and move on with life.

But on the other hand, realizing that I did the best I could was a profound indictment of myself. I had done the best I could—and my best was not good enough. The best I could do was to sin. The best I could do was to hurt others and myself. My highest moral effort was an abject failure. And this wasn’t merely because I got a raw deal. It was because who I was in the core of my being was sufficiently perverse to produce bad behavior. I did the best I could—and that revealed just how screwed up I was. It revealed that by myself, I don’t merely sin: I am a sinner.

It also revealed that I desperately need a Savior. My highest moral effort will never be satisfactory, so I badly need someone to satisfy God’s demands on my behalf. I need someone to rescue me from the airtight prison of my nature, someone with the power and will to transform me so that eventually my highest moral effort will not result in malice toward God, others, and myself. I need someone to set me free. And that someone is Jesus Christ. My recognition of my moral bankruptcy opened the door to a new awareness of the grace of God—his mercy, his love, his forgiveness. What a miracle that God in his love would meet my most profound need and forgive both my worst offenses and the horror of my nature that gives rise to those offenses! What a marvel that he would replace my foul nature with his glorious one! That’s why his grace is so amazing!

And not only that—having received God’s mercy on my “highest moral effort” I was able to turn my eye to the efforts of those around me. I looked again into my past at the hurtful things that others had done to me, and I realized something: they did their best too. They might have been wrong and malicious, even downright evil. But they were as good as they could behave; they weren’t going to be any better. Their natures might have been more or less wicked than mine and their circumstances more or less horrible, but in the final analysis, they were just like me—people doing their best even if their best was a disaster. If I could receive God’s grace for my highest moral effort, could I forgive them for theirs? Only because I had received God’s grace, I could. It wasn’t all at once, and it came with tears, but I did let them go and released those hurts.

Are this and the other practical applications of my view of freedom and destiny good reasons to accept it? I don’t know. But I confidently claim that my life has changed for the better because of it.

Chapter Twelve

Freedoms of the Free Churches

For at least the last 900 years in the West, spurts of amorphous spiritual vigor have broken forth from the church establishment. They have consisted of people who have a thirst for the Bible, who seek to emulate the primitive pattern of the New Testament church as closely as possible, and who desire a religion that is not only mentally believed but spiritually experienced. They haven’t all agreed with each other about everything either at the same time or across time—in fact, some offshoots have been downright heretical or frankly bizarre. But they have in common a belief that the church establishment in their time isn’t delivering the goods. They believe that in the establishment biblical truth has been smothered by off-base human traditions and that organizational complexity, inertia, and weight have stifled spiritual vitality and faithfulness. In many cases these movements react against establishments that once were reform movements themselves, and in the minds of the new radicals they lost their way, got complacent or stodgy, or didn’t go far enough. And so people looking for something more become convinced that they need to break out of the limitations of the establishment to follow God in something new, which they believe is actually something apostolically old. They go off on their own to make a fresh start at faithfulness.

These are the so-called Free Churches. Arguably groups as diverse as medieval splinter groups like the Waldenses, Anabaptists (who thought that the Lutherans and Reformed didn’t go far enough when they broke loose of Rome), Puritans, Baptists, Quakers, Wesleyan groups that sprang from the Methodists (who in turn sprang from the Anglicans for similar reasons), Christians/Disciples of Christ, Adventists, Pentecostals and many charismatics, unorthodox sects and cults of every shape and size, and other groups and movements too numerous to mention belong in this category. They are called Free Churches because they want to be free: free from being restrained by what they consider a corrupt, unbiblical, or “dead” religious establishment, free from supporting said churches with their taxes, free to worship how they choose apart from state coercion, free to read the Bible and conclude from it what seems apparent to them and then live accordingly, free to include and exclude members of their churches as they think appropriate, and free to cooperate and refuse to cooperate with other professing Christian bodies as they see fit.

Though it is tempting to engage in a broad survey and evaluation of what makes these highly disparate groups tick, that is beyond the scope of this book. Instead, my goal in this chapter is to look at some of the hallmark freedoms championed by Free Church practitioners in light of what I have stated about freedom earlier in this work. I’m doing this as a cautious but genuine Free Church partisan myself, and most of my material comes from my own Baptist tradition, especially since in recent years some Baptists have attempted to define that entire tradition with the word “freedom.”

Soul Freedom

I know that “soul freedom” sounds like an Afro-crowned, rhinestone-adorned musical group from the 1970s (I’m thinking Earth, Wind and Fire here), but it’s actually a term that bundles important theological ideas about the relationship between an individual and God.

The Protestant Reformation trumpeted the biblical concept of justification by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone (see Eph. 2:8-9). That means that a person who has placed their entire trust for salvation on Christ and his work is acquitted of sin solely by God’s unmerited mercy. The Reformers took the universally acknowledged (or lip-serviced) idea that Christ alone is sufficient for salvation to its logical conclusion. If Christ alone saves, then Christ alone is the Mediator between God and human beings (1 Tim. 2:5). Therefore, no other mediator is required or for that matter exists. Therefore, every Christian has access to the Father apart from any other go-between. Therefore, no church, clergy, or other ecclesiastical authority can either make or obstruct the way to God. Similarly, if faith alone is how a person receives God’s saving grace, then without that faith no one will be saved. Therefore, nothing will bring eternal salvation to a person if that person doesn’t have faith him- or herself; neither faith that some hold on another’s behalf nor attempts to force conversion by external compulsion (like baptism at sword-point, for example) will work. Put these ideas together and the result is obvious: no force other than Christ himself can create or directly affect a relationship between an individual and God. So it only makes sense that people should stop trying to force others to have the relationship with God that they think they ought to—not to stop preaching the gospel, but to stop trying to compel acceptance of it and conformity to it by coercion or manipulation.

In the view of 16th- and 17th-century Free Church agitants, the so-called magisterial Reformers in the Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican churches didn’t take these Reformation principles all the way. On the one hand, the magisterial Reformers espoused the theological basis sketched here, but on the other hand they were allied with and supported by civil governments that preferred their doctrines, traditions, and bureaucratic regimes over all others, even to the point of punishing dissidents with death. In protest, as a persecuted minority in England in the 17th-century, early Baptists propounded “soul freedom” or “soul liberty” as the logical extension of the biblical teaching recovered by the Reformation applied to the relationships between an individual, God, and the state with ramifications for the state church.

Perhaps the most eloquent, authentic, classic articulation of soul freedom is found in the Second London Confession, first published in 1677, a Baptist modification of the Presbyterians’ landmark Westminster Confession. Chapter XXI, entitled “Of Christian Liberty and Liberty of Conscience,” begins:

The Liberty which Christ hath purchased for Believers under the Gospel, consists in their freedom from the guilt of Sin, the condemning wrath of God, the Rigour and Curse of the Law; and in their being delivered from this present evil World, bondage to Satan, and Dominion of Sin; from the Evil of Afflictions; the Fear, and Sting of Death, the Victory of the Grave, and Everlasting Damnation; as also in their free access to God; and their yielding Obedience unto him not out of a slavish fear, but a Child-like love, and willing mind.

Isn’t it interesting how this exposition of freedom starts? The believer’s very first freedom is freedom from sin, death, and the devil. That is the essential New Testament understanding of freedom. It also happens to be a neat restatement of what I wrote about moral freedom in chapter five. In the minds of these confessors, this is the foundation of freedom as the Bible defines it, and any freedom that diverges from this is erroneous.

Then the confession goes on:

All [of the aforementioned freedoms] were common also to Believers under the Law for the substance of them; but under the new [sic] Testament, the Liberty of Christians is further enlarged in their freedom from the yoke of the Ceremonial Law, to which the Jewish Church was subjected; and in greater boldness of access to the Throne of Grace; and in fuller Communications of the Free Spirit of God, then [sic] Believers under the Law did ordinarily partake of.

So according to the authors, all of that freedom that we have in Christ also belonged to every genuine believer before Christ came—Abraham, Moses, David, Elijah, and so on. But we have even more freedom than they had. Christ set us free from the burdensome practices in the Law that distinguished Jew from Gentile (circumcision, dietary restrictions, and so forth) so that we are not under obligation to observe them as they were (see e.g. Col. 2:11-17). We have freer access to God, because whereas the Israelites prayed toward the presence of God in the Most Holy Place in the temple, separated by many physical and ceremonial barriers from getting near him, we have direct access to God’s presence in heaven through the priestly mediation of Christ (Heb. 10:19-22). And finally, we all are more free than they were to communicate with the Holy Spirit, who dwells within us always rather than coming down in power here and there on a tiny few as in the Old Covenant. Again, as in the confession’s previous paragraph, freedom is grounded in the work of Christ for our sake and the spiritual blessings of redemption that come from it. This is the heart of freedom.

Then the authors of the confession extend this concept and the principle of salvation through faith alone in Christ alone to check the frequent attempts of other people to interfere with the believer’s walk with God—attempts which cannot succeed unless the believer lets them, but they can still be quite painful.

God alone is Lord of the Conscience, and hath left it free from the Doctrines and Commandments of men which are in any thing contrary to his Word, or not contained in it. So that to Believe such Doctrines, or obey such Commands out of Conscience, is to betray true liberty of Conscience; and the requiring of an implicit Faith, and absolute and blind Obedience, is to destroy Liberty of Conscience, and Reason also.

In other words, God has set believers free from sin, death, and the devil so that they could serve him as Lord. Therefore, if any other person urges upon a believer a teaching or a command that is not given by the Lord, and the believer submits to it purely out of a sense of obligation to submit, not because it is rationally convincing, then that believer has thrown away the freedom that Christ paid for with his own blood by making someone other than God the boss of his conscience. To obey someone other than God for conscience’ sake in matters pertaining to the condition of one’s soul is to make that person one’s lord and thus equal to or greater than God. That is a profoundly serious thing; it is in effect idolatry. It is becoming a pleaser of people rather than of God, and no one who does this is a true slave of Christ (Gal. 1:10).

This is why, when Peter and John were hauled before the Sanhedrin and ordered to knock off preaching about Jesus, they answered, “Whether it is right before God to obey you rather than God, you decide, for it is impossible for us not to speak about what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:19-20). This is why, when Martin Luther was ordered to recant his teachings, he replied,

Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Holy Scriptures or by evident reason—for I can believe neither pope nor councils alone, as it is clear that they have erred repeatedly and contradicted themselves—I consider myself convicted by the testimony of Holy Scripture, which is my basis; my conscience is captive to the Word of God. Thus I cannot and will not recant, because acting against one’s conscience is neither safe nor sound. God help me. Amen.

This is why Christians in so many parts of the world today refuse to deny their confession when they face imprisonment, torture, or death at the hands of hostile authorities. This is why the Free Churches have always insisted on soul freedom and religious liberty, the conviction that the state has no business inserting itself where God alone has the prerogative by tilting the playing field toward one preferred dogma or manner of worship over others or by demanding total allegiance to itself in God’s place. Only God deserves that kind of submission.

But let’s look carefully at this part of the confession again. Note that it urges against submitting to a human being from “implicit Faith, and absolute and blind Obedience.” But these old Baptists insisted that we submit to God, who expressed his doctrines and commandments in his word, the Bible, with that same “implicit Faith” and “absolute and blind Obedience” that we would never give to anyone else, the kind of faith and obedience that took Abraham to a land he did not know (Heb. 11:8). The believer’s conscience is free from all because it is enslaved to One: “God alone is Lord of the Conscience.” The reason that a believer is free to reject a human teaching or command that is not from God is because a believer is not free to reject a teaching and command that is from God contained in God’s written word. That was what Luther meant when he said, “My conscience is captive to the Word of God.” To be more precise, a believer is always free to reject God’s will in the sense that, if a believer wants to reject it and do otherwise, he or she generally has the physical option to do so, just as Jonah was physically free to head to Tarshish instead of Nineveh. But a believer is not free to avoid his or her Master’s discipline for disobedience any more than Jonah was. In fact, because Christ’s death and resurrection set us free from sin, then to disobey God (which is at the heart of sin) is to return to that very bondage from which we were released. To go one’s own way and ignore God’s way revealed in God’s word in the name of Christian freedom, no matter how reasonable or comfortable it seems, destroys the very freedom it claims. In the apostle Paul’s words:

What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? Absolutely not! Do you not know that if you present yourselves as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey, either of sin resulting in death, or obedience resulting in righteousness? But thanks be to God that though you were slaves to sin, you obeyed from the heart that pattern of teaching you were entrusted to, and having been freed from sin, you became enslaved to righteousness [Rom. 6:15-18].

Steeped in the Scriptures as they were, we shouldn’t be surprised that the Baptists who wrote the Second London Confession concurred wholeheartedly. Note how similar the conclusion of their chapter on “Christian Liberty and Liberty of Conscience” is to what Paul wrote:

They who upon pretence of Christian Liberty do practice any sin, or cherish any sinfull [sic] lust; as they do thereby pervert the main design of the Grace of the Gospel to their own Destruction; so they wholly destroy the end of Christian Liberty, which is, that being delivered out of the hands of all our Enemies we might serve the Lord without fear in Holiness, and Righteousness before him, all the days of our Life.

In other words, if you use the freedom that Christ bought for you to disobey God by indulging your own sinful desire, you’re not free at all. You’ve gone back into the bondage that you were freed from; you’ve returned to slavery. True moral freedom only endures if it is employed to obey God. Christ’s work has given us the freedom to do what we want to do if and only if what we want to do is to “serve the Lord without fear in Holiness, and Righteousness before him, all the days of our Life” (see Luke 1:74-75). Indeed, as we saw in chapter five, the desire to serve the Lord that way also comes from him; in fact, the replacement of our desire to serve sin with our desire to serve God is what our emancipation consists of. If someone does not have the desire to obey God or confuses that desire with the old, wicked desires that Christ died to destroy, that person isn’t free at all but remains enslaved to their sins.

For this reason I remain baffled by the insistence of a few within the Free Churches that a Christian has the freedom to practice the much-debated sin du jour, homosexual activity, if his or her conscience is comfortable with it, and I am even more baffled by the somewhat larger number of people who aren’t troubled by this assertion. The notion that Christ has freed the believer to engage in a practice that the Bible only prohibits and never condones, that the believer has been freed to disregard God’s word having been saved by God’s grace, is absurd. That the dispute even exists would be outrageous were it not that this argument has probably arisen about some sin or another in every generation since Jesus ascended to heaven, which spurred Paul to write the previously quoted passage in Romans in the first place.

Now, if the state adopts what Baptists call soul freedom (as the U.S. has done in part in the Constitution’s First Amendment), then every citizen has the civic freedom to hold any combination of beliefs with any not-sufficiently-dangerous-to-others combination of behaviors. In this way in society at large a person is (ideally) free to profess Christ and practice homosexuality under the protection of the law without fear of violence, incarceration, or other persecution. But though free civically, that person is not free morally, because the freedom paid for on the cross is freedom only to reject sin and serve God. Otherwise that freedom is null and void.

I know that there is more to the argument for homosexuality than I have dealt with here because of the limited scope of this book. There remains the theological question of whether the Scriptures in both Testaments that prohibit homosexual behavior are indeed God’s word, as the writers of the Second London Confession (borrowing from the Westminster) declared in Chapter I of that document and assumed in Chapter XXI. There also remain the hermeneutical (i.e., interpretive) questions of how justified one is to bend the sense of those Scriptures beyond the conception of either the writers or the original readers and still claim a genuine meaning, and in what circumstances and manner one Scripture is superceded by another, particularly between the Old Testament and the New. Those are legitimate issues. But the idea that soul freedom requires all Christians to affirm or at least go along with homosexual behavior by other professing Christians is completely unfounded. That assumes that calling homosexual behavior sin is a “Doctrine or Commandment of men” that is “contrary to [God’s] Word, or not contained in it,” to quote the confession. If someone claims that to prohibit homosexual behavior is a “Doctrine or Commandment of men,” that person has to demonstrate that the Bible, or at least the pertinent texts as plainly read, is not God’s word but is purely man-made before the question of soul freedom even comes up.

The Freedom to Gather

Just as the supreme Lordship of Christ is both the basis and boundary of soul freedom, it also serves the same functions for the other freedom championed by the Free Churches, the freedom to gather with other believers under Christ’s Lordship in a local church and among churches.

Christ is the Head of the church (Col. 1:18), which is his body. Note that Christ was not elected Head by a duly constituted body of believers. Rather, the believers were elected (that is, chosen) by God to become members of the body over which God appointed his Son. In other words, as with individual salvation discussed earlier in the book, so with the corporate establishment of the church the initiative is all on God’s side. According to Paul, the church at Ephesus—a local church, though not to the exclusion of other local churches or of the universal church of all true believers throughout time and space—is what God “obtained with the blood of his own Son” (Acts 20:28). Christ actualized his Headship when he

Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her to sanctify her by cleansing her with the washing of the water by the word, so that he may present the church to himself as glorious—not having a stain or wrinkle, or any such blemish, but holy and blameless [Eph. 5:25-27].

In short, had Christ not died and risen, there would be no church. That’s why he calls the shots in it.

Therefore every believer enters the church at the call of God in Christ. Now, this is a fairly uncontroversial statement, even if it isn’t emphasized as often as it should be or it isn’t always seen in light of the other (controversial) concepts I’ve presented in this book. But if it is uncontroversial, it is because we immediately think of “the church” as the universal church of all true Christians everywhere all the time. And in fact this is true. The church is Christ’s body, and Paul tells the believers in Corinth that “we [i.e., Paul and the Corinthians together] were all baptized into one body” (1 Cor. 12:13). The church is the temple of God, and Paul insists to the Corinthians that “we are the temple of the living God” (2 Cor. 6:16). The fact that Paul and the Corinthians came to know Christ in different places, were baptized in different places, and spent nearly all of their time on earth in different places didn’t prevent them from being part of one church. But on the other hand, Paul tells the very same group of people that “you [the Corinthians distinct from Paul] are Christ’s body, and each of you is a member of it” (1 Cor. 12:27) and “you are God’s temple and . . . God’s Spirit lives in you. . . . God’s temple is holy, which is what you are” (1 Cor. 3:16-17). Without hedging or shading his meaning, Paul uses the exact same images of the church of Christ to describe both the universal church—all believers in all places at all times—and the local church—those believers that have gathered in a particular place at a particular time, in this case Corinth in the middle of the first century. Both are equally the body of Christ and the temple of God.

One of the great contributions of the Free Churches to the wider church is to remind it of the great biblical importance of the local church. It isn’t just a single cog in the machine of the universal body, but it is Christ’s body in its own right. But that leads us to a bit of discomfort when we assert from Scripture that “every believer enters the church at the call of God in Christ.” Because frankly it is easy for me to accept that God has sovereignly taken the initiative to put me in the universal church. The universal church is a great place to be a Christian. It is diverse, accepting, and glorious. It shines in heaven where it sits with Christ and worships at his throne. It makes me a member of an honored fraternity of saints that anyone would be proud to call brothers and sisters. And best of all, I never actually have to deal with it: it doesn’t do things that I don’t like or that embarrass me, it leaves me alone when I don’t want to be around it because in fact it doesn’t meet anywhere on earth that I have to show up at, and I don’t have to give money, time, or sweat to it. Essentially, it is easy to be a part of the universal church because until Christ returns, the dead are raised, and all the “wheat” is “safely gathered in” as the old hymn goes (see Matt. 13:24-30, 37-43), none of us ever tangibly witness it or experience it. Certainly when a local church worships and teaches in accordance with the truth of God handed down through the ages then that local church shows its fidelity to and association with the universal church. And when local churches gather together for worship, witness, or service, whether within a denomination or ecumenically, there is a faint glimmer of the universal church (more on that in a bit). But we are never confronted by the universal church in its fullness until it appears in glory with Christ and his holy angels at the end of time. Until then it remains remote, ideal, and beautiful, and though we are truly and genuinely a part of it now, we can’t see it or touch it. That’s what makes it so comfortable.

Because the local church that you are a part of or that I am a part of isn’t comfortable. It makes boneheaded mistakes sometimes. It probably doesn’t contain people whose names we care to drop in conversation, and it may contain people that embarrass us. It is awkward, parochial (literally and figuratively), and frequently narrow-minded. It contains cliques. It places demands on us, like to show up, give, and serve. As a rule it is hypocritical, never fully living up to the ideals it proclaims, and every individual member of it does the same. Like the field of wheat and weeds (Matt. 13:24-30, 37-43), it pretty much assuredly contains unregenerate unbelievers masquerading (to others and to themselves) that they are actually in Christ. It is often boring. And sometimes it alternates between smothering us and leaving us outside to freeze. But that specific group that you are a part of is the body of Christ and the temple of God. It is precious to him, he lives in it, and no matter who appears to be in charge, Christ runs it. And traditionally the people of God have seen such a continuity between the universal and the local, the invisible and the visible, the perfect and the imperfect, the heavenly and the earthly, the yet-to-come and the here-and-now, that they have insisted that everyone who truly is a member of one will truly be a member of the other. No one can be a genuinely baptized believer in Jesus affiliated with a local church who is not a member of the universal church alongside all other believers throughout space and time, like it or not. And no one can be a member of the universal church and fail to engage in a local church without raising a serious question about the authenticity of his or her belonging to Christ. In both directions, local to universal and universal to local, Jesus says, “If you will have me, you will have those people who have me; there is no other way.”

For this reason, when Free Churches (at their best) insist on the Christian freedom to gather together with other believers, they are not talking about what Christians may do but about what Christians must do—not because a distant ecclesiastical authority drew parish lines on a map to funnel believers where it wanted, but because God by the Holy Spirit led them individually where he wanted them to go. Just as God in Christ has freed us from sin and Satan to serve God, which is our obligation, so also he has freed us to gather with others he has set free, which is equally obligatory. Where and with whom leads us, we Christians are free to gather. We are not free not to gather. Or to be more precise, as before, we are physically free not to gather but we are not free to escape the painful correction from our Father that our disobedience requires. Each of us enters the church—both universal and local—at the initiative of God in Christ, who as Head calls the shots in it.

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of his own, so that you may proclaim the virtues of the one who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. You once were not a people, but now you are God’s people. You were shown no mercy, but now you have received mercy [1 Pet. 2:9-10].

Therefore, having been set free from our not-a-people-ness, we are obligated to employ that freedom to gather with one another as the people of God.

Choosing a Church

So what does it look like to employ our freedom to gather as God would have us use it? For one thing, if we truly understand our freedom to gather, it should transform the way most of us go about choosing a church, because it becomes starkly apparent that we are not really choosing a church so much as Christ, the Head of the church, chooses our church. In one of the places that Paul describes the church as the body of Christ, he says that in our physical bodies, “God has placed each of the members in the body just as he decided.” And likewise, “God has placed in the church” all different people to fill all different roles (1 Cor. 12:18, 28). That means that when one of us joins a church, it is not so much because we put ourselves there but that God put us there. Therefore, if we are obedient servants of the Lord, our objective when we choose a church is neither more nor less than to choose what the Lord has already chosen. To do otherwise is to pretend to be the Head of the church ourselves and place ourselves where we think is best.

Sadly, the latter is what most people do. I think that many people, hopefully most people, have good intentions. They want to be in a place where they trust the pastor’s integrity, doctrine, and skill; where when they assemble to worship, there is a good chance they will encounter God’s presence; and where people seem to love each other and are likely to love them too. These are all really important things; as a matter of fact, I advise people not to put down roots in a church where they don’t see these characteristics. The problem is that people often demand such perfection and precision about each of these things, not to mention add other criteria of their own, that their search extends far beyond what God wants. “Trusting the pastor” becomes a meticulous examination of all aspects of his work or every jot and tittle of his theology or such as vagaries as “Do I like him?” or “But he doesn’t seem pastoral” or “He’s too old/young” or “I wish we could find someone like Pastor So-and-So.” “Encountering the presence of God” becomes a pretext for boiling all of corporate worship down to the style, tempo, volume, selection, performance, and length of music and finding a presentation that suits one’s personal playlist perfectly. And the search for unified Christians with whom I might be united becomes a conveniently oblivious search for a Christian country club—a place where I can find people just like me to fit in with and not have to deal face-to-face with people not like me—veiled though it may be with serious-minded talk of shared theology, concerns, or values.

Do you see how easy it is to “church shop” for exactly what pleases us? Does the church that exactly pleases us exist? Even if it does, how can we be confident that that church is God’s “should”-desire for us? Since when is what is most comfortable to us always the most nutritious for us?

Recognizing our freedom to gather entails recognizing that God alone has the prerogative to place us where he will. It means that when we visit a church we don’t really take into account if we like it. I think that pretty much as a rule we will indeed like where God places us, at least at first, but that’s not really an important criterion. What we really must consider in prayer is, “Where have you already placed me that I simply haven’t discovered yet?” If we are willing to relinquish any preference, inclination, or self-will on our part when we pray this, God will answer. Most of the time our ignorance of what he wants us to do is caused entirely by our tenacious grip on our own preferences. When we release them, God’s will usually becomes pretty clear.

One reason that this matters is that as Paul’s words to the Corinthians demonstrate, God places us in a church to do something, to be an organ in a body. People who go to a church because it is where they want to go are far more likely merely to receive. They are liable to come on time (or a little bit late), put five bucks in the plate, and leave as soon as the service ends, not to be seen or heard from for the next 167 hours. But God puts people in churches to serve according to the gifts he has given them and to the measure of their faith and to give generously toward the spread of the gospel and the relief of the poor.

Other people appear to do the opposite, serving and giving like gangbusters. But their service is the work that they want to do to which they feel entitled to do it the way they want to do it, and their giving is offered and withdrawn as a way to manipulate the church rather than as a generous and cheerful sacrifice to God. This also comes from choosing a church rather than joining the church God chose for us. See, if we view ourselves as placed by God in his church rather than as people who have chosen a church, we are likely to see the church as “God’s church” instead of as “our church” for as long as we are in that church. That is hugely important, because a church where most of its members see it as “our church” has a mission to make its members happy, regardless of what written mission statement might be in the church’s literature. But a church where most of its members see it as “God’s church” has a mission to love God with all its heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love its neighbor as itself, because that is God’s objective (Matt. 22:37-40). In a way, you might say that the church that sees itself as “God’s church” really is that, and the church that sees itself as “our church” really is that too. Simply put, God’s church has eternal life; “our church” doesn’t.

Maybe this is a moment of conversion for you. Maybe you entered your church with a shopper’s mindset and you’ve seen your church until now as your church. There is still hope! You can acknowledge that though your motives may have been impure, the Almighty God still used them to put you where you are so that you could meet him right now and turn your church over to him. You are not free to huddle with whom you will, but you are free to gather and serve with the believers God has given you to. That difference in perspective makes all the difference.

Churches Gathering with Churches

This perspective governs not only the relationship of a believer to his or her church but also the perspective of that church towards other churches. Among all the Free Churches, Baptists have been the most strict to reserve the word “church” for the universal church and the local church. Since denominations, associations, networks and the like aren’t either a local church or the universal church, Baptists don’t call them a “church”—each group of Baptists calls its denomination a “convention” or a “conference” or “churches” in the plural. But whatever you call it, the cooperative collection of local churches begins to flesh out or provides a glimmer of the universal church, even if it isn’t itself the universal church in its fullness. Why is this important? Because if God has freed us to gather into the local church, a freedom that is obligatory, then he has also freed us to gather in the universal church as far as it is possible in this age, a freedom that is also obligatory. Like individual Christians, churches are free to gather; they are not free not to gather. Churches are obligated to exercise their freedom to begin to flesh out the universal church by loving each other, speaking truth to each other, helping each other, meeting the needs of each other, correcting each other, forgiving each other, and giving preference to each other in honor, not to mention cooperating with each other to proclaim the gospel and love our neighbor as ourselves. Most churches regard involvement with other churches as optional, as something to do if we have extra time or money left over if at all. Some churches consider their independent detachment from other churches to be a point of honor. But gathering with other churches is not optional and it certainly is not an affront to a church’s honor. It is required of those whom the Lord has set free from being “not a people” to being the people of God.

And similarly we are not allowed to pick and choose which Christian churches we will associate with. We must accept all those whom God has accepted in Christ, just as we are not allowed to pick and choose which individual blood-bought believers we will accept (Rom. 15:7). This means that we are obligated not only to have fellowship in more than name only with the churches we like within our denomination but also the churches we don’t like. And not only the churches in our denomination but also the churches in others. And not only the churches in our tradition or wing of the faith but also the churches in the other ones. And especially churches of other cultures, races, and languages that are really different and really hard to relate to. We are free to gather with other servants of the same Lord; we are not free to ignore them. Granted, because of soul freedom we are free not to do things as they do them or approve of all that they approve or believe all that they believe. But assuming that other churches have a sincere desire to walk in obedience to Christ, we have no choice but to gather with them. None of us as individuals or as churches are good enough to stand in the presence of God, but by the blood of Christ he has called us good enough by his grace. He will not look kindly on those of his servants who don’t consider their fellow servants to be good enough to associate with.

Granted, there are gray areas. Both as individuals within a local church and as churches associating to flesh out the universal church, we are not equally intimate with all those we accept. And when it comes to those outside the faith or wayward believers, we are not equally separate from all we reject. None of us know the mind of Christ perfectly as to who is acceptable and who is not, who is in Christ and who is not, who belongs in the church and who does not, so that means that some of our brothers will call others “brother” that we do not believe deserve that title. We don’t and can’t control whom those we accept in turn accept. But these things really aren’t our business or at least ought not be our focus. Each of us as an individual and as a church is obligated to exercise the freedom Christ bought us to gather as the Lord leads us. I think we can trust him to lead everyone else.

To sum up this chapter, the Free Churches stand for an individual’s and an individual church’s freedom to do what God wants him or them to do according to his word and Spirit apart from human compulsion. Paradoxically, that freedom is binding on those who have been given it, but not as binding as the ugly consequences of using that freedom as an excuse to serve the sinful nature. Rather, the Spirit says to the churches, “through love serve one another” (Gal. 5:13).

Postscript

How I Got Here

My ideas about freedom and destiny in this book (particularly in Parts One and Two) generally line up with a theological tradition called Calvinism, which is named after a very important French pastor and theologian named John Calvin (if you’re French you can call him “Jean Cauvin”), who spent the bulk of his life in Switzerland in the 16th century. I am not saying that what I’ve written is the Calvinist view. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are things that I’ve written that many Calvinists—maybe even Calvin himself—would have a problem with. And certainly Calvin thought and wrote about tons of stuff that isn’t talked about in this book. Nevertheless, my view on the matters I’ve written about here is definitely in the Calvinist tradition.

Now, I have scrupulously kept from mentioning the C-word until now, because if I had, and if you react to this word the way I used to, you probably wouldn’t have made it very far in this book. Like most born-and-bred, rank-and-file evangelical Americans, I grew up with an assumed indeterminism. Once I learned the word “Arminian,” that’s what I thought I was. Arminianism is a theological tradition that runs counter to Calvinism in a number of ways; it is named after Jacobus Arminius, a Dutchman from the 17th century. (Please note: “Arminians” follow Arminius; “Armenians” are from the country of Armenia. There is no relation.) Now, that was actually something of an insult to Arminius, because much later I discovered that I hadn’t been Arminian; I had actually been semi-Pelagian, which means halfway in the direction of the 5th-century British heretic Pelagius. It’s all a bit confusing, and I encourage you to read Appendix B to sort it all out. But in any event, I was definitely an indeterminist, a position I did not thoughtfully choose. To the contrary, I had inherited the cultural indeterminism of evangelical America by osmosis. I don’t remember a time before I held indeterminist views. It just always seemed entirely self-evident that no one made my choices but me, and that if my choices were somehow determined by forces beyond my control then that was terribly unfair.

When I got older and began to meet some oddballs who hadn’t been socialized into the cultural indeterminism that was our birthright, I didn’t react too well. Part of it was a version of “You’re not the boss of me” called “God’s not the boss of me the way you say he’s the boss of me,” said with similarly indignant vocal inflection and coming from similar adolescent vexation. But part of it was simply that many of the Calvinists were jerks. You might know what I’m talking about. Many Calvinists have a way of acting like indeterminists (Arminian or semi-Pelagian) are morons, self-assuredly quoting proof-texts and syllogisms as if to say, if you’re not on board, you’re either stupid or heretical or both. One example I’ve seen: in the course of reviewing an Arminian book on a bookseller’s website, a zealous Calvinist wrote, “Basically, if you are not a Calvinist, YOU DO NOT BELIEVE THE GOSPEL!!! It’s that simple!” Now, the Bible is clear that the gospel is “God’s power for salvation” (Rom. 1:16). So if full-fledged Calvinism in all its splendor is truly “the gospel,” then only a tiny minority of people who have called themselves Christians for the last 2,000 years have been saved (including virtually no one outside Western Europe and the white population of its former colonies) because most ordinary, often unlearned believers haven’t been Calvinists (not to mention the extraordinary, learned ones who haven’t been either). One might wryly conclude from Matthew 22:14 that indeed “many are called, but few are chosen” (though I don’t think that this sarcastic interpretation is what Jesus meant when he said it).

This supercilious attitude is even apparent in what Calvinists like to call themselves. Calvinists call themselves “Reformed”; the implication is that the rest of the world is unreformed, which I guess means that theologically they are still living in 1516 (the year before Martin Luther got his party started). Some call themselves “Augustinian” after the great St. Augustine, who theologically was the most important founder of Western (as opposed to Eastern Orthodox) Christianity; the implication is that the rest of western Christians have strayed from the wisdom of their forebear. A few go so far as to call themselves “Pauline” after the apostle Paul himself; the implication is that all other Christians have cut his letters out of their Bibles, I suppose. Now that I’m a Calvinist myself, I happen to agree that Calvinism is indeed Reformed, Augustinian, and Pauline, but that’s beside the point. The point is that if you want to persuade someone that you are on the right track, it is unhelpful to call yourself something that disparages the people you’re trying to persuade. So, whatever Calvinists might have going for them in doctrinal accuracy, they are frequently lousy at public relations—which to many of them appears to be just fine. (As the fatalist in chapter ten might say, “If it’s God’s will for someone to become a Calvinist, that person will become one whether I’m gracious or not.”) P.R. to many Calvinists is “selling out to the culture.” They don’t recognize that for those outside the clan, a little P.R. sensitivity on our part is received as grace, respect, and love.

But back to my story. Given that the Calvinists that I met acted like know-it-alls, I didn’t take to them too well, being an admitted (and, I hope, recovering) know-it-all myself. (It is a well-known fact that there can be no more than one know-it-all in one place at one time. This is the premise behind the game show Jeopardy!: if you put three know-it-alls in one room, two of them will be forced to leave in less than thirty minutes.) So, suffice it to say, going through high school and into college, I was defensive and hostile toward Calvinism and Calvinists. But it was in college that I encountered something I had never met before: likeable Calvinists. They were two philosophy professors and one Bible/theology professor, and I got to know each of them reasonably well during my four years with them. Without a doubt, these three guys were the hardest-line Calvinists I had ever met. In fact, I still remember ruefully commenting to my classmates that “Dr. Dorman roots for John Calvin like most people root for the Cowboys.” (It was the mid-90’s, and lots of people were rooting for the Cowboys then.) But as zealous as they were, they were respectful and kind, they had good senses of humor, and I admired them immensely. Over time, they defused much of my hostility toward the doctrine they championed just by being pleasant.

But there was something else about them too. Two of them in particular had suffered intensely in public yet very personal ways. One had endured the grief of begetting four children who did not survive to term. The other’s wife left him for another man; by his own admission to the campus at a chapel service a few years later, in the depths of his pain he had considered suicide. Since then the third has also endured intimate yet public tragedy as his Parkinson’s disease compelled him to retire early from his teaching post. And yet these men who suffered so continued to insist cheerfully (and seriously) that a loving, personal God ordained all things—including these things—to happen. Very strange. But if these guys could believe it, who couldn’t?

And so it was, having wrestled with these things at the hands of these men through this class and that over four years, that I finally found myself sitting on my couch in my dorm room on a Saturday morning in the spring of my senior year. I was reading a book assigned by one of them that dredged these issues up yet again, and I finally decided, “I’ve had it with this! I’m not getting up from this couch until I am sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what I believe about this stuff.” (I don’t know if I was inspired by the spirit of Isaac Newton, who allegedly sat at his bedside one day and didn’t get up until he had invented differential calculus, or what.) So there I sat from 8:00 A.M. to noon and pondered. During that time, I developed in my mind what you read in chapter seven, and when I was sure that all the I’s were dotted and all the T’s were crossed and I could not escape, I stood up, looked out the window, sighed, and walked to the dining commons to eat lunch, for the first time as a Calvinist.

The funny thing was that the world didn’t end. See, without realizing it, I think I had gotten confused about what a conversion to Calvinism would mean. Because Calvinists insisted that our steps are determined by God, I unconsciously supposed that if I were to become a Calvinist, I would suddenly cease to make any decisions for myself and that I would find my body jerked around all over the place by the invincible force of predestination. So, silly as it was, I was actually a little surprised when that didn’t happen. When I picked up my tray and started down the lunch line, I didn’t find a corn dog and French fries inexorably gravitating onto my plate. I still had to tell the lady what I wanted, and then she gave it to me, just like always. And then I still chose where I wanted to sit; my rear end was not forcibly drawn to a random seat. I guess I had thought that I was fighting for my independence, when in truth I was fighting for my explanation of my actions, which had nothing to do with whether I was actually independent or not. While I was fighting a new philosophy, I suppose I thought that I was fighting a new psychology as well. So when I adopted the former, I was pleasantly surprised to find that psychologically I was still myself. As I walked back to my dorm, I thought, “Wow, I’m a Calvinist. Who’d have thought? You know, it’s really not that bad.”

As I described in the introduction, one of the reasons I wrote this book is to help you make the journey that I made if you’re thinking about making it. In all the nitty-gritty of argument and objection and counter-objection what I’ve really been saying is, “Come on in; the water’s fine.” To your big toe it might feel freezing cold, but if you just jump in you’ll find that it’s a lot nicer than you think.

And as a matter of fact, “jumping in” doesn’t necessarily entail leaving one tribe for another. You can be a Calvinist without doing the things that Calvinists are prone to do—whether the old, “if it was good enough for the Puritans then it’s good enough for me” type or the new, blue-jeans-and-draft-beer type. You can be a Calvinist without having memorized the Heidelberg Catechism, the Westminster Catechism, or the Nine (9? IX?) Marks of a Healthy Church. You don’t have to believe that Christianity in America has basically gone downhill since Jonathan Edwards’ death in 1758. The music you worship with doesn’t have to be an exclusive diet of centuries-old psalm settings or contemporary praise songs about substitutionary atonement. You’re allowed to be unimpressed by Charles Spurgeon’s preaching or John Piper’s writing. You don’t have to have a systematic theology on your shelf by Charles Hodge, Herman Bavinck, or Wayne Grudem. You don’t have to own a single book published by Banner of Truth Trust, P&R, or Crossway or any book carrying a foreword or blurb written by David Wells, R. C. Sproul, or J. I. Packer (well, then again, it’s nearly impossible not to own a book blurbed or foreworded by Packer). You don’t have to tell people what books they need to read or keep multiple copies on hand to give away. You can read the Bible in a translation other than English Standard Version. You don’t have to have a single sermon by Al Mohler or C. J. Mahaney on your iPod. You don’t have to read a single post on Justin Taylor’s or Tim Challies’ blogs, and you certainly don’t have to comment on one. Your wildest dream doesn’t have to involve being “mentored” by someone “just like Paul mentored Timothy.” You don’t have to invest the same worry about who you shouldn’t be associating with as most people do about being lonely. You don’t have to be indignant about Popery or grieved by Evangelicals and Catholics Together. You don’t have to have friends among whom the Deepness Award goes to the first person in a conversation to mention Sin, the Cross, or the Sovereignty of God. You don’t have to be a complementarian or for that matter even know what that word means. You don’t have to kiss dating goodbye. You don’t have to homeschool your kids. You don’t have to be a Republican. You don’t have to use the word “gospel” more often in one week than most Christians do in one year. You’re allowed (and encouraged) to define the gospel in terms of Luke 4:18 and Mark 1:15 as well as Romans 1:16. You’re allowed to enjoy the fact that God loves you not only because loving you accrues to his glory (which it does) but also just because he loves you. And above all, you don’t have to maintain enough of these cultural idiosyncrasies to prove to the other people in the huddle that you’re really a Christian and that they are allowed to talk to you, like knowing a secret handshake. In fact, you don’t even have to know what I’m talking about here. Some of these cultural markers are stupid, some of them are nutritious, and some of them are simply unnecessary—I’ll leave it to you to determine which is which—but most of them have little to do with the doctrinal content of Calvinism regardless of what people in the Calvinist in-group might think. So you can be a Calvinist without joining a clique or drinking funky Kool-Aid; you can be a Calvinist and be yourself! Is that freeing or what?

I hope in this book I’ve been more like my college professors than like folks who give Calvinism a bad name. I’ve tried to be like the former, but I really don’t know if I’ve succeeded. I also don’t know if I’ve caused more problems than I’ve solved. Paul warned Timothy against people with “an unhealthy interest in controversies and verbal disputes. This gives rise to envy, dissension, slanders, evil suspicions, and constant bickering by people corrupted in their minds and deprived of the truth,” (1 Tim. 6:4-5). So if to you probing into the meaning of freedom and destiny is such a controversy that produces such verbal disputes, then by all means leave it alone! You’re much better off without it. The only thing that really matters is “faith working through love” (Gal. 5:6). But actually, that’s the very thing that I’m trying to encourage. My hope is not that this book would cause strife and division within the holy Church of God and not that some might be puffed up in arrogant knowledge against others (1 Cor. 8:1). No, my hope is that thinking about these things might help you to know better what a great and glorious God we serve. I hope that knowing this inspires you to trust him with every detail of your life more completely. And I hope that your trust in him wells up into a paean of praise to him in whom “we live and move about and exist” (Acts 17:28).

After all, that is our destiny.

Appendices

Appendix A

Biblical Terms for “the Will of God”

The biblical writers used a variety of words that could be translated “will,” “desire,” or (as a verb) “want,” pertaining to God. Some of these words are nouns (as in, “will of God”) and some are verbs (as in, “God wills”). These Hebrew and Aramaic words (in the Old Testament) and Greek words (New Testament) are listed below along with Scriptural references where they may be found. Not all instances of these words are listed, but only the ones that (a) may be fairly translated “will,” “desire,” or “want”—some of these words have other definitions as well—and (b) have God (Father, Son, and/or Holy Spirit) as their subject.

I put each reference into one of the following categories: (a) what God decrees will certainly happen, (b) what God desires humans to do or how to behave (which may or may not happen), (c) some other desire of God that may or may not happen, or some combination of (a), (b), and (c). The relationships between these categories can be understood by the diagram on the following page.

The circle on the left represents the “is”-will of God—what he decrees will happen. The circle on the right represents “should”-desires of God—things he wants to happen, but may not decree to happen. This is in turn divided into two categories: things he wants us to do, and everything else. The overlap between the two circles represents things that the Scriptures tell us God desires and decrees will certainly happen.

Please note that how one assigns a particular instance of these words into a particular category is sometimes heavily dependent on the opinion of the interpreter. I would expect that someone else attempting the same thing that I did below might come up with some significant differences. Therefore, it is best not to take my counts of how many times a given word appears in a given category as absolute fact. Rather, look at these statistics as an expression of the general distribution of meaning of the words under review.

Here are some notes on pronunciation for those who don’t know these biblical languages. Pronounce a as in “father” (â is the same, but you hold it longer), e as in “bet,” ê as in “fiancé,” i as in “machine,” and ô as in “phone,” ai as in “aisle,” eu as in “eureka,” and ou as in “couscous.” To pronounce y, put your lips like you would to say “oo,” but say “ee.” Put the stress for all the words at the underline (_).

Hebrew

hâmêd. (Qal-type.)

(a & c) 1 (Ps. 68:16)

hâfats. (Qal-type.)

(a) 2 (Ps. 135:6; Is. 55:11)

(a & c) 4 (1 Sam. 2:25; Is. 42:21; 53:10; Mic. 7:18)

(b) 12 (Ps. 40:6; 51:6; 51:16; Is. 56:4; 65:12; 66:4; Jer. 9:24; Ezek. 18:23; 18:32; 33:11; Hos. 6:6)

(c) 1 (Judg. 13:23)

hâfêts.

(b) 1 (Ps. 5:4)

hêfets.

(a) 1 (Is. 46:10)

(a & b) 1 (Is. 44:28)

(a & c) 3 (Is. 48:14; 53:10; Jon. 1:14)

râtsôn. (Always in the phrase âsâ râtsôn, “do (the) will.”)

(b) 3 (Ps. 40:8; 103:21; 143:10)

Aramaic

tsâvâ.

(a) 1 (Dan. 4:35)

(a & c) 4 (Dan. 4:17, 25, 32; 5:21)

Greek

boulêma.

(a) 1 (Rom. 9:19)

boulomai.

(a & c) 5 (Matt. 11:27; Luke 10:22; 1 Cor. 12:11; Heb. 6:17; Jas. 1:18)

(c) 2 (Luke 22:42; 2 Pet. 3:9)

epithymeô.

(a & c) 1 (Luke 22:15)

(b) 1 (Gal. 5:17)

epithymia.

(a & c) 1 (Luke 22:15)

eudokia.

(a) 1 (Eph. 1:9)

(a & b) 1 (Phil. 2:13)

(a & c) 3 (Matt. 11:26; 10:21; Eph. 1:5)

zêteô.

(a & c) 3 (John 5:30; 7:18; 8:50)

thelêma.

(a) 4 (Acts 21:14; Eph. 1:9, 11; 1 John 5:14)

(a & b) 4 (John 6:38, 39, 40; Gal. 1:4)

(a & c) 12 (Matt. 26:42; Luke 22:42; Rom. 1:10; 15:32; 1 Cor. 1:1; 2 Cor. 1:1; Eph. 1:1; 1:5; Col. 1:1; 2 Tim. 1:1; 1 Pet. 3:17; Rev. 4:14)

(b) 28 (Matt. 7:21; 12:50; 21:31; Mark 3:35; Luke 12:47; John 4:34; 5:30; 7:17; 9:31; Acts 13:22; 22:14; Rom. 2:18; 12:2; 2 Cor. 8:5; Eph. 5:17; 6:6; Col. 1:9; 4:12; 1 Thess. 5:18; Heb. 10:7, 9, 10, 36; 13:21; 1 Pet. 2:15; 4:2, 19; 1 John 2:17)

(c) 1 (Matt. 18:14)

(b & c) 2 (Matt. 6:10; 1 Thess. 4:3)

thelêsis.

(a & c) 1 (Heb. 2:4)

thelô.

(a & c) 15 (Matt. 8:3; 18:23; 20:14, 15; Mark 1:41; Luke 5:13; John 1:43; 5:21; 7:1; Rom. 9:18, 22; 1 Cor. 12:18; Col. 1:27; Jas. 4:15; 1 Pet. 3:17)

(b) 6 (Matt. 9:13; 12:7; 26:39; Mark 14:36; Acts 18:21; 1 Cor. 4:19)

(c) 11 (Matt. 13:28; 23:37; 26:39; 27:34; Mark 1:40; 6:48; 14:36; Luke 12:49; 13:34; John 17:24; 1 Tim. 2:4)

Appendix B

Comparison of Calvinism, Arminianism, and Semi-Pelagianism

“Calvinism,” founded by the 16th-century French-Swiss reformer John Calvin and expounded by his theological descendants, may be summarized as interrelated doctrinal stances as follows. On the doctrine of providence: God consciously and intentionally decrees everything that happens; no event happens outside of his purpose. On the doctrine of humanity: As a result of the Fall, human beings have a fundamentally perverted nature. As a result, they continually choose evil and sin; they cannot of themselves choose what is good (“total depravity”). On the doctrine of the atonement: Christ’s death atones only for those whom God chooses to be saved (“limited atonement”). On the doctrine of salvation: (a) God chooses individuals whom he will save before and regardless of any action they might take to merit that salvation (“unconditional” or “particular election”). (b) In order for someone to be saved, the Holy Spirit must first enter his or her life and regenerate him or her. Only then does the person have the ability to repent of his or her sins and believe in Jesus. In other words, God’s salvific action entirely precedes human choice (“irresistible grace”). (c) People that the Spirit has regenerated to salvation never degenerate again, or “lose their salvation” (“the perseverance of the saints”). The doctrinal catchphrases in parentheses, taken together, form the acronym “TULIP,” which is sometimes used as an abbreviation for Calvinist doctrine in general.

“Arminianism” was founded by the 17th-century Dutchman Jacobus Arminius, and it was propagated in the English-speaking world by 18th-century Englishman John Wesley. Arminianism differs from strict Calvinism as follows. Providence: God foreknows all events but does not foreordain all events, especially human choices. In other words, while God sees human choices in advance, he does not determine in advance how those choices will be made. Humanity: In agreement with Calvinism, human nature is fundamentally depraved, and humans cannot choose good apart from divine grace. Atonement: Christ’s death is intended to atone for everyone in the world, even though not everyone will accept that atonement. Salvation: (a) God chooses that there be a group of people in the world that will be saved, but each individual determines him- or herself into that group by repenting and believing in the gospel (also known as “general election”). (b) The Holy Spirit grants all of fallen humanity a renewed ability to choose what is right, but without going so far as to regenerate us; this “prevenient grace” restores indeterministic “free will” to humans. Then, if an individual chooses to accept God’s salvific grace in the gospel, the Holy Spirit enters and regenerates that person. In other words, God begins to act salvifically, then the person chooses, then God completes what he began. (c) People who choose Christ can subsequently un-choose Christ and return to their former degenerate state. (This last point is not held by all Arminians; see my discussion of “eternal security” in chapter ten.)

It is worth noting that Arminius agreed with Calvin and his followers about how serious human depravity is—namely, that no one can choose what is good without God’s help in some form. However, many today who place themselves in the Arminian/Wesleyan tradition are more optimistic than Arminius and Wesley about humanity’s innate moral ability, believing that prevenient grace is unnecessary, because even unregenerate people naturally have indeterministic “free will” and may therefore choose good and also accept Christ when presented with the gospel. In this view, while unsaved people are still under the judgment of God for their sins, still need God’s grace in the death of Christ to be forgiven, and may be morally impaired, they do not need God’s assistance to choose to accept that grace—being capable of saying yes to God is a natural part of being human even after the Fall.

This view is not actually Arminian but rather semi-Pelagian. Pelagius was a British monk of the 5th century who believed that human beings were basically good and were really only in need of moral improvement, not spiritual renovation. Though Pelagius’ views were condemned by the Church, there were some who tried to chart a middle course between Pelagius’ heresy and the strictly pessimistic view of humanity’s moral ability held by Pelagius’ opponent Augustine. The result was semi-Pelagianism. Semi-Pelagianism was in accord with what had become the norm in the Eastern wing of the faith and remains the prevailing view in Eastern Orthodoxy to this day. Though semi-Pelagianism was condemned by the Synod (a.k.a. Second Council) of Orange in 529, a conclusion later ratified by the Pope, it lingered here and there in the medieval Roman Catholic Church, often in unresolved dissonance with the strict predestinarian view. Despite that Augustine’s anti-Pelagian teaching dominated the medieval Church’s meditations on predestination and election, nevertheless in the view of the Protestant Reformers the Church’s system of sacraments as the means of grace rested on semi-Pelagian (at best) foundations that vitiated Augustine’s doctrine, which they believed to be the only biblical option. The Reformers and their followers maintained differing opinions about the sacraments, but they all decisively reclaimed Augustine’s anti-Pelagian perspective in one form or another (Calvinism, Arminianism, and so on). While Augustine’s view has remained the gold standard among evangelical Protestant theological elites, beginning in the 19th century the evangelical rank-and-file in America, including many clergy, began tending heavily toward semi-Pelagianism regardless of denominational identification. Among Protestant theologians today there is some debate over whether semi-Pelagianism is a heresy or whether it is as far as one can go toward full Pelagianism and still be orthodox. I would rather Christians be Arminian than semi-Pelagian, but my first choice is that they be neither since each is a version of indeterminism that I don’t think holds up.

As I have stated, I am a Calvinist. But there have been some unfortunate characterizations of Calvinism by others that, to be fair, have been encouraged by some Calvinists themselves but that do not accurately describe my views. To clarify my position briefly in light of the description of Calvinism I gave above: First, on the nature of total depravity, some Calvinists (and I think Calvin himself) tend to talk about sin in black-and-white terms. In contrast, note my theory of gradations of evil in chapter six. Also, I agree with most Calvinists (and classic Arminians), who do not believe that our depravity is total in degree, but total in scope (i.e., affecting all facets of our being). Second, on the nature of God's sovereignty over human decisions, note my insistence that God predestines history through our own wills in chapter two. Third, on the scope of the atonement, many and perhaps most Calvinists, including myself, believe that Christ’s death is sufficient to cover all the sin of all people but that the atonement is only applied to those who believe as a result of God changing their hearts. For myself, I am open to the possibility that Christ’s death does actually atone for the sins of all people to the extent that all are granted a reprieve before the final judgment and all are recipients of God’s common grace (exhibited, for example, in Matt. 5:45). This may be how a Calvinist like me can be faithful to Scriptures such as 1 Timothy 4:10 (“God . . . is the Savior of all people, especially of believers”) and 1 John 2:2 (“[Christ] is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for our sins but also for the whole world”), which admittedly give us problems. Fourth, on the practical application of the doctrine of perseverance, some self-described Calvinists are functionally fatalists. As for me, see chapter ten.

Appendix C

Freedom and the State

It just doesn’t seem right to me as an American to write an entire book with “freedom” in the title and not talk about civic/political freedom. But doing so goes well beyond the biblical witness into an area more speculative than even this often speculative book. As a result, my conclusions are much less firm, and I raise more questions in this section than I give answers. For these reasons I place this material out of the flow of the main text and set it in this appendix.

Government and the Paradox of Freedom

At first glance anyway, the broad scope of freedom comes naturally to us Americans who were born or chose to settle in “the land of the free,” a “free society,” the “leader of the free world.” In fact, the definition of freedom that I proposed in chapter three—that freedom is the ability to do what you want to do—is exactly what we’re talking about when we give thanks for our freedom and champion it for others. According to our nation’s highest ideals, this is a land in which a person can do what he or she wants without the limitations of birth, class, or other external, arbitrary discrimination or the intrusions of a totalitarian government getting in the way.

And yet, there are always some intrusions from government, aren’t there? In fact, to govern is to intrude into what individuals want to do; otherwise there would be no government. While there may be a tiny number of genuine anarchists among us, even the most libertarian of the rest of us agree that there ought to be at least a few basic laws enforced by the governmental authority that protect life and property and restrict the actions of others that would harm those good things. Otherwise, one person might exercise his freedom to do what he wants to do—namely, to kill his neighbor—and thereby deprive his victim of what she wants to do—namely, to live. Or one person might exercise her freedom to do what she wants to do—namely, to take her neighbor’s car—and thereby deprive the car’s owner of what he wants to do—namely, to keep it and drive it.

These very basic examples illustrate a fundamental truth about freedom that we saw in chapter three—freedom is relative, not absolute. It is not unlimited but is curtailed by circumstances. And in these cases the curtailing circumstances are the actions of other people who are exercising their freedom! Both of the examples above involve two people; what those people want to do are in conflict with each other, and so the free exercise of one will destroy the freedom of the other. Government exists in part to arbitrate between these competing claims for freedom. In what we call a free society, the government’s objective is to provide as much freedom for as much of the population as possible. It is not to provide complete freedom for everyone, because as long as individuals live in any proximity to each other or have any contact with each other—in other words, as long as there is such a thing as human community—complete freedom is impossible. Points inevitably come at which two persons’ desires conflict. On the other hand, one could argue that complete freedom is equally impossible for those who are entirely alone. Such individuals lack the freedom to love, be loved, procreate, and so on, if in fact those are things that such individuals want to do.

Nevertheless, for the vast bulk or even all of humanity who lives in some form of community, however widely separated from each other, government is essential to order the conflicting freedoms that inevitably arise in fallen human community as we know it. As you might imagine, arbitrating between the clashing freedoms of hundreds, thousands, or millions of people is no small job. And so the government passes and enforces laws to regulate citizens’ exercise of their freedom, which by nature limits them. Laws are generally of two kinds. One kind includes laws that limit one person’s freedom in order to preserve another person’s freedom—the aforementioned cases of murder and theft are good examples of this. The other kind includes laws that limit a minority’s freedom in order to preserve the freedom of the majority to thrive as they wish. The first kind of law involves individuals and the second kind masses of people, but they are alike in that they express a paradox: they attempt to maximize people’s freedom by limiting it—or perhaps more precisely, they attempt to maximize the freedom of some by limiting the freedom of others.

But where should the government strike the balance? We know that some laws are necessary to prevent the strong, bold, and unscruplous (say, a mob boss) from tyrannically limiting the freedom of everyone else. But how far do we take that? Surely it is possible to err in the other direction—to have such a dense mass of constricting laws that rather than releasing the freedom of many they smother them. Frequency of human contact goes a long way in determining how intrusive the government is. If a person lives utterly alone, with no human contact whatsoever, her freedom is unbounded by the actions of others, and government outside the self has no reason to exist. But pack thousands of humans into a couple square miles and suddenly their aggregate actions constrain them geometrically as each person in his exercise of freedom limits his neighbors and their exercise of freedom limits his. Suddenly, the need for government to sort out the mess and try to give each person some semblance of freedom within limits that won’t destroy others’ freedom becomes immense. If you have ever wondered why the citizens of Alaska (one person per square mile as of 2010) and those of the District of Columbia (9,857 persons per square mile) vote for political candidates with such different governing philosophies, population density has a lot to do with it.

But population density alone does not answer the question. Because even within a single community people will surely disagree as to where to strike the balance on any given issue, and how much more so within an entire state or country in which population density varies so widely.

Freedom’s necessary partner, the one that gives guidance as to just how much to prune freedom so that it might flourish and thrive, is justice. Of course, all Americans should know this as citizens of the nation “with liberty [freedom] and justice for all.” We know that it is acceptable to curtail the freedom to murder not only because murder itself curtails the freedom of the victim but also because justice tells us that murder is objectively wrong. In cases like this, justice urges the restraint of freedom in cases in which freedom alone threatens to devour itself. But justice also sometimes prevents a few being denied their freedom, no matter how much freedom might accrue to the many as a consequence, when such a course would be unjust to those deprived.

Because the interests of freedom require the wisdom of justice in order for the most freedom to accrue to the most people, we can’t figure out the right answer to the many policy questions that vex us using the measure of freedom alone. And so, since this book does not define and explore justice as it does freedom—though we might speculate that justice requires the interests of freedom to keep it from destroying itself as much as the reverse—I offer no definitive policy conclusions on the following pages. Nevertheless, we can still look at some of the pressing issues of our time and define how freedom is gained and lost depending on how those issues are resolved.

Economic Freedom

We have actually already treated one category of law—that which pertains to personal injury and property. In these cases, the freedom of all individuals to harm their neighbor is restricted so that their freedom to live uninjured is secure. Likewise, their freedom to take their neighbor’s belongings is restricted so that their freedom to possess their own belongings is preserved. We could add traffic laws to this category. A 65-mile-per-hour speed limit restricts our freedom to drive at 90 miles per hour, but it also, in theory, safeguards the freedom of all drivers and passengers regardless of speed to travel the freeway alive with their cars undamaged.

Some laws that protect property are paradoxical in that they forbid certain ways of garnering wealth for the purpose of creating more wealth for more people. For example, take consumer protection laws. Laws exist to prohibit false advertising and other scams, which takes freedom away from a very active (and devious) sector of the economy! But limiting sellers’ freedom to lie increases buyers’ freedom to make purchases without fear of being sold a “bill of goods.” That increased trust between buyers and sellers leads to more transactions, which in turn increases freedom to have and to earn for more people. A similar example is intellectual property laws. Though there is still active debate over whether such laws are legit, the argument for them is that restricting someone else’s freedom to use the idea (inventive, artistic, etc.) that one came up with not only increases one’s freedom to get wealthy from that idea but also increases others’ freedom to generate their own ideas without fear of them being exploited by someone else. Again, the increased confidence someone can have that they will benefit from their idea encourages more people to have ideas and develop them, and that allows all of us to be more free to benefit from more gadgets, enjoy more works of art, and so forth.

Yet another classic example of the paradox of property laws is the prohibition of slavery. There is obviously an argument to be made against slavery from justice—that is, that slavery violates the objective dignity of the human person—but there is also an argument against it from freedom. The argument goes that though one person’s enslavement of another increases the master’s freedom to accrue wealth from the slave’s labor, it even more drastically limits the slave’s freedom to accrue her own wealth, not to mention freedom of movement and so forth. If the enslavement is by violent force, this is obviously true, but the argument can be extended that slavery even limits freedom when the master and slave mutually and voluntarily enter into that economic relationship—for example, if someone sells himself into indentured servitude for a term of years in return for the payment of a debt. This is because the economic relationship of these two, master and slave, impacts people outside of their relationship. Imagine two farmers, one with a slave and one with a hired hand. The two farmers produce the same agricultural output, but the operating costs of the farmer with the hired hand are higher than the costs of the slaveowner. The slaveowner therefore grows wealthier and gets more slaves, taking away more people’s freedom to get wealthy. In order to compete and not be driven out of business, the farmer with the hired hand has to lay off his worker, taking away his freedom get wealthy, and get a slave himself, taking away someone else’s freedom. If this pattern continues and draws in more and more people, eventually there are a few farmers with enormous freedom to accrue wealth and many slaves (and poor farmers without slaves) with hardly any freedom at all. So what might begin as a freely entered economic relationship between two people ultimately takes freedom away from many people. This is one reason why slavery is outlawed—not the most poignant reason and probably not the most important, but a reason nevertheless.

This exact debate took place in the United States before the Civil War, though the eventual abolition of slavery came about for considerably less coolly calculated reasons. But I share it because the same basic debate has been repeated since the mid-19th century around economic issues and continues today. For example, in the northern industrial sector in the late 19th century workers were not literal slaves, but the disparity in income between factory workers and factory owners was so great that it raised the question whether all had access to the free enterprise system or whether a few had almost limitless freedom to do what they wished as economic actors while their workers had little to none. This is a very live issue all over the world, especially in developing nations whose economies today resemble America’s over 100 years ago. The situation becomes even more complex when wealthy nations with some level of labor protection laws trade with these developing nations to get the goods they want at the price they want them. Specifically, what is “free trade”? One could argue that removal of all tariffs and trade barriers is free because it allows individuals and companies across borders to do what they want to do—that is, enter into an economic relationship to buy or sell a good or service on the terms and at the price they choose. One could also argue that this kind of trade is not free, or at least not free for everyone. Is the freedom of the industrial worker in Bangladesh increased by “free trade,” or the freedom of the American worker who lost her job to that Bangladeshi? People much more knowledgeable than I am argue over the answers to these questions. Some maintain that free trade ultimately provides the most freedom for the most people because it is the greatest wealth generator the world has ever seen, the only way to lift masses out of poverty. Others maintain that free trade ultimately limits the freedom of many by concentrating freedom in the hands of the wealthy few owners, investors, and consumers of cheap goods and denying it to the rest. But for all their disagreements, the two sides silently and perhaps unknowingly agree on one idea: when individuals exercise their freedom, their choices affect the freedom of others, making the bulk of humanity more free or less.

In 2008 the world got a good look at this principle in the financial meltdown that became an economic crisis. A few individuals and firms exercised their freedom to enter into transactional agreements to make money. Their decisions precipitated a series of events by which not only they themselves but also many millions who did not make those decisions suffered a severe loss of freedom as companies collapsed, jobs were lost, and wealth evaporated. Though nothing exactly like what happened in 2008 had happened before, it was hardly the first catastrophic panic in financial history. Moments like this one highlight a deep irony of the free market. The freedom of the market allows people to make economic decisions freely, but sometimes those decisions consume the very environment—the marketplace and the wealth—that made those free decisions possible. Freedom is free, and so the free market supplies the freedom both for its flourishing and for its own destruction. Therefore in response to such crises the government typically passes laws that restrict freedom in the market—that is, regulation—for the purpose of preventing a more disastrous loss of freedom in the future. But how do they know that they preserved more freedom for more people than they took away by regulation?

Regardless of the field of economic endeavor, everyone can see that a law that limits an economic choice limits freedom. The question is, as that limitation plays itself out through the entire economy, does it actually increase freedom? Is this limitation the pruning that keeps the plant healthy or the death-blow that kills it?

Freedom to Be Well

Some laws limit the economic freedom of a few individuals in order to increase the economic freedom of many individuals. But other laws limit the economic freedom of some (or even all) to increase the freedom for many (or all) to live a generally better life in noneconomic terms. For example, your governments tax you. They limit your ability to do what you want with the money you earn by taking it away. And what do they do with the money? Ideally, they spend that money so that people in general in your community, state, or nation are free to live a better life than otherwise. They spend it on the military and law enforcement so that people can be safe from violent aggressors and thieves. They spend it on water, energy, and sanitation systems so that people can drink, power their appliances, and stay clean. They spend it on transportation systems so that people can travel from place to place. They spend it on education systems so that people can learn knowledge and skills and so that research might deliver technological breakthroughs that enable people to do things we haven’t thought of yet. They spend it on healthcare in the form of publicly funded medical providers or publicly subsidized health insurance so that people can be healed and kept healthy. They may even spend it on direct gifts of food, housing, or cash to the poor so that they can have the basic equipment to live.

When the government limits people’s freedom by taxing them and extends people’s freedom by providing services to them, some people make out better in the freedom exchange than others. Some people lose quite a bit of money through taxation and get little in return that they could not buy themselves if there was no government providing it to them. Others lose little money through taxation and get a lot of services in return. And of course there are some for whom the transaction is more even. But the overall unevenness stimulates a few debates.

First, is it more just to extend the freedom of those with little by curtailing the freedom of those with much, or is it more just to extend and curtail everyone’s freedom equally? In other words, is it right to redistribute wealth (in cash or in services provided) or should it be that the higher taxes you pay the more you get from the government in return? Should each person get equal “bang” or equal “bang for their buck”? (This is one of those justice questions that aren’t within the purview of this book.)

Second, what exactly is the relationship between money and freedom? Is a person’s freedom limited in exact proportion to the absolute amount of money they pay in taxes, and therefore everyone should pay the same amount ($X per head)? Or is a person’s freedom limited in proportion to the percentage of income they pay in taxes, and therefore everyone should pay the same percentage (X% per head)? Or is a person’s freedom limited in proportion to the percentage of buying power or standard of living that they lose, and therefore wealthier people should pay a higher percentage of their income? Or is a person’s freedom limited in proportion to the standard of living that they lose below some standard of living that everyone ought to have, and therefore those above that standard of living should be taxed down to it and everyone below it ought to be elevated up to it by wealth redistribution? (Another justice question.)

Third, at what point does the government’s effort to extend freedom through the services it provides become counterproductive? In other words, if the government limited people’s freedom less by taxation and consequently provided fewer services to the people, would the economy flourish so greatly that everyone would get wealthier and therefore need fewer services from the government in the first place? Or does our taxation scheme allow freedom for a few wealthy ones and comparatively limit freedom for many less wealthy ones, and so greater redistribution is required? What are the “sweet spots” for extending freedom the most for the most people in the total amount of revenue collected by governments, the scheme by which it is collected more from some than from others, and the scheme by which it is distributed in governmental services?

Some governmental limitations on freedom don’t necessarily have to do with taxation. Take environmental protection for example. Governments put all kinds of “don’ts” on what people can do to the earth. Want to dump the arsenic byproduct of your factory into a lake? Sorry, you can’t. Want to go hunting in a wildlife refuge? Too bad. Want to build a vacation home on the rim of the Grand Canyon? Huh-uh. There are all kinds of things that people want to do that could harm ecosystems, poison the air, water, and ground that we need to live healthy lives, or just spoil a fantastic scenic view, and a government says no and limits those freedoms. The purpose of limiting those freedoms is to extend the freedom of many to drink and breathe easily, to enjoy the grandeur of nature, and in the case of threatened animals or plants to live (for their own sake and because their loss may threaten our existence in ways we don’t know yet). But when is freedom limited for nothing—that is, it doesn’t extend or preserve people’s freedom to do anything? For example, does curbing the freedom to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge make us more free to enjoy a less sullied earth populated with caribou and other animals in a fragile ecosystem, or does it do nothing but limit our freedom to use a domestic source of petroleum? (And do the justice aspects of either of those options make the freedom calculus moot?)

Public health issues are the same. Should individuals be free to do what they want? Yes—that’s the essence of a free society and in keeping with freedom as I’ve defined it in this book. Does that include their freedom to harm themselves by their activities? In the sight of God that’s dubious, but in the sight of the state, why not? Well, what if the activity that harms oneself harms others as well? Then one person’s exercise of freedom limits the freedom of others in roundabout ways. The easiest to conceptualize is smoking tobacco. Who is the government to tell a person they can’t smoke? On the other hand, who is the government not to tell a person they can’t smoke because their smoke poisons the people they live, work, and play with, including people like children who don’t have the freedom to leave the home that smoke fills? Other drugs including alcohol, sexual activities like prostitution and pornography, and gambling, are all variations on the same theme. Freedom means the ability to destroy oneself if one wants to do so, but because humans are social creatures that affect each other by our exercise of freedom, destroying oneself usually means harming or even destroying others. How does the government determine how self-destructive a person can be before the threat to others’ freedom to live or live well becomes too great?

Perhaps the most profound question pertaining to the freedom to live well is abortion. On the one hand is the freedom of the woman to live the life she wants to live or in extreme cases to live at all. On the other hand is the freedom of the fetus to live. Another way to view it is as the conflict between the woman’s freedom to choose how she understands the fetus’s existence and value and the fetus’s freedom to choose anything in its future. Whose freedom should the government protect if it can’t protect both? (Or can it?)

Freedom to Be Who We Want to Be

The abortion question involves another example of how difficult it is to maintain freedom in a society: the problem of freedom of belief. On the one hand, unless a government so grossly violates a person by torture or psychotropic drugs that it brainwashes the person, a person is always free to believe what he or she believes. But governments routinely deny people the freedom to act on their beliefs. For example, in many countries abortion is illegal outright and in almost every other nation in the world it is illegal during certain parts of a pregnancy. A woman in one of those countries might believe that she ought to have the legal right to have an abortion whenever she wants. She might even believe that she ought to have the abortion itself. She is free to hold that belief but not free to act on it. In “free countries” laws that prohibit people from acting on their beliefs are passed if acting on a belief limits the freedom of others.

But that gets into extremely sensitive terrain, because what we believe both is caused by and causes who we are. Our nature and our environment combine to determine what we believe to be true, and those beliefs drive our actions, which partly shape our nature and our environment, which feed more back into our belief system. So there is a tight link between belief and identity. Therefore limiting the freedom to act on one’s belief is limiting one’s freedom to be oneself or to be who one wants to be. What makes this even more sensitive is that there are times when allowing individuals to be free to be themselves limits the freedom of the community, the society, or the nation to be free to be itself.

Religion is the classic example. When an Islamic terrorist who believes he is morally obligated to kill Americans is prevented by the government from doing so it curtails his freedom to be himself, a devout Muslim as he understands it. That’s fairly easy for most of us to justify, because people’s lives are at stake. But what about when people’s lives aren’t at stake, but their preferences are?

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution states that “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” a statute that the Supreme Court later interpreted to be binding on the states as well. The Establishment Clause (the first part of the amendment) preserves people’s freedom to live in a country that is officially pluralistic or even publicly agnostic, which many Americans believe is what America is all about. But it denies other people’s freedom to live in a country that is officially Protestant or Christian or “Judeo-Christian” or monotheistic, which many other Americans believe is what America is about. When the latter see religion restricted in the public square in the name of the First Amendment, they feel that their freedom to be genuinely American, not just religious, is being restricted by their own government. They cite the Free Exercise Clause (the second part), which ensures their freedom to be religious. But when they act religiously in public, like praying in Christian format at a public school graduation ceremony, for example, people of different religions or no religion may feel like their freedom to live in a religiously pluralistic or publicly agnostic country is violated and that the government is not doing its job to preserve their freedom to live in the authentic America. Either way—whether a group presses for its freedom to be specifically and publicly religious or it presses for its freedom to be shielded from it—others believe that their freedom to live in the land that they know and love is being taken away. Toss in our confused and conflicted history and legal corpus that gives each group plenty of ammunition, and we have a big mess on our hands.

We run into similar constitutional rights problems in the issue of same-sex marriage. Those who favor the legal existence of same-sex marriage hold that the federal government and the governments of most states are not only denying homosexuals’ freedom to marry. They are also denying all same-sex marriage proponents, gay or straight, the freedom to live in an America that treats everyone equally according to its founding ideals. On the other hand, when by legislation or judicial verdict same-sex marriage is made legal, those who are against it believe that their freedom to live in a society in which the basic social unit is a family with monogamous, heterosexual parents, which has been the standard pattern in the West for centuries, is violated.

Or how about immigration? There are undoubtedly issues of economic freedom on all sides of the topic of immigration, but immigration also strikes at one’s freedom to be oneself as an individual or community. As immigrants seek economic, religious, or political freedoms in the United States, some of them assimilate into American culture eagerly while others stubbornly resist it and maintain their own culture exclusively with a whole range of variation in between. Immigrants who resist assimilation, notably in the first generation, are trying to take advantage of the freedoms America provides that their home country did not but still preserve their freedom to be themselves culturally, religiously, and linguistically. Others try to be free to participate in both cultures eclectically. Meanwhile for Americans who count this as their native land, some resist the influx of foreigners in order to maintain their freedom to live in the America they know and love with its expected cultural, religious, and linguistic features. Other Americans champion immigration on the grounds that the influx of foreigners is an essential part of what America is all about, and therefore restricting immigration actually limits Americans’ freedom to live in the America that they know and love.

Issues of freedom of belief and identity arise every time the United States is engaged in war. When the nation goes to war, there are always some people who are against it because they oppose all wars all the time or this particular war for whatever reason. This is often a deep moral conviction. It is extremely difficult for the government to balance objectors’ freedom to act on their belief with the freedoms the government is trying to preserve or secure by armed conflict. The government generally continues to tax objectors and use that revenue to fund the war, which limits objectors’ freedom to abstain from it and refuse to support it. Sometimes the government institutes a draft. While our government has typically allowed for a limited degree of conscientious objection so that such objectors might serve in nonmilitary ways, that is not universal, which becomes a profound limitation of freedom on those forced to serve (not to mention the limitation of freedom on those who have no conscientious objection but are still forced to leave their own private affairs to serve). All of this highly intrusive, compulsory behavior of the state limits citizens’ freedoms in order to preserve freedom. Is it worth it?

The Unending Battle for Freedom

Struggling over freedom is in our DNA as Americans. Our most disruptive and character-defining wars—the Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II—all attest to it in different ways, but perhaps the Civil War is the most illustrative. Most of the freedoms we’ve looked at in this chapter entail a tension between the freedom of the majority versus the freedom of the minority or the freedom of the whole versus the freedom of the individual persons or communities that make it up. This tension is enshrined in our Constitution in numerous ways, perhaps most concisely in its Tenth Amendment: “The Powers [think ‘freedoms to do what they want’] not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”—the principle of federalism in a nutshell. From the beginning there has been much controversy over gray areas in which the assertion of federal power was perceived by some to limit states’ freedoms or vice versa. Slavery was the issue on which no compromise seemed possible. Southern states claimed that if the federal government limited the spread of slavery in federal territories and in the creation of new states in the West, it would illegally limit all states’ constitutional freedom to legalize slavery. Northern states claimed that if a state threatened to secede if a particular federal law were to be passed just because the state thought it was wrong or didn’t like it, that would illegally limit the national government’s freedom to do its job. In the case of slavery, this tension inherent in the Constitution became so great that the constitutional bonds themselves broke when a Republican president was elected and the Southern states seceded. The eventual Northern victory that restored the Union yanked the constitutional tension firmly to the side of the federal government’s freedom at the expense of the states, not by reason or by law but by force. That the resultant limitation of states’ constitutional freedom led to the gradual but immense expansion of the constitutional freedoms of the slaves and their descendants, which had been nullified by the Southern states’ exercise of freedom, substantially heightens the irony.

While I sincerely hope that our struggle as Americans to live out our self-concept as the land of the free never again becomes as bloody and destructive as the Civil War, the fact is that the struggle will never go away. We will never arrive, because we will never agree on whose freedom ought to trump whose or which other freedom ought to trump which and to what extent. In our standard, tired, Left-Right political landscape, liberals are comfortable with laws that restrict individuals’ freedom if they preserve the economic freedom or noneconomic welfare of the society as a whole (i.e., not that of each individual within it). Conservatives hate that restriction of freedom, but they are quite comfortable with laws that restrict the minority’s freedom if such laws maintain the freedom of the majority to live in the kind of society that they know, love, and believe in, which to liberals is self-defeating. Then on the fringes are libertarians who despise all laws that limit individual freedoms and communitarians (sometimes pejoratively and sometimes accurately called statists) who favor all such laws in order to maximize all kinds of freedoms for the society as a whole. And in the middle are people who are somewhere in between all four points either out of self-consistent philosophy or eclecticism or pragmatism. Political parties may comprise different sectors of this philosophical map, but the map itself probably won’t change anytime soon. Likewise the center of political gravity will continue to meander among these groups, but it is unlikely to travel too far without drifting back.

So when you hear a politician or party appeal to Americans’ love of freedom claiming that they or their agenda extend that freedom, you can acknowledge, no matter who they are or what they want, that they are right. And also that their extension of freedom will almost invariably limit freedom in some other way. And then it is the hard work of justice and wisdom to sort out whether that exchange is a net gain for freedom as God sees it or not.

Notes

In addition to these notes, I would like to give credit to a college professor of mine, James Spiegel, for teaching me much that undergirds the substance of this book not cited specifically below and for being my original source for some ideas cited below under more famous names.

Introduction

The essay that I quote is Kevin Moore, “Ethics” (unpublished). I hope I didn’t lay it on too thick about feeling hung out to dry as a result of his paper (which was the catalyst for me to write this book). My feeling is more of being an outsider-insider among the bulk of American evangelicals in general. This has shifted significantly in recent years, however—see Collin Hansen, “Young, Restless, Reformed,” Christianity Today 50, no. 9 (Sept. 2006): 32-38. On the other hand, Roger E. Olson maintains that the situation is the opposite among the evangelical theological elite, which is dominated by Calvinists and views Arminianism as a small step above heresy at best (Arminian Theology: Myths and Realities [Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2006], 20-21, 29, 40-41).

Chapter One: God and Time

The theology professor who thought that every good theology lecture starts at Genesis 1 is Rick Lints of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

For the idea that God exists outside of our timeline, see C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, rev. ed. (New York: Collier, 1952), 145-149. Lewis himself used the illustration of the novelist, though I have taken it further than he did.

Lewis concurred with the Greek idea that God exists in timelessness. I had believed this too until I read the master’s thesis of Ryan Spence, who argued from theologian Robert Jenson and other neo-Barthians (intellectual descendants of Karl Barth) that God inhabits time, albeit a different timeline than ours (Ryan Spence, The Space to Be: The Theology of Time and Eternity As Seen in the Work of Robert W. Jenson [South Hamilton, Mass.: Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, 2002]). Now I’m basically agnostic on this point.

The concept of “acting out the middle” of God's story, the beginning and end of which are contained in the Bible, comes from N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 140-143, as referenced in Marva Dawn and Eugene Peterson, The Unnecessary Pastor: Rediscovering the Call, ed. Peter Santucci (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2000), 29-30.

Chapter Two: God's Will and Ours

One source of the idea that we inevitably choose according to our nature, plus outside influences, is the philosophy of 18th-century American pastor, revivalist, theologian, philosopher, and intellectual extraordinaire Jonathan Edwards, who stated that “it is that motive, which, as it stands in the view of the mind, is the strongest, that determines the will” (Freedom of the Will, ed. Paul Ramsey, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1, gen. ed. Perry Miller [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957], 141).

For more on Pharaoh, see Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will, trans. Henry Cole (Lafayette, Ind.: Sovereign Grace, 2001), 88-90.

Chapter Three: Freedom and Choice

For more on my definition of freedom as contrasted with that of the indeterminists, see Edwards, Freedom of the Will, 163-165. (For that matter, read all of Edwards for an exposition of the thought in this chapter that is far more thorough and profound than I could ever hope to emulate.) In philosophical circles, this position is called “soft determinism,” a term I don't particularly care for. It is no less determinism than “hard determinism” (which I occasionally call in the text “atheistic determinism”). It just has, I think, more true-to-life (and biblical) definitions of freedom and choice than either hard determinism or indeterminism.

C. S. Lewis himself played the robot card, which I have yet to find in Scripture (Mere Christianity, 52), though he used the words “automata” and “machines,” since Isaac Asimov was only just publishing his seminal short stories that coined the term “robot” when Lewis was broadcasting on the BBC.

For a thorough explanation of my contention that the will always chooses according to the strongest motive, see Edwards, Freedom of the Will, 141-148. Edwards also points out that if the will determines its own choice, then the will requires a will before that to make its decision (Ibid., 171-174). The inspiration for the discussion of the infinite series of steps comes from J. P. Moreland, Scaling the Secular City: A Defense of Christianity (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1987), 28-33, though Moreland uses it in a completely different context.

Gerald L. Schroeder uses the peculiarities of quantum mechanics to suggest that some of nature, including the human will, is undetermined in The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom (New York: Broadway Books, 1997), ch. 10.

Edwards notes that if the will truly is “free” as indeterminists claim, it is also free of our understanding and reason—a freedom that is not very attractive (Freedom of the Will, 272-273). The quote from him about machines is found in the same work on p. 371.

Chapter Four: God and Personal Relationship

The song lyric quoted here is from “You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do It),” music by James V. Monaco, lyrics by Joseph McCarthy, 1913 (public domain).

Chapter Five: Moral Freedom

Augustine vividly explains his own divided will and the “unfreedom” it produced before God supernaturally intervened in Confessions, Book VIII, trans. Edward B. Pusey, The Harvard Classics Vol. 7, ed. Charles W. Eliot (New York: Collier, 1909), 137.

Martin Luther talks about the nature of the will with reference to moral freedom so eloquently (despite his self-deprecating comments to the contrary) that he is worth quoting at length:

[A] man void of the Spirit of God, does not evil against his will as by violence, or as if he were taken by the neck and forced to it, in the same way as a thief or cut-throat is dragged to punishment against his will; but he does it spontaneously, and with a desirous willingness. And this willingness and desire of doing evil he cannot, by his own power, leave off, restrain, or change; but it goes on still desiring and craving. And even if he should be compelled by force to do any thing outwardly to the contrary, yet the craving will within remains averse to, and rises in indignation against that which forces or resists it. But it would not rise in indigation, if it were changed, and made willing to yield to a constraining power. . . . [T]he will cannot change itself, nor give itself another bent; but rather the more it is resisted, the more it is irritated to crave; as is manifest from its indigation . . . .

But again, on the other hand, when God works in us, the will, being changed and sweetly breathed on by the Spirit of God, desires and acts, not from compulsion, but responsively, from pure willingness, inclination, and accord; so that it cannot be turned another way by any thing contrary, nor overcome even by the gates of hell; but it still goes on to desire, crave after, and love that which is good; even as before, it desired, craved after, and loved that which was evil . . . .

In a word, if we be under the god of this world, without the operation and Spirit of God, we are led captives by him at his will, as Paul saith. (2 Tim. ii. 26.) . . . And all this we do willingly and desiringly, according to the nature of will: for if it were forced, it would no longer be will: For compulsion is (so to speak) unwillingness. But if the “stronger than he” come and overcome him, and take us as his spoils, then, through the Spirit, we are His servants and captives (which is the royal liberty) that we may desire and do, willingly, what he wills.

Thus the human will is, as it were, a beast between the two. If God sit thereon, it wills and goes where God will. . . . If Satan sit thereon, it wills and goes as Satan will. Nor is it in the power of its own will to choose, to which rider it will run, nor which it will seek; but the riders themselves contend, which shall have and hold it (Bondage of the Will, 31-32).

Steve Wise (dean, Mercer County campus, New River Community and Technical College, W.Va.) pointed out to me how Satanic “control” is a counterfeit of life in the Spirit. C. S. Lewis’ explication of Philippians 2:12-13 comes from Mere Christianity, 130.

Chapter Six: Evil and Guilt

C. S. Lewis defines evil as a perversion of good and demonstrates the implications of this view with respect to the devil (The Screwtape Letters [New York: Macmillan, 1959], vii). In this Lewis was likely inspired by St. Augustine, who repudiated the Manicheans with whom he was once associated, a sect that believed that good and evil were equal and opposite entities. It has often been said that Augustine believed evil to be the absence of good, and he does write that way, but I think that the perversion of good may have been what he meant. See Confessions, Book VII, pp. 115-116.

My interpretation of Galatians 5:17 is from Martin Luther, Bondage of the Will, 148. The subsequent quote from that work is from pp. 58-59.

The source of my argument about guilt in which I posited a fictional “Bad Guy” is Edwards, Freedom of the Will, 320-327.

Chapter Seven: God and the Damned

The German scholar Gerhard von Rad brought the term “salvation-history” (in German, Heilsgeschichte) into prominence in the scholarly world.

Chapter Nine: God and Evil

Augustine’s quote is from Confessions, Book VIII, pp. 127-128.

C. S. Lewis is a major proponent of the indeterministic free-will response to the problem of evil. He finds it compatible with the greater-good argument I offer. See The Problem of Pain (New York: MacMillan, 1962).

Chapter Ten: Living Your Destiny

The seminary professor who had the curious conversation with the Catholic priest was Sam Schutz.

The story by Thomas à Kempis comes from The Imitation of Christ, rev. trans. (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, n.d.), I.xxv.2.

Chapter Eleven: What Difference Does It Make?

Jim Cymbala’s “new holy trinity” is from Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire: What Happens When God's Spirit Invades the Hearts of His People (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1997), 121.

Chapter Twelve: Freedoms of the Free Churches

The text of the Second London Confession is found in William L. Lumpkin, ed., Baptist Confessions of Faith, rev. ed. (Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1969). Luther’s quote is found in Heiko A. Oberman, Eileen Walliser-Schwartzbart, trans., Luther: Man between God and the Devil (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006).

Postscript: How I Got Here

The aggressive review at Christianbook.com was a March 24, 2005 review of Why I Am Not a Calvinist, by Jerry L. Walls and Joseph R. Dongell. The reviewer was Martin Bardell of Bridgeport, Conn., who was claiming to interpret approvingly a quote by C. H. Spurgeon that Calvinism “is just a shorthand for the gospel” (no source cited).

The anecdote about Isaac Newton may be found in Tom Wujec, Pumping Ions: Games and Exercises to Flex Your Mind (Toronto: Doubleday, 1988), 49.

Appendix B: Comparison of Calvinism and Arminianism

My comparison of these theological systems is largely drawn from Ted M. Dorman, A Faith for All Seasons: Historic Christian Belief in Its Classical Expression, 2d ed. (Nashville, Tenn.: Broadman & Holman, 2001), 133-138, 246-255.

Anthony A. Hoekema, a Reformed theologian, also holds that “total depravity” means total in scope, not degree. He prefers the term “pervasive depravity” (Created in God's Image [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1986], 150).

Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One:

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Part Two:

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Part Three:

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Postscript

Appendices

Appendix A

Appendix B

Appendix C

Notes

Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One:

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Part Two:

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Part Three:

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Postscript

Appendices

Appendix A

Appendix B

Appendix C

Notes