This week I think there was too much jargon and I was disgruntled as a result. I think I was more annoyed by the pre-class reading materials, which caused me to approach the lesson in a less conducive frame of mind. Why was I so annoyed? I complained to my brother that the chapter on “meticulous providence” by Oliver Crisp was worse than my law textbooks which I had to read for my undergraduate degree! It’s like the theologian was not writing English, even though he was!
I needed more background knowledge in order to be able to understand Crisp’s writing. He started off by mentioning the Heidelberg Catechism and its definition of ‘meticulous providence’ in the first sentence as if he already expected readers to be familiar with both the catechism and the concept of ‘meticulous providence’. I had never heard of either in my life. Obviously, I was off to a bad start.
In fact, when I attended the lecture, I realised I didn’t even understand the topic: divine providence. Because one of the first things the lecturer pointed out was that providence is different from provision… which I didn’t know (oops). And that ‘providence’ refers to “God’s foresight and governance”. So ‘meticulous providence’ is about how God’s sovereignty plays out in the way He governs the world: that nothing can happen outside of His will, therefore everything that happens must be within His specific plan or decree.
This only led to more jargon, namely ‘determinism’, which I understood to mean more or less the same thing. I think it is called “determinism” from the root word ‘determine’, as in, “Everything that happens has already been determined beforehand, as it has been decreed by God.” If God is all-powerful and sovereign, then nothing can happen outside His purview, right?
Then we go to the thorny issue of free will. Because, if everything is already decreed by God, then do we have free will? The lecturer said that there are two types of free will: a) Free from coercion, and b) Free to have options (if only option is available, then arguably you don’t get free will to choose since there is nothing to choose from).
After that we went to primary and secondary causality. I did feel like we were bouncing around a bit cos this didn’t seem connected to the issue of free will. But anyway, God is “the uncaused first cause” (i.e. the primary cause) and any other factor or agent that causes something to happen in this world would be considered a secondary cause. The power that we humans have to cause things to happen is derived from God. The lecturer gave the example of a craftsman’s tools such as a hammer, saw, or chisel, which are secondary causes that enable a chair to be built. They derive their ability to “cause” a chair to form & come together from the craftsman himself. As an arts & crafts kind of person myself, I liked that illustration.
I just have to say here that I don’t care about all the arguments about how is it that God is sovereign and in control of all things, yet humans are still able to have free will.
Calvin’s view, as presented by the lecturer, makes him (Calvin) look silly cos he wanted so much to defend God’s complete sovereignty (God ordains all events, and nothing happens outside God’s will) that he then he had to twist himself into knots trying to explain that humankind could still retain free will even if they are doing things that were ordained by God before the beginning of time.
Somehow, in Calvin’s viewpoint, we have the freedom to voluntarily decide what we want to do, and our decisions end up magically compatible with God’s sovereign will even though God did not manipulate or ‘determine’ our actions. This is the concept of ‘compatibilism’ (more jargon!). It was invented to explain that determinism does not cancel out free will. In my notes, I wrote:
Soft determinism = people can still make decisions because of compatibilism. But although they make decisions, they did not really have a possibility of making a different choice because God had decreed from the beginning of time that they would do what they did. They think they have a choice and it feels like they have a choice, but the choice they actually make always aligns with God’s decree.
If reading that gave you a headache, imagine me sitting in this lecture.
We were also presented with viewpoints from Arminius and Molina, but I don’t care enough to go into them and they didn’t take as hard a stance as Calvin.
The next part of the lesson focused on our understanding of ‘foreknowledge’. We understand time in a linear way but God isn’t bound by the boundaries of time as we know it. So, for God, omniscience means that He sees everything at once instead of seeing events sequentially: that’s how He was able to see it all and know it all even before the dawn of creation. That’s timeless knowledge.
For us humans, because we think in terms of a chronological sequence of events, the fact that God knows the future is ‘foreknowledge’; but actually to God it is just… knowledge. It’s not that He knows what is going to happen – it’s that He knows everything, all at once. Being omniscient and omnipresent, He’s outside time & space so for Him there is no yesterday, today, or tomorrow.
This was very interesting to me and a new way of thinking. It helped me to understand what we mean when we say, “God has a plan” and “God is in control”. It’s not that God is in control so things will work out in the end or God is in control so He’s capable of turning things around at any time. It’s more like He is in control because He already knows it all, therefore events and situations will unfurl as they should. I am very tired so my thoughts may not be 100% clear.
The last part of the lesson was on predestination, again from Calvin, Arminius, and Molina’s view. I don’t care about that either, and I apparently didn’t take notes on this part although it is included in the lecturer’s slides. I think I am supposed to care because, just like with determinism, if one could be predestined as stated in Rom 8:30 then it might mean that our choices aren’t real choices and don’t really matter, because (especially in Calvin’s view) it was always going to happen anyway.
Then it would mean that, perhaps, there is no need to evangelise because the people who are going to be saved will be saved anyway. But it would also mean that God decides not to select certain people, which the lecturer said is called “double predestination” because some are chosen to be sons of God, while others are chosen not to be sons of God. Which sounds rather cruel, really.
But then that also reminds me of that parable where the labourers were recruited at different times of the day but promised the same wage, so at the end of the day it seemed unfair that the labourer who had worked since the morning received the same amount as another labourer who had only worked for two hours or something. I never really understood that parable.
So if one can be “not chosen” and God allows that person to follow his/her own sinful inclinations and eventually become subjects of His judgement & justice, it seems unfair and cruel but in the OT, God also chose Israel and didn’t choose other nations. Hmmm.
The lecturer posited that perhaps, predestination is not to be saved but to be conformed to the image of Jesus, as stated in Rom 8:29 – sort of like to restore the natural order. We were made in God’s image but the Fall marred that image, so in the context of this Bible passage, I think predestination is about being selected to partner with God in restoring the world to what it was originally meant to be.
We were reminded in class that Israel was also chosen (as I said earlier) – but they turned to idolatry many times and eventually got exiled from the promised land. So, the theory is that being chosen or “predestined” does not mean that one is saved. If Israel had been saved, they wouldn’t have continued to worship other gods.
The suggestion was: What if to be “the elect” means you were chosen to have access to the truth, to have access to God and His teachings and warnings and exhortations? Israel was supposed to be a testament to God’s power and goodness to the nations around them – the elect is supposed to teach others about God because they know Him and love Him. But having access to the truth does not mean you will put your trust in Him and commit yourself to Him – as seen with the Israelites. They still had a choice whether to do that or not (or so it seems. Calvin would have disagreed).
I like this “being predestined doesn’t mean one will automatically be saved” interpretation of the Scripture. It seems less harsh and unyielding compared to the idea that to be predestined means you were chosen to be saved, while others were chosen to be ultimately cast into hell. But 1 Tim 2:4 says God desires all men to be saved, so that interpretation doesn’t work for me.
John Piper explains 1 Tim 2:4 by saying that what God desires, He doesn’t always do; for example, He hates murder of the innocent (Prov 6:16-19), yet He decreed Jesus’ murder at the hands of Pontius Pilate (and all those who clamoured for Jesus to be put to death), in order to put into place the means of salvation. So, Piper says that God doesn’t choose to give the gift of sovereign grace to everyone to help them see the truth which will bring them to belief and repentance. I don’t know why sovereign grace couldn’t be given to everyone; Piper wasn’t real clear about it. He wrote, “God is more committed to glorifying His own free and sovereign grace than He is to saving all.” That statement makes zero sense to me.
Anyway, Piper is Reformed and the Reformed “comes down from Calvin”, as my lecturer said. Calvin again… forever giving people headaches.
