Letter to Theologus: On the subject of God's Absolute Sovereignty

Dear Theologus, 

Thanks for yours of a few days ago. Your arguments are unanswerable, so I'm not going to try to answer them. They're unanswerable, not because the are true, but because they follow inexorably from the doctrine of absolute sovereignty. So let me address only that false assumption from which your arguments arise. 

God certainly could demand as Creator that His creatures behave like automatons. But He chose instead to allow them a limited “delegated sovereignty.” How can we doubt it? He gave man dominion over all the works of His fingers (Psalm 8). He holds man accountable for his actions. He often changes His own course based on man’s actions and responses. 

Unless God has limited His sovereignty to accommodate human choices, unless human choices can somehow thwart God's will, very much of the Bible is nonsense, and sin originates with God's will. Calvinian attempts to avoid that conclusion appear to us non-Calvinists to be all smoke and mirrors, verbal shenanigans full of oxymorons such as "irresistible grace," "causally determined free acts," and the like. You can't have it both ways. If man is not a real cause of action, then he is only a pretend, make-believe cause, and therefore sin does not originate in him. You can't have it both ways. Either God's rule is so absolute that man cannot oppose or frustrate His power; and therefore sin is ultimately the result of (at very least) His permissive will. Or man is free, able to frustrate God's will, to choose to reject or accept His grace; and therefore man is responsible for his own sin.  

To say that God's rule is so absolute that man cannot oppose or frustrate it makes nonsense of nearly every page of the Bible—fiery indignant prophets, an angry, sorrowful, aggrieved God, wrath against evildoers, and on and on. Jesus certainly treated His contemporaries like morally responsible individuals.  Behold a weeping Jesus saying, "Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often I would have...but you would not!" Here we have the puzzling spectacle of Jesus grieving over (according to you) His own eternal decrees.  Again, "But the Pharisees and the lawyers rejected God's will for themselves, not being baptized of John" (Luke 7:30).  I could multiply examples, as you well know. 

The Bible portrays God as one who interacts with humans, one who cares deeply about the events of history, and who even modifies His plans to accommodate changing historical circumstances (e.g. Jonah and Nineveh). Biblical writers present God as pondering, supposing, considering future possibilities—“If perchance they might repent..."; "What shall I do with you?" (Hosea 6:4).  If Calvinists can't respect that kind of God, then that's their problem, not mine. The only God I know is the One I find in the Bible; and He only vaguely resembles the Calvinistic God. 

Are second causes real players in the drama of salvation?  If not, then God is the originator of it all, sin included. The statement in Greek, me boulomenos tina apolesthai (“Not willing that any should perish,” II Peter 3:9), means that God did not INTEND for anyone to perish. Someone has thwarted that intent. Not everyone is saved. But (you say) God's purposes are always efficacious and cannot be frustrated. Well, then, God did not intend to save everyone. I say that God not only desired (thelein) to save everyone, He intended (boulesthai) to save everyone. But the contrary decisions of rational creatures (angels and men) frustrated His desire and intention. But thanks be to God for His immeasurable love! 

To say that God permits sin admits a condition into your unconditional system. If by permission you mean that God doesn't will it, but only allows it, then you have ceased being a strict Calvinist. But if by permission you mean that God does will it, then you have become a consistent Calvinist, but you have implicated God in sin. If God permits sin, then He permits acts to which He must respond. Thus God is not absolutely sovereign, but responsive to human action (at least) in this one area.  

That's all I maintain—that God is not absolutely sovereign, but has left His rational creatures free to act against His will. Nothing else makes sense to me. My view—that the portrait of God in Scripture ought to count for something—does not imply a nervous, hand-wringing, uncertain God who is unable to fulfill prophecy, as you suggest.  It doesn’t imply that God is not in control, or that He must merely hope someone will crucify His Son. Such a parody unfairly depicts my suggestion that God has, of His own will, afforded man a limited, delegated sovereignty. 

You wrote: "I would like to try to read scripture from that mind-set [Jewish]." Yes, by all means; but not from the modern Jewish mind-set—that’s pharisaical. That's why the historical-critical approach is (for all its faults) the best approach; for it seeks to find out the original meaning of the text. A great deal of excellent scholarship (mostly liberal) has been done towards the reading of the Bible as a Jewish book. It's not a Neoplatonic book, nor a Calvinist or Arminian book, nor a feminist book, nor a post-modernist book: it's a JEWISH BOOK.  Being a supernaturalist, I get riled at the rationalistic presumptions of these scholars; but since they have no theological axe to grind, they often make perceptive discoveries. I have my own, personal mind-set, forged by a lifetime of trying to know God better. I'm not out of the forge yet. But I'm absolutely convinced that the only safe way to approach the Bible is to accept it as God's own revelation of Himself AS HE WISHES US TO KNOW HIM!

 Blessings