Against Calvinism: Rescuing God's Reputation from Radical Reformed Theology

by Roger E. Olson

But, it can be and often is taken too far—making God the author of sin and evil—which is something few Calvinists admit to but which follows from what they teach as a “good and necessary consequence” (a somewhat confusing technical phrase often used by Calvinists themselves to point out the dreaded effects they see in non-Calvinist theologies).

Taken to their logical conclusion, that even hell and all who will suffer there eternally are foreordained by God, God is thereby rendered morally ambiguous at best and a moral monster at worst.

that this kind of Calvinism, which attributes everything to God’s will and control, makes it difficult (at least for me) to see the difference between God and the devil.

that I, like most non-Calvinist evangelical Christians, embrace free will for two reasons (beyond that we believe it is everywhere assumed in the Bible): it is necessary to preserve human responsibility for sin and evil, and it is necessary to preserve God from being responsible for sin and

“God calls not simply individuals, but a people for his praise” (i.e., corporate election).8 This is what Arminius believed about election; most Arminians throughout history have interpreted it this way.

Was not the cross of Jesus Christ a sufficient manifestation of God’s justice and hatred toward sin? (Not that Jesus was a sinner but the sin of the world was laid on him partly to display how seriously God takes sin.) Boettner’s and other Calvinists’ speculative reason for reprobation would seem to lessen the glory of the cross.

The limited nature of the atonement, then, was in its scope and not in its value.

What compassion refuses to provide for their salvation when it could be provided for?

There are distressingly many things that happen on earth that are not the will of God (Luke 7:30 and every other sin mentioned in the Bible), that are against his will, and that stem from the incomprehensible and senseless sin in which we are born, in which the greater part of mankind lives, and in which Israel persisted, and against which even the “holiest men” … struggled all their days…. To try to interpret all these things by means of the concept of a plan of God, creates intolerable difficulties and gives rise to more exceptions than regularities.

Traditional Arminian theology says that in and through the cross of Christ the sin of Adam inherited by all was forgiven (Romans 5) so that people are only condemnable for their own sins.

The cross completely removes every obstacle to every human being’s salvation except their own resistance to God’s freely offered grace, which is given to all in some measure but especially through the preaching of the Word.

(1) any limitation of God’s sovereignty is said to be a voluntary self-limitation because God is sovereign over his sovereignty, and (2) if anyone comes to Christ with repentance and faith, it is only because they are enabled by God’s “prevenient grace” to do so.

Classical Arminian theology, such as that of John Wesley (1703–1791), affirms the total depravity of human beings and their utter helplessness even to exercise a good will toward God apart from God’s supernatural, assisting grace.

It attributes the sinner’s ability to respond to the gospel with repentance and faith to prevenient grace—the illuminating, convicting, calling, and enabling power of the Holy Spirit working on the sinner’s soul and making them free to choose saving grace (or reject it). This is the Arminian interpretation of the “drawings” of God mentioned by Jesus in the gospel of John. God does not draw irresistibly but persuasively, leaving human persons able to say no.

Arminian theology does affirm divine election, but it interprets it as corporate...

not to the eternal destinies of individuals.

Arminians affirm predestination, interpreting it with Romans 8 as God’s foreknowledge of faith. They reject reprobation except insofar as it is freely chosen by people who live against the will of God revealed in nature and the law written on their

hearts (Roman...

Above all Arminians insist that God is a good and loving God, who truly desires the...

Adam could not have done otherwise than he did. Sproul says this is not determinism because he defines determinism as “coercion by external forces,” which actually has nothing to do with it, as already noted.

The question for Sproul and all Calvinists who take this approach is this: from where did Adam’s evil inclination come?

evil springs from evil character made up of evil dispositions. This is Sproul’s (and other Calvinists’) attempt to avoid making God the author of evil because God is said to foreordain and render certain actions while the evil of them flows from the finite actors’ sinful desires. God’s motive in foreordaining and rendering certain the sin is morally pure, and he does not coerce anyone to sin. Thus, God is said merely to permit the sin or evil action while at the same time rendering it certain.

The question is, however, whether at least some versions of Calvinism inadvertently make God dependent on the world for something that he needs—his own self-glorification through the manifestation of all his attributes equally.

It is that God must create, allow sin and evil, redeem, and reject in order to fulfill the potential of his own self-glorification. Without the world, then, God would not be God in the same way; his glory would be less than it is with it. Evil, then, is necessary to God. God is dependent on the world, including evil.

So how might one deal with the reality of sin and evil in God’s world without placing undue limits on God’s power and sovereignty? The only way is to posit what Scripture everywhere assumes—a divine self-limitation in relation to the world of moral freedom, including especially libertarian freedom. That freedom is a wonderful and terrible gift of God to human persons created in his image and likeness. In other words, God allows his perfect will to be thwarted by his human creatures whom he loves and respects enough not to control them.

God has a perfect will—also known as his antecedent will.

God also has a consequent will—

It would seem that “efficacious permission” must mean, as God’s permission of sin and evil means in Edwards, Boettner, and others, that God renders it certain without forcing people to sin.

agree with them wholeheartedly that there can be no such thing as single predestination insofar as predestination is unconditional election of some certain people, a certain number out of all, to heaven. The automatic, unavoidable correlate to that is predestination to hell. It’s double or nothing.

“The goodness of God must bear some positive relation to the sorts of human actions we regard as good. Otherwise, why ascribe goodness to God?”

How is God good if he purposefully withheld from Adam the grace he needed not to fall—knowing that Adam’s fall would result in the horrors of sin and evil and innocent suffering of history?

In his famous (or infamous) sermon “sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Edwards appealed to “God’s arbitrary will” to explain God’s treatment of the nonelect.

Daane rejects the

whole approach of traditional Calvinism as it inevitably makes God the author of sin and damnation and has to appeal to two or three wills in God, including a secret will (to damn some in spite of revealing his will to save all).84 It also contradicts itself by blaming humans for their depravity and condemnation when God decreed all of it from the beginning.

This scholastic theology, he rightly argues, makes God and God’s relationship to the world ahistorical, whereas the Bible portrays God as entering into history freely. “The possibility of taking history seriously, as real and not merely apparent, is foreclosed by the scholastic definition of the single decree.”87 For scholastic decretal theology, he says, nothing in the world can really affect God; everything including sin and evil and damnation are determined by God. The result, he says, is that “decretal theology is a profound rationalization of whatever is.”88 Also, in this theology, God’s love is really his love for himself and Christ died for God rather than for the world.89 Worst of all, according to Daane, this theology ends up depriving God of his freedom; whatever is, is what must be—Even for God.

He means that it makes sin, like everything else, a matter of course; it is decreed and foreordained by God necessarily and therefore is not really something opposed to God.

But it is God’s unconditional election of Jesus Christ and his people, Israel and the church.

“The Bible knows nothing of an isolated, individualistic doctrine of election.”

“Election in biblical thought is never a selection, a taking of this and a rejection of that out of multiple realities.” Rather, “election is a call to service, a summons to be a co-laborer with God in the actualization of God’s elective purpose and goal.”94 That elective purpose and goal revolves around Jesus Christ as God’s mission in the world to save it.

Huh? What is he really saying here? It's not clear to me how this is really the election spoken of in the Bible.

“Romans 9–11 does not form a biblical commentary on the truth of individual election. Rather, it is a commentary on the fact of the inviolability of God’s election of Israel as a nation.”

The “you” repeated throughout the chapter as God’s chosen

plural: God’s new people, the church.97

It is right to focus on the inability to preach that theology as good news because it inevitably includes sin, evil, innocent suffering, and hell as God’s will—whatever its advocates may say.

“You suppose him [God] to send them [the reprobate] into eternal fire, for not escaping from sin! That is, in plain terms, for not having that grace which God had decreed they should never have! O strange justice! What a picture do you draw of the Judge of all the earth!”

It is undeniably plain, that both these Scriptures [verses 12 and 13] relate, not to the persons of Jacob and Esau, but to their descendents; the Israelites sprung from Jacob, and the Edomites sprung from Esau. In this sense only did “the elder” (esau) “serve the younger”; not in his person (for Esau never served Jacob) but in his posterity. This posterity of the elder brother served the posterity of the younger.

for Paul in Romans 9 they are referring to Israel and the Gentiles, which is the whole burden of Paul in this section of Romans!

salvation is given by God to the person who freely responds to the gospel with repentance and faith, which are not gifts of God or “good works” but human responses to God’s gift of prevenient grace.

“The very power to ‘work together with Him’ was from God.”

Election is simply God’s foreknowledge of who will freely receive this grace unto salvation (Rom. 8:29).118 Reprobation is simply man’s rejection of this grace and God’s foreknowledge of that.

“the new Testament writers address salvific election in primarily, if not exclusively, corporate terms.”