Determined to Believe?

Kierkegaard said we are the “synthesis of the infinite and finite.” [1] So while we are confined to space-time, our awareness soars beyond it to something we are aware of but cannot reach. Like the electron. Once thought as a particle that moved in space, 20th century discoveries showed it was much stranger. An electron sometimes seems a particle and at other times a wave. It’s there, until someone looked, then it wasn’t. However, we try, we cannot reach it, pinpoint exactly where it is, or if it is a localised entity at all. Sitting in the book-smelling seminar room at ANU, I realised science had led me to the same place Christianity had left me 10 years before—with uncertainty. Not content to consciously approve a double-standard, I was encouraged to investigate God once more.

God.

God is beyond our understanding and reach, like infinity. For God is perfect and we are not. Jesus says “…your heavenly Father is perfect” [Mat 5:48], and the Psalmists declare God’s perfection repeatedly [eg: Ps 18:30, 19:7, 50:2]. To be perfect, according to the dictionary, is to be “complete and correct in every way,” “entirely without fault or defect,” “exactly right,” “flawless.” As Christians, we are taught God is perfectly loving, perfectly knowing, perfectly just, and perfectly powerful. So though God is beyond us, we gain some comprehension of him by taking these qualities we recognise and magnifying them without limit to perfection. But it’s not full comprehension.

I repeat that to myself daily—it’s not full comprehension.

So often we assent to the beyondness of God but forget this beyondness necessarily applies to our theology as well. While the encoding of Christian belief in creeds and doctrines is vital for clarifying and unifying the faith, it’s never a complete rendering of reality. Do we think we are God? To assume what we know is the same as all that is? For we try to contain God in our theological systems like shadows in boxes. And at risk of alienating many.

In 2009, I returned to church. Clickety stone steps, rough brick walls, and a scent of wood. The sermon theme was Election and Predestination. Thirty minutes later I ran from the church furious and terrified, my fear of eternity exacerbated tenfold. Either I was Elect or I wasn’t, there was nothing I could do either way. God hated some before they were born [Rom 9:13] and predestined them to damnation (by double Predestination, or passing them over for salvation; the effect is the same). Did that include me, my family, my friends, the poor child about to be murdered on the other side of the Earth? Why? My first church service in decades gave me a view of God’s sovereignty that eclipsed his love and also eclipsed our human responsibility, leaving me in a fatalistic despair. Where I had looked for hope, I had found more fear. Eternity with no God was surely better than eternity with a hating god. So I ran.

I’m not Robinson Crusoe. I know many have struggled with Predestination, specifically, and God’s sovereignty in relation to our level of free-will and responsibility more generally. But, however many times we may have heard the discussions before, I plead we never forget the pastoral impacts of what we teach in this area.

If someone thinks God may hate them—may have created them to hate them—how can they hear the gospel message of love? I couldn’t. And I’m not alone. John Lennox’s 2017 book, Determined to Believe [2] is precisely about this “pastoral dimension” of teaching on Predestination and God’s sovereignty. As hinted at in his title, it’s the determinism so often entangled in such teaching that troubles Lennox. There’s nothing quite as comforting as realising you’re not alone, and when I read Lennox understood my torment, my tears flowed.

Determinism has the general meaning that everything that happens is the result of something that’s already happened. So, the hurricane forms because the butterfly’s flap caused wind which then caused convergence which then caused enough extra pressure drop for the hurricane to form. The already can be temporal, like with the hurricane, or logical: A=B and A=C, therefore B=C. Give me the initial cause or first premise, and I’ll tell you the outcome, based on either on the laws of nature or the laws of logic. Chaos dictates had the butterfly been 1mm to the left or a bit tired that day, the hurricane might not have formed. But theoretically, specify the first cause, and you trigger a deterministic chain reaction of effects that unfold given known laws, like falling dominoes. Effect does not come before cause.

***

The theological dilemma flowing from understanding God’s sovereignty as deterministic—what Lennox terms “theistic determinism”—is that it turns us into fatalists or heretics. Thrust into the perennial free-will debate, we must choose. Either God is sovereign and we are not free, or we are free and God is not sovereign. But a non-sovereign God is clearly anti-biblical. So, to be Christian, we must not be free. Lennox quotes a hypothetical churchgoer in this predicament: “I wish I had your faith in God. But it just hasn’t happened to me. Maybe God will give it to me one day, but in the meantime I have heard in church that there is nothing I can do about it.” [3]

The devil likes to confuse, and there are many definitions of determinism. And this is where Lennox’s critics tore him down. Don Carson, in his review, Are Some Determined to Believe the Worst about Reformed Theology, says, “Lennox acknowledges different types of determinism (but comes nowhere near what a Reformed theologian would say).” [4] Similarly, James N. Anderson, in his review Determined to Believe? The Sovereignty of God, Freedom, Faith, and Human Responsibility,  criticises Lennox for assuming“theistic determinism … entails causal determinism.” [5] He further clarifies, “Calvinism is an expressly non-fatalistic form of determinism, since it affirms that our eternal destiny does depend on the choices we make.” Lennox, they say, has made a rookie mistake.

But Lennox is not so much making a theological claim as he is highlighting what is taught by theologians. Quotes abound in Lennox’s book that would reasonably push listeners towards fatalism. Take, for example, Edward H. Palmer: “He [God] causes all things to happen.” [6] Or Paul Helm: “not only is every atom and molecule, every thought and desire kept in being by God, but every twist and turn of each of these is under the direct control of God.” [7] Most listeners would reasonably interpret these statements as espousing fatalistic determinism—when I’m told to turn to the Lord Jesus, I can’t. There’s no point trying to have faith.

Both reviewers seem to downplay or ignore the pastoral dimension by not fully acknowledging, firstly, that whatever their own doctrinal stance, it may not be what is being taught in churches, and, secondly, that the doctrine is complex. Many, for example, don’t understand, let alone think to distinguish, between non-causal and causal determinism. Anderson himself, though he highlights non-causal theistic determinism, doesn’t explain what it comprises. Appealing to complexity as a means to avoid taking responsibility for what many reasonably hear from teaching on God’s sovereignty is unfair. Especially when quotes of Reformed theologians included by Lennox seem to espouse exactly the causal determinism that Anderson says it is a mistake to assume.

Many pastors—in Lennox’s experience and in mine—communicate fatalism as necessary for God’s sovereignty and leave people thinking God might hate them, regardless of anything they do. I know it’s not always intentional. My loving preachers weren’t trying to tell me I was damned. They were exhorting me to rejoice in God’s glorious power and grace that overcomes all human failure. But, since they’d also told me God caused everything, and I knew I wasn’t Elect, I deduced “damned” is what they meant. I knew I wasn’t Elect because Christians told me “I’d feel” or “I’d just know” when I believed. And I had no such feeling or knowledge.

Lennox’s admonition:

 “when some of the core teaching that is presented… moves so far towards the deterministic end of the spectrum that it appears to many to call into question the love and goodness of God, and in consequence alienates people who are beginning to think about Christianity, then we surely need to audit the validity of the interpretation of Scripture that lies behind such teaching,” [8]

is valid, where “interpretation” also encompasses the presentation—preaching—of scriptures. 

***

Conflating fatalism with God’s sovereignty is not new. Lennox echoes Andrew Fuller, Charles Spurgeon, and other Evangelical Calvinists of nineteenth century England in their battle against hyper-Calvinists and their hyper-focus on God’s power, turning it into what Fuller called, a “Mahometan predestination.” [9] Hyper-Calvinists insisted preaching be directed only towards the Elect and be only “a declaration of the facts of the gospel, not an invitation to repent.” [10] Implicit in this theology were the twin beliefs that one can distinguish who is Elect and also that Election is deterministic.

For if the preacher-mediated gospel call to “repent and believe” is only to be directed to the Elect, it follows we must be able to deduce who the Elect are. This deduction, according to hyper-Calvinists, is achieved by assessing evidence of Election within ourselves. The warrant for trusting Christ thus shifts from Christ’s teachings to our fickle selves. Also, since only the Elect have a duty to believe, the non-Elect are exempt from any “duty faith.” The privileged Elect are deterministically Predestined (and identifiable by preachers) so independently of any human response that gospel invitations should be withheld from many.

Evangelical Calvinists strongly objected. The biblical exhortations to repent are universal, they claimed. John W, Morris, friend and biographer of Fuller, lamented that by “stretching what are usually called the doctrines of grace, beyond the scripture medium,” hyper-Calvinists formed a system that “extended its baleful influence over nearly all the churches, and covered them with a cloud of darkness.” [11] Though they were firm believers in God’s sovereign Election and Predestination, Evangelical Calvinists saw, like Lennox, that over-emphasising God’s power and sovereignty in the confined structure of human theology minimised his love and human responsibility, leaving behind a suffocating fatalism.

***

In Charles Spurgeon’s incisive words, “divine sovereignty is a great and indisputable fact, but human responsibility is quite as indisputable.” [12] God is sovereign as Creator [Gen 1], as Ruler [eg: Mat 28:18], as Redeemer [Isa 44:24], and he predestines things to happen [Acts 4:27-28, Genesis 50:19-20, Isa 10:5:ff, Rom 8-9]. Humans are responsible as moral agents [eg: Jam 1:19], as responders [eg: Mat 11:28], as thinkers [eg 1 Thes 5:21], trainees [2 Tim 3:16], and obedient servants [eg Acts 5:29].

The salient question, as Lennox asks as the main thrust of his book, is: “just what does God’s sovereignty involve?”

Why do we so readily assume sovereignty implies causal determinism? I suspect, aside from our insatiable desire for either/or, it’s because we tend to understand things—including power and God’s power—based on what we see. And, until recently, what we saw was a clockwork-like causally deterministic universe.

Not anymore. Since the turn of the century, such causal or mechanistic determinism, and its close cousin, reductionism, have repeatedly proven inadequate descriptors of our world. Reductionistic parts-explain-the-whole models of reality with billiard ball bits of matter moving about deterministically under chemical, electromagnetic, and other forces do not fully describe what we see. For look sufficiently closely, and this view dissolves; the electron is no longer there, the whole (of life, of consciousness) is more than its constituent parts, and cause does not always precede effect.

John Polkinghorne, quantum physicist and theologian said,

”The physical world has been found not to be merely mechanical in character, as many had thought following the deterministic discoveries of Newtonian physics. The world is something more subtle and more supple than a clockwork universe. The role of metascientific decision in interpreting quantum theory in terms of open process shows that we can take with due seriousness all that science has to say without being condemned to think of ourselves as automata or that God is confined to the role of an externally interfering Clockmaker. The Creator can be believed to be providentially active within the open grain of created nature. Science has not established the causal closure of the world on its reductionist terms alone.” [13]

Quantum Theory is the most successful model of reality ever, predicting to great precision what we see. But the extent to which it also undermines our assumptions about that reality is still being processed. The “enormity of the conceptual change wrought by quantum theory in our basic conception of the nature of matter” is often underestimated, said quantum physicist, Henry Stapp. “The shift is from a local, reductionistic, deterministic conception of nature… to a nonlocal, non-reductionistic,, nondeterministic” [14] one that demands “metascientific,” or philosophical, analysis—what does it mean that the universe is non-local, that a particle is not a particle when we look closely? Physical science, that most empirical and rigorous of all knowledge aquisitors, led us to philosophy. It’s almost like we got too close, and a metaphysical hand swatted us away.

No one’s saying the macro world of our senses isn’t real. To take Schrödinger’s well-known thought experiment, our cat in the box is most certainly alive or dead, not both. What scientists do say is that the models of understanding built up from looking at the macro world’s billiard ball certainty are incomplete. The humility thus forced upon an entire discipline could serve as a warning for systematic theology.  Our models can be wrong. Perhaps, there’s a better model than Quantum Theory? Perhaps. But that would further demonstrate our models are not exact renderings of reality; they must morph and adapt with new information. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Scientific “laws,” are, after all, not really laws, not all-encompassing a priori determiners of reality, but a posteriori models that work very well most of the time.

But assumptions of causally deterministic models of the universe persist in the public consciousness. Hence, illustrations of atoms and molecules operating under cause and effect rife in divine sovereignty illustrations.

***

Once God’s sovereignty is confused with fatalistic determinism, then not only does God’s love recede, the deemed non-Elect gnashing their teeth in despondency, but that earlier mentioned dichotomy with free-will in general is brokered. Determinism fractures past Predestination to infect anything we do. We seemed to avoid this fraught ground earlier by accepting determinism was non-causal. Except it was a ruse. Because no one really explained what non-causal determinism comprised. Even if, like Anderson says, we have choices and God’s determinism is not fatalistic, how does that relate to human freedom and responsibility?

I don’t actually think I can solve the problem of human free-will that has confounded minds for millennia. My gripe is why it pulls so much focus in the first place, and why it’s common to create paradox in constructing supposed ‘solutions.’

The pro-free-will side is taken by Lennox. Human responsibility, he says, must mean we have freedom. Not just freedom of spontaneity, or we do what we want to do, but that we were free to do otherwise, a libertarian free-will. He asks, “How can God, whose love and justice are impeccable, hold guilty those who were incapable of doing what he commanded them to do?” If we are guilty of not doing something, then we must actually have had the ability to instead do that something, he reasons. This is a variation of the old free-will defence that is inherently framed in moral terms. Critics, like Carson, say that by insisting on libertarian free-will, Lennox has “domesticated” God’s sovereignty. It’s like forcing our limited human understanding of morality onto God.

Human responsibility, says Carson (whose view is common), does not entail libertarian freedom. We are not that free. We are free to do what we want to do but we could not have been free to do otherwise, because what we do do is ultimately determined by God. Since everything is determined by God, we can only be as free as is compatible with this determinism. Yet we are still responsible. Aha, compatibilism is the claimed solution. Herod and Pontius Pilate did “conspire against” Jesus [Acts 4:27] because they wanted to. They also did what God’s “power and will had decided beforehand should happen.” [Acts 4:28]. It’s a mystery, this view of God’s power, but we should expect mystery from the ineffable God. Mystery also fits with our observations of the world. Maybe God’s power and our will fit together via the middle-way of Molinism, or maybe something else. Certainly, Molinism is not commonly taught. Instead, many compatibilists, in my experience, teach causal determinism.

But the compatibilist that is also a causal determinist (the fatalist side of the free-will divide), falls into the same domesticated ‘trap’ as Lennox. To insist God’s sovereignty is equivalent to God controlling every causation on the way to the determined end—God had to make sure every butterfly flap and molecular movement on the mechanistic way to Jesus’s arrest was just so—is to insist God fit into our model of understanding as much as does Lennox.  Assuming sovereignty equates to causal determinism is to confine God to our limited human understanding of time and/or logic.

Compatibilism of this type is also a semantic trick. Anderson’s theological summary: “Calvinism is an expressly non-fatalistic form of determinism, since it affirms that our eternal destiny does depend on the choices we make,” becomes, “Calvinism is an expressly non-fatalistic form of fatalism…”  “Choices” are not really choices since, in the words of Reformed theologian B. B. Warfield, “God “creates the very thoughts and intents of [our] soul.” Mystery is one thing, but paradox created by a supra-scriptural assumption of sovereignty as fatalistic determinism, another. Why create this unnecessary barrier to belief? Leaving alienated nascent believers cowering before a divide that separates them from God.

These questions of God’s ways are boggling; it’s so easy to take our human analogies too far, to gloss meaning onto words like sovereignty and responsibility. If we hadn’t assumed sovereignty was causal determinism, we wouldn’t be forced to split down these hard Arminian/Calvinist lines in the first place. God is omnipotent and omniscient—sovereign. Since we are not, we don’t fully understand what those terms mean. Any understanding of ours is necessarily from within space-time to which we are confined. But God is not so confined. God “inhabits eternity” [Isa 57: 15]. Perhaps God can see all time at once, which would certainly mess up cause and effect as we know them and hence all our definitions of determinism and free-will. Which Quantum Mechanics has done anyway. C. S. Lewis nailed it when he said in The Great Divorce:

 “Time is the very lens by which ye see—small and clear as men see through the wrong end of the telescope—something that otherwise would be too big for ye to see at all.” [15]

***

Which my overly systemising brain has slowly come to accept. Jesus said “Come to me all who are weary” [Mat 11:28], not come to me all who have the correct systematic theology.

But we’ll keep thinking. It is God’s gift that we can mull over his Word. Even if we can’t understand it completely. Not knowing everything is not equivalent to knowing nothing and I am content with the scriptural teaching that God controls, in a way we don’t understand, and we are free, in that we are not fatalists. Which is really to say what Anderson says, but without the gloss often thrown in that substitutes antonyms into different words to hide contradictions.

I’m not, I imagine it’s clear, a professional theologian, but the theologians who drew me closer to Christ (surely the aim?) never let God’s love or human responsibility recede when preaching God’s sovereignty. Spurgeon, for example, turned to the “free invitations” of scripture, saying, the biblical exhortations to repent are universal—“Repent and be baptised every one of you.” We should remember, he said, that predestination is God’s knowledge, not ours, and the “only sure warrant for trusting in Christ” is “the objective commands and invitations of the gospel.” [16] This is to focus on God, not the understanding or feelings of assurance in ourselves. Similarly, Aquinas wrote, “The reason for the predestination of some, and reprobation of others, must be sought for in the goodness of God,” [17]  which concurs with Ephesians 1:5: “In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ.”

This is a place to sit that doesn’t alienate. God, driven by love, controls in a way we don’t understand, we are free, in that we are not fatalists, and we are responsible, regardless of how we feel. How exactly that maps to the level of causal determinism and our level of free-will is beyond us.

So, finally, I can rest.

That God “inhabits eternity” is helpful for fears of eternity aside from any consideration of difficult doctrine. My fear of eternity was borne of assuming my experience in eternity would be simply an extension of my experience now. But things taken to their limits are not the same as the things themselves—infinity is not a number though it is the limit of all numbers. Similarly, God’s love and ways of determining are fundamentally different to ours. All of God’s ‘without-limits’ qualities are fundamentally different to the shadows of those qualities in us.

So though I am exhausted now does not mean I will be in eternity. Though I am overcome now by all I don’t know, there is rest to be found in knowing God knows all. Though I fail and am failed in love does not mean God will fail at loving me too. For he is perfect. He will “wipe away every tear”, there shall be no more “mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore” [Rev 21:4]. I don’t know how. But I take some comfort knowing our experiences of self here and now will not be the same as those after physical death in eternity. My mantra in the depth of the night can be: “this I declare about the Lord. He alone is my refuge, my place of safety.” [Ps 91:2] I don’t need to run from Him.

 References:

1  Kierkegaard, Soren, The Sickness Unto Death (First published1849. Translated by Alistair Hannay. London: Penguin Books, 1989), 43.

2 Lennox, John, C., Determined to Believe (Zondervan, 2017).

3 ibid. 68

4 Carson, Don, Are Some Determined to Believe the Worst About Reformed Theology? (August 15, 2018, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/determined-to-believe-john-lennox. Accessed June 2022).

5 Anderson, James, N., Determined to Believe? The Sovereignty of God, Freedom, Faith, and Human Responsibility (https://journal.rts.edu/review/determined-to-believe-the-sovereignty-of-god-freedom-faith-and-human-responsibility/ Accessed June 2022).

6 Palmer, Edward, H., cited by Lennox, 54

7 Helm, Paul, cited by Lennox, 54

8 Lennox, 70

9 Fuller, Andrew Gunton, The Complete Works of the Rev. Andrew Fuller: with a Memoir of his Life (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1845), 232.

10 Murray, Iain, H., Spurgeon v. Hyper-Calvinism. The Battle for Gospel Preaching (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1995), 62.

11 Morris, J. W., Memoirs of The Life and Writings of Rev. Andrew Fuller (London, Wightman and Cramp, 1826), 214.

12 Murray, 76

13 Polkinghorne, John, The consequences of quantum theory, Dialogue Theology & Science, July 2012 https://www.theologie-naturwissenschaften.de/en/dialogue-between-theology-and-science/editorials/quantumtheory

14 Stapp, Henry, P., Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics (Springer-Verlag, 1993), 40.

15m Lewis, C. S., The Great Divorce (New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., 1946), 48.

16 Murray, 65

17 Aquinas, Thomas., Summa Theologica (Published 1265-1274. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Benziger Bros. Edition 1947. Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library http://www.ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/summa.html. Accessed 10/5/2019), Art 5.