Predestination and the Author of Sin
Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2011 9:18 am
This is mostly directed at Calvinists and people who believe in divine election and/or predestination, not as an attack of your view but as an effort to better understand the Calvinist perspective, since I've started to consider that it might be biblical,yet I have extreme problems with it.
Lately I've been thinking a lot about the ideas of predestination, our wills, determinism, and how they affect who is saved and who isn't. I was debating someone and they persuaded me that at least some degree of predestination and divine election are ideas taught in the Bible, with chapters like Romans 9 and various others that teach that no one comes to Jesus unless the Father raises him up first. However, I have severe personal issues with accepting the idea of election because this would mean that people who are unsaved never had a chance to be saved, ever, at all, at any point in time, and that this is because God simply choose not to save them. I feel this is incompatible with the idea that God desires that all would be saved.
In addition, in this deterministic view of the world, I think this would mean that we do not have free will, but only the illusion of it. This would also imply that God was ultimately the author of sin and not man or the Devil, since nothing happens that is outside of God's will and it all only happens as God predetermines. Even if you say it was the Devil and not God who introduced sin into the world, God still created the Devil and probably predestined him to do what he does, like he predestines us. Any way you look at it, it looks like God is the ultimate author of sin in a Calvinistic worldview, rather than sin being a necessary evil under the free will/self-determined Arminian model. To me, it just seems silly that God is offended by sin and rejects nonforgiven people who commit it if it was always part of his will and knowledge before the universe or people were even created. It also seems to make evangelism to others appear somewhat futile since whoever is saved will be saved anyway and whoever is damned will be damned anyway. Bascially I can understand why our sinful nature is punishable if it was under our own will that we became sinful, but not if it was predestined by God that we would do so. I feel that if we had absolutely no choice in the matter of sin or salvation, that it would be more holy and just to be sympathetic of the human condition rather than expect something that is an impossibility, like that we ought to somehow break free of how we were predetermined.
There are probably other ideas I want to get out but haven't articulated them in this post. I think should be a good start though.
Lately I've been thinking a lot about the ideas of predestination, our wills, determinism, and how they affect who is saved and who isn't. I was debating someone and they persuaded me that at least some degree of predestination and divine election are ideas taught in the Bible, with chapters like Romans 9 and various others that teach that no one comes to Jesus unless the Father raises him up first. However, I have severe personal issues with accepting the idea of election because this would mean that people who are unsaved never had a chance to be saved, ever, at all, at any point in time, and that this is because God simply choose not to save them. I feel this is incompatible with the idea that God desires that all would be saved.
In addition, in this deterministic view of the world, I think this would mean that we do not have free will, but only the illusion of it. This would also imply that God was ultimately the author of sin and not man or the Devil, since nothing happens that is outside of God's will and it all only happens as God predetermines. Even if you say it was the Devil and not God who introduced sin into the world, God still created the Devil and probably predestined him to do what he does, like he predestines us. Any way you look at it, it looks like God is the ultimate author of sin in a Calvinistic worldview, rather than sin being a necessary evil under the free will/self-determined Arminian model. To me, it just seems silly that God is offended by sin and rejects nonforgiven people who commit it if it was always part of his will and knowledge before the universe or people were even created. It also seems to make evangelism to others appear somewhat futile since whoever is saved will be saved anyway and whoever is damned will be damned anyway. Bascially I can understand why our sinful nature is punishable if it was under our own will that we became sinful, but not if it was predestined by God that we would do so. I feel that if we had absolutely no choice in the matter of sin or salvation, that it would be more holy and just to be sympathetic of the human condition rather than expect something that is an impossibility, like that we ought to somehow break free of how we were predetermined.
There are probably other ideas I want to get out but haven't articulated them in this post. I think should be a good start though.
Ultimately, if everything is predetermined, at least to me it seems like God's actions are also predetermined. You just end up with naturalism, except throwing in a God who is very similar to a multiverse or whatever science would call it.