Often in the Calvinist and non-Calvinist debate, Calvinists use the same vocabulary but a different dictionary. We all agree that God is “sovereign,” but we don’t mean the same thing by it. Calvinists define “sovereignty” in a way that assumes Calvinism, such as Theistic “determinism,” namely the belief that God exhaustively and meticulously decreed whatsoever comes to pass, whereas non-Calvinists interpret divine sovereignty to mean “dominion,” meaning God’s kingly right to rule as He pleases; God sits in the heavens and does what He pleases.
As a system of providence, while it’s true that “determinism” would give God an enormous amount of tight control, nonetheless for a variety of reasons, determinism may not have been God’s preferred choice (i.e. God not wanting to be the “author of sin,” and finding greater glory with “free will”). The bigger question is whether Calvinists believe that it’s possible for God to adequately govern subjects who are libertarianly free? In other words, would God get overwhelmed by free-will? Such thinking undermines faith and trust in God’s wisdom, knowledge and power.
What do Calvinists believe?
R.C. Sproul: “If we reject divine sovereignty then we must embrace atheism.”555
R.C. Sproul: “If there is one single molecule in this universe running around loose, totally free of God’s sovereignty, then we have no guarantee that a single promise of God will ever be fulfilled. Perhaps that one maverick molecule will lay waste all the grand and glorious plans that God has made and promised to us.”556
Our reply:
Let’s consider the scenario in which there’s not only one rogue, maverick molecule (totally free of God’s exhaustive, meticulous determinism), but also trillions of proverbial rogue molecules, in which some, namely Satan and his demons, are very powerful and use all of their energy to try to thwart God’s plans. What kind of a God would it take to outsmart and defeat such meddlings, in order to still achieve His goals? Wouldn’t it require a God who is infinitely all-powerful, all-knowing and all-wise? The implication, then, is that a God who can achieve victory when there are no strings attached is far more powerful than a God who can only win when there are strings of universal determinism attached. Hence, the God described by Arminians and Provisionists would be far superior in power than the God described by Calvinists.
What do Calvinists believe?
In Arminianism, God is not truly sovereign because there are people that God truly wants to save, but ultimately are not saved, and end up in Hell. In Calvinism, everyone God wishes to save, are saved.
Our reply:
Do you believe that God had a “choice” between doing things according to Calvinism, non-Calvinism or other? Once you acknowledge that God both had a choice and made His choice, then the question about which system is more “sovereign” becomes totally meaningless because whichever system it is—Calvinism or non-Calvinism—God chose it. That was His sovereign choice. Even if you think it’s a less sovereign paradigm, it doesn’t matter because that’s what He choose.
A.W. Tozer: “God sovereignly decreed that man should be free to exercise moral choice, and man from the beginning has fulfilled that decree by making his choice between good and evil. When he chooses to do evil, he does not thereby countervail the sovereign will of God but fulfills it, inasmuch as the eternal decree decided not which choice the man should make but that he should be free to make it. If in His absolute freedom God has willed to give man limited freedom, who is there to stay His hand or say, ‘What doest thou?’ Man’s will is free because God is sovereign. A God less than sovereign could not bestow moral freedom upon His creatures. He would be afraid to do so.”557
Some Calvinists have wrongly concluded that the non-Calvinist seeks to downplay the sovereignty of God and highlight the autonomy of man, when in reality we seek to maintain the right biblical understanding of man’s autonomy so as to better highlight the sovereignty, love and holiness of God.
Does God’s sovereignty terminate at the point of being able to create autonomous beings who seek their own purposes?\
Does God’s sovereignty terminate at the point of being able to offer such beings an independent choice He does not determine?
If God must meticulously decree every thought, word and deed ever conceived in order to remain “sovereign,” then that wouldn’t say much for divine sovereignty. In contrast to Calvinism, God exhibits being all-wise, all-knowing and all-powerful when He governs without any strings attached. The contrasting Calvinist conception of divine sovereignty would make God out to be pretty mediocre.
All of scripture supports God’s “sovereignty,” though Calvinists highjack the term in order to force it to mean something exclusive to Calvinism, and they do the same thing with the biblical term, “predestination.” However, the fact that God predestines some things does not necessarily mean that God predestines everything.
God is the ultimate cause of everything that exists, meaning that without Him, nothing can come to pass, which is something that all theists can affirm, so long as one incorporates a truly meaningful definition of divine permission, which includes God’s own determinations and man’s own determinations, which God permits within certain parameters that He defines. The problem in Calvinism, however, is that divine permission is reduced to God allowing people to do what He already decreed, thus redefining permission as camouflaged determinism.
God is in control of all things, though He is not all-controlling. Calvinists, however, believe in a type of divine sovereignty which requires God to exhaustively predetermine everything that ever comes to pass, including every person’s thoughts, intentions and actions, for all eternity, including sinful thoughts, intentions and actions, thus drawing a sharp rebuke from non-Calvinists. This is what Calvinists term “predestination,” though the Bible does not teach predestination in such a way. Moreover, such a notion has historically drawn the criticism of being a form of Christian fatalism.
Frankly speaking, Calvinistic determinism would mean that God cannot handle free-will, which would then gut all creation of true life. It would render God as a marionettist, pulling the strings of dead things. By contrast, under non-Calvinism, whenever we make free choices, it is understood that we are not countervailing the will of God, but rather we are acting in accordance with the ability God has granted.
What do Calvinists believe?
James White: “This is the divine truth of God’s sovereignty: His right to rule over what He has made. Those who love their king and are subject to Him find His sovereignty a great comfort and delight. Those who are in rebellion against Him fight and chafe against this divine truth. Much can be determined concerning our true subjection to God by asking if, in fact, we love God as He has revealed Himself to be, the divine ruler over all things, or whether we seek to ‘edit’ Him down to a more ‘manageable’ and ‘manlike’ deity. Modern men struggle with the biblical teaching of God’s sovereignty.”558
James White: “The complete freedom of God, combined with God’s role as the divine King who rules over His creation, provide the irrefutable foundation of God’s sovereign decree.”559
James White: “Many are willing to confess God’s sovereign rule over such things as earthquakes, floods, or other ‘acts of God.’ Yet the fortress of man’s pride, his ‘free will,’ is strictly off-limits.”560
Our reply:
Notice how Calvinists use the ploy of divine “sovereignty” to work their way to a “sovereign decree” in exclusion of human “free will.” Unless one affirms exhaustive, meticulous determinism, then it is said that they do not “love” God, are not “subject to Him” and are “in rebellion” against Him. Calvinism, then, becomes a litmus test for true spirituality, and that’s a really concerning aspect of Calvinism, because it offers people assurance. In other words, just believe these doctrines and you can have assurance of being “elect,” because it requires a work of the Holy Spirit to believe these things, which “modern men” cannot do.
What do Calvinists believe?
R.C. Sproul: “I have often heard it said, ‘God’s sovereignty is limited by human freedom.’”561
R.C. Sproul: “To say that God’s sovereignty is limited by man’s freedom is to make man sovereign.”562
Our reply:
God’s sovereignty is never limited by man’s freedom. God’s sovereignty can only be limited by God’s freedom, such as when God freely chose to give Adam the choice of what to name the animals. (Genesis 2:19)
Ultimately, R.C. Sproul agrees: “Any limit here is not a limit imposed on God by us, but a limit God sovereignly imposes on himself.”563
Calvinists will ask: Can God save people who don’t repent? The answer is yes. In other words, if God wanted to pop an Irresistible Grace on to anyone, could He? Yes. Does He? No. Calvinists want for you to think that if you don’t believe in Irresistible Grace, then you don’t believe in God’s power, when yet it’s not a question of power, at all.
What do Calvinists believe?
Non-Calvinists despise God being in control of all things, and even promote the idea that God’s will can be thwarted by puny man.
Our reply:
Rather, non-Calvinists despise the misrepresentation of God’s sovereignty as being meticulous divine control over every thought, action and deed of sinful creatures, and furthermore, it is recognized that God’s will is thwarted only insomuch that God allows it during this temporary time while on earth. Non-Calvinists fully recognize that presently, God’s will is not always being done on earth, as it is in Heaven, though someday it will be, when Jesus returns to earth to rule and reign as King. To illustrate this point, consider the following questions:
When can the will of a truly omnipotent God ever be thwarted?
Only when He allows it.
Why would a truly omnipotent God ever wish to allow His will to be thwarted?
When it serves a higher purpose.
How could it ever serve a “higher purpose” for God to allow someone to thwart His will?
If God values real relationships, and if true love requires the autonomy to either ‘choose to love’ or ‘choose not to love’, then that’s a scenario in which God might indeed wish to extend such autonomy. While it is unclear how God might have meaningful fellowship within the fully deterministic paradigm of Calvinism, it is easily plausible to see how God could have meaningful fellowship with people who freely chose to love and to be with Him, despite the adverse circumstances of this present world. So, extending to mankind an autonomy of reason seems to be something that serves the higher purposes of God.
Here is the question for Calvinists: Will you allow God to be sovereign enough to create beings with autonomy of reason and creative intelligence in order to independently form their own thoughts and actions, in order to serve as suitable caretakers for God’s creative ways? Or, is God sovereign, but not that sovereign? Who are the ones who are really questioning God’s sovereignty? God can do whatever He wants. He can do things in the way described by Calvinism or non-Calvinism. Will Calvinists allow God enough sovereignty to providentially govern in a manner that may be inconsistent with their deterministic expectations?
What do Calvinists believe?
Robert A. Peterson and Michael D. Williams: “Within the incompatibilist assumption of Arminian theology, responsible human freedom and divine sovereignty conflict, and since Arminianism is committed to libertarian free will, the sovereignty of God must be limited in order to preserve human free will.”564
Robert A. Peterson and Michael D. Williams: “It is difficult to imagine what such a sovereignty would look like, or if it could rightly be called a sovereignty at all, given the insistence upon the integrity of libertarian free will.”565
Robert A. Peterson and Michael D. Williams: “The difficulty that believers often have in relating to God’s sovereign lordship to human responsibility, as in the case of the Arminian doctrine of incompatibilism, comes not from Scripture but from an anthropocentric and abstract view of human freedom.”566
We do not believe that there is any conflict between genuine human freedom and divine sovereignty, primarily because we do not equate divine sovereignty with exhaustive determinism, as Calvinists do. Sovereignty, apart from determinism, looks just like 1st Corinthians 10:13. Moreover, we do not believe that free-will limits God’s sovereignty, but rather that God has chosen to express His sovereignty by giving man free-will, based upon God’s purposes for mankind, and therefore we neither attribute our views to man-centeredness nor to any extra-biblical source.
Calvinists hold their theology as superior on the grounds that it is truly God-centered and God-honoring because it magnifies God’s sovereignty over the created order, towering over all other theologies as inferior, on the grounds that those other theologies are man-centered and man-honoring, transmitting sovereignty from God over to the creature, man. Ironically, though, it is actually Calvinists who deny God’s sovereignty. For if it is admitted that God has free-will, and if God had the sovereign freedom and authority to choose to reject the Calvinist paradigm, in favor of a well-meant offer of the gospel where God makes people freely choose where they will spend their eternity, either from Heaven or from Hell, then who are Calvinists to deny God’s sovereign freedom and authority to determine His own method of providence? Once Calvinists acknowledge that God has sovereignty over paradigm choices, the quibble over which system is superior becomes superfluous, as the real issue becomes: Which system has God, in fact, chosen?
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555 Chosen By God (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1986), 27.
556 Ibid., emphasis mine.
557 The Knowledge of the Holy: The Attributes of God (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1961), 110-111.
558 Debating Calvinism (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Publishers Inc., 2004), 36, emphasis mine.
559 Ibid., 38, emphasis mine.
560 Ibid., 49, emphasis mine.
561 What is Reformed Theology? (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1997), 26.
562 Ibid., 27.
563 Ibid.
564 Why I Am Not An Arminian (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 143.
565 Ibid., 143.
566 Ibid., 145.
[This post has been excerpted with permission from Richard Coords, Calvinism Answered Verse by Verse and Subject by Subject, © 2024.]
