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According to the Westminster Confession of Faith (3:1), a seventeenth-century Reformed/Calvinist creed, God has “ordained whatever happens” (3:1). The dilemma with this statement is obvious: Bad things happen, as well as good. Is God, therefore, the cause of evil? Anticipating this question, the WCF goes on to say that, although God ordains sin, this does not imply that He is the:
Author of sin (he is not), that he represses the will of his created beings, or that he takes away the freedom or contingency of secondary causes. Rather, the will of created beings and the freedom and contingency of secondary causes are established by him (Ibid).
Thus, a distinction is drawn between “ordain” and “author”. Evidently to “ordain” something is to be its indirect cause, whereas to “author” something is to be its immediate cause. I “ordained” the delivery of pizza to my door by ordering over the phone, and the pizza boy “authored” the delivery. This logic might sound innocuous until we apply it to morally significant situations. A man who pays another to kill his enemy “ordained” his murder, and it was the hitman who “authored” the killing. By the apparent logic set forth in the WCF—the logic by which the god of Calvinism is exonerated for the evils that he has decreed on the grounds that he did not directly cause them—it is only the latter who bears moral responsibility for this act. Thankfully, this logic is not followed so consistently.
“But can God’s will be thwarted?” My Calvinist friend put this question to me more than once, leading me to suspect that this is a common talking point among Calvinists. For me, the answer could not be more obvious: Of course God’s will can be thwarted (e.g., see Luke 7:30). God’s overarching purpose for mankind will indeed be fulfilled. But if we imagine that this comes at the expense of overriding one’s free will, then we would be forced to conclude that God wills evil.
But who am I to opine on what God may legitimately will? I am no one, of course. But the question is not whether I have the right to judge God, but whether I have the capability to love Him, particularly the Calvinist representation of Him. “Perhaps,” one might honestly respond, “the truth does defy our understanding, but so does the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, and yet you accept this doctrine!” However, there is a vast difference between ‘“suprarational” teachings (like the Trinity) and “supramoral” teachings (e.g., that God “ordained” genocide or created people for eternal destruction). Unlike the former, the latter has a direct bearing on my love for Him, and it seems to me that this predication of love on divine goodness—goodness that we have the ability to understand and appreciate—is Scripturally based. After all, God prefaces His commandment to love Him by revealing that it was He who brought us out of bondage (Exodus 20:2). With all due respect and love towards Calvinists, I cannot help but conclude that such confessions of faith blaspheme God.
But let us turn to the Scriptures, for the weight of their testimony is infinitely greater than my worthless personal conclusions. To begin with a text routinely used by Calvinists to support a doctrine occasionally referred to as “double predestination,” St. Paul asks the following of the Romans: Who are you to reply against God? Will the thing formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why have you made me like this?’ Does not the potter have power over the clay, from the same lump to make one vessel for honor and another for dishonor? (Romans 9:20-21). For our Calvinist friends, this text constitutes incontrovertible evidence that God predestines some people for salvation and others for condemnation. They essentially read it as follows: “Will the thing formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why have you permanently made me like this according to your original design?”
This interpretation might escape scrutiny if we do not read this passage in conjunction with other texts that employ the same image.
In a great house there are not only vessels of gold and silver, but also of wood and clay, some for honor and some for dishonor. Therefore if anyone cleanses himself from the latter [i.e., dishonor], he will be a vessel for honor (2 Tim 2:20–21).
And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter; so he made it again into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to make.
Then the word of the Lord came to me. He said, ‘Can I not do with you, Israel, as this potter does?’ declares the Lord. ‘Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, Israel. If…[the] nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned’ (Jeremiah 18:4–8).
What a holistic reading of Scripture reveals is that the Potter never intended that any of his vessels be marred, and He is willing to refashion them into new vessels if they repent.
A verse that might shed light on this issue (one that does not seem to be cited very often in relation to predestination) is Luke 8:18 (Whoever has, to him more will be given; and whoever does not have, even what he seems to have will be taken from him). This text appears to speak to a kind of spiritual law: Our circumstances, good or bad, seem to be reinforced by the manner in which we exercise our free will. To use an analogy, suppose I have an artistically inclined child who wills to be a painter. “Foreknowing” that she will indeed be an artist one day, I enroll her in art classes and regularly buy her art supplies. I am “predestining” her for success as an artist (reinforcing what I have already perceived in her). However, I did not arbitrarily decide that she be an artist before she was born. Likewise, as St. John Chrysostom explains in his commentary on Romans 9, God “works nothing at random, or mere hazard, though [we may] be ignorant of the secret of His Wisdom.”
This recognition of our ignorance—of the mystery of God’s wisdom—is a distinguishing characteristic of Orthodox Christianity. To be sure, some might regard such ignorance as unpleasant or even intolerable. However, filling the void in our knowledge with conclusions drawn from a deductive logic that rests on odious theological assumptions can never be a satisfactory alternative.
