Those He foreknew, he also predestined

EDIT: I’ve changed my mind on this again, and I’m no longer confident that molinism is correct, but I’m leaning towards the reformed position once more because of the enormous weight of scripture behind it that I just can’t ignore. I think there are many clever doctrines we could adopt and they can seem very convincing and alluring, but we need to stick to what the Bible actually says.

________________________

God’s sovereignty and his providence has been an area I’ve been studying for a while now, painstakingly and obsessively at times. Recently I confessed to some Christian friends that I didn’t believe God would provide me an answer. I felt that God is very able to give clear answers, but that he didn’t always answer the questions we wanted. I still think there is some truth to that, but now God has proven me wrong and finally given me some clarity in this area. Consequentially, I’m going back on what I said in my previous blog post on God’s providence, where I held a view closer to Thomism or Calvinism, where God created us in a certain way, which determines how we will act in any given situation, thereby making God the first cause of our every action. You can read it here: God As A Writer.

I realize now that this view essentially destroys free-will, and makes God the author of evil. It makes a nonsense of every time in the Bible that God asks a human being to make a choice, or laments over a human being rejecting him, since all human beings would be acting in their own nature, exactly as he has created them, and according to his definite plan. It also makes the current state of the world exactly as God desired it to be, with all the evil and suffering therein. It also makes it God’s definite plan that most human beings would suffer in eternal hell, that he created some people with the certain purpose of destroying them, even though God himself laments about how he desires that all should be saved, and that he takes no delight in the death of the wicked, and how he longed for Israel to turn to Him and He would save them.

I realize now, as Romans 8:29 tells us, that those whom God foreknew he predestined, in other words: God knew beforehand who would freely respond to his grace, and those are the ones he chose to reveal his grace to. So when he created his plan for the world, he did so with the free choices of people in mind. This is why our observable experience tells us we have free-will. This is why the world doesn’t look like everything that happens is the desire of a loving God, but looks like a world broken by the evil choices of his creatures. He is fully sovereign and in control, but his plan included giving us free-will, that is why the world looks the way it does, and doesn’t look like a literal heaven on earth. But in spite of terrible human choices, he uses and orders the world to accomplish his purposes. So I’m not saying God isn’t in control, I’m saying that the world clearly reflects a divine plan that accommodates rather than violates human free-will.

I came to this understanding after my studies into divine providence zeroed-in on Romans 9, a key passage in this debate, where it says that God elects individuals to salvation, before they are born, and before they have done anything either good or bad, demonstrating that salvation is not based on the works of individuals, but on the mercy of God. Calvinists take this to mean that God arbitrarily selects those who will be saved (or perhaps they would say not “arbitrarily” but his reasons for selecting are a mystery), and that comes prior to the faith of the human being, meaning that human free-will doesn’t even come into it. So those who are saved are not saved because they responded positively to God, they are saved because they are chosen beforehand by God, and those who are not saved are cast into hell, not because they rejected God, but because God didn’t choose them from the beginning.

When you contrast this to the scriptures where God says he desires all to be saved and none to perish, this would mean that God doesn’t do as he desires, even though it was completely his decision before the beginning of time, and not based on any human consent. And how are we going to respond to non-Christians through Apologetics, when they come with questions about the problem of evil? We can’t tell them that it’s the fault of humans and their freely choosing evil, we have to say that God wanted it all this way. It just doesn’t add up.

So I wanted to find out what Christians have said historically about Romans 9, to make sure I’m not totally off-track in my interpretation. This has been a debate as far back as the 5th century, and probably a lot earlier if you look at Jewish and Greek views, but there seems to have been a consensus among the early fathers of Christianity, up until the 5th century. From reading these patristic commentaries on Romans, it was clear the dominant view was that God had chosen those whom he foreknew would believe. The first time we see this challenged is in the 5th century by St. Augustine, where we see the basis of what became the Calvinist view. But early on, Augustine himself had held the older view, and expressed it at least twice in his commentaries on Romans. He even admits this himself, later in life, that he had changed his mind on it.

So after studying the text myself, contemplating it in light of the rest of scripture, listening to debates, reading the commentaries of the Church Fathers, considering the revealed character of God and his desires, thinking about my lived experience and what best makes sense of it, I’ve come to the conclusion that I was wrong in taking the Calvinist stance on sovereignty. I think God really did give us free-will, and he is fully in control down to the management of the smallest details. He creates and orders without doing violence to our free-will, and those he has chosen and called to be conformed to the image of Christ, are those he foreknew would freely respond to his grace. I feel a lot of peace with this conclusion. I could still be entirely wrong, as my knowledge is only in part, but this makes the most sense to me now.