Predestination and the Like

The issues related to Calvinism, libertarian free will, open theism, and other such concepts have long since become less interesting to me as controversies. The concepts of human responsibility, God’s grace, God’s foreknowledge, etc are still important as matters of logic and divine revelation. My problem with the topics as issues is more an emotional or temperamental issue. Nevertheless, I made an observation several years ago that I’ve always kept in the back of my mind. I’m sharing it because of a strange association of several ideas that is not logically necessary:

1. Thesis 1: The doctrine of grace, summarized as TULIP are not necessarily connected to God’s predestination in all matters. In other words, soteriology is not connected to providence in a necessary fashion,
   1. For instance, Charles Spurgeon, a Calvinist if there ever was one, could say:
      “I see, in one place, God in providence presiding over all, and yet I see, and I cannot help seeing, that man acts as he pleases, and that God has left his actions, in a great measure, to his own free-will. Now, if I were to declare that man was so free to act that there was no control of God over his actions, I should be driven very near to atheism; and if, on the other hand, I should declare that God so over-rules all things that man is not free enough to be responsible, I should be driven at once into Antinomianism or fatalism.” In other words, Calvinist soteriology does not necessarily entail that God controls all events meticulously.
      
   2. Similarly, one could believe in a mechanisitc universe wherein all things were precisely predestined by God and set into motion where in God saves only those whom he predestined to earn their salvation.
   3. Or, one could be an open theist, as regards God’s creation (future events don’t exist, therefore they cannot be known with certainty, unless God explicitly causes them happen), but as regards soteriology, believe that God regenerates totally depraved people whom he chose unconditionally and then cause them to persevere. Greg Boyd nearly takes this view. In fact, one could find open theist exegesis of the Old Testament (when God has to find things by examination and ask questions of people for instance) but find Calvinist exegesis of Romans 8-11 very convincing on textual grounds and not find a contradiction in the perspective.
   4. I am not claiming that anybody believes these combinations of propositions. I am claiming that the connection between various views of predestination, salvation, and human history is not as clear cut as it is often claimed to be.
2. Thesis 2: If the logical connections between these aspects of theology are not necessary, then there may be psychological or sociological reasons that people connect the ideas.
   1. Some take it as axiomatic that, “One random atom or “maverick molecule,”…could throw everything back into chaos.” This point of view is not uncommon.
   2. Those who hold to the idea that Calvinism and comprehensive meticulous control of all things are necessarily connected are, by John Piper’s admission, of a certain cast of mind: “But I think there is an attractiveness about them [the doctrines of TULIP] to some people, in large matter, because of their intellectual rigor. They are powerfully coherent doctrines, and certain kinds of minds are drawn to that. And those kinds of minds tend to be argumentative. So the intellectual appeal of the system of Calvinism draws a certain kind of intellectual person, and that type of person doesn’t tend to be the most warm, fuzzy, and tender. Therefore this type of person has a greater danger of being hostile, gruff, abrupt, insensitive or intellectualistic.” And Piper is known for his connection of the five points of Calvinism with two more points: a Leibniz-esque view that the world is the best of all possible worlds and a stark double-predestinarian supra-lapsarianism (the idea that God ordained to send people to hell logically prior to his creation of those people or rather, that he created them for the purpose of hell). There are probably several other ideological concomitants that could be teased out here, but I’m not sure that they are as often as this. For instance many Calvinists belief in an Old Earth, some have very plastic beliefs about how ancient culture can be used to interpret Scripture, some are libertarians, some are reflexively republican neo-cons, some think non-Calvinists aren’t Christians, some love missions, some don’t, some focus on the law/gospel distinction, some focus on discipleship, etc. It’s just too difficult to go in that direction, though it would be interesting.
   3. Similarly, Open Theists are often, though not always, committed to denying anything like Tulip. But many Arminian thinkers, who certainly deny Tulip, fully accept God’s exhaustive foreknowledge and similarly deny God’s exhaustive planning of all events. Weirdly enough though, Arminian thinkers only overlap on concomitant beliefs sometimes (Arminians like Norman Geisler want to remove other Arminians from ETS for thinking that Genre is important in Biblical studies). But Open Theists like Greg Boyd do seem to overlap in beliefs with fellows like Scot McKnight (though Scot has a much clearer grasp of the New Testament than Boyd), Peter Enns, and Roger Olson.

Conclusions:

I don’t have enough data to make some hard and fast conclusion, but methinks there is more afoot here than simple systematic consideration of the issues. The likelihood that with all of the intelligent Calvinists and all of the intelligent Arminians/Open Theist types that one side was utterly logically coherent and the other side entirely refused to see the problem seems really unlikely. So it’s probably not a matter of one side getting it and the other side missing it. It seems that it is more a matter of value-level commitments affecting how the Christian worldview is expressed. Now these judgments, on both sides, are obviously informed by Scripture, but that does not mean that they aren’t informed by other things too: temperament, upbringing, culture, etc.