How it works (predestination time!)

Note from 2014: This was written in 2012, two years before I discovered that in many ways, I'm pretty much Arminian. The Arminian view of corporate election does a pretty fantastic job of explaining all of this in a much more intuitive manner. This is one way to do it...but I think that corporate election is probably better.

A few days ago I posted a fairly large blog detailing my thoughts on the actual "mechanics" of prayer: How it interacts with the divine foreknowledge of God, as well as the divine plan for the universe. Today I want to talk about it some more, because I think it has a very important application for a very important--and divisive--topic: Predestination.

But we're not going to talk about Calvinism, or Armenianism, or any of the other "isms". We're going to talk about the possibility of a comprehensive and cohesive doctrine that ties the few verses speaking about predestination to the consistent, Bible-wide assumption of free will. 

I need to talk a little bit more about this. The assumption of free will extends throughout the entire Bible. From Job's ultimate steadfastness to Abraham's mingled faithlessness and faithfulness, from Moses' obedience and disobedience to Zechariah pissing off the angel Gabriel... all of these are portrayed as actions that may have happened differently, actions that are punished or rewarded precisely because the doer could have done otherwise. I pick my examples at random, off the top of my head, because I could literally open the Bible to almost any page and find that same implicit assumption of free will. From Adam to the seven churches in Revelations, the Bible clearly shows us that we can choose.

Let's look at Jesus. The Jesus who does not believe in free will is a monster: He proclaims the good news to people who are fundamentally incapable of acting on it, and he does nothing to help them. When he speaks to a totally depraved humanity without free will, saying, "Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest," it is no different than if he told the lame man to get up and walk, without first healing the man's lameness. It is taunting, mockery of the worst kind, telling a quadriplegic how great it is to be able to walk.  The Calvinist Jesus does not truly love the young man in Mark 10: He merely pretends to love him, with a love that could be effective but is not, that willfully chooses to not be effective and, in doing so, dooms the young man whom Jesus loved to hell. That is not the Jesus I read about in the gospels, no matter how you twist his words, no matter how you twist Paul's words, that is not the Son of God that walked Jerusalem 2,000 years ago.

Ahem. Pardon me.

But then you have the few verses that explicitly mention predestination. God hardening the pharaoh's heart in Exodus, God foreknowing, predestining, and calling in Romans, and a few others. They are puzzling, to be sure... but they are not in and of themselves troubling, exactly because of the assumption of free will present in the gospels and each and every one of Paul's letters. They only become troubling when they are used, by Calvinism, to overturn the entire tone and direction of the New Testament. To say that there are verses that clearly teach predestination is only to say that the Bible teaches that predestination somehow coexists with free will. To say that we should take the verses of predestination and use them to completely overturn free will is, quite frankly, ridiculous. 

So. We find ourselves in the position of trying to reconcile free will and predestination. Jesus and Paul both take free will for granted: In calling to people and telling them and asking them to do things, they assume that their hearers can do those things, but are not forced to do them. But both also mention predestination. One might well look at this predicament and say, along with some of the internet's greatest scholars, "What is this I don't even?"

But there is a solution. We return to my blog on prayer, which, in hindsight, I shouldn't have linked so early in the blog before. Essentially, prayer  interacts with God's plan for the world, which, from our perspective, he set down before time itself. The Bible tells us to pray. More than that, it tells us to expect results. It tells us that we can choose whether to pray or not, and that there are consequences to praying and consequences to not praying. In short, it tells us that prayer changes things. 

This only makes sense once you recognize that God does not, primarily, experience time. I'm just going quote a paragraph from my last blog: feel free to skip it if you've already read it:

"The way we experience reality is a series of successive events, one after another: 6:00 a.m. is followed without fail by 6:01 a.m., and no amount of effort can prevent the eventual progression to 6:02 a.m., nor wind the clock back to 6:00 a.m. But that is merely a way of seeing reality, not reality as it really is. God sees everything as it really is: NOT as a series of linear, successive events, but as one utterly cohesive NOW; Thus God does not have to "wait" to experience 6:00, 6:01, and 6:02 in succession: He experiences them all at once, without confusion. (This is important: Otherwise God would be bound by time just as much as we are.) Thus the results of an answered prayer for rain made at a particular point in world history--say, June 4, 2012--would be visible and present in the world long before the prayer was even thought of. Because we experience reality through time, it seems to us as though the effect comes before the cause. But in actuality, God has merely seen the prayer and adjusted reality in the same cohesive, unbounded, endless Now."

 That is the only way prayer can work: The only way prayer can be effective and free, which is how the Bible always portrays it. 

So why not apply it to salvation?

If reality is truly governed by Time, if God himself is governed by time, and exists and works only in time, then of course predestination must override free will. But if God is not bound by time, if time is merely the way we perceive reality and not the way reality actually is, then it immediately becomes obvious that the mechanics of predestination vs. free will present no greater problem than that of prayer. Having (apparently) found a solution for one, it seems as though we have found a solution for the other.

Can God  receive a prayer, made on June 7, 2012, for rain on June 8, 2012, and as a result of that prayer, shape the weather patterns for the preceding however many thousands of years so as to make it rain on that particular day? I see no reason why not: And is it not obvious that this case flawlessly allows free will to coexist with the divine predestination of weather patterns, without either being overridden by the other?

If this is the case, then surely we can say that someone can make a decision to follow Christ, of his own free will, at a particular point in world history, and that God, as a result of and in conjunction with that prayer, foreknows that person and his decision to follow Christ: Before time yet in conjunction with that man's decision in time, God predestines and calls them... and yet free will, by the grace of our loving God, remains intact, remains perfectly consistent with God's loving and all-powerful governing of the universe and everything in it.

Clarification Edit: We've gotten really used to conflating a person deciding to follow Christ with salvation: The one logically leads to the other. But here's the thing: Accepting the freely-offered gift of salvation is NOT meritorious. It does not deserve the gift, it does not earn the gift. Therefore, without the grace of God, merely confessing Christ as Lord and believing that God raised him from the dead (as Paul says in Romans 10:9) would not naturally lead to salvation.

Without the grace of God, that decision would not lead to salvation. So let's go to Romans 8:29: "For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son." Paul himself puts foreknowledge as a basis for predestination. But foreknowledge of what? I am saying that God's foreknowledge extends to the decision, the proclamation, the belief: In his endless NOW, God sees a man saying, "Christ is Lord, and God raised him from the dead." Knowing this, having already freely offered the gift of life to anyone who accepts it, God predestines the man to receive salvation, to be adopted and conformed to Christ's image.

I am no longer troubled with how to reconcile predestination and free will. This is a way in which they can coexist without conflict, without one swallowing up the other, and that is enough for me. I should clarify something: I have no doubt that the scope of predestination here will not be robust enough for entrenched Calvinists to accept. I do think, however, that it meets the biblical criteria for predestination. Entrenched Calvinists are not my audience here: This is for those who, like myself, have struggled to reconcile the concept of predestination with the belief that God has given us free will (as befits creatures made in his image).