A Brief Introduction to John Calvin by Elwood Christopher

Author:Elwood, Christopher [Elwood, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781611647860
Publisher: Presbyterian Publishing
Published: 2017-02-09T16:00:00+00:00

A God Who Chooses: Predestination

In referring to Christian believers (the main audience Calvin addresses in most of his theological writings), I have been using, as a shorthand, pronouns in the first person plural (“we,” “us”). If we count ourselves among the society of Christians, these pronouns may make the message of redemption sound fairly inclusive. But is it? Who comes under the heading of this “we”? How can we be so sure that we are included in the “we” who are on the way to eternal blessedness (as opposed to a far less pleasant destination)?

Faced with these kinds of questions, Calvin always wanted to offer assurance that we can be confident that we belong in the group headed in the right direction. God has rescued us from the wastebasket that our sin put us into. The teaching with which his name is so often associated, predestination, helps to assure us of this.

Or so he thought. In practice, the idea that God predestines, eternally (“before” all time), some to eternal salvation and all others to eternal damnation led more than a few of Calvin’s readers and hearers to scratch their heads in wonder, awe, and fear. Others simply threw up their hands in disgust.

As we look at what Calvin believed about predestination, it is important to recognize that he didn’t invent the doctrine. Orthodox theologians (including Augustine and Thomas Aquinas) had developed similar doctrines. But the church always tended to tone down the more explicit versions of predestinarian thinking, mainly because they didn’t seem to do much for God’s image. The predestinating God looked rather more like a thuggish concentration camp commandant toying with helpless lives than anything worthy of devotion and love. Why in the world then would Calvin insist on a picture of God whose work among creatures is based on an irrevocable “double decree”?

For Calvin, the answer to questions about the doctrine could be found (as usual) in Scripture. But one might look elsewhere, too, for some clues. We might look, for example, at the disparate experience of people’s lives. Some people clearly make progress, of the spiritual and moral sort, in life. But others seem to be lost souls who simply can’t get it right and show no sign of God’s redemptive work in their lives. This evidence doesn’t prove to us that the “successes” are God’s chosen while the “failures” are not. Still, it speaks of the way in which God’s grace seems to be unequally distributed.

What explains this “diversity”? The testimony offered in Scripture is that God has chosen some persons and rejected others. Is that a gloomy picture? No, Calvin thinks. It is not really different from the message of God’s unfathomable mercy and grace that he has been concerned to stress from the beginning. What is the basis of my salvation? Is it a decision I make? The quality of my inner life? My moral worthiness? No. (And thank goodness for that: I am unable to make the right decision; my inner life is a cesspool; morally, I stink.

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