Copyright 2018 by Shea Oakley
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The God who created the Universe is a determining Being with a determinate character. It is from this fixed, eternal, and perfect character that He decides what is and what is not, what will be and what will never be, the existence or non-existence of all things everywhere. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, there is not a single inch of the universe, and all that may lie beyond it, for which Jesus Christ cannot and does not, with utter authority and finality declare, “Mine.”
However your theology deals with the issue of determinism versus free will one thing is certain; the God of the Bible cannot, by virtue of His very nature, be called anything but ultimately sovereign over all there was, is, and ever will be in time. He is also, by that same nature, Master of all eternity, for He is the only truly infinite and eternal Being.
So how, you may ask, could free will ever exist if this is true? I would argue that either free will only appears to be free will (the Calvinist view) or God, in his sovereignty, also has the sovereign power to limit that sovereignty in some secondary way. By this I mean that, while He never gives up ultimate control over all things, He is able to choose to limit that control enough to create conscious beings who can decide to either do His will or rebel against it. If true this is something that God allows, but with a determinate purpose with a specific outcome in mind. What have been called His “active will” and His “passive will” both will lead, in a way that the fallen human mind will never be able to completely understand, to his purposes being achieved in the end.
Based on the brevity of my description of the Calvinist view as opposed to the one that allows for a kind of restricted, but actual free will, you might deduce that I am Arminian in my own theology. I would not go that far. There are elements of paradox (the ability of two seemingly opposite propositions to both be true simultaneously) in the idea of an absolute Ruler of all things who chooses sometimes to self-limit that absolute rule. In my opinion paradox is something that is apparent in many aspects of the Word of God. This is often true with things in the Scriptures that non-believers would call “contradictions.” Many of these can be shown to be non-contradictory simply by reading the entire Bible in its proper context. As for the rest I have found that the vast majority of these things are paradoxical, not contradictory (for the few things I have not yet found to be that way I trust that my limited, and sometimes warped, human reason is not to be trusted when dealing with a God who must, by definition, embody infinite perfection and absolute truth in order to be worthy of the title “God.”)
So, in the spirit of a view of the Word that embraces paradox I have, for many years now, described myself as a “Cal-minian.” What that, I’d like to think clever; conflation of the two great Christian streams of thought means is that I simply believe that our Lord may sovereignly choose to limit his sovereignty in the above-described secondary and specifically purposeful way. This strikes me as being the best answer to the conundrum that has plagued theologians for several millennia now. I think this is especially true when considering the ability of our First Parents, Adam and Eve, to make the choice they unfortunately made.
Of course I am not a trained theologian (or philosopher, for that matter) but this is my story and I’m sticking to it. I just happen to think it makes the most sense of things, both temporal and eternal. Also I must say that I have always found a strange and subtle comfort in embracing it. The existence of that comfort is not sufficient evidence of its truth but I’d like to think my, hopefully Holy Spirit, inspired reason adds much more “sufficiency” to the proposition.
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