Somewhere about this time I got the two books I ordered after listening to the Calvinism debate on “The Bible Answer Man.” One, as I have mentioned before, was Norman Geisler’s Chosen but Free. This book, although I didn’t know it at the time, was a response to R.C. Sproul’s book Chosen by God. It puts forward what Geisler believes is a “moderate Calvinism,” in response to what he sees as the two equally wrong sides of the debate, Arminianism and what he calls “extreme Calvinism.”
It is always a little surprising to see somebody who is as well educated and informed as Dr. Geisler, thinking that he has come up with a novel way of exegeting the Biblical passages on predestination and election in such a way that he finds the path that nobody else has found. He does not directly claim this, of course, and in fact the reader who knows his Calvinists or his Arminians will quickly find that Geisler is not putting anything new forward for discussion, but one really gets the idea that he innocently thought that he had found a middle path that balanced election and free will, and was a little surprised and hurt that his book wasn’t acclaimed as the Grand Unified Theory of Predestination. Geisler makes clear the same things that Hannegraaff speaks of often enough in 2004 and 2005, that we must accept that there is such a thing as predestination and election, because the Bible positively teaches them. No serious Biblical scholar who believes in inerrancy doubts this, and it is a good place to start. But as far as Geisler is concerned, admitting that God predestines and elects, without going into what this really means, is enough to put him in the “moderate Calvinist” camp, as if Arminians don’t believe in predestination. The fact is, the Remonstrance believed in election and predestination, they just hinged it on foreknowledge of what the free will of man would decide, as opposed to the Calvinist view that God foreknows His people and chooses them for His own self-glorifying reasons. He then goes on to present what is essentially four-point Arminianism, since he is not opposed to perseverance of the saints insofar as he equates it with eternal security, and calls it “moderate Calvinism.”
For me, the tone of Chosen but Free was set right away, when Geisler made the statement that I believe is the philosophical foundation for everything else in the book: the attributes of God have in relation to each other a unity of essence, or to put it another way, God’s foreknowledge is His predestination. Since He is a unity, He cannot decide something beforehand without it being based on His knowledge of the future, and vice versa; Geisler is no Molinist who thinks that God decides which of all possible worlds will bring Him glory and carry out His will. I believe (but have no time nor writing ability to demonstrate now) that Geisler bases this idea on a Scholastic view of God as Prime Mover, the Aristotelian God that does not change: that God is such a complete Unity that His attributes are themselves a unity. His mercy and justice are the same (and many are the times that I have seen something like this in action in Scripture, to be fair), His love and hatred are the same, and His foreknowledge and election are the same. He chooses because He saw the future, and the future happened the way it did because He chose, and they are the same thing. (You know, there could be a Christological heresy here, but I will leave it to better minds than mine to make that determination.)
Consider carefully how this compares to the Remonstrance:
That God, by an eternal and unchangeable purpose in Jesus Christ his Son, before the foundation of the world, hath determined, out of the fallen, sinful race of men, to save in Christ, for Christ’s sake, and through Christ, those who, through the grace of the Holy Ghost, shall believe on this his son Jesus, and shall persevere in this faith and obedience of faith, through this grace, even to the end; and, on the other hand, to leave the incorrigible and unbelieving in sin and under wrath, and to condemn them as alienate from Christ, according to the word of the Gospel in John 3:36: “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him,” and according to other passages of Scripture also.
We see here that the Arminians believe that God chose who would be saved before the foundation of the world, but He chose those who “shall believe” and “shall persevere.” It is a subtle difference, but the true Calvinist view of this is that those whom He chose “shall believe” and “shall persevere.” There is a difference in the logical order here; perception of belief and perseverance precede God’s choice in the Arminian view, and follow from the choice in the Calvinist view. Geisler tries to find a middle ground here but by the time he has formulated his position, it is irretrievably Arminian. I recognized this pattern of thought; it was the logical conclusion of Aquinas and Maimonides. And ultimately, it was driven by and founded upon philosophy rather than exegesis.
I don’t say all this to claim that I am smarter or better at anything than Geisler; on the contrary, I am ashamed when I see how much even of my current theology is based on philosophy rather than exegesis. But in this case, having been a sometime-student of Maimonides, the rabbi who did the most to combine Aristotelian thought with Rabbinic Judaism, it was a familiar pattern, and I instinctively shied away from it. Geisler had failed me. I read the whole of his book, and I found myself agreeing with some of his points, and for the first time I read carefully the five points of Calvinism and tried to get a handle on them. Oddly enough (compared to most people), I didn’t have the same problems with them that most people did. The majority of people who have issues with the Canons of Dordt and their formulation of the Five Points in opposition to the Five Points of the Remonstrance (historical sidenote: Calvinists didn’t invent the idea of five points, it was their opponents in the debate who formulated the debate along the lines of five points, and the Reformed response was so well-formed that it has far overshadowed the Remonstrance itself) find themselves conditionally agreeing to Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, and Perseverance of the Saints (when understood as “eternal security,” a phrase I loathe only slightly less than “once saved, always saved”), wavering a bit on Irresistible Grace, and most likely rejecting Limited Atonement/Particular Redemption out of hand. For me, logic was king, and having accepted Total Depravity and rejected Universalism, it wasn’t hard to see that election had to be unconditional, grace had to be irresistible, and the atonement couldn’t have paid for everybody’s sins, because then there would be no righteous wrath for anybody. My biggest problem, to be honest, was the idea of perseverance; I had fought the idea that people couldn’t lose a true salvation for years, up and down internet forums and discussions with my dad outside restaurants on family holidays. Unfortunately Geisler didn’t fight that battle very hard, because he himself believes in eternal security. Only somebody with a true Arminian background, like a Wesleyan/Holiness or Assemblies of God believer (like the teacher himself), would reject that point.
When I considered it carefully, though, logic even triumphed over my pride on that point. If I wasn’t going to allow people libertarian free will in deciding whether they would be saved, then it made no sense to suggest that they would suddenly gain that freedom by becoming a slave to Christ. Does anybody really think that the Prodigal Son left his father’s house again after he was eating regularly for a while? Of course not—he had been broken. He now knew what it was to be a son, because he had been willing to come back as a slave, if only to be in the care of his father again.
Or, to put it another way, “he who lives and believes in Me will never die” (John 11:26).
I have to admit that Norman Geisler, not James White, made me a Calvinist. Dr. White only gave me the exegetical foundation for what I now believed.
I was emotionally very drained when I put down Chosen but Free and started to read The Potter’s Freedom. Dr. White does a good job of dealing with his rebuttal; he devotes two chapters to each major point addressed in Geisler’s work: one exegeting Scripture and making the case, and the other rebutting the statements in the book. He spends some time exegeting John 6 (read that link, bookmark it, it’s fantastic and as far as I can tell irrefutable) and dealing with the “Big Three”—the passages that seem to indicate that God really tried to save everybody but allowed man’s choice to override His will in some way, until you read them in context. These days I wish that I had been able to wrestle with these passages before I read Dr. White’s exegesis of them, because I have a hard time suggesting any other alternatives anymore.
Ultimately I was almost disappointed in Calvinism, because I think I was leaning back toward my old deterministic view of the universe, and I found that Calvinism does not suggest that people are robots or that they do not exercise their will; it simply pushes the question to its logical conclusion. You think you have free will, but how free, really, is your will? Can you decide to do whatever you want? The Bible teaches that our will is a slave to sin until we are made free in Christ; in fact it goes further, and says that we are dead in our trespasses and sins, totally unable to please God through any act of our will, be it faith or a work, until Christ makes us alive. I was surprised to learn that we are regenerated—“born again”—before we believe, but at the moment we have the new heart, the first thing it does it turn in repentance and faith to Jesus.
There is certain judgment on everyone who does not believe, but the sins of those who will believe have been propitiated, so that nobody can bring a charge against God’s elect; the charge and the judgment remains for those for whom atonement has not been made. We do choose to believe—but we cannot choose unless He first chooses us and gives us the power to make that choice. When He gives us a new heart and spiritual life, we do what now comes naturally to the adopted child of God in the power of the Spirit—we receive that grace and call out to the Father. And having done this, we are His, and none can snatch us out of His hand.
The paragraph above is, in a different presentation than normal, the Five Points of Calvinism.
And, you may notice, it is also the gospel. But as so many have said so well, we are not justified by our understanding of justification, but we are justified by faith in Christ. A passage from 1 John sums up my feelings on this perfectly:
1 John 3:1 Listen3:1 See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. (ESV)
It is simple, but what praise is more appropriate to hold forth to the Author and Finisher of our faith, than this? Jesus did not come merely to make men savable, but to save them. He didn’t just make salvation available, for those who would take the necessary step toward Him; he secured salvation for all the elect.
Matthew 1:21 Listen21 She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” (ESV)
What mitigated my “disappointment” was the amazing power of this gospel. We were not required to make perfect arguments, win every debate, or manipulate or vainly persuade men to the truth; we were simply called to proclaim the truth, and the power of the gospel preached would break men’s hard hearts and bring life to the spiritually dead, in God’s time and according to God’s purpose. I had heard people say that Calvinists don’t believe in evangelism, or that they are inconsistent if they do, but now I knew that the doctrines of grace represent the power of evangelism. If we are left to ourselves to persuade men to Christ, we have no hope, because we cannot perfectly reflect His glory, and because we cannot bring dead men to life. But the Holy Spirit can empower the Word preached, and the Gospel can do the impossible: it can take a man who hates God and cause him to love Jesus and through Him the Father. It can flatten the tallest Everest of pride and irrigate the Sahara of man’s philosophy. The Gospel is the Word is Christ, the Creator and Redeemer, the Shepherd and the Judge, the Lord God Almighty.
(Postscript: Dr. Geisler won the Calvinist Gadfly award, and his prize is this amusing clock:)
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