Ada Herald - Pastor's Pen Article October 22 2009

You would think me a chicken if I wrote a series of articles on Calvin and failed to mention predestination. One of the charges leveled against Calvin is that he invented the doctrine of predestination, pulling it out of thin air, as it were, making God into something of an arbitrary tyrant. In the public mind, Calvin equals predestination. While it is clearly an important part of his theology, the universe of Calvin’s thought didn’t revolve around it. It is more a spoke than a hub.

Predestination, as Calvin puts it, is “God’s eternal decree, by which he compacted with himself what he willed to become of each man” Some are ordained to eternal life; others to eternal damnation. Calvin taught this, yet the teaching didn’t originate with him. He traced it back to Augustine, who traced it back to the Epistles of Paul. Other prominent theologians held the view including Thomas Aquinas, John Wycliffe, and nearly every major Reformation figure.

Perhaps the reason the doctrine stuck to Calvin was the way his name came to be associated with the five points of Calvinism, proposed by the Synod of Dort some 50 years after Calvin’s death. The Synod highlighted predestination in its response to others who were advocating the place of free will in salvation. The Synod of Dort distilled Calvin’s teachings on salvation, and for some, this distillation remains the essence of all Calvin said, even though he wrote widely on numerous theological topics.

Calvin didn’t teach predestination simply to be controversial. For him, it reflected the teaching of scripture: in Romans 9 God chose Jacob over Esau before either of them were born; in Ephesians 1 God is said to have chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world; in Acts 13:48 Luke records that “all those appointed for eternal life believed.” Calvin felt that those who downplayed these passages were instead playing up their own opinions.

Despite his firm belief in the doctrine, Calvin recognized that predestination was hard for people to accept. He admitted that talking about predestination was itself a difficult thing, perplexing and hazardous, especially to those who were overly curious and refused to ground their speculations in scripture itself. If predestination is difficult, and if it met with such opposition, one may be justified in wondering whether it has any value.

On this point, Calvin was clear that predestination was valuable because it gave glory to God more than any other way of understanding salvation. When we were lost and unable to save ourselves, God opened our ears to hear the message of the gospel—that Jesus died and rose again for our salvation—and gave us the faith to believe it. All the credit for our salvation belongs to God, which magnifies his glory. At the same time, election gives believers confidence in their standing before God. If my salvation depends upon my choosing God, then my salvation is uncertain, because my will is fickle. My preferences change daily, but God’s are eternal.