Calvinism and free will: sovereignty, determinism, and responsibility
This excerpt revisits a key Calvinist claim about divine sovereignty and explains why the author argues it results in determinism and undermines true human responsibility. It also critiques compatibilism, “second causes,” and the idea of “efficacious permission.”
- The author argues consistent Calvinism leads to hard determinism and leaves no true basis for responsibility.
- Compatibilist “freedom” is described as psychological, not genuinely free, because desires are decreed.
- “Second causes” and “efficacious permission” are presented as insufficient to remove God’s responsibility for sin.
This article is no longer available online, but the entire four-part series is available for purchase as a downloadable resource/pdf.
Considering Calvinism — Item 02972 — $4.99
What is Calvinism? How should we feel about what it teaches? How does Calvinism contrast with what we believe to be a more biblical view of sin and salvation?
Jack Cottrell examines the essence and errors of Calvinism in this 10-page resource that originally appeared as a four-part series in CHRISTIAN STANDARD.
The articles focus on “Sovereignty and Free Will According to Calvinism” and “According to the Bible,” and a two-part explanation and response to “The T-U-L-I-P Doctrines.” Included are an article on the history of Calvinism—which didn’t originate with John Calvin—and a bibliography of the best books explaining Calvinism and Arminianism.
All downloads include permission to reproduce material up to 10 times for ministry and educational purposes.
To order this resource, CLICK HERE. To sample the first few paragraphs of article one, continue reading below . . .
The first article in this series presented a summary of the most fundamental doctrine of Calvinism, namely, its concept of divine sovereignty as it relates to human free will. I have evaluated this Calvinist concept of sovereignty in detail elsewhere (see the bibliography in last week’s issue), but will attempt to make some general points here.
First it must be stressed that, contrary to attempts to make it otherwise, consistent Calvinism is pure, hard determinism with all that is entailed thereby: no truly free will, no true basis for human responsibility, and no true way to relieve God of the blame for sin. The Calvinist concepts of divine sovereignty and the eternal decree lead inexorably to these conclusions. The devices created to avoid these conclusions are a smoke screen; those who think they transform hard determinism into soft determinism are deceiving themselves.
Cause and Effect
For example, in the compatibilist concept of free will, the will is “free” only in a psychological sense. Since everyone chooses the specific things he desires to choose, he feels free and uncoerced. But in fact no other choices are possible since the desires on which they are based have been eternally and unconditionally decreed by God for the very purpose of producing those specific choices. Bruce Reichenbach correctly says that under these conditions “freedom . . . is an illusion”; it “becomes an empty notion, for there can be no desire independent of God’s decree” (in Basinger, ed., Predestination and Free Will, 1986:51).
Also, the so-called “second causes” cannot be distinguished from God’s own causation since they have been infallibly decreed by God for the very purpose of producing the specific effects he has decreed. Thus to say that the human will, when it chooses to sin, is the “second” or proximate cause of the sin, in no way relieves God of the responsibility for the sin. If God causes the cause, he also causes the effect.
Likewise the claim that God only “permits” sin and therefore is not responsible for it is easily seen to be a fiction when the “permission” is qualified as efficacious. Frame is exactly right to say that such permission is “a form of causation.” . . .
Author: Christian Standard
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