One of the more frustrating things about being a Calvinist is the rampant misunderstanding about Calvin and his theology one encounters pretty much everywhere. Even among some of his followers! The old canard is the Calvinism equals determinism, but nothing could be further from the truth. Here is a definition of determinism:
Determinism, in philosophy, is the theory that all events, including moral choices, are completely determined by previously existing causes. Determinism is usually understood to preclude free will because it entails that humans cannot act otherwise than they do.
For some reason what little reading (or a lot in some cases) people have done of Calvin and Reformed theology, they think it teaches that God causes all things that happen. So if I decide to lift my arm, or type this sentence, God caused that to happen. My freedom is on this reading an illusion. But the Bible, nor any Reformed thinker I know of or have read, teaches any such thing. Maybe some who teach this are out there, but I haven’t encountered them (except one gentleman who used to believe this because he thought it was Calvinism, then rejected Calvinism because of his faulty reading of Calvin!). This isn’t to say that God can’t or doesn’t cause things to happen. One verse which is impossible to explain away in this regard is Is. 45:7
I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things.
So God clearly causes things to happen, but does this imply he causes everything to happen? No. Does it tell us the nature of such causation when he does? No. When we speculate about how God does what he does, we’re diving into infinitely deep waters where we will most assuredly drown.
The Bible is clear: God is sovereign over all things, in control of all things, and as David tell us in I Chron. 29, “the ruler of all things.” Yet in God’s kingly rule over his entire creation, there is human freedom. Not only is this freedom demonstrated and implied all throughout Scripture, we know it intuitively and experience it in our own existence. Some might be surprised, but The Westminster Confession, the famous Reformed confession of faith, agrees when it states plainly on the subject of free will:
God has endued the will of man with that natural liberty, that is neither forced, nor, by any absolute necessity of nature, determined good, or evil.
This freedom of will is not abrogated by the fall; we didn’t all of a sudden become robots because of sin. But when sin entered the world, we “wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation.” Our will vis-a-vis our relationship to God is completely corrupted, and we are unable and unwilling to seek him. We all by nature hide from God just like Adam and Eve did.
Martin Luther called this The Bondage of the Will in his book that challenged Erasmus‘ conception of free will. We cannot choose God, we cannot even seek God because we are dead in our sin. Not mostly dead, but all dead; big difference. Another way to look at this from the opposite side of the human mortality perspective is when Jesus told Nicodemus that we must be born again or we cannot see or enter the Kingdom of God. Jesus didn’t use the birth metaphor for salvation haphazardly. The human being that is physically conceived and eventually born has absolutely zero choice in the matter. Zip, zero, nada! It is exactly the same for those spiritually conceived and born again. It is a wholly sovereign, supernatural re-birth, as if a valley of dry bones came back to life, as if a heart of stone was miraculously turned into a heart of flesh, and as if a dead man came back to life.
Many Christians think it just isn’t fair that God wouldn’t give every human being an equal chance at salvation. But God doesn’t do fair; he does justice or mercy. As he says to Moses, he will have mercy on whom he will have mercy. If words mean anything in the Bible, the choice is all his. That’s why Matthew tell us Jesus was given his name, that he came to save his people from their sin. Not make it possible for all, but actual for them. None of this means we are not free creatures with actually free will, only that we don’t have the free will to chose God.
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