Predestination is the doctrine that states how God determines what will happen in human history according to his eternal will and pleasure. The debate on these doctrines is generally split between two camps: Calvinists and Arminians.
Before getting into how these two differ on this issue, allow me to list some points of agreement although, as you will see below, how each scheme works out these concepts is different. Both sides agree that:.
The differences that exist between Arminianism and Calvinism stem from the question of how human choice factors into predestination and election. If God chooses who is included in His people, does the individual therefore not choose?
Arminians answer this question by stating that people do in fact choose for themselves to believe in Jesus — free will is a value in Arminianism. A dead person cannot come back to life — a dead person needs to be raised. This results in working out predestination and election in the following ways:.
Many people make the mistake of concluding that in the Calvinist scheme, the person has no choice in salvation. Calvinists do not believe that God makes anyone a Christian against their will. So how should we understand the way personal choice factors into election for a Calvinist? Allow me to illustrate. Imagine you are a child on Christmas morning, and your father has just placed a gift in your lap to open.
As you open it, you quickly realize it is not anything you asked for — yet it is the most interesting and delightful toy you have ever seen. In fact, after all the gifts have been opened, it is your favorite present of all.
Did your father force you to like the gift, as if you were a robot? Did he make you enjoy that gift against your will? But in his wisdom, as he planned for Christmas day, he predetermined to give you that gift out of his gracious love for you, his child.
And it was precisely in the giving of the gift that he also gave you the desire for, love of, and joy over the gift. This is where a distinction is helpful to understand this. Preterition is God's passing over some when He choose others. Condemnation is God's actual consigning the passed over to eternal punishment. Condemnation, therefore, is subsequent to preterition. In other words, election and reprobation are not precisely parallel, as God's positive choice in grace is what makes us elect, while His withholding of grace by passing by means that others will be left in their sins and because of that are therefore condemned by God.
Some detractors of reprobation say that it is debilitating to the Christian life. Let me address the two common pastoral issues this doctrine often creates. It's easy for some of us who are affected with the struggle of seeing life as a glass half empty to hear a doctrine like reprobation and to live in doubt, but there are different categories of people who hear this doctrine and have a difficult time with it.
First, there are believers who have a living faith in Christ, are assured in their souls, have peace of conscience, and desire to be obedient to the glory of God. Yet even these believers are not completely assured at all times. Reprobation may bring this out in their minds and hearts. The answer is making perpetual use of the means that God has appointed for working His grace in you—the Word, the sacraments, and prayer.
The second kind of believer is the one struggling with ongoing sin. Are you beset by some sin that is keeping you from a stronger relationship with Christ?
You should not be afraid when you hear of reprobation because in His mercy, God has promised that He will not quench the smoking flax nor break the bruised reed Isa. Finally, there is a category of hearer that needs to be worried when this doctrine is mentioned. It's not believers who need to be worried but those who have wholly given themselves over to the cares of the world and the pleasures of the flesh.
If this is you, reprobation should be fearful; but its mention is also the opportunity to repent and believe in Jesus Christ.
A second practical problem is how reprobation relates to infants who die? The caricature described in the Canons of Dort is that those who hold to a doctrine of reprobation believe "many children of the faithful are torn, guiltless, from their mothers' breasts, and tyrannically plunged into hell" CD, Conclusion. So how does the doctrine of reprobation relate to this struggle? The Scriptures teach us as believers that our children are covenant children. The children of at least one believing parent are holy 1 Cor.
The Lord made His covenant with Abraham and his children Gen. When David found out his child died, he ceased weeping and fasting and arose in confidence that while his son would not come back to him, one day David would see him 2 Sam. In the presence of God. David prayed as a covenant member that when he was in his mother's womb it was the Lord who was forming him and who knew him Ps. Moving into the New Testament we see that nothing changes.
So the doctrine of predestination was already a problem in the 17th century, even within the Calvinist tradition, and there had been similar quarrels within the Lutheran tradition. Most of the Reformed confessions of the Presbyterian tradition reflect a doctrine of predestination as a part of justification by grace; some are more explicit than others.
But many 20th-century Presbyterians have been very concerned about the few statements in the confessions that suggest that God has from all eternity condemned some people to eternal death.
All through the history of the church this has been a doctrine that has been warmly embraced by some but has caused problems for others. It is my impression that most contemporary Presbyterians have not been nearly as interested in the doctrine of predestination as people outside the Presbyterian Church assume they must be.
Presbyterians have perhaps been forced to take up the question recently for two reasons. In the second half of the 20th century there has been pressure to write new confessions, and in writing these the church has had to ask quite seriously how we now understand this doctrine.
There has also been pressure from ecumenical conversations: The renewal of Catholic-Protestant dialogues and also dialogues with other Protestants have brought the questions of justification by grace and predestination back into the ecumenical conversation. I think at least four points are important. The doctrine of predestination re-emphasizes that God alone is Lord. In the second place, the doctrine of predestination functions for us today, as well as it did for Luther and Calvin, to safeguard the doctrine of justification by grace.
And Reformed predestination is a way of saying God has taken the initiative in giving us these gifts. It is a doctrine that gives us confidence as we stand before God as forgiven sinners.
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