Undeception

Until a man begins to obey, the light that is in him is darkness.

Any honest soul may understand this much, however—for it is a thing we may of ourselves judge to be right—that the Lord cannot save a man from his sins while he holds to his sins. An omnipotence that could do and not do the same thing at the same moment, were an idea too absurd for mockery; an omnipotence that could at once make a man a free man, and leave him a self-degraded slave—make him the very likeness of God, and good only because he could not help being good, would be an idea of the same character—equally absurd, equally self-contradictory.

But the Lord is not unreasonable; he requires no high motives where such could not yet exist. He does not say, ‘You must be sorry for your sins, or you need not come to me:’ to be sorry for his sins a man must love God and man, and love is the very thing that has to be developed in him. It is but common sense that a man, longing to be freed from suffering, or made able to bear it, should betake himself to the Power by whom he is. Equally is it common sense that, if a man would be delivered from the evil in him, he must himself begin to cast it out, himself begin to disobey it, and work righteousness. As much as either is it common sense that a man should look for and expect the help of his Father in the endeavour. Alone, he might labour to all eternity and not succeed. He who has not made himself, cannot set himself right without him who made him. But his maker is in him, and is his strength. The man, however, who, instead of doing what he is told, broods speculating on the metaphysics of him who calls him to his work, stands leaning his back against the door by which the Lord would enter to help him. The moment he sets about putting straight the thing that is crooked—I mean doing right where he has been doing wrong, he withdraws from the entrance, gives way for the Master to come in.

George MacDonald (from his sermon “Salvation from Sin” in The Hope of the Gospel, 1892)

The one originating, living, visible truth, embracing all truths in all relations, is Jesus Christ. He is true; he is the live Truth. His truth, chosen and willed by him, the ripeness of his being, the flower of his sonship which is his nature, the crown of his one topmost perfect relation acknowledged and gloried in, is his absolute obedience to his father. The obedient Jesus is Jesus the Truth. He is true and the root of all truth and development of truth in men…

He gives us the will wherewith to will, and the power to use it, and the help needed to supplement the power, whatever in any case the need may be; but we ourselves must will the truth, and for that the Lord is waiting, for the victory of God his father in the heart of his child. In this alone can he see of the travail of his soul, in this alone be satisfied. The work is his, but we must take our willing share. When the blossom breaks forth in us, the more it is ours the more it is his, for the highest creation of the Father, and that pre-eminently through the Son, is the being that can, like the Father and the Son, of his own self will what is right. The groaning and travailing, the blossom and the joy, are the Father’s and the Son’s and ours. The will, the power of willing, may be created, but the willing is begotten. Because God wills first, man wills also.

When my being is consciously and willedly in the hands of him who called it to live and think and suffer and be glad—given back to him by a perfect obedience—I thenceforward breathe the breath, share the life of God himself. Then I am free, in that I am true—which means one with the Father.

by George MacDonald
from Unspoken Sermons, vol. 2, “The Truth”

For the will is the deepest, the strongest, the divinest thing in man; so, I presume, is it in God, for such we find it in Jesus Christ. Here, and here only, in the relation of the two wills, God’s and his own, can a man come into vital contact—on the eternal idea, in no one-sided unity of completest dependence, but in willed harmony of dual oneness—with the All-in-all. When a man can and does entirely say, ‘Not my will, but thine be done’—when he so wills the will of God as to do it, then is he one with God—one, as a true son with a true father. When a man wills that his being be conformed to the being of his origin, which is the life in his life, causing and bearing his life, therefore absolutely and only of its kind, one with it more and deeper than words or figures can say—to the life which is itself, only more of itself, and more than itself, causing itself—when the man thus accepts his own causing life, and sets himself to live the will of that causing life, humbly eager after the privileges of his origin,—thus receiving God, he becomes, in the act, a partaker of the divine nature, a true son of the living God, and an heir of all he possesses: by the obedience of a son, he receives into himself the very life of the Father. Obedience is the joining of the links of the eternal round.

George MacDonald
from Unspoken Sermons, vol. 2, “Life”

One of Calvinists’ staple arguments in favor of monergism is the inference that positing God as relying, in some sense, upon our decision to participate in salvation is actually a demotion of God, a heinous and (usually) heretical inversion of man’s sovereignty over that of God’s. On Facebook today, a Calvinist posted the following statement:

It is no less blasphemous to proclaim Allah to be god than to proclaim the one true God to be a slave of your own will and whim.

I’m pretty sure he meant to state it in reverse order: it was an attack on non-Calvinists rather than Muslims. I think his point was that those who “proclaim the one true God to be a slave…” are no better than Muslims.

One of his friends concurred, asking rhetorically, “Where in the whole Bible does [God] give man authority over Him?”

That brought me into it.

I responded that, while I might quibble with the specific formulation of this question, the whole concept of prayer changing things, Moses changing God’s mind about killing the whole mass of the children of Israel, Abraham bartering with God over Sodom, etc. clearly portrays God as allowing people to decisively influence His actions. Why is it spitting in His face to entertain the belief that this same economy prevails even in the area of salvation? Even though I dislike it being framed in terms of “authority”, it is no less true that delegating authority is not ceding authority, but a mark of authority.

Someone else responded to my comment succinctly: “So, for God, the future changes?”

Without wanting to get into Open Theism, I responded that the fatal problem is in saying that because God has apparently (as Scripture presents it) chosen to respond to human action that He is therefore being forcibly enslaved to our own will and whim. These sorts of conclusions are based off of overreaching desires to systematize that disregard much of Scripture’s testimony.

The chief “faults” of non-Calvinists are that they don’t take their logical systems too seriously when applying them to God’s sovereignty and man’s will, and that they take the depictions of God as He interacts with man throughout Scripture too seriously.

Non-Calvinists see no need for fancy footwork to explain away the fact that the biblical authors are clearly trying to portray God as “repenting” of certain actions based upon some factor, such as pre-Flood mankind’s sinful behavior or Moses’ prayer. They see no reason to deny that “Ye have not because Ye ask not” means anything other than “God’s giving is actually contingent upon your asking.” They have encountered no logical rationale necessitating the conclusion that soteriologically related petitions such as “Choose life!” and “Repent!” were imperatives merely chosen to sound exactly like they demand human response, when all the while they were simply code phrases for “Just hang tight while I enact my plan to redeem and damn whomever I already decided I was going to.”

Yes, the Bible says that it is God who called and predestined; it says that some are, whensoever He wills, just plain SOL. If, as I doubt, it does indeed logically and necessarily follow from those propositions that our actions cannot influence God decisively, then you’re stuck with Scripture contradicting itself — which I’m fine with, by the way, but most Calvinists aren’t! We shouldn’t rely so heavily on our logic and our ability to systematize away the tensions in Scripture that, when we consequently run roughshod over clear depictions like I mentioned above, we end up excommunicating those who aren’t willing to do so despite their honest confession of God as sovereign. That is my main beef with the majority of Calvinists I have encountered.