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God does what He wills; fallen man finds this irredeemably offensive. Even many who profess faith in Christ cite passages from Scripture against their plain sense, which is that whatever happens, happens according to His eternal decree to create.
Over the past nine years, while working on Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, launched a few days ago, I came to grasp the foundational status of a Christian’s view of God’s sovereignty. What I believe about it might not sit well with brothers and sisters of mine who closely follow the exegesis of Sellers (1901—1992) in eschatology and ecclesiology, but not necessarily about the being and nature of God, to which the question of His sovereignty pertains.
What I believe about it is basically what the Reformed tradition has taught for half a millennium. If the latter is true, that’s only because that’s what the Bible has taught for millennia—if fidelity to God’s Word is one’s criterion of truth. I would only remind them that in differing from Sellers (and them) on this score, I’m trying to model the individualism that he exemplified. Since they are individuals, however, I cannot safely generalize about their doctrine of God. I cordially invite them to challenge mine.
When I knew Sellers in the late 1970s, I sensed a divergence between what he and I found in the Bible on the topic of God’s knowledge but had reservations about exploring them. I was a Ph.D. student in philosophy, not in Scripture. I was a new Christian learning from him; I didn’t feel comfortable pressing him on philosophical issues.[1] That’s not what I came to him for.
To me, Sellers seemed to write as if he believed that what God knows about us creatures depends in part on what we bring about by our actions. God knows all that He wants to know, but also only what He wants to know. That is, Sellers would say, you cannot “force knowledge” on God, as though God’s knowledge were an avoidable perception rather than a creative constitution of the thing known.
What God chooses to know, however, is what He had already chosen (“in eternity past”) to create—which is causally, organically related to everything else He has created! A change in any member of one class could only affect members of the other class.
God cannot foreknow what a man will do unless his ancestors and contemporaries are in place to condition his actions. For example, Jesus could not have foreknown Peter’s denial of Him unless He also foreknew that no Roman soldier would mortally wound Peter before his betrayal in a disturbance that might have arisen in the temple courtyard that fateful night. And the same goes for all the ancestors of all of the men and women we meet in pages of God’s Word. But God is not a supercomputer. He foreknows (יָדַע, yada) all that transpires in space and time, and He does so causally, not passively: “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew (יְדַעְתִּ֔יךָ, yadatikah) you.” (Jeremiah 1:5) There is, therefore, no need for Him to “micromanage” spatiotemporal affairs “along the way,” so to speak, to ensure the fulfilment of prophecy.
At the risk of making my readers uncomfortable: God cannot know non-pornographic things perfectly without also knowing the pornographic things to which they are causally related. He knows the content of every pornographic film, but that doesn’t mean His relationship to it is like that of its sinful human audience. Sellers would invoke the prophet Habakkuk: “His eyes are too pure than to behold evil (רָ֑ע, rah), and He cannot look upon iniquity” (Habakkuk 1:13), as if that settles the matter. But the evil (רָ֑ע, rah) He doesn’t (anthropomorphically) “behold,” He creates! (Isaiah 45:7). It’s the same word in both verses. No “blind spot” mars His grasp of creation.
His working all things (τὰ πάντα, ta panta) after the counsel of His will (Ephesians 1:11) includes pornography and every other evil. I see no reason to, but rather every reason not to, follow Sellers in restricting the scope of “all” to the immediate context (as he has exegeted other passages where τὰ πάντα occurs): all things (πάντα, panta) emerged (ἐγένετο, egeneto) from His creative act, and without the latter, nothing has emerged (γέγονεν, gegonen). (John 1:3).
In creating this world, He who transcends space and time created the space-time continuum and all the spatiotemporal interactions that occur within it—including those between Himself and His created image-bearers, such as between the Son of God and His murderers. That His cognitive grasp of His creation is not absolute is, for me, simply not a biblically faithful possibility. (Since my grasp is imperfect, however, I’m open to counterargument.) We often have specific, detailed purposes for our days, our years, our lives. Why should God’s purpose in creation be thought less meticulous than ours?
God’s perfect foreknowledge does not imply (as some suggest it must) that we are not responsible for what we do because “we could not have done otherwise.” To argue thus is to bring to the Scriptures an alien standard of knowledge, one that flatters a sinner in his presumption of autonomy. God is the only autonomous actor.
That is, we do not refute “Calvinist” metaphysics—which I believe many are eager to do, but which I have come to believe falls naturally off the Bible’s pages—merely by showing that it offends secularly humanist sensibilities toward what we “must” be free to do (including “doing otherwise”).
To be continued.
Notes
[1] Another issue was the Trinity, which I called “tripersonalism.” He was averse to using traditional language for any idea he thought couldn’t be derived from Scripture; thus, my terminological accommodation. In 1979, I wrote a paper, distributed to him and a handful of others, showing that Scripture teaches it. If Sellers had any comment on it, it never reached me.