The essential element in order to be categorized as a ‘Gnostic’ is the belief that a rival evil god created the evil cosmos composed of physical matter.[26] Gnostics were cosmic dualists, meaning that everything composed of physical matter was evil and everything non-physical (spiritual) was good. Humans are born evil because they possess a physical body. Therefore humans are damned at birth. Valentinus, a Gnostic, taught God offered the message of salvation to every human equally; however, only the predetermined elect were empowered by god to accept that invitation.[27]The Gnostic god unilaterally restored right reason to the helplessly corrupted human will through a gift to the mind (Corp. Herm.4.4; 6,68.36; 6,69.31–32; DH.5.3). When divine grace implanted that spiritual seed then the elects’ salvation was compelled by their new “free will” by their own “free choice.” The scholar Gilles Quispel articulated this Gnostic Valentinian separation of the elect (“predestined not to fall into foolishness”) from the damned evil nature of the majority of humanity (Treat. Res.46).[28] “All works are predestined, discipline and abstinence effect nothing, and the elect are saved by knowing that they are saved.”[29]
In contrast, the lλικοi (persons of earthly matter) were hopelessly damned from birth.[30] The Gnostic portrayal of Pharaoh as a ruined nature incapable of salvation precipitated Origen’s famous rebuttal (Princ.3.1.8) in defending free choice against Gnostic Divine Unilateral Predetermination of Individuals’ Eternal Destinies (DUPIED). Several Gnostic texts in the Nag Hammadi Library describe God’s command to be saved or God’s sole prerogative to save only some. This is a DUPIED requirement.
It is God’s business to save whom he wants; it is the business of the god-loving man to beseech God to save everyone. (Sentences of Sextus [Pythagoreanl, 373–374)
When the Gnostic god gave (forced) what he commanded, then he could command whatever he willed (humans would obey without fail).
Present a command to us to see Thee, so that we may be saved. Knowledge of Thee, it is the salvation of us all! Present a command! When Thou dost command, we have been saved. (The Three Steles of Seth, 125; cf. The Teaching of Silvanus, 114–115).[31]
“Only because the supreme God, in His infinite mercifulness and inscrutable will, at a certain moment decided to turn Himself towards the potential Gnostic, can he effectively convert himself.”[32] The Gnostic god must regenerate a person before that person is able to believe. Also in Gnosticism both ‘free will’ and ‘forced grace’ are taught simultaneously. Unfortunately, only the elect were given a healed ‘free will’ to accept this salvation offered to “everyone” (but offered unequally, cf. Hippolytus, Haer.5.14.1).
Jewish, Christian, and pagan philosophers alike unanimously denounced Gnostic Divine Unilateral Predetermination of Individuals’ Eternal Destinies (DUPIED) because it robbed humans of free choice, self-determination, and the universal opportunity for salvation.[33] Irenaeus of Lyons (ca.180) argued against Gnostic determinism, comparing their view to Stoic determinism (Adv. haer.1.6.2; 2.29.1–31; 2.14.4).[34]Clement of Alexandria refuted the Gnostic Basilides’ followers who claimed faith itself was a gift of God, with some persons being incapable of belief because they did not receive that ‘natural’ gift of faith (Strom.2.3–4). Clement claimed Gnostics used scripture (such as Romans 11) to prove their determinism (Exc. Theod. 56.3–27).[35] The premier church historian, Chadwick, summarized the early Christian response to Gnosticism:
For in rejecting the Gnostic way the Christians thereby rejected as inauthentic adulteration and corruption any theology of pure revelation teaching salvation by an arbitrary predestination of the elect and the total depravity of the lost, and possessing no criteria of rational judgment.[36]
Ken Wilson, The Foundation of Augustinian-Calvinism (Regula Fidei Press, 2019), 11–14.
FOOTNOTES
Mark Edwards, Catholicity and Heresy in the Early Church (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 1; found in Porphyry’s title to Enn. 2.9.
Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), 151–154; Ev. Ver. 11, 30–31; Corp. Herm. 1.26. The elect were πνευματικοί (spiritual ones) possessing Light particles required for salvation from ignorance.
Gilles Quispel, “The Original Doctrine of Valentine,” Vigiliae Christianae 1 (1947): 43–73.
Mark Edwards, Culture and Philosophy in the Age of Plotinus (London: Duckworth, 2006), 152.
Karen King, What is Gnosticism? (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 205; but see Wilson, Augustine’s Conversion, 13–15.
Note the similarity between this phrase from the Gnostic The Three Steles of Seth and Augustine’s famous line in his Confessions 10.31, to which Pelagius reacted as being a non-Christian concept: “Oh Lord, command what you will and give what you command.”
Giovanni Filoramo, “The Transformation of the Inner Self in Gnostic and Hermetic Texts,” in Jan Assmann and Guy G. Stroumsa, eds., Transformations of the Inner Self in Ancient Religions (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 139.
Dihle (1982), 152.
Jens Holzhausen, “Valentinus and Valentinians,” in Wouter Hanegraaff, ed., Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 1150–1154; cf. Origen’s Comm. Ev. Jo., fr. 46 (John 8:44a).
Jeffrey Bingham, “Irenaeus Reads Romans 8: Resurrection and Renovation,” in Kathy Gaca and Laurence Welborn, eds., Early Patristic Readings of Romans in Romans Through History and Culture Series (London: T&T Clark, 2005), 124.
Henry Chadwick, Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 9.
This next excerpt [in full] comes by way of Apologetics Vaughn and shows the “intriguing similarities between the two”, that is, Calvinism and Gnosticism:
Gnosticism and Calvinism are two distinct theological systems with different origins and core tenets. However, despite their differences, there are some intriguing similarities between the two that warrant exploration. These similarities primarily revolve around the concepts of election, dualism, knowledge, and limited atonement.
Election and Predestination:
Both Gnosticism and Calvinism emphasize the concept of election, where a select group is chosen for salvation. In Gnosticism, this election is based on possessing special knowledge (gnosis) or belonging to a spiritual elite. Gnostics believe that only those with this esoteric knowledge can transcend the material world and achieve salvation. Similarly, Calvinism upholds the doctrine of predestination, where God has sovereignly chosen a select few for salvation before the foundation of the world. While the basis for election differs between the two systems (knowledge vs. divine decree), the concept of a predetermined group destined for salvation is a common thread.
Dualism:
Gnosticism is inherently dualistic, positing a stark separation between the material world (seen as evil or flawed) and the spiritual realm (seen as pure and good). This dualistic worldview leads Gnostics to view the material world with contempt and to seek escape from its clutches through spiritual enlightenment. While Calvinism does not embrace the same level of dualism as Gnosticism, it does emphasize the depravity of human nature and the fallenness of the world, contrasting it with the holiness and sovereignty of God. This emphasis on the separation between the divine and the human, and the inherent sinfulness of humanity, can be seen as a point of convergence with Gnostic thought.
Knowledge:
Gnosticism places a high value on esoteric knowledge (gnosis) as the key to salvation. This knowledge is not readily available to everyone but is reserved for a select few who are deemed worthy. Similarly, while Calvinism does not rely on secret knowledge, it does emphasize the importance of understanding and accepting the doctrines of grace and the sovereignty of God. This emphasis on theological knowledge as a crucial component of faith can be seen as a parallel with Gnostic thought, where knowledge plays a central role in achieving salvation.
Limited Atonement:
Calvinism teaches the doctrine of limited atonement, which posits that Christ’s death on the cross was only intended for the elect. This exclusivity resonates with the Gnostic notion that salvation is only accessible to a select few who possess the necessary spiritual knowledge or insight. Both systems, in their own way, limit the scope of salvation to a chosen group, whether that group is defined by knowledge or divine decree.
Additional Similarities:
Beyond these core similarities, there are other potential points of convergence between Gnosticism and Calvinism. Both systems can be interpreted as promoting a hierarchical view of salvation, where some individuals are seen as more spiritually advanced or favored than others. Both systems also place a strong emphasis on the sovereignty of God (or a higher power) in determining the fate of individuals.
It is important to note that these similarities should not be overstated. Gnosticism and Calvinism are distinct theological systems with significant differences in their understanding of God, creation, and salvation. However, exploring the similarities between these two systems can shed light on the complex and multifaceted nature of religious beliefs and practices.
“If God sovereignly determines who will be saved and who will be damned, why does He still find fault?”
The alternative reading:
“If my rebellion and unrighteousness are being used by God to accomplish His redemptive purposes, why am I still being blamed?”
For years, Romans 9 has been used to support Calvinism’s most controversial doctrines—unconditional election, reprobation, and double predestination. But what if you’ve been reading it all wrong? In this eye-opening breakdown, we unpack the true identity of the interlocutor in Romans 9—hint: it’s not a 21st-century Arminian or Provisionist. It’s a hardened first-century Israelite rebelling against God’s redemptive plan. Discover how Paul uses the potter and clay analogy, not to teach predestined damnation, but to reveal God’s sovereign right to use Israel’s rebellion to bring salvation to the Gentiles.
00:00 – All are sinful, but all are responsible 00:45 – Who is the interlocutor in Romans 9? 02:00 – Calvinism and the potter-clay analogy 04:00 – Israel’s hardening: self-inflicted, not decreed 05:25 – Echoes of Romans 3: The same objector returns 07:00 – Sovereignty doesn’t require control 09:00 – Cross-reference: 2 Timothy 2 and Jeremiah 18 11:00 – You can cleanse yourself and be used for good 13:00 – God uses rebellion, but doesn’t cause it 14:30 – Why Calvinism’s reading of Romans 9 falls apart
Who Is the Interlocutor in Romans 9?
One of the most important—and often overlooked—questions in the debate over Romans 9 is the identity of Paul’s interlocutor: the person Paul anticipates objecting to what he has just said.
The answer matters because the identity of the objector determines what Paul’s response is actually addressing. If the interlocutor is objecting to God’s unconditional election and reprobation of individuals, then Romans 9 can be read as Paul’s answer to the familiar Calvinist objection:
If God determines who will be saved and who will be damned, why does He still find fault?
But if the interlocutor is someone else, then Paul may be answering an entirely different question.
The Calvinist Reading
The traditional Calvinist interpretation understands Paul’s argument roughly this way:
Paul declares that God has mercy on whom He wills and hardens whom He wills. The interlocutor then objects: “Then why does God still find fault? For who can resist His will?”
Under this reading, the objection is essentially:
“If God sovereignly determines who will receive saving grace and who will not, and no one can resist His sovereign will, how can God justly blame those who remain unbelieving?”
Paul’s answer is then understood as a response to that objection:
“Who are you, O man, to answer back to God?”
In other words, the Calvinist interpretation sees Paul anticipating the very objection that Provisionists, Arminians, and other non-Calvinists raise against unconditional election and reprobation today.
But there is a significant problem with that interpretation: the identity of the objector cannot simply be assumed. It must be established from the context.
If the Calvinist begins by assuming that Paul’s interlocutor is objecting to individual election and reprobation and then uses Paul’s response to prove individual election and reprobation, the argument becomes circular.
It is question begging. The very thing that must first be demonstrated—what Paul is talking about—has already been assumed.
What Problem Is Paul Actually Addressing?
Romans 9 does not begin with a philosophical discussion about free will, determinism, or individual predestination. It begins with Israel.
Paul expresses profound sorrow over his fellow Israelites. He even says that he could wish himself accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of his fellow Jews. He then lists Israel’s extraordinary privileges: adoption, glory, covenants, the giving of the Law, worship, promises, the patriarchs, and ultimately the Messiah.
That immediately raises the central question Paul is attempting to answer:
If Israel was God’s covenant people and had received all these promises, why are so many Israelites rejecting their own Messiah? Has God’s promise failed?
Paul’s answer begins with a crucial statement:
“It is not as though God’s word had failed.”
That statement provides an important lens through which the rest of Romans 9–11 can be understood. The issue is not simply, “Who goes to heaven and who goes to hell?” The larger issue is whether God’s promises and purposes concerning Israel have failed because so many Israelites have rejected Christ.
The argument presented in The Potter’s Promise therefore understands Romans 9–11 as addressing God’s faithfulness to His promises despite Israel’s unfaithfulness. God’s purposes will stand even when the people through whom He intended to accomplish those purposes prove unfaithful.
So Who Is the Interlocutor?
On this reading, Paul’s interlocutor is essentially a hardened, self-righteous Israelite within the context of Paul’s discussion of Israel.
The person is not necessarily a hypothetical first-century equivalent of a modern Arminian saying, “If God unconditionally elects some people and reprobates others, then how can He blame them?”
Instead, the objection is connected to God’s use of Israel’s rebellion to accomplish His purposes:
“If my unrighteousness and rebellion are being used by God to accomplish His purposes, why am I still being blamed?”
This becomes particularly significant when Romans 9:19 is compared with the earlier objection in Romans 3:1–7. In Romans 3, Paul anticipates essentially the same kind of objection:
“If our unrighteousness brings out God’s righteousness more clearly, what shall we say? That God is unjust in bringing His wrath on us?”
The objector’s reasoning is straightforward:
If my unrighteousness ultimately serves to demonstrate God’s righteousness, why should God judge me for it?
Romans 9:19 then presents a remarkably similar question:
“Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?”
The connection suggests that Paul is dealing with a recurring objection from within the same larger argument—not necessarily introducing an entirely new philosophical objection about individual predestination.
The Potter, the Clay, and Israel
This also changes how the imagery of the potter and the clay is understood.
The potter imagery has its background in Jeremiah 18, where God explicitly applies the potter analogy to Israel: “Can I not do with you, Israel, as this potter does?”
Israel is the clay in the Potter’s hands. The Potter has sovereign authority over His covenant people and can reshape, judge, or use them according to His purposes.
That makes the immediate context of Romans 9 especially important. The question is not merely whether God possesses sovereignty over individual human beings. Of course He does. The question is what He is sovereignly doing in this particular passage.
The argument is that God is sovereignly working through Israel’s history to accomplish His redemptive plan. Israel’s failure does not cause God’s promise to fail.
Pharaoh Is Part of the Same Argument
This is also why Pharaoh is significant. The argument does not treat Pharaoh primarily as an example of God arbitrarily selecting an individual for eternal damnation. Instead, Pharaoh functions as a paradigm for what God is doing with Israel.
God raised Pharaoh up so that His power would be demonstrated and His name proclaimed throughout the earth. In the same way, God can use even an unfaithful and rebellious people to accomplish His larger redemptive purpose.
Thus, when Paul says: “Therefore God has mercy on whom He wants to have mercy, and He hardens whom He wants to harden,” the argument does not necessarily concern God’s arbitrary determination of the eternal destiny of individuals.
Rather, God’s sovereignty includes His right to determine how particular people and groups will be used within His redemptive purposes.
That distinction is critical.
God’s “mercy” and “hardening” can concern a person’s role in God’s historical and redemptive plan without automatically meaning that the person has been unconditionally predestined to heaven or hell.
Hardening Is Not the Same Thing as Being Born Reprobate
There is another important distinction.
The hardened Israelites described in this argument are not portrayed as people who were born judicially hardened. Rather, they had already become hardened through rebellion, unbelief, and resistance to God. God then judicially hardened them for a particular purpose.
That distinction becomes particularly important when Romans 9 is read together with Romans 11. Paul says that Israel was cut off because of unbelief, but he also holds out the possibility that those who were cut off could be grafted in again if they did not continue in unbelief.
That is a very different picture from an eternally reprobated individual who was unconditionally passed over before birth with no possibility of salvation. The hardened Israelites remain objects of Paul’s hope. They can be provoked to jealousy, turn from unbelief, and be grafted back into God’s people. That continuing possibility of restoration is highly significant for understanding the nature of the hardening in Romans 9.
Romans 9 Cannot Be Separated From Romans 10 and 11
This is perhaps the most important contextual point.
Romans 9 cannot simply be lifted out of Romans 9–11 and treated as an isolated proof text for unconditional individual election.
Paul’s discussion continues into Romans 10, where he expresses his heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel—that they may be saved. He then describes Israel as having stumbled through unbelief while the Gentiles are being brought into God’s righteousness through faith.
Romans 11 continues the same story. Israel’s rejection is not the end of the story. The branches that were broken off because of unbelief can be grafted in again. The overarching picture, then, is of God’s sovereign plan moving forward despite Israel’s unbelief, not God’s arbitrary creation of two classes of human beings—those unconditionally destined for salvation and those unconditionally destined for destruction.
The Two Interpretations
CLICK TO ENLARGE
The difference can therefore be summarized very simply. The Calvinist reading:
“If God sovereignly determines who will be saved and who will be damned, why does He still find fault?”
The alternative reading:
“If my rebellion and unrighteousness are being used by God to accomplish His redemptive purposes, why am I still being blamed?”
Those are two fundamentally different objections.
And consequently, Paul’s response—
“Who are you, O man, to answer back to God?”
—takes on a different meaning depending upon which objection is actually being presented.
If the Calvinist interpretation is correct, Romans 9 is a powerful answer to the charge that God’s sovereign election and reprobation are unjust.
But if the alternative interpretation is correct, Romans 9 is not Paul defending Calvinistic reprobation at all.
Paul is explaining how God’s sovereign purposes concerning Israel remain intact despite Israel’s rebellion, how God can use even hardened vessels to accomplish His purposes, and how His covenant promises ultimately extend beyond ethnic Israel to include believing Gentiles.
That makes the identity of the interlocutor absolutely critical. The question is therefore not merely: “Does Romans 9 teach God’s sovereignty?”
It unquestionably does. The more important question is:
“What is the objection Paul is answering, and what exactly is the sovereign activity of God that the objector believes is unjust?”
Until that question is answered from the context, using Romans 9 as Paul’s definitive answer to the Calvinist doctrine of unconditional election and reprobation risks putting a theological question into Paul’s mouth that he may not actually be answering.
Soteriology 101 responds to the bees nest being poked:
Dinesh D’Souza, a popular author, filmmaker, and podcast host, has recently confronted the Calvinistic doctrine of Predestination and has received some very vitriolic rebuttals from the online Calvinistic community, including (as you may suspect) from James White. Many on X seem to think that anyone who doesn’t agree with Calvinism just cannot understand it.
Partial transcript from the above:
…So just because we argue that God does love everyone in the world and provides for everyone in the world, therefore we are somehow saying that God must love everyone in the world and provide salvation to everyone in the world—that’s just a fallacy. Okay? You’ll see these kinds of fallacies repeated over and over and over again.
Once you do this long enough, like I have, you start spotting it immediately. It takes a little while sometimes to see through the smoke screens and the fallacies, but they’re basically the same things repeated ad nauseam by the different Calvinists online again and again and again. And the more you engage it, the more you’ll begin to recognize it and be able to call it out for what it is.
And so basically what he’s saying is, because Dinesh argues that God does provide salvation for all people, therefore God owes salvation to all people. And that’s never what Dinesh argues. Okay?
What he’s ultimately arguing is that if mankind can’t respond positively, then why are they held responsible for not responding positively? And Calvinists don’t have an answer to that. That’s where they appeal to mystery. That’s where they just say, “Hmm, we don’t know.”
At least that’s what Calvin said, as we’ve quoted here many times. Let me put it back up on the screen for you, just for those that are tuning in for the first time, because I know this stuff with Dinesh is bringing in a lot of new audience.
So let me read from John Calvin what he says about this:
“How it was ordained by the foreknowledge and decree of God what man’s future was, without God being implicated as an associate in the fault, as the approver or author of transgressions, is clearly a secret so much excelling the insight of the human mind that I’m not ashamed to confess ignorance. Daily I so meditate on these mysteries of his judgments that curiosity to know anything more does not attract me.”
What is John Calvin saying?
“I don’t know how God is not implicated as the associate in the fault. I don’t know how he’s not the author and the approver of transgression.”
In other words, I don’t know how God’s good. I really don’t know how God’s good.
Really, that’s what he’s saying.
I, guys, would much rather appeal to the mystery of man’s capriciousness than to the character of God. For goodness’ sake, folks, we cannot appeal to mystery as to whether God’s good or not.
This is why C. S. Lewis argued that you can make God ultimately an all-powerful demon by saying his black is our white and our white is his black, and making these kinds of arguments that say, “Well, I don’t know how he’s good. We just believe that he is,” even though he’s responsible for sin and rape and the Holocaust and all these horrible, bad things by decreeing them to come to pass.
And this is the fault line of the entire Calvinistic system: that God’s holding men responsible for things they have ultimately no control over.
That’s the basic fault line of the entire Calvinistic system. And Dinesh is poking them in the sore spot. What’s that? How does God justly hold people responsible for things they have absolutely no control over? And they have absolutely no control over whether they’re elect or reprobate.
No control over that. They have absolutely no control over whether they can believe the gospel or not.
Absolutely no control over that. They have absolutely no control over whether they are born guilty of sin or not. They’re just born guilty of sin because Adam fell, representing them in the garden.
Universal guilt for the sin of Adam is the instead of the imputed guilt through your actual choice to sin, and imputed righteousness through faith, as we would understand Romans 5—imputation of guilt and righteousness based upon your actual choices, and the age of accountability, and all the things that we argue from the text of Scripture. Look at Soteriology 101 if you want to look for those defenses.
Instead of arguing that, they just argue basically, “You’re born guilty for what Adam did. You cannot choose to believe and follow the provisions of God and come when He calls you and acts like He really wants you to come,” at least because He sends the gospel to all people, calling all people. You can’t want to do that because of the nature you were born with.
You didn’t have any control of the nature you were born with. You’re born a reprobate if you’re on the covenant system. And what Dinesh is going, “How can you possibly blame these people for that?”
This is something that I wasn’t able to share this screen, but this is something I wrote on Twitter a long time ago. I said, according to Calvinism, everyone who ends up in hell is one born rejected by God. They’re non-elect.
That’s what rejected. They’re basically passed over. So on Calvinism, they’re all born rejected by God, unable to believe. Everyone who ends up in hell, born rejected by God, not elect, born unable to believe the gospel—total inability—born guilty for someone else’s sins, that Adam’s sin. They’re born original—that’s original guilt—and they are born without any means of atonement, limited atonement. That’s just true.
Everyone who ends up in hell, those four facts are just truisms on Calvinism: they’re born non-elect, rejected by God, passed over by God, with total inability; unable to believe the gospel because of a nature they were born with; guilty for someone else’s sin, original guilt; and without an atonement provided for them.
How are they not merely pitied as helpless victims rather than justly rebuked and punished as if they had any control of the way they were born?
If Calvinism is true, there is no good reason to not just feel sorry for the unbelievers and the reprobates.
And there certainly doesn’t seem to be any justification for punishing them for all of eternity for something they had absolutely no control over.
The central problem is that W. G. T. Shedd [(1820–1894) was a prominent 19th-century American Presbyterian theologian and professor, best known for his rigorous defense of Reformed theology and divine sovereignty] attempts to hold together exhaustive divine determination and a genuinely self-determining human will without first showing that those claims are logically compatible in the same respect.
This critique is therefore directed first at Shedd’s formulation and only secondarily at Calvinism insofar as Calvinistic compatibilism supplies the framework that creates the tension.
“The Westminster Standards, in common with the Calvinistic creeds generally, begin with affirming the universal sovereignty of God over his entire universe: over heaven, earth, and hell; and comprehend all beings and all events under his dominion. Nothing comes to pass contrary to his decree. Nothing happens by chance. Even moral evil, which he abhors and forbids, occurs by ‘the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God;’ and yet occurs through the agency of the unforced and self-determining will of man as the efficient.”[1]
Shedd is therefore making three claims:
A. Nothing happens contrary to God’s decree.
B. God’s decree encompasses even moral evil.
C. Moral evil nevertheless occurs through the “unforced and self-determining will of man.”
And this is where the law of non-contradiction becomes relevant.
The law of non-contradiction is one of the foundational principles of rational thought. As Ted Honderich’s Oxford Companion to Philosophy explains, “a theory in which this law fails…is an inconsistent theory.”[2]Manuel Velasquez likewise describes the law as “the foundation of logical reasoning.”[3]
William S. Sahakian and Mabel Lewis Sahakian make the implication especially clear when discussing contradictory premises. They explain that when an argument contains premises that contradict one another, “one premise cancels out the other.” It may be possible for one proposition or the other to be true, but contradictory propositions cannot be true simultaneously.[4]
J.P. Moreland makes this principle especially useful by showing how a proposition can also undermine itself. As he puts it, “When a statement fails to satisfy itself (i.e., to conform to its own criteria of validity or acceptability), it is self-refuting…,” in other words, “A” cannot be both “non-A” and “A” at the same time.[5] His examples include statements such as “I cannot say a word in English” when spoken in English, “I do not exist,” and “there are no truths.” In each case, the statement defeats itself because its truth would require the very thing it denies.
This distinction is important because the problem under consideration is not merely that Shedd’s formulation is difficult to understand. The question is whether the propositions themselves are logically compatible.
The appeal to mystery cannot resolve the issue unless the relevant terms are first stabilized: “determines” must identify the factor that makes one outcome certain rather than merely foreknown, “self-determining” must clarify whether the will ultimately settles between alternatives, “ultimate determiner” must distinguish the immediate agent from the decisive causal source, and “permission” must explain whether God merely allows an outcome or decrees the conditions that render it certain.
That principle matters here.
The question is not whether we can place Shedd’s statements together in the same paragraph. Obviously, we can. The question is whether they can all be true in the same sense at the same time.
If “self-determining” means that the human will genuinely determines which choice it will make, then God’s exhaustive decree cannot simultaneously be the determining cause of that same choice. But if God’s decree determines which choice the person will inevitably make, then the person may be the immediate agent of that choice, but calling his will “self-determining” becomes problematic.
So consider the two propositions at the heart of Shedd’s formulation:
God’s decree determines that this particular human action will occur.
And:
The human will is itself self-determining with respect to this particular action.
If “self-determining” means only that the person acts voluntarily according to desire, Shedd may be describing compatibilist freedom; if it means that the person could ultimately determine otherwise under the same conditions, he is invoking libertarian freedom, and the two uses cannot be treated as interchangeable.
The person can be the immediate agent who chooses and can act willingly without external compulsion, but agency and voluntariness do not by themselves establish that the will is the ultimate determiner of the action.
That distinction brings us to the real philosophical question:
Could the person have determined otherwise?
If God’s decree has made one particular outcome certain, then the important question isn’t merely whether the person wanted to do it. The question is whether he possessed the genuine ability to determine an alternative outcome.
And that is why simply calling the will “unforced” does not settle the question. Nor does calling it “self-determining.” Those terms themselves require definition. If “unforced” merely means that nobody externally coerced the person, there is no contradiction in saying that he acted willingly.
But if “self-determining” means that the person’s will ultimately determined which of genuinely available alternatives would occur, then exhaustive divine determination presents a serious logical problem.
The issue, then, is not whether God can know something we do not understand. The issue is whether two mutually exclusive descriptions of the same human choice can both be true in the same sense.
Mystery, Contradiction, and the Limits of the Calvinist Reconciliation
It is important at the outset to distinguish between a mystery and a contradiction. Christianity unquestionably contains truths whose full explanation exceeds human comprehension. The existence of mystery, therefore, is not itself problematic. The more precise question is whether an appeal to mystery acknowledges the limits of human understanding concerning truths revealed in Scripture, or whether it is being employed to reconcile propositions that are themselves incompatible.
This framework now applies directly to the Calvinist appeal to mystery. Wayne Grudem recognizes that Christianity contains truths that exceed full human comprehension, but he also insists that Scripture does not require belief in contradiction.
But it should also be said that Scripture does not ask us to believe in a contradiction. A contradiction would be “There is one God and there is not one God,” or “God is three persons and God is not three persons,” or even (which is similar to the previous statement) “God is three persons and God is one person.” But to say that “God is three persons and there is one God” is not a contradiction.[6]
The significance of Grudem’s observation is not that mystery is illegitimate, but that mystery cannot simply be invoked as a substitute for theological coherence. Doctrine may transcend our comprehension without being contradictory.
Rogers advances the argument by moving the issue from general logical coherence to the source of the alleged mystery: if the difficulty arises only after Calvinistic premises are added, then the burden rests on those premises rather than on biblical mystery itself.
This distinction is especially significant in William G. T. Shedd’s treatment of the origin of sin. Shedd acknowledges that the relationship between God’s permissive decree and the entrance of sin presents an “inscrutable mystery.”
Yet Rogers argues that the mystery arises precisely because Calvinism combines divine determinism with compatibilism. Within compatibilism, the creature freely acts according to his strongest desire, but that desire itself is determined by antecedent conditions. Consequently, the creature’s choice is free in the compatibilist sense while, given the identical antecedent conditions, he could not actually have chosen otherwise.
Compatibilism is therefore not an escape from determinism but a particular account of freedom within determinism. John Hendryx explicitly acknowledges that “compatibilism is a form of determinism,” adding that it is “no less deterministic than hard determinism,” so the key question becomes whether responsibility and voluntariness are enough to justify calling the will self-determining.
MacArthur sharpens the causal issue by framing God as the primary cause and human beings as secondary causes “moved by the primary cause.” Even if MacArthur rejects the conclusion that God is morally responsible for evil, his formulation confirms the analytical question: can a will moved by a determining primary cause also be called the ultimate determiner of its own choice?
This creates a significant difficulty for Shedd’s appeal to divine permission. Shedd can distinguish God’s permission from direct efficiency and can affirm that the creature freely apostatized. But if God sovereignly established the nature and antecedent conditions from which the creature’s desires necessarily arose, then describing the fall as something God merely permitted does not by itself explain how the fall was not also encompassed within the determinative structure of God’s decree. Rogers therefore observes that Shedd’s language concerning the unfallen will possessing the power to remain holy, while simultaneously acknowledging that its apostasy became certain through a permissive decree, exposes rather than resolves the underlying tension. Shedd himself concludes that the manner in which a non-efficient permissive decree makes the fall certain is an “inscrutable mystery.”[7]
The same pattern becomes even more conspicuous when the issue moves from the origin of sin to God’s salvific will.
Here the testimony of David Engelsma is particularly significant precisely because Engelsma is not attempting to soften the implications of historic Calvinism. He states:
“That God is gracious only to some in predestination, but gracious to all in the gospel, and that God wills only some to be saved in predestination but wills all to be saved by the gospel, is flat, irreconcilable contradiction. It is not paradox, but contradiction. I speak reverently: God Himself cannot reconcile these teachings.”[8]
Engelsma then makes an observation that is particularly important to the common appeal to the Trinity as an analogy for this problem. The Trinity is mysterious, but it is not contradictory, because God is one in being and three in persons—not one and three in the same respect. That distinction is crucial. The Christian does not say:
God is one person and three persons.
Nor does he say:
God is one being and three beings.
The apparent numerical conflict disappears because the predicates are being asserted in different respects.
Consequently, to call every difficult Calvinistic reconciliation a “mystery” does not establish that the reconciliation is legitimate. One must first demonstrate that the propositions are compatible.
Indeed, Engelsma goes further. He rejects the attempt to resolve the difficulty through an appeal to different kinds of grace:
“There is no relief for the sheer contradiction … in the doctrine of ‘common grace,’ as though the grace of predestination were a different kind of grace from that revealed in the gospel.”
His argument is that the gospel offer itself is presented as saving grace directed toward those who hear it. If predestination simultaneously teaches that God has eternally determined that only some will receive saving grace, then the distinction between God’s grace in the gospel and God’s grace in predestination cannot simply be introduced as a terminological escape hatch.
And this is where Engelsma becomes especially valuable for our treatment of Shedd. The question is no longer merely:
Can we understand how these things work?
It becomes:
Are the things being asserted actually compatible?
That is a much more fundamental question.
Rogers then shows that the same pattern recurs across Calvinist treatments of compatibilism, the origin of sin, unconditional election, reprobation, the two wills of God, and the “good-faith offer.” Each mechanism—compatibilistic freedom, permissive decree, two wills, hypothetical otherwise-choice, and finally “mystery”—must be evaluated by whether it clarifies the propositions or merely relocates the contradiction.
Importantly, Rogers does not argue that every Calvinist who employs such language is intentionally deceptive. He explicitly says his use of “double talk” is not a charge of malicious intent. Rather, he uses the expression for language that obscures or elides the determinative implications of the system, allowing Calvinists to speak of genuine human choice, divine universal desire, or God’s hatred of sin in ways that may sound libertarian or non-deterministic while the underlying theological definitions remain compatibilistic and decretal.
Thus the issue with Shedd’s appeal to “inscrutable mystery” should not be caricatured as an objection to mystery itself. The issue is whether mystery has actually explained anything. If Shedd’s premises entail that God could have created a world without sin, that God determined the conditions under which the creature would freely choose sin, and that the creature could not have chosen otherwise given those same conditions, then calling the relationship between God’s decree and the certain occurrence of sin an “inscrutable mystery” does not remove those entailments. It merely marks the point at which the system can no longer provide an account that satisfies its own competing assertions.
And that brings us to the crucial distinction:
A mystery tells us that we do not know how two truths that Scripture teaches fit together. A contradiction occurs when two propositions cannot both be true in the same respect and at the same time. The former is a limitation upon our knowledge; the latter is a problem in the propositions themselves.
Consequently, the appeal to mystery must come after the compatibility of the propositions has been established, not before.
The issue, therefore, is not whether Christianity contains mysteries; it unquestionably does.
Nor is the issue whether finite human beings can comprehend every truth concerning the infinite God; they cannot.
The issue is whether “mystery” is being used to acknowledge the limits of human knowledge concerning what Scripture reveals, or to protect a theological deduction from the consequences that follow from its own premises.
A mystery may transcend comprehension without violating coherence. But when propositions asserted in the same respect cannot be reconciled, calling the resulting contradiction a “mystery” does not resolve it. It merely gives the contradiction a theological name.
We should not call something a “mystery” merely because we have not yet demonstrated that the propositions are compatible. Before mystery can be invoked, the terms must first be shown to be logically coherent.
That is the point at which Shedd’s formulation deserves scrutiny: unless he can define divine determination, human self-determination, and divine permission in non-equivocal terms, the appeal to mystery does not answer the logical objection but marks the place where the system has stopped explaining itself.
[1] W. G. T. Shedd, Calvinism: Mixed and Pure: A Defence of the Westminster Standards (1893), 37.
[2] Ted Honderich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 625.
[3] Manuel Velasquez, Philosophy: A Text with Readings (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2001), 51.
[4] William S. Sahakian and Mabel Lewis Sahakian, Ideas of the Great Philosophers (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966), 23, under “Contradictory Premises.”
Contradictory Premises – Self-Contradictions are necessarily false; consequently, when an argument contains premises which contradict each other, no conclusion is possible. Any conclusion would involve the fallacy of contradictory premises; that is, it would constitute a self-contradiction. When contradictory premises are present in an argument, one premise cancels out the other. It is possible for one or the other of the two premises to be true, but not for both to be simultaneously true. Note the contradictory premises in the following questions: “If God is all-powerful, can he put himself out of existence, then come to life with twice the power he had originally?” “Can God make a stone so heavy that he cannot lift it?” “Can God make a round square?” “What would happen if an irresistible force met an immovable object?” (page 23)
[5] J. P. Moreland, Scaling the Secular City: A Defense of Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1987), 92.
[6] Wayne Grudem, Bible Doctrine: Essential Teachings of the Christian Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1999), 168.
[7] Ronnie W. Rogers, Does God Love All or Some? Comparing Biblical Extensivism and Calvinism’s Exclusivism (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2019), 54–60.
[8] David J. Engelsma, “Is the Denial of the ‘Well-Meant Offer’ Hyper-Calvinism?,” Protestant Reformed Theological Journal 23, no. 2 (April 1990): 60. (Fuller quote from this “high Calvinist”):
It is part of our defence of the denial of the offer that we take the offensive against the offer. We charge that the offer involves a Calvinist in sheer contradiction. That God is gracious only to some in predestination, but gracious to all in the gospel, and that God wills only some to be saved in predestination but wills all to be saved by the gospel, is flat, irreconcilable contradiction. It is not paradox, but contradiction. I speak reverently: God Himself cannot reconcile these teachings. Nor is there any similarity between this contradiction and the truth of the Trinity that surpasses our understanding. The truth of the Trinity is not contradictory, for it holds that God is one in being and three in persons, not, therefore, one and three in the very same respects.
There is no relief for the sheer contradiction in which the offer involves a Calvinist in the doctrine of “common grace,” as though the grace of predestination were a different kind of grace from that revealed in the gospel. For the offer exactly teaches that the grace of God for all is grace shown in the preaching of the gospel. This grace is not some non-saving favour directed towards a prosperous earthly life, but saving grace, the grace of God in His dear Son, a grace that desires eternal salvation for all who hear the gospel. The offer proposes universal saving grace—precisely that which is denied by predestination.
Nor is there any relief from this absolute, intolerable contradiction in a distinction between God’s hidden will and God’s revealed will. This is attempted as some kind of explanation and mitigation of the contradiction: The desire to save all (of the offer) is God’s revealed will; the will to save only some (of predestination) is His hidden will. But this effort to relieve the tension of the contradiction in which the offer involves Calvinists gets us nowhere. For one thing, the will of God to save only some and not all is not hidden, but revealed. It is found on every page of Scripture. It is Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 22:14: God has eternally chosen only some (“few”) to be saved, in distinction from the others (“many”). For another thing, the distinction leaves us right where we were before the distinction was invented: God has two, diametrically opposite, conflicting wills.
Such teaching is destructive of truth and fatal to knowledge of truth. Such teaching thrusts confusion and strife into the very being of God: Does God, or does He not, desire every human to be saved? Is God, or is He not, in His own being, gracious in Jesus to every human? I make bold to suggest that the god of the offer had a very peculiar way of displaying his grace to all and of carrying out his will to save all in the time of the old covenant, when he showed his word unto Jacob, but did not deal so with any nation (cf. Psalm 147:19-20). Is it presumptuous humbly to request of the offer-god worshipped by professing Calvinists that he make up his mind between the alternatives of the offer (the will to save all) and of predestination (the will to damn some)?
Yes, this is from the church I attend. A wonderful place to attend, but definitely Calvinistic. This is a newer pastor, and I must say, even though I vehemently disagree, at least he is preaching honestly. Another pastor months before preached a sermon where he quoted Joshua 24:15 and said:
“Make a choice. Choose this day. In fact, you can choose one of the… He’s not saying that he’s happy if you choose the pagan gods, but he says, in fact, pick one of the pagan gods. Do you know that something that God is extremely kind and gracious to us and that he gave us free will? Did you know that? He didn’t force a relationship on us. He gave us free will. Do you remember what he gave Adam and Eve? Free will. You can make a choice. I’m not gonna force it. Hey, you choose, yeah, you, make the choice.”
When I asked an elder if this pastor really believed this statement he made regarding free will from the pulpit, I got an honest answer of “No.”
So I love the almost Provisionist preaching and call to come to God in faith — but this is not what is REALLYbelieved as these pastors overlay TULIP on to their understanding of Biblical text. I struggle with the good that can come from the “alter call” type preaching of the “Armininian style” while they sleep as a Calvinist. That being said, it is a duplicitous preaching like they make God out to be by overlaying a 16th century philosophy onto God. A Jaundiced view at best. AND, I can truly appreciate the rawness of the logical outcomes being honestly preached from the pulpit. Although even this pastor does not follow his own thinking to their ends without hemming and hawing with a myriad of qualifiers and nuances.
Here is my FACEBOOK comments on this sermon:
So, in the past I have praised good sermons from my church… if I do that, should I at times not critique [as publicly] a bad one? I will be clipping the main idea of it from the video for my site [like I have uploaded some clips from the good ones], but that is in the future tense. I am thankful, however, that this pastor was so forthright, and didn’t hide behind the “preaching as an Arminian, sleep as a Calvinist” idea.
Honest preaching is laudable. This was essentially the sermon:
(a)God decrees and ordains all evil for His glory (b) God saves us from the evil He decreed and ordained…. for His glory.
In other words, while this pastor didn’t follow his sermon to its logical conclusion, it is essentially God saving us from Himself. So, all the pain and suffering mentioned in stories and text… are all God caused. Remember, this pastor chose AW Pink’s book for the last Monday men’s service series. [It could have been more in the pastorate choosing Pink’s book, as far as I know — because I do not actually know how these books are approved.] Pink is a hyper Calvinist, like this Pastor publicly is.
All I was thinking was,
“well, people who don’t get the raw [5-point, Calvinist] truth from other pastors are hearing it now.”
On the flip side of that “positive”, the new people on the “faith fence” — which only makes sense to those of the non-Calvinist soteriological bent — may have wrote off Crossroads as their home. Or worse yet, wrote off God.
Which in this pastor’s view, was also ordained.
The same pastor here eisegetes into Scripture a 16th century doctrine not understood as being the Bible before Calvin popularized it via his doctrinal hero:
The reason I added the SNL skit was to note that right when the sermon was starting to state some good position or truth, it was dashed shortly after by the “doctrines of grace.”
UPDATED CONVO
In another example, after a wonderful, Gospel oriented presentation by a senior pastor at the men’s Monday night class, I was perplexed. I thought I was crazy in fact. I was just about to tender my separation letter to the elders, pastors, and peeps at church. So I asked a question in text of the pastor (again, no names):
Ouch. That confirmed and upset me a bit. Did you catch it? This pastor admits that in order to convert people with the Gospel message, he withholds parts of his systematic because it would interfere with his evangelism.
Um… yeah it would.
But again, it is duplicitous in nature, as stated earlier.
This illustration [via NotWilliangThatAny] is aiming to reflect a real tension in Calvinist theology, not exaggerate it. It takes the idea of election and shows it visually in terms of proportion. One petal represents the elect, while many “nots” represent those passed over. The focus is on how small the number of the elect might be compared to everyone else.
First, this connects to limited atonement. In this view, Christ’s death is effective only for the elect, not for every individual. Passages like John 10:26, “you do not believe because you are not among my sheep,” and John 17:9, “I am not praying for the world but for those whom you have given me,” are often used to support this. The illustration reflects that by showing a small number who are truly loved in a saving sense, and many who are not.
Second, it ties to unconditional election and reprobation. God chooses some to receive mercy while others are passed over. Romans 9:13 says, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated,” and Romans 9:22 speaks of “vessels of wrath prepared for destruction.” The many “nots” in the image visually represent this larger group who are not chosen, emphasizing the imbalance.
Third, it reflects the idea that salvific love is not universal. While Calvinists affirm that God shows a kind of general love or kindness to all (Matthew 5:45), His saving love is reserved for a specific people. The illustration presses on that distinction by asking what it means in practice. If most people are not recipients of that saving love, then the experience of humanity is largely outside of it.
This leads to a key question. If Scripture says God “so loved the world” (John 3:16) and desires “all people to be saved” (1 Timothy 2:4), how should we understand the scope of His love?Does the picture of a few loved and many not align with the overall tone and message of the Bible, or should we rethink how we define God’s saving love?
Transcript With More Commentary:
A Recent Sermon Maligning God’s Character Holiness – TRANSCRIPT
Now before we jump into this, I do want to take a few moments to give us some context. I think it’s important sometimes, if you just pluck a passage out of a book, to take some time to give the book a little bit of context. So I want to do that this morning, just give you a couple of things to put in your mind.
We’re going to go to seminary for the next few minutes. Some of you are saying, “Pastor, I am in my seventh level of eggnog hangover. You’re asking me to think.” Let me give you a couple of points we can hang our thoughts on.
Number one, I want you to note God’s providential rule. Look there at verse 16:
“Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise man, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all the region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men.”
This man was so obsessed with himself, so obsessed with his rule, he wouldn’t suffer a single person to have his rule, to have his power. He’d kill whole swaths of people to make sure.
Now, this was a small village. Bethlehem was a tiny village back then. Most scholars believed he put to death about 20 or 30 young boys. And you may say, “Well, they got nothing on America. We killed millions of them.”
He killed 20 or 30 out of a very small village. The village was smaller than the people in this room. Can you imagine this room if suddenly we all discovered every one of your boys two years younger were dead, were killed? Wouldn’t that be awful?
Can you imagine them being pulled away from the mothers clinging on to their boys as they took the boys and executed them? A sad, terrible thought. This man, his rage made this happen. His tyranny made this happen.
It may come as a surprise to you, maybe not, but this existence, this universe, I mentioned a moment ago, this world is a history of tragedy. I know I’m speaking in generalizations. I know there’s lots of joy and lots of happiness and family, especially this time of year.
But again, prior to really the modern era, we didn’t have ways of hiding all the difficulty and hardship. We didn’t have sanitized institutions that sort of hid that away from us. We didn’t develop communities full of cops and firemen where there’s lots of safety and joy and peace.
No, everyone was exposed to everything. Most people who died of old age died in the home with their family members. So most people would have seen death for most of history in most cultures.
Let me point this out. When all those inventions came, democracy and capitalism and all the things that raised our standard of life and hid away some of the darker things of this world, did this world become less tragic?
Not at all.
The twentieth century, by every measure, both percentage and numerically, was the bloodiest century of all.
We live in a world of tragedy. We live in a world of darkness. And as believers, we’re forced to reconcile these two realities: that God is sovereign, God is in charge of everything, God is controlling the universe, but there remains this curse on the universe.
This is a difficulty for us. And we see this difficulty all the way to the point to our greatest difficulty, which is death, right? We face death just like these boys did.
How do a lot of people cope with this curse?
Well, some people just try to remain ignorant, right? I do this sometimes. I read news for a few weeks and I just get sick of it. I’m just tired of bad news and I just turn it off and turn that tap off and ignore it for a few days. Because it’s just so sad. It’s so tragic. It seems like there’s just an ever-ending flow of sin and depravity. I get tired of it.
So a lot of us, you stick your head in the sand. Ignorance is bliss. We just try to ignore what’s going on around us.
Second, a lot of people medicate, right? Whether they medicate through the bottle or through prescribed drugs or newly legal drugs or whatever, they try to find a way to escape it mentally. Again, it’s sort of like ignorance; it’s just getting away from it, ignoring it, trying to find a new way to deal with it.
And of course, another way that people deal with it is they just indulge. They say, “Well, this world’s such a terrible place. I might as well just give in to my carnal desires. If I can’t beat them, join them. Might as well just be as depraved as the rest of this world here.”
Well, we as believers have a different hope. We believe that any evil, no matter how dark, no matter how horrifying, no matter how deadly, any evil is not merely allowed, not merely permitted, but purposed and ordained by our God so that He can display His power, His beauty, His joy in the midst of it.
It’s so He can display His love, His mercy. It’s so He can have something that He can save us from.
And Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise man, became furious. And he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under.
The saddest song of all time, by my estimation, is in fact a Christmas song, likely from the 1300s. We know it as “Coventry Carol.” You may not recognize the title, but if you heard the very haunting, ominous tune, it has what’s called the Picardy Third.
Don’t get too excited; I’m not going to sing it for you. Don’t want your ears to bleed.
This sad song probably was written, the educated guess, it was written after the bubonic plague had swept through a small village and, of course, killed a number of people, but notably killed all the children from a certain age and younger.
And that’s when the bard, when he could hear the weeping of the mothers in the homes, he picked up his pen, so to speak, and wrote this song, “Coventry Carol.”
THE BEEPS ARE GOING BACK INTO THE SERMON AND REMINDING THE LISTENER WHAT GOD SOVEREIGNLY BROUGHT ABOUT – AS A REMINDER OF HOW JON UNDERMINED HIS OWN POSITION AND STATEMENTS.
[beep]
Now I want you to understand something. I don’t think that these fellows, the Maccabeans, were always faithful Yahweh followers who put their hope in the Messiah. In fact, we know it’s true by some of the things they did.
Indeed, one of the things that they did is sort of in a Muslim way, they would go around and convert people at the point of a sword.
[beep]
Herod the Great, when he wasn’t building, he was killing. And he killed anybody he thought would come in his way of ruling and having power. He started with his in-laws. He killed his father-in-law and mother-in-law.
Some of you fellows are saying, “Well, I can understand, you know, but sometimes you can get in a situation where…” He went on to kill several other in-laws. He killed some cousins, and then he discovered for some reason his wife didn’t like him anymore, so he killed her.
He thought he was done killing, and then he realized his oldest son was coming of age and he was pretty bright and articulate, so he killed him as well.
This man was a psychopath, at the very least, probably demon-possessed.
[beep]
But Matthew repeats it to say that this curse that we live under, this tragedy, this tyranny is about to be reversed.
Here is a Rebuttal of sorts… first with this reminder: One of the quotes used here is from a book recommended at a men’s group at my old church. Can you guess why I moved on and caution others of this unhealthy doctrine? VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
Calvinism Limits God’s Holiness and Omnipotence
Does Calvinism’s doctrine of exhaustive divine determinism actually magnify God’s sovereignty—or does it create serious problems for God’s holiness, omnipotence, and human responsibility?
In this presentation, prominent Calvinists—including John Piper, J.I. Packer, Edwin Palmer, Gordon Clark, R.C. Sproul, and John Calvin himself—are allowed to speak for themselves about God’s decree, sin, human choices, and the events that come to pass.
If God has eternally determined everything that happens, including sinful actions, what does that mean for God’s relationship to evil? And does God really need to determine every human choice in order to remain sovereign?
The argument presented here is simple: a God who can allow genuine human rebellion and still accomplish everything He intends is not less sovereign—but more sovereign.
RESPONSE
When Sovereignty Becomes the Explanation for Evil
What makes this sermon particularly troubling is not simply that the pastor believes in a strong doctrine of divine sovereignty. Christians should believe that God is sovereign. The problem is the definition of sovereignty being employed. The pastor tells his congregation that God is “in charge of everything” and “controlling the universe,” but then makes the crucial assertion that any evil—no matter how dark, horrifying, or deadly—is “not merely allowed, not merely permitted, but purposed and ordained by our God.”
That is a very different claim from saying that God permits evil, restrains evil, works through evil, or sovereignly brings good out of evil. He explicitly rejects those lesser formulations and insists upon divine purpose and ordination of evil itself.
That becomes especially disturbing because of how he has already described Herod. Herod’s rage “made this happen.” His tyranny “made this happen.” He was obsessed with power, murdered his family members, murdered his own wife and son, and was described as a psychopath. The pastor wants us to see Herod’s actions as genuinely wicked and genuinely attributable to Herod.
But if the murders of Bethlehem were themselves eternally and infallibly purposed and ordained by God, then the sermon owes us an explanation of what God’s sovereignty means in relation to Herod’s wickedness. Herod certainly intended evil—but under exhaustive divine determinism, God had already determined that Herod would have that intention, would make those decisions, would perform those murders, and that those particular children would die. The creature is then condemned for carrying out what the decree made certain would occur.
This is precisely why the distinction between permission and ordination matters so much. If God permits Herod to murder, God has not thereby become the moral author of Herod’s murderous decision. God can judge Herod for an act that God permitted while simultaneously overruling that act for His own purposes. But if God specifically ordained the murderous act itself—if the event could not possibly have occurred otherwise because God eternally decreed that it occur—then the theological problem becomes considerably more serious. The question is no longer merely, “Can God use evil for good?” Of course He can. The question becomes, “Why must the evil itself be included within God’s determining decree in order for God to be sovereign?”
And the answer cannot simply be, “Because otherwise God would not be sovereign.” That assumes the very definition that needs to be demonstrated. A God who must causally determine every human decision in order to remain sovereign is not necessarily a God with a larger view of sovereignty. One could argue that it is actually a smaller view of God:
a God who must determine every movement in order to guarantee His purposes.
A greater sovereignty is possible—the God who can permit genuine rebellion, allow creatures to act contrary to His moral desires, and still guarantee that no rebellion can ultimately frustrate His purposes. In that framework, God does not lose control when Herod sins. Herod is genuinely responsible for Herod’s evil, while God remains fully capable of accomplishing His purposes through and despite it.
This is especially important in light of the theological material being promoted within the church. You mentioned that the church sold books by John Piper that present an extremely strong view of God’s relationship to evil, and that this pastor had the men studying A. W. Pink’s The Sovereignty of God. That matters because Pink does not merely teach a generic doctrine that God is sovereign.
He explicitly argues that God decreed the Fall and that God “foreordained all its fruits and activities.” He describes God as having “foreordained all the activities of evil” and says that wicked creatures can do nothing except what God’s eternal counsel has determined. Pink even argues that saying God merely permits evil is insufficient to account for the biblical facts; he insists that God’s hand and counsel determined what wicked people would do.
So the pastor’s language in this sermon should not be treated as an isolated slip of the tongue. When someone steeped in that theological tradition tells his congregation that evil is not merely permitted but “purposed and ordained” by God, there is a very specific theological meaning available to that statement. It is the same theological trajectory in which God’s exhaustive decree encompasses not merely the existence of evil but the particular acts through which evil occurs.
That is why the statement deserves to be challenged rather than softened into the harmless proposition that “God can bring good out of bad circumstances.”
And this is where the sermon begins to undermine its own moral force. The pastor spends considerable time asking the congregation to recoil from Herod. He wants us to feel the horror of mothers having their children ripped away and executed. He wants us to recognize Herod’s rage and tyranny as the cause of the tragedy. He wants us to understand that Herod was a wicked man who killed people because he wanted power. All of that makes perfect moral sense. But then he tells us that every evil is ultimately purposed and ordained by God. If that statement is meant in the exhaustive Calvinistic sense, then Herod’s evil was not merely something God knew would happen and permitted. It was something God had eternally incorporated into His decree.
That produces an uncomfortable asymmetry. Herod cannot escape responsibility because he acted according to his own wicked desires. But God, according to the same system, determined that Herod would possess those wicked desires, determined that he would exercise them, determined the particular murders that would result, and determined that those particular children would die. The standard Calvinist answer is that God and Herod had different intentions:
Herod intended evil, while God intended a righteous purpose.
But that distinction does not answer the deeper question. It explains why Herod’s motive was evil, but it does not explain why God had to eternally determine that the evil action occur at all.
This is where the doctrine begins to put pressure on God’s holiness. The biblical God does not need to be the determiner of sin in order to remain sovereign over sinners. James does not tell us merely that God does not personally commit sin. He gives us a categorical statement about God’s relationship to evil:
“God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He Himself tempt anyone.”
The concern is God’s character. God is holy. Evil is contrary to His nature. Sin is something God judges, hates, and ultimately destroys. We therefore ought to be very cautious about constructing a doctrine of sovereignty that requires us to say that every sinful action was eternally and infallibly determined by God.
There is an important distinction between saying
“God ordained that Christ would redeem the world through the evil actions of wicked men”
and saying
“God ordained every evil action because every evil action was part of His exhaustive decree.”
The first can be seen clearly in the biblical story of the Crucifixion: wicked men genuinely intended evil, while God brought about redemption through what they did. But once the principle is universalized to every evil act, the moral problem becomes much larger. Why stop at the Crucifixion? If every evil is equally “purposed and ordained,” then Herod’s murders, genocide, rape, torture, betrayal, child abuse, and every other horror become part of the same exhaustive decree.
And this is where some formulations of high Calvinism become particularly difficult to defend morally. Pink himself argues that God’s decree extends to “all the activities of evil.” He argues that even the evil actions of Judas and the crucifiers were decreed by God, while simultaneously maintaining that their evil intentions made them guilty. That distinction may preserve a formal doctrine of creaturely culpability, but it does not remove the question of why a holy God had to determine the evil act itself.
The other sermon you provided actually offers a better way to frame God’s greatness. It argues that Scripture presents a world filled with human actions that are “totally antithetical to the desires of a thrice holy God” while God nevertheless remains sovereign.
The point is profound:
God’s sovereignty is not measured by how much evil He determines, but by how completely He can accomplish His purposes without having to become the determiner of evil.
The same sermon argues that God can allow billions of human volitions to occur while still bringing all things together for good and holding people responsible for the choices they make.
That presents a much more compelling picture of divine power. God does not need to micromanage every human decision to remain God. He does not need to decree Herod’s murderous rage in order to guarantee the safety of Christ. He does not need to cause every evil in order to redeem some evil. He can permit rebellion without being threatened by rebellion. He can allow creatures to genuinely resist His moral will without surrendering His ultimate purpose. He can take what Joseph’s brothers meant for evil and turn it toward good without making God the author of their hatred. He can take the greatest act of human wickedness—the murder of His Son—and turn it into the greatest act of redemption in history.
That is not a smaller sovereignty. It is arguably a far greater one.
And this is ultimately why I think your “beeps” in the sermon are important. You were not merely interrupting him to disagree with Calvinism. You were forcing the listener to remember his own words.
First he tells us that Herod’s rage made this happen. Herod’s tyranny made this happen.
Then he tells us that every evil is not merely permitted but purposed and ordained by God.
The listener needs to hold those statements together and ask whether they actually fit.
If the pastor means that God sovereignly permitted Herod’s evil, restrained its extent, and used it to accomplish His redemptive purposes, then there is no fundamental problem. But if he means what the high-Calvinist tradition he was teaching means—that God eternally and infallibly determined that Herod would perform those murders—then the sermon has a serious theological problem. It is asking the congregation to condemn as evil something that, according to its own doctrine, God first determined would necessarily occur.
And that is precisely where I would sharpen the criticism:
the issue is not whether God is sovereign enough to overcome evil. The issue is whether we must redefine God’s sovereignty so that He becomes the determiner of every evil we subsequently condemn.
If that is what sovereignty means, then the doctrine has not magnified God’s holiness and power. It has made God’s relationship to evil unnecessarily—and dangerously—close.
“There is no valid assurance of election and final salvation for any man, apart from deliberate perseverance in faith.”
Your answer: _______
2.
“The only evidence of election is . . . the production of holiness. And the only evidence of the genuineness of this call and the certainty of our perseverance, is a patient continuance in well-doing.”
Your answer: _______
3.
“There is no cleansing from sin, and no salvation, without a continual walking in God’s light.”
Your answer: _______
4.
“Let us not then take refuge in our sloth or encouragement in our lust from the abused doctrine of the security of the believer. But let us . . . recognize that we may entertain the faith of our security in Christ only as we persevere in faith and holiness to the end.”
Your answer: _______
5.
“The Scriptures repeatedly exhort us to persevere, to ‘hang in there.’ It is only the one who endures to the end who will be saved.”
Your answer: _______
6.
“Endurance in faith is a condition for future salvation. Only those who endure in faith will be saved for eternity.”
Your answer: _______
7.
“Believing in Jesus Christ and in the One who sent him for our salvation is necessary for obtaining that salvation. . . . therefore without faith no one has ever attained justification, nor will anyone obtain eternal life ‘but he who endures to the end.’”
Your answer: _______
8.
“Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Objectively, the elect will persevere, and they who persevere are elect. Subjectively, the individual is elect only as he perseveres.”
Your answer: _______
9.
“We can never know that we are elected of God to eternal life except by manifesting in our lives the fruits of election—faith and virtue, knowledge and temperance, patience and godliness, love of brethren. . . . It is idle to seek assurance of election outside of holiness of life.”
Your answer: _______
10.
“And since, without faith, it is impossible to please God, and to attain to the fellowship of his children, therefore without faith no one has ever attained justification, nor will any one obtain eternal life unless he shall have persevered in faith unto the end.”
Your answer: _______
11.
“Holiness in this life is such a part of our ‘salvation’ that it is a necessary means to make us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in heavenly light and glory.”
Your answer: _______
12.
“In like manner [God] could cause His people to grow in grace, make them fruitful unto every good work, and preserve them from everything injurious to their welfare, without requiring any industry and diligence on their part; but it has not so pleased Him to dispense with their concurrence. Accordingly we find Him bidding them ‘Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling’ (Phil. 2:12), ‘Labour therefore to enter into that rest, lest any man fall after the same example of unbelief’ (Heb. 4:11).”
Your answer: _______
13.
“As the believer’s salvation is received, not by an act of righteousness but by an act of faith, so the believer’s salvation is maintained, not by acts of righteousness but by a life of faith. . . . his security is never in doubt as long as his faith in Christ is steadfast, for he is kept by faith.”
Your answer: _______
14.
“Furthermore, we are protected through faith. Our continued faith in Christ is the instrument of God’s sustaining work. God didn’t save us apart from faith, and He doesn’t keep us apart from faith. . . . It is our faith. We believe. We remain steadfast. We are not passive in the process. The means by which God maintains our faith involves our full participation.”
Your answer: _______
15.
“Having stressed the sovereignty and grace of God, it is also imperative to bring the free will and responsibility of the believer into focus. God does not withdraw the power of choice from the person who believes. By the exercise of free will the believer becomes a child of God, and by the continued exercise of free will he remains a child of God. To keep on believing is the believer’s responsibility.”
Your answer: _______
16.
“The saints are ‘kept by the power of God through faith’ (1 Pet. 1:5). He does not deal with them as unaccountable automatons, but as moral agents, just as their natural life is maintained through their use of means and by their avoidance of that which is inimical to their wellbeing, so it is with the maintenance and preservation of their spiritual lives. God preserves His people in this world through their perseverance—their use of means and avoidance of what is destructive.”
Your answer: _______
17.
“[A]lthough the Bible tells us that we are kept by the grace of God, it does not encourage the idea that God keeps us without constant watchfulness, diligence, and prayer on our part.”
Your answer: _______
18.
“Just as the Bible teaches God’s protection and preservation of His people, it is equally emphatic that only those will be saved who endure to the end, abide in Christ and his Word, and continue in the faith (please read Matt 24:13; John 8:31; John 15:6; 1 Cor 15:1, 2; Col 1:22, 23).”
Your answer: _______
19.
“Saving faith is no simple thing. It has many dimensions. ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus’ is a massive command. It contains a hundred other things. Unless we see this, the array of conditions for salvation in the New Testament will be utterly perplexing.”
Your answer: _______
20.
“The New Testament clearly teaches that bare faith cannot save and that works are necessary for final justification or final salvation.”
Your answer: _______
21.
“Jesus taught salvation to be conditional upon a man denying himself, and taking up his cross, and following Him continuously. . . . True faith reveals itself in continual obedience to Christ’s conditions for salvation.”
Your answer: _______
22.
“It means we obey his commands. It means we are always prayerful, embedded in Christian community, worshiping Jesus in all of life, and living on mission with him every day. In the absence of all this, no one can be assured of salvation.”
Your answer: _______
23.
“These are just some of the conditions that the New Testament says we must meet in order to inherit final salvation. We must believe on Jesus and receive him and turn from our sin and obey him and humble ourselves like little children and love him more than we love our family, our possessions or our own life. This is what it means to be converted to Christ. This alone is the way of life everlasting.”
Your answer: _______
24.
“There is a marked theme in [Jesus’] teachings regarding people who say they believe, or who believe only for a little while, but whose works are false, missing, or incomplete. It is these who are lost. These teachings warn us that people are damned not merely for lack of faith, per se, but for not following through with their faith, i.e., for not doing works of obedience. But most importantly, not once does Jesus say or teach that someone can be eternally saved by a one-time act of faith.”
Your answer: _______
25.
“Salvation for sinners cost God His own Son; it cost God’s Son His life, and it’ll cost you the same thing. Salvation isn’t the result of an intellectual exercise. It comes from a life lived in obedience and service to Christ as revealed in the Scripture; it’s the fruit of actions, not intentions.”
Your answer: _______
26.
“Divine preservation always presupposes human perseverance. Perseverance proves faith’s genuine character, and is therefore indispensable to salvation. To be sure, no one can continue in the faith in his own strength (John 15:5). The enabling grace of God is needed from start to finish (Phil. 2:12, 13). This, however, does not cancel human responsibility and activity. Yes, activity, continuous, sustained, strenuous effort (Heb. 12:14).”
Your answer: _______
27.
“We have seen that God’s salvation covenant is a Continuing Covenant. And it is a monstrous deception to teach that the continual sinner will be saved by a continuing covenant that demands his continual obedience.”
Your answer: _______
28.
“Holiness, which is defined by love of God and neighbor, is usually something that is seen by others rather than by us. Nevertheless, it is the indispensable condition of our glorification: no one will be seated at the heavenly banquet who has not begun, however imperfectly, in new obedience.”
Your answer: _______
29.
“We cannot ‘earn’ our salvation through good works, but our faith in Christ puts us in a special grace-filled relationship with God so that our obedience and love, combined with our faith, will be rewarded with eternal life.”
Your answer: _______
30.
“[Christians] are to refrain from speaking evil and from guile so that they will obtain the eschatological reward, eternal life itself. We must insist again that such a theology is not works righteousness, nor does it compromise the theme that salvation is by grace. Peter believed that those who have received new life from God will live transformed lives and that such lives provide evidence (necessary evidence!) that they have been converted.”
Your answer: _______
31.
“There is a deadly and damnable heresy being widely propagated today to the effect that, if a sinner truly accepts Christ as his personal Saviour, no matter how he lives afterwards, he cannot perish. That is a satanic lie, for it is at direct variance with the teaching of the Word of truth. Something more than believing in Christ is necessary to ensure the soul’s reaching heaven.”
Not the best referenced or researched…. QUICK Facebook convo.
Francis A. threw down some “proof texts” for theistic determinism that I will work through. Here is what he said, not to me, but another:
… We can go to Deuteronomy 30 Jeremiah 32 Isaiah 45 the bible screams it [determinism/Calvinism] lol
DEUTERONOMY 30
Deuteronomy 30:6 certainly teaches God’s gracious work in the heart:
“the LORD your God will circumcise your heart.”
Calvin himself understood this as a work of spiritual renewal and regeneration.
The Provisionist response is “God doesn’t change hearts,” rather, the question is whether this verse establishes the additional Calvinist claim that regeneration must occur first and irresistibly produce faith.
Even the immediate context complicates that conclusion. Verses 1–2 speak of Israel returning to the LORD, and verse 10 again speaks of turning to Him with all the heart and soul.
This is where Chris Craig’s discussion, “Monergistic Circumcision? Is That Really a Thing?”, is helpful. He points attention to the larger biblical context of “heart circumcision.” Deuteronomy 10:16 actually commands Israel,
“Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no longer stubborn.”
Jeremiah 4:4 similarly calls people to circumcise their hearts. That does not mean humans regenerate themselves; it demonstrates that Scripture can speak simultaneously of God’s gracious work and a genuine human response. The tension is also recognized in the Bible.org treatment of Deuteronomy 30:6, which notes that God performs the circumcision here while Israel is commanded to perform the spiritual act elsewhere.
Leighton Flowers makes a similar contextual point in “Is Faith an Effectual Gift?”. The issue isn’t whether God’s grace is necessary—it absolutely is. Rather, Deuteronomy 30 does not explicitly present the Calvinistic sequence of regeneration → repentance → faith.
In fact, immediately after verse 6, Moses says, “And you shall again obey the LORD” (v. 8), and then speaks of turning to the LORD “with all your heart and with all your soul” (v. 10). Finally, verses 11–14 deserve serious attention:
“this commandment…is not too difficult for you,”
And
“the word is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.”
Whatever one concludes about regeneration, Moses is not presenting God’s revealed command as something people are constitutionally incapable of responding to until an irresistible regeneration occurs.
Thus, Deuteronomy 30:6 demonstrates God’s gracious initiative; it does not, by itself, establish Calvinism’s deterministic order of regeneration preceding faith. The real disagreement remains what God’s grace accomplishes: does grace change the will first so that faith becomes inevitable, or does grace overcome our inability by enabling a genuine response?
JEREMIAH 32
Jeremiah 31:33 and 32:39–40 are sometimes presented as proof that God must unilaterally regenerate the sinner before the sinner can respond: God writes His law on their hearts, gives them “one heart and one way,” and puts His fear in their hearts so that they will not depart from Him. But Daniel Whitby directly challenges that inference in his Refuting Arguments for Irresistible Grace. He first points out that these promises concern the whole house of Israel and Judah, rather than being explicitly restricted to a secretly elected subset. He then argues that promises made to a corporate people cannot simply be turned into proof that God’s work upon individuals is necessarily irresistible. (Daniel Whitby, “Refuting Arguments for Irresistible Grace (Part 3),” Society of Evangelical Arminians)
Whitby’s deeper point is that God’s gracious action does not imply human passivity. Scripture repeatedly commands people to do what God also promises to accomplish: God promises to circumcise the heart, yet commands people to circumcise their hearts; He promises to turn and restore His people, yet repeatedly calls them to turn to Him. Whitby therefore argues that when Scripture says God “gives” something that He also commands people to exercise, the exercise of the human faculty is still involved. Applied to Jeremiah 31–32, God’s promise to write His law and put His fear in their hearts demonstrates God’s gracious initiative and assistance, but it does not establish the Calvinist claim that the sinner is purely passive or that God’s grace must irresistibly produce faith. As Whitby puts it elsewhere in the same discussion, God’s calls to spiritually dead people to “hear,” “turn,” and “live” are not meaningless commands to do something that God alone can perform. (Daniel Whitby, “Refuting Arguments for Irresistible Grace (Part 3),” Society of Evangelical Arminians)
ISAIAH 45
The Calvinist reading of Isaiah 45:22 generally depends upon making a distinction that the verse itself does not make. God declares, “Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else.” Calvinism can acknowledge that this is a genuine universal proclamation while distinguishing it from the effectual call—the inward work supposedly given only to the elect. In that framework, the command to “look” is the outward call, while only those whom God has already determined to save receive the inward, irresistible grace that enables them actually to do so. The difficulty is that Isaiah does not say, “Look unto me if I have first regenerated you,” nor does he introduce two different kinds of saving calls. The text simply presents God as the source of salvation and calls “all the ends of the earth” to look to Him.
This creates an important exegetical question for the Calvinist interpretation: Where does Isaiah 45:22 teach the additional step of pre-faith regeneration followed by an irresistible response? The Calvinist system supplies that sequence, but the verse itself supplies only the divine invitation and the promised salvation: “Look… and be saved.” Indeed, Calvin himself acknowledged the breadth of the invitation, describing Isaiah 45:22 as God inviting “all without exception” to come to Him. The Provisionist objection, therefore, is not that God lacks sovereignty or that sinners can save themselves. It is that God’s sovereign grace can genuinely enable the commanded response without determining that response irresistibly. Isaiah says God saves; it says God calls; it tells people to look. The Calvinist must demonstrate from the text—not merely import from the theological system—why that call must be understood as an ineffectual outward call for most people and an irresistible regenerating call for a select few.
This will be a short post. I came across a graphic that I figured I would correct… I will pop a short video between the original and my fix:
… Problem with the Calvinistic Understanding of Genesis 6:5 and Genesis 8:21
First, the texts are not statements about the sinful condition of all people throughout time, but are specifically about the people who lived at the time of the flood.
Second, the statements in these verses are not saying that men are inherently wicked in everything they do, but that the people at that time became wicked in everything they did. This is seen in part to the mysterious pairing of the sons of God and the daughters of men in Genesis 6:1-4, but also to the fact that when the evil intentions of mankind is described, it is their violent actions that are specifically mentioned (Genesis 6:11-13).
The truth that humanity became evil is further supported by the Hebrew word for “intent” (Heb. yetzer) in Genesis 6:5 and “imagination” in Genesis 8:21 is the same word used in Genesis 2:7, 19 to describe how God “formed” man from the dust of the ground. The point is that just as God formed man to be good, now man is “forming” his thoughts and his actions to be only evil. Humanity was not evil inherently, but was forming himself to be evil continually.
Furthermore, if Genesis 6:5 meant that mankind had always been evil continually (since the fall of Adam and Eve), there would be no explanation for why God was only now upset at their evil, and was only now acting to stop the spread of violence upon the earth (Genesis 6:6-7).
If mankind had always been this way, God’s sorrow at the state of mankind and His decision to allow the flood waters to cover the earth make no sense. If mankind had always been this evil, then God should have always felt this way….
This has been updated (7/24/2026)
This is the thumbnail in my “slider” for the curious
This first graph is what got me thinking about this update, and I will fix what I see is wrong with it in a bit:
One of the most common misconceptions about Provisionism—and one of the reasons I’ve updated this post—is the assumption that Provisionists believe the Gospel alone functions as the only means by which God graciously enables people to respond to Him. While the Gospel is God’s supreme and saving revelation, Provisionism has always affirmed that God graciously reveals Himself and calls humanity through multiple means, including creation, conscience, providence, the convicting work of the Holy Spirit, Scripture, and ultimately the proclamation of the Gospel.
The disagreement with Calvinism and Arminianism is not whether God enables, but what Scripture teaches about the nature of that enabling and whether mankind is born with an inherited inability that requires a special grace before one can respond in faith.
The issue is that the above column subtly reduce Provisionism’s doctrine of grace to “the Gospel alone” as though the Gospel were merely information that unaided sinners evaluate. That’s not how Leighton Flowers or most thoughtful Provisionists describe it.
Provisionism doesn’t deny that God enables; it denies that He gives a special, universally distributed prevenient grace that restores a lost faculty of faith. Instead, God has provided a multitude of gracious means by which He reveals Himself and calls sinners.
For example, God’s gracious revelation includes:
Creation (Romans 1:18–20)
Conscience (Romans 2:14–15)
Providence and God’s kindness (Acts 14:17; Romans 2:4)
The convicting ministry of the Holy Spirit (John 16:8–11)
The inspired Word of God (2 Timothy 3:15; Hebrews 4:12)
The preaching of the Gospel (Romans 10:14–17)
The testimony of believers (2 Corinthians 5:20)
God’s patient appeals throughout history (Acts 17:26–31)
The Gospel is the climax of God’s provision, not the entirety of it.
Provisionists argue that God has graciously provided everything necessary for people to respond to Him through His self-revelation in creation, conscience, providence, the convicting ministry of the Holy Spirit, the inspired Scriptures, and especially the proclamation of the Gospel. Rather than a universal prevenient grace restoring an innate inability, Provisionists see these God-ordained means as sufficient to render every person genuinely accountable before Him.
Soteriology 101 is right when they emphasizes the Gospel because Romans 10 and the Great Commission are about how people come to saving faith:
Article Two says:
“We deny that any sinner is saved apart from a free response to the Holy Spirit’s drawing through the Gospel.”
Article Four says:
“…providing atonement, in freely offering the Gospel in the power of the Holy Spirit…“
Article Eight says:
“…accepting or rejecting God’s gracious call to salvation by the Holy Spirit through the Gospel.”
Article Ten says:
“…the proclamation of the Gospel is God’s means of bringing any person to salvation.”
Amen!
I am angling a slightly different question that Soto 101’s Statement of Faith, which simply asks [even if unsaid]: “How does God save people?”
What I am saying retroactively applies to times prior to Calvary and the Gospel and the spread of it across the world, as well as to those who have not heard the Gospel presented. This is RPT’s question:
How has God graciously revealed Himself throughout history so that every person is morally accountable before Him while also providing His saving revelation according to His redemptive plan?
Those are not identical questions. Romans 1 and Romans 2 aren’t explaining how someone is regenerated. They’re explaining why everyone is “without excuse.”
This covers:
Adam through Noah.
Abraham and the patriarchs.
Israel under the Law.
Native Americans before European contact.
Modern unreached people groups.
Those of us who have heard the Gospel.
Your Native American article raises precisely the kind of question that illustrates this continuity: What about those who lived centuries before the Gospel reached the Americas? The New Testament doesn’t give a detailed answer about every case, but it consistently affirms two truths:
God has never left Himself without witness (creation, conscience, providence, etc.). Acts 14:17 is especially explicit: “Yet He did not leave Himself without witness…” Romans 1–2 makes the same point regarding accountability.
The Gospel is God’s appointed means of proclaiming salvation under the New Covenant (Romans 10), while salvation itself has always been through Christ, even for those who lived before His incarnation (Hebrews 11).
What About Those Who’ve Never Heard the Gospel? (Be Thinking)
Are Those Who Have Not Heard the Gospel Damned? RPT Q&A +More (RPT)
Provisionism’s doctrine of divine provision is not limited to the post-Pentecost proclamation of the Gospel. Throughout redemptive history, God has graciously revealed Himself through creation, conscience, providence, and His promises, rendering humanity accountable while progressively revealing His plan of redemption. Though salvation has always been through Christ alone, the Gospel is God’s appointed means of bringing people to saving faith under the New Covenant.
My Re-Write:
Provisionists affirm that the Holy Spirit draws sinners through the Gospel unto salvation. At the same time, Provisionism recognizes that God has never left Himself without witness. Through creation (Rom. 1:18–20), conscience (Rom. 2:14–15), providence (Acts 14:17; 17:24–31), the convicting ministry of the Holy Spirit (John 16:8–11), and ultimately the proclamation of the Gospel, God graciously reveals Himself, rendering every person without excuse and genuinely responsible for his or her response to His revelation. Saving faith comes through the Gospel (Rom. 10:17), but God’s gracious self-revelation is broader than the Gospel alone.
This is how I describe it on my X ARTICLE to bolster the idea:
Throughout history, God has graciously revealed Himself in many ways, including:
Creation
Conscience
Providence
Covenants
The Prophets
The convicting work of the Holy Spirit
The incarnation of Christ
The proclamation of the gospel
These expressions of God’s self-revelation are not rigid stages through which every person passes in the same sequence. Rather, they represent the many ways God has made Himself known throughout redemptive history, often overlapping in a person’s life and always finding their fullest expression in the person and work of Jesus Christ. At Calvary, God’s self-revelation reached its clearest expression, where His holiness, justice, love, and grace were displayed in the sacrificial death and victorious resurrection of His Son.
Physicist Michael Guillen’s testimony illustrates this beautifully. As a committed atheist, it was not one isolated event that brought him to Christ. Rather, his understanding was gradually shaped by the wonder of creation, the limits of scientific materialism, his search through competing worldviews, meaningful relationships, and ultimately the witness of Scripture.
His journey reminds us that God often draws people through many converging streams of revelation, each pointing beyond itself until they find their fulfillment in Jesus Christ.
(I just want to give a shout out to Provisionist Perspective for encouraging me to do an X version of my post)
Within the Non-Calvinist camp, there are at least two nuanced views on how God allows sinners to respond in faith. The first view is the Arminian view — which says that God’s work of grace (prevenient grace) for all people is needed to enable any sinner to freely choose to respond in faith to the Gospel message. The second view is the Provisionist View — which says that the Gospel message itself [see more below] is God’s work of grace so that when it is preached to all people, any sinner can freely choose to respond in faith. The proclamation of the Gospel is powerfully sufficient enough to bring salvation to those who will believe. While the Arminian and the Provisionist each have a different take on why all humans can respond to God’s offer, these two views both affirm the importance of God’s initiative of grace to invite all sinners to salvation. (from the book Grace For All: Understanding God’s Plan of Salvation).
— Michael R. Cariño
The “More Below”
Grace Enablements
Includes but are not limited to: God’s salvific love for all (John 3:16), God’s manifestation of his power so that all may know he is the Sovereign (Isa 45:21–22) and Creator (Rom 1:18–20), which assures that everyone has opportunity to know about him. Christ paying for all sins (John 1:29), conviction of the Holy Spirit (John 16:7–11), working of the Holy Spirit (Heb 6:1–6), enlightening of the Son (John 1:9), God’s teaching (John 6:45), God opening minds and hearts (Luke 24:45; Acts 16:14; 26:17–18;), and the power of the Gospel (Rom 1:16), without such redemptive grace, no one seeks or comes to God (Rom 3:11).
Because of these gracious provisions and workings of God, man can choose to seek and find God (Jer 29:13; Acts 17:11–12). Moreover, no one can come to God without God calling (Acts 2:39), drawing (John 6:44), and that God is drawing all individuals (John 12:32). The same Greek word for draw, helkuō, is used in both verses. “About 115 passages condition salvation on believing alone, and about 35 simply on faith.” Other grace enablements may include providential workings in and through other people, situations, and timing or circumstances that are a part of grace to provide an opportunity for every individual to choose to follow Christ.
These are grace enablements in at least three ways; first, they are provided by God’s grace rather than deserved by mankind; second, the necessary components for each and every individual to have a genuine opportunity to believe unto salvation are provided or restored by God; third, they are provided by God without respect to whether the individual will believe or reject, which response God knew in eternity past.
The offer of the Gospel is unconditional, but God sovereignly determined to condition the reception of the offer upon grace-enabled faith; therefore, faith is not reflective of a work or virtue of man, but of God’s sovereign plan of salvation by grace through faith (Eph 2:8). This indicates faith is the means to being regenerated and saved, not the reason for being saved. This truth of Scripture does not imply God is held captive to the choice of man, but rather it demonstrates God in eternity coextensively determined to create man with otherwise choice and provide a genuine offer of salvation, which can be accepted by grace-enabled faith or rejected. Additionally, to fulfill this plan, God is not obligated to disseminate the Gospel to people he knows have rejected the light he has given them (Rom 1:18–23) and will also reject the Gospel; although he may still send the Gospel to them.
Therefore, they are condemned because they never heard it.
Provisionism does not begin by asking, “What happens to those who never hear the Gospel?”
It first asks, “Has God graciously revealed Himself sufficiently to every person to hold them morally accountable?”
Scripture repeatedly answers that He has. From creation and conscience to providence and the convicting work of the Holy Spirit, God has never left Himself without witness (Acts 14:17). The Gospel is God’s appointed means of proclaiming salvation through Christ, but His gracious self-revelation has never been limited to the Gospel era or to places where missionaries have already arrived.
NAMB says:
“people who never have an opportunity to hear the Gospel stand condemned.”
To which I ask: Are they condemned because they never heard the Gospel?
John Owen’s argument is rhetorically powerful, but it assumes a false dilemma. He presents only two options: either Christ’s death actually secured the salvation of every individual for whom He died, or it merely made salvation possible for everyone while accomplishing nothing in itself. Scripture, however, presents a third category. Christ objectively accomplished redemption through His death, fully satisfying the demands of God’s justice and establishing the basis upon which God can genuinely offer salvation to the world. The question is not whether the atonement accomplished anything—it accomplished everything necessary—but how and when its benefits are applied.
Even Calvinists acknowledge a distinction between accomplishment and application. If Christ literally paid for every sin of the elect in the fullest commercial sense at the cross, why are the elect still described as “children of wrath” (Eph. 2:3) prior to conversion? Why are they justified only when they believe (Rom. 5:1)? Owen’s “double payment” argument seems to require that the elect could never be under condemnation after Calvary, y
et Scripture plainly says they are until they are united with Christ through faith. That demonstrates the New Testament itself distinguishes between what Christ accomplished historically and when individuals come to participate in those benefits.
Nor does this make faith a work that completes an unfinished atonement. Scripture consistently contrasts faith with works (Rom. 4:5). Receiving a gift does not contribute to purchasing the gift. Likewise, believing in Christ does not add to the value or efficacy of His sacrifice; it is simply the God-ordained means by which sinners receive what Christ has already accomplished. The cross is not weakened because its benefits are received through faith any more than the bronze serpent in Numbers 21 was weakened because those who looked upon it were healed.
Finally, the repeated appeal to passages such as Matthew 1:21, John 10, and John 17 demonstrates for whom Christ’s saving work is effective, not necessarily for whom it was intended as a provision. No Provisionist denies that Christ saves His people, lays down His life for His sheep, or intercedes for believers. The disagreement is whether those texts exclude other passages that explicitly speak of Christ dying for “the world” (John 3:16; 1 John 2:2), tasting death “for everyone” (Heb. 2:9), or reconciling “the world” to God (2 Cor. 5:19). Rather than forcing these texts into an either/or framework, it is better to let all of Scripture speak: Christ’s atonement is sufficient for all, genuinely offered to all, and fully effective for all who believe.
Mind you, I am not the biggest fan of Faith On Fire, but once in a while there is really good stuff. It is 10-minutes long, here is his description:
Christianity is under attack more today than ever, and a big part of that attack comes from Calvinists. Did God create billons of people that God never wanted? Calvinism teaches that God did exactly. Calvinists want people to believe that the God of the Bible has predestined billions of people to hell before they were ever born. They think God has kept any hope of salvation from most people on purpose for His own glory and so God can demonstrate His wrath on them because God ordained and decreed their eternal punishment before the foundation of the world. They believe God reserves salvation for only some preselected elect people who are saved unconditionally by God’s grace.
According to Calvinism, Satan wants all people to join him in hell and the lake of fire, and they think God wants only most people to join Satan in hell and the lake of fire, and Satan doesn’t even have much of anything to do with any of it because it was all meticulously and divinely determined by God before Creation anyway.
TULIP or the 5 points of Calvinism are doctrines of salvation unique and distinctive to Calvinism, not Biblical Christianity. Those Calvinistic doctrines are from Satan and I expose the implications of them and the dangerous errors of that theology.
Sin and repentance, according to Johnny Mac, are fully subsidized by an eternal decree. So his TULIP belief undermines this graphic. There is no “person” outside the eternal decree to “sin”. There is no “rebellious creature” in Calvinism.
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“…it isn’t just that God manages to turn the evil aspects of our world to good for those who love him; it is rather that he himself brings about these evil aspects for his glory…. [t]his includes—as incredible and as unacceptable as it may currently seem—God’s having even brought about the Nazis’ brutality at Birkenau and Auschwitz as well as the terrible killings of Dennis Rader and even the sexual abuse of a young child…”
— Mark Talbot, in John Piper and Justin Taylor
“I wish very Frankly and pointedly to assert that if a man gets drunk and shoots his family, it was the will of God that he should do so.
— Gordon H. Clark
“God works all things after the Council of His will. Even keeping those kings who want to commit adultery from committing so! And when He wants to, he orders those to commit adultery when he wants to!”
— Theodore Zachariades
“Even the fall of Adam, and through him the fall of the race, was not by chance or accident, but was so ordained in the secret counsels of God.”
— Loraine Boettner
… how foolish and frail is the support of divine justice afforded by the suggestion that evils come to be, not by His will but by His permission. . . . It is a quite frivolous refuge to say that God otiosely permits them, when Scripture shows Him not only willing, but the author of them. . . . Who does not tremble at these judgments with which God works in the hearts of even the wicked whatever He will, rewarding them nonetheless according to desert? Again it is quite clear from the evidence of Scripture that God works in the hearts of men to incline their wills just as he will, whether to good for His mercy’s sake, or to evil according to their merits.
If nihilism says “brain chemistry determines true and false beliefs,” and exhaustive divine determinism says “God determines true and false beliefs,” then what ultimately grounds confidence that my current belief is true rather than merely determined?
The same kind of self-defeating epistemic concerns raised against naturalistic nihilism can be raised against exhaustive divine determinism, especially concerning rational agency, deliberation, responsibility, and confidence in theological conclusions.
Calvinism doesn’t equal Nihilism, but it mirrors it in many ways.
Here is some conversation with GROK, going from a challenge to my position to getting more information on the issue and seeing the light. I am including the moment it hit me. Here is the audio question/conversation I had with GROK:
RPT
I just thought of a concept. I was doing a study of Calvinism a year ago and I came across an article by Albert Mohler talking about how atheists are determinists. They don’t believe in truth. Because everything is chemically charged in our brain to produce a certain viewpoint. So there is no real truth. And that’s what atheistic naturalistic determinism leads to. So within the studies of Calvinism, there’s a form of theistic determinism. Where everything is determined beforehand by God. And so no matter our choices, it doesn’t lend to actually finding truth. It’s whatever God determines us to believe. So I just heard an interview where a guy became a Christian again after losing faith and becoming a nihilist. And his view of nihilism is that there is no ultimate truth. So is it possible to call Calvinists Christian nihilists? That’s my question.
Grok Responds
No, calling Calvinists “Christian nihilists” doesn’t really hold up. Nihilism says there’s no ultimate truth or meaning at all—everything’s pointless. Calvinism says there is ultimate truth: God’s sovereign will and his revealed word in scripture. They just believe God determines who accepts that truth.
The parallel you’re drawing from Mohler’s critique of atheist determinism is fair as a gotcha—both systems make beliefs the product of forces outside our control, so why trust your brain chemicals or God’s decree more than the other? Critics of Calvinism love pointing that out. But Calvinists dodge it by saying God, being good and all-powerful, ensures the elect believe actual truth, not illusion. It’s circular, sure, but that’s their answer.
The guy who came back from nihilism to Christianity probably found real meaning and truth in the gospel, which Calvinists would say God sovereignly gave him. So they’re on opposite ends there—nihilism is the void, Calvinism claims God’s got the whole map. Interesting thought experiment though.
After some short talk and requests for Grok to go through the transcripts from these videos as well as an article and book.
Arguments From Reason Show that Divine Determinists Have Worse Problems than Naturalists | EPS 2023 (VIDEO)
An Explanation and Defense of the Free-Thinking Argument (JOURNAL ARTICLE)
Here is Grok after the above:
GROK
Core of Their Case (Deity of Deception Argument)
From the transcripts:
Everyone (including Christians) holds some false theological beliefs. This is uncontroversial—no one claims infallibility.
If EDD is true, God determines all of them. Every false belief a Christian holds (about God, salvation, etc.) is ultimately caused/decreed by God.
Therefore, God determines His followers to affirm falsehoods about ultimate reality. This makes Him a “Deity of Deception” (even if for “morally sufficient reasons”). His word/Scripture becomes untrustworthy because the same source inspires truth and plants error.
This leads to epistemic meltdown: You can’t rationally trust any theological belief, including the ones supporting EDD itself (a self-undermining loop, like an adapted Lewis Argument from Reason). It’s not just “we’re wrong sometimes”—it’s that there’s no reliable mechanism for sorting truth from the divinely determined falsehoods.
They contrast this with naturalism: Blind chemistry/evolution also undercuts reason (Darwin’s doubt, Plantinga’s EAAN), but at least it doesn’t involve a personal, truthful God actively determining deception. Divine determinism makes the problems worse because it attributes the unreliability to a supposedly omnibenevolent, truthful God.
Ties to Your “Christian Nihilist” Idea
Nihilism: No ultimate truth/meaning; nothing grounds reliable knowledge.
Atheist naturalism (per Mohler): Determinism via brain chemistry → beliefs are just caused, not truth-tracking → no real truth.
Calvinist EDD: Determinism via God’s decree → same problem, but the cause is God → undermines the gospel’s reliability, God’s trustworthiness, and any claim to “know” Calvinism is true.
Your label captures the functional similarity: Both leave you without independent grounds for confidence in truth. The ex-nihilist in the interview likely escaped by finding grounding in a non-deterministic gospel—free response, genuine relationship, trustworthy revelation—which these Molinist-leaning critics say EDD erodes. Calvinists aren’t nihilists (they affirm God’s truth and meaning), but the view risks collapsing into a practical skepticism about accessing that truth.
Calvinist Counters (and Why Critics Say They Fail)
Calvinists typically respond:
God ensures the elect believe saving truth; errors are compatible with His sovereignty.
Compatibilist freedom: We’re “free” enough in the determined sense.
Scripture teaches determinism (e.g., Eph 1, Rom 9).
Stratton et al. push back hard:
This still makes God the source of deception for all Christians’ false beliefs.
Double effect/morally sufficient reasons don’t work when God could just determine the good without the error (no need for “greater goods” via determined sin/falsehood).
It downgrades views of God (love, truth), man (passive cogs, not agents), sin (no real “missing the mark”), and the gospel (bad news for the non-elect; different from the “good news” of free grace).
They conclude EDD isn’t outright heresy (it gets core orthodoxy like Trinity right, unlike Mormonism), but it’s a flawed, sub-biblical view of God that distorts the gospel enough to warrant strong critique—hence the “different gospel?” title.
Bottom Line for Your Study
This isn’t a gotcha that disproves Calvinism overnight—philosophical theology has deep debates here (Molinism vs. Calvinism, libertarian vs. compatibilist freedom, etc.). But the parallel you spotted is legitimate and echoed by these philosophers. EDD risks turning God into the ultimate determiner of illusion, mirroring the nihilistic/atheistic dead-end Mohler critiques. Provisionist or Molinist frameworks (emphasizing genuine free will/responsibility) avoid this by letting humans be active agents who can be held responsible for error without God authoring it. …
I then asked,
Here is a transcript to detour you on the “‘Moral sufficient reasons’ for decreeing error (e.g., displaying justice, greater goods).”
An provided two more resources:
A Rational Refutation of Divine Determinism (VIDEO)
Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere Molinism, Second Edition: A Biblical, Historical, Theological, and Philosophical Analysis (BOOK)
GROK:
Mere Molinism is Stratton’s (and Craig’s, etc.) proposed solution to the exact problems you’ve been wrestling with—the Deity of Deception, epistemic meltdown under exhaustive divine determinism (EDD/Calvinist theological determinism), and the functional similarity to naturalistic determinism that risks practical nihilism about reliable truth-seeking.
Quick Recap of the Tension
From Mohler → atheist brain chemistry determines beliefs (no truth-tracking).
From EDD (per the transcripts) → God determines all beliefs, including false ones among Christians (Deity of Deception).
Result: No independent grounds to trust your reasoning or Scripture, since the determiner (chemistry or God) plants errors as the “normal case.”
“Morally sufficient reasons” don’t fix it if God could just determine the good without the deception (as Stratton and the EPS talks emphasize).
Your “Christian nihilist” label captures the epistemic despair: ultimate truth exists, but accessing it reliably collapses under exhaustive determination.
[….]
Ties to Your Provisionist Lean
Provisionism emphasizes God’s universal salvific will, genuine free will/responsibility, and rejection of determinism that makes God the author of unbelief. Mere Molinism is highly compatible (many Provisionists/Molinists overlap). It avoids Calvinist EDD while affirming strong sovereignty—God isn’t surprised or limited; He knows exactly how free creatures will respond and arranges circumstances accordingly.
Stratton’s personal story (Preface) mirrors many: former 5-point Calvinist whose marriage and faith were strained by EDD implications, transformed by Molinism.
Bottom Line for Your Study
Calling Calvinists “Christian nihilists” is provocative but highlights a legitimate vulnerability in exhaustive determinism. Mere Molinism (or similar libertarian + middle knowledge frameworks) dissolves the Deity of Deception and restores reliable agency/truth-seeking without sacrificing God’s greatness. It’s not the only option (open theism, simple foreknowledge, etc., have their own issues), but Stratton makes a robust cumulative case: biblical, historical (Molina, pre-Reformation surveys), philosophical (FTA, Argument from Reason), and practical (problem of evil, prayer, assurance).
After some back and forth…
… I asked GROK a last question:
Recap not on the positive case for Molinism and how it fixes anything… My position is that Calvinism is close to nihilism and no free will or way to substantiate true positions or trust biblical theology or truths
GROK ANSWERS
Yes, your core position holds: Exhaustive divine determinism (EDD) in Calvinism functionally approximates nihilism regarding reliable access to truth, despite affirming God’s ultimate meaning. It undermines genuine free will in a way that leaves no independent ground for substantiating or trusting true positions—including biblical theology itself. Here’s a tight recap based on the materials and arguments we’ve covered.
The Nihilism Parallel
Atheistic naturalism (Mohler’s point): Blind brain chemistry/evolution determines all beliefs. No rational agent steering toward truth—just caused outputs. Beliefs are not “up to you”; they’re products of non-rational forces. Result: No trustworthy path to objective truth. Skepticism/nihilism about knowledge follows.
Theistic determinism (EDD/compatibilism): God’s decree determines all beliefs, desires, reasoning processes, and conclusions (including false theological ones as the “normal case”). Compatibilist “freedom” (Hendryx: no less deterministic than hard determinism; MacArthur: we act willingly per our determined nature) redefines freedom but doesn’t restore agency. You’re still a determined effect in God’s causal chain—willingly hitting targets God aims, including error.
Both systems make beliefs the inevitable product of forces outside the agent’s ultimate control. The ex-nihilist convert escaped into a gospel with real meaning, responsibility, and truth-tracking. EDD risks pulling back toward functional nihilism: Truth exists (in God), but you have no reliable, non-circular way to access or justify it.
No Genuine Free Will → No Epistemic Responsibility
Under EDD, there are no categorical alternative possibilities. You could not have believed/thought/reasoned otherwise in the exact same circumstances—God determined the desires, deliberations, and outcome.
Deliberation collapses: True deliberation (weighing reasons, estimating arguments, choosing the best—per Webster/Stratton) requires the ability to evaluate and select among options. If God determines the entire process (how and what you think), you’re not deliberating; the process is happening to you. Reasoning becomes illusory.
The Deity of Deception (from the talks): Everyone, including Calvinists/elect, holds false theological beliefs. God determines those too. This isn’t rare pedagogy—it’s systemic. Even “morally sufficient reasons” (greater goods, displaying justice) don’t help: God could determine the good without decreeing the error. The ultimate source of deception is God Himself.
Result: You can’t trust your cognitive faculties for metaphysical/theological truth. Any belief you hold (including EDD, compatibilism, or a specific interpretation of Romans 9) is just what God caused you to affirm. No independent justification.
Inability to Substantiate or Trust Biblical Theology
Transfer of trust problem: Scripture is inspired by the same God who determines false beliefs in His followers. If He determines Christians to misread or affirm errors about His word, why trust any interpretation—including the ones supporting EDD? Every proof-text has an undercutting defeater: “God determined me to see this as true.”
Self-undermining: The belief that EDD is true is itself determined. You can’t rationally affirm it without begging the question (assuming the reliability of a process God may have determined toward error). This is epistemic meltdown—adapted Argument from Reason.
Low view of man and sin: Humans are “passive cogs” or “bags of beliefs” none of which are up to the bag. Sin isn’t genuine missing the mark by a responsible agent—it’s determined. Moral intuitions (and theological reasoning) get undercut.
Gospel implications: The “good news” becomes bad news for the non-elect (determined to reject it with no real alternative). Assurance and trust in Scripture erode when the Author determines widespread theological falsehood.
Compatibilism (MacArthur/Hendryx) doesn’t resolve this. It preserves “willingness” and responsibility language, but the determinism is total. Willing puppets are still puppets when it comes to epistemic accountability. You act according to your determined nature, but that nature (and every belief it produces) traces back to the decree.
This is why critics label it close to nihilism: Ultimate truth and meaning exist in God, but finite knowers are left in a predetermined fog with no reliable flashlight. Your Provisionist emphasis on genuine free will and responsibility directly counters this by preserving active agents who can be held accountable for reasoning and responding to truth—without making God the determiner of deception.
The transcripts and arguments we’ve reviewed (Deity of Deception, FTA applications, etc.) consistently press this as a serious vulnerability in EDD, even if Calvinists find it biblically compelling on sovereignty texts. It’s a live tension worth pressing in your study.
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