One less paradox after all?
I believe in the doctrine of "election", and so does my church. In short, its the belief that God decided before the beginning of time who he would save. A core aspect of this belief is the fact that man is sinful and blind and a blind person cannot do anything to become sighted. He can choose and desire to see, but he will still be blind. Or another way scripture often illustrates it is that we are spiritually dead, and a dead person is helpless to do anything to become alive.
People who hold this view often say they feel a tension between the Biblical idea of man being responsible, and the other Biblical idea of God's sovereignty, often likening it to other things we can't understand but must just accept, like the trinity and God's omnieverything. I'm increasingly puzzled at what the problem is.
The trinity is clearly a mathematical paradox. It says that 1+1+1=1. We can't understand this. We just have to either accept it, or reject the Bible.
The fact that God has no beginning makes no sense mathematically either. Everything must have a beginning, right? You can't have infinity of something. But somehow God always was. It makes no sense to us, and we must just accept it.
The doctrine of election says that I am fully responsible for my sin, and God is fully responsible for my salvation. What is the mathematical problem here? Or is the problem not mathematical? It seems to make perfect sense to me. Difficult to swallow perhaps, hard to believe, but not hard to understand. Am I oversimplifying?
Any thoughts?
People who hold this view often say they feel a tension between the Biblical idea of man being responsible, and the other Biblical idea of God's sovereignty, often likening it to other things we can't understand but must just accept, like the trinity and God's omnieverything. I'm increasingly puzzled at what the problem is.
The trinity is clearly a mathematical paradox. It says that 1+1+1=1. We can't understand this. We just have to either accept it, or reject the Bible.
The fact that God has no beginning makes no sense mathematically either. Everything must have a beginning, right? You can't have infinity of something. But somehow God always was. It makes no sense to us, and we must just accept it.
The doctrine of election says that I am fully responsible for my sin, and God is fully responsible for my salvation. What is the mathematical problem here? Or is the problem not mathematical? It seems to make perfect sense to me. Difficult to swallow perhaps, hard to believe, but not hard to understand. Am I oversimplifying?
Any thoughts?
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7 Comments:
Cool. I'll come up with more on that soon. In the meantime, bear in mind that my question "what's the problem" is directed to people who have already embraced the idea of election, but who still struggle with a paradox that I'm not so sure exists. To those who have not yet accepted the idea, a struggle is most understandable. Its an idea that flies in the face of popular evangelicalism, where we want to believe that God is subject to our human ideas of what is fair. I first heard of the concept at Cedarville College in Bible class, and I was furious. I even considered dropping out over it. But a closer look at scripture left me with two choices... embrace the doctrine and the Bible, or reject the doctrine and the Bible. Over time, I chose the former.
The book of Romans is famous for being the first place to go to research this. Surprisingly, the book of John is probably a close second, but John is definitely NOT famous for that, probably because John 3:16 has been made so famous out of context. But a good understanding of the Old Testament is key to understanding John, as I'm very recently discovering. My church spent a year in Genesis before doing a year in John, and its amazing how it brings it together. The New Testament is like an answer key to the Old. Imagine reading only the answer key to a math book. It would be meaningless. Or to understand how frustating it would have been to live on Old testament times, imagine having a math book with no answer key! Probably my coolest Bible lesson of the year is that the Bible is a bit like that. Reading the Old Testament is now high on my priority list as a result.
The Bible is cool!
I don't mean this as an argument, but what is the conflict between believing God is wholly responsible for our salvation and believing He gives us the option to accept or decline it?
Good question! I think my quick (for now) answer would be, there is no logical conflict between God being wholly responsible for our salvation and believing he gives us the option to accept or decline it. This is the typical Baptist (and many other denominations) position. The one I grew up with. In our minds, this would seem the logical and fair way to go about it if we were God.
Biblically, I think it would be more accurate to say that we all choose to reject him. Perhaps in theory the option to choose his gift exists, but none of us in our sinful nature are capable of coming to that decision. We are dead in our sin. Helpless. A dead person cannot choose to become alive. But the Holy Spirit opens the eyes of some... the ones God has chosen in spite of everything.
But some people, once accepting this idea, see a paradox of how can man then be held responsible if God does the choosing? Some decide its a paradox like the trinity that we just can't understand. But I'm saying... just musing really... that I'm starting to see it as something that makes perfect sense, and may not be a paradox after all.
John 6:65 "He went on to say 'This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enable him'".[NIV]
John 10:25-30> Jesus answered, "I did tell you, but you do not believe. The miracles I do in my Father's name speak for me, but you do not believe because you are not my sheep. My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father's hand. I and the Father are one."[NIV]
All this said though, I should mention a paradox that does remain in my mind, filed right in the same folder as the trinity for me. I just don't get it. But its in scripture. In fact, its back to back. Romans 9 gives us probably the most clear and concentrated dose of God's sovereignty in election found in the Bible, and then Paul immediately anticipates a possible wrong application of that doctrine and gives one of the clearest and most concentrated dose of evangelism found in scripture right in chapter 10. Why is evangelism needed if God is sovereign over election? I don't know! But it is, if we are to believe Paul here in the book of Romans, so we best be getting the word out about the good news of Jesus Christ!
On this topic, I HIGHLY recommend the short book called "God and Evil: The Problem Solved" by Gordon H. Clark and available from trinityfoundation.org. It's not about election as such, as one can tell from the title, but a lot of the same issues of personal responsibility come up when deciding on where evil comes from. Basically, we are responsible because God says we are; He's sovereign over everything, including individual responsibility. But Clark is a great philosopher, so he covers various objections, such as the idea that God's sovereignty makes people puppets. A rollicking good read, too.
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