Freedom and Predestination

Note: People who come to this blog because of their interest in the issues raised in Inherit the Land may find the following discussion of biblical theology puzzling. For me, the issues are inseparable. The questions have to do with human freedom and God’s work in the world, as the inscription to the book reads: “Justice, justice shall you pursue, so that you may live and inherit the land which the Lord your God is giving you.” I consider this kind of discussion fair game and expect to continue it.

The questions of predestination that have occupied Christianity for so much of its history, and the biblical texts invoked on their behalf, take on an entirely different color when understood in the context of the Hebrew story. However one may want to use those passages in our time, claims to their meaning when they were written should have to take into account what was available to the writer when the texts were composed. This is an intentional denial, of course, of any view of biblical inspiration that depends on the platonic understanding of forms that might have been seen and described, but not understood, by the biblical writers. The premise here is simply that what the writers wrote – the meaning it had when they wrote it – was intelligible to them and their readers in the first instance.

I think that at least two ideas key to the predestination ideas from Augustine forward are missing from biblical understandings for the vast majority of biblical history, and I find the strength of these ideas in the New Testament still highly debatable. The ideas are 1. “original sin” and 2. “afterlife.”

It appears clear to me that doctrines of predestination and original sin are inextricably linked from at least Augustine forward. It seems less clear that the link predates Augustine. The logic of the link is something like an inverse proportion between one’s view of the damage done by original sin and one’s view of predestination. Well down one end of the spectrum is the Anabaptist view that original sin distanced human beings from God but did not do great damage to their nature. That comes with the view that human beings are free to choose in their relationship with God, with little or no reference to predestination ("Free Will Baptists," for example). It was, in fact, the ascription of such a view to Pelagius that seems to have driven Augustine to the kinds of statements he makes about both predestination and original sin. We will deal later with Augustine’s and others' use of certain biblical texts in that debate. Well down the other end of the spectrum is a certain Reformed view that human beings are totally depraved because of original sin. That comes with the view that humans have no freedom in their relationship with God, and reference to predestination is complete, not only for those who are “saved” but also for those who are “damned.”

A personal aside: My father was present at the examination of a candidate for the ministry by officials of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, a Calvin-Knox tradition, in upper South Carolina in the 1950s. The elders asked the candidate whether he would be willing to be “damned for the glory of God.” His answer: “Sir, I would be willing for this whole committee to be damned for the glory of God.” He was ordained. Possibly at the same meeting, my father thought that he would not be able to be ordained because he would not admit that he believed in predestination to this degree: He would not say it was God’s will when a 4-year-old child was hit by a car and killed. At lunchtime, he asked my uncle, a prominent Methodist, to try to arrange a Methodist appointment for him. After lunch, he returned to the session and asked what the elders meant by “predestination.” They argued among themselves until 5 p.m., when they decided they should not withhold ordination if they couldn’t define the term of their question.

It also appears clear to me that leading ideas of predestination have to do with “afterlife,” an unbiblical word and likely an unbiblical concept as commonly understood. “Predestination,” as in the ARP elder’s question, is usually “to” some eternal state, “heaven” or “hell,” a word as completely absent from the biblical text as “afterlife.” In fact, the Hebrews vigorously denied the possibility of an afterlife – no big surprise, considering how they were treated in Egypt where the concept was perhaps at its most extravagant in history. Better, they thought, to accept “dust you are and to dust you shall return” than to legitimate an oppressive priestly-political class with control over the fate of individuals. The view of resurrection that they came to around 164 B.C., by way of their theologies of creation and the justice of God, is radically different from the static "beatific vision" supposedly enjoyed by a disembodied soul.

The biblical texts, both in the Old Testament story and in the New Testament writers’ use of those stories, especially Paul in Romans, seem to me to be describing the relationship of free beings – God on the one hand and humans, individually and collectively, on the other. His exchanges with Abraham over Sodom, with Moses over Israel after the calf incident, with David over the Temple, with Amos over sinful Israel, etc., are not exceptions to be explained away but representative of the whole relationship. (Notice that nothing resembling the notion of “original sin” as an explanation of the actions shows up in these texts.) Where post-Augustinian doctrines of predestination seem to calculate relative degrees of freedom between the parties in a zero-sum way, the biblical stories seem to assume that each is free precisely within the limit of the other’s freedom. God does not force human beings, and human beings do not force God, but they are in dialogue with each other. The outstanding exception to the second rule turns out to be Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, Job’s friends who thought they could make demands on God and explain mechanically the reason why good things and bad things happen. God says they were lying about him. Robert Frost noticed in his poetic drama about the story that Job set God free from human demands.

The post-biblical doctrines of predestination obscure the fact that the biblical story is about God’s freely making promises and keeping them. God’s central identity to Israel is as the one who “brought you up out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” Unlike all the people around them, Israel eschewed prediction (cf. Deuteronomy 18) because, I think, they realized that the notion that the future is fixed is antithetical to freedom. Some read the texts as merely distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate ways of predicting the fixed future. That makes no sense to me, like the readings of the promise at the end of Flood story that suggest God will still destroy the world, only not with water. This is not a matter of excluding certain arbitrary details. It is a wholly different way of looking at the world.

Much predestinarian theology makes extensive use of Romans, especially 9-11. There are other ways to read those texts more consonant with the biblical narrative. Take the notion of God’s “hardening hearts.” A careful reading of the Plagues story in Exodus shows that Pharaoh hardened his own heart at least as often as God hardened his heart, and the passive voice “heart was hardened” avoids identifying the acting subject even more often. The phrase “God hardened his heart” may have much less to do with God’s arbitrary or coercive action than with the irrevocability of Pharaoh’s choice that he made freely.

Even more interesting is the discussion of God’s choice of Jacob over Esau. This is typically read as if Jacob is predestined to heaven and Esau to hell, as if Jacob is part of God’s people and Esau is not. But in context, this is an impossible reading. God’s promise to Abraham, which is the question under discussion, included the blessing of all the nations, not the exclusion of Edom. The question is not who is in the people of God but how God is going to establish a people for the sake of all the nations. The question is not whether the Edomites are among the nations God intends to bless but whether the group that will become the nation for the sake of all the others is Jacob’s descendants or Esau’s descendants. (The notion that it can’t be both seems non-controversial in any Christian theological system – God could no more have two People than he could have two Sons.) The story is about God’s keeping his promise to Abraham. Keeping his promises is the righteousness of God. God’s keeping his promises is also the meaning of predestination in the biblical story. Post-biblical predestination theologies don’t get the wrong answers – they just ask the wrong questions.