The Arminian Trap for the Divine Will

By Mark W. Christy, PhD

Calvinists uphold a compatibility understanding of the doctrine of election whereby God chose those whom He would save before the beginning of creation in such a way that their free will response becomes a foregone conclusion. Given the imposition of God’s selective to the choice of those who would be saved, the atoning sacrifice of Christ necessarily becomes limited to these Elect of God. In this system of thought, the Non-Elect are those who make a free will rejection of the gospel (or the law in their hearts if they never hear the gospel).

Within this discussion favoring compatibilism, some suggest the idea of double predestination, which essentially makes God responsible for the choices made by both the Elect and the Non-Elect. Succumbing to this position is hard to avoid since in essence (and in line with Calvinistic thought), those who are condemned to hell never had the option to escape their judgement for God never willed them unto salvation.

Other compatibilists reject this hard determinism and prefer to posit only single predestination, which focuses more on God’s gracious choice to redeem the Elect. In regard to those whom God does not choose, they argue that the full responsibility of the Non-Elect’s choice in regard to the gospel rests on them. In their view, God is under no obligation to save anyone, and therefore He can sovereignly select those whom He pleases and elect them unto salvation. Those He does not simply choose to disobey the gospel and receive the just sentence of eternal damnation.

Irrespective of which compatibilistic camp the Calvinists choose to reside in, the charge of determinism coming from the Arminians is impossible to escape because the choice of God becomes the determining factor in regard to anyone’s salvation. Despite the many scriptures that support God’s sovereignty in election (see endnote for links to article that discuss this in detail),[i] this deterministic stance on election of course becomes scandalous in the minds of Arminians, who prefer “genuine freedom” where there is “the opportunity for a genuine choice between at least two options, and…no coercion [is] made with respect to the choice.”[ii]

For the Arminians, a loving God could never arbitrarily elect to save some and not others as this non-gracious act would be an unjust violation of the creature’s free-will along with an unjust non-loving condemnation to hell with no opportunity to escape. In their view, the love of God becomes an all-encompassing (and controlling) characteristic of His divine being to the extent that any other aspect of His being must pay homage. In particular, His divine right to choose according to His will and His perfect understanding of justice is made subservient to this emotional aspect of His person.

With such a view of divine love, God is forced to act on His love so as to provide humanity with this ‘genuine freedom’ so prized among Arminians. To accomplish this feat, God must likewise have been forced to send His only Son to die on the cross so that human freedom, which had been in bondage to sin, could be released from its chains and once again respond to the love of God in a receptive manner. In this way, God’s sending of His Son and His Son’s Death becomes compulsory due to the demands of His love and regardless of His own will in the matter.

To conclude, Arminians are certainly correct when they point out the deterministic elements of the Calvinistic understanding of election because Calvinists posit God’s sovereign will as the deciding factor in election. Since God’s will is an all-encompassing will and therefore the constraining feature in the salvation of any individual, the free will responses of both the Elect and Non-Elect are made certain by the will of God even before those responses are rendered in time. Like the Calvinists, the Arminians affirm God’s sovereign will in election, but the controlling feature in their scheme becomes the love of God so that due deference can be made to the ‘genuine freedom’ of humanity. Their desire to preserve this freedom, likewise, forces God to lovingly act to preserve the freedom of the human will. To do so, God is forced into a trap whereby He must send His Son to remove the bondage of sin and its imposition on the human will. To put this another way, humanity sinned by free will choice, but their sin constrained God’s free will choice and forced Him to sacrifice His only Son due to the constraints of His love.

[i]See “The Bereans and Unconditional Election” available at https://battlehardenedbeliever.com/?p=1893; “Acts 13:46 and Unconditional Election” available at https://battlehardenedbeliever.com/?p=1890; “Is God’s Foreknowledge of the Elect Merely Intellectual” available at https://battlehardenedbeliever.com/?p=2061; “The Deciding Factor in Our Salvation” available at https://battlehardenedbeliever.com/?p=2007; “The Necessity of the Doctrine of Perseverance of the Saints” available at https://battlehardenedbeliever.com/?p=1972; “John 12:32 and God’s Saving Grace” available at https://battlehardenedbeliever.com/?p=1933; “John 1:29 and the Atonement” available at https://battlehardenedbeliever.com/?p=1910.

[ii]David Allen, “Commentary on Article 3: The Atonement of Christ,” in Anyone Can be Saved: A Defense of ‘Traditional’ Southern Baptist Soteriology, ed. David Allen, Eric Hankins, and Adam Harwood (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2016), 56.