By Mark W. Christy, PhD
The Calvinistic doctrine of election upholds the biblical teaching that one’s salvation is rooted in the will of God as opposed to the will of the person. In other words, those who respond to the gospel in repentance and faith do so because they were divinely chosen and enabled to make such a response. Despite the many passages in Scripture which undergird this doctrine, many remain uncomfortable with the idea that somehow their freewill is somehow constrained in the matter of their salvation. One such detractor, Leighton Flowers, states that “Calvinists…have wrongly concluded that the Potter has only one ‘election’ or ‘choice’”.[i] To assess Flowers contentions, this article will carefully examine the argument he makes against the Calvinistic doctrine of election and the one he offers in support of his own view.
According to Flowers, God’s choice in regard to election is not personal (at least in the individual sense); rather, God’s choices throughout “His redemptive plan” are made “to ensure the fulfillment of His promise.”[ii] Incredibly, he depicts Jesus’ use of parables as a means whereby Christ temporally obscured the truth to accomplish God’s promises because “Jesus knew that had [the Jews] believed in Him before the right time then they would not have crucified Him.”[iii] The sordid nature of this understanding for Christ’s employment of parables should make a person cringe because such an approach by the Lord renders each person to be little more than a cog in the wheel of God’s worldwide salvation goals.
Nevertheless, in Flowers’ idea of election, God’s overarching focus is on enacting His salvation strategy. When necessary, God, as Flowers sees it, is willing to judicially harden sinners not so much due to their persistence in sin but based on whether or not such hardening will further His redemptive efforts.[iv] Beyond His judicial hardening efforts, God, according to Flowers, is willing and able to “determine some things” but the “purpose[s] of God’s unique intervention is clearly redemptive.”[v] Apparently God, as Flowers conceives Him, becomes saddled with “cleaning up mankind’s libertarianly free choices and actions” when these interfere with His loving efforts to redeem them.[vi]
To establish his libertarian view of the human will and relegate the divine will solely to God’s evangelistic agenda, Flowers positions himself against the biblical teaching on predestination which asserts that God Himself chooses those who will be saved in eternity past.[vii] Such clear teaching can be found in passages like Romans 8:28-30, where Paul declares,
“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.”[viii]
Verse 28 makes it clear that Christians are “called” (saved) “according to his purpose” (His design, His will). In other words, it is by God’s will that a person is saved. Verse 29 makes this truth even more certain when it mentions that “God foreknew” those he has “predestined” (cf. Eph 1:4-11; 2 Thess 2:13). This being true, a believer’s (personal/individual) salvation is made certain by God even before he/she exists. Adding to the previous verses, verse 30 says that those who have been predestined and called have also been justified (made righteous) and glorified. To put this another way, true believers have been given a salvation which completely obliterates the hold sin has over them by making them righteous before God.
In disregard to the biblical texts that bring forth doctrinal clarity when discussing the Calvinistic doctrine of the election, Flowers prefers to reject this doctrine and supplant with his own uniquely derived inferences from Jesus’ Parable of the Wedding Feast in Matthew 22:1-14. For him, this parable “has been the most helpful in bringing clarity to the complex issue of divine election in my journey out of Calvinism.”[ix] Before even proceeding to examine his argument derived from this parable, one must ask how Flowers is able to obtain such clarity from teachings, according to his own statements (see above), that were meant to obscure truth. Apparently unaware of this concern, Flowers moves forward to draw “three different and very distinct choices of God” from this parable.[x]
The King in the Wedding Feast parable, Flowers opines, chooses which servants will be tasked with inviting guests, which country will receive the first invitations, and who will be allowed to enter based upon their attire. Within his allegorical understanding of this text, the King is God, His servants are the prophets and apostles, Israel is the first to receive an invitation, and the Gentiles are the last.[xi] Since this parable ends with the statement, “many are called, but few are chosen,” Flowers feels obligated to determine the identity of the chosen, but of course any such determination has already been limited by his self-imposed theological framework which has already been discussed. For him, the wedding clothes of those who do attend the King’s feast “represent being clothed in the righteousness of Christ through faith.”[xii] The chosen mentioned in Matthew 22:14 (“many are called, but few are chosen”) are, in Flower’s mind, those who made a libertarian free will response to the invitation (i.e. gospel) to the King’s wedding feast.
To discern the merits of Flowers’ allegorical interpretation of the Wedding Feast parable, one should first consider the proper method of for interpreting a parable. Throughout much of Church history, many have chosen to use an allegorical approach when interpreting the parables. In other words, “people read into the parables elements of the church’s theology that had nothing to do with Jesus’ intention.”[xiii] To properly interpret a parable, one should examine its place and language within the overall message of the Gospel in which it is located. While one can and should attempt to ascertain the theological significance of a parable, one should carefully avoid “reduc[ing] the parable to theological propositions.”[xiv] Finally, the end of the parable should be given special attention as it typically offers the most important aspect of the whole parable which “often requires a decision or forces the hearer to reverse his or her way of thinking.”[xv]
By implementing the aforementioned guidelines for the proper interpretation of a parable, one can arrive at Christ’s meaning in the Parable of the Wedding Feasts in Matthew 22:1-14. Since v.2 makes it certain that Jesus is teaching about the kingdom of heaven, most would agree that that the King envisioned is God Himself. Jesus’ depiction of a banquet in this parable seems to coincide with the eschatological banquet when all of God’s people are gathered together in heaven (cf. Matt 8:11). Those who resist and rebel against the initial invitation exhibit the same sort of behavior as Christ’s audience, the Pharisees, who were being offered this teaching at the time.
Just as in this parable, Matthew mentions a king in another parable in 18:23-24, and this king likewise “deals with wrong responses to the divine initiative.”[xvi] In response to the final rejection of his first invitation to the wedding feast, the King in Matthew 22:5-7 becomes indignant and institutes his judgement upon those who rejected his offer and even maliciously killed those the King’s invitation bearers.
Throughout Jesus’ public ministry, He constantly encountered all forms of harassment and hostility from the Pharisees. Whereas the king portrayed in the Wedding Feast parable becomes justly indignant for the reasons mentioned above, Jesus likewise becomes exasperated with the Pharisees at times and employs some harsh language in His indignant rebuke of them: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness” (Matt 23:27). In the same chapter, Jesus calls them the “sons of those who murdered the prophets” (31). This description seems to further align the Pharisees with the initial group of guests invited to the wedding feast.
In the context of Jewish history as revealed in the Old Testament, the Jews, taken as a whole, repeatedly rejected God and invoked an anger response from Him in return. While Jesus Himself may have intended His comments, at least in the moment, to assert God’s ultimate condemnation for the Pharisees rejection of His divine invitation, Matthew’s goal is to employ this story to reach his Jewish audience who could have certainly drawn a connection between the historical behavior of their predecessors in regard to God’s invitation through the prophets.
While Christ does teach that some Jews will certainly attend His heavenly banquet, he also states that many “sons of the kingdom will be cast out into the outer darkness” (Matt 8:12). In his comments to the Roman centurion, Christ clearly reveals God’s intent to invite Gentiles to receive salvation and therefore entrance into this heavenly celebration: “many will come from east and west, and recline at the table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 8:11). Obviously, this mirrors the king’s order to have his servants go and invite those not unlike the Gentiles (in the view of the Pharisees) whom the Pharisees would regard as too vile to receive such an opportunity.
The second invitation mirrors the difference between God’s old covenant with the Jewish nation and His new covenant as revealed in the gospel. Like the old covenant (the Mosaic covenant) which was given particularly to the Jews, the initial wedding invitation was given “to call those who had been invited” (Matt 22:3). With the second invitation, however, anyone who happens to be located is by default invited: “Go therefore to the main highways, and as many as you find there, invite to the wedding feast” (9).
Among those who respond to the second invite, their role now becomes “entirely passive, so the fulfillment of the task cannot be implied by the report of the response to its fulfillment.”[xvii] While Christ went to great lengths to emphasize the king’s desire for a personal response to his first invitation and his corresponding anger at the rejection of his efforts, filling the seats at the wedding banquets becomes the utmost concern, so much so that some of the guests who arrive have failed to adorn themselves correctly. Some contend that these interlopers (see Matt 22:11) were originally a part of the group invited this second time, but there is some evidence to suggest they arrived by some other means.
First, the previously mentioned passive roles the guests played in their reception of the second invitation does not parallel the king’s expectation of active responsibility on the part of the guest in Matthew 22:11-12. In other words, the guest needed only show proof of having been invited as the wearing of wedding clothes seems to have been assumed to the extent that the king appears surprised at the interloper’s lack of proper attire. Second, the question posed by the king in v.12, “how did you come in here?”, suggests that this guest came by some other alternative means other than the invitation that was passed out to whomever on the streets. Finally, this understanding, as the discussion which follows will demonstrate, fits Christ’s conclusion in v.14 better.
Since the guest is not able to offer a ready defense for his attendance nor does he mention his being invited, the king condemns him to a place that, based on Christ’s overt language, is clearly a depiction of hell. Abruptly, Christ ends the parable by stating, “many are called, but few are chosen” (v.14). For Flowers, “[t]he ‘few’ who are ‘chosen’ represent those who respond freely to the invitation sent by the king.”[xviii] This, however, is unlikely for the following reasons.
In Matthew, the elect or chosen of God are uniquely favored by God in such a way that they make it safely to heaven (24:22, 24, 31). These Elect are clearly seen to be preserved according to the power and sovereign purposes of God. God’s role in the choosing of those who respond therefore becomes a limiting factor that is imposed upon entrance into the ‘chosen’ classification apart from any response to the invitation. Just as they make it through the final trumpet call in Matthew 24, they will make it through the careful examination of God the King when they arrive at the wedding feast of His Son.
Despite their status as chosen and the obvious fact that only God could provide such status as He is the chooser, those whom are chosen as shown in the Wedding Feast parable are not those who reject the invitation or those who invite themselves; rather, they are invited despite not seeking an invitation and not even being among those who would normally first have been considered for such an invitation. Though many are called as the invitation to the wedding feast of heaven is to be given to all people, the Elect of God become readily identified as those who receive the invitation in such a way that they arrive in God’s presence in an appropriate manner (symbolized by wedding clothes in the parable). Their response, in this way, is the indication that they are divinely chosen.
In conclusion, the Parable of the Wedding Feast teaches that among the many who are called to attend the king’s banquet, their attendance is outwardly limited based on their status in regard to the election of the king himself. While they must of course respond to the king’s invitation, the exact characteristics of their right response are not identified in this parable. Therefore, Flowers oversteps the boundaries of sound hermeneutical principles when he argues that this parable affirms the libertarianly free will response to the gospel which he espouses.
[i]Leighton Flowers, The Potter’s Promise: A Biblical Defense of Traditional Soteriology (Coppell, TX: Trinity, 2017), 29.
[ii]Ibid.
[iii]Ibid., 47.
[iv]Ibid., 48.
[v]Ibid., 56.
[vi]Ibid.
[vii]Ibid., 29.
[viii]All Scripture references are taken from NASB1995.
[ix]Ibid.
[x]Ibid.
[xi]Ibid., 30.
[xii]Ibid., 32.
[xiii]K. R. Snodgrass, “Parable,” in Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, eds. Joel B. Green, Scot McKnight, and I. Howard Marshall (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1992), 591.
[xiv]Ibid., 598.
[xv]Ibid., 599.
[xvi]John Nolland, The Gospel of Matthew: A Commentary on the Greek Text, in NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 885.
[xvii]Ibid., 888.
[xviii]Flowers, The Potter’s Promise, 32.