In a word: Calvinism

This entry will probably contain more questions than answers... It has been inspired by a discussion I just finished with someone who has recently come to embrace Calvinism. I have never had a deep discussion before with someone who holds to the principles of Calvinism, specifically predestination. It is something that I have occasionally glanced on and pondered about from time to time, but never deeply considered. In this discussion a million questions have crossed my mind, but let me start from the beginning.

First of all I will state that Calvinism adheres to the belief that all of our actions are predestined. That is to say that every perceived choice in our life is made because that choice must be the one made, all other choices that hypothetically exist could never actually be acted upon. The person I discussed this with explained that this stems from the fact that God does not change, including His desires. Next, and this is where I begin to falter, he explained that all our desires are initiated by God. God could instill desires in our hearts directly, or He could instill them through our interaction with our environment. Whatever we feel at the time can eventually be traced back to God! That is quite a big pill to swallow! And the rest easily follows from there. At time that we make a decision, we make that decision based upon our own feelings and desires at the time, and this is the one and only thing we base our decisions on. Thus, our decisions in life come from God and God only! Whoa!!!!

One of the biggest questions that occurred to me after chewing on this for a little while was why did Adam and Eve take bites from the apple? Why would God have them disobey Himself? It seems absurd to me that God would have us choose to sin. In a way, this seems to depict God as a cat who is toying with the mouse. God calls us to obey and love Him, yet He places desires in our hearts to choose to disobey Him. This is a giant oxymoron that I can't get over. In addition, how can God hold us accountable for our actions? If I go out and stab somebody to death, all I have to do is explain that my decision to choose to kill the person was due to God's will insistence on me to do so. Having said all this, speaking from a philosophical/theological point of view I haven't disproven his argument; I have only demonstrated some absurdities that I see if I accept the point of view.

His argument seems to hold some legitimacy as long as you accept the premise that God is the creator of us and our universe. Since God set everything into motion, does that mean Adam's desires were wholly set into motion by God as well? As I was thinking these things through, it wasn't my goal to disprove his point of view as a Calvinist, but in order to determine if these things were true I was playing a devil's advocate role. So my first objection to this was that just because God set everything into motion, it does not mean the He set everything into motion to yield his will. In other words God placed some ambiguity into the world which would release the world from predestination. It would allow some things to unfold on their own, basically by chance. The person I was discussing this with then asked if this meant that God choose to limit His sovereignty, to limit His control over the world. I believe that God would not have been limiting His power over the world, but that he was in effect limiting its expression. God chose not to fully express His power or sovereignty. Why would God do this? An analogy that I came up with was the following. Say I was a good basketball player, hypothetically of course, and that I was playing a little one on one with someone that was really bad. I would probably decide to not use all of my ability to play well so we could both enjoy the game and have fun. I would be choosing not to fully express myself for a greater good. We see that God has at times done this as well in the Bible. The greatest example is His own personification through Jesus Christ. He limited Himself to the human form. The question becomes would God limit his expression this sense. It certainly isn't necessary that he do so.

First I need to mention another common premise among Christians that we accepted. God's ultimate purpose in creating us and our world was to bring glory to Himself. Having said that, I was inclined to believe that God would in fact limit His power expressed in our world to allow us to have free will. This in turn would allow us to freely choose God, and any glory that we bring Him would be somehow more valuable. If something must glorify you, how uplifting is it really? Technically you are still being glorified, but it seems so much more valuable to be glorified by someone who doesn't have, but decide to anyway. But I suppose this is a weak point in my argument, because it completely based on my own feelings. It isn't logical that glory received unnecessarily is more valuable than glory received otherwise. Also, this person would argue that the person who is unnecessarily deciding to give glory would actually be doing it necessarily. They are actually glorifying because they desire to, and that desire eventually comes from God and nothing else.

So it seems that both a Calvinist and its opens disagree on the means, but not the end. God could choose to limit Himself if He felt that it would bring Him greater glory, or he could choose to fully express His power and forcibly bring about the most glory. So the important question is: is glory that is forced valuable? As I answered previously, logically the answer is yes, but to me personally the answer is no. Which answer is more important? I don't know. I want to keep myself up in the air about this because I can tell that my friend has reached this decision after much prayer and deliberation. This is something that I will definitely be praying wisdom about.