Perhaps you’ve heard this story before.
A captain looked out from his bridge into a dark, stormy night and saw a faint light on the horizon coming straight at him. He immediately sent a message: “Alter your course 10 degrees south.” Promptly, the reply came back: “Alter your course 10 degrees north.” The captain was not used to having his commands ignored. He sent a second message: “Alter your course 10 degrees south. I am an admiral.” Back came the reply: “Alter your course 10 degrees north. I am a seaman third class.” Incensed, the captain ordered a third message: “Alter your course 10 degrees south. I am an aircraft carrier!” Back came the reply: “Alter your course 10 degrees north. I am a lighthouse.”
This is a Calvinist story of coming to faith. Humans enamored of their power to choose for or against God have a surprise in store: God is the lighthouse!
Yet many Christians actually identify far more with the captain. As the concluding verse of the often-quoted poem Invictus declares (even in the face of God’s “strait gate” and “scroll”):
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
When I became a serious follower of Jesus in college, I lived for years afterwards never questioning that I was the captain of my soul. My evangelical friends clearly portrayed “making a decision for Christ” as the crucial turning point in my existence. Indeed, somewhere in the recesses of my brain I took some pride in my decision setting everything in motion, especially compared with people who had not yet made such a choice.
Today, I see the “lighthouse” (Calvinist predestination) and “captain” (Arminian free will) positions as a false either/or choice. I now believe the truth is far more paradoxical and mysterious; indeed, the truth lives in the tension between these opposite polarities.
The Lighthouse–God’s Choice
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23).
Our rebellion against God is something we cannot fix on our own, which leads us to an inevitable conclusion: we need outside help. Some of us realize early on that we need this outside help; some of us discover our need for it only after monumental struggle and suffering; some of us go through an entire lifetime thinking we’re just as good or better than the next guy, so we have nothing to worry about.
The biblical term for this outside help from God is grace.
If you’re of the Calvinist persuasion, grace is help that, because we are dead in our sin (Eph. 2:1), we never ask for. Dead people don’t ask for help; they’re dead!
Gradually, “my decision for Christ” looked more and more like the tip of an iceberg. Below the waterline was what St. Augustine called the prevenient grace of God, grace that “comes before” every decision I thought I was making by myself. Had God the Holy Spirit been working all along: strengthening me, wooing me, nudging me, showing me I needed God’s help? I became more and more in awe of God’s gracious choice beneath the surface of my life.
When we ask for help from God, here’s what happens: “It is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast”
(Eph. 2:8–9, emphasis added).
This classic verse posits that nothing regarding salvation is our own doing; it implies even having faith is the gift of God.
I began to realize I made my decision for Christ only because Christ had first made a decision for me—even, according to the Bible, before the foundation of the world (Jer. 1:5; Ps. 139:15–16).
The Captain–My Choice
The Bible makes a strong case that we are justifiably responsible for what we do (James 1:13–15). Furthermore, the Scriptures speak of Jesus coming into the world “to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10) and of God’s “not wanting anyone to perish” (2 Peter 3:9). It is difficult to reconcile this robust picture of God’s desire for “all people to be saved” (1 Tim. 2:4) if humans have no choice and God predetermines some to have faith while others do not.
In his classic Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis begins his defense of the Christian worldview by describing in detail the moral nature of human beings. Where does our inherent sense of right and wrong come from? Why do we feel guilty when we violate moral norms?
Lewis offers this evidence that God exists as the source of a moral universe; we are created in God’s image as moral beings ourselves. Adam and Eve seem to have genuine freedom to choose to obey or disobey God in the garden of Eden; nothing in the text implies otherwise. Without allowing humans a free moral choice, how can God hold all later humans responsible to face judgment and the penalty that Jesus Christ ultimately bears for them?
How do we explain the reality of sin unless there is the possibility of real human choice?
A Third Way–Living in the Tension
After an exhaustive study of biblical literature, D. A. Carson concludes that the tension between opposite ideas of divine sovereignty and human free will is inescapable, “except by moving so far from the biblical data that either the picture of God or the picture of man bears little resemblance to their portraits as assembled from the scriptural texts themselves.” Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility: Biblical Perspectives in Tension (1994)
He offers a crucial point: we must look at the biblical evidence itself, not impose a theological filter (predestination or free will) over the evidence so we only take seriously whatever that particular filter allows us to see. Taking predestination to its logical conclusion, for example, seems to violate all we know about God’s love and justice. Taking human free will to its logical conclusion, however, seems to violate the sovereignty of God. It’s a paradox!
How might living in this paradoxical third-way tension help us?
First, it offers us great comfort.
A little voice at the back of our minds (at least my mind) occasionally asks: was your “decision for Jesus” was good enough? Is your faith strong enough? Is it totally sincere, with no reservations?”
If my salvation hangs by the yardstick of my decision, how does the Lord deal with blasé, haphazard faith compared with hardcore, committed faith? I can easily find people around me who seem far more filled with faith than I am. How will I ever know if my little faith is enough?
There is great comfort in believing that God is somehow involved; my faith is a choice but also ultimately a gift of God’s grace.
Second, it helps us think about God’s will.
Do I decide—making my own plans and then (perhaps as an afterthought) ask God to bless them? Or does God decide—unfolding a detailed plan for my life that, like a treasure map, I must discover to be happy and fulfilled?
Are God’s will and my will mutually exclusive, like two wrestlers each seeking to pulverize the other? Many preachers have little good to say about the human will.
Yet through this paradox, we might conclude that just as God’s decision regarding my faith (divine sovereignty) can underlie my decision (human freedom) without negating it, so might God’s will can underlie my will.
If I want nothing but God’s will for my life, what happens when I discover it? I must re-engage my will! Thus we live paradoxically: throwing down our will at God’s feet, only to take it up again as soon as God calls us to do something.
And as some of us have experienced only too well, it often takes a stronger human will to act on God’s marching orders than follow our own plans. Without engaging our will, how can we ever accomplish God’s will?
Our Lenten Self-Examination
Where might we need to repent?
As soon as we speak about “who decides, me or God?” we treat God as a being who chooses as we do. But the Creator is an entirely different order of being than the creation (just as a painter is a different order of being than a lifeless canvas).
If God’s being transcends our space/time existence (and it does), we really have no idea what choosing means for God. Whatever it is, we cannot equate it exactly with our human choosing–it is of an entirely different order. This might lead us to repent of our small view of God and begin to reflect that God’s choices and our choices do not necessarily exclude each other after all. God’s ways are above our ways.
I might also repent of my pride in thinking faith is all about me and what I’ve decided. I might repent of how I have pushed or manipulated spiritual seekers to “decide for Jesus” before they were ready, or even turned them away completely. I might repent assuming because God has elected (chosen) me, I will never suffer consequences for my own choices. (This is exactly the problem Paul writes about in his Letters to the Corinthians.)
Where do we find hope?
- As you reflect on various points in your own spiritual journey, where do you see God’s Spirit at work in ways you did not understand or appreciate at the time?
- How does “being saved by grace, through faith” speak to your moments of doubt or confusion?
- How does living in within this “I decide/God decides” tension inform how you think or feel about Jesus freely choosing death on the cross for you?
