Next time you are shut up in the house — say it is a rainy day with nothing much to do — a pleasant and instructive afternoon could be spent with a world atlas. The cartographical exercise I have in mind would perhaps reveal something about the world which is well worth knowing.
While staring at the map, the first question to ask is which nations have the strongest heritage of political and civil liberty. We are not looking for a utopian paradise, or nations where such liberties are made out of stainless steel and cannot erode, but simply for those nations which have the strongest comparative attachment to civil liberty. Compared to the other nations, which nations have the strongest legacy of liberty?
Now the second question concerns which nations have the strongest Calvinistic heritage — that is, in which nations did the doctrine of biblical predestination at one time have the most influence? And, generally speaking, taking one thing with another, you will come up with a list of the same nations which showed up in response to the first question.
And why is this? To most modern Christians this would seem counterintuitive. Why do we have more liberty where the doctrine of predestination once held sway? To hear some talk about it, the doctrine of predestination is a doctrine of celestial tyranny, and those who believe in such ultimate tyranny should seek to imitate this tyranny themselves. No doubt, the argument goes, they should end their chain of reasoning by imitating their Despot in the Sky by practicing their own petty tyrannies. But this is not at all what happened. The reverse happened. Predestinarian Calvinists were the fathers of civil liberty, and advocates of free will paved the way for various forms of statism. All this should give us pause. We should perhaps reflect on the possibility that the picture painted of God’s sovereignty is actually a gross caricature.
Because the creation reflects the way God is, we find that sovereignty is built into the creation. This means that denials of God’s exhaustive sovereignty will necessarily have an unexpected effect. Every attempt to “define down” the doctrine of God’s sovereignty leaves a vacuum at the top, and the heart of man, like nature, abhors a vacuum. And the heart of man, like nature again, will always seek to fill it.
Put another way, predestination is really unavoidable, and it shows up in all systems of thought. It is an inescapable concept, meaning that it is not a question of whether we will have predestination, but which predestination we will have. If we will not have the sovereignty of God, then we are in some respect agitating for the sovereignty of man. And once man has the sovereignty, what will he do with it?
When God is “removed” from His predestining throne, men do not merely breath a sigh of relief. They do not simply proceed to go about their business happy and content, now that the tyrant is gone. Rather, they quickly notice that the throne is now vacant, and they begin scheming about how to occupy it themselves. Men who do not believe in a God who determines the details of our lives will soon be men who lust to determine the details of the lives of other men. If God does not number the hairs of our heads, then some nosy bureaucrat will want to.
And this is precisely why our liberties in this nation have eroded so badly. It is not because scoundrels in Washington have sought to seize the throne; it is because the messengers of God, through lousy preaching, have declared that the throne is empty. In pulpits across the land, ministers of the gospel no longer preach the genuine sovereignty of God. They consequently have become nothing more than turncoat forerunners, little shuffling johnbaptists for the messianic state. And so, in some parts of our country, the land of the formerly free, it is now against the law to use opaque garbage bags. Gotta use the transparent ones so that massa can verify that you are recycling like a good little steppin fetchit.
Even with a situation this desperate, we still like to kid ourselves, wanting reassurance. We want to think that these things are just happening, mysteriously, and that inexplicably we are somehow victims. But such things are occurring because of our doctrine of God. And this is why the “right-wing” in the United States is impotent, why “conservatives” don’t conserve anything, and why “traditional values” Christians spend all their time trying to reestablish an earlier form of feminism. We must face, as the saying has it, facts. The only alternative to a predestinating state is a predestinating God. We will either have one or the other — Big Brother in Washington or our Father in Heaven.
We cannot shake free of predestination, and should stop trying. Regardless of whether we like it or not, it follows us around, like tape on our shoe. Someone is going to assume the predestinating role. Our teaching, our doctrine, declares who we think it should be, and does so as much in our silence as in our speech. As Reformed believers we know (on paper) that God is the one who actually predestines; He is the one who necessarily possesses all sovereignty. But as modern evangelicals we are more than a little unsure about whether we want it this way.
And because we do not want Him, we get them.