Why I'm Not a Calvinist - Pt 3: Sovereignty isn't Tyranny

On Participation and Cooperation

Sun beams were cutting through the yellows and reds of the stained glass windows that lined the church auditorium; we all sat in old wooden pews, oak, rich brown, and behind the preacher were the pipes of the church’s organ.

“There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!”

The preacher said that, and he was quoting Kuyper.

And he kept going, quoting Sproul this time :

“If there is one single molecule in this universe running around loose, totally free of God's sovereignty, then we have no guarantee that a single promise of God will ever be fulfilled.”

The preacher continued on this train of thought - and many in the congregation were sat with open bibles and journals, taking notes. But I was wondering what he meant by sovereign.

And then there was the kicker - the idea that sovereign means complete control - dictating where each molecule bounces, dominating the comings and goings of every square inch of the universe, and of course, decreeing our human movements.

That Sunday there was this strong claim - the direct control of God, that nothing in the universe occurs without His permission or decree. And that Sunday, my mind didn’t run to the question of the will and the freedom of man; I wasn’t thinking about the problem of Sin on a determinist or compatibilist framework.

That Sunday, in my own open notebook, I wrote the following question :

Is God a Tyrant?

What Does Sovereignty Mean?

Like I said before, all of these posts are just the questions that help me get at the deeper and more theological / philosophical issues that surround a Calvinist Soteriology - these posts aren’t scholarly essays or theological treatises - they’re more like stones in a shoe. Hopefully annoying enough for you to stop and consider; all the deep stuff comes AFTER this.

I grew up in a world that preached the strong case of God’s sovereignty. Supreme Authority. Executing and administering all his Eternal purposes.

People would ask, often, in Sunday School or in Bible Studies, if anything happens outside God’s will, and the answer would come back as:

“No.”

“Even the hard stuff? Even evil and sin?”

“Yes, even those are God’s will.”

“Like war, and rape, kids dying?”

And verses would come out, and ideas of multiple wills in God, and the back and forth would go on and on and on.

But that was what I learned.

That’s what it meant for God to be sovereign; nothing happening outside of His will - a complete and direct control.

But that question, is God a tyrant? kept circling my mind.

If God directly controls all things, and all people, is He actually a Tyrant?

Definitions matter, don’t they?

More Than One Way to Rule

There’s more than one way to Rule; more than one way to be King.

There is a difference between authority and authoritarianism; a difference between compassion and compulsion.

It was one thing to be the Ruler of Creation, to reign over it; it seemed altogether different, to me, for that rulership to be the kind of absolutism that is more like a cosmic Big Brother than that of a Loving Father.

I don’t want any Calvinists to get riled up by the language - so let me take a second to be another pebble in the shoe. A moment to stop and pause.

We all agree that God is sovereign; God has supreme authority over His creation - our differences lie, ultimately, in how much of that authority God decides to exercise.

If His goal, and I think we all agree here, too, is to bring about maximum Goodness and maximum Truth and maximum Beauty - to be glorified maximally, then God’s ability to bring about those ends really matters.

There’s one way to bring those ends about, the ends of maximum glory, and that’s by constraint and obligation.

God could, if He so desired, make every person and particle do exactly what He wants - He can force them by exercising His absolute authority over them. In a game of wills and powers, God always wins - what He says goes, and no one can do otherwise.

God brings about His ends by enforcement.

And that’s the answer I got to lots of these questions growing up.

Sovereignty, as a natural outworking of God’s omniscience and omnipotence, means that God has the know-how and the power to do whatever He wants. So when He says He knows the end from the beginning, it’s because He makes it so, imposes it, ensures there’s no deviation.

This isn’t the creeping tyranny of government goons holding society up at gunpoint making sure they don’t break the laws of the supreme dictator.

This is different.

It happens before you’re born, before you had a choice, and in such a way you could not do otherwise. The game, as it were, was rigged from the start. Luckily, the Calvinists say, it was God who rigged it - and rigged it in His favour. But whatever way you parse it out, that rigging seems less like ruling and more like restraint.

There’s no real way, in my view, to differentiate a complete lack of freedom from a full kind of tyranny. If humans, and the entire cosmos, has not just the word mine inscribed across it, but also, freedom is slavery, then it seems like this cosmos is a dictatorship - a regime where only one person calls the shots, makes all the rules and all the decisions.

That is one way to rule.

But to me, it seems to answer yes to the question of, is God a tyrant ?

There’s Another Way

I’m a dad now.

Ransom is closing in on a year and half, and with that age and his newfound mobility, he can get into all kinds of things. And, he wants to - to assert his independence, to see the world and demand his way. He wants cookies and eggs all the time, he wants to play with every kid and their toys, he wants to run out into the street and drink espresso and grab knives.

It might be a surprise, but I’m much strong than him, by a pretty big margin. I can make him do whatever I want, because if he doesn’t, I can grab him and force him.

Oh, you don’t want to come this way, well, too bad.

And I could take it further - I could force feed him, force everything upon him. Tell him where to go and what to do. It’d be heart wrenching for me, but I could do it.

I could rule over this child, father him, with an iron fist.

I could be a tyrant.

But I don’t think that’s what a father does, I don’t think it brings about Ransom’s best, nor do I think it brings about my best. Love is not real if it is forced, at any level. And Fatherhood is not Good if it crushes the child.

Fatherhood is about giving up more and more of my control and letting Ransom develop his own strength and wisdom and power. I could keep him out of harm’s way all the time, but, I know, some lessons are only learned the hard way.

Fatherhood is about desiring the Good of the other for their own sake - I want the best for little Ranse, and that means I do not use my power over him as a tactic of absolute control, but as a way to build him up and train him. That means, even now, I let go a lot.

My goal is not tyranny; my goal is fatherhood. I do not want a house of fear or compulsion or obligation, I want a house of love and virtue and goodness - and those things cannot be compelled.

I do not constrain his will by my power, I do my best, in love, to aim it towards what is Good.

Another example would be government.

I love a free nation; I have big qualms, for example, with North Korea. Controversial, I know. There are bodies that govern the people of a nation, and all of those nations have a main ruler, a president, a prime minister, a king.

That ruler has a choice - and we’ve seen nations go down the dark path of dictatorship - think of the curfews and rations, the militarized state, controlled movements, controlled speech, controlled everything.

To deviate would mean imprisonment or death.

That’s one way to rule a nation.

Obedience comes, but at what cost ?

Another way to rule is with respect to freedom.

A government concerned with the rights of the people; and that seems to lead to all kinds of flourishing, both human and nation.

How Does God Rule?

My read of the early Genesis account is that God made humans to share in Hs rulership of Creation. To be co-heirs and stewards. God made humans in such a way that they have a kind of true freedom; some aspect of autonomy.

We can get into the whole monergism vs synergism and the primary vs secondary causation debates some other time - but the view I’m putting forth is that God has given up some of His control, some of his “exercised authority” for the sake of humanity - for them to have freedom and for them to be able to rule with Him.

Why ?

Part of the answer is because love cannot be forced; love must be freely chosen.

The other part of it is more theological.

God is a Father, first.

And His House, His Cosmos, is one where Love and Goodness and Virtue reign. Just like I don’t force Ransom to do everything I demand, even though I could, God doesn’t enslave me to His own power.

In fact, it is more amazing that despite my freedom, God can still work all things towards His Good Ends.

God is also a King, but His angels are not gestapo and his regime is not domineering. It is not imprisonment or death that comes with every deviation - I’d be smote a long time ago. Mercy triumphs over judgement, and just as God was long-suffering with the ancient Israelites as they wandered and rebelled in the wilderness, so too is he long-suffering with us.

Let me sum this section up with a quote from Lewis :

“God created things which had free will.

That means creatures which can go wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong, but I can't. If a thing is free to be good it's also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible.

Why, then, did God give them free will?

Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata -of creatures that worked like machines- would hardly be worth creating.

The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water.

And for that they've got to be free.

Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently, He thought it worth the risk.

If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will -that is, for making a real world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings- then we may take it it is worth paying.”

Participation and Cooperation

God is not sovereign in the sense of a tyranny or having had created humans to be mere machines that grind according to their programmed code.

God is sovereign in the sense that He rules and reigns as the supreme King of the Cosmos. That reign is one of invitation.

Part of the invitation is to participate in His Goodness, Truth, and Beauty - that’s the place where all our freedom is found. God created humanity to participate in His Goodness and further invites us to cooperate with Him in spreading that Goodness to the whole universe.

Jesus says that His kingdom doesn’t use the same weapons the kingdoms of the world use; His reign is different.

His Sovereign Dominion is not a tyranny, it is not a dictatorship of machines, it is alive and it is loving; it is some sort of wild humility that takes a Divine Risk ( to echo Lewis ), and asserts that, in the game of bringing about the Greatest Good, it is better for man to be free than it is for them to be machine; that it is better for us to freely participate and cooperate with our Father-King.