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A number of minor
additions have been included, which do not affect the thesis,
PREDESTINATION AND FREEWILL
January
1997
The
events planned before created time and
executed
within it
Rev. Dr. Robert Donaldson
of the Presbyterian Church in
Author of The Shadow of a Mighty Rock
(comprising: The Light
that Shatters,
The Rock that Shades,
and
Jesus Christ, Lord of
Logic, Gift by Grace),
A Question of Gifts,
That Magnificent Rock
and other works
First published January 1997
by World
Wide Web Witness Inc.
ISBN 0
9586992 7 5
Introduction, January 1997 (expanded May 1999, slightly further 2012)
This work, in conjunction with the trilogy, The Shadow of a Mighty Rock* and other works* on this site, shows one more aspect of the sovereign majesty of the God who uttered the Bible. In a sense it is APPLIED CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS, showing from the basis demonstrated in that work:
i) the unique applicability of Christian teaching to the case of man, its intimate and infinite capacity to handle the data of man in the vast parameters of his powers, procedures and vitality.
ii) its clear, harmonious coverage of life and logic, undaunted amidst the chronic swamps of confusion in philosophy and its battalions, squatting paradoxically in 'Science'.
iii) the composition at the highest levels, of the entire place, purpose and position of man. It shows moreover, the base of his squandering of needless time by chronically looking where the answer is NOT to be found: and hence not finding it.
This comprehensive and harmonious coverage of the facets of man, precisely where philosophy founders and culture fails, is an a fortiori magnificence of the Rock which is Christ, of the word of God; it is one of the incomparabilities of the God who has so spoken, and so given us wisdom in His truth that he can so deliver man from confusion: it is one of the criteria without parallel in the world, of the word of God.
For thousands of years popular pagan philosophers, disdaining or ignoring the simple realities of the Creator and of the limitless transformation which that reality provides to our position, our condition and our capacities; or inventing deities which do not have the advantage of existence ... have spiralled.
They have vacillated around autonomy with its pseudo-adolescent fantasies, determinism with its slavish self-deceptions; they have liberated irresponsibility and instituted self-conditioning's mock solemnities: never guilty, always afflicted, yearning like gods, despairing like children. Meanwhile, they try, oh how they try to combine heteronomies from which to concoct mankind - a little matter, a little mind, a flush of libido, a swag of survival, a thrust of passion for races or cultures or nations, a little character, a lot of heredity and environment, in prosperity talking triumphant evolutionism, now amid systematically broken dreams, despairing amid the disquietudes of unconstructive angst.
All this they do and more: while forgetting or wilfully ignoring the spiritual environment and the vitality which comes from a chaste, deep and intimate relationship with God who made them. And this? It is as if a driver ignored the ground, a bird the sky or a ship the waters - not to say, the shipyard or the manufacturing plant.
Such colossal blindness reminds one of Matthew 13:14 and John 12:40, and we should look at this:
Hearing you will hear and shall not understand, and seeing you will see and not perceive. For the heart of this people has grown dull. Their ears are hard of hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, lest they should understand with their heart and turn, so that I should heal them.
In case you should imagine that this was merely a Jewish phenomenon at that time, consult II Timothy 3:1-7, Romans 1:18ff. and I Timothy 4:1-4, revelation given to the 'Apostle to the Gentiles', or Matthew 24:6-14. As to the heart, there is no difference, Jew or Gentile: all have sinned.
Even those who put in will at last, like Schopenhauer, tend to forget its bounds and grounds, while the Kants try to distance it from God, by making Him so apart as to be merely imaginable, and his laws to be by decree - of Kant. Nice try! We look at this in the Appendix to Predestination and Freewill. Hume would have got rid of causation altogether, and is careful to describe the cause of his conceptions about the unreality of causation! Attention is given to these general areas and such approaches in different measures here and in The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, and to some extent in That Magnificent Rock.
Here, in Predestination and Freewill, it is shown that -
just as there is no rationale to freedom without a divine base;
nor personal meaning to responsibility, nor avoidance of irrational determinism and the immature stringencies of callow reductionism on the one hand§ , or illusory autonomy on the other - without access to this base:
so there is no escape from a depersonalising propositional abyss,
indeed from de-imaging man from the divine model:
except through the divine love and election, achieved in that God who is love.
By sovereign predestination within this love, the nature of His Being - that He eternally wills: there is an issue in children of God of whom the sinless Redeemer, the Saviour is the brother and Lord. The Bible covers uniquely and coherently all facets of the human case: invariant and without need to vary.
The word of God in verifiable fact, exhibits such a facility for harmonious contemplation of all these elements, as to be not only unique, but breathtaking. As we survey some of these its qualities - those relevant to our purpose in this thesis - the mind is arrested with the magnitude of the love of God, precisely as He declares it, just as it delights the heart with the intensely personal force of the divine beauty. That these sit together with the design for human freedom is both a wonder and a responsibility, under the awning of entire divine governance.
Such effortless combination is a jewel in its place. Its sides are not merely regular but flashing and a wonder.
If this stresses the extreme liability of man; and it does - it is one which this same God is willing to assume, at cost to Himself: one predestinatively paid, for those chosen before the foundation of the world, to which this Son was sent. If it is an incredible, even preposterous effrontery to reject Him who gave, bringing peace to mind, and heart, from Him who is the designer of both: in view of this cost to and integrity of God, it is also as we shall show, entirely the fault of man, and this in no empty form, as though God were NOT love, but provided merely an empty symbol of it.
With God, it is so in practical reality. God's attitude and power combined are guarantee express in His word, so that to reach hell, one must in a sense both true and sincere, do it over Christ's dead body in the face of a light of staggering integrity. That body is raised, but its significance is not lost.
It is because of that love that the lost are mourned in His word, and that He came to seek them. The celestial harmonies were translated into practical redemption and so Christ came to earth, verifying on earth the love of God.
These things being done, we delight in that word of God that endures like granite, in its beauty, verification again completed. The grandeur once more attested in scope, accuracy, realism, it is a paragon that philosophy cannot match: that is slave neither to futile reductionism to change the problem, nor of vainglorious aspirations, to ignore it.
It is that word which we attest, showing its multiple facets of harmonious perfection by means appropriate to such a task, without adding such explicatory devices to doctrine as such (cf. pp. 122-123, 145, 147-150 infra). The word of God, it is that word which is light unmatchable in the midst of all the writings of man, and having so attested, we focus anew in it on that Christ whom it depicts (pp. 148-149).
It is time man learned to glory in the God of the word, and in the word of God and to worship Him through the Man of His Power, the Son of His heart, the eternal Word made flesh (John 8:58, Hebrews 1:1-8), Jesus Christ, who translated things into a practice so phenomenal as to leave this current servile idolatry of sport and gurus, the throb of musical derangement and misplaced political power, and indeed all the pagan figures of history - but a dim shadow. I like sport; but in its place; history's often sober lessons, but considered with unaffected realism; the magnificent spiritual stimulus of which music is capable: but yet more, the paths of peace with purity. Like a bonnet on a car, I like also to be in my own place; and since that it is in God, not as a slave but as a friend through unpolluted grace, each day is a delight and a privilege.
It depends on the company; and that of God is unspeakable privilege. To work for Him is the ultimate in employment for any man.
It needs to be emphasised that people often have become so accustomed to the virtues of Biblical teaching that they may tend to forget its incomparable resolving power for this specific area of predestination and freewill, as for all human logical predicaments which man has made for himself. As here in logic, so there in personal affairs, it holds the key; and at the latter level, as in the former, it shows the way to the approach which prevails in every good thing: Jesus Christ. (Cf. The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, Chs. 5-7, esp. pp. 532-560).
The wonder is this: that
just as His truth is sure and unimpugnable, so He also personally is still
available (John 10:9, Romans 10:9, Matthew 24:14) - to whosoever desires
(Revelation
As to His drawing, our coming and what He shows of His ways, we are about to embark on study. Of this be sure, He denies none who comes in His name, no one who calls on it, and puts the trust of the heart, according to His word, in Him: crucified, bodily risen, returning to rule, well-groomed in the flesh, perfect in spirit, deity in status, serving, interceding, the kiss of mercy on the page of righteousness, in the annals of truth (cf. Psalm 85).
We indicate that the election of sinners to salvation is essentially a matter which involves "cross-election" (cf. John 14:1-9), since the Christ on earth manifested God in heaven intrinsically, and hence the realities of heart which were transpiring in predestination itself; and since Galatians 6;14 insists that we glory not except in the Cross of Christ. That? it implies as John Murray so well declaimed, that eternal and blessed counsel of God, that plan of salvation, that entire dominion of love and discipline (His), power and resurrection, knowledge and humiliation.
It is indeed by these
things that Christ both showed the integrity of His love in practical action
which attests it (cf. Colossians 1:19-22), and the reality of the cost (His)
which bespeaks that though He is sovereign, He is no dictator, the things
concerned being substantive and glorious, intrinsic and lovely, sufficient and
substantive (cf. Romans 5:1-11, Hebrews 10:1-14), holy and pure.
In quality, He bore what we
must (otherwise) bear; for though He was innocent in guilt, yet was He vicarious
in victory (cf. Isaiah 25:8, I Peter
The Cross ? (cf. The Kingdom of Heaven, Appendix): It is the pivotal expression
for it is merely a motion of centrality in a theme of glory, of spirituality in that there is none of this without love (cf. I Cor. 13), and no love which is not prepared to face cost.
It is the sublime necessity for man, that he take what is there offered, and the glorious spontaneity for God in this, that there is none to force Him to the steps He took - which produces something of the glory of this inexhaustible wonder, so emphasised here by Paul in Galatians 6:14. The Cross is the mode which betokens the heart, for the heart which accepts the mode. It is the PERSON who does it, and WHAT He does: it is all of this.
It is not a
peremptory, capricious, dictatorial or arbitrary thing, this predestination by
God, then;
in fact, since He declares He
would have all men to be saved, as to attitude (I Timothy 2:1ff.- cf. SMR pp. 1128ff.), it is generic, freeing us
by the superb dimensions of His love, who IS love
( I John 4:7ff.), from any
thought of favouritism, of being ravished differentially by disgrace and disorder
- however much deserved, as indeed it is - because of an unreliable lack of
amplitude in His dispositional lovingkindness (cf. esp. putative schema
in SMR p. 638, with 635).
This sort of short-circuited
divine love is excluded in the Bible (Colossians 1:19ff.), which
also presenting God as intensely personal, deliberative, weighing all things
and knowing all things (cf. A Question of Gifts, Section VII), makes it clear that the exclusion
of souls, which occurs for so many, is one NOT from natural qualities, as if God
were selfishly seeking people select and choice in themselves, and grasping them
by a specious predestination then merely allegedly all of grace; for all have
sinned being without God and without hope in the world, alienated from the
life of God, while outside the salvation in Christ Jesus; and NONE appreciates the actual spiritual things adequately,
until saved by grace, so to avoid foolishness concerning them
(I Cor. 2:9ff.).
NONE has the natural qualities inherently to respond effectually to this love. ONLY by a change which ONLY God can secure, does this reality of response have release, come to actuality. Otherwise all are automatically lost as servants of sin, whose lives are alienated from the life of God (Ephesians 2:1ff., 4:17ff.) Nor is it a work proceeding from divine caprice, since the love is not cornered by divine self-indulgence, self-satisfaction or self-directed desire that does not consider the object of the love. God does not lack as if He NEEDED completion, not being as if created, or subject to this and its kind, and so exists without any containing, crimping or cramping limits at all, the Creator of all limits as of all things. He needs no conferment. His love is pure and towards His creation, and His selection is not reward for virtue, but generic love's consummation. As it is grand, so it is assured; and predestination grants this wonder as a certainty.
Thus NO religion or philosophy can compete in showing the REALITY of human RESPONSIBILITY, since none other presents
a) a personal God
i) who knows all
things, makes no mistakes, has no natural or other forces to
incline askance from knowledge or reality.
ii) who has all willingness
to save all, but only within truth, never by force or violence to will.
iii) who has a procedure
whereby justice is satisfied, so that love is not limited to what by nature is
inferior in any respect - namely, the Cross.
b) who is thereby enabled to effect lovingkindness without respect to ANY good in the receiver, the saved soul.
c) who thus makes ALL of
salvation a donation;
while remaining One ...
d) who secures such results in the saved, that their position as children of God, with character composed on that mould, redeemed AND restored, is neither illusory on the one side, nor peremptory on the other side, as if truth were no more truth, because love is love.
In this way, responsibility for loss is entirely of man, love for the saved and over and towards all DISPOSITIONALLY is entirely of God, and the justice otherwise so abused that the selection would HAVE to be arbitrary or purely peremptory for the One selecting, is now maintained, while the love is fulfilled not by whim, or say-so, but by effort and work and results. These proceed from God Himself alone, foreknowing not the virtue but the preference of the persons of those not yet created, apart from the works of their day (Romans 9). These, not yet sinners or limited by its guile and wiles, are not gifted with inherent superior grace or face, or so beheld, with the differentials which sin imposes, this, being chosen in Christ (Ephesians 1:4), being pre-temporal, works apart, the willingness to come to the light, foreknown (John 3:19). Thus no cloud obscures the reality, nor distorts the result. Foreknowledge apprises of it; predestination secures it, as in all God's works, the truth triumphant.
This divine finding involves divine funding from the first, and is so based till the last. The whole status as freely chosen and salvation as a free gift, is practically obtained by Christ at the Cross, to enable the restitution; and then, as to quality and life, empowered by the Spirit of God, to enable the continuing characterisation of the children with the properties of children ... of God, and this willingly; and yet this again, so that responsibility even here is not lost. For the status is not the function; but merely the basis for it.
What results ?
Through the word of God, not merely is freedom-determinism resolved, as shown in these pages, but also evidenced coherently and systematically, is autonomy's basis and folly, volition's reality, love and justice in their parallel concerns, authority and responsibility, personality and restraint, divinity and humanity all in their mutuality: how ?
In consistently applying precisely what the Bible teaches, all of it, to the point. It is there that it is found. Nothing else can coherently cover all this for the simple reason that nothing else has the necessary ingredients of love and cost, reality and design, image of God creation and death of Christ invitation to share, to come in by going out, so that nothing that is partial shall glory. Neither shall it exalt itself nor justly complain; for nothing lasts, all being crucified with Christ, as the apostle Paul so strongly attests (Galatians 2:20, Ephesians 2:1-10), as part of the reality of salvation.
This indeed is inherent in it, so that none may glory, so that likewise none may lament their loss because of some extrinsic cause, from the Kingdom of Heaven (cf. Isaiah 2:17, Luke 19:42, John 15:21-23).
Here then is not merely the exhibition that the Bible has a harmony magnificent and arresting, because it has so comprehensive a coverage of all the realities of man in this sphere, which in fact nothing else has ever achieved in the history of human thought, often called philosophy: so that God is shown where He is, infinitely superior to man, being his Creator. In fact, there is more.
The very ingredients are
essential to the resolution of the problems in this sphere, any departure
bringing in not merely an impoverishment but an omission from the needful form
of harmony, covering all the issues. They are, quite simply, found nowhere
else: only in the word of God.
THAT, it constitutes in
verifications, merely one more, relating not only to the unique and total
resolving power of the word of God, but to the grandeur which is inherent in
Bible, the word of God, confirming what it claims in depth upon depth,
dimension upon dimension, height over height, breadth beyond breadth. To these
things now the reader may make address, for God has already, and long made His
own declaration, more immovable than the sun, and far brighter.
In general, note that only slight or cosmetic changes are made to the original 1964 thesis. However, some short added elements of more interest are set to appear in this font, its colour and character, within one style of brackets i.e.{ }, throughout the work. In substance, thrust and position, however, it is unaltered, so that in all essentials it is true to the original.
To the text of Predestination and Freewill, original preface and then contents: proceed here.
NOTE that a Supplement in 1964 was provided to the thesis, and it was named
THE FATHER OF FREEDOM
or Freedom without Flounces
Thus there is a 1964 Supplement to M.A. Thesis, presented to University of Melbourne following oral examination on the thesis,
"PREDESTINATION AND FREEWILL.
·
on this Site, and domain - http://webwitness.org.au
· may be found in Predestination and Freewill, Responsibility, Foreknowledge and allied subjects.
Firstly, this topic as above, has now for some time been covered (2012 with extension to 2014) in a
SEVEN VOLUME SET
of which
Predestination and Freewill is the first volume.
This is the Predestination and Freewill Heptad, its formal name:
ON PREDESTINATION and
FOREKNOWLEDGE,
LIBERTY and NECESSITY,
RESPONSIBILITY, DUTY and CREATIVITY.
To this additions are made, some this year.
Other references may be noted as below (as from 2003).
These are to be found, esp. as indexed or indicated