Double Predestination

One of the worst doctrines to ever hit the church is the doctrine which came in under the Reformed label and it is the doctrine of double predestination. Basically this doctrine says God chooses who goes to heaven and who goes to hell and people have no choice in the matter. There is no such thing as human freedom to choose whether or not to follow God, repent, believe in Jesus and receive eternal life. This doctrine is held up to uphold the notion of God’s sovereignty and is usually bandied about by semi-academics. This doctrine is thought by some to be the high watermark of the Protestant Reformation and the strength of the church in the 17th and 18th centuries. The doctrine and the historical analysis are both untrue. First for history, the strength of the Protestant Reformation came from three other doctrines, not double predestination. The great energy which changed Europe and the world came from three rediscovered truths by the early reformers. The first truth was justification by faith, the second was faith in Christ alone as necessary for salvation and the third was the authority of scripture over church tradition. The rediscovery of these three doctrines rocked the world and they are still rocking the world. The truth is the doctrine of double predestination killed the momentum of the reformation and is the main doctrinal reason the church is nearly dead in Europe today. This is because double predestination is nothing more than fatalism with Christian language attached to it. Double predestination cuts the heart out of evangelism and purpose for the church and renders the church listless and uncaring. The worst part about double predestination is that it makes God responsible for evil. If humans have no free will then God is the one who set Adam and Eve up to fall, God is the one who created and destined Hitler to kill 6 million Jews and set the world to war. It would mean that it is God who created the rapist to rape and the murderer to murder all for some sovereign plan we are told we can’t understand. We are told to be quiet in our ignorance because His ways are higher than our ways. Well His ways are higher than our ways, but this doctrine makes His ways lower than our ways. It makes God out to be the author and orchestrator of evil. Abraham said “will not the judge of all the earth do right” because he knew he couldn’t worship an unjust God, and neither can we. If double predestination is true we may fear God and serve God but we will not love and worship Him because we will see Him as less fair than we are, and if we don’t see God as all good we will not be able to give Him our total worship. Double predestinarians say their doctrine is scriptural, relying a lot on Romans 9, but nearly the whole rest of the Bible refutes this position. Not only does the Bible tell people to choose one way over another, time and time again, (see Genesis 4, Deut. 28 and Joshua 24 as examples) but the Bible is full of commands or imperatives. Every command, every imperative implies a choice. God is saying do this, or don’t do that. Commands make no sense without choice. It’s not that there is little evidence for human volition in the Bible, but the whole Bible is about God acting with humans with volition. The Bible is a book about how God works out His salvation with people who are free. He implores, invites, judges, corrects, woos His people but never overrides their choice to love and follow Him or leave and reject Him.