How Predestination & Arminianism Discredit The Story of Scripture: How Karl Barth Reconciles the Election of Grace and the Goodness of God

Intro

When discussing the election of grace by evaluating Arminianism and Double-Predestination, it is vital not to disconnect the discussion from the story, foundation, and person of our faith; Jesus of Nazareth. In Him is the story of the Gospel, the foundation of the Church, and the person who reversed the curse of Adam for all who are in Him. 

Only in Jesus can the question of the election of grace be confirmed: because He is the elected one, and the God who elects. Arminius is correct to say that Double-Predestination is defies the wisdom of God: however, this does not mean that Arminius’s solution, that God elects on the foreknowledge of faith, is correct. Both Arminianism and Double-Predestination remove Jesus of Nazareth’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension as the defining moment of the purposes of God.

Arminius places the defining moment of salvation in the hands of human choice, while Double-Predestination places it in a decree of God made before the creation of the world. While Double-Predestination proclaims that Jesus is the key to this proclamation, the defining moment is not Jesus of Nazareth but this decree. Double-Predestination argues that the contents of the decree before the creation of the world are the election of Jesus Christ and all His people and those who will be rejected. The latter is what I take issue with in this paper. 

I have long struggled with the question of predestination. For most of my life, I agreed with Arminius; however as I read his work and evaluated the arguments of Arminian theologians, I developed an aversion to this stance. At the root, Arminius argues salvation is human choice. If God elects on the basis of foreknowledge of faith, then salvation becomes the free human election of Christ rather than a divine election of humans in Jesus. 

However, as I studied Double-Predestination, I could not affirm this either. I was stuck between the two.

Then I began studying the works of Karl Barth, and Barth, unlike most other theologians I read, centers this argument on the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Normally this discussion is based on the decrees of God, the character of God, and other theological categories. These are not bad things, however, to me it seemed that the best place to start is Jesus of Nazareth. Not only because of Barth’s starting point but because of his conclusions, Barth does not fit into either Double-Predestination or the Arminian argument, as it is developed today or as it was in his time. Barth throughout multiple volumes of Church Dogmatics, affirms the election of Christ and all those who are in Christ, but vehemently rejects the idea that our election in Christ means that there is another column in the Book of Life of the rejected. Barth instead argues that in Christ’s election all humanity is elected, not rejected. If humans are disconnected from God, it is not because of His rejection of them, but because of their folly and rebellion. 

This paper develops Barth’s argument further by stating clearly what Barth leaves ambiguous: why are some humans outside the covenant of grace if all humanity is elected in Christ? My answer to the question of human rejection is that humans can live a lie of rejection: even though it is a lie, that lie has real consequences. Even though God elected all humanity in Jesus Christ, a human can live an eternal lie. This does not mean that Satan, or the human themselves, overturned God’s election of the individual: it means that the individual lives for all eternity separated from God even though God elected them to grace. An individual status does not change because of their experience.

The Creation Order 

The Exalted Status of Humans

God, out of the overflow of the love within Himself, created the universe. This was not to satisfy some lack God had or to serve another end. Creation was a pure act of love. Creation was “very good” (Genesis 1:31), and the purpose of creation was to live in God’s love and reflect that love. Especially the humans, the pinnacle of creation, given dominion over all creation as God’s living representatives (Genesis 1:26-28). 

Because God immensely loved humanity, the dominion He gave them was not of a vassal state under the boot of a large empire with no real power. God placed in the Garden the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, giving them a choice: to rest in Him or rule on their own terms. The purpose of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is to provide a choice for humanity. Without the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, humanity has no real dominion because they have no agency of their own. The decree of God for humans to rule over creation would be hollow since there is no other choice but to obey YHWH. 

Humanity’s authority is exactly why the serpent deceived Adam and Eve. The choice Adam and Eve made to eat of the fruit affected all creation, and the choices humans make today affect creation. Satan plays into this question of authority, beckoning Eve to take more authority than she is given for herself, “You shall be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5).

Human Responsibility and God’s Election

Arminius rightly says, “man did not sin on account of any necessity through a preceding decree of Predestination…” Then Arminius quotes the 14th Article of the Dutch Confession, “God then did manifest Himself such as He is; that is to say, merciful and just; merciful, since He delivers and preserves from this perdition all whom He in His eternal and unchangeable counsel of mere goodness has elected in Christ Jesus our Lord, without any respect to their works; just, in leaving others in the fall and perdition wherein they have involved themselves.” Arminius focuses on the last sentence in his work, saying, “It is not obvious to me, how these words are consistent with the doctrine of Predestination.” Arminius is not wrong; the doctrine of Predestination proposed by the Belgic Confession cannot fully reconcile this statement because of the last sentence Arminius quotes from Article 14 of the Belgic Confession. The language of the Belgic Confession here points more towards human responsibility than a pre-existing decree of God. 

The last sentence exposes the primary flaw of Double-Predestination: if the fall is the full responsibility of the human race, then how is predestination a decree that went out before the foundations of the world? Did God decree the election and subsequent rejection of humanity before the foundation of the world or not? If it is the fault of humans their fault is incurred at the moment of the fall, not before. Therefore, the election that takes place before the foundation of the world is not one in which God elects some and rejects others; rather it is the election of the man Jesus of Nazareth, in whom all humanity is elected. 

The election of Jesus of Nazareth before the foundation of the world is why Arminius is wrong when discussing the Heidelberg Catechism question 54, which says, “‘election to eternal life,’ and ‘agreement in the faith,’ stand in mutual juxtaposition…” The life of faith is not a thing to possess; it a reality that exists outside of each individual and is real whether an individual believes or not. For if the person and work of Jesus of Nazareth is true in the fullest ontological sense, then this is reality and nothing can change its status; even if the individual does not believe it is true, this does not change the fact that they are elected in Christ. However, this does not mean that this person does not suffer the consequences of the lie they choose to live.

What Is Sin

Arminius in “On Predestination” treats sin as a free act, which, if not submitted to Christ, becomes the cause of an individual’s rejection by God. This stance undercuts Arminius’s own argument because a predestination of rejection, even when based on foreknowledge is still rejection. While he keeps human will intact, much the weight of Arminius’s argument is lost. If God foresees individuals’ faith and then elects the faithful, then he also declares some to rejection before they are ever created. This rejection before creation is one of the same principles of Predestination which Arminius critiques. 

Is there a consequence for sin if all are elected in Christ? Yes! The consequence God names for eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is death. The most basic definition of dead and death is “deprived of life: no longer alive.” Humans introduced death into the world through their disobedience because their rebellion fractured the relationship between humanity and God, veiling humanity in the lie of sin. Without God’s intervention, the universe was non-existent, and without God, it would return to that state. This is why the warning God gives to Adam is that if he or Eve eats the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, “you will certainly die” (Genesis 2:16). There is no life at all apart from God; only death. All those who live in Sin and not in Christ are slowly corrupted into the non-existent chaos of Genesis 1:1-2.

This is why any reality outside of Christ is a lie; it has no positive quality or existence of its own, only a corruption of the true life of God. For if the lie were anything at all, it would be good; for it would have been created by God who made all things very good. 

Jesus is sole ruler of the universe, with the truth fully revealed to those who will accept it. Therefore, all can be elected into the reality of faith, and some still do not stand in that reality. The “agreement of faith” is standing in the reality of the election of grace rather than the lie of the serpent.

The Will Of YHWH

Did Adam and Eve’s Fall subvert the will of God in which He was forced to respond? Was sin a surprise to God that forced Him to change course? While Arminius denies that God’s will is affected by any outside force, his internal logic says otherwise. The entirety of his framework rests on humanity’s choice to choose Christ. Arminius says God elects based on foreknowledge of faith: meaning that God’s will for humanity in his pre-existing election was affected by future human action. 

Arminius says that God’s will is one will. Within his understanding of this one will, there is an antecedent will and a consequent will: the antecedent will is the will of God from all eternity; the consequent will is in response, or in Arminius’s language, “follows” a human action. Arminius's use of follows is an obvious fill-in for the word response: meaning that something within the will of God was affected by the human action. 

The only way that you can truly affirm the goodness of God’s will and God’s freedom is to affirm that YHWH knew before creation that by having this authority humans would, or at least knew that humans had the potential, plunge creation back into the “wild-wasteland” of Genesis 1:2, before creation. God did not will the sin itself, but willed and knew that even through human sin, His purpose of election and incarnation would be accomplished. 

The Garden was not the goal in itself. The Garden was not a failure; it accomplished precisely what God intended: the launch of the elective story of Israel and the revelation of the election of the Son of God, in whom all creation knows as Jesus of Nazareth.

While the means by which the election happened through sin, when humans unleashed the darkness of the creation, this did not affect or change God’s will in the slightest. Sin did not remove the goodness of creation, which God declared in Genesis 1-2. The goodness of creation is actualized in the incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth, and He rescues His creation once for all from the threat of the “nothingness, and contradiction of evil.”

The story of Joseph in Genesis 37-50 begins with God’s will, as expressed in Joseph’s dreams and at the beginning, these dreams do not seem likely to come true because of human evil. However, at the end of the story Joseph says to his brothers, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to keep many people alive” (Genesis 50:20). Does that mean that God ordains or wills people to sin? No! Sin is the absence of God; therefore, all things God does are good. 

What Joseph saw in life, Jesus brought to full completion. God took the entirety of human evil on Himself. What Satan meant for evil, God used for good in the death of His Son. Therefore, it is unreasonable to say that God is cruel for allowing bad or hard things to happen within His will, because God placed the full weight and consequence of all evil and sin on the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

All creation was made for and in Jesus of Nazareth. The full unity between God and creation was consummated in the person of Jesus of Nazareth: God as creature while remaining Lord of the Universe (John 1:1-4, 14-17). 

The Question of Individual Election

How can human agency and God’s election be reconciled? Calvin says, “…if we attempt to penetrate to the secret ordination of God, we shall be engulfed in that profound abyss.” However, Christians must articulate the election of grace in a way that affirms human agency. Either extreme answer to the election question is incomplete. Arminianism makes the gift of God the merit of humans. Arminius says that how God elects is through his foreknowledge of who would believe in Him. This means the election is based on human choice rather than God’s. On the other hand, Double-Predestination removes all need for human agency and has God decree evil for a great portion of His creatures, even though in Genesis 1-2 He proclaims all His creation good. Any attempt to fully reconcile the two is ultimately unstable and incomplete. 

Therefore, what shall we do in order to articulate God’s grace and sovereignty? Start with the one who was absolutely elected, Jesus Christ, and in Him all humanity is elect. The hope of the gospel is not for some, but for all who hear it can enter into the reality it proclaims. 

The gospel presents a genuine choice, and even though it is a genuine choice, that does not mean it gives the individual who makes it any merit of their own by stepping into the New Creation of Jesus. Because this election of all humanity was accomplished before each individual’s existence. All humanity, because of their sin, are rejected on their own; however, in Christ, they are elected because He is elected, and this election happened before the foundation of the world so that no man can boast (Ephesians 1:4-5; 2:8-9; Romans 11:6). 

The Gospel proclaims that every human being is elect because Jesus of Nazareth is elect and in Him all humanity is elect. However, humanity can choose not to live in this election, but live the lie that they are rejected. Even in their rejection, in this life, they do not escape the hand of God, because Jesus of Nazareth, though elected, was also rejected on the cross. Yes, even rejected and abandoned by the Father, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me (Matthew 27:46)?” There is nothing anyone can do to reverse the status of their election, and there is nothing anyone can do to earn the state of their election because it is already a fact.

How then can people be lost? Is this universalism? No! Those who do not believe, live in the lie that they are rejected and suffer the consequences of the lie: separation from God eternally is a reality, but a lie. Rejection is utterly real for those who live in the lie . Their experience of rejection is not God’s choice. Each person is elected, and that status is never revoked; however, people still experience the lie of rejection at their own choosing, and if they die before they bear witness to the truth of their election, they experience the reality of the lie for all eternity. 

Conclusion

Why Arminianism falls short is that its election is based purely on God’s foreknowledge of future faith. Why Double-Predestination falls short is that God does not elect anyone to total rejection. Even the Old Testament examples of rejection, Cain, Esau, Ishmael, and Saul, all experienced blessings of a different kind, and God was with them. 

What ultimately matters is that the basis of our confession of election is Jesus Christ. All humans are elected and can attest to this truth by living in the truth already established. Living in the reality of truth is no merit to them since it exists outside of them in Jesus, but they are graciously welcomed in. The reality of rejection is utterly real, but ultimately a lie because Christ is the only truly rejected one; He took all rejection so no human being would have to be truly rejected. Those who experience rejection are living a lie of their own making.

The fundamental difference from Double-Predestination is this: in that view, God's eternal decree before creation already contains individuals elected into the Kingdom and others rejected from it. Here the decree before the foundation of the world is the election of Christ and through Christ all humanity is elected. Individuals can reject this election; their rejection is not based on God’s will, but a lie which they will live in for eternity. 

This differs from Arminianism in that, there, an individual's status of election depends on their choosing of Christ. Here, the status of election rests solely on the will of God. Their status is secure even if they do not believe in Christ, though their refusal to live in that truth carries real and lasting consequences. The election of Christ is an objective reality outside of each individual, whether they accept that truth or live in the lie of rejection is up to them.

This is not Universalism because a person's status of election and their lived experience of that election are two different things. In Universalism, everyone spends eternity with God regardless of their response; here, the separation a person creates through their rejection of God is taken with full seriousness, and they suffer the real consequences of the eternal lie they have chosen.

All Scripture points to the election of Jesus of Nazareth. He alone accomplished the fulfillment of the covenant and welcomes all humanity into the reality in which He established through His life, death, resurrection, and ascension. Finding our answers anywhere else is not attesting to the truth of the gospel.

Bibliography 

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