Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from man. From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man. “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.”

Do you believe that God, in this passage, reveals something new, something he did not say to Adam and Eve? Do you believe God always allowed humans to eat animals, only “without their blood,” or this is something new God is instating among humans? Do you believe that God set the rainbow in the skies as a sign of his covenant not to destroy the Earth by water again?

In Genesis 28:13–15, God says to Jacob:

And behold, the LORD stood above it and said, “I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring. Your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and in you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land. For I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”

Do you believe that God is reveals something new, something that Adam and Noah did not know? Do you believe God is covenanting with a specific person, Jacob, describing how his offspring will stand apart from the rest of humanity in some specific way?

If you read these passages and think: “God treats groups of people—separated by time, events, and other groupings—in different ways,” then you believe in dispensations. This is, in fact, all a “dispensation” is—a way in which God deals with a group of humans, whether grouped by time, ancestry, service, or anything else.

This is the first element of dispensationalism.

The second element is simply reading what God says in the Scriptures literally. For instance, when God says in Genesis 17:13, “So shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant,” God means he making an everlasting covenant that is in the flesh of Abaraham’s descendants. This covenant cannot end because it is everlasting. This covenant cannot be replaced by a “spiritual covenant,” because it is in “in your flesh.” This covenant cannot be transferred to someone outside Abraham’s physical descendants, because it is to his descendants “in their flesh.”

So, broadly speaking, dispensationalism makes these two claims:

• God deals with different people in different ways at different times.
• God’s promises and covenants should be read as literal promises that God—based on God’s own character—has or will fulfill in precisely the way God describes.

To these two, we can add a third that is almost universally accepted by all modern dispensationalists:

• Christ will return to return and reign on the earth for a thousand years from Jerusalem, or premillennialism. 

What about all the charts? What about all the graphs? What about the locust in Revelation being helicopters, and the false prophet being an AI? All of these things may be things particular schools of dispensationalist teach, but they are not, in and of themselves, dispensationalism.

With this background, let’s examine some false claims about dispensationalism.

Dispensationalism is a Recent Invention

Dispensationalism was created as a completely new doctrine in the mid-1800s by John Darby and popularized by the Schofield Bible. Dispensationalism, as a set of ideas, is less than two hundred years old, while the other views reach back sixteen-hundred years!

All three of the primary eschatological views—dispensationalism, amillennialism, and postmillennialism—can be traced back to ideas contained in Rabbinical schools of thought that existed at the time of Christ. None of these views were “invented out of thin air” within the last two hundred years.

Further, all three of the widely accepted eschatological views have been modified and systemized within the last two hundred years.

A quick trip through history might help here.

Augustine, for some time after his conversion, held to a form of Chiliasm, a form of historic premillennial dispensationalism that seems to be a blend of the beliefs of the Essenes and the Sadducees in varying degrees. In this view, the events described in Revelation were already happening, and Christ would soon return to stand at the helm of the recently converted Roman Empire, using the political and social structure of Rome to build his kingdom.

When Rome fell, however, it became obvious that the Roman Empire was not going to be the vehicle for the Kingdom of God, so Augustine moved to a view similar to the Sadducees, holding to many of the same ideas a modern amillennialism. In short, the modern versions of the three primary eschatological systems did not even exist in the time of Augustine.

Moving much farther forward in history, Calvin seems to have held that the thousand-year reign of Christ described in Revelation was a figurative reference to the current church age, but that there was to be a future return of Christ once the world was converted, via government power, to his particular view of Christianity. Calvin, then, held to some elements of amillennialism and some elements of postmillennialism.

Again, skipping forward in history, Jonathan Edwards held Christ would return after his kingdom was established on the Earth, which modern theologians would classify as a form of postmillennialism. However, while many of the Christians in the founding generations of America held this new land was the place where God would create his new kingdom, the “New Jerusalem” to which Christ would return (a major element of the groups as diverse as the Latter-Day Saints, for instance), Edwards was convinced America was too sinful to serve such a role.

Instead, Edwards held that God would re-establish the Jewish state, that massive numbers of Jews would convert to Christianity, and Christ would return to the literal Jerusalem once his kingdom had been established there. Edwards also held out great hope that China would play a major role in rebuilding the kingdom of God on the Earth.[1]

When did the three modern views—dispensationalism, amillennialism, and postmillennialism—take the form they have today? Between the mid-1800s and the mid-1900s. Why this period? Because of the sheer volume of social upheaval and technological progress concentrated into a single century. Just consider a few of the things that happened in this period:

• The invention of modern steel making processes
• The invention of the telegraph, telephone, transistor, and the beginnings of computers and computer networks
• The invention of many kinds of modern transportation, including the automobile, the train, the airplane, and modern shipping
• The expansion of voting rights by the removal of property ownership requirements in 1856, the expansion of voting rights to all races in 1870, and the expansion of voting rights to women in 1920
• The “New Deal” reforms in the 1930s, creating welfare and public works systems

The massive innovation and change between the War Between the States and the two World Wars led to a mood of almost unbridled optimism. Many held that technological progress could be translated into social progress, as illustrated by this quote from 1912:

The engineer by producing powerful weapons and the means of concentrating troops quickly has made war so costly and so deadly that we must credit him with being a most efficient peacemaker. In improving personal morals, as well as national morals, and thereby advancing civilization, the work of the engineer is extremely powerful.[2]

The Christian counterpart to this progressive exuberance was the rapid rise of postmillennialism among the American and European elite. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a postmillennial anthem, was wildly popular. Christian pastors and leaders throughout the world provided strong support for things like eugenics as a path to eliminate crime and poverty, all part of “building God’s Kingdom” on Earth.[3] Many theologians even directly supported (and many Christian Nationalists today still support) the rise of the Third Reich in Germany as the financial and social model through which “the Church” could build the kingdom over which Christ would eventually rule.

Darby’s systemization of dispensationalism started as a “middle brow” counterweight to the progressive exuberance of this period. At the end of the Second World War, when progressivism collapsed into more a more cynical pursuit of money and power, dispensationalism rose to prominence in Christian circles, primarily through the lay Bible Camp movement and The Fundamentals, a series of books mailed large numbers of pastors in America.

With the rise of computer and computer networking technologies in the 1960s, progressive exuberance once again gripped the Western world, and Darby’s systemization of dispensationalism once again fell to the wayside.

What all this history teaches us is, in fact, quite simple:

None of the existing eschatological systems have existed in anything like their present form for more than about two hundred years.

Dispensationalism teaches Disengagement

Dispensationalism teaches Christians should just hide out and disengage from culture!

This is another set of arguments based on a half-truth which only gains rhetorical power by ignoring similar kinds of arguments made against amillennialism and postmillennialism.

Perhaps an illustration would help here. Assume, for a moment, that Christians are gardeners, and the families, churches, and other organizations around each group of Christians is a garden. Around this garden—or around each garden, depending on your point of view—there is a wilderness we can call “the world.” How should Christians grow these gardens?

According to amillennialism and postmillennialism, Christians should primarily grow these gardens from the top down. Christians should create Christian governance structures, and intentionally place Christians into roles of responsibility, to impose Christian ethical and social values onto the wilderness. Whether quickly or slowly, then, the wilderness becomes a garden.

The primary difference between amillennialism and postmillennialism in this illustration is when and to what Jesus returns. In postmillennial thought, Christ returns once Christians have made the entire world into a garden and ruled over that garden for some time. In amillennial thought, Christ returns once Christians have prepared the garden to the point that Christ has a kingdom to rule.

Dispensationalism, being premillennial, holds a different view. In the dispensational view, the role of each Christian is to grow the garden around them organically, from the bottom up. This isn’t just a matter of converting people to Christianity, but of making disciples, of creating paths from conversion to spiritual maturity.

The difference is not in whether Christians should engage culture or society, it is how Christians should engage culture or society. Should Christians engage from the bottom up, using organic means, or from the top down, using various kinds of political power?

Dispensationalism is for Losers

Dispensationalists believe the Church is going to lose! I’m not a dispensationalist because the Church is going to win!

The first problem with this accusation is that it assumes “winning” means something like: Taking over the world to build a Christian kingdom via political power.

What if this is not what “winning” means, however? What if “winning” means something like: Fulfilling God’s purpose as outlined in the Scriptures. In other words, “winning” could just mean “remaining faithful,” rather than some version of what the world would recognize as success.

The alternatives to dispensationalism take their meaning of “winning” primarily from Matthew 16:18.

And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

These systems read “my church” as a unified socio-political organization that will not be prevailed against. This reading, however, assumes what it seeks to prove—that Jesus intended to found a socio-political organization called “the Church,” which was to then grow into a kingdom that would rule the Earth.

Dispensationalists, however, rely heavily on the Great Commission found in Matthew 28:19–20.

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

This call is bottom-up oriented, calling out people from within all the nations and teaching them to be disciples. Thus, the alternatives to dispensationalism read the Great Commission as being contained within creating God’s kingdom, and dispensationalist read Matthew 16:18 as similar to the promise Jesus gives in Matthew 28:20, that Christ will not abandon his disciples even until the end of the age.

Further, dispensationalism asserts that “things getting worse” is a well-worn pattern in the Scriptures. From Adam to Noah, things became progressively worse. From the first Judge in Israel to the last, things became progressively worse. From Saul to the Babylonian captivity, things became progressively worse in Israel. Even Stephen’s speech before the Sanhedrin in Acts assumes this recurring theme—God calls, God is rejected, and then God must step into history.

Dispensationalists also point out that the alternatives assume we can somehow find a man, or a group of men, that are “sin free” enough to lead a Christian nation. This does not, from a dispensational view, seem to take the problem of sin seriously enough.

“Dispensationalism is for losers,” then, really depends on what the word “winning” means, how seriously a Christian takes the patterns of history, and how seriously we take the problem of sin.

Dispensationalism teaches Escape

Dispensationalists believe there is a coming tribulation. Rather than sticking around and witnessing, they just want to escape, as if God should treat them as special little snowflakes!

The first point against this accusation is that Jesus, himself, teaches that Christians should escape, if possible, from certain calamities. For instance, in Luke 21:20–22, Jesus says:

But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near. Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, and let those who are inside the city depart, and let not those who are out in the country enter it, for these are days of vengeance, to fulfill all that is written.

We do not need to agree about when this took place or will take place to understand the underlying statement Jesus is making: “In this case, if you see this happen, flee.” It’s interesting that Josephus seemed to hold Jesus’ words here account for the lack of Christians in Jerusalem at the time of its fall and destruction at the hands of the Romans.

Jesus doesn’t say: “If you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, make certain you stay in the city, ministering and being a witness until you die.” While that might have been a noble course in some situations, Jesus is saying it’s not the right course in that situation.

The idea that it is okay to flee from trouble of this kind can be traced back to, and supported by, various incidents in the Tanach. For instance, God commands both Abraham and Isaac to flee a coming famine in the land.

Further, there is another foundational principle to consider. In Genesis 18:22, Abraham says:

Then Abraham drew near and said, “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?”

While God does not directly answer this question, the ensuing conversation about how many righteous must exist for God not to sweep the Cities on the Plain away implies God’s answer is clearly “No!” Moses asks a similar question in the Wilderness, and God again answers “No!”

The obvious question from the dispensationalist’s point of view is this:

If Christians, those indwelled by the Holy Spirit, are among the righteous, then where shall they flee if God is judging the whole Earth, rather than just a nation or a place?

The only reasonable answer is God must remove the righteous from the Earth before judging the Earth to stand with the principles outlined in Genesis 18. There is no place for God to remove these people but off the Earth entirely.

Finally, most dispensationalists are not going to argue from the perspective of fleeing from a coming trouble, but rather that removing the Church is necessary for God to shift his focus back on fulfilling his promises to Israel. According to Paul, one of the various purposes of Christianity is to bring Israel back to God through jealousy. According to dispensationalism, God moves from making Israel jealous through Christianity at some point in the future, returning to dealing with Israel directly, as he did in the days of the Theocratic Kingdom.

Conclusion

Modern theology is often presented as a set of stark, rigid, and completely defined systems. Modern amillennialism and postmillennialism are taught as complete and whole systems that have stood the test of time, while dispensationalism is an unformed system recently invented to cater to the fears of a few weak Christians.

None of this is true.

The theological world—especially in the realm of eschatology—is broad and deep, with many streams, recurring ideas, repeating themes, and modifications. The craze of systemization and progressive exuberance that started in the mid-1850s brought on a wave of new ideas, including the modern forms of every popular eschatological system.

Dispensationalism is neither new, novel, nor escapist. It is a serious set of ideas that deserve attention and care, rather than outright dismissal based on poor arguments grounded in half-truths.

[1] See Victor Zhu, America’s Theologian Beyond America: Jonathan Edwards, Israel, and China, with Douglas Sweeney (Oxford University Press, 2022).

[2] John Lyle Harrington and John Alexander Low Waddell, Addresses to Engineering Students (1912), 342.

[3] See, for instance, Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement, 1st edition (Oxford University Press, 2004).

After this there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

During the initial phases of this trip, Jesus encounters an man who had been an invalid for thirty-four years laying by the Pool called Bethesda. This narrative, contained only in John’s Gospel, is odd in several ways. To really understand this passage, we need to start with some “boring background.”

Background

Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaic called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades.

The Greek is difficult here, but the gate is presumably called the “Sheep Gate” because it is the way sheep were brought to the Temple.

There are actually two pools by this gate, including four colonnades and a small bridge that counts as a fifth colonnade. Not only have these pools been excavated and studied, but the name of the pool has been verified by contemporary scrolls. Note these pools, and the accompanying gate, would have been outside the city walls of Jerusalem proper at the time of Christ. This fact will play something of a role in the disagreement over healing on the Sabbath, which will be considered in the next post in this series.

In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed [because an angel would go down into the pool from time to time and stir up the water. Then the first one who got in after the water was stirred up recovered from whatever ailment he had].

Here we arrive at the first oddity in this passage. Does the text in the brackets—verse 4—belong here or not? Most modern translations do not include the fourth verse, because it is not included in many of the “better manuscripts,” and it does not seem to “fit” the Biblical worldview. Zane Hodges, however, argues the manuscript evidence for including this passage is stronger than the evidence against it.[1]

One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be healed?” The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.”

The man clearly does not see Jesus as a healer, but—perhaps—as a helper. Jesus is clearly a teacher of some kind, as he has disciples. Perhaps the man is thinking that Jesus might stick around and help the man into the pool at the appropriate moment, or assign some of his disciples to do the job? John does not give us any reason to believe this man knows who Jesus is, nor what power Jesus has. Jesus, surprises the man.

Jesus said to him, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.” And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked.

This is truly amazing. At no point in this passage is faith even mentioned. This seems completely contrary to Matthew 13:58, for instance, which says, “And he did not do many mighty works there, because of their unbelief.”

In fact, reading further into the passage:

Now that day was the Sabbath. So the Jews said to the man who had been healed, “It is the Sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to take up your bed.” But he answered them, “The man who healed me, that man said to me, ‘Take up your bed, and walk.’” They asked him, “Who is the man who said to you, ‘Take up your bed and walk’? Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had withdrawn, as there was a crowd in the place. Afterward Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you.” The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him.

The man does not even ask who Jesus is nor why Jesus healed him. There is no “thank you,” nor any attempt to find out more. In fact, the man “throws Jesus under the bus,” seeking out the religious authorities to identify Jesus once he learns Jesus’ identity.

Jesus’ words to the man: “Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you,” are also startling, as they seem to indicate the man has only been physically healed, rather than spiritually. There is no indication that the man is now saved, not a word about sins forgiven.

Making Sense of the Oddness

Returning to the beginning, Jesus walks up to a random invalid laying on his bed by a pool, waiting for healing in accordance with widespread beliefs about the pool. He asked if the man wants to be healed, the man answers with a complaint, and Jesus heals the man. The man then turns Jesus in to the religious authorities for doing this good work. Faith is not mentioned once in the entire story, and the man’s salvation does not seem to result.

This is entirely baffling to most modern Christians, because modern hermeneutics reads the Scriptures almost entirely through the lens of individual salvation. This passage does not seem to relate to individual salvation, so we have difficulty understanding it.

What if we intentionally frame the passage with another question?

Who is Jesus?

Let’s try our hand at reframing the passage with this question.

Jesus, to show his authority over physical sickness and the superiority of his power over angels, approaches a man who has been sick for many years. He heals the man without revealing who he is, asking the man to do something he knows the religious authorities will object to, hence bringing his power to the attention of those authorities without revealing himself to them.
Once the religious authorities notice the situation, Jesus reveals himself to the man, telling him to stop sinning. The man now reports his discovery to the religious authorities—although neither the man nor the authorities actually learn who Jesus is through this healing.
The healing does, however, cause the religious authorities to confront Jesus, allowing Jesus to clearly state who he is, using the healing as a backdrop and proof of the authenticity of his words.

This framing makes sense of the beliefs of the people by the pool, the lack of any mention of faith, the lack of any mention of salvation, and the man reporting Jesus to the authorities. Perhaps the man ultimately placed his faith in Jesus. Perhaps he did not. Whether he did is beyond John’s purpose in narrating this story from the life of Christ.

Rather than telling us about how Jesus saved someone, John is telling us about how Jesus went about confronting the religious authorities, drawing them into a situation where they would need to argue against his authority and power in the context of a clearly visible miracle directly illustrating his authority and power.

Jesus, John is saying, is the one who is greater than the widely known angels at the pool of Bethesda, the one who can heal physical sickness even when unknown and unappreciated. Jesus is who he says he is, the very Son of God.

This question—who is Jesus—and the answer John gives in this passage will resonate through the remainder of John 5, when we consider the beginnings and meaning of the Sabbath controversy, and the answer Jesus gives when accused by the religious leaders.

Jesus’ actions here also illustrate his control over the course of his life, and how he intentionally brings the opposition to his ministry to the Cross.

[1] Hodges, “The Angel at Bethesda—John 5:4: Problem Passages in the Gospel of John Part 5.”

• Unregenerate humans are unable to desire salvation. The reason for this inability varies, but for the purposes here, it is unimportant.
• God changes an unregenerate person’s heart, so they now desire salvation.
• The person places their faith in Christ, and God gives them salvation.

This article is going to leave all the various enmeshing details to the side, and focus on one issue:[1]

Why does it matter if God changes a person’s heart contrary to their assent?

After all, it seems that God, being God, can freely choose to act against any human’s will any time he likes, in any matter he likes. “isn’t God omnipotent? God can do anything he likes!”

This framing begins by focusing on God’s power, but we should all agree that God’s power does not include the power to do anything unethical or unjust. No matter how powerful God is, God is limited by his own character and logic (as logic itself flows from the character of God). The question of salvation is not, ultimately, about what God can do, but what God has said he will do.

Another common way to frame this is as a technical question about salvation or soteriology. We might ask: “What is the order of salvation (the ordo salutis)?” This framing, however, puts the human in the center of the question, rather than God. We should always start from God when thinking about theology, rather than humans; the Creator rather than the created.

A more helpful framing is this:

Would it be unjust for God to change a person’s heart contrary to their assent?

This places the question in the proper context: God’s character.

Let’s consider four reasons it would, in fact, be unjust for God to change a person’s heart contrary to their assent.

It Violates Moral Agency

First, it is unjust because it violates the moral agency of the person, making the person into a means rather than an end.

A prime example of this concern in the Scriptures is recorded in Mark 2:23–27, where the Disciples are picking and eating heads of grain on the Sabbath. The Pharisees scold Jesus for allowing his Disciples to break the Sabbath, to which Jesus replies: “The Sabbath was made for man, not the man for Sabbath.” Jesus is saying men are the ends of the Law, not the means to fulfilling the Law. This leads Lewis and Demerest, in their Reformed Baptist systematic theology, to argue:

Persons as spiritual beings are not things to be folded, mutilated, or spindled. As self-transcendent spirits humans are self-conscious and self-determining subjects and moral agents.[2]

Changing a person’s heart against their assent is clearly a case of violating the self-determination and moral agency of the person.

Further, we can ask: Why does God change the person’s heart against their assent? The standard answer is: “To show his mercy and his glory.” In this case, the person is not an end to God; they are a means God uses to show something about his own character.

One objection people sometimes give against the assert that it is unjust for God to change a person’s heart against their assent is:

God can do things humans cannot, like changing someone’s heart against their assent, and still be just because he doesn’t “owe” anyone salvation.

This entire objection rests on a single point: The ethical standards God gives to humans are not grounded in his character. Instead, they are arbitrarily chosen and assigned to humans. Once you disconnect God’s character and God’s ethics in this way, capriciousness soon follows. We should not go down this path.

Two more common objections are:

• God changing a person’s heart against their assent for their good is not the same as God doing so for evil.
• God changes a person’s heart out of mercy, rather than to show his own glory.

Two simple answers to these objections are:

• A right thing done in the wrong way is still wrong. Even if God changes someone’s heart against their assent for their good, it can still be an unjust action, just like imprisoning someone to “break and addiction” against their assent can be illegal and unjust.
• According to Calvinism, in particular, God does all things for his glory; including passing over those he chooses not to save. It is hard to see how to sustain this objection in the face of the totality of Calvinist teaching in this area.

There are longer answers to these objections, as well.

It Show Partiality on the Part of God

A second line of answers for the two objections above, and a second reason to see God changing someone’s heart against their assent, is this: It shows partiality on the part of God, in whom we are told there is no partiality in Romans 2:9 (among other places):

For God shows no partiality.

If God selects some for salvation, and others to pass over, for “no reason in or of the person themselves,” this is the very definition of partiality. God has said he will have no part in this kind of behavior.

There is a second ethical problem lurking in this neighborhood, as well. The Parable of the Good Samaritan, found in Luke 10:25ff is perhaps the best place to start to understand this problem. If you’ve not read it in a while, you may want to lay this aside for a moment and do so.

In the narrative, Jesus has been asked about what it takes to inherit eternal life. Jesus refers to the Law, whereupon the questioner states the Law says: “You shall love the Lord your God without all your soul and all your strength and all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”

The questioner, a lawyer, does not have a problem with loving the Lord, it seems—but he does want to know about this whole thing with “loving your neighbor.” “Who is my neighbor,” he wants to know?

Jesus answers this question with the familiar parable. We can boil the parable down to:

Any person you encounter who is truly in need and you can help is your neighbor.

Lest we think this is some kind of invention on Jesus’ part, the same definition can be inferred from many different places in the Law. Jesus relies on this in Luke 14:5, saying:

And he said to them, “Which of you, having a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on a Sabbath day, will not immediately pull him out?”

The ethical principal Jesus is putting forward here is: If you pass by someone who is truly in need, they are your neighbor; if you can help them, you should.

The Priest and Levite are both condemned by Jesus for being able to help and not doing so. While we are not directly told why they would not help, the story is arranged to infer their lack of help is related to their self-perceived status and importance.

Now consider:

• God can change the heart of any person he chooses so they desire salvation.
• Changing the heart of a person costs God nothing more than he has already paid at the Cross and gains him the worship and glory of another soul saved.
• The person thus changed does not need to assent to the change; in fact, they can resist the change, but God’s power in this regard is absolute and irresistible.
• However, God, figuratively speaking, chooses to pass by some men dying from sin on the other side of the road.

How can this be justified? Other than arguing that God holds himself to different ethical standards than any human, what possible reason can we give for God doing such a thing?

Some might object that the man lying in the road clearly wanted to be helped, and all the humans God passes by on the road of history do not. But this just illustrates the problem more fully—every person God encounters, according to Calvinism, is:

• Is dying from sin
• Does not want salvation, and in fact hates God
• Can be saved by God, because God can change irresistibly change their heart

Every single person is equal in their position and place, and yet God selects some, and leaves others.

How can God justify being partial to some? If God has the power to save all, irresistibly, either God should leave them all, or God should save them all, based on God’s own definition of whom we should love.

“But doesn’t God,” you might say, “show preference to Abraham, and Noah, and Israel, and others throughout history?” In short, yes—but in the matter of service and temporal blessings, not in the matter of salvation.

A key point is that salvation is ethically different from either service or blessings. There are several reasons for this difference, some of which are considered below.

It Runs Counter to God’s Promises

Consider the following thought experiment.

Suppose your manager at work comes to you and says: “You need to finish this project in two weeks.” However, your manager already knows you do not have access to the resources needed to complete the project—perhaps access to a particular file, or a specific tool, or something else. Through those two weeks, you attempt to gain access to the resources you need, but you cannot. Your manager, in fact, is the one who denies you access to what you need to complete the project. At the end of the two weeks, your manager calls you into their office and says: “You didn’t complete the project in the time allotted; you are fired!”

Would you think your manager is just, or unjust? If this happened to a friend, a colleague, a student, or anyone else, would you think they were treated justly, or unjustly?

There is not a single person who would think you, or anyone else so treated, was treated justly.

And yet, listen to what God says:

If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, and you must rule over it. Genesis 4:7

… choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD. Joshua 24:15

Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. Mark 16:16

And they said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.” Acts 16:31

Everywhere, and all the time, God promises to save on the condition of our placing faith in him. Yet, according to Calvinism, God himself determines whether the person hearing these words will believe or not.

How can God be just for condemning a person who cannot fulfill a promise only he can fulfill?

There are two typical objections to this line of argument.

First, that “God does not owe us salvation, so it is not unjust for God to not fulfill a promise only he can cause us to keep.” The problem with this counter begins with the word “owe.” This is not about what God “owes” anyone, but rather about God’s character, which includes God’s truthfulness. If God only controls your ability to fulfill the terms of a promise, God cannot hold you responsible for not fulfilling the terms of that promise.

Second, that God is “not a human,” and hence God can do what he likes in these situations. Here, again, we encounter a “solution” that creates a bigger problem than it solves by detaching God’s character from the ethical code he gives to humans.

It Violates Love

In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 1 John 4:10

Love is, as Wayne Grudem says, “self-giving for the benefit of others,” and this “attribute of God shows that it is part of his nature to give of himself in order to bring about blessing or good for others.”[3] Virtually everyone agrees that this self-giving nature of God is not praiseworthy if it is not free. As Karl Barth says:

God’s being consists in the fact that He is the One who loves in freedom. In this He is the perfect being: the being which is itself perfection and so the standard of all perfection; the being, that is, which is self-sufficient and thus adequate to meet every real need; the being which suffers no lack in itself and by its very essence fills every real lack.[4]

To this point every theologian agrees. But does God’s love communicate to human love? Are God’s and human love essentially the same, but on different levels? The Scriptures indicate this is so.

By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. 1 John 3:16

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” John 13:34–35

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. John 15:12

If God’s love is universally acknowledged to be free, and human love is “like” God’s love, then human love must also be free to truly be love.

Carrying this further:

• Salvation is a choice to love God
• Love must be free to truly be love
• Therefore, salvation must be free

Otherwise, the choice to love God, to place one’s faith in God for salvation, is an unjust violation of the very nature of love.

Further Objections

Thus far, four different reasons, and objections to those reasons, have been weighed. In each case, there is a solid line of argument showing that God would be unjust in changing a person’s heart against their assent. There are two further lines of argument often used to support the justness of God changing a person’s heart against their assent.

First, those who hold to this doctrine often make the salvation decision equivalent to all other decisions in life, saying something like:

But doesn’t God override human free will in many other situations? Humans cannot choose the family to which they are born, and God clearly predestines (at least) some humans to specific roles in history.

Insofar as the objection considers God’s power, the objection is sound. The difficulty is predestination to a family, nation, or service is not within the same ethical category as predestination to salvation.

On one side are decisions about life circumstances, which the objector correctly notes we have little control over either way. On the other side, we have a decision about the eternal state of our individual soul. These are different classes of decisions.

On the one side, we have decisions about temporal blessings. On the other, we have a decision about our eternal state. God never—not once—promised material blessing if we do some particular thing, such as placing our faith in him. God has repeatedly promised a particular eternal state, communion with God, if we place our faith in him.

Only one of these two decisions touches directly on God’s character.

Second, those who hold to tis doctrine often make an argument something like:

It is impossible for God to control the ends of creation if God cannot override human will in decisions that impact the flow of history.

This objection confuses two completely different classes of predestination. Predestination to service relates to the time and circumstances of our lives. God has not promised a life free of pain and sorrow. God has not promised us red shoelaces. There is no ethical component to God choosing the time and place of our birth, nor the color of our shoelaces. As explained above, however, there are definite ethical consequences to God choosing whether we will be saved whether we assent to such a thing or not.

Summary

Would it be unjust for God to change a person’s heart against their assent? Four reasons to believe it would have been considered here:

• It violates the moral agency of the human person, touching their dignity, and the very image of God in that person.
• It shows partiality on the part of God in salvation, when God claims he is impartial in this regard.
• It runs counter to God’s promises.
• It violates love.

In each case, we have looked at various objections and determined that because this question touches the very character of God, these objections fail.

An important note at this point: even if, on reading this paper, you disagree with one of these four reasons, or even three of these four reasons, a single argument is enough to call such an action on the part of God unjust.

God would, in fact, be unjust if he changes the heart of a person without their assent.

[1] Someone will inevitably say: “Calvinism does not teach God changes the person’s heart contrary to their assent; he simply changes their heart.” The problem with this counter is it guts the first and fourth points of the Calvinist acrostic, replacing them with word games. Why must grace be “irresistible” to be effective? Because, on Calvinism, if any person can resist grace, they will, because they are totally depraved. The only escape from this is to declare logic, itself, illogical.

[2] Lewis and Demarest, Integrative Theology, 2:172.

[3] Grudem, Systematic Theology, 198–99.

[4] Barth et al., Church Dogmatics, 322.

Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God…

The latter part of this sentence, “has been born of God,” is clearly passive. Being born of God is not something the believer does, but rather something God does. At first reading, this certainly sounds like salvation is wholly God’s doing, and the doctrine of total inability (humans are unable to even seek after salvation without God changing their hearts first).

The immediate reading, however, appears to conflict with the many offers of salvation found throughout the Scriptures. For instance, in Acts 16:30–31, we find—

Then he brought them out and said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” And they said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.”

These many passages infer the person must take an active role in their salvation by placing their faith in Christ. This is not just found in the writings of the Apostles, either. There are many passages in the Tanakh where God openly says that if certain people, or Israel, will place their faith in him, he will provide some form of salvation.

How can these two different kinds of passages be reconciled? Perhaps we can find an answer by looking at the rest of the passage, specifically the words, “Everyone who believes…” Rather than looking at the whole passage in a translation, however, let’s look at it in Greek.

There are two verbs here, rather than one. The first verb, believes, is coded as:

• V, verb
• P, present
• A, active
• P, participle

The second verb, glossed as has been fathered, is coded as:

• V, verb
• R, perfect
• P, passive

Because the first verb is a participle, we know it modifies something—in this case, the subject, which is everyone. Because the verb is active, we know that whoever this verb modifies actively takes part in, or does, the thing described. So we can read this part of the passage: “Everyone who actively believes Jesus is the Christ…”

For those who actively do what is described in the first part of the sentence, the second part of the sentence will apply. They will be “born of God.” This passage, then, does not teach that salvation is an entirely passive affair. If a person actively places their faith in Christ, then God will give them salvation.

Where is the problem?

First, a problem will arise if we assume the passive from the second part of the passage must, somehow, apply to the subject, everyone. Many who hold to predestination note believe is a participle, correctly note it “only” modifies some other word in the sentence, and hence apply the passive tense of the second part of the passage to the first.

This does not make grammatical sense, however. The participle does “just describe” something about everyone—it describes how everyone does the thing described. In other words, the participle describes how everyone believes. Their belief is active.

Second, a problem will arise if we now try to inject some other question into the text. For instance, many who hold to deterministic individual predestination will then ask: “But why did they believe?” Presupposing the answer to be “because God has changed their heart,” inevitably leads to the deterministic conclusion.

But the passage does not ask or answer this question. How someone among the everyone comes to believe is not something addressed by the passage at all. Trying to force this passage to answer a question it does not answer is a certain recipe for exegetical disaster. The very framing of the question presupposes a desired outcome.

If anything, the passage infers those among the everyone who do believe do so out of their own desire or volition.

These failures should point us to two lessons.

First, pay attention to all of the passage. The active voice of the first part of the passage is clear even in the English translation. Rather than simply discarding or passing over that active voice verb for the second, passive voice verb, we must spend time and effort trying to understand what each of these verbs does in the context of the whole. We need to seek what the author is trying to say, rather than what we would like the author to say.

Second, do not ask questions the passage does not answer, particularly as a form of injecting a false dichotomy.

Deterministic individual predestination requires believing there are things the Scriptures do not say, or that God uses “round-about” language. If God meant for the act of belief, itself, to be understood as passive, the Greek in 1 John 5:1 would have believe in the passive voice. It does not, so belief is not passive.

Salvation, according to 1 John 5:1 (and similar passages), is simple.

A person actively places their faith in Christ. God then actively changes the person who believes so they are now born of the Father. The person placing their faith in Christ is not a work, as the merit is all on the side of God, who does the work of changing the person.

I have already pointed out, in dealing with the subject of jests, how unseemly it is to take the position in life of individuals as the target for our gibes, and also have urged that we should refrain from insulting whole classes, races or communities. But at times our duty toward our client will force us to say something on the general character of a whole class of people, such as freedmen, soldiers, tax farmers or the like. In all these cases the usual remedy is to create the impression that it is with reluctance that we introduce topics which must give pain, while further we shall avoid attacking everything, and even while using the language of reproof with regard to the essential point of attack, shall make up for our censure by praising our victims in some other connexion.
Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 11.1.86

Tax collectors were not well-liked anywhere in the Roman empire—much less in Israel, where they constantly reminded Jews of their subservient status to the Roman government. Rome contracted out the collection of taxes to whomever would promise to collect the most taxes from a region (the highest bidder). These men were strongly motivated to collect the amount they bid, as any shortfall would be taken from their personal wealth. On the other hand, any taxes they collected beyond what they bid was theirs to keep, so many of them became fabulously wealthy by abusing the taxation system (see Luke 3:12–13, for instance).

Tax farmers were given extraordinary power, as well. They could, on reporting tax fraud to the Roman authorities, take anything they liked from their victims, up to and including their physical person, their wives, or their daughters.

When Jesus encounters Levi, sitting in his booth collecting taxes, he is encountering a person often considered something less than a full person—a person without dignity. In Rome, as in all pagan cultures, individual humans did not have worth based on their existence, but rather only on their connection to some greater power, whether wealth, deeds, or some god.

Levi was the least of the least in all these regards. He was not only rejected in every corner of Roman and Jewish culture, he was sitting at a booth collecting taxes. He was not even one of the men Rome contracted with to collect taxes, he just worked for them. He was least in the society of men, least in the society of his fellow Jews, and not among the greatest in the company of other tax collectors.

Levi seemed to be a small man in just about every way possible.

After this he went out and saw a tax collector named Levi, sitting at the tax booth. And he said to him, “Follow me.” And leaving everything, he rose and followed him.
Luke 5:27–29

This encounter with Jesus and his disciples completely changed Levi’s life. He leaves his way of making a living. While little is said of his financial position, losing his living and cutting off all hope of advancement.

Levi’s next action almost seems calculated to emphasize his standing in society. He throws a feast, which should be understood as one of the ways Levi began to follow Jesus.

And Levi made him a great feast in his house, and there was a large company of tax collectors and others reclining at table with them.
Luke 5:30

While he must have been a wealthy man, Levi only seemingly attracted other tax collectors to his feast. No family, other than his father and a potential brother (James), is ever mentioned in relation to Levi. He was, however, determined to bring the news of Jesus to those in his social circle.

While this next passage is presented by the Gospel writers as happening during the feast itself, Pharisees would not have attended any feast given by a tax collector. The Pharisees probably heard about this event at some later time, perhaps a few days or weeks. On hearing of it, they would use this feast as another accusation against Jesus.

And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” But when he heard it, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Matthew 9:11–13

To fully understand what Jesus is saying here, we need to reach back into the Tanakh and understand the context of Jesus’ quote, which can be found in Hosea 6:4.

Your love is like a morning cloud,
like the dew that goes early away.
Therefore I have hewn them by the prophets;
I have slain them by the words of my mouth,
and my judgment goes forth as the light.
For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,
the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.
But like Adam they transgressed the covenant;
there they dealt faithlessly with me.
Hosea 6:4–7

The context here is about what we would call the spirit of the Law as opposed to the letter of the Law. What we don’t often inquire into is what the spirit of the Law might mean.

The first thing to notice is that Israel was, in fact, keeping the letter of the Law. They are doing the works of the Law. They are performing the sacrifices. What is missing is the attitude of faith an love that should accompany those sacrifices.

While modern Christian theologians portray the Mosaic Law itself as a form of salvation by works, Hosea—and, in turn, Jesus—is claiming favor from God does not come from doing the works of the Mosaic Law. Rather, the works of the Law must be done in an attitude of faith. The person presenting the sacrifice must desire to build a relationship with God via all of their life, and place their faith in God’s promise of forgiveness through these sacrifices.

As the Levites were to lead Israel into a faithful relationship with God, grounded in faith in God’s character, via the Mosaic Law, Levi turned his life from collecting taxes to bringing as many as possible into a relationship with God, placing his faith in God’s promises via the Messiah.

The Pharisees have turned the Mosaic Law into a transaction with God, making it worthless. Levi, on the other hand, has turned his entire life into faithful seeking after a relationship with God.

The Pharisees had turned the Mosaic Law into a path to righteousness so they would not need forgiveness. Levi, on the other hand, knew he could never live by the Mosaic Law, and hence he needed forgiveness. He sought that forgiveness at the feet of Israel’s Messiah, Jesus.

Paganism also evokes a sense of “the old,” something societies have left in the distant past.

But is paganism really in the past? It depends on how paganism is defined. If paganism is a specific pantheon of gods connected to a set of rituals, it is true there are very few who worship the “old Roman pantheon” today. But paganism is more than a particular pantheon of gods; it is also a worldview.

According to Steven Smith in Pagans and Christians, the essence of this worldview is making the physical world sacred—or rather, sacralizing the immanent. Smith argues Christianity represents the opposite of this worldview. Christianity holds God is transcendent, outside physical space. Rather than being a “person writ large,” God is something “other.”

Two points might help readers understand this review a bit better.

First, the author often “works to the edges,” making space between these two worldviews by emphasizing their differences. This is very helpful, but readers should not forget that there is a range of belief in Christian circles. All Christians hold God is transcendent, but the closer a given Christian theological system comes to its Jewish roots, the more likely it is to hold God is both transcendent and immanent.

Second, there are two senses in which the physical world can be sacred. To fully understand the author’s argument, readers need to be careful to differentiate between them. For Christianity (and Judaism) the physical world is sacred to God because God created it, sustains it, and is present in it. In this view, the physical world is a means to some end, sacred in proportion to the end being sought.

In Paganism, however, the gods are part of the physical world. The physical world, and the desires of the physical world, are an end in themselves. If the physical world is somehow destroyed (not just the Earth, but the entirety of physical existence), the gods would cease to exist as well.

In Smith’s telling, Paganism dominated the world before the rise of Christianity. The natural focus of Paganism is its pantheon. There were gods for places, like hills and streams. There were gods for things, like swords and buildings. There were gods for activities, like eating, cooking, war, and—the big elephant in the room—sex. Because of this, there were gods at every corner in the city, and at every turn of the road in the natural world. The world, as it were, was full of gods.

Paganism centers the ideas of right and wrong in the physical world—the desires of and thoughts of the gods. If the “god of this mountain” is ascendent, what the “god of this mountain” thinks or feels about anything sets the ethical rules. A culture that draws its meaning from the world draws its ethical framework from the world.

The rise of Christianity, according to Smith, desacralized the world. The obvious effect is the gods are no longer “everywhere.” The less-than-obvious effect is people no longer draw their meaning from the world, but from God, who is—although present in the world—outside the world.

The shift from drawing meaning from the physical world to God outside the physical world is radical. Two areas the author describes, but does not call out explicitly, are perhaps the most important examples of this shift.

Smith, Steven D. Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac. Eerdmans, 2018.

Roman culture was focused on male sexuality. The entire moral and ethical code, from slavery to worship to marriage, was built around the male sexual act. Rome treated male desire as sacrosanct and involatile. Male sexuality could be openly and publicly displayed and was honored by all of society.

Christianity, on the other hand, desacralized sex. Like any other act, sex was an act that could be sacred in the right context, and evil in others. Christianity treats monogamy as sacrosanct and involatile.

For Romans, fulfilling male desire was an end-in-itself. For Christianity, the sexual act is aimed at producing higher things, such as children and relationship.

These different views of sexuality led to differing views of human dignity.

Paganism tied human dignity first to the male sexual act, and second to worldly success. Christianity ties human dignity to a relationship with God.

Smith argues that while the gods of the old Roman pantheon have fallen to the side, the foundational pagan worldview has lived side-by-side with Christianity for the last two-thousand years. While the Christian view has dominated our view of law and dignity, the pagan view has lived on as part of most peoples lived experience. Marriage itself has been sacrosanct rather than the sexual act. People are expected to control their desires and actions out of respect for the dignity of others.

As Christianity has receded in the last hundred or so years, however, Smith says the pagan view (sans the pagan gods) is moving into a controlling position again.

What might we expect if the author is right? Consider a few examples.

The sexual act would be re-sacralized, becoming the goal and point of relationships, including marriage. Sex would be everywhere, all the time, and people would rate their importance and dignity on the number and quality of their sexual partners.

Material success and experience would be re-sacralized. Dignity would be tied to material success. This would not be restricted to being financially successful but would extend to experiences. People would focus their lives on living as comfortably as possible and experiencing as much as they can through their lives. He who dies with the most toys would, in fact, “win.”

Childbearing, in that it interferes with material success, sexual desirability, and sexual availability, would be a center of attention. How can you avoid childbearing? Even if someone wants to have children, how they can minimize the number of children to maximize the other areas of their lives?

An observer who cannot see these things happening in Western cultures everywhere over the last fifty to one-hundred years is simply blind.

There are two major differences between Roman paganism and the modern pagan worldview that make this movement a bit harder to see. First, while the pagan worldview is returning, the pagan gods are not. Instead of worshipping a “god” representing the thing, Western culture has taken to openly worshipping the thing itself.

Second, Roman paganism made male sexuality sacred, demeaning the passive partner in the sexual exchange. The male in the male-female sexual act determined the time and place, circumscribing the ethical boundaries of his partner’s actions. The receiver of the sexual act, whether male or female, was effectively an “accessory.”

The modern pagan worldview, on the other hand, makes female sexuality sacred in the male-female sexual act. The female controls the time and place, circumscribing the ethical boundaries of the male.

The importance of the return of the pagan worldview can hardly be overstated. Tying dignity to material success enables and emphasizes the financialization of everything. Relationships are no longer sought for the good of the other person, nor the relationship itself. Relationships are pulled through an app, measured, tracked, and focused on either gaining money or experience. Work is only a source of dignity in proportion to its financial aspects. Any desire that can be tied to sex is immediately declared ethical—so long as it does not transgress on the female’s desires in the moment.

If the trend towards paganization continues, the societal results will be ever-more profound.

According to Smith, the pagan worldview cannot help but to be “at war with Christianity.” While Christianity can tolerate, to one degree or another, a pagan cultural subtext, a pagan culture cannot, in any sense, tolerate Christianity or Judaism.

Overall, the author does an excellent job of drawing out the foundational worldviews underlying Roman paganism and Christianity. These observations will help readers understand the cultural shifts happening in the modern world and how to relate to them.

Well worth reading.

The alternate view described here does not replace, or negate, the view presented in the previous post, but rather augments it, or fills out the picture by considering a second group that was present—the “teachers of the law.”

On one of those days, as he was teaching, Pharisees and teachers of the law were sitting there, who had come from every village of Galilee and Judea and from Jerusalem. And the power of the Lord was with him to heal. Luke 5:17

We can think of the “teachers of the law” as the other half of the Sanhedrin, or the second major group of religious leaders in Israel during the Second Temple. These leaders cared deeply about the Temple. Why?

Because the Temple held the keys to the sacrificial system. While modern Christians tend to reduce the Mosaic sacrificial system to a single dimension—the forgiveness of sins—it had many layered dimensions. These sacrifices can be broken down into two large classes:

The sacrifices prescribed by the Mosaic law are included under two classes: those offered for the sake of communion with Jehovah; and those offered in communion, and may be tabulated as follows: (1) For communion, or propitiatory, including sin offerings and trespass offerings. (2) In communion (a) burnt offerings; (b) peace offerings, including thank offerings, votive offerings, and freewill offerings; (c) grain and drink offerings.[1]

Beyond these two classes of sacrifices, the Temple system anchored the Feasts of Israel, unifying God’s people culturally across time. The Temple system also anchored Jerusalem’s importance, making it the hub of commerce, as everyone had to be there several times a year for the various feasts, and the hub of wealth, as everyone had to spend money there attending feasts and making sacrifices.

For the Temple leadership, then, the Temple was the root and heart of Israel. Without the Temple, there would be no Israel, there would be no forgiveness of sins, and there would be no fellowship with God.

With this background in mind, let’s take another look at the interaction between Jesus and the “teachers of the law” in Luke 5:20–21.

And when he saw their faith, he said, “Man, your sins are forgiven you.” And the scribes and the Pharisees began to question, saying, “Who is this who speaks blasphemies? Who can forgive sins but God alone?”

Are the leaders condemning Jesus for forgiving sin, or for forgiving sin outside the Temple system? The belief that they are condemning Jesus for forgiving sin at all lends itself to the modern view that the Pharisees and Temple leadership were legalistic; that they were concerned with following the Law more than they were with forgiveness and mercy.

That does not seem to be the point the Pharisees and “teachers of the law” are making, however. According to James D.G. Dunn:

Not that a forgiveness was being offered which might otherwise have been denied the man; he could, after all, have taken his offering to the Temple and/or benefited from the Day of Atonement like other Jews. Nor that Jesus was claiming a special status for himself by saying these words (which any priest could say). The answer seems to be rather that he pronounced the man’s sins forgiven outside the cult and without any reference (even by implication) to the cult. It was not so much that he usurped the role of God in announcing sins forgiven. It was rather that he usurped the role of God which God had assigned to priest and cult. God could forgive sins no doubt when and as he chose. But man could only promise and pronounce the forgiveness of sins when he operated within the terms and structures provided by God—the Temple, priesthood and sacrifice. In that sense, as usurping a prerogative of God in disregard for the terms laid down by God, what Jesus said and did could be counted a kind of blasphemy.[2]

We can see echoes of this very accusation at Jesus trial. For instance, in Mark 14:58, Jesus’ accusers say: ““We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands.’ ” Of course, Jesus is never recorded as saying these things, but we might take this as an accurate description of how the Temple leadership heard what Jesus did say.

This accusation is echoed in Acts 6:12–14 against Stephen:

And they stirred up the people and the elders and the scribes, and they came upon him and seized him and brought him before the council, and they set up false witnesses who said, “This man never ceases to speak words against this holy place and the law, for we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and will change the customs that Moses delivered to us.”

This accusation against Jesus and the early Christians is the second arm of the pincer movement against Jesus later in his ministry. The Pharisees saw Jesus as opposed to their concern with the purity that kept Israel in existence in the Land as a nation. The Temple leadership saw Jesus as opposed to the very existence of the Temple and its sacrificial system, hence against the forgiveness of sins as directed by God in the Mosaic Law, and, again, threatening the very centrality of Jerusalem to Israel.

Just as the threat from the Pharisees grew throughout Jesus’ ministry, the threat from the Temple leadership does, as well. At the very end of his ministry, Jesus—perfectly in control of the situation—is going to inflame these two groups until neither believes they have any choice but to eliminate him.

Do not, of course, make the mistake of thinking either of these two groups represent every Israelite, or even most Jews at the time of Jesus’ ministry. These two groups are a small slice of the whole Jewish world even if they did control the two major institutions of Jewish life, the synagogues and the Temple. Neither of these two groups were a unified front against the teachings of Christ; the Scriptures record both Pharisees and Priests who followed Christ.

This one encounter over the healing of the paralytic, however, sets the stage for much of what follows in Jesus’ ministry.

[1] Merrill Frederick Unger et al., The New Unger’s Bible Dictionary, in The New Unger’s Bible Dictionary, Rev. and updated ed. (Moody Press, 1988).

[2] James D. G. Dunn, The Partings of the Ways: Between Christianity and Judaism and Their Significance for the Character of Christianity, Second Edition (SCM Press, 2006), 61.

A key part of modern replacement theology is Paul’s focus on individual salvation in Romans 9–11. This view sees several changes in Paul’s argument. It has side notes. It uses God’s predestination of nations to explain individual predestination. There are also adjustments to fit the text with the theological system.

The question we rarely ask is: “Is Paul really talking about individual salvation in this passage?”” There are two other alternatives to the individual salvation view.
For instance, Paul could be defending God’s character. Someone has raised the objection that God has not kept his promises to Israel, so we cannot trust God’s current promises of salvation via faith in Christ. Paul counters this argument by showing how God has not, in fact, abandoned his promises to Israel.

Robert Anderson, in *Mercy for All*, presents a different view. He argues that Paul defends Israel against a growing Gentile Church belief that God has abandoned Israel. Christians, in this view, must separate themselves from Judaism and Israel; Judaism is old, Christianity is new, and God is done with the old.
The author solidly refutes this view and proposes an alternative.

He asserts Paul is defending Israel by examining the situation in Rome at the time Paul wrote to the Christians there. Jews had been exiled from Rome in various ways just prior to Paul’s letter, and there is evidence Jews were now returning to Rome, establishing synagogues in the area. Christians were inclined to distance themselves from Israel because Judaism was rapidly becoming a disfavored religious sect.

For Paul, Israel is the past and future bearer of God’s promises. Christianity has not replaced Israel but rather is a mission from God to save his covenant people, Israel.
This is a must-read book for anyone who studies Paul’s argument in the first part of Romans. The author has marshalled impressive arguments with support from a wide array of sources. The argument made here ultimately augments or overlays, rather than replaces, the argument that Paul is defending God’s character—Paul defends God’s character by defending the place of Israel and God’s mission to Israel. The book does, however, add much evidence to discount the “individual salvation” view of Paul’s argument in Romans.

Highly recommended.

The three horns of our dilemma are:

1. If God is all powerful, he can prevent evil.
2. If God is all good, he should desire to prevent evil.
3. There is evil, so God does not exist, is not good, or…

We can extend this basic “logical problem of evil” in two ways:

4. If God existed, there would be much less evil.
5. If God existed, this particular evil would not have happened to me (or them).

Christians—and Jews—have been dogged by this problem from the beginning. There are really only two broad classes of solutions to these various problems of evil:

1. God causes every particular evil to result in a corresponding particular good
2. God is seeking—or maximizing—some good he considers greater than an evil-free world

Particular Good for Particular Evil

The term particular in this context means an individual thing. Much like weighing the value of two pieces of fruit, this class of solutions argues that God can, and does, replace every lost orange (for instance) with an apple, or every lost apple with an orange. This class of solutions is intuitively attractive, but it requires:

• The particular goods are not always visible.[1]
• Every evil and every good are, in fact, particular
  • There are no “general” evils
  • There is no “gratuitous” evil, or some evil that has no good final outcome
• There is a way to “weigh” some evil against some good
• There is some way to “balance” particular evils and goods for each individual person in creation, such as:
  • If a particular evil is committed against person A, and person A is not saved, it is just and right for the resulting particular good to accrue to person B
  • People who are not saved are annihilated rather than eternally separated from God (and life), negating the required balance between good and evil in their individual lives
  • Everyone is saved

Some objections to this class of solutions include:

• If not all corresponding goods are not visible, what proof do we have they exist?
• Not every evil nor every good seems to be particular. There seem to be general evils like earthquakes and tsunamis that impact millions, and it’s hard to see either how to make these into particular evils or how particular goods could counter these general evils.
• Gratuitous evils seem to exist.
• There doesn’t seem to be any way to “measure” a particular evil against a particular good and determine if they are “equal enough to count as justice.”
• Noe of the solutions for balancing good and evil for individuals seem very convincing.

Finally—and most importantly—there is no good Scriptural warrant for holding:

• Every good and evil are particular
• Every particular evil is offset by some particular evil

While some Christians find solace in this class of solution, I find them unconvincing on the Scriptural evidence alone. Pursuing this path to solve the problem of evil also seems to result in unacceptably long leaps of logic.

Maximizing Tradeoff

This leads us to the second class of solutions: God is maximizing some general good he considers greater than an evil-free world. Perhaps an example would go some way towards explaining the concept.

Suppose you go out to dinner with your family, which includes a young child. As a parent, you have two competing goals:

• Having a peaceful meal
• Only feeding your child healthy food

However, you also know that if your child becomes hungry, they will also become cranky—and cranky means crying or acting out in some way. In the event, the restaurant is taking a long time to deliver your food order, long enough that your child is obviously hungry, and starting to cry.

Do you give your child an easily accessible piece of unhealthy candy in this situation? Do you choose to allow the (potentially minor) evil against the child’s health, or lose the good of peace and quiet? Since the peace and quiet impacts everyone in the restaurant, it is a general rather than particular good, so you are deciding: do I trade this particular evil against a general good?

This explanation of particular and general immediately raises the first objection to such views: why should we think God should ever face this kind of decision? If God’s omnipotence is unlimited, shouldn’t it be that God can prevent the particular evil while also creating the general good? Can’t God just “make the child not hungry?”

This is initially very attractive—we intuitively want to “maximize” God’s power in this way. As Alvin Plantinga has shown with modal logic however, this entails God being able to accomplish the logically impossible.[2]

The reply to this objection, then, depends on whether God’s power is limited by logic.

• If you hold God created the three logical laws so they only apply to humans, you should accept the entailments of this position, such as God’s inability to lie resting in his standing above the concept of lying, rather than in his trustworthy character, and that when God speaks his words can mean something completely different than what we hear. While many hold to this view of God, it is not the God the Scriptures describe.
• If you the three logical laws are a part of God’s character, then God cannot do the irrational, and the objection fails. In this case, we should see God reasoning with humans about the righteousness of his actions and appealing to a human sense of good and evil to convince or condemn. This is the way God is described in the Scriptures.

Assuming God cannot do the logically impossible, we can examine the second class of solutions.[3]

Before doing so, we should state that we cannot determine whether God is righteous in seeking this greater good or that God has chosen the “correct” balance—we cannot judge God. We can, however, ask: “What is this greater good?” Let’s consider three possibilities.

God is Maximizing His Glory.

There are many ways to phrase this, such as:

• God ordained evil to show the fullness of his attributes
• The Father ordained evil to glorify the Son
• God ordained evil to increase his glory

This position is often held by those who want to maximize God’s power or omnipotence; power is God’s “preeminent” attribute. Nonetheless, all of these imply God’s power is limited in this way: God must “ordain” or “cause” evil to fully increase or show his glory.

This solution is largely tied to Thomistic and Calvinistic thought. Some objections to this solution include:

• There is no Scriptural basis for claiming God’s only goal is his own glory, that God’s love only exists to increase his glory, etc.
• It puts God in the position of “ordaining” evil for his own glory, which is impossible to square with the moral and ethical standards to which God holds humans. In other words, this view seems to entail that the word “good” means something different to God than it means to humans.

God is Maximizing Perfected Souls.

In this solution, God is maximizing the number of mature, or perfect, souls across time. Perfecting a soul, however, requires the experience of pain, so God must allow evil into the world to create these perfect souls.

This solution is also called “the soul building theodicy,” and it is most often associated with various forms of Arminianism and open theology.

Some objections to this view include:

• It’s widespread connection to open theology.
• There seems to be little direct Biblical evidence that God’s goal in creation is building souls.

God is Maximizing Relationship (or Love).

To understand this solution, we must begin with the nature of relationships.

1. Relationships are based on love, and love, in turn, on faith. The modern world has so distorted the meaning of the word “love” that we struggle to understand the meaning of the word, but according to the Scriptures love is the desire for the good of the other. Hence, love is related to the idea of virtue in classical Greek thought.
2. Faith and love must be given freely. According to the Scriptures, if love is not freely given it is definitionally not love.
3. To love, then, requires that humans have at least some limited form of free will—at the minimum, the freedom to choose to love.

So—God is constrained by the nature of relationships to allow at least some form of free will. That God cannot create a world with free will, and without the possibility of evil, can be shown through modal logic (often expressed as possible worlds).

Given the free will to choose love or not, at least some of God’s created beings will choose not to love, so there will be evil in any possible world God can create with free will. This is what Plantinga calls “Transworld depravity.” Hence:

God created this world in spite of the evil he knew would exist in order to create the real possibility of loving relationships.

This solution is closely tied to Molinism and other mediating positions between Thomism/Calvinism and open theology. These positions do not hold that God creates without knowing the amount of love and evil, but that God chooses to create because he judges the relationships (love) enabled by limited free will to be a greater good than the evil. Unlike open theism, then, this view does not modify a traditional understanding of omniscience. This view does, however, cannot be reconciled with a Thomistic/Calvinistic view of divine simplicity.

Some objections to this view include:

• Some object to love requiring a free choice—they hold a person can rightly be made to love against their will.
• It seems to constrain God’s power.

While these objections do tell against this solution, they are answered by supporters in a variety of ways, including:

• If love is not a free choice, humans have no (even limited) free will. Humans are not, in this case, creatures made in the image of God, but rather extensions of God himself.
• God’s power is not decreased by limited forms of human free will, but rather increased. A God who can convince millions to freely love him is infinitely more powerful than a God who must force people to love him via an ontological change against their will.
• Further, except for universalism, God’s power is constrained in every case; there is no more constraint in God maximizing love and relationship than there is in God maximizing his glory. The only difference is which general good God values above the existence of an evil-free world.

Summary

There are four basic positions:

• Every particular evil is offset by a particular good.
• God can only do the logically possible, and:
  • God ordains (or must ordain) evil to maximize his glory.
  • God allows (or must allow) evil to create mature and/or perfected souls.
  • God allows (or must allow) evil to enable free will, which is necessary for true I/thou (loving) relationships.

All other solutions are variations of these.

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[1] This is sometimes called the “noseeum defense.”

[2] Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil, Kindle ed (Eerdmans, 1989).

[3] There are versions of High Calvinism that hold God created logic, and therefore is “above” logic. To counter the problem of the unintelligibility of God resulting from practical nominalism, these versions of High Calvinism further hold God “repairs” his elect enough to experience something of God—ironically using a practical Gnosticism to counter practical nominalism.