Question 148 from Emma, United Kingdom

Can you lose your salvation? How can we be sure that Jesus won’t turn to us on Judgement Day and say “I never knew you”?

The short answer is that in almost every branch of Christian theology, there are no guarantees about salvation, unless a person is living a life marked by Christian discipleship.

In terms of believers losing their salvation, the Bible and later Christian teaching place great store on ‘perseverance’. The Apostle Paul famously described his own quest for perfection when he said: (more…)

Question 146, from Carol, United Kingdom
Why is there such as difference in God’s attitude to mankind between the Old and New Testament? e.g. If God gave everyone a free will why did he then override this and harden Pharaoh’s heart in Exodus so that he wouldn’t release the Israelites from Egypt?

There are two big questions here based on two very big assumptions. The first is the assumption that there is a major difference between the way God is depicted as acting towards human beings in the Old Testament compared to the New. The second assumption is that human beings have free will, which God ignored when God chose to ‘harden Pharaoh’s heart’.
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The following exchange of views was conducted via e-mail with PR, United Kingdom.

Dear Jon, I’ve just come across your site and find it really interesting. I was looking through your response on Predestination, and wondered if you have considered the following:

That “Pre-destined” (Rom 8:30) actually refers to the promise that those who believe will be transformed into the likeness of Christ, and it therefore does not relate to the choosing or otherwise by God of those who will be saved or not saved. Foreknowledge (in Rom 8:29) is about God knowing the outcome of his decision to send Jesus to die, namely that it would be possible for man to be reconciled to himself, but not necessarily that any would actually accept the salvation. Hence, God has put in place the possibility for all to be saved but not all will be, due to human free will.
Would appreciate your thoughts…

Response from Jon the freelance theologian:

Thanks for your comments,

As I said in the answer about predestination, the problem with basing any doctrinal stance about predestination solely on Scripture is that the Bible can be interpreted in many different ways and does often seem to say different things in different places. On that note, the danger is that we can try to explain away a difficult passage, like the one in Romans, looking for meanings that are not obvious. That does not mean your interpretation is incorrect, but like everybody who approaches this particular topic our interpretation of various ‘proof-texts’ depends on our personal opinion, rather than our belief following on from a natural reading and comprehending of the texts.

Like most of Christian theology, predestination opens up a nice paradox – how can human free will co-exist with the Sovereign will of God? Especially as humans only exist in the first place because of God’s Sovereign will? And yet it is clear that we are beings who have been given the freedom to choose (the ‘terrible choice’ as some people call it).

I like your summing up, but the big question with pursuing a doctrine that emphasises human free will is why did God take a risk that humans would reject him? This throws up two further questions. 1) Did God know (does God know) who would (will) reject him – and why does he not do more to prevent that rejection? And 2) Ultimately, if human free will is ‘given’ to us, then we do not have a choice not to have it, so is a forced choice really a free choice?

To which PR replied:

My thought about your response is that we are created in God’s image (personality), and since God has free will, we inherit it – it’s something that he “forced” himself to do through creating us and so takes a risk on us rejecting him.

One other question… if we are not to base our doctrinal stance solely on Scripture, what else might we use?

The next response from Jon the freelance theologian:

Hi PR

I like the analogy. I am assuming, as I have never met you in person, that the main difference between you and your children and God and his creation, is that you are not eternal and able to see every outcome. No doubt your kids do things that continually surprise you – sometimes good things and sometimes not so good! Of course I might be wrong about your attributes and nature there – let me know if that is the case.

However, God is eternal, omniscient, all–powerful and so on. The implication is that he knew that, in giving humans the potential to rebel against him, they actually would. Yes, he reveals himself in love to humanity, in direct revelation, through the Law, the prophets, Jesus Christ, the canon of scripture and the ongoing witness of the Church universal. But (and this is the main point), sometimes this revelation fails to convince people to turn to him.

Now we can say that ‘failure’ is human free will, however, if God is all-powerful and all-knowing he knows what would be incontrovertible proof in each human situation to each human being and he would be able to offer that proof. Given that some people are still ‘free’ to choose yea or nay, we have to conclude that God has chosen not to reveal himself to the point where that person cannot turn him down. In fact, the Bible is full of references to God ‘hardening people’s hearts’ against him (see especially Romans 9 v18, a common passage quoted in this kind of debate).

The key element that God is searching for is faith. Believing in God is not like believing in something easily seen and touched (like your computer screen). So that might be why God does not overwhelm human beings with proof. The point is, though, that he could and chooses not to. Human free will? Or God’s Sovereign choosing will?

Jesus did indicate that humans have the capacity to choose to believe or not and, perhaps because he was aware of that need for faith, he urged people to believe. Jesus also said “Nobody can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” (John 6 v44), in a passage that is heavy on the idea that those who come to Jesus are selected by the Father. In Jesus’ words here and elsewhere we see this balancing act between God’s restrained impact on human beings somehow allowing human ‘free will’ and his desire for the entire world to be saved.

Regarding your final question about Scripture as a basis for theology, personally I think all doctrinal statements should be rooted in all of Scripture. The problem with an issue like predestination is that people root it in their understanding of certain parts of Scripture and that’s where it all starts to fall apart. I think at some point we have to accept predestination is a paradox and work from there.

Other things we can use as tools in theological inquiry include reason (quite legitimate as long as our minds are not conforming to the world – Romans 12 v2) and experience. Often an experience of the transcendent cannot be adequately expressed in words (Paul’s description of the third heaven in 2 Corinthians chapter 12 falls into that bracket), but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to express it.

One of the reasons to believe that the Bible is essentially true is because it is hard to understand, does not offer quick fixes and seems to contradict itself. Which seems to make it perfect for this confusing world of ours!

Thanks for the conversation, PR. If you would like to comment on this, or any other topic covered on freelance theology please email using the ‘contact me’ button.

Question from VN, United Kingdom:
Dear freelance theologian, can you please give an overview of the whole predestination/free will debate, and give a solution?

And from GT, United Kingdom:
If we are predestined (Ephesians 1 v1 and other places too I think), does that mean that some people aren’t predestined and therefore can’t be saved?

There are a number of starting points for any debate on predestination. The Bible would be an obvious place to start, except that there seem to be some contradictory passages. How do you reconcile Ephesians 1 v 4 (‘For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight’) with 1 Timothy 2 v 3 (‘God our saviour desires all men to be saved‘)? [To add to the confusion both those statements are attributed to Paul.]

Most people when addressing this issue tend to ‘proof-text’, quoting the sections of Scripture that agrees with their point of view. However, this is not a recipe for good, coherent and intellectually satisfying theology.

There are problems with both views. Absolutely rigid predestination and unconditional human freedom have aspects that do not make much logical sense.

If God created people and picked some for eternal salvation, then he automatically destines some to Hell. Calvin stated that in his Institutes as what has become known as the ‘doctrine of double-predestination’. In this respect, Calvin is merely being intellectually honest. If the decision to save people is ultimately God’s, then the fact that some people go to Hell is the flipside of that decision.

In fairness to Calvin, he adopted an extreme view of predestination because he simply could not understand why someone would not accept and respond to the Gospel. He felt it was inconceivable that anyone would turn down the offer of salvation, so he concluded it must be because God did not choose those people that failed to respond. Calvin was awed by the sovereignty of God, and the ‘irresistible grace’ shown to human beings. Calvin felt it was bordering on the offensive to imagine that a mere created being could reject its creator, unless God had willed it that way.

However, there does not seem much point in creating people whose sole purpose is to sin and go to Hell. Calvin believed that the righteousness of God could be seen in God judging those people, but to create beings just to prove a point seems arbitrary in the extreme. It also fails to explain those passages in the Bible that imply God’s will is for any and everyone to be saved (1 Timothy 2 v3, John 3 v16ff, 2 Peter 3 v9 etc).

The problem with advocating that salvation is solely dependent on human free will is also severely deficient. If God is all-knowing and all-powerful, the idea that humans are free is a false one. Just by knowing all outcomes, God is in a unique position to influence each situation. If God knows what will bring a person to him, and does not act to bring people to him, then he is effectively making the choice for them.

If God does not know every outcome, then we have to ask how that can be. It may be that God has surrendered some part of his awareness, in order to allow human beings to make truly free choices. This seems incredibly reckless – why would God risk anybody rejecting him? There is no perceptible reason why God would create beings who would turn against him, and, anyway, in creating beings with the capacity to rebel and choose Hell as their eternal destination, God is ultimately responsible for the existence of those creatures. At some point, the decision to be the creatures they are and to end up in the place that they choose, rests not with the creature, but with the creator. Either way, total free will seems to be an illusion.

So, what’s the solution? As ever in this sort of debate it lies somewhere in the middle. An ingenious proposal by Karl Barth, the twentieth century theologian, runs something like this:

~Christ through his divine nature is the God who chooses people to be saved
~Christ through his human nature is the one perfect human being who has been chosen for salvation.
~Human Beings are able to ‘share in the death of Christ’ and therefore appear as righteous in the eyes of God (following on from Martin Luther’s belief that when we are declared righteous it is because God sees the righteousness of Christ that we share).
~Human Beings are free to choose whether to share in Christ’s righteous standing before God.

This approach means that all human beings, except for Jesus Christ, are predestined for Hell. But, because Christ took the punishment for all of human sin (which through his eternal divinity he could), human beings can opt, through repentance and the sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit, to share in Christ’s status as the only human chosen for salvation.

This neatly ties up the difficulty of reconciling the Biblical concept of human free will with the Biblical concept of God’s sovereign will. Basically, all humans can do is claim the righteousness of Christ through faith and that means they can avoid the punishment ordained for them.

I hope that goes some way to answering your questions, VN and GT. Thanks for contributing to freelance theology. Thanks also to RF, whose Biblical awareness was much appreciated.