When it comes to the perceived tension between God’s sovereignty and human responsibility, our minds are often consumed with finding a solution or at least a juxtaposition however uncomfortable it is to avoid hyper Calvinism on the one hand and Arminianism on the other. However, we seldom reflect on why such a tension exists. At one level the answer is simply that the Bible (and the Christian experience) portrays God as sovereign over everything and humans as responsible for the choices that they make. But we can press the point further by reflecting on why the Bible does this.
What is the Bible about? Many have followed the champions of biblical theology in seeing the Bible as a being about the kingdom of God. While there is a great deal of truth to this, it often pushes us to look for “purple passages” to determine a skeletal structure for the unfolding narrative of salvation history. In the end, the kingdom of God is only half the story, for the kingdom of light is constantly juxtaposed with the kingdom of darkness. From the beginning of the story we see enmity placed between the offspring of the woman and the offspring of the serpent (Genesis 3:15). These are portrayed in the lines of Cain (which means I have acquired - works) and Seth (I have been granted - grace). Throughout the unfolding narrative of the Bible these two “kingdoms” are essentially made up of the elect and the non-elect (if you believe in God’s sovereign choice) and are expressed in Jerusalem and Babylon in the Old Testament and personified in Jesus and the world in the New Testament. The Bible is a tale of two kingdoms where the wheat is constantly growing up with the weeds.
To expand our understanding of what the Bible is about to the point that we’re not forced to look for purple passages (which are about what we’re trying to say the whole Bible is about), we can broaden our thematic categories to that of sin and grace. Indeed, I am arguing that every chapter of the Bible is about sin or grace or both. This is not denying that the Bible is about the kingdom of God, for that is the ultimate expression of grace, but it is to add that it’s also about the kingdom of the world, for that is the expression of sin. All good love stories have an obstacle to overcome, and sin the all encompassing obstacle of salvation history, which is finally overcome by grace alone. Where some have advocated that there are two ways of reading the Bible, as all about you or all about God, the themes of sin and grace pick up the truth in both, for the message of the Bible (the gospel) is one of how our sin is overcome by God’s grace. “Though the world was made through him, the world did not recognise him (sin). He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God (grace) – John 1:10-12.
What does this have to do with the necessity of God’s sovereignty and human responsibility? The two have to be held together because the Bible is all about sin and grace where sin requires human responsibility and grace requires God’s sovereignty. For sin to be a genuine rebellion against God it must be “of humanity”, God does not force our hand to sin and we cannot blame him for our willful disobedience that sin is. For grace to be an undeserved gift it must be “of God”, for it is undeserved by definition and so it cannot come from anything that we do. And therein lies the dilemma, the twin themes of sin and grace that run through every chapter of the Bible require human responsibility and God’s sovereignty respectively. Humans are responsible in that our sin is ours and we cannot blame God for it, and God is sovereign in that his grace is his and it is not merited by us. In short, we are responsible for our sin and God is sovereign over his grace.
But where do we go from here? Does this kind of reflection on the problem help us move towards a solution of the perceived tension between God’s sovereignty and human responsibility? In one sense it doesn’t because it’s just establishing (or restating) the problem, but in another sense it does simply by acknowledging the agents of sin (us) and grace (God). While God is sovereign even over our sin and we are responsible for how we respond to God’s grace, the origin of sin lies in the will of man and the origin of grace lies in the will of God. While the transcendence of God’s sovereignty complicates the relationship between God’s will and our will because God achieves his will not only against evil but through evil, at least we have two distinct starting points. However complicated the manifestation of the relationship between sin and grace becomes, they remain separate in whose will they come from and by whose agency they are expressed. This is indeed the glory of the gospel, for while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8).
