In an attempt to preserve the human freedom required for people to be responsible, some have let go of the idea that God is sovereign, to varying degrees. Pelagius first promoted a strong view of free will to oppose the idea of God’s sovereignty in both salvation and good works. His opponent Augustine, demonstrated that the bible teaches that God is sovereign, especially in salvation, but the Roman Catholic church adopted a fairly weak view of God’s sovereignty in our good works. Pelagius’ view was resurrected by Arminius a thousand years later and opposed by Calvin and the early reformers. And the Roman Catholic church’s view of good works has recently be revitalised in reformed circles by the new perspective. Against Pelagius and Arminius, Augustine and Calvin argued that God saves us and keeps us. The Roman Catholic church and the new perspective affirm that it is God who saves us, but teach that it is up to us to keep ourselves in the faith.
Open theism tries to bridge the gap arguing that God is like a brilliant chess player. People are also players in the game, but God is so good that he always wins, using even his opponents moves to achieve his desired outcome. This incorporates the idea of middle knowledge: that God knows everything that there is to know, but he can’t know our choices until we make them. If our choices were known in advance, they wouldn’t be real choices. This is a logical outworking of the philosophical idea that foreknowledge contradicts freedom. If it’s possible to have foreknowledge of the future, then it’s not possible to exercise any freedom that would change that future. Therefore, if God is sovereign, then people have no choice but to do his sovereign will. Ultimately, this is another exaltation of free will at the expense of God’s sovereignty.
What exactly is at stake here? Advocates of free will argue that exalting God’s sovereignty at the expense of free will leads to a hyper-Calvinism where we don’t have to do anything because God is sovereign over everything. Calvinists argue that exalting free will at the expense of God’s sovereignty leads to a theology of salvation by works which denies God’s grace, for we are “chosen by grace. And if by grace, then it cannot be based on works, if it were, grace would no longer be grace” (Romans 11:5-6). In the end it is a battle of wills. Is God sovereign in his will for salvation or do we exercise free will in becoming a Christian? Do we persevere as Christians because it is God’s will, or is it our will to persevere? Is human history the result of God’s sovereign will, or the result of the countless human choices that have shaped human history?
At the heart of the tension is the demand that we draw the battle lines between God’s will and our will. We demand that our will be free such that God cannot be sovereign over it, or that God’s will be sovereign such that people don’t have any freedom under it. However this is a false dichotomy that stems from an overly simplistic understanding of God’s sovereignty that’s bound by the limits of human sovereignty. Two people’s choices can easily be in a zero-sum conflict (tug of war); the more a certain decision is one person’s choice, the less it is another’s. But God’s choices and ours are not in the same “either/or” relationship that our choices are in with another person’s. God’s choices are put into effect by the choices of people, God’s will is achieved through human will, not instead of human will (Genesis 50:20, Acts 2:23).
The question then becomes, how does God’s will transcend our will? What is the relationship between God’s choices and ours? The bible describes people as free to chose and accountable for their choices (Deuteronomy 30:11-20), but compared to God’s freedom, people are like tools in the hands of the God who wields us (Isaiah 10:15). People have real agency, but when compared to God’s agency, people’s actions appear to be a mechanism for God’s agency. By analogy, computers make “decisions” all the time. A computer’s processor decides which instructions to execute and when, and its decisions sometimes depend on the “decisions” of other computer processors. The decisions of two CPU’s can easily be in a zero-sum conflict, for example, when it comes to the order and priority of sending and receiving information across a network, the more its one CPU’s decision, the less it is another’s. But when a computer’s ability to make decisions is compared to ours, it becomes negligible. People have infinity more freedom than computers, but God has infinitely more freedom than people.
If God is a chess player, then he is not playing against us, he is moving us, his pieces, to the eschatological end of human history. With sin and death already dealt with on the cross, the final move to make is to send his son a second time to bring the kingdom of God into completion. God has “mate in one”, but he continues to turn pawns into queens, or more accurately (and this is where the analogy breaks down), to turn black pieces into white pieces. It’s not as though God is somehow sovereign over people becoming Christians, but not over their perseverance as Christians. God is sovereign over everything (Romans 8:28, Ephesians 1:11), not despite the choices we make but through the choices we make. Restricting God’s sovereignty to be like the sovereignty that we have over our choices and actions is to imagine that God is playing chess against you, rather than using you as the piece he created, whether you’re black or white, towards his ultimate end of heaven.
