Wesleyans and Grudem (Satan and demons)

Some of my previous posts in this series include:
Miracles
Prayer
Angels

Chapter 20: Satan and Demons
Grudem is an interesting thinker in that he is a fundamentalist in thinking and yet sympathetic to the charismatic movement. That's an unusual combination.

Accordingly, the amount of detail this chapter covers is quite striking. Grudem has clearly thought about this topic a lot more than most Wesleyans do. In fact, he reminded me of a remark a friend once made about Roman Catholic theology. They have been around so long that they have thought about a lot of things that Wesleyans have not thought much about. They've developed some ideas that, to many of us, may seem a little weird.

In the same way, Grudem has asked questions about demonic activity that most Wesleyans have never even occurred to most Wesleyans.

1. As with angels, there is much in this chapter that Wesleyans either would agree with or would not really have an opinion on.

• Satan is a fallen angel, as are demons.
• Satan is the head of the demons.
• Satan and demons are opposed to God.
• The power of Satan and demons is limited and doesn't even come close to God's power.
• What the OT calls "gods," we would call demons. I would add that the earliest strata of the OT does not know yet about Satan. There are places in the early OT where God is said to cause something evil (e.g., 2 Sam. 24:1) where later passages indicate it was more precisely Satan (1 Chron. 21:1), with God's permission (see Job 1).
• Jesus exorcist ministry on earth was the binding of Satan, a sign of the inauguration of the kingdom of God. Satan's power is definitively over, even though he is still kicking.
• Demons are active in the world today.
• Not everything evil that happens comes from Satan and demons.
• Demons cannot make a Christian do something, but they can attack and try to influence them.
• Christians need not fear demons. Christians who are spiritually strong can rebuke demons when they know for certain they are dealing with one. Grudem is probably right that whatever Jude 8-10 is about, it is not about the kind of confrontation the seventy had with demons in Luke 10. It may refer to the kind of over-zealous demon seeking of some in the charismatic movement.

2. Weird things
There are a number of things in the chapter that may be right, but it really seems more or less to be speculation and charismatic tradition.

• Demons can't read our thoughts or know the future. Sure, why not. But we can imagine that they are smarter than Einstein. There are people who are so intuitive they can more or less see what's coming. You would imagine that angels and demons are smarter.
• Grudem questions some teachings in the charismatic church today. He finds no evidence for there being demons in certain territories or locations (421). He discourages questioning demons for information.
• Grudem questions language of demon possession. He apparently distinguishes that from "having" a demon (Matt. 11:8). I'm not sure I see the difference.
• I seriously doubt that demons are the main culprit behind someone who teaches false doctrine. Evil is not focused in belief but in the heart. We discern evil when we discern a heart of hatred, not when someone has crazy ideas.
• He gives some interesting advice: don't talk glibly about demons (431); focus on people oppressed, not on demons. Don't be overly curious about demons (432).

3. Exegetical issues

a. There are not many passages in the Bible about Satan and demons, and much of what is said had deep connections to Jewish apocalyptic thinking. The allusive nature of these comments make it dangerous for us to be very detailed about our thoughts on Satan and demons. It will inevitably be difficult for us to know where the cultural context of apocalyptic Judaism ends and distinctly Christian revelation begins.

Indeed, much of what Christians believe about Satan and demons seems as much a matter of Christian tradition after the New Testament as it does the Bible itself. So we must decide whether God continued to unpack revelation in this area after the Bible or whether this is simply an area in which we should only have some basic core beliefs like those mentioned above.

b. For example, Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 simply were not about Satan in context. Satan is unknown in Isaiah or Ezekiel, and the context of these two chapters is obviously about evil kings at the time of these two prophets. Later interpreters read these passages in a "fuller sense" about Satan. That may be a legitimate "spiritual" way of reading these passages.

Perhaps that is legitimate. The problem is that the New Testament does not clearly endorse this reading. Luke 10:18 may allude to Isaiah 14 when Jesus says that he observed Satan fall from heaven like lightning. But the context of Luke 10 is not the fall of Satan before Adam. It is the exorcist ministry of Jesus' disciples. It either referred to what was happening in Jesus' own ministry or to what is now destined to happen.

c. Again, some of the key verses about the origins of demons come from very obscure verses in the Bible: 2 Peter 2:4, Jude 6. Other possible verses to take into account are 1 Peter 3:19, Genesis 6:1-2, and Rev. 12:4. These are scarcely clear enough to build much in the way of essential Christian belief.

Grudem's hermeneutic, a fundamentalist hermeneutic, takes individual verses and harmonizes them into an overall system. By contrast, because individual verses are most likely to be ambiguous and to be based on historical context, biblical theology should focus on big principles and live with uncertainty about individual verses that do not seem to fit.

What is particularly difficult in relation to these sorts of verses is how deeply entrenched they seem to be in an apocalyptic Jewish worldview. The New Testament only skirts the edges of this paradigm. If we read passages like those again from the perspective of Jewish apocalyptic, we would read Genesis 6 as angels having sex with human women, for that is how 1 Enoch reads this text.

This Jewish background literature gnaws at a person the more you know it. It suggests that Grudem's reading requires a person to treat 1 Peter, 2 Peter, and Jude as if they weren't written at the time and place that they were. Once again, we end up endorsing Grudem's theology of where Satan and demons come from but probably revealing that he does not get that belief from the Bible but from early Christian tradition, which is okay.

d. My personal hunch is that we should take the millennium in Revelation 20 symbolically. No other part of Scripture suggests there will be 1000 years between Jesus' return and the final judgment. And we shouldn't base a doctrine on something that only appears once in Scripture. It's not, however, something to die for. We'll know when it happens.

e. Given how much of the ancient Jewish worldview is involved in NT imagery about Satan and demons, we should probably be cautious in our application. For example, not all instances of epilepsy are demon-possession. It is quite possible that some events that would have been identified as exorcisms in the ancient world would today be identified as schizophrenia or other psychological conditions.

Let me be clear here. I am not suggesting that all instances can be explained as mental disorders. Similarly, I am not discounting any of Jesus' healings. But we are dealing with real people here, and love demands that we be very careful in this area. If medication works, then we should medicate rather than presume a demon is involved. I have no doubt that heinous things have been done by both well-intentioned and less than well-intentioned Christians in this area.

5. In summary, Satan and demons exist. They remain a strong influence for evil in the world, but their power is nothing compared to God's. Jesus has struck the definitive death blow, even if they will not be finally dis-empowered until Jesus returns.

Wesleyans and Grudem (Angels)

Some of my previous posts in this series include:
Miracles
Prayer

Chapter 19 Angels
1. To begin with, there was not much in this chapter to which a Wesleyan would object as a Wesleyan. For example:

• Wesleyans believe that angels are created beings, created sometime in between Genesis 1:1 and the Fall of Adam.
• Wesleyans do not believe that angels marry (e.g., Mark 12:30)
• Most, if not all Wesleyans would believe that there are lots of angels and that they are powerful. (To be frank, I don't hear Wesleyans talking about angels very often. Practically speaking, this is not a major area of conversation for most Wesleyans).
• Angels show the greatness of God's love. They carry out some of God's plans. 
• Wesleyans (again, without really discussing it much) would believe that angels are present in the world around us. But it would make us uneasy if someone put too much emphasis on them. We certainly do not believe in worshiping them. We would entertain the possibility that angels take human form and appear to people from time to time (although we might hesitate to express certainty about any individual instance).

2. There was one section a Wesleyan should find problematic in tone. Grudem writes, "If God had decided to save only five human beings out of the entire human race, that would have been much more than justice" (403).

In this section, Grudem is arguing that angels show the greatness of God's love for us by contrast. God did not try to save angels. He did not send Jesus to die for them. But God did send Jesus to die for us. This is where the quote above occurs.

Technically speaking, Wesleyans would agree with the quote above, but not with the tone. God did not have to save anyone. However, Wesleyans would say that God's disposition toward the creation is love. In that regard, we would have been completely baffled if he had not made a way of salvation. Sure, he didn't have to save one. But it is no surprise that he made it possible for everyone to be saved.

Therefore, as Wesleyans, we believe that God would have even saved Satan himself if that were at all possible within the parameters he has created for this universe. What are those parameters? Those are the parameters of free will. The difference between humans, who can be saved, and the fallen angels, who cannot at this point, must therefore be in the nature of our wills rather than in God's openness to it.

In particular, the human will must surely be more pliable, less resolved than that of the angelic will once such decisions have been made. We must suppose that Satan's free will, once fixed, will now never be unfixed. Perhaps our wills will turn out to be the same in our glorified bodies. In that sense, our wills will never turn against God once in the kingdom. Similarly, the wills of those who are against God presumably will never change thereafter.

3. There are a number of questionable moments in this chapter, not from a Wesleyan standpoint, but from that of a contextual Bible scholar. I have said repeatedly that Grudem is a premodern reader of the Bible. He reads the words flatly as the words of one book from Genesis to Revelation with the words in one part more or less having the same meaning as words in another part.

When we come to a subject like angels, where Jewish thought changed significantly over the course of the writing of the Bible, this approach ends up with a bizarre concatenation of pieces that do not really go together.

Here we get back to a fundamental fact. The books of the Bible were revealed in the categories of their audiences. To find the voice of Scripture as a whole, the whole council of God, you cannot simply mix and match verses from here and there and assume they all mean the same thing.

For example, Grudem more or less adds up the different names for heavenly beings, as if these are different things: seraphim, cherubim, etc. But we should be very careful about adding these pieces together. We don't know what they literally point to. All we have are the kaleidoscopic images of Israelites and Jews looking at them through the lenses of their day. Inspiration never came in a bubble. It always came in categories that made sense to those to whom God wanted to speak.

It is incredibly difficult to study the intertestamental period in any depth and not be struck by how much the language of the Bible in this category has been affected by the language of apocalyptic Judaism. Yet almost no one in Christianity today accepts that body of imagery as inspired. [1] In short, we must be very careful not to assume that all the angelic imagery of the Bible is straightforwardly literal. Genres we don't recognize are involved. Fantastic symbolism is involved.

4. Finally, there are a number of interpretations in this chapter that are at least questionable. For example, I do not believe that Colossians 2:18 was about the worship of angels but about a Jewish group that believed they were mystically worshiping with angels. It does not change any of Grudem's points, however.

Similarly, I think it is incorrect to portray the Sadducees as liberal. Many, including myself, do not see Acts 23:8 as a denial of belief in angels and spirits but as a denial of different forms of afterlife. Peter's angel in Acts 12:15 may refer to a form that Luke saw people taking between death and resurrection. Again, this is only one set of biblical imagery, one that expressed truth in Luke's categories. We should not take it as how it works literally, minus the symbolism and worldview.

The Bible seems ambiguous on guardian angels. You should not base a doctrine on one verse, and Matthew 18:10 seems about the only really substantive basis for the idea.

Lastly, there is the angel of the LORD in certain Old Testament passages. Notice again that this is a passing image in a certain part of the OT. In other words, it is not a whole Bible image. This immediately pushes us toward seeing it as an expression of truth in the categories of Moses and a certain layer of the OT. [2] It may or may not combine with other images elsewhere.

However, the angel of the LORD would seem to be a messenger from God who so represented God that a person who had received word from this angel could be said to have seen and talked to God himself. No doubt we--and later Jews--would have wanted to word such encounters more carefully, with greater distinctions between God himself and his messenger. But at this point in Israel's history, when polytheism was the default surrounding culture, it was not so crucial to emphasize these points.

5. In summary, there is very little doctrinally in this chapter with which Wesleyans would disagree. The only point is where Grudem is asking why angels cannot be redeemed. Here Wesleyans agree with him on their non-redemptive status, but we disagree on the reasons why they will not be redeemed. Finally, Grudem's use of Scripture is generally non-contextual, so his interpretations should be read with caution.

[1] The Ethiopian church would be an exception, since they consider 1 Enoch inspired.

[2] I am using this traditional language for simplicity. I'm not making an argument for authorship above.

Wesleyans and Grudem (Prayer)

Now to continue my Saturday posts reflecting on Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology from the standpoint of Wesleyan-Arminian thought. My last post was some time ago on his chapter on Miracles (chap. 17).

Chapter 18: Prayer
There is little in this chapter to which a Wesleyan-Arminian would object. A WA would object to how Grudem thinks prayer works, but Grudem does not explicitly get into that here. He writes the chapter in a way that a WA could agree with. His two-dimensional use of Scripture will continue to annoy anyone with a historical consciousness, but that is a critique we have already noted repeatedly.

A. Why pray?
Grudem gives three reasons. First, it is an expression of trust and faith, which is a good thing. Second, it brings us into deeper fellowship with God. Third, it involves us in things that are eternally important. Fair enough.

B. Effective prayer
1. First, Grudem notes that prayer changes the way God acts. "When we ask, God responds" (377).

The way that Grudem words this section is completely in sync with WA thought. Where WAs would disagree with him is in the underlying mechanism. For a WA, God knows whether we are going to pray or not and also knows how he will respond accordingly. But God empowers us to decide freely whether to pray.

For Grudem, God not only knows but he decides whether to make us pray or not. So while Grudem says "prayer changes the way God acts," the assumption is that God is determining whether we pray and thus how he will respond. There is no free act of prayer in Grudem's theology.

Grudem is a soft determinist, which means that we experience our actions as free even though they are ultimately determined by God.

However, because Grudem does not make these assumptions of the chapter explicit, there is nothing in this section that a WA could not also say. Indeed, this section really would be more natural for a WA to say than for Grudem. God chooses to act differently depending on whether we pray. The stakes of prayer are thus even more crucial for a WA than for Grudem.

2. Second, prayer is made possible by Christ. Grudem rightly notes that God knows everything, so God "hears" every prayer in the sense that he is aware of all prayers. It is common in some circles to act as if God isn't even aware of the prayer of someone who does not trust in Christ. Grudem rightly points out that God knows everything.

However, God has not promised to answer the prayers of the unbeliever. For Grudem, however, it is ultimately God's choice, which again is sound. Through Christ, however, the believer has confidence to approach God in prayer. [1]

3. Grudem's third, fourth, and fifth points in this section have to do with praying in Jesus' name, whether we should pray to Jesus and the Holy Spirit, and the role of the Holy Spirit in prayer.

Grudem notes that praying in Jesus' name is not merely saying those words at the end of a prayer, "in Jesus' name." It means that we are praying with his authorization to pray (379). This urges us to pray in a way that is consistent with his character. Grudem actually discourages a ritualistic or formulaic use of the phrase, where it becomes empty. "Genuine prayer is conversation" (380).

Grudem notes that most of the prayers in the New Testament are to God the Father, but that some are to Jesus (e.g., 1 Cor. 16:22). [2] He suggests that prayer to Jesus and the Holy Spirit is not inappropriate, for they are God, but he suggests it should not be our dominant form of prayer, since it is not the New Testament pattern.

This is a very interesting section, for it reflects Grudem filling in gaps in the Bible by way of reasoning. This is completely appropriate, even necessary. Grudem is normally hesitant to do it and is cautious even here. Nevertheless, reason is a necessary element in all theologizing.

Finally, Grudem rightly points to Romans 8:26-27 for the key function of the Holy Spirit in helping us in prayer.

C. Important considerations
Most of the rest of the chapter covers miscellaneous issues in the Bible relating to prayer. For example, he addresses praying according to God's will. If we pray something that is in Scripture, we know we are praying according to his will and all is good. If we do not know God's will, we should pray with a spirit of "If it is your will." (383).

We should pray with faith. A person can have a sort of "settled assurance" that God is going to answer (384). Our disobedience hinders our prayers. We can pray in confession of our sins. We need to forgive others before we expect God to forgive us. Humility is the right attitude to have in prayer.

We need to pray regularly and with a significant time investment, not using empty phrases but being earnest in any repetition of prayer. Jesus did. "Intensity and depth of emotional involvement in prayer should never be faked" (387). We may have to wait on the Lord to respond. We should pray in private and with others.

Fasting appropriately accompanies prayer for many reasons, most of which sharpens us in self-discipline and humility, but also expresses our earnestness and urgency. God does not grant every prayer but there will be some unanswered prayers in God's sovereignty and also because of our failings.

D. Finally, praise and thanksgiving are essential elements in prayer.

Conclusion
Again, there is little if anything in this chapter that a Wesleyan-Arminian will find objectionable, especially since Grudem does not get into the mechanisms he would say are behind the scenes. He presents us as individuals who make choices, which is the key difference between the WA and Calvinist traditions.

A WA would thus only accentuate the claim that prayer changes things. God, in his sovereignty, has given us this great privilege and responsibility to pray. He actually factors our prayers into his decisions on whether to intervene in the natural flow of events. What a fearsome honor!

[1] I personally believe that passages in Romans 8 and Hebrews that have to do with the intercession of Christ are specifically about intercession relating to atonement.

[2] Prayer to Jesus is one of the key arguments of Larry Hurtado that earliest Christianity was "binitarian," worshiping Jesus alongside God the Father. See One God One Lord (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1988).

Wesleyans and Grudem (Miracles)

I've been on a hiatus from reading through Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology for some time. It was a lot of work the way I was doing it. I want to keep working through but offer a more selective response.

I think what I would especially like to do is draw attention to ways in which a Wesleyan-Arminian approach to theology might be the same or different from him. Here is a response to his chapter on Miracles (chapter 17).
____________________
1. First, I want to say that Wesleyans are on the same page as Grudem for most of the chapter. For example, he respectfully disagrees with B. B. Warfield, D. A. Carson, and Norman Geisler, all of whom believe that miracles done through humans ended with the apostles. They are what are called "cessationists" who do not believe that God uses Christians to heal today or to prophecy, etc. This is decidedly not something Wesleyans believe.

Wesleyans believe that God continues to perform miracles through the hands of his people today and give spiritual gifts, since we are filled with the Spirit today just as in the days of the apostles.

Indeed, hard core Wesleyans would go further than Grudem and say that Jesus played it so much by the human rules when he was on earth that everything he did, he did through the power of the Spirit. That means that there is nothing that Jesus did while he was on earth that we in theory cannot still do today through the power of the Holy Spirit.

In general, Wesleyans should be aware that thinkers like Norman Geisler, D. A. Carson, B. B. Warfield, Tom Schreiner, and John MacArthur--all of whom are cessationists (believe the gifts were just for the apostolic age) do not come at theology the way Wesleyans and perhaps even most Christians do. Put them on a theological watch list. They have a particular theological ax to grind against ongoing spiritual gifts.

I am completely dumbfounded that anyone can seriously read the biblical texts and come up with their position. 1 Corinthians 13:8 is obviously not about the end of the age of miracles. It is about the immensely greater value of love when put next to spiritual gifts. Grudem accurately interprets 2 Corinthians 12:12 and Hebrews 2:3-4, showing that these words are being made to say things they weren't saying.

2. Grudem sees miracles as characteristic of the new covenant age. Of course there are miracles in the Old Testament as well, but he seems correct in thinking that miracles served to corroborate the truth of the good news of Jesus' resurrection.

Thus, the purpose of miracles was to point to the truth of the gospel, not to bear witness to the truthfulness of Scripture. It wasn't at all just apostles that had spiritual gifts (see 1 Corinthians 12, Romans 12, etc). At the time the miracles in the NT were happening, the writings about those events largely did not exist. The written word was not primary for the apostles but the spoken word and, even more so, the living Word of Jesus.

The apostles would look at you like you were crazy if you suggested their miracles served to authenticate the writings of the NT. You just can't have any sense of history and even suggest something so insane. It would be like saying that the ultimate purpose of a great worship service was some account of the service written up by the pastor (or even more likely someone who investigated the event) twenty or thirty years after it happened. You have to be some kind of crazy out of touch even to say such a thing, Mr. Warfield.

3. Grudem defines a miracle as "a less common kind of God's activity in which he arouses awe and wonder and bears witness to himself" (355). On the one hand, it's not such a bad definition. He's trying to walk a line between those who would trivialize miracles by seeing every answer to prayer as a miracle and those who would not give God thanks, for example, for recoveries that come from medicine.

While Grudem's definition isn't all bad, Wesleyans should beware that some of the definitions he rejects are rejected because of a non-Wesleyan theology. Wesleyan-Arminian theology holds that God has given some freedom to humanity, even the freedom to disobey him.

By definition, if you believe in any degree of free will, then you cannot believe that everything that happens is part of God's perfect plan.

Grudem is a particular kind of Calvinist. He believes that nothing happens in the world that God did not plan and direct in detail. Wesleyans do not believe this, and Grudem should be on the watch-list for any Wesleyan as someone likely to come from a different perspective than Wesleyan-Arminian theology.

It is not Deist to go with some of the definitions of miracle to which Grudem objects. For example, I would define a miracle technically as an event in which God interrupts the normal cause-effect chain of events in the universe. Grudem would not like this definition, because he is basically not looking at history as a sequence of causes and effects but as God behind the scenes directing everything.

Because my definition is assuming that miracles happen, that God acts in history, then by definition it is not Deist. Good grief!  Lord help me not to completely lambaste the craziness! Christians will never be good historians or scientists or voters if they can't think in terms of cause and effect. Thunderstorms don't usually come from God or demons throwing lightning bolts around... maybe they never do.

4. A deeper critique of Grudem is lurking here. It is not a Wesleyan critique but a scholarly one. The drive to see the teaching of the Bible as self-contained, unified, and distinct from the cultural contexts of the Bible is a "pre-modern" one, a historically unreflective one. Beware of rhetoric about a "biblical worldview." While it is possible to formulate such a view on a deep level, the more typical use of this language comes from a "flat" reading of the biblical text, not one that perceives the rich three dimensional texture of the biblical books.

It is simply beyond dispute that the books of the Bible were written at specific times and places using the "language games" and building off the paradigms of their contexts.

The words of Scripture partake of the definitions of words at the time of each writing, and the thoughts of Scripture were originally expressed from within the paradigms of the original author-audience thought context. We thus do not have to do with one book whose words all mean and teach exactly the same thing. We have different books using words in different ways to express truths using the paradigms of their audiences as a starting point.

Thus, when Grudem says, "The biblical view is such and such," he says it on a very superficial level, one that does not fully engage the underlying paradigms of the biblical authors and audiences. It is not enough simply to point out that many parts of Scripture use deterministic language. Of course they do--the ancient world in which they were written was largely fatalistic and talked in fatalistic terms.

But there are also central parts of Scripture that express the moral culpability of human decisions and the real possibility that humans will do the opposite of what God prefers. Grudem as a Calvinist works out these tensions in one way, while Arminians work them out in another. Both traditions are drawing on biblical traditions but, in order to come up with a systematic theology, they both of necessity have to re-appropriate one set of biblical texts.

In that sense, both Calvinism and Arminianism are biblical, and both reinterpret certain biblical texts. A mature hermeneutic can live with the inevitability of this dynamic, the need to use a certain philosophical or theological framework that is outside the biblical text in order to "pick and choose," identify central and peripheral texts, and finally form a coherent Christian (more accurate than "biblical") perspective on specific issues.

Grudem 16d: Objections to Arminianism

Here is the final summary/evaluation of Grudem's 16th chapter on God's Providence. Thus far I have reviewed:

• God's Preservation of everything and
• God's Cooperation with everything
• Human Action in Calvinist perspective

Now the final review of the chapter:
____________________
G. Another Evangelical View: The Arminian Position 
Summary 
In this section, Grudem addresses Arminianism (named after Jacob Arminius, 1560-1609), the main alternative to Calvinism. [1] He describes it in this way: Arminians "maintain that in order to preserve the real human freedom and real human choices that are necessary for genuine human personhood, God cannot cause or plan our voluntary choices" (338). Rather, God's purposes for the world "are more general and could be accomplished through many different kinds of specific events." [2]

He gives four arguments that Arminians have used against the Calvinist view of providence:

1. Arminians charge that "the verses cited as examples of God's providential control are exceptions and do not describe the way that God ordinarily works in human activity" (339).
Here Grudem references a paragraph in a chapter by David Clines. [3] In this chapter, Clines argues that while the Bible indicates that God predetermines certain specific events, it does not teach that God determines every event. Additionally, the Bible doesn't say he was ordering events in Australia when he was ordering things in ancient Israel.

2. Arminians charge that "the Calvinist view wrongly makes God responsible for sin" (339).
Arminian's would say that the Calvinist view makes us merely puppets or robots who cannot do anything other than what God causes us to do. Clark Pinnock puts it this way: "it is simply blasphemous to maintain, as this theory does, that man's rebellion against God is in any sense the product of God's sovereign will or primary causation." [4]

3. Arminians charge that "choices caused by God cannot be real choices" (340).
Jack Cottrell writes that, in a Calvinist understanding, there really isn't a primary and secondary cause but God reduces to the primary cause. [5] Cottrell argues that when someone uses a lever to move a rock, "the lever is not a true second cause but is only an instrument of the real cause of the movement."

4. "The Arminian view encourages responsible Christian living, while the Calvinistic view encourages dangerous fatalism" (341).
The argument here by some Arminians is that regardless of Calvinist theology, Calvinists have to live like Arminians. If they were consistent, some might argue, they would live in a fatalistic way. They often live and act like they have choices, although their theology might lead them simply to sit back and watch "God's will" play itself out.

Evaluation
Notice right off the bat the biased way in which Grudem describes the Arminian position. The Arminian thinks that God "cannot" do something. According to Grudem, Arminians believe that "God cannot" cause voluntary choices. Quite the contrary. God could certainly cause us to make choices we experience as free choices. What the Arminian disputes is whether such choices would really be free. We are not debating what God can do. We're debating whether the Calvinist position even makes sense.

1. We will evaluate Grudem's responses below. At this point we ask whether he has accurately described the Arminian objections to the Calvinist understanding of Providence. With regard to biblical instances of God's determinism being exceptions, Grudem probably skews the position of some Arminians (e.g., me). I personally would say that some deterministic language in the Bible is cultural language or even conventional language. It is the way people in the ancient world talked about divine and human agency. It is part of the "that time" of the Bible rather than the "all time."

On the other hand, if Grudem is trying to say that an Arminian might believe that God determines some things but not all things, that would be an accurate assessment. Most Arminian thinkers would not say, however, that humans are completely free. Indeed, it is quite possible that the vast majority of things we do are predictable. Arminians simply believe that, on the core matter of salvation, God can empower us to make an undetermined choice. Beyond this point there would be a variety of positions among Arminians as to how free we are in any one instance.

2. Grudem's second description of the Arminian position is dead on. This is the key critique. Calvinism makes God responsible for sin. It makes us into puppets and seems to deeply contradict the most central and important affirmations about God's character in Scripture. In our view, Grudem sacrifices the most important characteristics of God in Scripture (his goodness and love) in order to harmonize a difficult and arguably incarnated detail of Scripture (his determinism). This has always been the greatest problem with the doctrine of inerrancy as it has played out in Calvinist circles--it skews the most central and important truths in order to harmonize them with difficult and unclear details.

3. Again, Grudem's wording is not the way I as an Arminian would put it. It is not that choices caused by God cannot be real choices. It is that they aren't real choices. They are not real choices by definition. We are not debating God's power here. We are debating a contradiction in definition--and one that is a matter of Grudem's piecing together of Scripture, not straightforward divine revelation. Grudem's position is that a decision can be both fully determined and yet not be fully determined at the same time (while using the words in exactly the same way). This is not a denial of God's power, as Grudem is trying to argue, but a fundamental incoherency to the Calvinist doctrine of providence.

4. Some Arminians would no doubt accuse Calvinists of promoting fatalism. I personally would not, although I would agree that fatalism is the most likely skew of the Calvinist's true position.

H. Response to the Arminian Position
1. Are these passages unusual?
Summary
Grudem's response to the charge that instances of God's determinism are exceptional or special cases is that "the examples are so numerous... that they seem to be designed to describe to us the ways in which God works all the time" (342). "Scripture is given to tell us the ways of God," and the Bible gives "clear teaching" on this in some places we should extrapolate to other places. Some of the teaching seems very general in nature (e.g., Eph. 1:11).

Evaluation
There is no denying that a good deal of Scripture uses deterministic language. Yet there is no denying also that a good deal of Scripture uses language that seems to imply that humans have real choices that God does not determine. I return to 1 Timothy 2:4. If God wants everyone to be saved and everyone is not saved, then God must not ultimately determine everyone who is saved. Grudem wants to think that he is the one who believes in Scripture and the Arminian just doesn't like what it says. But, in reality, the Bible has two sets of language that are just difficult to fit together.

Grudem's version of inerrancy is a harmonizing version. He harmonizes ideas in the text the way that others harmonize events. So if Mark says Jesus healed blind Bartimaeus while leaving Jericho (Mark 10:46) and Matthew says Jesus healed two blind men leaving Jericho (Matt. 20:29) and Luke says Jesus healed one blind man going into Jericho (Luke 18:35), the harmonizer's version of inerrancy insists that Jesus must have healed three blind men, one going into Jericho and two coming out, one of whose names was Bartimaeus. Notice how the final version of the story is different from all the actual versions of the story in the Bible. The idea of harmonizing has trumped all three of the actual biblical texts in the name of an idea about the Bible.

In the same way, Grudem and his version of Calvinist theology tries to shove together two different sets of biblical imagery to make them fit together. There are texts that sound deterministic and there are texts that sound like people make real choices. So Augustine and Calvin in their pre-modern glory harmonize them together to say that we experience our choices as free even though they are not. Like the blind harmonizer above, Grudem, Calvin, and Augustine have created a theology that is different from all the individual theologies in the Bible in order to preserve an idea they have about how Scripture must fit together.

2. Does Calvinism make God responsible for sin?
Summary
Grudem's basic answer here is that the Arminian cannot account for the many texts where God seems to determine evildoing. As for Grudem's secondary causes really being primary causes, Grudem once again simply says that Scripture doesn't reason this way. "Scripture repeatedly gives examples where God in a mysterious, hidden way somehow ordains that people do wrong, but continually places the blame for that wrong on the individual human who does wrong and never on God himself" (343). Meanwhile, Grudem claims that Arminians will not allow God to ordain even one sinful act.

Evaluation

We have already mentioned earlier that there seems to be a development within Scripture on the question of how directly God causes evil or tempts individuals to do evil. When we say something of this sort, we are letting the individual passages say what they seem to say, rather than reinterpreting them to fit our interpretations of verses elsewhere.

James 1:13-14 would seem to give the most mature statement of Scripture on the topic: "No one, when tempted, should say, 'I am being tempted by God'; for God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one. But one is tempted by one’s own desire, being lured and enticed by it" (NRSV). Grudem cannot take these verses at face value. He would reinterpret it to say, "We are not tempted by God but by our own desires that God completely causes us to have." He has to reinterpret the verse to say nearly the opposite of what it says in order to harmonize it with his idea about Scripture.

The statement that "Arminians will not allow God to ordain even one sinful act" is misleading at best. Arminians believe that God ordains all sinful acts in the sense that he allows them. No sinful act happens outside of God's control.

Does God directly command sinful acts? An Arminian might believe there are some instances where he does. The key point is that Arminians do not believe that God directly forces us to be sinful. Arminians believe that God can use those whose intentions are already evil in heart. Does God sometimes steer the evil? Most Arminians would accept that God can use evil to accomplish his will. What is key is that he gives everyone the opportunity to choose good.

Another key distinction here is the difference between the subjective dimension of evildoing and the objective dimension. Arminians affirm that God gives individuals the opportunity for their subjective will to be free to make good choices. But if a person is evil in heart, the Arminian does not necessarily deny that God might direct the external, objective acts of evil that a person does. The Calvinist makes no meaningful distinction between objective and subjective wrongdoing.

3. Are determined choices real choices?
Summary
Grudem spends over three pages responding to this critique. He seems to hold that both the Arminian and Calvinist positions are a matter of assumption. Because of human intuition, he claims, the Arminian assumes that a person whom God causes to do something cannot be a real agent, a real person. The Calvinist, he would argue, follows Scripture and assumes the contrary.

In this section, he references Calvin's distinction between necessity and compulsion, a distinction which William James would aptly describe three hundred years later as "soft determinism." So God necessarily does good and the Devil necessarily does evil, but neither are compelled in terms of their wills. They are doing what they want to do. So human beings freely do what they want. They are not "compelled" even though God is ultimately causing them to want what they want. According to Grudem, we are not compelled to do what we do even though we do it necessarily.

So Grudem denies that this makes us a puppet or robot. He indicts the Arminian of being small minded, like a plant that would say God could not make a creature who could move around or an Arminian dog who would say God could not make a creature who could record barks down on paper. The problem with the Arminian, in Grudem's eyes, is a lack of faith in what God can do and probably a lack of submission to Scripture.

Evaluation

The idea that God might cause us to feel like we are doing things freely when in fact he is causing us to want to do them is completely coherent. What is not coherent is to suggest that such acts are truly free. Again, it amounts to saying that we are fully determined and not fully determined at the same time, while using the words in exactly the same way. To say so is not a denial of God's power. It is simply pointing out a straightforward logical contradiction.

Again, this is not like a dog or plant saying that God couldn't create a dog that could write speech down or a plant that could walk. It is like saying that God always makes 2 + 2 to equal 5 in base 10 while 2 + 2 at the same time equals 4 in base 10. There are propositions of definition and propositions about the world. Grudem's plant and dog illustration is a proposition about what God can do in the world. But the Arminian is saying that Grudem's thinking is a contradiction of definition. He defines "real choice" in a way that contradicts the definition of "real choice."

This is the fundamental problem with Grudem's version of Calvinism. It makes God directly responsible for evil and thus obliterates the distinction between good and evil. It makes God into Satan. It is difficult to see how, if Calvinism is true, that we would not have to conclude that Christianity is fundamentally incoherent.

4. Does Calvinism encourage fatalism?
Summary
Grudem indicates that Calvinism calls for "responsible obedience" (346). Rightly understood, Calvinism would oppose fatalism or a laziness. "Both Calvinists and Arminians believe that our actions have real results and that they are eternally significant" (347). But, to Grudem, Calvinists have a "more comprehensive trust in God in all circumstances and a far greater freedom from worry about the future." Calvinists, in his mind, truly trust that "all things work together for good for those who love God and are called" (Rom. 8:28, NIV).

Evaluation
Every theological tradition has strengths and weaknesses. The best thinkers in each tradition do their best to make fine distinctions to keep each system from falling into incoherency. But on the grass roots, popular level, those fine distinctions are often lost.

So Roman Catholicism has never endorsed the worship of Mary. They make an important distinction about venerating her. Only God is worthy of worship. But do some Roman Catholics on the popular level come close to worshiping Mary? It's certainly possible.

Do Wesleyans believe in total depravity and that we can only choose God because of God's grace working in us? That's certainly what John Wesley believed, but on a popular level, no doubt many in the Wesleyan tradition would pick "false" on a test that said, "Humans are totally depraved."

In the same way, we should not hold it against Calvinist theology if some Calvinists have a fatalistic attitude on a popular level. In official Calvinist teaching, God works through our action and so the doctrine of predestination is no excuse not to be diligent or to sin.

We might correct Grudem's understanding of Romans 8:28, however, which rips these words out of their context in Romans 8. When Paul told the Romans that everything works together for good, he was in the middle of a train of thought about the suffering we may undergo in our bodies before the resurrection, especially the suffering that might come from persecution. If we suffer with him now, we nevertheless have the hope of being glorified with him (8:17).

So, in context, Paul was not talking about what God does with each individual event in the lives of the Romans. He was talking about what their ultimate destination was, despite any current suffering or persecution. In the end, those who love God would come to a good destination, namely, being conformed to the image of Jesus, being glorified (8:30). What is the image of Jesus? It is what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:49: "Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven" (NRSV). What is Paul talking about here? Our resurrection bodies!

So if we read what Paul is saying in context, Romans 8:28 is saying that, despite any suffering we may face now, God will eventually work things out for good, namely, the ultimate transformation of our bodies away from the current ones that are subject to futility like the creation and to a resurrection body that is transformed and glorified like Christ's resurrection body (see also Phil. 3:21). Eventually, God will bring about the redemption of our bodies (Rom. 8:23).

To take Romans 8:28 in terms of God determining every event that happens in our lives or making everything that happens in our lives have a purpose is to read the verse WAY out of context. The verse is about our ultimate destination, not about God's micromanagement of every little detail on the journey.

5. Additional Objections to Arminianism
a. How can the Arminian God know the future?
Summary
Grudem here presents the classical argument that if God knows the future, then the future must be determined and, therefore, we cannot be free. He addresses two different "Arminian" responses.  One is that of open theists like Clark Pinnock, who might say that there is nothing about the future to know now since it doesn't exist. In this view, God knows everything because the future is currently nothing to know. It does not exist. Grudem rightly suggests that such a view requires a radical revision of what God's omniscience would mean.

He describes the majority Arminian position second. This is the view that God's knowledge of the future does not imply that he has caused it to happen. Grudem objects that the future must then somehow be determined by something, if God knows it is going to happen. "If our future choices are known, then they are fixed. And if they are fixed, then they are not 'free' in the Arminian sense (undetermined or uncaused)" (348).

The third and final position Grudem treats under the heading of Arminianism is based on the idea of "middle knowledge." Middle knowledge is the idea that God knows all future possibilities and how each creature will respond under varying circumstances. William Lane Craig is one of the best known proponents of this position. Craig puts it this way, "By knowing what every possible free creature would do in any situation, God can by bringing that situation know what the creature will freely do... Thus he knows with certainty everything that happens in the world" (348). [5]

Grudem suggests that this position really does not lead to the kind of freedom Arminians want us to have. The circumstances and a person's disposition "guarantee that a certain choice will be made" (349).

Evaluation
It is hard to understand why anyone finds this argument persuasive apart from lack of understanding. The argument assumes that God is limited to go through time in the same way we do. In other words, it implicitly assumes that God is stuck within the creation. If God knows the future now, Grudem says, then the future is determined, and it must be determined by something.

And it is! The future is determined by what we decide in the future. The fact that God sees now what will be determined then does imply that it is determined, but it does not imply when it is determined or how it is determined. The future is determined in the future by us, and God knows it now because he is not only walking through history with us but sees history as a whole from a vantage point outside of time.

History is a movie that God has already seen with that part of him that is outside the creation and beyond time, the part of him that created the world out of nothing. What is unique to God is that he is also in the movie. Only God could have seen the whole movie after it is produced before taking part in the shooting of movie. Talk about having a higher view of God's power!

The other two "Arminian" positions can thus be rejected as unnecessary. Open theism is simply an attempt to reconcile free will with God's knowledge, but the only reason for it is either a lack of understanding of what we have just said or taking biblical anthropomorphism too literally. We can dispense with it as a position based on an inadequate understanding of time. Since there is no contradiction between God's foreknowledge and our free will, there is no need for open theism.

Meanwhile, the Molinist "middle knowledge" position of William Lane Craig is not truly Arminian to begin with. Craig and others like him recognize that the Grudem position is incoherent. If God determines our choices then we are not free, and it becomes difficult to say that we are responsible for our choices. So the Molinist position tries to find a way for us to be free and culpable yet for God to determine the future. In the end, however, God is still manipulating what we do in this scenario, so we must consider this position only a slightly more attractive version of the basic Calvinist position.

b. How can evil exist if the Arminian God doesn't want it?
Summary
Grudem depicts Arminians as holding that the entrance of evil into the world was not according to the will of God. In Grudem's depiction of Arminians, they believe that God "had to" allow evil to enter into the world "in order to allow genuine human choices" (349). He then suggests that if this is true, then God will have to allow the possibility of sinful choices in heaven too.

He then pushes further. "If real choices have to allow for the possibility of choosing evil, then (1) God's choices are not real, since he cannot chose evil, or (2) God's choices are real, and there is the genuine possibility that God might someday choose to do evil" (349). Grudem's answer is that God's choice is real by definition even if God cannot choose to do evil.

Evaluation
Grudem twists the Arminian position here, at least my position. For God to be sovereign, the entrance of evil into the world has to be a possibility that God created and allowed. It must have been his will generally. He intentionally created a world with the possibility of evil and made it a world where it was better for evil to be a possibility than for us to be moral robots of Grudem's sort.

Could God have created a world where we had genuine human choices and there was no evil. Far be it from me to say that he could not have. Far be it from me to say what God could have done in another universe--I have no point of reference to speak of such things. My position is only that, in this universe, God has created a world where it is better to freely chose the good rather than to be forced to choose the good.

I have written elsewhere that I believe God had the choice to create this universe as he did. Having created this universe, he has revealed himself to be good in it. He has freely chosen to do good in this world as he has defined it. He could do evil in this world but has committed not to do so. So God is free to do evil but will never do it--of his own free will. This is far superior to Grudem's position, which reduces to saying that God does all evil but we're not going to call it evil because God is the one doing it.

c. How can we know that the Arminian God will triumph over evil?
Summary
In this section, Grudem suggests that, if evil came into the world against God's will, how can we be sure that God will triumph in the end over evil? Grudem depicts Arminians as teaching that God "was unable to keep it out of his universe in the first place" (352). In Grudem's view, "the Arminian position seems logically to drive us to a deep-seated anxiety about the ultimate outcome of history" (352).

While he accepts that it is difficult to see evil as ordained by God as in the Reformed view, "there are far more serious difficulties with the Arminian view of evil as not ordained or even willed by God, and therefore not assuredly under the control of God" (352).

Evaluation
This is absurd. God has promised that good will triumph over evil. He of his own sovereignty created the possibility of evil. He in his authority has allowed evil to exist for the time being. He will in his sovereignty destroy evil as he has promised.

d. The bottom line for Grudem
Summary
Calvinists do not know the answers to these questions, Grudem says: 1) how can God ordain that we do evil willingly and yet not be blamed for evil and 2) how can God cause us to choose something willingly. But the Arminian, Grudem says, has unanswered questions about God's knowledge of the future, why he would allow evil when it is against his will, and whether he will triumph over evil in the end. In his view, the Arminian position diminishes the greatness of God and tends to exalt the greatness of man. In his view it "diminishes the wisdom and skill of God the Creator" (351)

Evaluation
I hope it is clear by now that the real problems lie with Grudem's approach. The Arminian has no questions about God's knowledge of the future. Grudem's argument here is what really would fit a Calvinist dog asking how God can know the future without determining it. Arminians have not a doubt about whether God will triumph over evil in the end.

The only mystery is indeed why God would allow evil to have so much power in the world if he is a good God. But the Calvinist has no answer to this question. The Calvinist tries to redefine evil so that God can do evil and still be good. So which makes more sense, to say that we do not fully understand why God allows Satan to do so much harm, or the Calvinist position--that God is in fact commanding Satan to do all the harm he does?!

You decide.

Here ends the chapter.

[1] Grudem helpfully corrects those who confuse someone from Armenia--an Armenian--from an Arminian who believes in some form of free will (338).

[2] Throughout this section, Grudem's main source for an Arminian position is Clark H. Pinnock, ed. The Grace of God, The Will of Man: A Case for Arminianism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1989). Since Pinnock became an open theist, he represents only one form of Arminianism (an extreme one). Since then, other books have come out comparing the two. See especially Roger Olson, Arminian Theology: Myths and Realities (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2006); Jerry L. Walls and Joseph R. Dongell, Why I Am Not a Calvinist (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2004); and Don Thorsen, Calvin vs. Wesley: Bringing Belief in Line with Practice (Nashville: Abingdon, 2013).

[3] Cline's chapter, "Predestination in the Old Testament," is in the book mentioned in n. 2 above that was edited by Pinnock, Grace of God.

[4] Quoting Pinnock's chapter, "Responsible Freedom," in Grace of God, 10.

[5] "The Nature of the Divine Sovereignty," in Grace of God, 104-5.

[6] Citing Craig's chapter, "Middle Knowledge, a Calvinist-Arminian Rapprochement?" in The Grace of God, 150-51.

Grudem 16c: Human action is important.

Here is more summary/evaluation from Grudem's 16th chapter on God's Providence. Thus far I have reviewed:

• God's Preservation of everything and
• God's Cooperation with everything

Now the second to last installment:
____________________
C. Government
Summary
After discussing God's maintenance of everything and the relationship between human will and God's will, Grudem proceeds to God's government. Grudem defines God's government as the fact that "God has a purpose in all that he does in the world and he providentially governs or directs all things in order that they accomplish his purposes" (331). Grudem does distinguish between God's "moral" will, his moral expectations of the universe and God's "providential" or "secret" will, his will for what happens in history.

Evaluation
We have argued in our evaluation of the previous section that God's "concurrence" or "cooperation" with the creation for Grudem is not substantially different from God's direct governance. Grudem makes a distinction without a difference. Our evaluations elsewhere on this chapter will sufficiently cover the problems with Grudem's approach.

We might mention here a distinction in God's will that Grudem does not accept, namely, the difference between God's "directive" will and God's "permissive" will. For Grudem, all God's will reduces to his directive will, things that he specifically commands. By contrast, others such as myself would say that God sometimes allows things to happen that he did not specifically command. Interestingly, this Arminian perspective still fits within Grudem's definition of God's government, since one of God's purposes for the universe is to give it a measure of freedom.

D. The Decrees of God
Summary
"The decrees of God are the eternal plans of God whereby, before the creation of the world, he determined to bring about everything that happens" (332). This is the plan itself, whereas providence is the implementation of the plan in history. "God does not make up plans suddenly as he goes along" (333).

Evaluation
An Arminian will generally not have a problem with the idea that God had a plan for the universe, although it would not be typical to speak of the decrees of God outside of Calvinist circles. Arminians have typically believed that God's plan is from eternity past, only that he formulated that plan in dialog with his foreknowledge of choices we would make. It is this last statement that Grudem and other Calvinists would reject.

E. The Importance of Human Actions
Summary
One objection to Calvinist determinism is that it implies that our actions are not important or that we should not be morally responsible for our actions, if God is determining them. This section argues that human action remains significant even though it is determined.

1. We are still responsible for our actions.
It is in this section that Grudem basically says that God has defined "being responsible" as doing the act. The primary agent (God) is not responsible, but the secondary agent that does the act (us), at least when it comes to God. If we do it, we are the guilty ones, even if God made us do it.

2. Our actions have real results and do change the course of events.
This is true to Grudem because "God has ordained that events will come about by our causing them" (334). In other words, our actions do things that God has planned, which makes them significant. God has predestined that certain things happen by way of our actions. He has determined our actions and he has determined the results of our actions.

3. Prayer is one specific kind of action that has definite results and that does change the course of events.
In other words, God has both predestined us to pray for certain things and he has predestined that he will perform certain miracles as a result of those prayers he has predetermined that we would pray. He has also predetermined that sometimes we would pray and he would not answer.

4. In conclusion, we must act!
"A hearty belief in God's providence is not a discouragement but a spur to action" (336). God has predestined that the actions he has predestined us to do will be the means by which certain things come about. The Calvinist doctrine of providence, Grudem argues, should not encourage anyone to sit back in idleness to wait for God to act. Laziness is a distortion of the doctrine of providence, Grudem says.

Grudem does not mention Calvinism and missions, but we can use the question of missionary work to clarify what he is saying here. When modern missions was first on the rise around the year 1800, some Calvinists objected to the idea of going to India to preach the Christian message. The idea was that if God had predestined those in India to be saved, they would have been born somewhere where the Christian message already was.

Grudem and Carey would respond that it is God's will that such individuals hear the gospel by the human agency of missionaries going. In that sense, the fact that the eternal destiny of each individual person from India is decided by God is no excuse not to go and share the good news with them.

5. What if we cannot understand this doctrine fully?
Grudem, like Calvin, recognizes that the Calvinist doctrine of providence is difficult. Calvin's advice is to accept it because (he thinks) it is taught in Scripture and to embrace it "with humble teachableness."

Evaluation
I have already discussed some of this material in the earlier evaluations of this chapter. Arminians--and all rational thinkers--maintain that the person planning an act is far more responsible for an act than the puppet or instrument that actually does the act. This is the fundamental basis of all moral understanding and is in fact an aspect of Western law that demonstrates the influence of Judeo-Christian values. The Calvinist trajectory on this issue thus fundamentally undermines the basis of moral thinking in general.

Jesus teaches that it is the heart that defines evil (Mark 7:20-23), not the action. Paul (e.g., Romans 14:5, 14, 23) and the New Testament (e.g., James 4:3, 17) operates with an ethic that focuses on intention rather than action. The Calvinist orientation toward the act itself, rather than the intention behind the act, threatens to undo the very essence of Christian ethics. The Calvinist definition of sin is thus wholly inadequate, defined as any act short of God's absolute moral standard.

The Wesleyan-Arminian definition of sin, at least the sin about which God is most concerned, is more biblical, especially in terms of the New Testament. Sin is any intentional action contrary to what you know to be the right action. This is not the only kind of wrongdoing, but it is the one about which God is most concerned.

As far as prayer is concerned, we would suggest that God actually makes decisions on whether to intervene in the flow of history sometimes, based on whether we choose to pray or not. In one scenario, he might let x happen because we do not pray. But if we pray, he might intervene to where y will happen. Of course he knew whether we would pray or not before the foundation of the world and thus he knew how he would respond from eternity past.

E. Further Practical Application
Summary
The headings for this section more or less speak for themselves. Trust in God. "We need not worry about the future but trust in God's omnipotent care" (337). Be thankful for all good things that happen. Finally, "there is no such thing as 'luck' or 'chance.'" Nothing "just happens." "We should see God's hand in events throughout the day, causing all things to work together for good for those who love him."

Evaluation
We do not need to worry about the future. We should be thankful for the good things that happen to us.

Whether there is "luck" or "chance" is a good question for an Arminian. Does God grant a degree of freedom to the creation? Certainly nothing happens without God's permission, but it is here that the Arminian may resort to mystery and say we don't know whether God has ordained that some events happen by chance.

However, an Arminian probably will not see God micromanaging everything that happens every day. In some cases, God may let nature take its course. In other cases, God allows human beings to make choices. In that sense, Rick Warren's Purpose Driven Life is much more of a Calvinist perspective than an Arminian one. It may be more comfortable to think that God causes everything to happen for a reason, but that does not make it true. And, when it comes to evil, it is deeply problematic to think that God directs the evil that happens down to the smallest detail.

Grudem 16b: God's Providence 2 (Concurrence)

Continuing my summary/evaluation of Grudem's chapter on providence. Again, this is the chapter where Calvinists differ most from Wesleyan-Arminians.
___________________
B. Concurrence
Summary
Grudem defines divine "concurrence" as follows: "God cooperates with created things in every action, directing their distinctive properties to cause them to act as they do" (317).

The understanding here of God's "cooperation" with human action is subtle and needs to be understood very carefully. In Grudem's view, humans feel like they are acting freely even though God is really behind the scenes making them do what they do. We experience our actions as free actions even though God is really directing them. This is a position that William James called "soft determinism" in the ate 1800s. [1]

To capture the logic, we might skip ahead to the section on human responsibility: "God has created us with the characteristic of being responsible for our actions" (333). For Grudem, this is the starting point. By definition, he is saying that if a human shoots the gun, then the human did it and is responsible. It does not matter if I have hypnotized you, manipulated you, or somehow brainwashed you to make you pull the trigger. It does not matter if I am the one who has entirely made you want to shoot your wife and created the circumstances under which I know you will shoot her. By definition, if you want to shoot her and shoot her, you have willfully shot her by definition and are responsible, even if I made it such that you could not possibly have done anything else.

Accordingly, by definition, God does not do evil. "The blame for evil is always on the responsible creature, whether man or demon, who does it, and the creature who does evil is always worthy of punishment" (329). This is true for Grudem even though ultimately, "God ordained that evil would come about through the willing choices of his creatures" (328). Again, according to Grudem and others like him, God makes us want to do evil. God creates circumstances in which it is not possible that we would do anything but evil. But because we are the ones who do it, we are responsible and God is not.

This is just the way it is, by definition. Grudem will later respond to the Arminian critique of this scheme. The Arminian responds, "If a man uses a lever to move a rock... 'the lever is not a true second cause but is only an instrument of the real cause of the movement... In such a system man contributes only what has been predetermined'" (340). [2]

Grudem does not deny that it works in this way, that we are the instruments of God's will like a lever. He simply denies that the person or "lever" is not free or responsible by definition. For Grudem, Scripture defines being a lever, as it were, as being responsible. It is an assumption "about the nature of human freedom" (343 n. 54). For Grudem, the way it works for God is simply different than the way it works with us. If we object and say this is not really what it means to be responsible for an action, Grudem responds that "Scripture is not willing to apply such reasoning to God" (343).

It is important to keep Grudem's overall logic in mind as we then go back and read his section on concurrence. What Grudem means when he speaks of God "cooperating" with created things in every action is really that God is what we might call the secondary cause behind every primary cause in every case (319). The created thing looks like it is freely acting, feels like it is freely acting in many cases. But God is actually behind the scenes causing it to act and even feel in this way. When Grudem says, "No event in creation falls outside of his providence" (317), he means that God is behind the scene directing everything that happens.

So God directs inanimate creation (318). God directs animals (318). God directs events that seem random or chance, coincidental (318-19). But for Grudem, there is no such thing as chance or coincidence (337). God directs the affairs of nations (319-20) and every aspect of our lives (320-22). Grudem produces numerous Scriptures throughout this section that certainly sound deterministic, that sound like God determines and directs all these things down to the minute details.

In many cases, we could give a fully "natural" explanation as well (319). The creation looks like it is acting freely. We feel like we are acting freely. But "the doctrine of concurrence affirms that God directs, and works through, the distinctive properties of each created thing, so that these things themselves bring about the results that we see" (319).

Why is it important for Grudem to make such distinctions? There are at least two very important reasons for Grudem to interpret the Scriptures in this way. First, it is important so that humanity is responsible for its actions (321). The second is so that we can say that God does not do evil, even though Grudem believes God commands it to be done by us.

This leads us to what is by far the most important part of this chapter: Grudem's consideration of how God's providence relates to evil. It is very important for Grudem to be able to say that God "never does evil and is not to be blamed for it" (328). As quoted above, "The blame for evil is always on the responsible creature" (329).

But at the same time, "God ordained that evil would come about through the willing choices of his creatures" (328). This is a very subtle tightrope. According to Grudem, God is causing us to do evil. But because we are the ones with the gun in our hands, because we want to pull the trigger, we are the ones doing it. We feel like we are the ones choosing evil even though God is really causing us to do it. But since God is not the one with his hand on the gun, he is not responsible for it in Grudem's mind.

Grudem quotes Calvin here with approval: "Thieves and murderers and other evildoers are the instruments of divine providence, and the Lord himself uses these to carry out his judgments that he has determined with himself" (328). [3] Then of course God also gets glory when he punishes those who have done the evil (he has caused them to do) (327).

Grudem understandably warns us that we humans never have a right to do evil (329, even if God wills us to do it). We should never want evil to be done (even when God is willing us to want evil to be done). We can understand why Grudem concludes with his mentor Louis Berkhof that "the problem of God's relation to sin remains a mystery" (330). [4]

He concludes the section on concurrence with Calvin's preference not to say that humans have free will at all. Certainly we do not have absolute freedom, Grudem says (331). "Scripture nowhere says that we are 'free' in the sense of being outside of God's control." Yet Grudem allows that we can say we are free in the sense that "we make willing choices, choices that have real effects. We are aware of no restraints on our will." In other words, we feel free (even though we really aren't).

Evaluation
In this section, Grudem presents a Calvinist understanding of concurrence, and he quotes John Calvin more than once to demonstrate that his teaching is fully in keeping with the Calvinist tradition. To argue for "cooperation" between divine and human action, Grudem plays hocus pocus with his definitions. In so many words, Even though what I'm saying is really not cooperation, I'm going to define 'cooperation' as God manipulating me to feel and act this way. You can't argue with me, he says nicely, because this is just how God wants me to define the word, even though it's not any picture of cooperation that would fly in any other context.

In the end, however, Grudem's section on concurrence basically reduces to God's governance. God's cooperation with human will for Grudem is nothing more than God giving us a drug that forces us to do evil but then does not consider God responsible for the evil we then inevitably do. Concurrence for Grudem simply means that the puppet doesn't feel like a puppet, even though it is.

To be sure, Grudem produces a significant amount of Scripture that sounds deterministic. God hardens pharaoh's heart (Exod. 9:12). God sends an evil spirit on Saul to torment him (1 Sam. 16:14). God incites David to do an evil for which God then punishes Israel (2 Sam. 24:1). God can deceive a prophet and then punish the prophet for deceiving Israel (Ezek. 14:9).

On the other side, Grudem would not deny that there are countless passages where it sounds like human beings have real choices in front of them. Just before Ananias dies for trying to lie about what he did with some money, Peter says, "Wasn't the money at your disposal?" (Acts 5:4). In other words, Ananias was free to do whatever he wanted with the money. When 1 Timothy 2:4 says that God wants all people to be saved--and yet not everyone is saved--then we must conclude that God has ultimately left the decision up to us.

This last verse is potentially very significant. If God wants all people to be saved, then must not Grudem become a universalist, someone who believes all people will be saved? In Grudem's system, if God wants everyone to be saved and God is the one who causes those who will be saved, then everyone must be saved. For the Arminian, God would prefer for everyone to be saved but leaves the choice to us, with the result that not everyone will be saved. Grudem has to find a way to reinterpret the verse for his system to remain logical, which he certainly does. Logic is as important to his system as it is to the Arminian's.

Grudem wants to say both that we have freedom to decide and yet could not possibly decide anything but what we decide. When the Arminian objects that this is a logical contradiction, Grudem suggests we are like a plant arguing over whether God can make animals who can walk (346). But this is not a question of what God is capable of doing, as if we don't have enough faith. This is a flat out logical contradiction. It says, "x is y... and x is not y." Grudem's position is incoherent in a way fundamental to the universe God has created. God has defined this sort of thinking as irrational for this universe. It's not God's problem; it's Grudem's.

Clearly there are a number of Scriptures that sound Calvinist and a number of verses that sound Arminian. Both Grudem's side and the Arminian side have to do something with one or the other set of language to be logically coherent--and both sides typically do. They just choose to address a different set of language. When Grudem argues for soft determinism, he is arguably twisting the Scriptures where people sound free to choose. Similarly, Arminians have often dodged verses that sound deterministic.

For Grudem and the Calvinist tradition, the best way to fill in the blanks is to suppose that even though we feel like we are free, God is actually making us feel that way. By contrast, Arminians have often argued that God predestines us on the basis of his foreknowledge. God knows what we will freely choose and determines things accordingly.

However, the best way to approach such things is to read all such comments in their full context, recognizing that even the ideological language of the Bible comes to us incarnated in the thought categories of the original audiences. The ancient world was strongly fatalistic yet accepted that humans make choices as an expression of their will. We therefore should not be surprised to find both deterministic language in Scripture and language that sounds like we make free choices.

Take the Oedipus story. It is fated that Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother. Oedipus then makes great efforts of will to escape his fate. Yet in the process of trying to escape his fate, Oedipus ends up killing his father and marrying his mother. In the Greek fatalistic worldview, Oedipus makes choices that seem to be free yet in the end his fate is accomplished nonetheless.

It is no surprise that much biblical language would have this same deterministic feel. At times biblical language sounds like people are freely making choices and at other times biblical language sounds like people are determined. St. Augustine took this imprecise language typical of the times when Scripture was revealed and made it into a coherent, logical philosophical system. Calvin followed suit and now Grudem, John Piper, and others after Calvin.

But this language was generally informal in Scripture. It was always at least partially cultural language. It was normally imprecise rather than philosophical. We are left to make it into a system. Fundamentalists like Grudem inevitably mistake elements of ancient worldview for God's all time philosophical thinking.

For the Arminian tradition, the best way to fill in the blanks is to suggest that, yes, God is fully in control. God signs off on everything that happens. God allows everything that happens (permissive will). But God does not always command every specific thing that happens (directive will). Sometimes God does determine. But sometimes God genuinely empowers the creation for freedom.

Grudem's case in relation to evil is where it really gets sticky. He is saying, in effect, that even though the rapist feels like he is raping a little girl freely, God is ultimately behind the scenes forcing him to do it. God has left him no other alternative but to rape. According to Grudem, God has caused every child molester and sadist to do what they do. Yet Grudem wants to say that because the assailant feels like he is freely murdering, raping, ripping, stabbing, cutting, he is the only one morally culpable. The puppet master, the master planner of the rape, the one who designed it in all its minute details, is off the hook. It is ultimately a distinction without a difference.

No rational person could handle such logic. It is terrifying to think of how a person with this sort of thinking might behave in this world. Many will lose their faith if they are led to believe that this is the way a Christian must think, and many people's hearts will be defiled if they apply this twisted logic to their parenting or everyday life.

The solution is to recognize that the biblical language is uneven and enculturated, even that biblical understanding develops in the flow of revelation from Old to New Testament. The test case of 2 Samuel 24:1 and 1 Chronicles 21:1 is instructive. 1 Chronicles says that Satan incites David to do something that 2 Samuel says God incited David to do. Grudem's explanation of this conundrum is to see Satan as the instrument God commands to push David to do something.

By contrast, the Arminian suggests that God allows Satan to test David and that David fails the test (unlike Job, who passes). 2 Samuel reflects an earlier stage in Israelite thinking. The earliest layer of biblical texts in the Old Testament have no awareness of the Satan, not even Genesis, which never mentions Satan. Even in Job's thinking (Job the person rather than the thinking of the author of Job), the Lord is the one who has taken away (Job 1:21). In the story, Job doesn't know about Satan.

But by the time of 1 Chronicles, God is no longer the one who directly tempts people (cf. Jas. 1:13). After the Babylonian exile, Israel has broadened in its understanding of divine agency, now having a category for the Satan. If Genesis and 1 Samuel were being written now, they would no doubt have ascribed to Satan various actions that were earlier ascribed to God.

This discussion reveals the inadequacy of Grudem's use of Scripture. His position is ultimately based on a certain understanding of biblical language, yet he doesn't know how to read the Bible in context, which undermines his entire position.

A final word should be said about Romans 9:20-21, where Paul indicts the clay that would complain to the potter for making it the way the potter did. This is a difficult verse--or at least should be for anyone with the heart of Christ. It is difficult not because of some defiant heart but because of the rest of Scripture. The way Grudem takes it fundamentally contradicts the way the New Testament reveals God's character as one that desires everyone to be saved.

Is God the father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son or is he the eternal tyrant Grudem sees in Romans 9. Grudem, Piper, Calvin, and Augustine pick the wrong set of verses as their fundamental starting point. Rather than consider Romans 9 unclear, and rest on the clear voice of Christ in the Gospels, they take their stand on a difficult passage and force the majority passages into its logical mold.

So what is Romans 9 really about? It is about the puzzling situation in Paul's day that Gentiles were receiving the gospel while most Jews were not. Paul's opponents saw his position as something like a married man who was divorcing his wife for a younger woman. Why was God allowing the Gentiles in without becoming Jews? After God had been "married" to the Jews within the covenant of the Jewish Law all these years, they might say, why was God seeming to change the rules, turning to a new Gentile "mistress," now making salvation available to all through Christ? These are the underlying questions of Paul's opponents that were driving Romans 9.

Paul's answer is that God can do whatever he wants, because he is God. Absolutely true! We have no basis to complain about God's will. Absolutely true! But we can clearly see by Romans 11 that Paul's argument in Romans 9 is not the end of the story. Even disobedient Israel can be saved (11:11-12). Indeed they will be saved (11:26). Language in Romans 9 that sounds very hard is thus not nearly as hardened as it sounded at first. There was an element of rhetoric involved from the start.

[1] In "The Dilemma of Determinism," a paper presented at Harvard Divinity School on March 3, 1884.

[2] Here Grudem is quoting Jack Cottrell, "The Nature of the Divine Sovereignty," The Grace of God, The Will of Man: A Case for Arminianism, Clark Pinnock, ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 104-5.

[3] Quoting Calvin's Institutes 1.16.5.

[4] Louis Berkhof, Introduction to Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982 [1932]), 175.

Grudem 16a: God's Providence 1 - Preservation

Nowhere perhaps is Wesleyan-Arminian theology more distinct from Calvinist than in the subject matter of this chapter.  I hope to review this chapter in three installments: 1) today's on Grudem's treatment of God's preservation of the universe, ) a second one on God's "cooperation" with the creation, including whether God causes evil, and 3) a third where Grudem argues against the Arminian position.

For previous summaries and evaluations of Grudem's theology, see here.

Chapter 16: God's Providence
Summary
Wayne Grudem defines God's providence in this way: "God is continually involved with all created things in such a way that he 1) keeps them existing and maintaining the properties with which he created them; 2) cooperates with created things in every action, directing their distinctive properties to cause them to act as they do; and 3) directs them to fulfill his purposes" (315). He treats each of these areas under a distinct heading: 1) preservation, 2) concurrence, and 3) government.

A. Preservation
Summary
God does not continuously create new atoms and molecules, but God preserves what has already been created. "God has made and continues to sustain a universe that acts in predictable ways" (317). Grudem references verses like Hebrews 1:3 and Colossians 1:17, which speak of God upholding the universe by his word or holding things together. Nehemiah 9:6 says that God preserves the heaven, the earth, and the hosts within them.

Evaluation
One of the biggest weaknesses of Grudem's use of Scripture is his failure to read verses in their full contexts. He more or less takes verses as straightforward propositions. But God spoke to the audiences of Scriptures largely in their worldviews, including their paradigms of the cosmos. This means that language such as that found in the verses Grudem references cannot be assumed to be straightforwardly literal, much less the basis for a firm perspective on a doctrine. In this case, see how few verses he is even able to produce on this subject--a reflection of the fact that we are trying to address questions that were not the questions of the biblical authors themselves.

In Nehemiah's worldview, for example, the hosts that worship God may include stars. In Nehemiah's day, they sometimes thought of stars as heavenly beings, angelic beings of a sort, while we now think of them as burning suns. Hebrews 1:3 and Colossians 1:7 may draw on Jewish traditions about the Logos, which Philo also says glues the world together (e.g., Heir 188). In such cases we are better to take biblical language as more poetic than literal. The imagery is drawn from ancient worldview.

In short, we have no way of knowing exactly how God sustains the universe. The universe would not exist apart from God and it only continues to exist by God's direct will. But does God actively go around making sure gravity always works according to Newton and Einstein's laws? Is God holding my rear end down right now so that I don't fly up and hit the ceiling? Does God specifically make sure the second law of thermodynamics is in play (or is it the result of sin?)? This is certainly the way Christians before the scientific age would have viewed it.

But there is surely nothing heretical to suggest that we may now be able to speculate more precisely than was relevant for Christians before the 1600s and the biblical writers themselves. What if God created the universe as a machine that more or less runs on its own? What if a miracle is God interrupting the normal working of the machine? The key doctrines are maintained. God is still in ultimate control. God is still active in the world according to his will.

However, contrary to Grudem's approach, it was not the sense that God is predictable in his sustaining of events in the universe that gave rise to modern science. Rather, science exploded because thinkers in the 1500s and 1600s believed God had created the universe to run on its own by certain natural laws that inhere in nature itself. Indeed, the view that everything that happens in the world is the action of God or some other spiritual being was an obstacle to the rise of science. It is no coincidence that the Arminian point of view, which argues for free will and which Grudem argues against, rose at the same time as the rise of modern science.

In the end, we have no way of knowing exactly how it works. Does God go around directly making sure electromagnetic forces follow the laws of physics? No one can disprove that he does, because natural laws would look exactly the same. Did God create the universe largely as a machine that runs according to the laws he created as part of it? The fact that the "scientific" paradigms of the biblical authors were a function of their ancient contexts does not argue against this position, since the Bible was revealed in categories its original audiences could understand.

But science has not advanced on the supposition that God flips every switch and yanks every chain. It advances on the assumption that there are regular laws to the way the universe operates and that we best understand those rules by experimentation and the collection of evidence. Grudem's approach thus more pulls against science and the discoveries whose benefits are undeniable and all around us.

Grudem 15f: Old Earth versus Young Earth

I am delighted to finally put this chapter of Grudem behind me. The previous summary/evaluation is here.
_________________________
3. The Age of the Earth: Preliminary Considerations
Summary
Grudem considers the age of the earth much less important than the matters of creation he has discussed up to this point in the chapter. What has he discussed: 1) creation out of nothing, 2) creation is distinct from God, but dependent on him, 3) creation shows God's glory, 4) God created the universe "very good," 5) there is no final conflict between God and science, and 6) secular theories that deny God as creator, including Darwinian evolution, are incompatible with the Bible (289).

However, Grudem does not believe that the Bible is clear on the age of the earth. He looks at five angles. First, he argues that there are gaps in the genealogies of the Bible  (290-91). The expression, "the father of" can indicate an ancestor of rather than the immediate father. His second section argues that, from the angle of science, humanity was certainly on the earth by 10,000 BC, the dating of cave paintings by Cro-Magnon man.

Interestingly, Grudem thirdly concludes that the Bible does not say clearly whether animals died before Adam's Fall. When Romans says that death came into the world by sin (Rom. 5:12), it is talking about human death. Similarly, Grudem fourthly does not reach a biblical conclusion on whether dinosaurs were extinct by the time of Adam.

Fifth, he spends considerably more time discussing whether the days of Genesis 1 are literal twenty-four hour days or long periods of time. The Hebrew word yom can refer to a period of time, rather than only a 24 hour day (e.g., Prov. 25:13). Grudem thinks that the evidence is not conclusive either way. The word yom can mean 24 hour day and it can mean a period of time.

He does mention some significant objections to such flexibility, however. There is the phrase, for example, "there was evening and there was morning," which sounds like a 24 hour day. Then again, no one said how much time was between the morning and the next evening in the sequence. The 10 commandments sound like they are treating the days as literal 24 hour days. And most of the time when a number is used with the plural word for days, it is thinking 24 hour days.

Grudem gives other arguments and counterarguments. In the end, he does not think that the Bible is entirely clear and, thus, that a person's opinion on the age of the earth is not simply a question of whether he or she believes the Bible. "God has chosen not to give us enough information to come to a clear decision on this question" (297).

4. Christians can believe either "old earth" or "young earth."
Grudem divides this section into two parts. In the first one, he gives two biblical strategies for believing in an old earth.

a. First, there is the "day-age" view, sometimes called a "concordist" view. In this view, the days of creation are interpreted to be ages, very long periods of time. Here Grudem mentions arguments for the age of the earth that seem rather forceful and all of which consist with each other:

• radiometric dating of rocks from the moon and meteorites (which would not have been affected by the flood)
• the time required for liquid magma to cool (about a million years for some large formations)
• time and pressure necessary for some types of rocks that have small fossils in them
• the time required for continental drift (fossils in West Africa and East South America match)
• the time required for the formation of coral reefs (100s of thousands of years)

Counterarguments include the fact that the sequence of Genesis 1 doesn't correspond exactly to the current understanding of the development of life. Indeed, it might be taken to imply that the sun did not exist for millions of years while plants and trees were on the earth. Grudem wrestles with this and suggests that, if the old earth view is correct, the Hebrew verbs on Day 4 be taken as perfects that mean something like, "God had made the two great lights" (300).

Second, there is what he calls the "literary framework view." This view, as Grudem presents it, sees Genesis 1 as a literary device to indicate that God created everything. "Chronology has no place here" (301), he quotes Henri Blocher. [1] One feature of this approach is to see the first three and last three days of creation as parallel. So the creation of light in Day 1 mirrors the creation of the sun in Day 4. The sky and waters of Day 2 connect with the creation of fish and birds in Day 5. Then the creation of dry land in Day 3 connects to animals and humanity in Day 6.

Grudem has some questions about this approach. For one, he thinks the correspondence between the days is more imprecise than it might seem at first. For example, the sun is placed in the firmament of Day 2, not Day 1. Similarly, the waters do not become seas for fish until Day 3, not Day 2.

Next, he wants to be careful that we not pick a theory because it is convenient in reconciling science and Scripture. He also does not think some of the objections to the sequence are as strong as the literary view protests. For example, he does not see a conflict between the order of events in Genesis 2 (humanity-trees and plants-animals).

In the end, he does not find the literary framework view very convincing because he thinks Genesis 1 wants to be read as a chronological sequence. The commandment about the Sabbath day also seems to read the days of creation as a sequence of days.

b. Then Grudem gives how a person with a young earth view might process science that seems to point in a contrary direction. First, there is the "apparent age" approach. This approach basically agrees that the earth and the universe "look" old, but that God created the universe to look this way. God created light in mid-stream. God created trees already with rings just like he made Adam and Eve as adults.

Grudem ultimately has problems with this approach because the earth appears very old even where there is no apparent benefit to humanity. Did God put the fossils of what look like very old, dead animals into the initial creation and call it "very good"? It is only in the modern age that scientists have discovered much of this evidence for an old earth--why would God have made those pieces look old, even though they aren't, evidence that has never even been observed before the last one or two hundred years?

Second, he considers "flood geology." What he calls "neo-catastrophism," which attributes most of the present geological evidence of the earth to the immense catastrophe of the flood. Interestingly, Grudem strongly distinguishes the science in relation to flood geology with than in relation to biological evolution. "The controversy over flood geology is strikingly different from the other areas of dispute regarding creation, for its advocates have persuaded almost no professional geologists" (306). By contrast, Grudem argues that evolution itself has very significant problems in explaining facts of observation from the created world.

5-6. Conclusions and Moving Forward
In the final parts of this chapter, Grudem suggests that there is neither enough scientific or exegetical evidence to know the age of the earth. He believes the science leans heavily toward a very old earth and that the interpretation of Genesis leans toward young earth. But neither, in his opinion, are conclusive. We should therefore not fight over this particular issue but cooperate as Christians in continued discussion on the age of the earth. He considers intelligent design a much more profitable apologetic.

Evaluation
Given Grudem's general bent, it is intriguing that he is non-committal on the question of the earth's age. It would seem, in general, that his hermeneutic would most naturally lead to considering the days of Genesis 1 as literal 24 hour days. It is perhaps a testament to how strongly the scientific evidence points away from this conclusion that he will not eliminate other interpretations of Genesis that, in general, are quite different from his interpretations elsewhere. It leads him, and others like him, to drive a wedge between the question of the earth's age and the question of evolution per se.

His arguments against the apparent age view are compelling. It is one thing to say that God created the light already to the earth so that humanity had light. It is one thing to say that God created Adam and Eve already as adults. We can see why God would do such things.

But to say that God planted fossils in rocks that look a certain age--that weren't actually from animals that ever really lived--so that he could finally test the faith of us once they were eventually discovered in the 1800s and 1900s? This presupposes a "gotcha" God who is not the God of the Bible. To say that God also arranged any number of other converging lines of scientific evidence to support an old age of the earth, only to be discovered in the twentieth century to test us? This would be a morally sick god more like that of Loki in Norse mythology.

The fundamental problem with this entire discussion is a genre problem. Both Grudem and those who are ardent for a young earth assume that Genesis 1 means to give us straightforward history. Genesis 1 may not exactly be a poem, but it is poetic. It is, in my opinion, highly anachronistic to read it in the way Grudem and others do. Grudem's anguish over perfect tenses and precise orders is completely unnecessary. It is a genre mistake.

Rather, the closest Grudem comes to reading Genesis appropriately is with what he calls the "literary framework view." But he does not let this view have its full impact. He is still trying to read that view with the assumption that Genesis 1 means to give us history. But what is the literary purpose of Genesis 1? Is it not primarily 1) to introduce the Pentateuch 2) in a way that identifies who the God of Israel is in contrast to other gods, and 3) expresses Israel's way of looking at the world? The purpose is neither history nor science but theological, in a broad sense. Even if it is not in the form of poetry, it is more poetic in nature than literal.

Grudem's critiques of the literary view are based on the fact that he still sees that view as historical with a twist. But what is Genesis 1 about?  More than anything, it indicates that, unlike the gods of the other creation stories, the God of Israel competes with no other. He creates by command and does not have to defeat other gods for the creation to obey. He is in complete control.

Not all Christians will be as comfortable with seeing Genesis 1 more as an expression of a Levitical worldview than as an explanation for it. If we are not a scientist, it is not a problem. Nevertheless, Grudem suggests that it is hard to find any Christian geologists who think the earth is 6000 years old, even if you can find a number of Christian scientists who question evolution.

For those who struggle with the issue, his recommendation is appropriate. Let Bible readers and scientists with faith continue their dialog without dechristianizing or demoralizing the other. Those of us especially who are not scientists should give some leeway to scientists with faith and trust that God will explain everything in the kingdom.

[1] In the Beginning: The Opening Chapters of Genesis, trans. by D. G. Preston (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1984), 52.