Now the question behind this doctrine is: Why does not everybody receive the same possibility to reject or to accept the truth of the Gospel? Why doesn’t he get it historically? – -he never knew Jesus. Why does he never get it psychologically? – his preconditions are such that he could not even understand the meaning of what is said to him. This is a question we must ask today, every day.
The answer is: By Divine providence, but, as we have heard, providence with respect to our eternal destiny is predestination. In the moment in which Christianity emphasizes the uniqueness of Christ, it must ask why most people have never heard about Him, while those who have externally heard about Him were preconditioned in a way that this hearing didn’t mean anything. In other words, all these men observed something empirically, namely that there is a selective and not an equalitarian principle effective in life. Life cannot be understood in terms of an equalitarian principle; it can be understood only in terms of a selective principle.
Everybody asks these questions. Calvin says: You shouldn’t suppress such questions in terms of a wrong modesty; one must ask them. “We shall never be clearly convinced. . . that our salvation f lows from the fountain of God’s free mercy till we are acquainted with His eternal election, which illustrates the grace of God by this comparison, that He adopts not all promiscuously to the hope of salvation but gives to some what He refuses to others.” But this is only the one side. The other is that which gives to those who ask this question a certainty of salvation because it makes salvation completely independent of the oscillations of our own being. This was the second reason for this doctrine, in Paul, Augustine, and Luther. They wanted certainty of salvation. If they looked at themselves, they couldn’t find it because their faith was always weak and changing. If they looked beyond themselves, they could find it in the action of God. The concrete character of Divine grace is visible in an election which elects me especially, by not electing others. All this leads to the concept of predestination.
“We call predestination the eternal decree of God by which He has determined in Himself what He would have every individual of mankind to become, for they are not all created with a similar destiny; but eternal life is foreordained for some and eternal damnation for others. C” That’s his definition. What is the cause for this election? Only God’s will, and nothing else. “If, therefore, we can assign no reason why He grants mercy to His people but because such is His pleasure, neither shall we find any other cause but His will for the reprobation of others.” I. e., the irrational will of God is the cause of predestination.
Now here we come into an absolute mystery, as he calls it. We cannot call God to any account. We must accept it and we must drop our criteria of the good and the true. If someone says that is unjust, he answers: We cannot go beyond the Divine will to a nature which determines God because God’s will cannot be dependent on anything else. even in Him. Here you have the full weight of the Scotistic- Occamistic thinking: the will of God is the only cause for what God does; nothing else.
Calvin himself feels the horrible character of this doctrine. “I inquire again how it came to pass that the fall of Adam, independent of any remedy, should involve so many nations with their infant children in eternal death, but because such was the will of God – it is an awful decree, I confess.” Nevertheless, when he was attacked, and especially in his last years, in face of his death, then he answered in a little different way: Everything is dependent on Divine predestination. “Their perdition depends on the Divine predestination, in such a manner that the cause and matter of it are found in themselves”; the immediate cause is man’s free will. i. e., Calvin thinks, as did Luther, in two levels. The Divine cause is not real cause, but decree, something which is mystery and for which the category of causality is only symbolically and not properly applied. Besides this he knew, as did every Reformer and predestinarian, that it is man’s finite freedom through which God acts when He makes His decree of predestination.
