We affirm that God has from eternity ordained salvation through Christ as the Elect One. In His sovereignty, God chooses to save those who believe in the Chosen One (Christ). Faith in Christ is the only condition for election unto salvation. Those who freely believe in Christ will have eternal life and becomes part of the elect (the Church). Those who choose to reject Christ are condemned for eternity. We disagree with claims that God have ordained from eternity some to eternal life, and condemned others to eternal damnation, even before they were born apart from a free response of faith in Christ.
Did God Preselect Some to Salvation and Preselect Others to Damnation? | By Michael Cariño, from the book “Grace For All: Understanding God’s Plan of Salvation”, 2024.
One of the teachings that seems horrible and repulsive to many believers is the doctrine of “double predestination” — the Calvinist teaching that from eternity God has chosen some people to save and God has chosen some people to damn, even before the world began and even before sin entered our world.
According to John Calvin, in Institutes of the Christian Religion: “God is said to have ordained from eternity those whom He wills to embrace in love [i.e. election] and those upon whom He wills to vent his wrath [i.e. reprobation].”[1] For Calvin, God had created some humans for the purpose of destroying them:
“Just as God has a plan for the elect and brings them to salvation through their effectual calling, so He has a plan for the reprobate and brings them to their destruction. Both of these plans are executed by the same external means.” (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3. 24. 12–14)
Calvinists say that God “in a real sense” determines people’s choices, and there is no such thing as “self-determination” or free will. Loraine Boettner, in The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination, argued that reprobation is necessarily part of God’s sovereign plan and purpose and is not ultimately conditioned by anything outside of God Himself. God’s “decreed will” to predestine them to hell, even before the world began, is the “decisive factor” in the life of the reprobate and their reprobation. Yet, the confusing part is that Calvinists also teach that reprobates are going to hell because they “voluntarily chose sin.” Such contradiction is simply dismissed by them as mystery. For Calvinism, without reprobation, God’s justice will not be fully displayed and thus God will not be fully glorified.[2]
Are All Human Beings Created Equally?
In the book The Five Points of Calvinism, Edwin Palmer, like many Reformed-Calvinists, define reprobation as “God’s eternal, sovereign, unconditional, immutable, wise, holy, and mysterious decree whereby, in electing some to eternal life, He passes others by, and then justly condemns them for their own sin — all to His own glory.”[3] Hence, the predestination (pre-choosing for salvation) of some necessarily implies the reprobation (pre-choosing for damnation) of others. If God has chosen some, then He necessarily has unchosen others: “Up implies down; back implies front; wet implies dry; later implies earlier; choosing implies leaving others unchosen.” [4] Although all things — unbelief, evil, and sin included — proceed from God’s eternal decree, the condemned reprobates are still to blame for the guilt of their own sins. Their reprobation is their own fault, not God’s.[5]
John Calvin also believes in this double predestination, including God’s sovereign reprobation of certain human persons to hell. Calvin even called this teaching a “horrible decree”.[6] Moreover, Calvin wrote: “God once established by His eternal and unchangeable plan those whom He long before determined once for all to receive into salvation, and those whom, on the other hand, He would devote to destruction… Therefore, those whom God passes over, He condemns; and this He does for no other reason than that He wills to exclude them from the inheritance which He predestines for His own children.”[7]
Calvin affirmed that not all human beings are created equally, some people are predestined to eternal life, and some people are predestined to eternal damnation (i.e. doomed from the womb):
“By predestination we mean the eternal decree of God, by which He determined with Himself whatever He wished to happen with regard to every man. All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation; and, accordingly, as each has been created for one or other of these ends, we say that he has been predestinated to life or to death” (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.21.5).[8]
“Since the arrangement of all things is in the hand of God, since to Him belongs the disposal of life and death, He arranges all things by His sovereign counsel, in such a way that individuals are born, who are doomed from the womb to certain death, and are to glorify Him by their destruction.” (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.23.6).[9]
Hence, most Calvinists (although not all) believe that God reprobates people unconditionally because God himself foreordained sin and rendered it certain, and yet for Calvinism the reprobates are solely responsible for their damnation and deserve their predestined eternal punishment, even if God withdrew from them the grace to enable them to believe. Sadly, many Christians tend to reject Calvinism because of apparent contradictions and confusing teachings like this.
All of the Calvinist theologians who argue for double predestination embrace and affirm the idea that God sovereignly predestines some of His own human creatures, created in His own image and likeness, to hell, and that, according to Calvinism, this view is still consistent with God’s goodness, justice, and love.[10] For may Christians, this type of Calvinist teaching is dreadful and horrendous.
David Hunt, in What Love Is This?: Calvinism’s Misrepresentation of God, challenges this terrible Calvinist portrayal of God who claims to be loving and good yet withholds the offer of salvation to people who needed to be rescued.
How is God being good to those whom, instead of regenerating, He damns to eternal suffering?… How could it increase the responsibility of those who are incapable of responding to plead with and warn them? Instead, whoever withheld the help which someone needed would be held accountable. Yet this immoral, deliberate withholding of salvation is attributed to God under the excuse that it is “God’s good pleasure to do so.” Would someone who stood by and watched a person drown whom he could have saved be exonerated if he explained that it had been his “good pleasure” to do so? Doesn’t God have an even higher — yes, a perfect — standard of love and concern?
This is not to deny that God has the right to damn us all. However, it is not true that His justice requires Him to damn the non-elect any more than the elect. Nor is it rational that God, who is infinite in love and mercy, would allow anyone to be damned whom He could justly deliver. Many scriptures clearly declare that God sent His Son “to be the Savior of the world” (John 4:42; 1 John 4:14) and that Christ on the cross paid the penalty for the sins of the whole world so that God “might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus” (Romans 3:25–26). The ultimate problem with Calvinism is the limit it places upon Christ’s redemption and God’s infinite mercy and love.[11]
Many theologians find this horrible teaching illogical, ridiculous, nonsensical, and foolish. Because in Calvinism, the reprobates (non-elect) have no hope at all — they were chosen to be damned for eternity, their sins were not included when Christ died on the cross, they were predestined to reject the Gospel, and they will never be given the ability to desire, understand, and trust God. Yet, some Calvinist defenders of unconditional election (or double predestination) see it as an expression of God’s great goodness and mercy.[12]
In opposition, Non-Calvinist Evangelical Christians see it as an expression of a dark and hidden God who cares more about His own glory than about the well-being of all people.[13] We disagree with this view of unconditional election because it cannot be reconciled with Scriptures such as “God is love” and “God does not want anyone to perish” (1 John 4:8, 16; 2 Peter 3:9). Most of all, it cannot be reconciled with the character of God revealed in Jesus Christ, who wept over Jerusalem when its inhabitants did not accept Him as their Messiah (Luke 19:41–44). This so-called double predestination of individuals by God is inconsistent with His love, and this Calvinist teaching makes it difficult to tell the difference between God and the devil. That is, both God and Satan desires people to be in hell — God desires many people to go to hell, and Satan desires to send all people to go to hell.[14]
Roger Olson, in his book Against Calvinism, argued that a God who, out of pleasure, have unilaterally prechosen majority of human beings He created as firewood for the flames of hell, cannot be considered good, loving, and just in any sense analogous to those virtues as they are revealed to us in Jesus Christ and in Scripture. If God does this the way most Reformed-Calvinists describe, then God’s “goodness,” God’s “love,” God’s “justice” are mere meaningless words.[15]
How can the Gospel call be given out as a well-meant offer to all if some have already been chosen by God for damnation and thus have no chance at all of being accepted by God? Is God limited in some way? The obvious implication is that God must damn some people in order to display His attribute of justice and thereby glorify Himself. So, it seems that for Calvinists, God’s need to glorify Himself overrides and controls His love. [16] This terrible portrayal of God is indeed worth resisting.
Jerry Walls and Joseph Dongell, in the book Why I Am Not a Calvinist, tells a parable that seems to expose the dark side of this Calvinist teaching on double predestination:
Here is an analogy to test whether any human being would be considered loving or good if he or she acted as Calvinism says God acts in giving irresistible grace only to some of His fallen human creatures He created in His own image and likeness.
A doctor discovers a cure for a deadly disease killing a group of camp children and gives it to the camp’s director. The director administers it to some sick children so that they are cured and withholds it from others so that they die terribly. He has no shortage of the cure; nothing at all hinders him from curing all the children. Even though some of the children resisted the cure, the director had the ability to persuade all of them to take it; he only persuaded some. When the parents confront the director, he passionately contends that he loved all the children — Even the ones who died. He cared for them while they were sick and made them as comfortable as possible.
The director’s claim to love all the children rings hollow at best, deceptive at worst. If love will not employ all available means to rescue someone from ultimate loss, it is hard to hear it as love at all. In our judgment, it becomes meaningless to claim that God wishes to save all while also insisting that God refrains from making the salvation of all possible. What are we to make of a God whose walk does not match his talk? [17]
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In his work entitled “Free Grace”, John Wesley resisted this horrible Reformed-Calvinist teaching which unjustly cosigns people to damnation — where majority of humanity was eternally decreed by God to stay spiritually dead without any possibility of redemption: no one can save them but God; and God does not want to save them. That is, if you are spiritually dead, and God refused to give you life; then if God hath absolutely decreed your everlasting death — you are absolutely consigned to damnation.[18] Wesley argued that to think that God will send the reprobate into eternal fire, for not escaping from sin and for not having that grace which God had decreed they should never have, this is a terrible injustice. For Wesley, this Calvinist doctrine of unconditional election (double predestination) is a sickening portrayal of the Judge of all the earth.[19]
According to John Wesley, unconditional election, which necessarily includes reprobation, calls God’s sincerity into question. He rebukes the Calvinists and poses an image to illustrate the problem: a jailor calling on prisoners to leave their cells without opening the doors. “Alas! My brethren, what kind of sincerity is this, which you ascribe to God our Savior?”[20] Wesley takes on the issue of God’s goodness and love clearly revealed in Jesus Christ:
“How is God good or loving to a reprobate, or one that is not elected?” To those who argue that God does love the reprobate in some way and is good to them, Wesley asks how God could be good to him in this world (i.e., in temporal gifts) “when it were better for him never to have been born?” As for God’s love for them: “Is not this such love as makes your blood run cold? … If, for the sake of election, you will swallow reprobation, well. But if you cannot digest this, you must necessarily give up unconditional election.” [21]
In contrast to Calvinism, many Non-Calvinists teach that salvation is given by God to the person who freely responds to the Gospel in faith. Faith is not a “gift” of God nor is it “good works”, but rather, faith is a human response to God’s gift of prevenient grace or enabling grace (i.e. the grace that restores freedom of the will for all sinners). This universal invitation for humans to freely respond to the Gospel is simply the calling, enlightening, enabling grace that God implants in a human heart because of His love and because of the work of Christ. But this grace that is given to everyone is resistible, not irresistible. Sinners can say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to God’s gracious invitation to salvation.[22]
In the Bible, God’s dealings with humanity show us that God lovingly, graciously, and mercifully offers salvation to all mankind — and that all sinners are able to make a moral choice to believe in, and accept or to reject Christ. The plain reading of Scripture which repeatedly offers salvation to all sinners seems to proclaim that God truly desires to convince and to save all who are lost, and that they all have the capacity to turn to Him if they choose. Calvinism, however, robs these Scripture passages of their plain meaning.[23]
The Words “World” and “Whosoever” and “All People”
“For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him. Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.” (John 3:16–18, NLT)
John 3:16 says God loves the “world.” Calvinists either do not believe that “world” refers to everybody without exception, or they say that God loves even the non-elect (reprobates) in some distinct ways. Both explanations of John 3:16 fail to make sense. However, the best critical exegetes of John 3:16 affirm that “world” does mean “the whole human race.”[24]
Some Calvinists think God loves “the whole world” but not in the same way. That is a strange kind of love and hardly fits the context of John 3:16. If “world” in verse 16 means all people, then verse 17 clearly says Jesus came to save everyone (or give everyone that possibility): “For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him.” Calvinist interpretations of John 3:16 turns out to be dishonest and unsound.[25]
In his “A Critique of Limited Atonement”, David Allen disagrees with the Calvinist version of the word “world”. He states that, “John 3:16 speaks in universal terms: ‘world’ and ‘whoever’ (NKJV). The text affirms God’s love for all people. His love is unrestrictive: the scope of His love is the entire world. John specifically says God gave Jesus to be an atonement for the sins of the world… Just as God’s love encompasses the entire world, so Jesus made atonement for the sins of the whole world. There is no limitation here. There is, however, a condition for the benefits of Christ’s atonement to be effective for any individual: ‘everyone who believes.’ God has annexed a condition on salvation: faith in Christ. The atonement is unlimited. The benefits of the atonement are limited to only those who believe.”[26]
Even the respected Greek expert William Mounce, in an article he wrote entitled “Does John 3:16 Say Whoever?”, cautioned us that to limit God’s love and to say that He does not love everyone, runs counter to the rules of Greek grammar:
We do have an indefinite construction in John 3:16 with the use of πᾶς and an articular imperfective participle (πᾶς ἡ πιστευών) used to indicate a generic, “general utterance” (see Wallace, 615f.). Just do a search for that construction and you can see it is universal in intent.
Contextually, John is asserting a relatively unusual notion that God not only loves those who follow him (John’s normal usage) but He actually loves the entire world, hence requiring an indefinite construction. To limit the meaning of the statement to a subgroup of people, “those among you who believe,” is to read in a theology not supported by the Greek.
In the larger context, it agrees with statements like says God “wishes all people (πάντας ἀνθρώπους) to be saved…” (1 Timothy 2:4).
True, each/every person who believes, is a subset of the whole (the “world”), and the gift of eternal life is only for that subset, but to somehow limit God’s love to a subset of people runs counter to the Greek, the meaning of πᾶς, the grammar, the immediate context, and the larger context… let us not dismiss the clear meaning of the text and suggest that God does not, in some way, love the world.”[27]
In 1 Timothy 2:4, which says God wants “all people” to be saved, the meaning in Greek cannot be interpreted any other way than “every single person without exception.” [28]
This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. (1 Timothy 2:4, NIV)
The phrase “all people” is unrestricted and is all-inclusive. Paul then asserted God’s desire for “all” people to be saved. There is nothing restrictive in the word “all” here either.[29]
Because the same Greek word for “all” is used in 2 Timothy 3:16 with regards to inspired Scripture. If it does not mean literally “all” in 1 Timothy 2:4 (all people), then it does not mean literally “all” in 2 Timothy 3:16 (all Scripture).[30]
All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, (2 Timothy 3:16, NIV)
In other words, people go to hell not because God chose them to be there even before they were born. Rather, people go to hell because they choose to be there by rejecting God. From the biblical perspective, no one who spends eternity in hell can complain that he is there because God didn’t want him in heaven. All of the damned will be tormented by the knowledge that they are not there by God’s predestination but by their own refusal to receive the salvation God has provided and freely offered for all. The Bible presents a God who laments over a hell filled with those for whom He provided salvation but who refused to receive it. In direct contrast, Calvinism presents a God who fills hell with those whom He could save but instead damns because He doesn’t love them. These two different views of God are the major point of separation between Calvinists and Non-Calvinists.[31]
- — — — — — — -
Non-Calvinist Evangelical Christians are fellow born again believers from various theological persuasions which include Provisionists, Molinists, Free Grace, Arminians, Freewill Baptists, General Baptists, Wesleyans, Lutherans, Pentecostals, Methodists, Mennonite, Brethren, Nazarene, Evangelical Free, Anabaptists, Anglican, and all believers who embrace “Whosoever Will” theologies.
𝗚𝗿𝗮𝗰𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗔𝗹𝗹 𝗖𝗼𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 is a cross-denominational collaboration of various Evangelical Christian pastors, theologians, scholars, church leaders, and believers from all theological stripes who affirm and teach that God has provided the means of salvation for all people through the life, death, and resurrection of the Son of God. So that all who trust in Jesus Christ are saved by grace through faith. We believe that the Gospel (εὐαγγέλιον) is asserting that God actually loves the entire world and that God sincerely desires every person to gain eternal life through Jesus Christ. God offers the free gift of salvation to all sinners and invites all humanity to respond in believing faith. The saving grace of God is sincerely offered to every person, not decreed to a preselected few. We desire to be a theological voice against teachings that limit the saving grace of God only to a chosen few, against theologies that teach that Christ did not die for all of humanity, and against doctrines that say that the Gospel is actually good news only to preselected individuals, not for every person.
We subscribe to the theological convictions of the 𝗔𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘁𝗹𝗲𝘀’ 𝗖𝗿𝗲𝗲𝗱, the 𝗡𝗶𝗰𝗲𝗻𝗲 𝗖𝗿𝗲𝗲𝗱, the 𝗟𝗮𝘂𝘀𝗮𝗻𝗻𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗻𝗮𝗻𝘁, and the 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱 𝗘𝘃𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗔𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲.
[1] Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 3.24. 16, 17, in Library of Christian Classics; ed. John T. Mcniell; trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 984, 985. Institutes 3.24.16, 17, pp., 985
[2] Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948)., 175, 215, 217.
[3] Edwin Palmer, The Five Points of Calvinism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1996), 95.
[4] Palmer, The Five Points of Calvinism, 106.
[5] Palmer, The Five Points of Calvinism, 105–106.
[6] Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.28.7, p. 955. The actual phrase Calvin used in the original was “decretum horribile.” It is translated as “the decree is dreadful indeed.”
[7] Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.21.7, pp. 937, 947.
[8] Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.21.5, trans. Henry Beveridge, Christian Classics Ethereal Library, www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutes.v.xxii.html
[9] Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.23.6, www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutes.v.xxiv.html
[10] Roger Olson, Against Calvinism: Rescuing God’s Reputation from Radical Reformed Theology, (Grand Rapids. MI: Zondervan, 2011), 72
[11] David Hunt, What Love Is This?: Calvinism’s Misrepresentation of God, (Bend, OR: The Berean Call, 2013), 74–76.
[12] Olson, Against Calvinism, 67–69.
[13] Olson, Against Calvinism, 67–69.
[14] Olson, Against Calvinism, 67–69.
[15] Olson, Against Calvinism, 67–69.
[16] Olson, Against Calvinism, 67–69.
[17] Jerry Walls and Joseph Dongell, Why I Am Not a Calvinist, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 54–55; Olson, Against Calvinism, 108.
[18] John Wesley, “Free Grace,” in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 3, Sermons 71–114 (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, n.d.), 547.
[19] John Wesley, “Predestination Calmly Considered,” in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 10, Letters, Essays, Dialogs and Addresses (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, n.d.), 221.
[20] Wesley, “Predestination Calmly Considered”, 227.
[21] Wesley, “Predestination Calmly Considered”, 229; 255.
[22] Wesley, “Predestination Calmly Considered”, 229; 255.
[23] Hunt, What Love Is This?: Calvinism’s Misrepresentation of God, 76.
[24] For example, A. T. Robertson as quoted by Jerry Vines, “Sermon on John 3:16,” in Whosoever Will: A Biblical-Theological Critique of Five-Point Calvinism, ed. David l. Allen and Steve W. Lemke (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 2010), 17.
[25] Olson, Against Calvinism, 87–88.
[26] David Allen, “A Critique of Limited Atonement”, in Calvinism: A Biblical and Theological Critique, (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2022), 134.
[27] William Mounce, “Does John 3:16 Say Whoever?”, in BillMounce.Com article online: https://www.billmounce.com/monday-with-mounce/does-john-3-16-say-whoever accessed September 20, 2024.
[28] Olson, Against Calvinism, 87–88.
[29] Allen, “A Critique of Limited Atonement”, 112.
[30] Olson, Against Calvinism, 87–88.
[31] Hunt, What Love Is This?: Calvinism’s Misrepresentation of God, 78.
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