Does Divine Determinism Make God the Author of Sin?
Since it’s relevant to some current discussions, I’m posting here a short section from a forthcoming essay entitled “Divine Sovereignty and Human Freedom: Incompatibilism versus Compatibilism,” which is due to appear in a multi-author volume on the doctrine of unconditional election.
Does Divine Determinism Make God the Author of Sin?
Reformed compatibilism maintains that divine determinism is compatible with human freedom and moral responsibility, where divine determinism is understood as the view that all events within the creation, including human choices and actions, are ultimately determined by the will or decree of God. It is commonly objected that divine determinism, if true, would make God to be “the author of sin,” but since God cannot be the author of sin—James 1:13 is commonly cited here—it follows that divine determinism must be false.1
Let us note first that Reformed theologians have consistently repudiated the idea that God is “the author of sin.”2 To take one representative example: the Westminster Confession of Faith, in its chapter on God’s eternal decree, affirms that God has sovereignly ordained from eternity “whatsoever comes to pass,” but denies that God is thereby “the author of sin” or that his decree does “violence” to the will of his creatures. Similarly, the Confession’s chapter on divine providence, while asserting that God’s providential control of events extends even to creaturely sins, insists that God “being most holy and righteous, neither is nor can be the author or approver of sin.”
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- For examples of this charge, see Bignon, Excusing Sinners and Blaming God, 168. Often the objection is expressed in rather cagey terms, as though the critic wants to claim that divine determinism entails or implies that God is the author of sin but lacks a specific, positive argument in support of that claim. Thus, we encounter statements like, “If divine determinism is true, it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that God is the author of sin,” or rhetorical questions such as, “How can divine determinists avoid the conclusion that God is the author of sin?”—as if the burden of argument lay with Calvinists rather than their critics. In such debates, it is essential to distinguish between a stated argument (which can, in principle, be refuted) and an allusion to an unstated argument (which cannot). ↩
- Calvin, Institutes, I.18.4. Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 1:509–10; Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 2004, 2:615. Jonathan Edwards is more nuanced, distinguishing different senses in which “authorship” might be attributed to God. Jonathan Edwards, The Freedom of the Will (London: Thomas Nelson, 1845), 286–88. ↩
John Lennox is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and an evangelical Christian with a longstanding concern to defend the Christian faith in the public sphere. In recent years he has risen to prominence as an articulate, well-informed, and winsome apologist, writing books on the relationship between Christianity and science, and engaging in public debates with prominent skeptics such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Michael Ruse. His 2007 book God’s Undertaker, which I have often recommended to my students, deftly debunks the myth of conflict between religion and science. I wish I could be so enthusiastic about his recent foray into systematic and philosophical theology, which might well have been titled Calvinism’s Undertaker.
That seems like a knockdown argument on the face of it, but on closer examination it turns out to be very weak. In John’s writings “the world” (ho kosmos) rarely if ever carries the sense of “all mankind” or “every human who ever lived.” It certainly doesn’t mean that in 3:16 because that would make nonsense of the immediately following verse. (Try replacing “the world” with “all mankind” in verse 17 to see the point.) Rather, “the world” typically means either (i) “the created universe” (as in John 17:24), (ii) something like “the fallen creation in rebellion against God” (e.g., John 3:19; 13:1; 15:19; 17:13-18; 1 John 2:15-17) or (iii) “all nations” as opposed to the Jewish people alone (as in John 4:42). Whatever the exact sense in 3:16, there’s nothing that conflicts with LA.