Concluding Statement - Shandon L. Guthrie

I certainly enjoyed our exchange and agree that all Christians ought to carefully weigh the issues that separate each other. Concerning such divisions, Professor of Philosophy Ronald Nash at Reformed Theological Seminary nicely conveys the message that all sides of a Christian debate ought to remember:

The most important thing any teacher can do is get people to think for

themselves. ⁽¹⁾

If we learn anything from this debate, it is a deeper appreciation for thinking through the controversies of Evangelicalism.

What I would like to do now in closing is take a look at the arguments for and against unconditional election and see which explanation better fits the facts.

I. NO GOOD REASON TO THINK UNCONDITIONAL ELECTION IS TRUE

It should not appear as no surprise that I find Pike's presentations unconvincing. In this section I want to show why the final analysis of Pike's arguments requires me to reject his conclusions.

First, Pike returns to Romans 9 as the tour de force of his view. His perception of why God says "I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy" is because God's election is unconditional given verse 16 ("It does not depend . . . on man's desire or effort, but on God's mercy"). So, what exactly does "it" refer to? Pike responds that this refers to salvation, and I certainly agree with that. But God is claiming the sovereign right to extend salvation beyond ethnic Israel. Verses 3-13 are meant to express Paul's anguish that the people of Israel remain hardheaded about their exclusivity as God's elect. The argument proceeded by Paul is that those people were "reckoned" because "it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham's offspring" (v. 8). When Paul earlier reported that the contingency of salvation rested with those who entrusted Christ as the propitiation for sins (cf. Rom. 4) he was diffusing the contention that Jesus was only Israel's messiah. And there is no doubt that the early Christian community interpreted Jesus' remarks about unifying the "sheep not of this fold" with Israel as extending salvation to all persons.

Secondly, do my views imply theological determinism? Pike sees my view on election as an admission of determinism because I suggested that "If God did not want us to choose certain courses of action then God would have altered the circumstances so that we would have done otherwise." But is this determinism? Not at all. If the subjunctive counterfactual

were true then it is because given the actual state of affairs (I ran out of milk) I actually went to the store. This is not determinism because it is possible that

Either state of affairs could ensue which is not possible in a deterministic world view where only one state of affairs is necessarily true. Analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga of Notre Dame University writes

Of course we might say that a proposition is necessarily true if it is impossible

that it be false, or if its negation is not possibly true. ⁽²⁾

This is to suggest that if it were necessarily true (because God so determined it) that in the absence of milk I would go to the store then it is impossible for me to do otherwise. And this is not the view I uphold.

Finally, is John 6:64-5 a definite argument for unconditional election because Jesus first "enables" people to come to them? I had addressed this in my first rebuttal by suggesting that Jesus enables us in the sense that He makes the choice for salvation available where it was not before. Further, I pointed out that the same term "enable" or "draw" (Gr: "helkuo") is found in John 12:32 where Jesus says, "I . . . will draw all men to myself." So the availability of salvation by Jesus has to be the subject. Pike had never responded to these two points.

Thus, given the arguments in favor of unconditional election I think that it is evident to me that there is no good reason to think that such a doctrine is true.

II. GOOD REASONS TO THINK THAT UNCONDITIONAL ELECTION IS FALSE

In this section I had advanced two primary subarguments supporting the proposition that reasons do exist as to why unconditional election is false. And it seems to me that they have never been adequately refuted.

(A) Theological determinism contradicts creaturely freedom. I have maintained that God cannot make people freely choose salvation because the proposition

is contradictory to

Pike had offered very little resistance to this except to say that while we are incapable of choosing salvation, we are still free to do as we please. But freely doing as we please obviously excludes the issue at hand: the ability to choose salvation. Thus, Pike must agree that with unconditional election comes the inability to choose, a conclusion that the Bible and epistemic intuition seem to preclude.

(B) The New Testament advocates creaturely freedom. In this subsection I suggested that God avails salvation to all implying the creaturely freedom to choose it which is supported by several New Testament passages. Pike's ongoing contention here is that such passages are to be limited to a certain number of people. However, in my first rebuttal I explained that such a limitation is unwarranted and that a universal audience is to be preferred. Pike ultimately dropped this point.

Therefore, it seems that since there are no reasons in favor of unconditional election and that the subarguments (A) (that theological determinism contradicts creaturely freedom) and (B) (that we have creaturely freedom) are true, then it follows logically and inescapably that unconditional election is false.

END NOTES

1. Ronald Nash, Great Divides (Colorado: NavPress, 1993), p. 218.

2. Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdman's Publishing Co., 1974, 1977), p. 14.