The Canons of Dort
A Theological and Pastoral Critique
by Edwin Walhout
Published by Edwin Walhout
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Edwin Walhout
Cover design by Amy Cole (amy.cole@comcast.net)
See Smashwords.com for additional titles by this author,
including critiques of five ancient Christian creeds
and two additional Reformation creeds
(Heidelberg Catechism and Belgic Confession)
Biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.
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Table of Contents
I Divine Election and Reprobation
II Christ’s Death and Human Redemption Through It
IV Conversion to God and the Way It Occurs
V The Perseverance of the Saints
Preface
This critique does not include an analysis of the historical setting of the Synod of Dort. Nor does it analyse the section in each Canon which considers Errors. On the contrary it is limited to a critique of the theology in each of the main sections of these Canons, trying to understand the mentality of the church fathers of Dort, and then to evaluate the theological positions being defined.
The critique argues from the point of view of the ancient Hebrew-Christian mindset, the way of thinking evident in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. There are significant deviations from that definitive Biblical mindset here in these Canons of Dort. There is, of course, much that is laudable and essential, but as often as not these gems of theology are put in a skewed theological framework which casts a cloud of doubt even upon them. The overall conclusion is that the church should no longer accept the Canons of Dort as definitive of its ecclesiastical theology.
The Canons of Dort
The Decision of the Synod of Dort on the Five Main Points of Doctrine
in Dispute in the Netherlands
(as found in the Psalter-Hymnal, 1988 edition, p. 927 f.)
I Divine Election and Reprobation
Article 1: God’s Right to Condemn All People
Since all men have sinned in Adam and have come under the sentence of the curse and eternal death, God would have done no one an injustice if it had been his will to leave the entire human race in sin and under the curse, and to condemn them on account of their sin. As the apostle says: The whole world is liable to the condemnation of God (Rom. 3:19), All have sinned, and are deprived of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23), and, The wages of sin is death (Rom. 6:23).
All men have sinned in Adam. In Genesis the name Adam not only refers to the individual so named but also carries the connotation of the entire human race, as if Adam is Everyman. Dort gives us to understand, correctly, that what the individual person Adam does in the Genesis stories is intended to be a description of what everybody does.
It is not made clear here in Article 1 that this is the background of the Reformed theology of Dort. What is the connection between Adam and the rest of us? This article does not specify an answer.
If, however, we go to the prior Reformed creed, the Belgic Confession of Faith, we do find an answer, namely, the doctrine of original sin. In that creed it is affirmed that the guilt and pollution of Adam’s sin is passed on by heredity.
Hence it is very likely that this first article of the Canons of Dort also means to say that we all have sinned in Adam in the sense of original guilt and pollution passed on to us by heredity.
While the attempt to define the connection between Adam and us is in itself laudatory, one can hardly credit the doctrine of original sin in the sense of hereditary corruption. How can a moral act such as that described in Genesis 3 produce a result in terms of genetics?
Since, however, this doctrine of original sin is not defined here, it is not appropriate to analyze it further. Simply recognize that it is probably the background of the article’s first clause.
… have come under the sentence of the curse. This refers to the curse that God pronounced upon sin: that Eve would have great pain in childbirth, that Adam would have to contend with weeds in his farming operations, and that the serpent would some day be crushed.
Understandably this curse is extended in our theology to cover all actual and possible consequences of sin in our daily civilized life. The entire human race lies under this curse from God upon our human sin, the evidences thereof to be seen everywhere from disease to war to pain and poverty, to guilt, depression, crime, hatred, and all other kinds of evil.
… and eternal death. Here we have another undefined term, the meaning of which we will have to discover elsewhere, very probably again in the Belgic Confession. Dort is here affirming that the consequences of Adam’s sin are to be understood not merely within this life but also in the existence to come after physical death. When we deliberately live in sin, as Adam, we thereby deserve to go to hell forever. That is Dort.
…God would have done no one an injustice if it had been his will to leave the entire human race in sin and under the curse, and to condemn them on account of their sin. This is an expansion of the previous affirmation that sin deserves hell. It follows, says Dort, that if sin deserves hell, God can in full justice simply leave us there. We get what we deserve; we deserve what we choose; we choose to sin rather than to obey. So we can have no complaint if we get what we choose.
This is the theodicy of Dort, Dort’s way of justifying God. But does God need justifying? Who are we to think we can, or even need to, justify God? Do we need to explain God’s right to do what he does? The Canons are correct to insist that the troubles we are in as a human race are our own fault, not God’s. God created us good and in his image. We, exercising that image, choose contrary to the will of our creator, contrary thus to our own good created nature, and we suffer for it. That is correct.
But the Canons are preparing the ground for an explanation of election and reprobation, and one wonders whether this first paragraph is entirely satisfactory in defining the parameters of divine election and reprobation.
Dort is reading more into the story of the fall of Adam and Eve than is actually in Genesis 3, that is the notion of eternal death. What is there in this Genesis account that suggests there is such a thing as eternal death, that is, hell?
Furthermore, what is there in this account that requires us to think physical death is a result of sin? To be sure, God said to Adam and Eve, In the day you eat thereof you will surely die. But they certainly did not die that very day, for Adam lived to be 930 years old. The death he died at the moment of sin was spiritual death, moral death, death to what God commanded them, death to the life of God-imaging for which they had been created. Death in this instance means choosing not to obey God, but rather to obey the temptation of the devil. But, note well, there is nothing in this resembling what Dort calls eternal death.
It is better to define the consequences of the sin of Adam and Eve in terms of what God had commanded them in the cultural mandate. What did God require of his human creatures when he created them? To be his image in the way they populated the earth and gained dominion over it, to subcreate a civilization that incorporated into its structures all the divine virtues of honesty, truthfulness, justice, love, respect, reliability, hard work, and so forth. Adam and Eve must be rigorously obedient to God in order to accomplish this goal. But God did create them human, not animal. This means with the ability to choose not to obey, able to go their own way instead of God’s way.
That is what the choice between the two named trees of Eden represents. Adam and Eve could not avoid making a decision between those trees, that is, they could not avoid the decision either to obey God or not to obey him. They had to choose one way or the other. The fact that they chose to disobey meant that they would go about their daily work in such a way that they would not reflect the image of God in their behavior and relationships. We see the consequences in their children and in the antediluvian history of Genesis.
We see it also in all of ancient history. All ancient civilizations were founded on force, military compulsion, war, suppression, slavery. Consequently they all failed to reflect the goodness and love of their creator, failed to image God in the cultures they created. Dishonesty, crime, poverty, pride, jealousy, suppression, slavery, selfishness, cruelty, and the like were endemic to all those ancient cultures, identify them as one might. That is what we see in actual history as the result of our sin. There is no need to speculate about eternal death, whatever that may or may not mean. We see the untoward results of sin every day in the structures of our civilization.
So then, what might it mean that God would do no injustice to leave us in that condition? No injustice to whom? To us? But that is not the point at all. God created us with a certain purpose in mind. When we sin we are not working toward that end. So God’s task, so to speak, is to get us to the point that we choose to obey him and image him in our daily work and civilization. How does he do this? Not by sending us to hell. That is entirely beside the point. He gets us to become obedient by sending Jesus and his Spirit to change our minds and wills.
So, to be frank about it already here at this point, the Canons of Dort begins with a skewed vision of God’s purpose. We need, on the contrary, to think in a God-centered teleological way: What is it that God wishes to accomplish in time and in history, and how is he doing it? The theological parameters of the doctrine of election and reprobation should be delineated in terms of God’s purpose, not in terms of theodicy. If we start out wrong we are not likely to arrive at any useful destination. We will have to see whether this applies to the Canons.
Article 2: The Manifestation of God’s Love
But this is how God showed his love: he sent his only begotten Son into the world, so that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
Nobody can quarrel with this. The love of God is seen in the goal that he sets, namely that people should not perish. Left unchecked, the momentum of sin would eventually annihilate the human race, a kind of universal suicide. God, who created the human race in his image and for his own purpose, is not about to let this happen. He does what is necessary to reverse the decision of Adam and Eve. He continues to love his people in spite of their rejection of his commands.
But what is that eternal life that John writes about in his Gospel? Not a life beyond death, as we ordinarily assume, but the kind of life that Adam and Eve lost by eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They lost the life of paradise, of the garden of Eden, which is a symbol of life as God intended it to be lived.
So that is what defines the purpose of God sending his only begotten Son Jesus into the world. The purpose of Jesus’ coming is to enable us to live the way God intended us to live when he created the human race, namely as his image. That is what the term eternal life means in the Bible, symbolized by the garden of Eden and the Tree of Life, and also by the new Jerusalem in the book of Revelation.
Article 3: The Preaching of the Gospel
In order that people may be brought to faith, God mercifully sends the proclaimers of this very joyful message to the people he wishes and at the time he wishes. By this ministry people are called to repentance and faith in Christ crucified. For how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without someone preaching? And how shall they preach unless they have been sent? (Rom. 10:14-15)
The significant words in this paragraph are: to the people he wishes and at the time he wishes. If we look at the facts of history we see that the gospel did not come first of all to the Philistines, or to the Chinese or the Japanese, or to the Maori people of New Zealand. It came to the Jews. Why to the Jews and not to the Huns? Who can say? That is just the way it happened.
So the Canons are saying that this fact of history is explained by affirming that it was God’s decision to do so, God’s decision to work with the Jewish race rather than with some other nation.
We may be deeply appreciative of this insight and this formulation. It arises from a profound recognition that history is under the control of its sovereign creator. This is God’s world. He made it. Consequently he determines the direction in which its development will go – even when his human creatures pretend they know better. He sends his messengers with the information people need to correct their ways and travel in the right direction. This is how God gives sovereign control and direction to the course of human civilization.
So then, having begun with the Jewish people, God moved on in history with his gospel to the Gentiles of Greece and Rome, then after the fall of the empire to the barbarian tribes of Europe, thence to America and the rest of the world. To understand the workings of God we must learn to see these developments in time and history.
… By this ministry people are called to repentance and faith in Christ crucified. This defines the purpose of preaching the gospel: a call to repentance and faith. Not an abstract faith but a faith translated into daily life, that is, into repentance from sin. The gospel speaks about Jesus and his work as the sent Son of God, summoning hearers to believe all of that. But the gospel also goes on to summon hearers to repentance, to change their lives from disobedience to obedience. This would be the work of the Holy Spirit within their thinking and their activities.
We see in these functions of the gospel also the lineaments of the doctrine of trinity (recognizing that Dort does not articulate this doctrine): God the creator, Jesus the savior, Holy Spirit the inner motivator. But be careful not to push this doctrine too far; that is, not into the ontology of God’s inner being.
In terms of the Canons more specifically we should remember that this is still preparatory for a fuller discussion of election and reprobation. Presumably the Canons will define that doctrine within the context of what is said here that God sends the gospel to the nations he chooses and during the time he chooses.
Article 4: A Twofold Response to the Gospel
God’s anger remains on those who do not believe this gospel. But those who do accept it and embrace Jesus the Savior with a true and living faith are delivered through him from God’s anger and from destruction, and receive the gift of eternal life.
The anger of God. What is this? Does not the Bible tell us that God is love? If God is love, what does it mean to say that love has anger?
Perhaps something on the order of what we call tough love. God does not stop loving Adam and Eve after their unfortunate choice. But their choice has its own consequences. Those consequences are built-in. Jump off a skyscraper and you will be killed. Carry grudges and you will have a scarred soul. Cheat on an exam and you will be a dishonest person. That is all built-in, part of the way the world works. And it works that way because God built it that way.
That is the way we should understand the story of the fall in Genesis 3. The story is told in such a way that it is God who pronounces the curse and sends them out of Eden. But we should see that God does this by making those curses and consequences part of the inevitable result of sin. To say that God curses sin means exactly the same thing as to say sin brings its own punishment. Sin brings its own punishment because God created the world that way.
So what does it mean to talk about the anger, or wrath, of God? Not something added on as an afterthought, but the built-in structure of the creation, including human life. It is not as if God decided after Adam and Eve sinned to punish them this way. No, God had structured the world in such a way that if they sinned they would get into trouble from the consequences and would take themselves automatically out of paradise. To sin means the same as to encounter God’s anger. It cannot be avoided. That’s the way God made the world to work.
Remember also that this curse and this expulsion from Eden does not imply that God no longer loves the creatures he made in his image. Actually it is the opposite. The curse means that God cares enough about us to show us that our way of sin does not work, but that his way of love and faithfulness and honor and obedience does work. To believe the gospel means that we have learned this lesson, that we have decided to trust Jesus and to live by his Spirit. It may be difficult to see this, but as a matter of divine fact the existence of the curse of sin and its evil consequences is a demonstration of God’s love for us, wanting us to have a better life than sin provides.
But those who do accept it and embrace Jesus the Savior with a true and living faith are delivered through him from God’s anger and from destruction. To be delivered from the anger of God, then, means to find in this life the rest and peace and comfort and satisfaction that enables us to live contentedly and fruitfully in the task and environment that God gives us. There may well be a great deal of suffering involved in this kind of life, as Christian people have experienced in the past, but it also involves the willingness to suffer for the sake of Christ, and to endure any and all hardships that life may bring if this is what the Lord sends into our lives.
To be delivered from the anger of God means also to be delivered from bondage to sin and Satan. Can you conquer some bad habit you may have developed in earlier years? Can you control your volatile temper when you are challenged or stressed? Can you be genuinely sorry when you can’t? Can you keep praying and trying honestly to submit your life to the Lord Jesus even when the devil keeps reminding you of the failures of the past? Can you really believe that all those failures are forgiven by God, distanced as far as east is from west, buried at the bottom of the ocean? The Lord is patient with you so long as you are honestly trying to serve him more faithfully. You are never outside his love and care. Trust him. Love him in return. Do your best to live faithfully.
…and receive the gift of eternal life. What is written in the previous paragraph should be understood as being the eternal life that is spoken of in this clause, life from heaven. Unfortunately, this is probably not what Dort means by eternal life.
In traditional theology eternal life means a life beyond death sometime in the future that will never end. But who really knows that? What we do know is what effect faith in Jesus has in this life when we live by his Spirit. He who has the Son has life. Whosoever believes in him has eternal life. Let us concentrate on faith and life in this present world rather than in an unknowable expectation of bliss in the future.
Article 5: The Sources of Unbelief and of Faith
The cause or blame for this unbelief, as well as for all other sins, is not at all in God, but in man. Faith in Jesus Christ, however, and salvation through Him is a free gift of God. As Scripture says, It is by grace you have been saved, through faith, and this not from yourselves, it is a gift of the God (Eph. 2:8). Likewise: It has been freely given to you to believe in Christ (Phil. 1:29).
The cause of our unbelief and sin is not in God but in us. That should be obvious. God does not make us sin. He makes us capable of sin, indeed, but he does not force us to do so. The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 shows us that they were created with the necessity of choice, but were not preprogrammed to choose one way or the other. So this fifth article of the First Canon of Dort says that all the sin and unbelief and evil in the world stems from the wrong choice on our part, thus placing the blame or guilt for it all squarely on us rather than on God. It is not God’s fault that we are in the mess we are in, but our own.
Faith and salvation is, on the contrary, a free gift from God. Believing in Jesus is, obviously, a decision on our part, but Dort reminds us that the very fact of our believing does not originate with our own inner will but with the will of God shown to us in Jesus Christ and his ministry on earth. God, seeing how we in Adam all fall short of what he created us to be, does not leave us to wallow in our own filth, does not allow our perversity to destroy the human race, but makes provision for us to escape the degenerative ruin of sin and find a new path and life through Jesus his only-begotten Son. Dort reminds us that even our faith is a gift of grace; the fact of our choice to believe in Jesus is in itself the evidence of God’s sovereign grace to us.
Article 6: God’s Eternal Decision
The fact that some receive from God the gift of faith within time, and that others do not, stems from his eternal decision. For all his works are known to God from eternity (Acts 15:18, Eph. 1:11). In accordance with this decision he graciously softens the hearts, however hard, of his chosen ones and inclines them to believe, but by his just judgment he leaves in their own wickedness and hardness of heart those who have not been chosen. And in this especially is disclosed to us his act – unfathomable, and as merciful as it is just – of distinguishing between people equally lost. This is the well-known decision of election and reprobation revealed in God’s Word. This decision the wicked, impure, and unstable minds distort to their own ruin, but it provides holy and godly souls comfort beyond words.
Yes, this doctrine of election is easily misunderstood. Some would prefer not to use the term at all. Yet the Bible does employ it, for example in Romans 9 and 11 and elsewhere.
Perhaps the doctrine can be better understood if we begin with the people involved and not with what goes on in God’s mind. The historical facts of the matter are that Ishmael chose to go with his mother Hagar in terms of religion, rather than with his father Abraham. Which means he chose polytheism over monotheism, accepting the gods of Egypt as did his mother, rather than the one God of Abraham. Similarly with Esau.
Why did Ishmael and Esau choose not to accept Abraham’s monotheism? We can try to provide some sociological answers, or some psychological answers, and perhaps these suggestions would be accurate. But if we take seriously that there is one God, the creator of the heavens and the earth, and take seriously that this creator God continues to direct the course of his creation, including human life and destiny, then we must also answer that God provided the circumstances in which both Ishmael and Isaac had to make a choice, and in which both Jacob and Esau also made their choices.
The circumstances are essentially the same as those recorded in the parable of the two trees of Eden, between which Adam and Eve must make a choice. God did not force Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden tree, nor did he force Ishmael and Esau to make the choices they made. So the term election must never come to mean that people are not given the choice between obedience and disobedience. It must not come to mean that God himself chooses to send some people to heaven or hell eternally regardless of their own choices in life.
When we consider the doctrine of election, therefore, we should not ignore the facts of the matter, the people involved. Some people choose to believe in Jesus and receive his Spirit in their hearts and minds, and choose to live accordingly. That is election. Other people have never heard of Jesus. Still others have heard the gospel and choose to disregard it and go their own way, imitating Adam and Eve in thinking they know better than God how to find a happy life. Do not think of election in any other way. In all cases God is in charge. God is the sovereign guide and director of human history, but he never exercises this authority and power in such a way as to negate the humanity of the people he created.
On a larger scale than that of individual persons, the Bible describes the history of Israel as God having chosen this nation, electing it. But begin with the historical facts of the matter, not with some futile attempt to penetrate the mind of God abstractly. It is a matter of historical fact that the process of salvation in human history began with Abraham, continued with Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, then later with Moses, Joshua, David, Hezekiah, Josiah, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and many others of the nation of Israel. The process of salvation did not occur elsewhere, among Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Aztecs, Mayas, or Mongolians. It began with Israel. So if we begin with that historical insight, and let it be the equivalent of God’s choice to work this way in our history, then that is the meaning of the doctrine of election.
That, then, is the way we should understand the Canons of Dort. That approach should also govern our understanding of the term reprobation. If the process of salvation was historically guided through the people of Israel, it was not guided through the people of Philistia or Moab or Edom. We do not need to penetrate into the inner mind of God and try to figure out what goes on there. All we need to know is that as a matter of historical fact God began his program for the human race through the Jewish people, not through the rest of the human race.
Reprobation then should mean nothing more than this historical, observable fact that God is not working out the redemptive plan in terms of Buddhism or Islam or Shinto, but in terms of Christianity. Reprobation points to that negative, election points to that positive.
But what about that language of God’s eternal decision (decree)? The fact that some receive from God the gift of faith within time, and that others do not, stems from his eternal decision. It is very likely that the theologians who formulated the Canons of Dort did think in terms of what goes on in God’s mind at some supposed point before he created the world. It would appear that they did mean to say that back before time God decreed that some people would be saved and other people not saved. History then would be understood as simply the working out of that eternal decree in time, like the unwinding of a clock.
If we take decretal theology this way it becomes very difficult to see how it preserves the responsibility of human beings. If God, from eternity, before he even created the world, decreed that some persons would be saved and not others, how does human choice and decision figure in? Adam and Eve were created with the necessity of making a choice. That characteristic is part of being human, part of the image of God by which we are to live. But if God created me with the proviso that I would not believe in Jesus, how can I be held responsible for not believing? I don’t have a chance. God made that decision, not me.
It seems best to understand decretal language as not referring to something that God decided before he created the world, but that it is an implication of what has actually happened: some people believe in Jesus and some don’t. God created us all, he guides and controls and directs all human history, he causes things to happen in history in such a way that the gospel does come to some and that they do believe. If we mean nothing more than this then one can honestly say that God decreed, controlled history in a way, that some people would believe the gospel.
But what about that term eternal when describing the decree of God? It is sometimes taken to mean prior to creation. But there was no time prior to creation. It is not as though God sat down with himself before he created the world and figured out just how he would handle the problems that human beings would make, that is, their sin and punishment. Time began when he created the world. So there was no time prior to that when God figured things out.
The word eternal then simply has to mean God himself, the creator rather than the creature. God, in the process of creating the world, made it in such a way that it could sustain human life; and that human life would be ideal when lived under certain circumstances and according to certain patterns of behavior. Violate these conditions and you get into trouble; observe them and you make good progress. Some people would learn how to live profitably; others would either take longer or never learn at all. This is the way God made things and the origin of it is then not within our time or our capacity but with God who is in himself eternal, that is, the creator not the creature. That is the way God decreed things to be, the way he created them.
Excursus on Sin and Punishment
We usually take our cue from our human practice of crime and punishment. A person commits a crime; he is caught, tried, found guilty, and subjected to an appropriate punishment – a sequence involved in human justice.
This pattern, however, does not work with divine punishment, that is, with sin and punishment. Properly understood, sin is its own punishment, not needing to have at a later point an additional punishment attached. God does not need that sequence. God has created us in such a way that for us to violate the rules of truth and morality brings, automatically, the punishment connected with that sin.
Every action we do that is contrary to God’s law necessarily and inevitably carries with it a negative result in terms of our character and conscience. Commit murder and you become thereby a person who does not respect the image of God in your victim. Commit theft and you become a person who does not respect the property of others under God. Lose your temper and you thereby endanger the respect you ought to have for the person aggravating you. You become less human than God wishes you to be, less demonstrative of what it means to image God in the way you live. Sin does that to us when we choose to disobey our creator. Sin is its own punishment. That is the way God punishes sin, by attaching the punishment to the sin so that the result of sin is automatic.
Consider the story of the fall in Genesis 3. Immediately upon sinning Adam and Eve knew they were naked. This was a result of their sin, before which they were unclothed but without shame. Then they tried to hide from God. Sinning had made them uncomfortable in the presence of God. God sent them out of Eden. This is a metaphor for them being out of the approval of God. God cursed Eve. Sin resulted in an unnatural aggravation of normal feminine affairs. God cursed Adam. Sin made the male’s sin produce unneeded and unnatural difficulty in making a living. God cursed the serpent. There is a built-in process in God’s world that will allow sin but guarantee its defeat.
The point of this analysis is that we should not think of God adding on some extraneous punishment besides that which sin itself produced. Those results are precisely the way in which God punished the sin of Adam in Eve in Genesis 3, and they all should be understood as coming from the way in which God created human nature. The various items of God’s curse are simply articulations of what happened automatically and immediately after Adam and Eve sinned. God made his punishment for sin a built-in structure in human nature itself.
This insight is especially important in understanding God’s warning that in the day they ate of the forbidden tree they would surely die. We need to understand that what actually happened at that moment, namely the act itself of disobedience, is precisely the same thing God warned against; it was death. Not physical death but spiritual death, the death that is the same thing as disobedience to God. That death happened immediately. It was built-in.
(end of excursus)
Article 7: Election
Election [or choosing] is God’s unchangeable purpose by which he did the following:
Before the foundation of the world, by sheer grace, according to the free good pleasure of his will, he chose in Christ to salvation a definite number of particular people out of the entire human race, which had fallen by its own fault from its original innocence into sin and ruin. Those chosen were neither better nor more deserving than the others, but lay with them in the common misery. He did this in Christ, whom he also appointed from eternity to be the mediator, the head of all those chosen, and the foundation of their salvation.
And so he decided to give the chosen ones to Christ to be saved, and to call and draw them effectively into Christ’s fellowship through His Word and Spirit. In other words, he decided to grant them true faith in Christ, to justify them, to sanctify them, and finally, after powerfully preserving them in the fellowship of His Son, to glorify them.
God did all this in order to demonstrate his mercy, to the praise of the riches of His glorious grace. As Scripture says, God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him with love; he predestined us whom he adopted as his children through Jesus Christ, in himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, by which he freely made us pleasing to himself in his beloved (Eph. 1:4-6). And elsewhere, Those whom he predestined, he also called; and those whom he called, he also justified; and those whom he justified, he also glorified (Rom. 8:30).
Article 7 contains the Dort definition of election. It is apparent that the theologians who sat at the Synod of Dort struggled hard to explain how it is that some people become Christian believers and others do not. How explain that if you really believe in the sovereignty of God? Should not a sovereign God arrange things so that everyone is saved? Why only some when God created everyone?
Further, these theologians did recognize that sin is a matter of our choice, our decision, so that whatever happens as a result is something we bring down upon ourselves: fallen through their own fault. We are all fallen creatures and therefore deserving of nothing but forfeiture of our lives.
So how can these men put all these factors together in such a way as to acknowledge God’s sovereignty and at the same time not subvert our responsibility?
One of the more troubling phrases in this Article is the one which quotes the Apostle Paul, before the foundation of the world. It would seem that there was no before the world was created, no time prior to the existence of the world. If it is true that time began when the world began, then how can it be said that God decreed that something should happen prior to the existence of the world? So what did Paul mean by that phraseology?
Very likely he meant simply that the reason why some people believe in Jesus and some do not cannot be traced back merely to our human will, but that our responses must somehow be within the absolute sovereignty of God. If this is his meaning, then the temporal reference before should not be taken literally but figuratively. It would mean then something like outside or beyond, with no implications of time involved, only source, origin. The source of the events that find some people believing and others not believing is in God not in us. Our existence as human beings has its origin in God the creator, therefore also what happens to us is in his control as well. We never become independent of God as if our ultimate destiny is in our hands not his. While it must remain ever true that we are responsible for our own decisions whether to believe or not to believe, it must also remain true that even those decisions, as well as everything we choose to do or not do, fall under the ultimate scrutiny and supervision and control of the God who made us. The problem is to find accurate terminology to explain it all.
The language and phraseology of Dort can certainly be questioned. It has been understood by many as meaning that God arbitrarily assigns certain persons to hell and others to heaven, as if our responsibility to hear and obey the gospel is of no significance. We must not do this, and surely this is not the intent of the theologians at Dort. If we recognize the inherent difficulty of finding suitable phraseology to explain the mystery of God’s grace, then we can be somewhat charitable of language that may not express that mystery with sufficient reserve.
Article 8: A Single Decision of Election
This election is not of many kinds; it is one and the same election for all who were to be saved in the Old and the New Testament. For Scripture declares that there is a single good pleasure, purpose, and plan of God’s will, by which he chose us from eternity both to grace and to glory, both to salvation and to the way of salvation, which he prepared in advance for us to walk in.
Perhaps there were theologians who affirmed that salvation and election meant one thing for the Israelites in the Old Testament, and something far better for Christians in the New Testament. Jewish believers, it might be affirmed, did not enjoy the same blessings of faith that those did who received the spirit of Christ after Pentecost. Such a theology would suggest that God intended it so; that God chose Israel to receive certain temporal benefits from their faith in one God, but that he reserved greater and different benefits for those whom he chose to give to Christ later. Perhaps it was something like that prompted this Article.