Q: Does the One-Way Love of God Necessarily Entail Predestination? A: Sorry, yes

Distilled: A Catechism for Taming Cynics

Thinking about the intersections and dissonances between popular religion, classical theism, and biblical dogma, I decided to revisit and finally finish a catechism I began writing a decade ago. Thanks to a long vacation called cancer I never completed it. My plan is to rework what I had written, as God has made me otherwise than who I was back then, and to write new entries for the questions that I left unaddressed.

There is a long tradition in the historic church, especially in the Reformation, of distilling the faith down into concise questions and answers with brief supporting scriptures. As Luther intended his own Small Catechism, the Q/A's of a catechism are, really, the pretense for a longer dialogue, in Luther’s case a conversation between parents and their children. Given the post-Christian world in which we will live, I think it's important to outline the faith such that people can see— and learn— the philosophical foundation beneath it. It's important for people, in and out of the faith, to see that ours is a faith which isn't afraid of doubt even as it takes the reasons for doubt with moral seriousness. Ours is a faith that has ancient answers for modern questions, a faith that will always rely upon God's self-revelation but it is not irrational for all truth is God's truth. In other words, ours is a faith with the resources to tame the cynicism of a post-Christian culture.

You can see my last entry:

Q: Does God Suffer? A: Yes.

18. Is God Indifferent Towards Us?

Of course not.

A person’s act of being as well as every action done by a person is an act of God. So, if the creator is the reason for everything that is, there can be no actual being which does not have the creator as its center holding it in being always. So God literally cares more for us than we can conceive. Our compassion is a feeble attempt to be what God is all the time.

Put less philosophically, the entire point of the Reformation was that the gospel promise is unconditional.

Quite the opposite of indifference, God is so jealous for his creatures that he pledges a love freed of any condition of human fulfillment.

In other words—

• The gospel is the promise of God’s one-way love for us.

• The gospel declares, apart from any cooperation on our part, “The Crucified lives for you.”

• Therefore, God is not indifferent towards us; God loves you for Jesus’s sake.

In fact, a primary implication of the gospel is that it responds to a hearer who does not believe it thusly, “Just by your unbelief you prove yourself the very person to whom God is not indifferent, whom God loves, for the Lord elects— above all— the ungodly.” The gospel tolerates no conditions— no systems of merit and demerit— exactly because the God of the gospel is the opposite of indifferent towards us.

“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing.”

— Ephesians 2.8

19. Does the One-Way Love of God Necessarily Entail Predestination?

Yes.

The sheer unconditionality of the gospel promise, however, elicits another unavoidable question— that of human freedom.