C. Michael Patton and Rhome Dyke · The Theology Program · 48 minutes
Lecture by C. Michael Patton, Th.M., and Rhome Dyke, Th.M., from The Theology Program, published on their public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
After two weeks of arguing each side, the teachers now say where they stand, and it is not a compromise so much as a refusal: they will not let go of either divine sovereignty or human responsibility, because Scripture will not. The session then walks into the doctrine’s darkest room, whether God predestines people to hell, before turning a corner into the course’s next great subject: why did Christ die? Listen for the single verses in which both sovereignty and responsibility stand side by side, and for the two small words Patton finds missing from Romans 9:22.
Patton opens by owning his position: unconditional election is the true biblical teaching, not because it sits well, but because his stage of truth puts Scripture in front and he cannot get past the texts exegetically. If experience and emotion stood in front, he says plainly, he would be an Arminian. But the same Scriptures teach that humans are responsible, so the position the course lands on is compatibilism: God unconditionally and sovereignly elects, and humans are genuinely responsible, two realities Scripture teaches that finite minds cannot fit together and must hold in tension. Calvinists cannot twist the texts to make God love only some and man not responsible; Arminians cannot twist away unconditional election. Better to change your stage of truth openly, he says, than to quietly bend the text.
The teachers guard the definition carefully. Compatibilism does not hold in tension that God elects unconditionally and conditionally; that is a contradiction, not a tension. Nor does it pair God’s sovereignty with libertarian free will; that too is contradiction, two sovereigns over one choice. The pairing is God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility: man will stand before a real judgment, fully accountable for actions, thoughts, attitudes, and unbelief, and will not be able to plead non-election. Tension is not contradiction, they insist, any more than confessing Christ as God and man is contradiction, and only postmodernism shrugs at real contradictions. Dyke offers his own phrasing of where the mystery lives: in man’s responsibility, God remains sovereign.
What Patton loves about the doctrine is that Scripture teaches both sides in one breath. Luke 22:22: the Son of Man goes as it has been determined, but woe to that man by whom he is betrayed. John 6:37: everyone the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes I will never cast out. Acts 2:23: this man, delivered up by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God, you nailed to a cross, and the hearers were cut to the heart precisely because they were responsible for what God had determined. Philippians 2:12 and 13: work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you both to will and to work. Paul, the teachers say with a smile, was a compatibilist, though he never used the word; theological terms are labels we invent later to describe what the text was already doing.
The strongest presentation of God’s sovereign election in Scripture is Romans 9; the strongest presentation of man’s full responsibility is Romans 10, and Paul wrote them as one flowing document without chapter divisions. After it does not depend on the man who wills or runs, and he hardens whom he desires, you would expect Paul to explain Israel’s unbelief by God’s not choosing them. Instead, at the end of chapter 9, he lays all the responsibility on Israel: they did not pursue righteousness by faith but as by works, and stumbled over the stumbling stone. So who is responsible for your salvation? God. Who is responsible for your damnation? You. And chapter 11 completes the argument: God has kept his promise because he always works through a remnant. All one can say with assurance, the teachers conclude, is that if anyone is saved, all credit goes to God for electing them, and if anyone is lost, all credit goes to them for rejecting him.
The teachers call two Reformed voices to seal the point. Anthony Hoekema: to understand the Scriptures we must accept the concept of paradox, trusting that what our finite minds cannot square is harmonized in the mind of God. And J. I. Packer, in Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God, which they commend as a classic: God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility are taught side by side, sometimes in the same text; they must be held together and never played off against each other; man is a responsible moral agent though divinely controlled, and divinely controlled though responsible; such antinomies find their reconciliation in the mind and counsel of God. The teachers add their own formula: the Bible is fully God’s and fully man’s, Christ is fully God and fully man, and salvation is one hundred percent the sovereignty of God and one hundred percent the responsibility of man. No Calvinist in the history of the church, they note, has actually denied man’s responsibility, whatever the caricatures say.
Then the hard question the unit cannot skip: does God predestine people to hell as he predestines people to life? Terms first. The reprobate are those destined for judgment. Single predestination: God predestines the elect to life and passively passes over the rest, leaving them in their sins. Double predestination: God actively predestines the rest to hell, hardening and preparing them for unbelief, the position of what the teachers call extreme Calvinism. Some read Calvin himself as holding it; Patton doubts that reading, and notes that the Council of Orange, for all its Augustinianism, denied double predestination.
The evidence claimed for double predestination comes down to three passages. Romans 9:17 to 23: Pharaoh raised up for this purpose, mercy on whom he desires and hardening whom he desires, the potter with rights over the clay, vessels of wrath prepared for destruction. 1 Peter 2:8: they stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do. And Jude 4: certain men long ago marked out for condemnation. Patton answers with a close reading of the potter text. Set verses 22 and 23 in parallel and two things appear in the second that are missing from the first: the vessels of mercy he prepared beforehand for glory, but the vessels of wrath are simply prepared for destruction, no he, no beforehand. In Greek parallel constructions that asymmetry lands the emphasis where the words are, and Patton takes it as deliberate: God actively prepared the vessels of mercy before time, while the vessels of wrath are being prepared, passively, in time, turning themselves over to the destruction they are heading toward. He calls it, with disarming honesty, his loophole out of double predestination, and adds the wider point: three texts, none unambiguous, are far too thin a base for so terrible a doctrine, and if God actively forced unbelief the whole structure of human responsibility would collapse into contradiction.
A brief tour of an old formal exercise, the divine decrees: in what order, before time, did God purpose what he purposed? The Arminian and Wesleyan order: create, permit the fall, provide atonement for all, elect those who believe, give grace so all can believe, save all who do. The supralapsarian order, which the teachers identify with hyper-Calvinism and the edge of unorthodoxy: first elect and reprobate, then create, then permit the fall so the non-elect will fall. And the moderate order Patton holds: create, permit the fall, elect some out of fallen humanity and pass over others, provide salvation for the elect, save all who believe. The difference sounds scholastic but matters: on the moderate order, God’s purpose in creating was never to damn; election is his answer to a fall he permitted, not the reason he made men.
A question from the class turns the sovereignty discussion pastoral: Dyke tells of serving where the gospel had arrived only in living memory, and being asked why God saved none of my people until now. He had no answer. Even prevenient grace, the teachers observe, does not help there: what does a balanced scale mean in a culture where every influence is pagan? Only God’s sovereignty explains the pattern, and our obligation is to hold the truth of Scripture without pretending to explanations we lack; as Spurgeon quipped about defending the Bible, one might as soon defend a lion. Turn it loose.
The session then opens the course’s next great doctrine. Why did Christ die on the cross, and what did his death accomplish? These are the most basic questions of Christianity, and, the teachers warn, the doctrine was not settled from the beginning; the church struggled toward it as it struggled toward the Trinity. The struggle is not ancient history: Patton recounts a phone call with a man angry at the very idea that God required a payment, protesting that a God who demands satisfaction before forgiving is worse than the baseless forgiveness he commands of us. Six main theories will organize the study: recapitulation, ransom to Satan, satisfaction, moral example, governmental, and penal substitution, and the method is the course’s motto: in contrast there is clarity.
The first theory the early church produced, associated with Irenaeus and still living in Eastern Orthodoxy. Christ lived the perfect life Adam failed to live, recapitulating, doing over, every stage of human life, birth through manhood, in perfect obedience, and by that perfect life salvation is made possible. It grew in a particular soil: against docetism and Gnostic dualism, which denied Christ’s real humanity, Irenaeus insisted Christ had to be truly human, living every bit of our life, to save us. The parallels with Adam are drawn from Scripture itself: Romans 5, through one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so through the obedience of the one many will be made righteous, obedience, notice, not death; and 1 Corinthians 15, the first Adam a living soul, the last Adam a life-giving spirit. Adam disobeyed in a garden and failed at a tree; Christ submitted in a garden and won at a tree.
The teachers’ verdict sets the pattern for the whole unit: the theory is true but incomplete. Christ really is the second Adam; his sinless life really is part of the atonement, not a byproduct, for he had to qualify by the time he reached the cross, and a Christ who died in infancy could not have atoned as Scripture describes. The church rightly refuses to call Irenaeus a heretic for taking the first step. But the weakness is decisive: if Christ came only to recapitulate a perfect life, the cross becomes irrelevant; he could have died a natural death and still atoned. None of these early theories, they stress, doubted the history of the cross; the church was working out its meaning, and revelation was complete while understanding was still growing. Next: the ransom to Satan theory.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all eighteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. Why does Patton say he holds unconditional election?
2. Which pairing does compatibilism actually hold in tension?
3. What will no one be able to plead at the judgment, according to the lecture?
4. How does Luke 22:22 teach both sides in one verse?
5. Why were Peter’s hearers cut to the heart in Acts 2?
6. At the end of Romans 9, how does Paul explain Israel’s unbelief?
7. What single sentence of assurance do the teachers draw from Romans 9 through 11?
8. What is Packer’s counsel about the antinomy, as the teachers present it?
9. What is the difference between single and double predestination?
10. What does Patton notice comparing Romans 9:22 with 9:23?
11. Beyond exegesis, what wider argument does Patton make against double predestination?
12. Why do the teachers place supralapsarianism at the edge of unorthodoxy?
13. What question from the mission field could Dyke not answer?
14. Why was the man on the phone angry at the doctrine of the atonement?
15. What did the recapitulation theory teach?
16. Against what error was recapitulation forged?
17. What is the decisive weakness of recapitulation?
18. How do the teachers relate complete revelation to the developing theories?
All eighteen correct. Lecture 4 is complete.
Salvation is one hundred percent the sovereignty of God and one hundred percent the responsibility of man, like the Bible and like Christ himself. Which hundred percent does your praying actually reflect? And your evangelism? What would it look like for both to reflect both?
Patton confesses that Romans 9:22 and 23 gives him a loophole out of double predestination, and that he wants one. Is wanting a loophole a failure of nerve or a right instinct about the character of God? How do you tell the difference between softening a text and reading it precisely?
The man on the phone raged that God will not forgive baselessly while commanding us to. Before the course answers him in the coming sessions, how would you answer him today? What is your forgiveness of others actually based on?
Paul holds both truths in one breath in Philippians 2: work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.
The lecture’s own pointers: J. I. Packer’s Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God, commended as the classic treatment of the antinomy this session leaves standing, and Piper’s two-wills paper already in hand. The teachers close by previewing the ransom to Satan theory, a view you can still hear preached today, and the next session carries the atonement’s story from Satan’s supposed rights all the way to the view the course will defend.