~ Taken from Commentary on Ephesians ~

Here I must reprimand many Calvinists and Reformed theologians for being unfaithful to both the Scripture and the theological tradition to which they claim allegiance, because some of them also affirm this unbiblical and irrational assumption that moral responsibility presupposes human freedom. They agree with the heretics that for God’s commands to be meaningful, man must be free to obey them. Thus they generate contradictions, antinomies, and paradoxes (or whatever else they may call them) in connection with the doctrine of predestination, and then present them as part of the biblical teaching, when the truth is that the Bible is contradicting them, and not itself.

For example, in his Evangelism and The Sovereignty of God, J. I. Packer writes as follows:

The particular antinomy which concerns us here is the apparent opposition between divine sovereignty and human responsibility, or (putting it more biblically) between what God does as King and what He does as Judge. Scripture teaches that, as King, He orders and controls all things, human actions among them, in accordance with His own eternal purpose. Scripture also teaches that, as Judge, He holds every man responsible for the choices he makes and the courses of action he pursues….

God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility are taught us side by side in the same Bible; sometimes, indeed, in the same text. Both are thus guaranteed to us by the same divine authority; both, therefore, are true. It follows that they must be held together, and not played off against each other. Man is a responsible moral agent, though he is also divinely controlled; man is divinely controlled, though he is also a responsible moral agent. God’s sovereignty is a reality, and man’s responsibility is a reality too. This is the revealed antinomy in terms of which we have to do our thinking about evangelism.

It is true that Packer defines “antinomy” as only an “apparent” contradiction, but to him this does not mean that the human mind can resolve it. That is, the kind of antinomy that we are dealing with is not a real contradiction in God’s mind, but it appears to be one to us, and it is not something that we can resolve. As he writes, “To our finite minds, of course, the thing is inexplicable.” He should speak only for himself – to his very finite mind, the “thing” may be inexplicable (since he made it inexplicable), but how dare he impose his confusion on the rest of us and even on Scripture itself?

So he says that we must affirm both sides of an apparent contradiction while it still appears to be a contradiction. However, I have shown elsewhere that this is impossible, since as long as two propositions remain contradictory to us (whether or not they are truly contradictory), then to affirm both is really to deny both in reverse order.

What is the apparent contradiction? Packer says that it is between divine sovereignty and human responsibility. He correctly states that divine sovereignty means that man is “divinely controlled” (so that man is not free), and for him this seems to contradict human responsibility. In other words, he assumes that responsibility presupposes freedom.

But Luther had refuted this nonsense long ago. In The Bondage of the Will, Luther writes as follows against Erasmus:

Wherefore, my good Erasmus, as often as you confront me with the words of the law, so often shall I confront you with the words of Paul: “By the law is knowledge of sin” – not power of will! Gather together from the big concordances all the imperative words into one chaotic heap…and I shall at once declare that they always show, not what men can do, or do do, but what they should do!

Even grammarians and schoolboys at street corners know that nothing more is signified by verbs in the imperative mood than what ought to be done, and that what is done or can be done should be expressed by verbs in the indicative. How is it that you theologians are twice as stupid as schoolboys, in that as soon as you get hold of a single imperative verb you infer an indicative meaning, as though the moment a thing is commanded it is done, or can be done?

But there’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip! – and things that you commanded and that were possible enough may yet not be done, so great a gulf is there between imperative and indicative statements in the simplest everyday matters! Yet in this business of keeping the law, which is as far out of our reach as heaven is from the earth and just as impossible of attainment, you make indicatives out of imperatives with such alacrity that the moment you hear the word of command: “do,” “keep,” “choose,” you will straightway have it that it has been kept, done, chosen, or fulfilled, or that these things can be done by our own strength!

Packer is an especially appropriate example of how many Reformed theologians have strangely and ironically gone wrong on this subject. This is because Packer translated Luther’s book! I am quite sure that Packer had read Luther before he published Evangelism and The Sovereignty of God, since it was released in 1961, and his translation of The Bondage of the Will was released in 1957, and he had probably read Luther a long time before that.

Therefore, I must conclude that either Packer disagrees with Luther, or he is just muddleheaded. He claims that he wants to be biblical in his beliefs, but if this is true, then he should not add to and impose upon the Scripture his own premise, “responsibility presupposes freedom.” At least on this issue, Luther had much more respect for Scripture than Packer.

We would expect an Arminian, who is wholly confused about election, redemption, and conversion, to fail to recognize the simple but clear distinction between freedom and responsibility. But what is wrong with the Calvinists and Reformed scholars who still foolishly assume that responsibility presupposes freedom, making some kind of paradox out of the whole doctrine of predestination, and then say that nobody can resolve it? Do they not cause needless trouble? Are they not lunatics and morons, and like the Arminians, also “twice as stupid as schoolboys”?

With Luther, we must affirm that on this subject Scripture contains no contradictions, no antinomies, and no paradoxes, but that unfaithful and incompetent theologians “create difficulties where none exist, and dream contradictions for themselves.” Scripture teaches both divine sovereignty and human responsibility, and these two do not contradict each other; moreover, human responsibility does not presuppose human freedom.