Rachel Held Evans is a young author whose got a book coming out from Zondervans. In a blog post she talked about “why Calvinism makes her cry“. It’s an amazing piece of self-disclosure.

There’s been a discussion on the subject and I wanted to save one of my responses, partly because I have to give bits and piece of it regularly.

I’d like to make comment on God’s agency that is clearly a piece of Rachel’s working on this issue.

On one hand Rachel you object to a very strong view of determinism, God micro-managing every last detail of human history. This idea too gets labeled as “Calvinism” sometimes, even among Calvinists. Technically it is a separate subject than the question of divine election. A more Arminian approach seems more compatible with a more “open” view of history with respect to God’s agency. Most North Americans born in the twentieth century culturally prefer a more open view. Neo in the Matrix says he doesn’t like the idea of fate because he doesn’t like the idea that he’s not in control of his own life.

OK, so we say we’re more comfortable with a more “open” system, where God more or less sets the stage and we run around on it exercising our supposed “free will”. I can understand that.

I do notice, however, that we also want the other system around. How often haven’t you heard someone say, often as a poor attempt to comfort someone who has suffered some misfortune “everything happens for a reason.” Hmmm. Do we believe that? What happened to our stage setting God and we as free will exercising players?

Or take this one for example. Something really bad happens to someone. Let’s say a parent was killed or they were sexually molested as a child. What’s one of the first thoughts that comes along? “How could God let that happen to me?” This question gets asked by lots of people and is seen as a ground for there not being a loving, all powerful creator God.

Or another one. “God made me.” This one gets pulled into the homosexual debate. “God made me this way.” OK. Did God make that still born child that way? Did God decide to make you in the womb of a crack addict? Why does God decide to make so many babies in wombs in third world countries where any statistician could easily forecast a high infant mortality rate?

Yet at the same time, we also assume an interventionist God. Christian Smith’s “Therapeutic, moralistic deism” is pretty popular. We expect cries of “help me” to be answered by divine intervention and churches, Arminian or Calvinistic encourage people to pray in such a way.

So which way is it? Does “everything happen for a reason” or is the system open? If you are consistent in either direction there are some pretty difficult mental consequences to face in terms of how we feel about God. Would it be responsible for God to allow us to develop nuclear weapons? To emit sufficient greenhouse gasses to destroy the planet and ourselves?

Free will itself is another conundrum. People like to say “free will” but not a lot of observation will show you that are wills are hardly free. Why are there fads? Why are so many little girls named “Emma”? Was that name chosen freely? When I was in my 20s “Maddy” was the popular girl’s name.

How free are our choices really? Check out one of my favorite podcasts WNYC Radio lab: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2008/11/14

And here’s another one. One of the real problems for Christian exclusivism is the person born in Saudi Arabia, India, or in the Amazon years before Jesus came to be. “God can’t hold them accountable for not becoming a Christian if they never had the chance to pray the sinner’s prayer.”

OK, but then haven’t you already admitted that there is no such thing as “free will” or at least limited it greatly. We can easily see that many don’t “choose to follow Jesus” if they’re born into a Muslim family, or at least the statistics are far lower. Then you are also admitting that history is NOT such a thing where at any given moment an infinite range of possibilities are open to us of which we may chose freely.

Once you have a child you know this. Parents regularly very accurately predict the outcome of their children exercising their wills. How? People can be fairly predictable. So do we really have “free will” or is it better to say we have “real agency”?

And if there is huge amounts we don’t know about our “real agency” given the fact that all of us have lived with it for 100% of all of our lives, how much can we really pretend to have a grasp on God’s agency and specifically how he works around us in an unseen way?