(http://www.gci.org/yi/colyer34), Elmer Colyer"]There is a debate [Predestination] that has raged through the history of the church, that’s divided theologians and churches into different camps. I’m a United Methodist, so in my Wesleyan heritage, we’ve never been very big on predestination, but I also stand with a foot on the Reformed tradition with my study of Bloesch and Torrance. The problem with predestination is that it’s mentioned in the Bible, so you have to deal with it.
Part of the problem in the whole conversation of double predestination is that oftentimes it has rested in kind of an abstract doctrine of God: a God who is all-powerful, all-knowing, absolutely in control of everything. So if you have that kind of a God, and that kind of God knows the end from the beginning, in some respect you’re almost driven to a concept of providence where everything that happens, happens under the purview of God, and double predestination is only a step away from that.
Here I find Torrance’s theology to be especially helpful, because he challenges that whole doctrine of God at the very core – asking, How do we know anything about God, about God’s power, about God’s election or predestination, apart from what God has actually revealed in Jesus Christ? And there, we find something rather difficult, that creates problems for double predestination.
At this point at least, Wesley has enough sense that when he was arguing against predestination, he finally said, **“Whatever predestination means, it cannot mean that God, from all eternity wills the damnation of some. Because it’s contrary to the character of God as depicted by the whole scope and tenor of Scripture and preeminently in Jesus Christ." **What Wesley was saying, in Torrance’s words, is there can be no dark, inscrutable deity, some sinister God behind the back of Jesus Christ who secretly wills the damnation of some and not the salvation of all, which is what we see actually revealed in Christ’s life, death and resurrection. So that kind of theological approach to thinking about double predestination, thinking about providence, is more helpful than the other way of approaching it.
