Double Predestination | Bible Study Notes

Expanded explanation

Calvinists often distinguish the "passing over" view from Calvin's stronger language, but the distinction does not change the outcome. If God alone decides who receives the grace that makes faith possible, and withholds it from the rest, then the lost were never able to believe, and their condemnation was settled by God's choice before they were born. Calling one decree active and the other passive does not make the second any less a decree.

Context

Double predestination should be distinguished from God's foreknowledge, from biblical predestination, and from judicial hardening. Foreknowing who will reject Him is not the same as decreeing that they will. Biblical predestination, as Decalvinised reads it, concerns the destiny God has prepared for those in Christ (Ephesians 1:5, 11), not a list of who will and will not believe. And when Scripture speaks of God hardening people, it describes a response to those who have already set themselves against Him, not an eternal decree. The Calvinist case for double predestination rests mainly on Romans 9, where we believe Paul is defending God's freedom in how He carries out His promise to Israel rather than describing individual destinies.

Calvinist Usage

John Calvin taught that God "hath determined, in himself, what he would have to become of every individual of mankind," so that "eternal life is foreordained for some, and eternal damnation for others" (Institutes 3.21.5). The Westminster Confession says that "some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life; and others foreordained to everlasting death" (3.3), and that God was pleased "to pass by" the rest of mankind "and to ordain them to dishonour and wrath for their sin" (3.7).

Most Reformed theologians describe the two sides as unequal. God actively works faith in the elect, but He does not work unbelief in the non-elect; He passes them over and condemns them for sins they freely commit. R.C. Sproul, for example, affirmed double predestination in this sense and rejected "equal ultimacy." Many Calvinists avoid the phrase and speak only of election, or of reprobation as God "passing over" the rest.

Decalvinised Position

Decalvinised rejects double predestination in every form. God does not decree anyone's damnation before they are born. He "desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:4) and has "no pleasure in the death of anyone" (Ezekiel 18:32). Christ is "the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world" (1 John 2:2). A person is condemned because they have "not believed in the name of the only Son of God" (John 3:18), not because God passed them by.