Sovereignty and Responsibility
Few theological debates have more clearly exposed differing understandings of divine sovereignty and human responsibility than the historic dispute between Calvinism and Arminianism. The table below summarizes the principal distinctions between these two systems, showing how each relates God’s sovereign rule and providence to meaningful human freedom, moral agency, and accountability.
Table T2
| Reformed | Arminian | |
|---|---|---|
| Nature and Scope of Divine Sovereignty | God exercises comprehensive and efficacious rule over all creation; no event falls outside his sovereign purpose. | God exercises comprehensive rule over creation while sovereignly allowing some creaturely decisions that he does not causally determine. |
| Providence and Decree | God’s eternal decree encompasses all that occurs, and providence brings his purpose to pass through means and secondary causes. | God decrees creation, redemption, and providential government, while some events remain contingent upon free creaturely choices. |
| Concurrence and Secondary Causes | God sustains and governs creaturely actions while creatures remain real, immediate causes acting according to their own natures. | God sustains, enables, and governs his creatures while their free acts are not determined by divine causal concurrence. |
| Human Freedom | Freedom is ordinarily understood compatibilistically: people act voluntarily according to their desires, without external coercion, even under God’s decree. | Freedom is ordinarily understood libertarianly in morally significant choices: under the relevant conditions, a person may choose otherwise. |
| Moral Responsibility | Responsibility rests on willing agency, motives, and conformity to God’s command; divine ordination does not excuse the creature’s sinful intent. | Responsibility rests on genuine, grace-enabled agency in which the person is not causally determined to make the morally significant choice. |
| Foreknowledge and Foreordination | God certainly foreknows future events within his eternal decree; foreordination is the ultimate ground of their certainty. | God exhaustively foreknows future free choices without that knowledge causing or determining them. |
| Permission of Evil | God ordains to permit and govern evil for holy ends without being its sinful author; the creature supplies the evil intention. | God permits but does not determine evil, which arises from the creature’s misuse of freedom; he remains able to restrain and redeem it. |
| Prayer and Means | God ordains both ends and means; prayer is a real instrument through which his settled purposes are accomplished. | God appoints prayer as a real relational means and may condition some providential actions on requests he freely invites. |
| Evangelism and Response | God uses proclamation as an ordained means; hearers respond voluntarily and are accountable, while God effectually brings his people to faith. | God uses proclamation and enabling grace to make a genuine response possible; hearers may receive or resist that grace and remain accountable. |
| Accountability under God’s Rule | God’s sovereignty and human accountability are compatible because divine and human agency operate at different levels; the person acts from his or her own motives. | God’s rule and human accountability cohere because God does not determine the creature’s morally significant free choice, though the creature remains dependent on him. |
For more information on the human will and the nature of its freedom, see The Freedom of the Human Will. For a more detailed comparison of Calvinism and Arminianism, see Calvinism and Arminianism.
