Review: Divine Sovereignty & Human Responsibility

"If God is absolutely sovereign, in what sense can we meaningfully speak of human choice, of human will?"

D.A. Carson addressed this and other, broader questions in his 1975 doctoral dissertation. I know, I'm late to the party, but questions regarding God's sovereignty and "free will" still plague sincere believers today, and Carson's treatment is a good antidote to some of the muddled thinking going on out there.

In Divine Sovereignty & Human Responsibility Carson explores the Old Testament's apparent nonchalance about speaking both of God's absolute sovereignty and, at the same time, man's responsibility in choosing.

Carson also examines the tension between divine sovereignty and human responsibility in the Greek Septuagint, the apocrypha and psuedepigrapha, the targums and rabinnic literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other intertestamental literature. To be honest, I skipped this. Call it lazy, but I went straight to the discussion of the tension as it appears in the gospel of John.

From John's gospel Carson explores all the different ways in which the apostle expresses the theme of divine sovereignty, particularly with regard to how men come to have faith in Jesus.

Much of Carson's discussion is technical, but much is also useful for pastoral concerns and the interests of laymen who wish to clarify their understanding of how God can be sovereign while man is held responsible, especially in the area of salvation.

JESUS SUSTAINS ALL

Hebrews 1:3 says that Jesus Christ upholds the universe by the word of his power, and Colossians 1:17 says that in him all things hold together.

This means that while Jesus was speaking to first-century denizens of the Middle East about camels and needle eyes, he could have caused Neptune to explode, or a different galaxy to change locations in the universe, or cause a certain bird to eat a certain insect on the plains of the Serengeti (though it probably wasn't called 'Serengeti' then). Could have...and probably did (well, we don't think he caused Neptune to explode).

We think this phenomenal, even impossible, and the thought causes many a theologian to wax apoplectic. But is it so different (in type, that is) from what we do each day in our own bodies? Which of us thinks about making our hearts beat, or our lungs expand and contract to draw air and then expel it? Which of us directs cells to collect nutrients from blood, from food, from oxygen? Who thinks about instructing other cells to divide, fight bacteria, or collect and dispose of waste on a microscopic level?

Knowing that, it is not so far out of the realm of imagination that God, while carrying on with man, is carrying on (in a different way) with millions of planets that are circling myriads of stars, which are growing, plateauing and declining.

So, since we don't consciously control our hearts, our breathing, our circulation, is it too radical, to overwhelming, too humbling to suppose that at this very moment Jesus Christ is making my own heart beat? And yours, too?