I think I get it now, Ergun...

During the whole debate fiasco between James White and Ergun Caner, I was stunned at the venom Ergun was spouting about the Reformed understanding of the Doctrine of Election. My initial response was the sinful inclination to be angry and defensive of truths that I hold very dear and to write him off. However, I have since had my own heart checked on that issue and am a little more reflective, thoughtful and saddened by the dive the pre-debate discussion took.

Recently, I have been reading a series of posts by Colin Smith on the understanding of Predestination in Islam. You can find them here, here and here.

Given the Muslim counterfeit of election, which leads to the impossibility of Muslims to love an impersonal, arbitrary and fatalistic deity, I can sympathize with Ergun’s emotional and frenzied reaction to statements of God’s sovereignty in election. Once freed to love Christ, anything that would seem to echo the tenants of Islam would at first blush be abhorrent to the grace of the loving and personal God in Christianity.

But, the predestination of Islam is not the predestination of the Bible. Colin aptly states it this way:

It is not the fact that God is able to decree a man’s path and predetermine his final destiny that is the major theological problem with the Islamic view; rather it is the fact that God appears to do this without any reason or motive for so doing. Why does God choose to send one man to Paradise and another to Hell? According to the Muslim, because He wants to. How can the Muslim be assured that God has not decreed that he will suffer in Hell at the end of his life? Ultimately, he can’t. He can hope that any good he has done is as a result of God’s intention to give him eternal Bliss, but he cannot know for sure that God might snatch that from him at the end. If there is no rhyme or reason to why a man goes to Heaven, why should there be one for sending a man to Hell?

A key difference in Islam and Christianity is the nature of man. Islam teaches that man is born innocent and then does good or evil at the whim of Allah. He is then judged for what Allah determined that he do. Colin explains it this way:

There is a concept in Islam of man’s “natural inclination,” which is called fitrah. At birth, each person’s fitrah is pure, free from erroneous ideas, and ready to take in sound teaching. However, soon after birth, this fitrah is corrupted by jinn (spirits that tend to lead a man to sin) and devils. God will intervene and protect and guide those He wishes to lead ultimately to Heaven, and simply leave the rest to be led astray by the jinn and the devils (though he guides the path of these people too, to make sure they don’t suddenly decide to resist these temptations and seek out paths of righteousness contrary to His decree for their lives).

The Bible teaches a radically different reality of human nature than any other religion. Because of Adam’s fall, all men everywhere inherit a sin nature. Again, Colin states it like this:

This idea of fitrah is clearly far removed from the Biblical idea of Original Sin. The Bible teaches that as a result of Adam’s transgression in the Garden of Eden, sin entered the world and caused Adam and his progeny to experience spiritual death (Romans 5:12). As a result of this, every person is born with a natural inclination to sin (Romans 3:9-18). It is this natural inclination towards sin that results in every person being under God’s just wrath, and subject to final and eternal punishment in Hell (Romans 1:18-32). So, rather than man being born in a neutral state that God either preserves or corrupts according to what final end He has decreed for that man, Biblically speaking, man is born in a corrupt state, subject to the full wrath of God against his sin, and dependent upon God’s mercy in Christ to save him.

The entire race is a fallen lump of clay from which God in His mercy, true mercy, saves some and passes over others. According to the Bible, there will be no sinner standing on the precipice of Hell who will ever say, “I don’t deserve this.” Likewise, there will be no saint who ever enters Heaven saying to himself, “I deserve this” or “Look what I’ve accomplished.” God either allows the sinner to continue on his wilful and gleeful path toward destruction or He sovereignly intervenes to open blind eyes and enlighten hearts to save those whom He has known from before the foundation of the world.

Oddly enough, Muslims who come to Christ provide a stark example of God’s sovereign election to grace through faith in Christ. What hope would they have to “discover” Christ on their own? They are programmed from birth to reject the Christ of Christianity and have no inclinations toward believing the gospel. To the human eye, it is clearly an act of sovereign grace that any Muslim is saved at all. And yet, what is so clear externally in the case of Muslims is equally true of those born in the West who have the gospel proclaimed so freely. True faith is born of grace, God’s grace, so that no one can boast that God made them fit for Hell and that no one can boast that they made themselves fit for Heaven.