Thursday, March 12, 2020

C. Gordon Olson, "Critique of Ray Ortlund, Jr. on Sovereignty"


Writing in response to Ray Ortlund, Jr., “The Sovereignty of God: Case Studies in the Old Testament,” an attempt to argue for the Reformed understanding of God’s sovereignty, C. Gordon Olson wrote:

Critique of Ray Ortlund, Jr. on Sovereignty

Ray Ortlund, Jr. surveyed some Old Testament case studies to support a Calvinistic view of the sovereignty of God. His treatment is badly flawed. First he quoted without specific comment five passages as being “striking testimonies to God’s supremacy over us” (ex. 4:11; Isa. 45:7; 63:17; 64:7-8; Lam. 3:37-38; Dan. 4:34-35). Since most Christians believe in God’s supremacy over us, these passages are irrelevant to the issue. The Isaiah 63-64 context speaks about the severity of God’s judgments on Israel in language reminiscent of Paul in Romans 1, referring to God giving up the heathen to sin. I is in this judgmental sense that God had made Israel wander from His ways and hardened their hearts. It is not that God has sovereignty reprobated individual Jews to hell. He has not made his point . . . Ortlund put a deterministic spin on Psalm 139. Commenting on the verse 5 reference to God hemming him in: “David is confessing his vivid awareness of God’s unrelenting attentions bombarding the fortress of his soul from all sides. As a result, God has David under his control, as the second line implies. All David can do is yield.” Certainly we can agree that God is actively involved in the circumstances and many details of David’s life, including Nathan’s confrontation of his sin. But was this exhaustive in God determining that David would sin? This is what Ortlund implied! Then in commenting on verse 14 he took the phrase “your works” as a reference t the unfolding of events in David’s life as being solely divine works. The immediately preceding context, however, is a reference to God’s forming him in his mother’s womb, so Ortlund is guilty of isogesis here. In verse 16, he focused on the statement that David’s days were ordained or planned by God, they were written in God’s book. This is the heart of the argument: “He means that his life, considered not only as a whole but also right down to his daily experience, was determined (what other word fits?) ahead of time” (p. 32). Again, would Ortlund include David’s sins with their terrible consequences upon the children of Israel in this? We should hope not! His discussion hinges upon the meaning of yatzar in v. 16. He didn’t examine this word (as he should have done), but BDB lists: “2b. Fig. for frame, pre-ordain, plan (in divine purpose)” (p. 427). Yes, God has a general plan for every believer’s days. The RSV uses “formed,” which may be on a target since we can understand how our days are formed by God’s workings and ours. Would he say that every detail of David’s life was a direct work of the Holy Spirit? Even as Calvinistic a writer as R.C. Sproul acknowledges that there is a synergism in the Christian life. Would Ortlund extrapolate this to also say that the days of unbelievers’ lives are also pre-ordained? . . . Ortlund tried to develop his view of sovereignty from the book of Jonah. Certainly God’s sovereign dealings with man comes out clearly in this book, but not the deterministic concept. Time and again God had to confront Jonah to move him to even minimal obedience. But never did He work any “irresistible grace” on Jonah. This is the pattern in God’s dealings with man over the ages—He has to confront mankind (Cain, the pre-flood peoples, Israel, Christians today, etc.) to bring about repentant faith and obedience. The book of Jonah saying nothing about exhaustive control of humans. Indeed, did God in eternity past decree Jonah’s disobedience? Ortlund then quoted Job 12:13-16 about how “God retains ultimacy in all things.” He seems to imply that God is ultimately behind man’s deceiving and being deceived, whereas Job’s point is more simply that the deceiver and his victim are both in the hands of God, just as the song goes, “He’s god the whole world in His hand.”

In any case, Ortlund’s whole discussion misses the point! All the passages deal with God’s providence in the lives of believers, not with God’s exhaustive control of all the events transpiring in the whole world. Omnicausality was the unbiblical notion that Genevan-influenced hyper-Calvinists got put into the Westminster Confession of Faith, which came out of a politico-religious conference, after all. It is not even essential to Calvin’s Calvinism, as Richard Muller claimed, was rejected by Richard Baxter, and most importantly, has no basis in the one clause of one verse (Eph. 1:11) which is claimed by its proponents. To conclude, Ortlund’s discussion has no force against a mediate soteriology. (C. Gordon Olson, Beyond Calvinism and Arminianism: An Inductive Mediate Theology of Salvation [3d ed.; Lynchburg, Va.: Global Gospel Publishers, 2012], 37, 38, emphasis in original)



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