Why There’s No Middle Position Between Calvinism and Arminianism

Man cannot help himself but to try to create frameworks within mystery and to create parachurch organizations, committees or fellowships. And most are created and driven by a man (i.e. John Calvin) and many fall apart or fail after that man or his successor passes on.

In this debate, there are a basic set of questions, and these questions can only be answered in a certain number of ways. All of those questions have been asked, and the possible answers have all been given. What remains is to choose which answers you think are the most biblically faithful.

How has the author come to this grand insight? Certainly, there can be questions and answers that we in our fallible minds haven't considered.

....but I do remember once reading a medieval scholar's writing discussing something along the lines of essential will of God vs. non-essential. So at least someone has tried to find a middle ground--hopefully without becoming a heretic! It's worth noting as well that Arminius himself, I'm told, loved Calvin's Institutes and held a much stronger view of divine sovereignty than do most modern "Arminians".

Sometimes the whole deal reminds me of a Bible study I once led, of Hebrews, where two participants would debate divine sovereignty while I tried to walk everyone else through the treasures of that epistle; they were getting so worked up about the mysteries of divine sovereignty, they were missing the basic treasures of Hebrews.

There is a lot of detail in the article on why the author sees the debate the way he does. It’s worth a read.

It does all boil down to a relatively small number of questions. And he’s certainly correct that debate on them has gone on for many centuries in one form or another.

Whether a true ‘middle’ is impossible, I don’t know. What I do know is that humans often trip up over language then debate an “opposing” view, when they are saying essentially the same things a different way or with a different emphasis. I have directly observed this with this particular debate more than once, though I’m not saying there aren’t real opposing views. There are. Just not as many there sometimes seems to be.

If you read Roger Olson on what Jacob Arminius actually taught, it looks like a lot of ‘Arminians’ are more Arminian than Arminius. I also often have gotten the impression that many ‘Calvinists’ are more Calvinist than Calvin.

Second thing I do know, is that humans are not logically consistent (myself included), and there can certainly be ‘middle’ views that don’t really cohere. I’ve heard a lot of those. The internal consistency test fails pretty quickly with most of them.

One last thing I’ll claim to know: There is the ‘shrug’ view. It would not be quite accurate to call it a view ‘between’ the Big Two. It’s more of a view that it’s OK to not have a view. Functionally, it ends up sometimes leaning one way, sometimes leaning the other way, but the gist is: “I don’t know how it all fits together. Let’s just focus on some points of agreement and leave the rest to mystery.” It has a lot of appeal. But there are lots of problems with that, too. Is it OK to have a teaching ministry where you teach one thing one Sunday and then teach the opposite three Sundays later? So coherence matters, if you love truth.

But I don’t have a solution to offer.

I’ve leaned toward sovereignty and the weakness of human will for all of my adult life, but lately as I’ve mediated more deeply on what it means to be created ‘in the image of God,’ I think I have sometimes slipped into a determinism that doesn’t honor that truth. But… it is not a puzzle I feel like I have a solution for.