Replies

Your article is well-written, but I must disagree with you on one point. While it is true that Inshallah invokes the concept of the will of God, there are in fact many Christians who believe in the sovereign will of God who are the very opposite of your irresponsible person template. Indeed, there are a number of concepts in Scripture which, if extracted and isolated from their original theological context would become grotesque and misleading caricatures of the underlying truth they represent. Remember, Satan is unoriginal. He cannot operate from truth; therefore he cannot create valid, new ideas. As a result, all of his systems are toxic rearrangements of good and beneficial ideas. Marxism is a case in point. It certainly would be good if everyone had all their needs met, and it would be equally good if everyone made a fair contribution to the effort.

Now comes the departure from reality. People, as you say, are imperfect, and often are unwilling to contribute to the needs of others on a voluntary basis. They need motivation. Free markets motivate individual effort by rewarding it, but Marxism has a void here, and defaults to using the brutality of state force to compel contribution. It has such a void because it has borrowed incompletely from Christianity. The early Christians are sometimes accused of being “communist” because they shared all things in common. But they were not, because their sharing was totally voluntary. It had to come from the heart. Remember that Annanias and Saphira were told, before they were judged for lying to the Holy Spirit, that they had, as Christians, retained the right to withhold from the communal resources as long as they were honest with God about it. Marxism, like Satan, takes the living heart out of goodness and makes it a mechanical function powered by threat of force. No wonder the analogy to zombies keeps surfacing in this context.

But my broader point is this: Inshallah, i.e., the notion of the will of God governing all things, in isolation from the totality of Islamic doctrine, is not the cause of irresponsible behavior. People are irresponsible because that is the nature of human sinfulness. Rather, I contend an implied belief in unbridled human free will can be found in any and all persons who are “brave” enough to assert their own little will against the divinely inspired dictates of conscience. Sin would have no foothold at all if we fully accepted the authority of God over everything.

Furthermore, the will of God does have a proper role in Christian theology, and in that role has led to many positive benefits. First, with respect to salvation, if we are in fact dead in our trespasses and sins, as Paul teaches, it requires the life-giving work of God in the soul to awaken us to our need of redemption. There are countless Scriptures which put the initiative for salvation in the hands of God, not humans. We love him, as it says, because he first loved us. When you can successfully explain how a dead will is a free will, I may change my position on the matter.

And more than that, there are many Scriptures that assert God’s providential role in events well beyond personal salvation. God sent the plagues on Egypt. They fought and fought but the outcome was never in doubt. God’s people would be set free. There is no uncertainty or incomplete understanding in God about the consequences of anything he does. As Isaiah says, he is the God who knows the end from the beginning. Even in political affairs, we are told that God sets up kings, and God takes them down. The will of God, as Spurgeon said, really is the axle upon which the wheel of the universe turns.

However, the pertinent question is this: How has that understanding of the will of God, in the context of Christianity, and often referred to as Calvinism, affected human responsibility among those who believe it? Some have, it is sadly true, devolved into irresponsibility, but only because of abandoning the full compliment of Christian truth, not because of their belief in the will of God per se. Paul says we are to work out our salvation in “fear and trembling,” not because we think it all depends on us and we will likely blow it, but precisely because we know that it is God working in us both to will and to do what lines up with his purposes. As Nebuchadnezzar declared, if God wills it, no one can stop it.

That concept, that we have the backing of God himself in the pursuit of good, inspires an indestructible courage to face all obstacles. If one is a Christian, that courage takes the form of consistent allegiance to the truths of the Gospel. If, however, this truth has been isolated from a Christian context and set down in the company of murderers to justify them in vigorous pursuit of their evil ways, an entirely different result may be expected.

So I would not rush to judgment so quickly that a belief in the will of God will automatically produce irresponsibility. Otherwise, how can a Christian pray the Lord’s Prayer, which specifically hopes for the will of God to be as manifest on earth as it is in Heaven? No, hold them responsible who abandon their duties of conscience simply because of the evil resident within them. Sin can take many disguises, including a partial acceptance of the highest truths. That is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.