Pollster says he can't find Christianity transforming lives

VENTURA, Calif. -- Pollster George Barna, known these days as the bearer of bad tidings about the state of Christianity in America, arrived in his office a few minutes late for a 10 a.m. appointment.

His hair was ruffled; his eyes puffy. Shoulders slouched. Being the George Gallup of the conservative evangelical world is a heavy burden for Barna, who often works into the early morning, deciphering numbers generated by his surveys to find church trends.

The 48-year-old author of 30 books, who describes himself as a raging introvert, is a popular national speaker. And he produces enough in-your-face statistics and blunt talk to irritate pastors, cost him business and earn a reputation for having, as one magazine put it, "the gift of discouragement."

His data undercut some of the core beliefs that should, by definition, set evangelicals apart from their more liberal brethren. Findings of his polls show, for example, that:

• The divorce rate is no different for born-again Christians than for those who do not consider themselves religious.

• Only a minority of born-again adults (44 percent) and a tiny proportion of born-again teenagers (9 percent) are certain that absolute moral truth exists.

• Most Christians' votes are influenced more by economic self-interest than by spiritual and moral values.

• Desiring to have a close, personal relationship with God ranks sixth among the 21 life goals tested among born-agains, trailing such desires as "living a comfortable lifestyle."

'Are people's lives being transformed" by Christianity? Barna has asked. "We can't find evidence of a transformation."

Even Barna's toughest critics concede that Barna Research Group's polls carry considerable weight because of his first-rate surveying techniques and his 17-year-long record of tracking church and cultural trends.

His work has been used by major companies (Ford Motor Co. and Walt Disney, for example) and religious organizations such as the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and World Vision.

"He is the accepted authority on church trends," said Bob Cavin, director of the Texas Baptist Leadership Center. "He gives pastors insight, not only into the effectiveness of the church, but with trends in society that help the pastors with their strategic planning."

Because of his influence, many are watching with interest as Barna branches out from his usual business. He has been preoccupied with quantifying contemporary Christian beliefs, attitudes and practices; comparing them with biblical truths; and delivering the results to pastors, Christian leaders and laity. He said that he once hoped his analyses would be used as building blocks for more relevant churches.

But he decided this year to take a more active role by helping to identify and develop new and better church leaders who will boldly go where their predecessors haven't gone before: to radically revamp the church. He said he believes the process will take decades -- generations -- to complete.

"One of our challenges is to revisit the structures and means through which people experience Christ," Barna said. "People have been talking about developing the 'new church' for the past several decades, but nothing new has been forthcoming."

According to Barna, pastors are great teachers, but not necessarily adept at leadership. To back up his claim, he cited one of his own polls: It showed that only 12 percent of senior pastors say they have the spiritual gift of leadership and 8 percent say they have the gift of evangelism. In contrast, two-thirds say they have the gift of teaching or preaching.

"We, not God, have created a system that doesn't work and that we're reluctant to change."

Barna also is in the early stages of establishing a genuine and appealing Christian presence in secular entities: film, music, media and politics. He has identified these as the institutions that hold the most influence over Americans.

What's needed are "skilled professionals who love Christ and model his ways through their thoughts, words and behavior in enviable and biblically consistent ways," he said.

For Barna, the need for better leadership and better Christian role models in the secular world was underscored by a poll he released this month.

The survey showed that the Sept. 11 attacks had virtually no lasting effects on America's faith, despite a 20 percent rise in church attendance during the first few weeks afterward.

"We missed a huge opportunity," he said, adding that, because of their own shallow faith, church regulars needed so much reassurance themselves that they couldn't minister to newcomers.

Mike Regele, author of "The Death of the Church," is one of many who believe the Barna Research Group's statistical work is excellent, but the conclusions drawn by the company's founder are too harsh.

The hypocrisy of Christians, Regele said, "has been a part of the church, probably since the day of Pentecost" and doesn't indicate its collapse.

"It sounds like he's very, very angry at the church," said Regele, a church critic himself who is ultimately an optimist. "There are reasons to be disappointed, but scripture never said we'd be perfect. We shouldn't view the whole institution as a failure."

With each new Barna poll or book, the attacks begin again: He's too negative; he has it in for pastors; he's arrogant.

The criticism "would affect any human being," said Barna, a husband and father of two. "We all want to be loved and accepted by others, but we also have a higher calling to which we each must be true."

Barna said he has learned painfully that giving advice on how to revitalize churches in America is a hugely complex proposition that doesn't fit well into sound bites. He has learned to be more guarded.

Although his statistics often show self-described Christians living lives no different from those of atheists, Barna's faith never has wavered.

"The issue isn't whether Jesus or Christianity is real," he said. "The issue is, are Americans willing to put Christ first in their lives?

Predestination in the Old Testament..

1. The Historical Literature

a. Genesis: The Patriarchal Histories
Let us begin with the patriarchal histories (Gen. 12-50). The theme of these narratives, most simply stated, is the survival and growth of the family of Abraham. The dramatic unity of the stories, however, lies in the tension between the threats to the survival of the family and the divine promise that they will live and multiply (Gen. 12.2). The threats to survival follow in rapid succession: famine in the land of promise (12.10); Sarai, the wife through whom the promise is to be fulfllled, is taken into the Pharaoh's harem (12.11-20); Abraham's nephew Lot, his male heir, leaves the patriarchal family (ch. 13); Sarai is barren (ch. 16); Sarah falls prey to the Canaanite king Abimelech(ch. 20); Ishmael, Abraham's son, is cast out from the family (ch. 21); Isaac, now his only heir, is offered as a sacriflce (ch. 22); Rebekah is barren (25.21); Rebekah and Isaac run the danger of death in Gerar (ch. 26); Esau plots to kill Jacob (27.42); Rachel is barren (30.1); famine drives Jacob and his family out of the promised land and into dangers in Egypt (42.1-4).
Here the form the predestination takes is the promise. God has long-term intentions for the Abrahamic family, which he alone will bring about-no word is spoken in Gen. 12.1-3 of conditions Abraham must fulfll./3/ That is surely a predestination. But the speciflc form that predestination takes is a promise of descendants, a land, divine blessing, and blessing to the Gentiles. That is, the predestining does not point Abraham's attention to immutable decrees established in eternity past, but to a future in which the destiny will progressively be realized. God's predestination is thus not a possession that Abraham and his descendants can count their own, but an announcement of what God will make of the patriarchal family. Abraham's response to the announcement will not be thanksgiving that everything has been settled long ago in the counsels of eternity, but faith in God that he will bring that destiny into being.
The promise (predestination) is for the sake of the Abrahamic family and of the Gentile nations. The text of Gen. 12.1-3 does not enable us to establish where the emphasis lies: Is it flrst and foremost on the blessing to Abraham, or climactically on the blessing to the nations? It is not important to decide the priority, but the dual direction of the promise is signiflcant. The predestination is not for the sake exclusively of those who are predestined, but for the sake of world blessing;/4/ but neither does it relegate the Abrahamic family to a secondary role just because they are only part of God's larger intentions. Many traditional studies of predestination have erred in neglecting God's wider intentions that reach beyond his chosen people, but it is unnecessary to over-react to this misplaced emphasis with a hesitation to speak of God's predestination of the chosen people.
What now is the role of predestination in the patriarchal stories? It might be thought that since the divine promise precedes all that happens, there can be no real crises that call the promise into question but only an outworking of the divine intentions that is recognized by the actors in the story as inevitable. But such is plainly not the mood of the patriarchal narratives. The story is focused, as we have seen earlier, on the hazards that the promise faces just as much as it is on the promise itself. It is from the tension between the promise and the realities of life that the story gains its momentum. So the predestination is not the absolutely determinative factor in what happens. The story is as much about what happens against the promise as about how the promise is fulfllled.
That is not to deny that in one way or another everything that happens advances the fulfllment of the promise, or even, perhaps, that in retrospect God's predestination can be seen also in some happenings that were apparently against the promise. Thus Joseph can say that his bondage in Egypt, though plotted by the brothers, was equally intended by God (45.5; 50.20); and perhaps the same thing could be said truly enough of other reverses in the patriarchal fortunes. But that is precisely what these narratives do not keep on saying, and it would be wrong to insist that the narrator intends us to extrapolate Joseph's remarks to every detail of the histories. Whether or not it is true that God has planned everything in advance, all that the patriarchal stories show is the promise beset by hazards but moving towards fulfllment nevertheless. That is what Genesis 12-50 means by predestination.

b. Genesis: The Primaeval History
The primaeval history (Gen. 1-11) is, unlike the patriarchal history, a history without a promise. It is, in fact, a history in which predestination in general is conspicuous by its absence. We cannot here speak (with one or two exceptions) of the form or role that predestinarian ideas have, but only of what takes their place.
The movement of the primaeval history is largely initiated by humans; God's action is a positive or negative response to their decisions. If Adam decides to become an independent being, determining for himself what is good and evil, God's response is to turn him loose from the garden and-make him independent. If Cain deflles the tilled ground with spilled blood, God responds by driving him away from the tilled ground that will no longer yield its strength to him. If human wickedness spreads so drastically that the earth is 'fllled with violence' (6.11), God responds by being sorry that he has made humans, and by determining to destroy humankind. If the men of Babel say, 'Come, let us build a tower with its top in the heavens', God responds, even to the extent of imitating their speech, with: 'Come, let us go down and destroy their tower' (11.4, 7). Yet also, when Adam and Eve sense their nakedness before God and prepare makeshift clothes, God responds to this appropriate sense of shame and provides proper clothes for them. When Cain shouts that his punishment, to be driven from the society of humans and from the presence of Yahweh, is greater than he can bear, God responds even to the murderer and sets a mark on him to protect him from his fellows.
And where is the predestination in all this? To suppose that any of this catches God by surprise, or even that all of these human decisions are merely human decisions that God has to make the best of now that they have happened, would doubtless be contrary to the spirit of the Old Testament. But the story does not stop to point to decrees established in the dark counsels of eternity. What is important in the story of humanity, Genesis 1-11 might well be saying, is not what God has already decided to do, but with what freedom he can respond, in mercy or judgment, to human decisions,/5/ creating good from evil and swallowing up wrath with mercy.
Though this is the major thrust of the primaeval history, as I see it, there are some secondary elements that belong to the realm of predestination.
First, the creation story of Genesis 1 plainly envisages God creating everything with a purpose. The sun is created in order to rule the day, to distinguish day from night, to act as a marker of time. Humanity is created in order to rule on earth as God's viceregent. All living things are created according to their kind, that is, what they are and can be is a determinate part of the created order. God has not created an aimless, formless, indeterminate world, but a world of beautiful order where everything has a destiny: to be what God made it to be. Predestination in this sense, then, is an aspect of the doctrine of creation. Needless to say, this is not a predestination to salvation or damnation, but an afflrmation of God's purposiveness in creation.
Secondly, there is a predestinarian type of idea in God's selection of Noah and his family to be saved from the fiood. The story of Noah flts the pattern of the other narratives of the primaeval history in that after the judgment upon human sin is announced, grace intervenes and mitigates the punishment. But the Noah story is unlike the preceding narratives in that God's act of grace toward sinful humanity does not extend to all those who have sinned, but only to a chosen family, in whose salvation the human race will be kept alive. But why does God choose Noah to survive? It is not that Noah is the one righteous man on earth, to whose righteousness God can respond with salvation. For it is signiflcant that God's favour rests on Noah (6.8) before any word is spoken of Noah's righteousness (6.9)./6/ Here the form predestination takes is unmerited election.
Thirdly, from the perspective of Genesis 12, it becomes clear that a predestined goal was shaping the course of the primaeval history. What would otherwise be a collection of unconnected episodes in Genesis 1-11 is seen from the standpoint of Genesis 12 to be a sequence that leads to Abraham. The primaeval history itself has had no interest in stressing God's control of history, for its interest has been in God's freedom to respond to human decision. But in its setting in the book of Genesis the primaeval history takes on a new signiflcance: the primaeval history is but the prelude to the story of the promise.

Predestination in the Old Testament..

2. The Wisdom Literature

a. Proverbs
The heart of the theology of Proverbs is that good or bad deeds bring appropriate reward or punishment from God.

A perverse man will be fllled with the fruit of his ways
and a good man with the fruit of his deeds (14.14).

The righteous is delivered from trouble,
and the wicked gets into it instead (11.8).

He who is steadfast in righteousness will live,
but he who pursues evil will die (11.19).

That is, the destiny of humans is determined by their own behaviour. The form that predestination takes, then, in Proverbs' theology of reward is human self-determination. It is not God who decides whether someone shall be counted among the righteous and the wicked; it is their own actions that determine that. Thus Proverbs contains not only predictive proverbs, of the kind I have quoted, but also descriptive proverbs about what constitutes wickedness, folly, wisdom, sloth, pretence, generosity, deceit, so that readers may recognize themselves and know their destiny.
Predestination in Proverbs is not contradictory to or incompatible with predestination as we have seen it in Genesis. But the emphasis is very different. Proverbs is not denying the promise to Abraham and his offspring, but neither does it flnd it necessary to afflrm it. When it is a matter of how people should live their lives, Proverbs is saying, divine predestination is not the point; what counts is how people are destining their own future. No doubt there are ways in which divine predestination could be relevant to ethics: another Israelite teacher might well have exhorted his hearers to 'walk worthy of the vocation with which you are called' (Eph. 4.1). But Proverbs does not choose that route. Proverbs of course does not claim to be the whole of Scripture, and it would be a mistake to regard the theology of Proverbs as the only valid way of looking at the question of ethics. But it is a legitimate position, and as such receives conflrmation in the New Testament (see Rom. 2.6-10), even by Paul, whom most would regard as the New Testament's chief apostle of divine predestination.
Already something has been said about the role of predestination in Proverbs: in the sense of human self-predestination, it is central to the teaching of the book. But the role such predestination plays in the theology of Proverbs can be more carefully evaluated if we consider how God is related to this scheme of deed and retribution.
In the flrst place, it is clear that God is the one who brings reward or punishment. Yet it is noticeable that God's activity in this respect is not often explicit in Proverbs (10.29 is about the nearest Proverbs comes to saying it). More frequently good or bad seems to bring its own reward automatically: 'The work of a man's hand comes back to him' (12.14)./7/ It is not of course denied that this is God's doing, but the emphasis does not lie there. Secondly, and more important, God's relation to human destiny is that he creates the path of life, which is wisdom, and summons people to follow that path. If people are righteous, in the terminology of Proverbs, or if they have wisdom, it is not because they have inherently a good streak in them, but because they have been amenable to the teaching of the wisdom that is a gift from God. 'Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him' (22.15). That 'discipline' or 'instruction' is ultimately 'the Lord's discipline' (3.11), and the wisdom that the maturing child develops is regarded as 'given' by God (2.6). So while growth in wisdom and goodness is a matter of effort and discipline, Proverbs' concept of wisdom as essentially God's creature (cf. 8.22-31) makes it impossible for the righteous to regard their wisdom as their own achievement. In a word, people prepare their own destiny. If their destiny is life, they have God to thank, and not themselves. But if they are headed for destruction, they have only themselves to thank for that.
Finally, having observed where the emphasis lies in Proverbs' teaching about predestination, we are perhaps in a better position to understand some sentences that apparently set forth a rigorous divine predestination:
The Lord has made everything for its purpose,
even the wicked for the day of trouble (16.4).

Here might seem to be presupposed a doctrine of 'double predestination', but what is really involved is the usual teaching of Proverbs about appropriate retribution. The word translated 'purpose' is actually 'answer', so a better translation would be:

The Lord has made everything with its counterpart,
so the wicked will have his day of doom./8/
That is, the wicked are on their way to their appropriate fate. However, this does not mean that their destiny is flxed and irreversible; iniquity can be atoned for (16.6), they need not remain wicked.
Again, when we flnd:

The king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord;
he turns it wherever he will (21.1).

we do not have some doctrinaire assertion that a king never makes any decisions of his own and is only a puppet in God's hand. That would be contrary to the general outlook of Proverbs, though the proverb in isolation could doubtless mean that. Rather, what is taught here is that God, the world's governor, cannot be thwarted even by kings, who are accustomed to having their own way. It is a variation on the theme of 21.30:

No wisdom, no understanding, no counsel,
can avail against the Lord.

Similar proverbs are:

A man's mind plans his way,
but the Lord directs his steps (16.9).

The plans of the mind belong to man,
but the answer of the tongue is from the Lord (16.1).

The horse is made ready for the day of battle,
but the victory belongs to the Lord (21.31).

Our English equivalent is: 'Man proposes, God disposes'. Those who believe that God rules the world are bound to say as much. They do not mean that God always sets aside human plans or that it is only divine decisions that matter; that plainly is not what the book of Proverbs as a whole is saying. But when it comes to confiict between God and humans, undoubtedly it cannot be humans who win the day.

b. Ecclesiastes
Ecclesiastes is surely the leading Old Testament exponent of predestination. Life is essentially for him a matter of God's 'allotment' or 'gift' (3.13; 5.18; 6.2; cf. 7.13). Everything in life happens according to its allotted occasion (3.17); so he says in his most famous lines:

For everything its season, and for every activity under heaven its time:
a time to be born and a time to die;
a time to plant and a time to uproot;
a time to kill and a time to heal (3.1-3, neb).

That does not mean that there is an appropriate time for every human activity, which people must recognize and fall in with; this is not an ethical precept, but a global statement about the nature of human existence, that the variegated experiences of life do not occur by human design but when their 'time' arrives./9/ Once again, however, it is valuable to consider the form and role of Ecclesiastes' idea of predestination.
As for its form, we can observe flrst that Ecclesiastes is not thinking about differentiated destinies for humans after death. For him, good and bad alike meet the same ultimate destiny-death. If there is any hereafter, Ecclesiastes does not reckon with it; he simply asks, 'Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down to the earth?' (3.21). His horizon is the span of a human life.
Secondly, Ecclesiastes is not thinking about a predestination to good or evil deeds. He believes that there is a distinction between the righteous and the wicked (e.g. 8.14),/10/ and that people ought to be righteous, fear God, and keep his commandments (12.13). He is not arguing that the righteous and the wicked are so because of any predestination.
Yet, thirdly, there is something predestined for all-that is, their death. Death is undeniably 'in the hand of God': 'the time to die' (3.2) is appointed by God as the conclusion of these 'days of life that God gives' humans under the sun (8.15), when the human 'spirit returns to God who gave it' (12.7). Ecclesiastes is not viewing death as a punishment, or as a tragedy, but as a most signiflcant factor in the created order. Humans are mortal; it is God who has made them so; the time when they succumb to their mortality is likewise of his making.
Now, fourthly, God's sovereign freedom over death becomes for Ecclesiastes the paradigm example of God's freedom over all reality: 'I know that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, or anything taken from it' (3.14). He is not speaking of God's initial creation, but of the multifarious activities that go on upon earth (3.1-8), all upon the occasion appointed for them (3.17). To put it rather crudely: all that life adds up to is death, so if death is destined by God, all that life is is equally destined by God.
Death is plainly a nodal point in Ecclesiastes' theology. Probably he is an old man himself, who, as he faces the prospect of death, asks what 'proflt' there has been in life. Death negates all the values that humans strive for in life; pleasure, fame, success, possessions, even wisdom and righteousness, are empty in the face of death (cf. 2.1; 9.11; 4.7-8; 6.1-2; 2.12-17; 8.14). This realization brings him into confiict with the ideals of wisdom teaching, as they are to be seen especially in Proverbs. Wisdom offers life, but what about when life itself is no longer desirable (12.1), or when life has been overcome by death?
The fact of death is a constituent element of the created order; it is part of God's world, God has made things like this. Then he too has created the relationship between the values of life and the fact of death. It is God who has created a world in which all values add to zero and what is crooked cannot be made straight (7.13; 1.15). Weeping, laughter, seeking, losing, silence and speech, war and peace (3.1-8) are real, but each has its time, and one is superseded by the other without any discernible progress or any measurable proflt. So the catalogue of the 'times' concludes: '[But] what gain has the worker from his toil?', or better, 'What does the doer [of these] add by his effort?'/11/ And that is the world God has made; that is his destined order of things, so argues Ecclesiastes.
Fifthly, we may note that predestination for Ecclesiastes does not mean that the particular acts of individuals are flxed in advance by God, but rather that the possibilities open to humans and the value of human activities are settled in advance by the framework of God's created order, which terminates everything human with death.
When we come to enquire about the role that these ideas of predestination, so difflcult to nuance correctly, play in Ecclesiastes' book, we may be surprised that Ecclesiastes is not impelled by this view of life to advocate suicide or despair. Ecclesiastes is, in fact, far from pessimistic; his message is life-afflrming to a remarkable degree: 'There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and flnd enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God' (2.24).
There are two reasons for Ecclesiastes' positive attitude.
First, Ecclesiastes does not doubt that God knows what he is doing. 'It is an unhappy business that God has given to the sons of men to be busy with' (1.13), when looked at from a human perspective. Yet God has 'made everything beautiful in its time' (3.11), he says, echoing the repeated phrase of Genesis 1: 'And God saw that it was good'. It is simply that God's purpose is inaccessible to humans; he has so made humans that they 'cannot flnd out what God has done from the beginning to the end' (3.11), that is, they cannot understand the totality of God's purpose nor how the individual event is related to the totality. 'As you do not know how the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything' (11.4; cf. 8.16-17; 9.1; Prov. 30.3). God is inscrutable. In so saying, Ecclesiastes holds up a needful warning sign before the teachers of wisdom who claimed they could know how and when God would act, ever faithful to the principle of retribution./12/ Job knows well that retribution is only a general rule, not an infallible one: the righteous may suffer. The Psalmists too experience the prosperity of the wicked and the victimization of the innocent, quite contrary to the principle of retribution. So also Ecclesiastes; his extremism, neglectful of God's actual revelation of himself to Israel, is because he is working stolidly from a theology of creation. To Ecclesiastes, God is essentially Creator (cf. 12.1); and a creator must be wise, he must know what he is about, even if we can know nothing of his purpose. This is a world away from a belief in a blind fate or a capricious Deity.
Secondly, as a theologian of creation Ecclesiastes must accept that what is is 'from the hand of God'. And part of what is is happiness, work, wisdom, righteousness, the commandments. Since they exist, they were created, and to deny them would be to deny, or 'forget', one's Creator. Whatever else the world is for, it is given to humans for their enjoyment (2.24; 5.18-19); therefore let people busy themselves with their work and their pleasure (3.12-13; 8.15; 9.9; 11.9). Precisely because these 'goods' have been created, they are approved by God (9.7). Whatever one's hand flnds to do (9.10) is what one is intended to do.
What we flnd, then, in Ecclesiastes, is a radical awareness of a divine predestination that encompasses the whole of human activity but that, just because it is inscrutable, imposes no constraints on people, nor weakens their self-determination, but rather points them from the mystery of their existence to the mystery of the Creator God.

Predestination in the Old Testament..

The Prophetic Literature

In the prophets, predestinarian ideas take on two major forms: the concept of God's election of Israel, and the concept of divine purposes in history.

a. The Election of Israel
The flrst major form that predestination takes on is that the people of Israel has been chosen by God to be his people. That is a pre
2. The Wisdom Literature

a. Proverbs
The heart of the theology of Proverbs is that good or bad deeds bring appropriate reward or punishment from God.

A perverse man will be fllled with the fruit of his ways
and a good man with the fruit of his deeds (14.14).

The righteous is delivered from trouble,
and the wicked gets into it instead (11.8).

He who is steadfast in righteousness will live,
but he who pursues evil will die (11.19).

That is, the destiny of humans is determined by their own behaviour. The form that predestination takes, then, in Proverbs' theology of reward is human self-determination. It is not God who decides whether someone shall be counted among the righteous and the wicked; it is their own actions that determine that. Thus Proverbs contains not only predictive proverbs, of the kind I have quoted, but also descriptive proverbs about what constitutes wickedness, folly, wisdom, sloth, pretence, generosity, deceit, so that readers may recognize themselves and know their destiny.
Predestination in Proverbs is not contradictory to or incompatible with predestination as we have seen it in Genesis. But the emphasis is very different. Proverbs is not denying the promise to Abraham and his offspring, but neither does it flnd it necessary to afflrm it. When it is a matter of how people should live their lives, Proverbs is saying, divine predestination is not the point; what counts is how people are destining their own future. No doubt there are ways in which divine predestination could be relevant to ethics: another Israelite teacher might well have exhorted his hearers to 'walk worthy of the vocation with which you are called' (Eph. 4.1). But Proverbs does not choose that route. Proverbs of course does not claim to be the whole of Scripture, and it would be a mistake to regard the theology of Proverbs as the only valid way of looking at the question of ethics. But it is a legitimate position, and as such receives conflrmation in the New Testament (see Rom. 2.6-10), even by Paul, whom most would regard as the New Testament's chief apostle of divine predestination.
Already something has been said about the role of predestination in Proverbs: in the sense of human self-predestination, it is central to the teaching of the book. But the role such predestination plays in the theology of Proverbs can be more carefully evaluated if we consider how God is related to this scheme of deed and retribution.
In the flrst place, it is clear that God is the one who brings reward or punishment. Yet it is noticeable that God's activity in this respect is not often explicit in Proverbs (10.29 is about the nearest Proverbs comes to saying it). More frequently good or bad seems to bring its own reward automatically: 'The work of a man's hand comes back to him' (12.14)./7/ It is not of course denied that this is God's doing, but the emphasis does not lie there. Secondly, and more important, God's relation to human destiny is that he creates the path of life, which is wisdom, and summons people to follow that path. If people are righteous, in the terminology of Proverbs, or if they have wisdom, it is not because they have inherently a good streak in them, but because they have been amenable to the teaching of the wisdom that is a gift from God. 'Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him' (22.15). That 'discipline' or 'instruction' is ultimately 'the Lord's discipline' (3.11), and the wisdom that the maturing child develops is regarded as 'given' by God (2.6). So while growth in wisdom and goodness is a matter of effort and discipline, Proverbs' concept of wisdom as essentially God's creature (cf. 8.22-31) makes it impossible for the righteous to regard their wisdom as their own achievement. In a word, people prepare their own destiny. If their destiny is life, they have God to thank, and not themselves. But if they are headed for destruction, they have only themselves to thank for that.
Finally, having observed where the emphasis lies in Proverbs' teaching about predestination, we are perhaps in a better position to understand some sentences that apparently set forth a rigorous divine predestination:
The Lord has made everything for its purpose,
even the wicked for the day of trouble (16.4).

Here might seem to be presupposed a doctrine of 'double predestination', but what is really involved is the usual teaching of Proverbs about appropriate retribution. The word translated 'purpose' is actually 'answer', so a better translation would be:

The Lord has made everything with its counterpart,
so the wicked will have his day of doom./8/
That is, the wicked are on their way to their appropriate fate. However, this does not mean that their destiny is flxed and irreversible; iniquity can be atoned for (16.6), they need not remain wicked.
Again, when we flnd:

The king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord;
he turns it wherever he will (21.1).

we do not have some doctrinaire assertion that a king never makes any decisions of his own and is only a puppet in God's hand. That would be contrary to the general outlook of Proverbs, though the proverb in isolation could doubtless mean that. Rather, what is taught here is that God, the world's governor, cannot be thwarted even by kings, who are accustomed to having their own way. It is a variation on the theme of 21.30:

No wisdom, no understanding, no counsel,
can avail against the Lord.

Similar proverbs are:

A man's mind plans his way,
but the Lord directs his steps (16.9).

The plans of the mind belong to man,
but the answer of the tongue is from the Lord (16.1).

The horse is made ready for the day of battle,
but the victory belongs to the Lord (21.31).

Our English equivalent is: 'Man proposes, God disposes'. Those who believe that God rules the world are bound to say as much. They do not mean that God always sets aside human plans or that it is only divine decisions that matter; that plainly is not what the book of Proverbs as a whole is saying. But when it comes to confiict between God and humans, undoubtedly it cannot be humans who win the day.

b. Ecclesiastes
Ecclesiastes is surely the leading Old Testament exponent of predestination. Life is essentially for him a matter of God's 'allotment' or 'gift' (3.13; 5.18; 6.2; cf. 7.13). Everything in life happens according to its allotted occasion (3.17); so he says in his most famous lines:

For everything its season, and for every activity under heaven its time:
a time to be born and a time to die;
a time to plant and a time to uproot;
a time to kill and a time to heal (3.1-3, neb).

That does not mean that there is an appropriate time for every human activity, which people must recognize and fall in with; this is not an ethical precept, but a global statement about the nature of human existence, that the variegated experiences of life do not occur by human design but when their 'time' arrives./9/ Once again, however, it is valuable to consider the form and role of Ecclesiastes' idea of predestination.
As for its form, we can observe flrst that Ecclesiastes is not thinking about differentiated destinies for humans after death. For him, good and bad alike meet the same ultimate destiny-death. If there is any hereafter, Ecclesiastes does not reckon with it; he simply asks, 'Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down to the earth?' (3.21). His horizon is the span of a human life.
Secondly, Ecclesiastes is not thinking about a predestination to good or evil deeds. He believes that there is a distinction between the righteous and the wicked (e.g. 8.14),/10/ and that people ought to be righteous, fear God, and keep his commandments (12.13). He is not arguing that the righteous and the wicked are so because of any predestination.
Yet, thirdly, there is something predestined for all-that is, their death. Death is undeniably 'in the hand of God': 'the time to die' (3.2) is appointed by God as the conclusion of these 'days of life that God gives' humans under the sun (8.15), when the human 'spirit returns to God who gave it' (12.7). Ecclesiastes is not viewing death as a punishment, or as a tragedy, but as a most signiflcant factor in the created order. Humans are mortal; it is God who has made them so; the time when they succumb to their mortality is likewise of his making.
Now, fourthly, God's sovereign freedom over death becomes for Ecclesiastes the paradigm example of God's freedom over all reality: 'I know that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, or anything taken from it' (3.14). He is not speaking of God's initial creation, but of the multifarious activities that go on upon earth (3.1-8), all upon the occasion appointed for them (3.17). To put it rather crudely: all that life adds up to is death, so if death is destined by God, all that life is is equally destined by God.
Death is plainly a nodal point in Ecclesiastes' theology. Probably he is an old man himself, who, as he faces the prospect of death, asks what 'proflt' there has been in life. Death negates all the values that humans strive for in life; pleasure, fame, success, possessions, even wisdom and righteousness, are empty in the face of death (cf. 2.1; 9.11; 4.7-8; 6.1-2; 2.12-17; 8.14). This realization brings him into confiict with the ideals of wisdom teaching, as they are to be seen especially in Proverbs. Wisdom offers life, but what about when life itself is no longer desirable (12.1), or when life has been overcome by death?
The fact of death is a constituent element of the created order; it is part of God's world, God has made things like this. Then he too has created the relationship between the values of life and the fact of death. It is God who has created a world in which all values add to zero and what is crooked cannot be made straight (7.13; 1.15). Weeping, laughter, seeking, losing, silence and speech, war and peace (3.1-8) are real, but each has its time, and one is superseded by the other without any discernible progress or any measurable proflt. So the catalogue of the 'times' concludes: '[But] what gain has the worker from his toil?', or better, 'What does the doer [of these] add by his effort?'/11/ And that is the world God has made; that is his destined order of things, so argues Ecclesiastes.
Fifthly, we may note that predestination for Ecclesiastes does not mean that the particular acts of individuals are flxed in advance by God, but rather that the possibilities open to humans and the value of human activities are settled in advance by the framework of God's created order, which terminates everything human with death.
When we come to enquire about the role that these ideas of predestination, so difflcult to nuance correctly, play in Ecclesiastes' book, we may be surprised that Ecclesiastes is not impelled by this view of life to advocate suicide or despair. Ecclesiastes is, in fact, far from pessimistic; his message is life-afflrming to a remarkable degree: 'There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and flnd enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God' (2.24).
There are two reasons for Ecclesiastes' positive attitude.
First, Ecclesiastes does not doubt that God knows what he is doing. 'It is an unhappy business that God has given to the sons of men to be busy with' (1.13), when looked at from a human perspective. Yet God has 'made everything beautiful in its time' (3.11), he says, echoing the repeated phrase of Genesis 1: 'And God saw that it was good'. It is simply that God's purpose is inaccessible to humans; he has so made humans that they 'cannot flnd out what God has done from the beginning to the end' (3.11), that is, they cannot understand the totality of God's purpose nor how the individual event is related to the totality. 'As you do not know how the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything' (11.4; cf. 8.16-17; 9.1; Prov. 30.3). God is inscrutable. In so saying, Ecclesiastes holds up a needful warning sign before the teachers of wisdom who claimed they could know how and when God would act, ever faithful to the principle of retribution./12/ Job knows well that retribution is only a general rule, not an infallible one: the righteous may suffer. The Psalmists too experience the prosperity of the wicked and the victimization of the innocent, quite contrary to the principle of retribution. So also Ecclesiastes; his extremism, neglectful of God's actual revelation of himself to Israel, is because he is working stolidly from a theology of creation. To Ecclesiastes, God is essentially Creator (cf. 12.1); and a creator must be wise, he must know what he is about, even if we can know nothing of his purpose. This is a world away from a belief in a blind fate or a capricious Deity.
Secondly, as a theologian of creation Ecclesiastes must accept that what is is 'from the hand of God'. And part of what is is happiness, work, wisdom, righteousness, the commandments. Since they exist, they were created, and to deny them would be to deny, or 'forget', one's Creator. Whatever else the world is for, it is given to humans for their enjoyment (2.24; 5.18-19); therefore let people busy themselves with their work and their pleasure (3.12-13; 8.15; 9.9; 11.9). Precisely because these 'goods' have been created, they are approved by God (9.7). Whatever one's hand flnds to do (9.10) is what one is intended to do.
What we flnd, then, in Ecclesiastes, is a radical awareness of a divine predestination that encompasses the whole of human activity but that, just because it is inscrutable, imposes no constraints on people, nor weakens their self-determination, but rather points them from the mystery of their existence to the mystery of the Creator God.

destination because it is not just an act of grace or salvation but an act that establishes Israel's future destiny, and an act that deflnes what it will mean to be Israel.
The occasion of this election is not for the prophets an eternal decree but a historical act: the election took place at the exodus from Egypt (Ezek. 20.5-6). It was then that Israel was 'chosen', 'formed' (Isa. 43.20-21), 'called' (Hos. 11.1), 'wooed' (Hos. 2.14-15), 'known' (Amos 3.1-2). All these terms belong to the election vocabulary, for they all point to the divine action that constituted Israel.
The nature of this election is expressed by many images of Israel found in prophetic poetry./13/ Israel is God's vineyard, planted and tended by him (Isa. 5.1-7); God's bride, whom he took to himself in Egypt (Jer. 31.32), led through the wilderness (2.2), and lavished gifts upon (Hos. 2.7-8); God's servant, whom he has chosen (Isa. 41.8-9; 43.10; 44.1-2) and 'formed' (44.21) and destined to glorify him (49.3); God's adopted son, called by him from Egypt (Hos. 11.1).
We should also enquire about the role of the idea of election in the prophets, that is, why should the election of Israel be mentioned at all by the prophets? The major emphasis of the pre-exilic prophets is the announcement of imminent judgment upon Israel. Sometimes it is said that repentance is still possible, and the doom can be averted (e.g. Hos. 14.2). At other times it appears that it is too late for repentance (e.g. Amos 8.2), but in either case the focus is upon the heralded doom. The role of election in such a context is to highlight the contrast between God's grace and Israel's sin. Election in the prophets is no guarantee of eternal security. Amos is characteristic of prophetic theology when he proclaims this word from God:

You only have I known of all the families of the earth:
therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities (3.2).

God's 'knowledge' of Israel here is clearly identifled with his election of them in Egypt; the word is spoken 'against the whole family whom I brought up out of the land of Egypt' (3.1)./14/ And it is precisely because of the prophet's belief in election that he can be sure that Israel's iniquities will not be overlooked by God. Elsewhere this same connection is apparent: the picture of Israel as God's vineyard is introduced in order to denounce Israel's sin:

For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel,
and the men of Israel are his pleasant planting;
and he looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed;
for righteousness, but behold, a cry! (Isa. 5.7).

and to announce its destruction:

And now I will tell you
what I will do to my vineyard.
I will remove its hedge,
and it shall be devoured;
I will break down its wall,
and it shall be trampled down (5.5).

Likewise in Jer. 2.2 Israel's marriage to the Lord is the backcloth to the Lord's current controversy with his people, and in Hos. 11.1 Israel's call to sonship is but the preface to the irony of election:

The more I called them,
the more they went from me.

It is noteworthy also how often in Isaiah Israel is referred to as God's people in the context of its disobedience or its impending destruction (e.g. Isa. 1.3; 2.6; 5.13, 25). The role of election theology, then, is to heighten the gravity of Israel's sin and to guarantee that there is no escape from the consequences of its guilt.
However, the doom of Israel, though the major preoccupation of the pre-exilic prophets, is not their only concern. They, together with the prophets of the exile and beyond, also deliver prophecies of hope. In this setting the role of election is different. Here election takes on the character of promise, assurance that Israel will become what it was called into being to become. Israel must respond to the prophetic reminders about election with courage, faith, work. Thus we flnd:

But you, Israel, my servant,
Jacob, whom I have chosen,
the offspring of Abraham, my friend;
you whom I took from the ends of the earth,
and called from its farthest corners,
saying to you, 'You are my servant,
I have chosen you and not cast you off';
fear not, for I am with you,
be not dismayed, for I am your God.
(Isa. 41.8-10; cf. also Isa. 43.1-2; 44.1-3, 21-22; Hos. 2.14-16; Hag. 2.4-5.)

b. God's Plan for World History
The other major form that prophetic predestination takes on is the idea that events of world history are planned by God./15/ A clear example is Isa. 14.24-27:

The Lord of hosts has sworn:
'As I have planned,
so shall it be.
And as I have purposed,
so shall it stand,
that I will break the Assyrian in my land,
and upon my mountains trample him under foot . . . '
This is the purpose that is purposed
concerning the whole earth;
and this is the hand that is stretched out
over all the nations.
For the Lord of hosts has purposed,
and who will annul it?
His hand is stretched out,
and who will turn it back?

Other references to God's 'purposes' or 'plans' or 'thoughts' occur in Isa. 25.1; 46.10; Mic. 4.12; Jer. 23.20; 29.11; 49.20; 50.45; 51.11. And of course the whole rationale of prophetic prediction is that God has plans or intentions, whether of judgment or salvation, which are so sure of fulfllment that they may be announced in advance.
Almost all of the speciflc references to God's plans have in view a particular event or a limited series of events, for example, 'his purposes against the land of the Chaldaeans' (Jer. 50.45). Furthermore, it is not a matter of a single divine plan; various passages speak of various intentions, and some references are in fact to God's plans in the plural. So it cannot be shown that the prophets believed in a flxed divine plan that extended from the beginning to the end of world history. When they spoke of God's plan they referred to the obvious truth that God is purposive in his actions. As for the prophetic predictions of what God is going to do, it can be freely acknowledged that they are extremely varied in their scope, comprehensiveness, and time-range. But they do not amount to a claim that all the events of history move towards a divine goal. They are rather an assertion that within history God is working his purposes out./16/
The role of this form of predestination must be deflned in terms of the main foci of the prophetic message. Characteristically the announcement of God's 'plan' is an announcement of doom, whether against foreign nations (Isa. 14.26; Mic. 4.12; Jer. 49.20; 50.45; 51.11, 29) or against Israel itself (Jer. 23.20-30.24; cf. Isa. 5.19). On one occasion, it is a promise of the future welfare of Israel (Jer. 29.11). That is, the predestinarian element functions as an assurance that the prophetic message will take effect. It is not an expression of a broad philosophy of history so much as an afflrmation of the inescapability of God's wrath or the certainty of God's blessing. The same is true of the predictive or predestinarian aspect of prophetic oracles of judgment or hope, even when terms for God's 'plan' are not used.

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