God as a Novelist

One Pedestrian’s Opinion on Free Will, Sovereignty and Time

Not everyone will agree with my view on time, God’s sovereignty and man’s free will—and that’s fine. I’m a cannon-fodder Christian: unlikely to make any kind of major splash in the ocean of theology. If the works of big-thinkers like Stott or Carson are the Mona Lisas and Cistine Chapels of the theological world, think of my little blog as a crayon doodle scribbled under the adults’ dinner table.

Before I begin: this isn’t a critique of Calvinism, Arminianism or Molinism (Google it). These are just one pedestrian’s beliefs on a topic Christians have argued about for centuries.

I believe in free will. I believe God gives every individual freedom to submit to him or not.  Unless God has a very special role for you (such as a Major Prophet), your life’s story is paved by the decisions you make. Instead of being an editorial assistant at Myrtlefield House, I could have been a milkman, or a crane operator, or a nurse, or a transvestite pole-dancer if I had so chosen to go down those routes. With the exception with maybe the last one, God would have blessed any one of those occupations, so long as I did it in faith and spent my talents well. God, I believe, does not control but respects our choices.

I also believe God is sovereign. I sometimes hear it as if free will and sovereignty are opposite ends of a see-saw: when one goes up, the other goes down. I don’t think that’s true. A king can be ruler of his land without governing the little things of his subjects’ lives. The king, for example, gives Pete the barber freedom to choose what he is going to have for lunch, or what colour of car Jenny the doctor will buy. But he won’t let them go as far as to sneak into the bedchamber and slay his prince.

My understanding of God’s sovereignty is this: he is in control—the reins of history never slip from his hands—so we can be confident that nothing will steer him off his ultimate purpose. The saving of the baby Jesus from Herod is an example of God’s sovereignty at work; had Jesus died then, his salvation mission would have failed, so Herod’s free will was overruled by God’s. It’s like we are sheep in a big pen—we can wander and nibble on whatever grass we like … but there are carefully placed fences.

To help me explain God and his relationship to time and man’s free will, I will use a metaphor close to my own heart.

Say I am writing a novel. You might be surprised to know that I—as do many other writers—don’t plot the story. Instead, I create characters and plonk them in a situation and watch and see how they get on. For example, I would take a cheerleader, a bus driver and a proctologist and trap them in a barn surrounded by bloodstarved vampires and say, Go. From page to page, I have no more idea what my characters will do than the reader does. I give them free will, and simply watch in my imagination’s eye their thoughts, words and actions.The characters bumble along, make wrong decisions (which sometimes gets them killed) and, frustratingly, do things to impede the happy ending I want to achieve until, until three months later, I write THE END.

During the writing and editing I, the author, am sovereign. I let the cheerleader, bus driver and proctologist do what they want for most part—but it is not in accordance with my personality to let the bad guys, the vampires, win. And so sometimes I have to subtly influence my characters: dropping a prop here, arranging a fortuitous meet-up there …  all this is done without violating my characters’ free will. But there’s going to be a good ending to this story whether they like it or not. And because I live outside the story, I can give each chapter as much careful and attention as needed so that plots and subplots all interconnect in a highly complex web. Sometimes I even drop in foreshadowing’s of future events in previous chapters so, to my readers, it looks like I knew what I was doing all along.

Of course, this is imperfect illustration of how God works (but, really, what illustration can be perfect when you’re dealing with the Almighty?) but this is the one that satisfies me most. We are characters in a story, to whom God has given free will, and though we may do things that he doesn’t want us to do—things that offend him or impede the spread of his kingdom—because he is in control, standing outside time in eternity as a novelist stands outside his book, God can edit, rearrange and tweak to achieve his ultimate ending.

Let’s take Judas Iscariot as an example. Rather than God being clairvoyant and peering into the unhappened future, and telling his prophets about it so they could write it down, because he is eternal and every moment is ‘now’ to him as each page of a novel is ‘now’ to its author, God knew what was going to happen not necessarily because he predicted it, but because he sees it (present tense) happening from his eternal perspective. To put it another way, I don’t believe God invents prophecies and then self-fulfils them by altering history—e.g. dooming Judas as a traitor. I don’t think Christ necessarily had to be betrayed for God’s plan to work. Rather, it was Judas’ own free will made that event happen, and God sees it and has incorporated it into his grand story of mankind’s salvation. And, like a master storyteller, he foreshadows the betrayal through the prophets (see Matthew 27:9–10).

So is this a child’s crayon doodle, or the scribblings of a madman? I’ll let you decide. But I’ll say this: when trying to understand him, we are sometimes guilty of bringing God down to our level. We anthropomorphise him. But we can’t say with total confidence how he runs things, because his mind is vaster than ours as ours is vaster than a tadpole’s. To say that we totally understand something as mysterious as God’s sovereignty and time (as if we stood beside him when he laid the earth’s foundations) is arrogance.  This is why I’m not dogmatic about my worldview on this subject; I believe it gives me a glimpse of the truth, but that’s all it is. (It is probably mostly wrong—after all, is Jesus both still on the cross and sat down at the right-hand side of God? And how infinitely can you break down ‘moments’ into segments in God’s eternal perspective—what happens to all these micro-moments when we all get our new bodies in the new Earth? Do the run in the background like a TV while the ‘real show’ happens? Or, in God’s eternal perspective, am I already resurrected and glorified? All these I can’t yet answer.)

If this blog helps anyone out by giving them illustration to work by on this complicated topic, then all well and good. If it doesn’t, then forget all about it. As C. S. Lewis* wrote on the matter, ‘You can be a perfectly good Christian without accepting it, or indeed without thinking of the matter at all.’

*C.S.LEWIS, MERE CHRISTIANITY