Piper's more complete treatment of this subject can be read at
http://www.desiringgod.org/library/topi ... wills.html
I believe his argument is flawed. Here is my critique:
John Piper’s essay, “Are There Two Will in God,” written as a chapter for the book, “Still Sovereign: Contemporary Perspectives on Election, Foreknowledge and Grace,” is an attempt to show that the Calvinistic doctrine of unconditional election can be harmonized with those texts of scripture which seem to teach the “Arminian” idea that God really wants all men to be saved, and none to be lost.
Calvinism teaches that there are secret “decrees” of God which determine the ultimate destiny of every person, and that, before the onset of human history, every person was thus predetermined by God’s decree either to be eternally saved or eternally lost. It is a corollary of this teaching, jealously defended, that God’s choice in the matter was not affected in any way by the decision that men make, nor of God’s foreknowledge of any such decisions. The sovereign grace of God, who could, if He had wished, have chosen to save every person for salvation, instead chose only some (“the elect”) for salvation, and either passed-over (as modern Calvinists say) or positively reprobated (as John Calvin taught) those whom He did not desire to save.
The fate of every man, woman and child is said to be determined by these sovereign decrees alone. A man can do nothing to change the destiny that was determined by God for him before he was born. He can simply live out the scripted routine of his existence, experiencing the illusion of free choice, but really just fulfilling the secret will of God for him, whether by his life of piety or his life of reprobation.
The Arminians (and the primitive Christians prior to Augustine) have always felt that this is a misrepresentation both of God’s policies and of His desire. They believe that God really desires that every person should be saved and live righteously, and that any failure to do so on the part of a man is owing to that man’s will to reject God’s will, and not a result of God’s willing the man to be reprobate.
The scriptures most often cited to prove that God desires all men to be saved, and that He sent Christ to reconcile the world to Himself are II Pet.3:9/Ezek.33:11/ I John 2:2/I Tim.2:4, 6; 4:10. There are others besides. In fact, every passage in which God complains about man’s sin or unbelief bears further biblical testimony that God has not decreed that men should sin or that they should be in unbelief. These passages number in the hundreds in scripture.
The fact that God wants all men to be saved, set in juxtaposition with the fact that not all men end up saved, suggests that there is not only one will in the universe, but at least two. Arminians say that there is the will of God and the will of man—two wills at odds in the universe. Calvinists say the two wills that are at odds are both in God. That is, in one sense, God wishes all men would be saved; in another sense, He really wants millions of people to burn in hell for all eternity. Piper opens his essay with this ambitious statement of purpose:
“My aim in this chapter is to show from Scripture that the simultaneous existence of God's will for ‘all persons to be saved’ (1 Tim. 2:4) and his will to elect unconditionally those who will actually be saved is not a sign of divine schizophrenia or exegetical confusion.”
I have been surprised to see how many readers seem to think that he accomplished this goal. He does make about as good a case as can be made for such a doomed postulate, but he does so by tricking the mind of the inattentive reader (I don’t suggest that John Piper intends to “trick” anybody. I am sure that he is very convinced of the validity of the case he makes, but Calvinists have in many ways allowed themselves to be “tricked” by a faulty logic which they would never accept if used by their theological opponents. It manifests the phenomenon of how intense desire to believe a thing to be true will lead a man to accept uncritically the flimsiest case in its defense).
Like any good polemicist, Piper begins by explaining the perceived problem and presenting a few of the scriptures that support the objections to his view. He presents the conundrum: God wills that all men would be saved (it’s scriptural); but God has willed to damn a large percentage of men who He could as easily have saved (it’s Calvinism). There must, then, be two wills in God that are contrary to each other.
The bottom line in Piper’s argument is that a rational being may indeed will a thing at a certain level, but choose not to implement that thing out of deference to a higher purpose. I may want to sit around today and play my guitar, but there is work to be done, so I type. On one hand, I want to relax and play music, but some things are more important to me than that, so I really don’t want to relax as much as I want to accomplish something that precludes my relaxation. Two wills. It’s that simple. Or is it?
What if I were capable of doing both? If I could play the guitar and type at the same time, without sacrificing the quality of either activity, but I chose not to play the guitar? Could it really be argued, in such a case, that I truly wanted to play? The only reason that I don’t do everything I want to do is that I can’t do some things without sacrificing other things that I want even more. To say that God wants to save all men, and could do so, but chooses not to do so suggests that there is a higher compelling interest that God has in mind which would be compromised by His saving everyone. Piper acknowledges this, but says that the Arminians are in essentially the same position as are the Calvinists, in this respect:
“…God wills not to save all, even though he is willing to save all, because there is something else that he wills more, which would be lost if he exerted his sovereign power to save all. This is the solution that I as a Calvinist affirm along with Arminians…”
Piper says that the Arminians view man’s free will as that higher priority, which God refuses to compromise, while Calvinists identify that highest priority as “the manifestation of the full range of God's glory in wrath and mercy (Romans 9:22-23) and the humbling of man so that he enjoys giving all credit to God for his salvation (1 Corinthians 1:29).”
This line plays well for Calvinists, but non-Calvinists do not think that God derives more benefit or glory from His judging the wicked than He would derive from saving them (nor do we believe that the Calvinist explanation is the only one that preserves man's humilty and God's glory in salvation). Given the choice between showing mercy and judging sin, on an even playing field, God would prefer showing mercy every time (Ezekiel 33:11). In God’s list of priorities, mercy triumphs over judgment (James 2:13).
Let’s face it, Calvinism has always presented a God of a different character than that which Arminianism and primitive Christianity embraced. The God revealed in Christ must judge sin, when it is persisted in, but is really like a father longing for the restoration of his estranged children. If a single sinner repents, God and His angels rejoice. Calvinism’s God, on the other hand, rejoices to cast the children who disappoint Him into flames of eternal torment.
This is how He chooses to glorify Himself, even though He could as easily have saved them all with the same sovereign grace that He exercised toward the relatively few whom He actually chooses to save. Though He is said to be the perfection of fatherhood, Calvinism’s God is not like any loving father known among men. Even evil fathers, Jesus said, delight to give good things to their children. This is not in contrast to the way God is. It is a dim reflection of that greater compassion in God. “How much more shall your Father who is in heaven…”
The non-Calvinist view does not believe that consigning billions of people, made in God’s image, to eternal damnation was ever “Plan A” with God. The eternal fire was “prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41)—not for men. The only reason that men ever go there, against God’s stated will, is that (dare I say it?) God cannot prevent them!
Yes, I said it. There are some things that God cannot do. The Bible says so.
For example, He cannot lie (Titus 1:2). If He tells a sinner that he is capable of repenting and doing good (Gen.4:7), but in fact that man was predestined by the good pleasure of God to be irredeemably evil and to go to hell, then God is lying, because He isn’t telling the truth. If God says that He had desired to save the lost, but was unable to do so because they “were not willing” (Matt.23:37), but in fact the reason they never came to Him was because He had secretly decreed that they should not and could not, then, again, He is lying. This is impossible for God to do.
Another thing God cannot do is deny Himself (2 Tim.2:13). He cannot violate His own character and values. Arminians believe that God’s decision to make man in His own image was not very unlike the decision of a human couple to start a family, rather than simply to breed Labrador retrievers. The dogs will never turn on their masters, but most people think that children hold more potential and can be much more satisfying, in the long run.
It is in the nature of children to be morally free and responsible, though the good parent attempts to educate, civilize and influence a child’s will through proper nuture. No parent wants to see a child go astray, but every couple, in choosing to bring a human being into their home (rather than a puppy), knows that it is in the nature of free moral beings to make choices and to live with the consequences. Many parents have known the grief of their children’s rebellion, but have been unable to control the will of another independent human soul. God apparently knew this frustration as well:
“I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me; the ox knows its owner and the donkey its master’s crib, but Israel does not know, my people do not consider…What more could have been done…that I have not done? “ (Isa.1:2-3; 5:4).
We might think that God should have been satisfied with oxen and donkeys, who know their master and give no cause of heartache—but, then, He wouldn’t have any children at all, would He? I think that the teaching of scripture about this matter is that God’s highest priority in creation was that He have children, not pets; a family, not a menagerie.
He was under no external compulsion to create people, but He sovereignly chose to do so. He really desired that every one of His children be saved and in relationship with Him, but He wanted them to have that relationship with Him upon a different basis than that of the birds and the bunnies He had already created—all of whom relate to Him just as He wished they would, but without much depth or intimacy.
To have real people means having real choices, which animals don’t have. It means taking the risk of being disappointed. But if it was God’s choice to create such beings, who can fault him? The point is, once such beings are in existence, they make their own choices. That is what they were made to do. Does God wish for them only to make right choices? Of course He does. But it is in the nature of the case that one free will can only wish that another free will should do a certain thing. It is not possible to dictate and determine what another free being will choose.
In God’s case, as sovereign judge of a universe that contains free and responsible agents, He is not at liberty to save those who refuse to be saved, and must, of necessity, punish those whose choices incur righteous judgment. Thus, no one ultimately wins against the sovereign God, though the scriptures bear abundant testimony that many truly disappoint Him.
In the course of making his case, John Piper drifts into a lengthy, and irrelevant, discourse that gives the inattentive reader the impression that the case for his basic point is supported by a wide range of examples and arguments. Piper shows that the crucifixion of Christ, which was the will of God, involved the sinful acts of many participants—Judas, Caiaphas, Pilate, et al—who were doing things that God says are not His will for men to do. The same is true of Joseph’s brothers accomplishing God’s will through their selling Joseph into slavery.
Also God’s hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, and the hearts of other wicked men, as an act of judgment against them, resulted in those hardened sinners performing sinful acts that God elsewhere declares to be contrary to His will. These examples are given to demonstrate that God “in one sense” wills righteousness, but “in another sense” wills evil. Strange as this may seem, Piper tells us, “God's emotional life is infinitely complex beyond our ability to fully comprehend.”
This may be true, but there is nothing very complex or mysterious about the cases Piper gives. Those who killed Jesus and those who betrayed Joseph were already very evil men, by their own choices. God permitted them to carry out their evil designs, just as He allows all men to choose sin, if they insist. God was not obligated to allow them to carry out their evil purposes. He prevented them from doing so on many previous occasions. But, when allowing them to do what they wished proved to be expedient for God’s purposes, Jesus was “delivered [into their hands] according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God" (Acts 2:23). There is nothing complex about this. It is the simple principle, as enunciated by Napoleon Bonaparte: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
There is nothing here that says that God put it in the hearts of these men to choose the evil of their ways, nor that these particular men were predestined to be evil. If they had been better men, God could easily have delivered Jesus (and Joseph) into the hands of other evil characters. There have always been plenty around.
Then there are the cases of God's hardening Pharaoh’s (and certain other people’s) heart, of His giving the unbelieving Jews “a spirit of stupor” (Rom.11) and of His giving certain people up to reprobation (Rom.1).
The hardening of the heart of a man so as to prevent him from repenting—and the turning of a man over to the bondage of his own sinful choices—is simply God’s way of saying, “You have exercised your freedom of choice very poorly hitherto, and you are now under my judgment for your sins. Your judgment will be a moral blindness amounting to the suspension of your opportunity to repent.” It is God’s prerogative to judge a man however He sees fit, and to exploit that judgment for the higher good of His kingdom. There is nothing complex or mysterious in this fact.
What Calvinists fail to recognize is that the whole enterprise of God hardening the hearts of certain sinners, so as to prevent their repentance, implies that, had He not taken this special action, they might have repented. Yet Calvinists believe that it takes special election and action on God’s part to make a man repent. If their doctrine were true, God would never have to do anything special to keep a man from repenting. Calvinists would embarrass themselves less by concealing this phenomenon of God's hardening certain men's hearts in scripture, rather than continually bringing it up to their own undoing.
In fact, Piper’s bottom line is very simple and unrelated to the lengthy case He makes for God making use of sinners to accomplish certain important purposes (e.g., the crucifixion of Christ and the transporting of Joseph to Egypt in order to save his family from famine). His real position is that there are some priorities in the mind of God (as in all rational beings) which cause Him to sacrifice certain desires for others—and that the damnation of certain men was so essential to His highest goals, that He had to predestine certain persons, as yet unborn, to that fate, in order to guarantee that He would be glorified in this manner, while He still loved them and wished they had been saved.
What he fails to show is that there is any scriptural support for the notion that God’s highest desire (or His desire at any level, for that matter) was to create any human beings strictly for the purpose of their damnation, to whom He would never grant the genuine opportunity for salvation, because it pleases Him just to know that He is glorified in their eternal torment.
He thinks Arminians are wrong because they appeal to man's "free will" as the factor that overturns God's desire for all to be saved. Yet, "free will," Piper asserts, is not a concept found in the Bible. In commenting on 1 Timothy 2:4, Piper writes:
"There is no mention here of free will. Nor is there mention of sovereign, prevenient, efficacious grace. If all we had was this text we could only guess what restrains God from saving all. When free will is found in this verse it is a philosophical, metaphysical assumption not an exegetical conclusion."
While the term “free will” (like the term “Trinity”) is not found in scripture, it is everywhere illustrated in scripture as well as history and personal experience. The Calvinistic terms “decrees of election” and “decrees of reprobation,” on the other hand, are neither found in scripture, nor illustrated there.
If reason be sought why certain things—like the salvation of all men—are declared to be "the will of God" in scripture, but those things do not come to pass, Piper is correct in recognizing the involvement of “two wills” at odds with each other. His mistake is in seeing both of these wills as being “in God,” rather than recognizing there is the divine will and the will of man. Is man’s will, then, greater than God’s? Only to the degree that "God wills" it to be.