Let’s begin by identifying two different senses of “glory”.
Objective glory: the degree of greatness that an individual exemplifies.
Subjective glory: the perception others have of the degree of greatness that an individual exemplifies coupled with an appropriate response to that objective greatness.
Our concern here is with Calvinism and its explanation for God’s subjective glory (that is, the way that creatures perceive his greatness). All further references to “glory” in this article should be taken as references to “subjective glory” (that is, the creaturely perception of objective greatness) unless otherwise specified.
With that introductory material out of the way we can turn to our central question: why would Calvinists believe that God needs to reprobate some people for the benefit of his own glory? How could this be? Let’s start by putting the problem in perspective. Consider this passage from Revelation 5:
11 Then I looked and heard the voice of many angels, numbering thousands upon thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand. They encircled the throne and the living creatures and the elders. 12In a loud voice they were saying:
“Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain,
to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength
and honor and glory and praise!”
13Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, saying:
“To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb
be praise and honor and glory and power,
for ever and ever!”
14 The four living creatures said, “Amen,” and the elders fell down and worshiped.
At first blush one would have thought this is a maximally glorifying state of affairs for the creator. But apparently many Calvinists demur, believing that the maximally glorifying state of affairs for the creator requires that some creatures reject his Lordship. On this assumption, the following revised scenario is more glorifying:
13Then I heard many creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, saying:
“To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb
be praise and honor and glory and power,
for ever and ever!”
But other creatures were screaming:
To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb
be curses and hatred and shame and destruction,
for ever and ever!”
14 The four living creatures said, “Amen,” in response to the first group while appreciating God’s glory more fully because of the second group and the elders fell down and worshiped.
Now let’s not pretend that this is a plausible assertion on the face of it. It is, to say the least, counterinuitive. The following premise helps to capture that implausibility:
All other things being equal, the more people embrace the rule of a sovereign and the more deeply those people embrace that sovereign’s rule, the more the sovereign is glorified.
Consider that intuition applied to the case of presidential approval ratings:
All other things being equal, a president who has an approval rating below 30% is less glorified than a president who has an approval rating of 100%.
At first blush it strains any sense of credulity to suggest that a reigning sovereign is more glorified in virtue of having a lower approval rating. And yet when the sovereign in question is God the Calvinist asks us to suspend this very plausible intuition. All this begs the question: How could the curses of some be more glorifying to God than the praises of all?
Given the stupifyingly extraordinary nature of the Calvinist’s claim (and the unsatisfactory nature of simply appealing to divine mystery every time one’s theology verges into conceptual disaster) we should really do our dardnest to latch on to some sort of explanation. To that end I’m going to consider the possiblity of explaining the phenomenon in terms of the contrast effect.
The contrast effect is a psychological disposition to compare the situation that one is in over-against other situations and consequently to experience things differently relative to those comparisions. For example, it may be that one has a greater degree of satisfaction or dismay at one’s own position when it is held up in contrast to those other situations. So the contrast effect is rooted in the simple observation that, as psychologist Catherine A. Sanderson observes, “people’s beliefs about one thing are influenced by what they have just seen or heard.” (Social Psychology, Wiley, 2010), 156. Sanderson continues:
“a $70 sweater may not seem like a very good deal initially, but if you learn that the sweater was reduced from $200, all of a sudden it may seem like a real bargain. Similarly, my family lives in Massachusetts, so we are very used to cold weather. But when we visit Florida to see my aunt and uncle for Thanksgiving they urge the kids to wear hats when it is 60 degrees outside–virtually bathing suit weather from the kids’ perspective!” (Social Psychology, 156)
I discussed the contrast effect last February in my article “Misery loves company, especially more miserable company“. While in the midst of bemoaning a seemingly endless Canadian prairie winter I found solace gloating over the much more extrene conditions in Siberia. (Pathetic, I know.) Here’s what I wrote:
It is that that point that I turn to Siberia and settle on Yakutsk. While there are colder settled regions, they’re all tiny villages with populations in the hundreds. But Yakutsk holds the icy title of the coldest city on earth. With a population in excess of 200,000 people, that’s a lot of potential misery.
So how cold is it? Remember I said that the average high in Edmonton’s January is -8 C. In Yakutsk an average January day is -36 C. Yes, you read that right: minus thirty-six. (Remember -40 C is -40 F.) Anyway you look at it, that is miserably, horrifyingly cold.
Think of it this way: there are many years when Edmonton never hits the frosty depths of an average Yakutsk January afternoon. And when you drop into the -40s the entire city is usually enveloped in a heavy ice fog where visibility can drop to mere meters. Think of having to wrap up in furs, leave your meager cold war apartment and journey out into that desolation day … after day … after day.
Or think of it this way: Edmonton is to Yakutsk as Los Angeles is to Edmonton. That’s the temperature chasm we’re talking about. For a visitor from Yakutsk the snow outside my window would look more like white sand. Now that’s a change in perspective. Imagine that Edmonton in January would offer some people a vacation respite from the cold. What an amazing psychological impact this information has! The weather hasn’t improved outside my window but I feel better — warmer — already.
I discuss the relationship between hell and the contrast effect in Faith Lacking Understanding where I observed that “Aquinas contends that against the backdrop of eternity, our pleasure will be greatly intensified as we see God’s wrath visited justly upon others knowing that, but for his grace, we too could have been included in this sorry lot.” (Paternoster, 2008), 154.
If there is a biblical locus classicus for the contrast effect as an explanation of Calvinistic election it is surely found in Romans 9:22-24:
What if God, although choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath—prepared for destruction? 23 What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory— 24 even us, whom he also called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles?
Based on this text and an understanding of the contrast effect a person could argue that for God’s elect to have a more robust sense of his glory there need to be both elect and reprobate persons so the former can be objects of his mercy and the latter objects of his wrath. And together the sum total perception of God’s glorious attributes is greater than it could be otherwise.
Can we apply this notion of contrast effect leading to greater glory to our earthly sovereigns? I think so. First we need to add the following premise:
A lower approval rating ultimately needs to reflect an indictment of those who render the negative approval rather than of the sovereign.
Now consider the following:
Sovereign A has a 100% approval rating from his population.
Sovereign B has a 30% approval rating from her population and that low approval rating reflects the immorality of a large segment of the population who rejects Sovereign B’s principled stand on an important moral issue.
For example, Sovereign B may be speaking out against the Apartheid of her country and seeking to implement revolutionary reforms.
In this context it may well be that the overall perception of Sovereign B’s greatness (in other words, Sovereign B’s “glory”) is higher in the 30% who rightly view her as a true hero given her just and right stand against the dissenting 70%. Consequently, it actually is plausible to think that greater glory might come with greater rejection.
Remember at the beginning of the article I distinguished objective glory (an individual’s greatness) from subjective glory (another individual’s perception of that greatness). To illumine the point consider this simple perceptual illustration. Note that the dot in the center doesn’t change size but the contrast between that dot and the surrounding dots leads to a perceptual shift such that the central dot appears larger or smaller depending on the size of the surrounding dots.
Now think about this in terms of the present question. On the Calvinist view Group 1 would represent the possible world where God reprobates some and elects others while Group 2 represents the possible world where God elects all (hence the bigger circles). Consequently, God’s glory is perceived more fully in Group 1 than in 2. Just as the sovereign is plausibly more fully glorified by the contrast between his devotees and dissenters so God is more fully glorified by the contrast between his devotees and dissenters.
Brief interlude
The contrast effect and Calvinism has passed the first hurdle. It appears initially plausible as illumined by analogy with a human sovereign. However, there are at least three problems with the application of the case to the divine sovereign, and these problems strike me as fatal to the position. I will bring out these problems with three illustrations, the kitten furnace illustration, the Walt the War Vet illustration and the Ninja Master illustration.
The kitten furnace illustration
The human sovereign analogy may explain how the Calvinist form of election functions, but it doesn’t explain why God chose this means to glorify himself to begin with. Consider the following illustration. Imagine that a brilliant scientist designed a system of furnaces to heat the chilly homes of Yakutsk. They are marvelously efficient and keep everyone toasty warm. The only problem is that they run off of live kittens. One kitten needs to be tossed into the furnace every day to keep the home comfortable. Somebody visiting Yakutsk witnesses with horror a kitten being tossed into a furnace and exclaims “Why did you do that?” The Yakutskian calmly explains: “The engineer designed our houses to be kept nice and warm this way.” That response would explain the action of the Yakutskian. But do you think it would satisfy the visitor? Hardly! The visitor would then ask the next question: “Why did the engineer design furnaces to function with live kittens to begin with?”
This is precisely the response a “visitor” to Calvinism should have. The non-Calvinist visits the citadel of Calvinism, learns of the Calvinist theology of election, and cries out in horror “Why would God decree to elect only some and reprobate others if he could have elected all?” The reply comes: “Because this is more glorifying to God” followed by an appeal to the contrast effect as the means more fully to perceive the divine glory. But as with the kittens feeding the furnace, this simply begs the biggest question of all: why did God create human beings such that they would require a contrast between good and evil of this type in order to perceive the divine glory more fully?
There is a superficially appealing response readily at hand: the contrast effect is necessary to perceive God’s glory more fully. I call this the Bruce Hornsby response: “That’s just the way it is, some things will never change.” But perhaps that is an unfair title since Bruce then sings “Ahh, but don’t you believe it.”
I couldn’t agree more with that sentiment. Why should we believe that a contrast effect of this type is necessary to perceive God’s glory more fully? Are we really to believe that God could have not created a world where he was maximally glorified (i.e. his objective greatness was perceived to a maximal degree) by his creatures without requiring the eternal reprobation of some of those creatures?
Please note how heavily the burden at this point lies on the shoulders of the Calvinist. We’re not talking about a logical limitation. I’m on board with the notion that God cannot create a possible world in which there are square circles or in which 2+2=3. Of course if the Calvinist believes there is some logical necessity that requires the contrast effect he can certainly point out what it is. But barring such a demonstration we have no reason to think that any logical necessity exists. At best it is a psychological necessity and if it is that then we can still ask why he created the world with that psychological necessity thereby requiring the damnation of some when he need not have.
To come back to the burning kitten illustration, if the engineer could have designed the furnaces to run on wood or gas or some other fuel source, then why did he choose kittens?
The Walt the War Vet illustration
The sovereign analogy assumes that there need be a visible demonstration of a sovereign’s greatness through some crisis or we will not perceive the sovereign’s glory as fully. The Walt the War Vet makes the point that even if this is true there is no reason to think God requires the level of cosmic conflict posited by eternal reprobation to illumine his glory to creation.
In the film Gran Torino Clint Eastwood plays a Korean war vet named Walt Kowalski. Walt is one tough hombre. And to know it you don’t need to have Walt serve you up a knuckle sandwich. In fact, his power (his objective greatness or glory) comes through even more clearly when he doesn’t.
Consider the scene where Walt happens upon his young neighbor being picked on by three punks. Warning, there is a surfeit of expletives in this two minute scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ6r1r_aBXI Obviously Walt is far from a paragon of virtue in this scene, not least because of the way he opens the dialogue with a racial slur. However, we don’t require Walt to be morally perfect for the analogy to carry. The illustration focuses on the way that the unfolding conflict serves as the occasion for Walt to demonstrate his courage and fidelity to his young neighbor Sue. And here is the crucial point: the situation does not need to erupt into violence for Walt’s point to be made. There merely needs to be some minimal conflict with the threat of violence and the demonstration of Walt’s bravery. That is enough for Walt’s greatness to be demonstrated. There is no need for Walt to fire his gun; the mere knowledge that he has the power to do so is enough.
God’s relationship with creation is already characterized by something analogous to the degree of violence in the scene. That is, there is conflict and that conflict serves as a means to illumine God’s glory. But it does not require that the young men be killed (that is, people be eternally reprobated) for this glory to be made clear. Thus the Calvinist needs to explain why God would require not only minimal conflict as in the Walt the War Vet scene, but actual eternal reprobation analogous to Walt actually killing the attackers.
The Ninja Master illustration
Walt the War Vet gets us thinking that maybe the exercise of violence through conflict really is a wrongheaded approach for best illumining the divine glory. We can push this illustration further with our Ninja Master illustration. The three youths are picking on Sue when Ninja Master strolls up to them. They all know Ninja Master. They’ve seen his skills. He doesn’t require any conflict to demonstrate his abilities. They know that he could deal with them all in a moment. By comparison with Ninja Master, Walt’s presence is about as threatening as David Spade. It isn’t that Ninja Master has ever been in a conflict. He never needed to. The youth quickly mumble apologies and stumble over one another as Ninja Master looks at them with his piercing glare.
Surely if Ninja Master could establish his credentials apart from conflict, God could do so as well!
Conclusion
Let’s close with an important point. God perceives his own glory perfectly. That is, his own subjective perception of his objective glory is perfect. And he doesn’t require reprobate objects to perceive his own glory (pace some themes in modern Hegelian theology). But if this is true of God then surely God could enable us to perceive his glory apart from the reprobation of some as well. Consequently it must be that insofar as any are reprobated, they are not reprobated for anything like the contrast effect.
