Evangelists, Let the Doctrine of Predestination Batter Your Heart
By Jenny Manley, TGC. (Editor’s note: The writer examines a difficult doctrine, and argues for its relevance in today’s church)
“What do we call the test?” Leslie Groves asked Robert Oppenheimer.
“Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” he replied.
“What?”
“Trinity,” Oppenheimer explained. In Christopher Nolan’s newest film, the chief physicist behind the atom bomb associates the Manhattan Project with the God who destroys to remake and restore, who destroys to give humanity hope in the wake of sin’s rabid consequences.
Oppenheimer is quoting John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 14, which reads in part,
Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
The Renaissance sonnet is a picture of God’s inescapable sovereignty over man’s fate and the sinner’s inability to turn to God unless the Lord rescues him from the enemy (and death) to which he’s yoked. Oppenheimer and Donne acknowledge what believers have affirmed for millenia: God’s sovereignty is inescapable.
But is this assertion biblical? And does what it says about the fated destinies of individuals lead us to a weaker view of missions and evangelism? Let’s explore what God reveals to us in the Scriptures.
Politics and Protons
God is the Creator, Sustainer, and Ruler over all things that happen in the universe, from big-scale events like nations at war to the smallest and most seemingly insignificant combination of atoms. He controls politics and protons. He rules over every collapsed star that cannot be seen by humans and every molecule of bacteria living so deep under the ocean that we can only speculate about its existence. He’s sovereign over all things.
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