"What's the difference?" you're probably asking. This article is my response to the doctrine of the sovereignty of God, and while I believeGod holds sovereignty over the universe, I'm going to suggest that the doctrine of sovereignty, as usually taught, actually limits God.

For those who aren't Baptist or aren't aware of the Calvinist position on what God's sovereignty means for us, let me breifly explain it -- as well as I understand it from listening to a number of preachers who held the doctrine as a non-negotiable part of their faith.

This is the "absolute" position on God's sovereignty. God is the only being in the universe with the power of choice. Well, maybe not the universe, since I haven't heard these preachers expound on their cosmology (metaphysics, in philosophical terms). But they do hold that when it comes to salvation, at least, humans DON'T have the power of choice.

This position comes from a large number of Bible texts, especially Ephesians 1. Here Paul speaks of Christians as "predestinated" by God,who works all things according to his will. A commonly-used Old Testament text is in Malachi 1:2, 3. Here God tells the prophet that he "loved" Jacob but "hated" Esau.

The Calvinist position, then, is that man has no option when it comes to salvation. If God has decided that you will be saved, you will hear the "effectual call" of the Holy Spirit and place your life under the control of Christ. If God has decided that you will be lost, you can decide for Christ, you can keep the commandments, you can attend church faithfully, you can even declare Christ to the world, but you will never be saved.

[It is in this context that the Baptist teaches "Once saved, always saved." Therefore it is not the license to "sin" that the Baptists'free-choice brethern make it out to be.]

There is merit in this position in that it makes ALL human effort, including choice, useless in obtaining salvation. And the doctrine has plenty of Biblical support, especially in the writings of Paul. The doctrine that humans DO choose to be saved, however, also has support. In the end the question of what the Bible teaches is a matter of interpretation, and for that reason I won't spend a lot of time trying to argue all the texts that could be brought to bear on the subject.

My problem with the "absolute" view of God's sovereignty isn't so much with how it's taught as with aspects of it that aren't taught, and may not even be believed (I like to give people as much benefit of doubt as I can). When you look at the teaching on a more universal scale, is God's sovereignty equally absolute? I've never heard a Calvinist preacher say anything about this. If it is, then I have some real problems with it.

"Now YOU are limiting God," some of you may be thinking. "You don't mind if God is absolutely sovereign on earth, but you don't let him be sovereign in the universe!" Guilty as charged -- and here's why. If God exercises absolute authority only on earth, then it's a temporary measure necessitated by the fall of man. But if it's universal, then God decided there would be a devil, God decided to introduce evil to this earth, God decided to subject us to misery and to condemn some of us to eternal torment in the fires of hell.

In short, making God's absolute sovereignty apply to the entire universe for all time makes God responsible for evil. Does that bother you? I hope it does. And that's why I believe making God's sovereignty so absolute limits him. You either accept him as the source of evil, or you limit where his sovereignty is absolute.

So I suggest a doctrine of unlimited sovereignty. How is that different? Let me attempt to explain. In this doctrine God still has complete sovereignty over earth and the entire universe. But, being the creative and loving God I believe him to be, he has chosen to share that sovereignty with his creations.

This was a major risk! When you grant a created being the power to choose, it must be possible to make a bad, rebellious choice, or there is no real choice. Before doing this, God had to develop a plan for dealing with rebellion when it happened. It is a plan developed "from the foundation of the world" which we call the plan of salvation.

Now humans DO have a choice in their salvation. It's the only effective thing they can do -- but it is what makes the difference between the saved and the lost. Now God can be "able to save to the uttermost those who come unto," him through Christ. The only limit to his power is the choice of the individual -- a limit God himself allows. Since, under this doctrine, the only limit to God's sovereignty is self-imposed, I choose to call it unlimited sovereignty.

I recall reading a book that attempted to answer Calvinists by suggesting that God's knowledge of the future was not absolute. He could make predictions based on his superior knowledge of all factors and of human nature, much as a modern-day meteorologist makes better forecasts because he has more information about current climactic conditions. I had a problem with that book, and I still do, because I believe God is not limited by time as we experience it.

The reason the book dealt with God's knowledge of the future is that the Calvinist says that God already knows who will be saved or lost, and for that reason alone we have no choice. [I've written a paper on that topic which I might be able to find a place on this site at some future date.]

Now I'll try to apply sovereign choice as taught in the Bible in a way that fits my "unlimited sovereignty" doctrine. Let me start with the text in Malachi. What this text is saying is that God made an arbitrary choice between the twin brothers in deciding who would have the responsibility to carry his message to the world.

"Arbitrary?" you ask. "Didn't God make his choice based on the characters of the two men?" No! Esau may have caused a few problems at home by marrying Caananite women. But look at the problems Jacob caused when he took the birthright blessing by deceit. Good character? No!

What about the choice of Judah as the king/ruler of Jacob's (Israel's) tribe? Wasn't that based on the character failings of the three eldestsons? Yes, but that was Jacob's choice, not God's. God's choice was for the priesthood blessing, originally given to the eldest son of Jacob's favorite wife, Rachel. Now he did display an unimpeachable integrity.

But I ask, was his character a result of some innate quality he had that his brothers didn't have? Or was it based on God's sovereign and arbitrary choice to honor him? How about others, such as Moses? Maybe it is God's honor that gives men such honorable characters, rather than the other way around! How about the apostles? They have the honor of seeing their names on the gates of the New Jerusalem. We know from the accounts in the gospels that these men were very ordinary, erring humans. Their extraordinary characters did not show up until Jesus had left. Certainly there were many thousands more in Judah in those days that could have received similar honor, if we were to look at character alone.

This, to me, is an appropriate application of the principle expressed in the doctrine of sovereign choice. When someone demonstrates an honorable character, we can know that there is no merit in them. It is the sovereign, arbitrary choice of God that called such honorable character forth. The only credit the individual can take is that they chose to follow God rather than to rebel (Judas was an example of one who chose to rebel).

When Paul writes of God's election in the New Testament he is speaking as a devout Jew. The Jews had gotten the wrong idea about God's choice of them. They thought they were chosen to salvation (they were) to the exclusion of everybody else (they weren't). This was such a tough concept for the disciples to grasp that they never "got" it when Jesus was around. God had to send Peter the shocking vision of the unclean beasts in a sheet and then work miracles in the house of Cornelius to convince them that he wanted the gospel of salvation to be carried to the Gentiles, and some still dragged their feet!

Then Paul enters the picture. He "got" it (in several ways) when he met the glorified Jesus on the road to Damascus. But even he had trouble connecting this idea to the old ideas that God had exclusively selected Israel for salvation. You can read this conflict between the lines of Romans 9-11. Salvation is equally open to both Jew and Gentile, based on the sacrifice of Jesus for all mankind, and determined by the choice of the individual.

With th