Reprobation and God’s Sovereignty: Recovering a Biblical Doctrine, by Peter Sammons. Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2022. 296 pp. $25.99.
Author Peter Sammons engages the difficult doctrine of reprobation as a rhetorical Valiant-for-Truth, eager to defend the glory of God against the proud pretensions of man. We cannot help but admire his daring, and any such effort to glorify God certainly attracts the goodwill of all who love God.
Sammons states in his introduction that his purpose is “to properly define reprobation and explore God’s use of secondary causes in this doctrine” (15). He situates his discussion at the beginning of the book with two chapters on God’s lordship. He follows this with a four-chapter exposition of Romans 9. Chapters 8 and 9 lay out the parts of predestination following a typical Reformed template. Chapter 10 discusses “Concurrence, Compatibilism, and the Origin of Objections,” and the following three chapters lay out and respond to various objections to reprobation. Here Sammons introduces the concept of primary and secondary causes in order to respond to concerns that reprobation makes God responsible for sin. This sets the stage for his further discussion regarding human volition and ability (chap. 15), categorizing causes and the causality of divine abandonment (chap. 16), the causality of hardening (chap. 17), the causality of personal and nonpersonal agency (chap. 18). Sammons intends his book to clarify this difficult doctrine, and he does so from a self-consciously Reformed perspective. Those familiar with this tradition will recognize much of what he has to say, as this is well-trodden ground.
Having said all of that, the book needed more refinement to achieve its objectives. First, the book needed refinement in editing. Typographical errors and/or misspellings are surprisingly common. There are a few punctuation errors. Sometimes entire words are missing from sentences. Some sentences lack subject-verb agreement. The writing style could have benefited from the hand of a skillful editor, eliminating circumlocutions, clarifying ambiguous turns of phrase, and clarifying pronominal antecedents. Normally, this kind of error is not worth commenting on in a book review; however, in this case the problem is pervasive and can be a real source of consternation to the attentive reader. One is surprised that a publisher would allow this kind of work to go out under its label.
Second, in a couple instances, the book cites sources without giving attribution. On page 45, a sentence is put in quotation marks, but no source is cited either in the text or in the footnotes. On page 97, a lexical definition is given in quotation marks, but once again the author fails to provide any source. In this instance, the source is Louw and Nida’s Greek-English Lexicon (§87.71). It appears that these omissions were not an attempt to plagiarize as much as they were careless oversight. Nevertheless, they contribute to the impression that the book did not receive the attention it needed for such a serious topic.
More substantially, the book needed refinement in argumentation. Reading it produced friction regularly in this reviewer’s mind. Sometimes the rub is broad generalizations or over-simplifications which do not take seriously the complexity of the discussion. For an example early in the book, on page 15 the author states, “Since the Synod of Dordt in 1618, many in Christendom have been speaking past one another when it comes to this doctrine, simply because adequate care has not been given to defining it biblically.” One wants to ask if the author truly believes that the post-Reformation debates on reprobation were “simply” a matter of not giving adequate care to the Bible?
At other times the friction comes from fuzzy concepts. An exegetical example comes from Chapter 6, which is an exposition of Romans 9:14–18 entitled “A Defense of Meticulous Sovereignty.” It appears that “meticulous sovereignty” means that God is sovereign over all details related to his creation. This is undoubtedly true. However, this is not the focal concept the text is talking about. The text is talking specifically about the issue of justice (Rom 9:14), not God’s sovereignty or God’s freedom, per se. Is this criticism mere nit-picking? It could be, but when we attempt to explore the deep things of God, especially in a polemical way, we need to be as clearheaded as we possibly can be. Sammons himself wants to pursue “precision” (142). I simply desire to push further in that direction.
More systemically, one gets the sense that for the author, arguably, “sovereignty” is primarily about control and “authority” is basically the right to wield power or to judge. While this understanding might be common in our day, these concepts should be interrogated from a thoroughly God-centered perspective. Even more critical for the author’s project, it seems that the author has not broken free entirely from a conception of causation in which God ends up being one kind of a cause among other created causes. For example, he approves of a kind of “domino theory” as one model that illustrates at least God’s “immediate” and “direct” interaction with his creation (194–95). He writes, “Any supernatural event in Scripture could be described this way, when God overrides necessary causality (or suspends natural law). In those instances, God is the primary and efficient cause, not just the ultimate cause” (194). Is this not to conceive of God as external to his creation and as in some kind of competitive relationship with it, in which he has to “override” the work of his own hands? It would seem that in every causal relation, God is always the primary cause. He is not one cause among others in the created realm, limited to being a temporally first actor in a series and absent from the subsequent causal relations. The author should consider further the implications of what he himself quotes from Aquinas.
Speaking of Aquinas, there are intellectual resources in Christian doctrine which could improve this book. The book does not wrestle with the implications of a Trinitarian God and the revelation of this God in Jesus Christ for how we view the relationship of God and creation. It never contemplates the intrinsically non-competitive understanding of the relationship between God and his world, which perspective is the fruit of the church’s reflection on the person of Jesus Christ. It never wrestles with the fact that God is not only exterior to his creation but also more interior to it than it is to itself. There is no discussion of God’s love, giving the impression that such is irrelevant to the topic at hand.
This book is valiant. Of that there is no doubt. Yet more work is needed before it clarifies our knowledge of the difficult doctrine of reprobation.
