New interpretation preserves libertarian freedom by making every inconvenient pronoun corporate, temporary, or rhetorical.
POMONA, CA — A Calvinist scholar was reportedly forced to reconsider his entire theology this week after discovering that Romans 9, long thought to discuss God’s sovereign mercy, hardening, and purpose in election, is actually a carefully coded defense of the proposition that every sinner retains libertarian freedom until the moment God needs him for an illustration.
The breakthrough came while reading Paul’s statement that God’s purpose in election might stand “not because of works but because of him who calls.” At first, the scholar believed Paul meant what he plainly wrote. But a helpful online explainer informed him that Paul was actually arguing against a mysterious, unnamed Deterministic Diatribal Opponent who had somehow inserted an entire chapter into the apostle’s letter.
“It was right there all along,” the scholar said. “When Paul asks, ‘Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?’ that is obviously not an objection arising from Paul’s own account of mercy and hardening. It is a rhetorical hallucination voiced by an invisible Calvinist opponent whom Paul never identifies, addresses, or corrects in any recognizable way.” Romans 9 does include that objection, followed by Paul’s response: “Who are you, O man, to answer back to God?”
The scholar then learned that Jacob and Esau are not individuals, despite Paul’s discussing them before either had done good or evil. They are nations—except for Pharaoh, who is plainly an individual but has reportedly been reclassified as “a highly concentrated nation” for interpretive purposes. One commentator notes that the Jacob–Esau material can invoke Israel and Edom in its Old Testament background, while Pharaoh in Romans 9:17–18 remains a specific individual in the argument.
“Paul says God has mercy on whom he wills and hardens whom he wills,” the scholar explained, visibly shaken. “But the key is to understand that ‘whom he wills’ means ‘whom they first freely permit him to will,’ except when it means nations, or temporary vocational hardening, or an objection Paul didn’t mean, or something else that preserves autonomous choice.”
The scholar also discovered that the potter-and-clay analogy is not really about a potter’s rights over clay, even though Paul immediately invokes a potter’s authority over clay. Rather, he learned, it is about clay independently deciding whether it will become a vessel of mercy—an insight apparently unavailable to the apostle, who spent several verses saying the opposite.
At press time, the scholar was preparing to reread Romans 9–11 with a new hermeneutical rule: any verse that appears to affirm God’s decisive mercy must be about corporate history; any verse that names an individual must secretly mean a nation; and any objection that sounds like the natural response to divine sovereignty must belong to a fictional determinist Paul politely declines to identify.
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