Predestined in Love

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Our esteemed Pastor Emeritus, Dr. Murray Smoot, has recently written the book, Predestined in Love. Many of our members have been busy digging into it. Perhaps your relationship with Dr. Smoot, your desire to understand the concept of predestination, or some of the following information will convince you that this is a book worth your time, energy and a few bucks.

Copies will be available for sale at Central's church office. You may also look for Predestined in Love at AddAll, an online bookstore comparison tool.

2003 Update: Pastor Murray Smoot's memoirs, Under Rower, has been published in memory of Dottie. If you are interested in obtaining a copy, please contact Dave or Jan Turnbaugh or check AddAll for paperback or hardcover.

See also "Murray's Meanderings," one of Pastor Smoot's writings for Oak Crest's "Village Voice" newspaper.

About The Book:

You are in for a whole series of delightsome surprises from the first page to the last.

Here is a totally fresh and unique approach to the most universally misunderstood theme of the Bible, but nevertheless, the most rewarding. The theme is God's gracious plans and programs and promises for believers.

Forget all about some alleged inflexible decree way back before time that dooms a certain number of people to be lost and a favored few to inherit eternal life. Be reminded that it is St. Paul who introduced and delineated God's predestinating love. It is he who never ever hinted that this predestinating purpose was the same thing as God's freedom to elect. And most assuredly nothing in his writing hints that divine predestinating culled out a certain number of people for reprobation. Nor does the apostle teach that God fore-ordains 'whatsoever cometh to pass;' thus making God the author of sin and misery.

After clearing away such debris, the most part of the book gets joyously practical. Working almost exclusively from the scriptures that relate to divine purposing, this work uncovers new approaches to the how and why of holy living, of eschatology, suffering, the prayer life and world missions.

Introduced here is what may be a relatively new word to many: teleology. This concept regarding purpose, direction and goals will be a guide throughout this study, clarifying many difficult passages of scripture. It also will encourage christian leaders how to share their truths in understandable terms.

No footnotes will impede your pleasurable reading, but an extensive bibliography is there for you to resource at your leisure.

Now, be warned, this work will force you to work. It will demand that you think deeply and boldly, and to weigh these old/new concepts against the whole counsel of the word of God.

The author has not sought your agreement, but your newly-prodded pursuit of the truth. 'For we cannot do anything against the truth, but only for the truth'. (II Cor. 13:8)

John Murray Smoot, Ph.d:
Author of Predestined in Love

Dr. John Murray Smoot brings more than fifty years' distillation of his unique and varied career as pastor, missioner, professor and author.

What could be more eclectic than his degrees from Wheaton College (B.A. 1940), Dallas Theological Seminary (TH. M. (1944)), and St. Mary's Seminary and University (MA. 1980; Ph.D. 1982)?

Pastor Smoot has been associated closely with such parachurch organizations as Young Life, Intervarsity Fellowship, the Navigators, T.E.A.M., Interserve, Wycliffe Bible Translators, World Vision, SERVE, Christian Aid Mission, and several China Missions.

He has served as Moderator of the Presbytery of Baltimore, President of P.U.B.C., and has represented the United Presbyterian church in Japan. Now Pastor Emeritus of Baltimore's Central Presbyterian Church, one of the leading evangelical churches in the PCUSA; he has pastored congregations from Bangladesh to Scotland, and has lectured in universities from South Africa to Taiwan, and has traveled the globe in support of Christian Missions.

Dr. Smoot has achieved an international reputation for godly leadership, scholarly preaching, and thought provoking teaching, and has spent a lifetime developing a pastoral theology that reflects his strong support for the infallibility of scripture as God's revelation of himself.

He is a recognized authority on the Pauline letters to the Romans and the Ephesians; it is this authority which Dr. Smoot brings to his provocative, new interpretation of Scripture's teaching on the subject of predestination.

From the Preface:

Furtively she scanned her hospital room and the adjacent corridor, then, 'Did you say you were a Presbyterian pastor? Certainly you don't believe that horrible doctrine...' her voice dropping into a conspiratorial whisper, 'of... predestination?'

'Predestination? That's one of the Bible's most glorious truths!' I replied so the empty hallway could hear too. My simple explanation probably failed to settle her disquietude then and there, but I made an attempt. I assured her that when God set his love in Christ upon her he had all kinds of delightful purposes he planned to work out in her life, even including her present infirmity.

Like 'the Trinity,' the word 'predestination' is not in itself a biblical word. It may come as a surprise that one will look in vain throughout the scriptures for that much-maligned noun. The verbal form, however, does appear in the Bible; and I propose that if it had been left that way - as a verb - it might have lessened the overflow of misconceptions the noun unfortunately has spawned. As a conceptual noun, predestination has attracted to itself over the centuries all manner of pejorative, and foreboding freight.

My hospitalized friend was, of course, reflecting the problem: say the word and one generally either shies from it or tries to explain it away. In Forty-nine Vital Doctrines Simplified and Explained by an unknown author, predestination does not even appear, and sermons on the subject are remembered only because of their rarity. Preaching on predestination is as popular in the standard Presbyterian church as expounding on dunking stools for witches.

A Ph.D. candidate at Fuller Seminary writes, 'preaching ought not to be put under restraint by a somber doctrine of predestination which limits the offer of salvation. There is, it seems, an intuitive feeling that predestination in its classical form is not 'good news'.'

Rudolph Bultmann, the theologian of a few decades back, considered God's 'predestining' or 'electing' as insolvable contradictions to faith and obedience. Before him the Jewish theologian Joseph Klausner flatly dismissed predestination as 'a hate-filled doctrine.' Then, going back to the Reformers one finds Martin Luther's warning of the doctrine's pitfalls and his advice to avoid it altogether. Even John Calvin, the one most consistently identified with predestination, likened it to a dangerous sea or an inescapable labyrinth for the unwary.

The Scottish bard Robert Burns leaves us a caricature of Calvin in Holy Willie's Prayer: O Thou that in the heavens does dwell! Who, as it pleases best Thysel', Sends ane to heaven and ten to hell A' for Thy Glory; And no for any guid or ill They've done before Thee.

A New Dictionary of Christian Theology, edited by Alan Richardson and John Bowden (SCM Press, 1989) demonstrates only too well (1) the popular erroneous understanding of predestinating purposes, and (2) the crying need for my clarifications and practical applications.

1. In the Dictionary M. J. Langford offers: 'predestination. This is the doctrine that God foreknows and ordains, from all eternity, who will be saved' (that is a fair definition of election but misses by a mile what Paul teaches us about predestinating love).

2. Then Langford perceptively notes, 'It is tempting for contemporary liberal Christians to reject the doctrine of predestination altogether as an unfortunate relic from the past. However, despite the undeniable errors that can be found in most or perhaps all presentations of the doctrine (italics mine), it does stand for at least one extraordinarily important element in Christian teaching, without which Christianity would scarcely be recognizable. This is the realization by the Christian that he depends upon the grace of God.'

It assuredly is not my purpose to shy away from the doctrine of predestination nor to water it down into a palatable pablum. Nor do I intend to defend the doctrine as it is commonly understood. Rather, I will let the light of scripture expose a concept which is exciting, reassuring, even liberating. I hope to show clearly that the accepted 'classical' form of predestination was not content to stay within the parameters of the straightforward biblical account.

First, we will show that there is as much difference between predestine and predestination as there is between destine and destination, or between propose and proposition. Second, we will look at God's predestining love without the burdensome trailer of the Christian doctrine of divine election, attached by so many well-meaning theologians. Third, we will cut away some of the misleading doctrinal accretions that result from this attachment. And finally, we will attempt to give God's predestining love a new opportunity to minister positively, not only to my hospitalized friend, but to all suffering humanity.

Our exploration of this new land of predestination will yield some surprises; I definitely intend the trip to be instructive, invigorating, inspirational. I begin this adventure with you, convinced of a provident wisdom and enthralled by a divine love that breaks out in incalculable ways throughout the Bible. God's predestining love in Christ is one of the key scriptural truths I have uncovered in my own pilgrimage. I say 'uncovered' deliberately, for this truth fairly leaps at its human constraints to put itself on joyous display. A conviction I can no longer restrain compels me to give this work to you, the Christian public.