ISLAM'S VS. CALVIN'S PREDESTINATION

1. ONLY A SURFACE SIMILARITY

One of the features of Islam, whether one agrees with it or disagrees with it, is that it presents Allah as a god whose great power brought forth all things. That he is the ruler of the universe whose will all things must obey. Samuel Zwemer called Islam the “Calvinism of the orient. But do Islam and Calvin agree on the nature of predestination?

2. DIFFERENCES

In Islam, second causes are practically ignored. It finds no place for the uncoerced activity of the human will. Allah‘s will, like fatalism, is not merely an inevitable necessity, but implies an arbitrary automatic control over human wills, an unchangeable pathway each person will walk, a control-over-but-no-involvement in human affairs, and a capricious mood-driven unpredictability. It is a predestination of ends with little-to-no regard for ways and means or purpose

“A ship crowded with Christians and Muslims was ploughing through the waves. One of the passengers fell overboard. The Muslims said, ‘if it is written in the book of destiny that he shall be saved, he will be saved. If not, he will perish.’ The Christians said, ‘perhaps it is written that we should save him?’”

Many of the terms may be the same, the results of their reasonings are far apart. The further one probes each doctrine, the more superficial does the resemblance become. Islam reduces Allah to a category of will and makes him similar to an oriental despot, whose stance toward humanity is remote and uncaring. Submission is not just the ultimate issue, but the only issue. The Islamic god can be held to no standard, even one dictated by consistency to his own being.

Zanchius wrote that Islam’s kind of predestination is a sort of blind, rapid, overbearing impetus which, right or wrong, with means or without, carries all things violently before it, with little or no attention to the peculiar and respective nature of second causes.

In Islam, there is no understanding of the Fatherhood of God and no purpose of redemption to soften decrees and give them focus for the benefit of humanity. The attribute of love is absent from Allah. And the notion of a personal relationship between God and man is a strange, blasphemous idea to a Muslim.

But, due to Redemption and the Fatherhood of God – religion clothed in the warmth of relationship - Christianity affirms that the sovereign, predestinating God has an awesome cosmic power that is guided by wisdom, compatible with human agency, has Trinitarian connectedness, and is directed toward destruction for rebels joy-overflowing for the redeemed!