Phil Johnson and “The Spirit of the Hyper-Calvinist Error”

Phil Johnson wrote:

The question of whether God can in any sense “desire” what He does not sovereignly bring to pass further complicates the whole question of divine impassibility but is too involved to deal with fully in this chapter. It is worth noting, however, that Scripture often imputes unfulfilled desires to God (e.g., Deuteronomy 5:29; Psalm 81:13; Isaiah 48:18; Ezekiel 18:31–32; Matthew 23:13; Luke 19:41–42). And the question of what these expressions mean involves the very same issues that arise out of the debate over impassibility.

Specifically, we know that expressions of desire and longing from the heart of God cannot be taken in a simplistically literal sense without compromising the sovereignty of God. After all, Scripture says God accomplishes all His pleasure (Isaiah 46:10); He works all things after the counsel of His own will (Ephesians 1:11). Nothing can ever frustrate Him in an ultimate sense. Therefore the yearning God expresses in these verses must to some degree be anthropopathic. At the same time, we must also see that these expressions mean something. They reveal an aspect of the divine mind that is utterly impossible to reconcile with the view of those who insist that God’s sovereign decrees are equal to His “desires” in every meaningful sense. Is there no sense in which God ever wishes for or prefers anything other than what actually occurs (including the fall of Adam, the damnation of the wicked, and every evil in between)? My own opinion—and I think Dabney would have agreed—is that those who refuse to see any true expression of God’s heart whatsoever in His optative exclamations have embraced the spirit of the hyper-Calvinist error.

Phillip R. Johnson, “God Without Mood Swings,” in Bound Only Once: The Failure of Open Theism, ed. Doug Wilson (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2001), 118n20.