Acts 4:28 and the Limits of Calvinist Determinism
Question: Regarding your contingency series, particularly in arguing against the Calvinistic deterministic position, the Acts 4:28 position. Looks to me like it wasn't Peter speaking at all, but the ones to whom he had reported regarding the man Peter had healed and then was confronted by the priests and the scribes. They had lifted their voices in one accord in praise and thanksgiving, and verse 28 looks to me like it's part of that prayer recorded by Luke by the whole group. So, ah, John Piper wasn't entirely misrepresenting the text. Not that I agree with John Piper. However, Piper does seem to take the text beyond its scope in supporting his position on predestination. What say you?
In Acts 4, you are correct about the immediate speaker. The words of Acts 4:24–30, including verse 28, are not Peter’s personal, solitary speech but the corporate prayer of the gathered believers after Peter and John report what has happened.
The narrative flow is:
"And being let go, they went to their own company, and reported all that the chief priests and elders had said unto them. And when they heard that, they lifted up their voice to God with one accord, and said, Lord, thou art God, which hast made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all that in them is:" Acts 4:23–24
What follows, including verse 28,
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"For to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined before to be done," Acts 4:28
is part of that united prayer of the assembled company, not a solo statement by Peter. So on the question of who is speaking, your reading is right: the text attributes these words to the congregation praying "with one accord."
On the broader theological use of this verse, especially in Calvinist determinism: even if John Piper correctly observes that the praying believers affirm that God had beforehand determined the events surrounding Christ’s suffering (the gathering of Herod, Pontius Pilate, Gentiles, and Israel against Jesus, Acts 4:27–28), he goes beyond the text when he uses it as a blanket proof of exhaustive, meticulous determinism of all events.
The verse states that God’s hand and counsel had previously determined the events leading to Christ’s rejection and crucifixion. That is fully consistent with other passages that present Christ’s death as foreknown and planned within God’s redemptive purpose. It does not, however, assert that every human decision, act, or outcome in all of history is equally and unconditionally predetermined in the same way, nor that prophecy itself lacks real contingency.
To use Acts 4:28 to claim that every choice of every creature is decreed in an exhaustive, deterministic sense is to extend the verse beyond its stated scope. It is one thing to affirm that God sovereignly purposed and orchestrated the events surrounding His Son’s rejection and crucifixion; it is another to universalize that statement into a comprehensive metaphysical system in which no genuine contingency remains.
So, on two points:
- You are right that the speaker is the praying congregation, not Peter alone.
- Piper’s appeal to Acts 4:28 may correctly recognize that Christ’s suffering was in accord with God’s prior counsel, but his deterministic system presses the verse beyond its textual limits by making it support an all-encompassing, absolute predestination of every event.
The passage supports God’s purposeful governance of the specific, climactic events of Christ’s passion; it does not by itself settle the broader philosophical question of whether all things are without exception predetermined in the Calvinistic sense.
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