There are, at the very least, two deep mysteries at work in this debate.
The first mystery concerns how divine agency relates to human agency. So many debates swirl here: monergism, synergism, secondary causality, divine concurrence, primary and instrumental causation, occasionalism, concurrentism, double agency, cooperative causality, non-competitive agency, asymmetrical causality, participatory causation. The sheer number of these terms should give us pause. These are not markers of insight but are, rather, attempts to force conceptual clarity where none is available. We're attempting to impose an explanation upon a mystery.
The second mystery concerns free will itself. No one knows what “free will” even means. Again, the debates and positions swarm: libertarian freedom, compatibilism, incompatibilism, hard determinism, soft determinism, agent causation, event causation, Frankfurt cases, indeterminism, causal determinism, self-determination, autonomy, moral responsibility, compatibilist freedom, and non-causal accounts of choice. Like I said, no one knows what "free will" even means.
A third mystery would be God’s plans, purposes, will, foreknowledge, and providence. But when you pop the hood on this mystery, you inevitably reach one of the first two mysteries. How, for example, can God predestine human persons and still hold them morally responsible and accountable for their actions? In short, the mystery of providence is not a new problem, it is simply a recombination of the intractable tensions we have already highlighted.
Here’s the point. The Calvinism–Arminianism conflict cannot be resolved because no one can penetrate the mysteries at its heart. No one knows how any of this works. The debate is an exercise in imposing explanations on the inexplicable. Worse, many of these explanations are mechanistic, built on crude cause-and-effect models. They pit divine agency against human agency, causality against freedom, and God’s sovereignty against human moral responsibility. These agonistic frameworks inevitably tempt us to “cut the baby in half,” each side claiming different pieces, each side justifying different compromises. That is the Calvinism–Arminianism debate in a nutshell: a quarrel over tradeoffs imposed on what cannot be divided, explanation imposed upon mysteries.
This is especially true if both parties in the debate function under a sola scriptura framework. All they do is trade Bible passages back and forth. This proof-texting seesaw creates a zero-sum dynamic, as the combatants are forced to choose a part of the biblical vision at the expense of the whole where all tensions and paradoxes are left intact. A falsifying simplicity and clarity is imposed upon rich and unfathomable mystery.
