On Free Will

Do we have free will? Did I choose my breakfast this morning? Did I choose to write this? Do we choose God? Do we decide our eternal fate? Here are few things that I believe to be true.

What everyone has to accept.

No Christian can actually believe that his will is totally free. Every Christian must affirm that nothing happens that God does not at the very least allow. If we could think or do anything that God didn’t allow to happen, God wouldn’t be God. That would contradict the very definition of God. No, everything that we do is somehow part of God’s will.

This wrecks the notion of free will. Yes, our will could still be mostly free, but not ultimately. Freedom is binary; it is not a spectrum. You can be possess more or less freedom, but you're not truly free if someone else can place even the slightest restriction on your freedom.

Taking it further.

It may still be tempting to cling to some adulterated version of free will, but I don’t think that’s a tenable position. I think God does a lot more than just place minor restrictions on our will. I think that God’s sovereignty is absolute. I think that God is sovereign over every part of us, even when we don’t give him permission to be.

I have a handful of reasons for thinking this way. First, I think it’s consistent with the mere idea of what it means to be God. You can’t put a box around God. He’s the first cause. He sustains all things. Everything lives, moves, and has its being in him. Everything is eternally dependent on him for its existence. I think that includes our wills.

“In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

Second, my monergistic soteriological assumptions inform this view. I think that salvation is the exclusive work of God. If our free will doesn’t lead us to salvation, what good is it? Even if we supposed that our will was technically free, it is forever in bondage. We were “slaves of sin” (Romans 6:17). Our will was enslaved to evil desires. Worse, it was dead in its trespasses and sins.

“You say the will is free, but in reality it is a slave” (Augustine, Against Julian, Book 2).

If free will yields such a wretched hell-bound race, I think I’ll pass. If God has to withhold my free will in order to redeem and resurrect me from that sorry state, so be it! And then even once we’re redeemed, God doesn’t just set us free. Our will remains in bondage because he makes us “slaves of God” (Romans 6:18). Of course, God is a far better master. The fruit of sin was death, but God’s free gift is sanctification and eternal life (Romans 6:23). God is freedom, so to serve God is to participate in true freedom.

“God's sovereignty is not a limitation on our freedom, but a source of true freedom” (Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will).

Third, I simply cannot get around all the times God seems to violate people’s will in Scripture. God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Depending on how you read Daniel 4, God makes Nebuchadnezzar go crazy and eat grass like an ox for seven years. In Proverbs, we read that God manipulates the hearts of kings.

“The king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; he turns it wherever he will” (Proverbs 21:1).

Further, Paul describes us as clay that God handles however he pleases. That doesn’t sound like it leaves much room for free will. If God has the right “to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use” (Romans 9:21), and if we have no right to answer back to God (Romans 9:20), it must be inevitably futile to insist on any kind of self-determinism. If God’s the potter and we’re the clay, does that not reduce us to pawns in God’s grand schemes? I think it does.

But . . .

But notice I didn’t say mere pawns. We’re not just pawns in God’s plan. While I think it’s good to acknowledge the ultimate reality that we are indeed small shards of clay with which God can do what he pleases, there’s another perspective to consider.

The interaction of God’s will with our will is not cut and dry. It’s not the same as the interaction of two humans’ wills. We perceive ourselves as having free will. We don’t feel forced to do anything. As far as we’re concerned, we make our own choices. We are agents that are responsible for our decisions and actions. And that perception isn’t necessarily wrong just because God ultimately imposes his will on our will.

In one sense, our will can be free even as it is subordinated to God’s absolute sovereignty. Just as God exists outside of time and space, he can also exist and function outside of our typical paradigm for understanding free will. Consider the relationship between an author and the characters in his stories. Does Frodo have free will? Of course not. He only exists as a figment of Tolkien’s imagination, right? Yet within the finitude of the story, you might say Frodo does have free will. Within the story, Frodo makes his own choices. But from a perspective that breaks down the fourth wall and transcends the story, Frodo’s free will vanishes.

I don’t see any reason why it can’t be the same with God and us. If anything, this line of thinking works better for God and us. Tolkien is a lot more like his characters than God is like us. God transcends us humans to an infinitely greater degree than a human author transcends his characters. As a result, it seems like there would be infinitely more room for nuanced interaction between God’s will and ours.