Free Will Revisited

A Respectful Response to Luther, Calvin, and Edwards

Picirilli

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781498244039
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Whether man has free will continues to be a hot topic among Bible teachers and theologians. After defining the issues involved, from both a worldview and a biblical standpoint, this work devotes three chapters to exploring the single-volume treatments against free will by the great theologians Luther, Calvin, and Edwards. The author then responds to the major issues involved in their objections to free will: foreknowledge and necessity, human depravity and the grace of God, the sovereignty and all-encompassing providence of God, and Edwards's rationalistic argument. In each instance, the doctrine of free will, rightly understood, is in full and biblical accord with these concerns. A concluding chapter summarizes and expresses the bottom-line differences in the doctrine of salvation between the Arminian and the Calvinistic wings of reformed theology.

Part One

Defining the Issues

1

What Is Free Will?

The first step in the serious discussion of any issue ought to be a clear definition of the issue. I begin, therefore, by explaining what I mean by the freedom of the will.

Free will is not a “thing,” not a distinct substance or essence that makes up one part of a human being. To say that a person has free will is not the same as saying that a person has a body—or a spirit or soul. (I have no interest, here, in the debate whether humans are two- or three-part beings.)

What is clear is that a person has—or is?—a will. I assume that the reader—any Christian reader, at least—will agree. The noun will is closely associated with, and its meaning is involved with, other words like desire, purpose, intention, determination, and decision. To say that a person has a will is to say that a person experiences purpose, intends things, and makes decisions. Machines do not do that sort of thing, regardless how sophisticated they are. We only anthropomorphize when we say something like, “My computer thinks I want the next word after a period to be capitalized.” Computers, as marvelous as they are, do not “think” at all; they only do what they are programmed to do by people who do think. They do not make decisions; they experience no purposes achieved or thwarted. Only human beings, only essences that are conscious of themselves as selves, function in such ways. Only such an essence can will. (Will works at least as well as a verb as a noun.)

To describe the human will as free is to say something about the way it functions. In one sense, then, to speak of the will as free is to say something redundant. Be careful how you deny free will: you may very well deny the will itself. To be sure, when we use the term free will we intend to convey the notion that choices are involved. But that notion is already inherent in the unmodified word. The first definition my dictionary gives for will is, “the power of making a reasoned choice or decision.”1 To say that persons exercise their wills is little if anything more than to say that they choose. Any such choice or decision we call a volition, an act or exercise of the will.

At least one of the three giants whose writings against free will I will interact with in this volume would seem to agree with what I have just said. Jonathan Edwards defines the will—not free will, as such—as “that by which the mind chooses anything,” a “faculty or power or principle of mind by which it is capable of choosing,” “an act of the will is the same as an act of choosing” (FW 137). As I will show later, he goes on to say that a will can choose without being free. I am more inclined to think that if there is no freedom then there is no choosing, so that a will, by definition, is free.

I am not pretending that the matter is that simple, but I am saying that this ought to be the starting point for exploring the issue. Before we argue about depravity, about whether fallen human beings still possess free wills—or wills at all—we had better say clearly what we mean to affirm or deny in the discussion of free will. And I offer, now, a basic definition of free will that I think we can use as a starting point for further discussion:

Free Will is a way of saying that a person is capable of making decisions, that a person can choose between two (or more) alternatives when he or she has obtained (by whatever means) the degree of understanding of those alternatives required to choose between them.

I intend for this definition to involve what is traditionally stated as “the power of alternative choice,” also sometimes called “libertarian freedom.” This means that the choice or decision is one that really could go either way; that the person is neither compelled by some force outside nor shut up from within by previous condition or experience, so that only one alternative can actually be chosen. In other words, possessing a free will—or a will, for that matter, as I would contend—rules out determinism and compatibilism. I will say more about these in the next chapter. For now, it is enough to say that both of these are forms of determinism, given that compatibilism by definition includes the idea that determinism and freedom are compatible. Another name for compatibilism is “soft determinism,” after all. My definition, then, is intentionally set against all forms of determinism and in support of self-determinism. It is the very nature of a self to exercise will.

I also intend my definition to allow that making choices requires some level of understanding as to what the choices are. This means more than one thing. One is that the choices we call free are not merely random but are rational or reasoned. There is no will apart from the mind of a self. The will is perhaps an aspect or attribute of a mind—but I do not intend, here, a technical description of personhood. Nor do I intend to qualify a real choice as requiring understanding of everything involved in the choice, like all the reasons for and against it or all the consequences. But the one who chooses between two (or more) alternatives must at least perceive what those choices are and that he can choose between them.

I also intend my definition, without avoiding the implications of depravity, to make a distinction between the capacity of the will and the circumstances within which the will is able to operate freely. First we define free will and then we can talk about how depravity affects it and where grace must intervene. Each of those issues can be defined in its own right and confusion can be avoided.

When I say this I am reflecting on the fact that the Calvinistic wing of Reformed theology denies that fallen humanity possesses free will, at least if free will means the ability to choose between alternatives. I would suggest that many people—to some degree with justification—take this to mean the same thing as a naturalistic mechanism or fatalism. It matters little to people whether “determinism” is a result of the blind cause-effect laws of a purposeless cosmos or of the deliberate intention of an all-controlling God. Determinism from either source makes no allowance for human freedom, since human choices determine nothing.

I regard it as obvious that the ability of a person to will is part of what it means to bear the image of God, and that fallen humanity still bears that image, as 1 Corinthians 11:7 indicates. I offer, then, that the freedom of the human will is constitutional. One’s will is always “there” as an aspect of human nature, a way persons function. Depravity does not change the fact that a person has a will or that it is constitutionally free to make choices. To be sure, the circumstances in which the will functions bear on whether the person can choose this or that alternative, and that is where depravity gets involved. A person in prison, for example, has not lost the capacity to walk the streets unchained, but his circumstances curtail his ability to exercise that capacity at the time.

Just so, depravity limits our choices without our losing the constitutional capacity to choose. How, then, can a fallen person ever be “free” to choose for God? I will deal with this more fully in a later chapter on free will, depravity, and grace. For now, it is enough to say—and this is the point of the latter part of my definition, above—that such a person must obtain a level of understanding of the choices available.

To some degree, although not as fully as I think is required, Calvin and Luther (less so) acknowledged the existence of this constitutional capacity. Luther spoke of it as a “dispositional quality,” but he was willing to name it “free will” only in respect to what is “below” human beings and not to what is “above” them, only in the realm of nature and not in the realm of grace (BW 105, 265). Calvin made some distinction between what it means to will as such and to will for good or ill. The first he called “the faculty of willing” and the second “qualities of opposed habits.” Of the first he said it is “perpetually resident in our nature,” but he urged that its evil condition at present represents a corruption of nature that finally belongs to the power itself (BLW 209). He went on to say that in regeneration a new substance is not implanted, but that this change affects “habit” (BLW 210).

All three of the men I am interacting with, however, back away from this constitutional capacity when they discuss the will of fallen humanity. They are so dominated by thoughts of the effects of the fall and the helplessness of fallen persons that in effect—and in words, for that matter—they deny that humanity any longer possesses free will. And, given what it means to be able to will, this seems to be no better than to deny that fallen persons have a will at all.

To believe in the freedom of the will as I have defined it above, then, applies to choices of any sort. They include everyday decisions that seem entirely innocent and unimportant, like which socks to wear today (almost, but not quite, inconsequential) or which restaurant to take your wife to for your anniversary celebration (very consequential!). They include much more important moral choices: whether to lie to avoid a predicament, or whether to retaliate when wronged. And they include the ultimate choice that leads to eternal life: putting faith in Jesus Christ. But in all of these, there must at least be some understanding of what the choices are for there to be freedom of choice in the circumstances.

Free Will as Self-Determinism

If I have consciously defined free will in a way that is opposed to all forms of determinism, including soft determinism (compatibilism), I may add that it is also not the same as indeterminism. Generally speaking, indeterminism is the view that there are at least some events in the universe that ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Part One: Defining the Issues
• Part Two: The Case against Free Will
• Part Three: The Major Issues
• Part Four: In Conclusion
• Bibliography