This comment made me think of one of my favorite Dilbert strips:
Anyway, I think the second criticism you mention likely applies more to those who aren’t “elect.” If there is nothing they can do to become a Christian, then “don’t bother” seems to be the most logical next step. Whereas the “robot” criticism seems more applicable to those who believe they are elect and are already trying to “mortify sin,” etc.
This is just my view, FWIW. The (or maybe I should say “a”) model of free will among Calvinists is that you will always choose according your strongest inclinations. That your actions are determined, but they are self-determined. At the moment I have no choice available to me that is more desirable (when consequences are factored in) than writing this response. So I write this response…
Couple this view of free will with the Calvinist view of Total Depravity (or by another name, Original Sin) and you see that in his fallen state man has no inclination to choose God and so, yes, man freely chooses not to choose God. Given the desire toward God, which from the Calvinist perspective is a gift that arrives when a person is regenerated, they will inevitably (irresistible grace) choose God.
In summary:
That is a very simplistic version–but it captures the gist as I understand it.
But when the strongest inclination is not mine how do you call that self-determined?
But I didn’t choose this state. It was given to me (or I was created in it). So my choice to reject God is not really my choice. It is the result of what I was given.
And likewise if I am given the inclination to choose god and I have to make that choice it is the result of what I was given and not of my own free will.
No (and again this is obviously just my opinion) the inclination (to avoid God) is yours. As much yours as your eye color or handedness. You were born with it. You are stuck with it. But it’s yours. Unless a miracle (supernatural regeneration) occurs.
It is your choice. No external force is preventing a non-regenerate person from choosing God.
Because of what you were given (a new heart) you now have the moral ability to choose God.
As I said, unapologetically, it is a model of free will that makes you a slave to your desires, not a slave to God’s whims.
If a person is inclined to a life of crime, but through education is changed so that the crimes he once committed become morally repugnant and unthinkable, did he not choose at one time to commit crimes because of his “natural” morality and then, at a later time, choose to avoid the same crimes because a new morality was given to him through education? Were not those choices in fact self-determined by the immediate desires of his heart? Did the educator violate the man’s free will by changing those desires?
It is the same thing.
Yes but the person can also chose to return to a life of crime. Which makes this a free will choice. If I have no choice in accepting God’s gift then it is not a choice but a command. As I understand it you are saying the choice lies with God. He is the one that chooses you or doesn’t choose you. You have no part in what happens after that except to go with the flow.
To avoid an infinite loop, I’ll agree to disagree and give you the last word. Peace.
I like this. But be careful also not to try too hard. It’s easy to try to figure it all out, but this is an infinite being we’re talking about here and therefore, His ways are higher than ours, His thoughts are bigger than ours. He is not a man that He should reason and act as one. I’m so glad you have been exploring this! Keep it up, glorify God through it! But sometimes God doesn’t want us to figure out the paradox, and life is all about them. Life is all about living in the middle, and the middle is Christ, He is the incarnate mystery, and we rest in Him. Fully God/Fully man, free will/predestination, the Cross is the MOST horrific moment/the greatest moment, we sin and are both guilt/innocent in that moment, God sees us and we are perfect/still in progress. There are more and more, and we just need to be content with God! That being said, I cannot stress how wonderful this is that you find passion in this! Praise God for the reason and gifts of wisdom through His Spirit, He has given us!
Keep it up man. One child of God to another. Probably never meet you until eternity, but maybe we’ll bump into each other, and find out the answers we spent our lives pursuing!
God bless, Christ strengthen.
The versions of theology that deny free will and the versions like @heddle described (where our strongest desire is given to us and we always go with our strongest desire) both seem to deny that we actually make choices. We may think we’re making choices, but we’re always choosing the only thing we could actually choose. We may look indecisive or look like we just made a choice, but it’s an illusion. If we actually knew how God has governed our behaviour or managed the desires we find within us, we’d discover there was never more than one possible course of action, even if that course of action involved periods where we decided to act indecisively.
All this reminds me of appearance of age arguments, and I reject these formulations for the same reason. Yes, God could have created the world last Thursday but made to seem as though it had a long history. Yes, God could define our behaviour/desires but make it seem as though we make real choices. Both are logically coherent. I just don’t find them to be livable ideas.
What is the alternative? If your will is not determined by external determinism (the differential equation of the universe taking its next time step) and it is not self-determined by your desires, on what basis do you make a choice?
On the other hand… I feel your angst. That is why I would say that the self-determinism I described is at most a first order effect, otherwise we are not truly free moral agents. For example, I believe that you can meaningfully pray for God to change your desires–and that the act of prayer is not just itself an irresistible reflection of your strongest inclination as provided by God.
But at that second order–it becomes a total mystery how that works. In my opinion it has to be supernatural.
One alternative is that, contra Einstein, God can roll dice, don a blindfold, or in some other way self-limit so that an outcome is not entirely arranged or controlled. I think the incarnation shows that self-limiting on God’s part is possible without God ceasing to be God. In this case, God can create beings that are not automatons, perhaps through creating a world that has bounded but nonzero freedom. I wouldn’t even limit that to the natural world: there may be non-natural beings that also have a measure of freedom. God achieves certain ends (and I do mean certain ends) by acting in the world in various ways, not by writing the script everything must follow.
But, similar to you, in imagining the details of how freedom could arise that is more than randomness, I end up in mystery. Mystery, but not incoherence, since it corresponds with what seems to happen in lived experience.
I appreciate what you say about us not being truly free moral agents if there is nothing more than self-determination by the desires one has been given. If someone does want to hold that God determines everything, whether by control or by what desires God bestows to which creatures, I would hope such a person also accepts God’s ultimate responsibility. To me, the real incoherence is in pairing God’s meticulous sovereignty with ultimate human responsibility. That makes no more sense than me blaming a program for a bug I coded into it (or one it inherited from a dependency that, ultimately, I also coded). The program may indeed be doing what it “wants” to do, but it only wants that because of the way I designed it.
One thing that I like about Calvinism is that it avoids the scientific controversy over free will and determinism.
Though I dislike the idea of ‘limited atonement’. As a recent reformed convert (perhaps 39 Articles Anglican) I prefer Amyraldism.
It’s still damnationist.
@Reggie_O_Donoghue, nice to hear from you again. I hope you are well; I’m praying for your Prime Minister.
Blessings and prayers for those on the other side of the pond.
Randy
At one point of my life I was convinced that by some deep, penetrating heurmeneutics, and study of historical theology, that I would be able to navigate the tensions between our will and God’s sovereignty. That quest has long elapsed, and I have come to believe that it is an arrogance to attempt to package scriptural teaching into a systematic superstructure and then to reflect back and diminish those verses of scripture that do not fit the system. This is done mainly to resolve what appears to be contradictory between free will and sovereignty, but I believe we are just supposed to live with the tension unresolved. The path back to tree of the knowledge of good and evil is blocked by an angel with a flaming sword. It is not given us to know the mind of God. God is transcendent.
Why would God give us a special revelation which consists mainly of exhortation and narrative? If systematic theology is what matters, then inspired scripture should tidily consist of proper theology, soteriology, eschatology, and so forth as a well ordered, sequential development of what you are supposed to believe. Rather, when the Bible says to choose, I take seriously that we have the ability and responsibility of genuine volition, not some sort of weasel willing choice for the only thing I have the ability to choose. When the Bible teaches that God has it all under control, I believe that is total. So while I think Calvinism and Arminianism both incorporate truth, they both also reach into a realm of human presumption and intellectual idolatry.
Right! I believe Enns says it is a recounting of how God is interacting with humans…though I can’t find his exact definition.
…and the fact is that the addition of both sectors still comes to choice and free will. The absolutist uncompromising position here is the denial of free will. We can acknowledge all the things that bereft us of free will to quite agree that there is nothing absolute, guaranteed, inviolable, or universal about free will, only to say that a smidgin of free will is still in there somewhere. And indeed this is good for taking judgementalism and self-righteousness out of the free will equation to still say “there but for the grace of God I would be also.” In fact, I often suggest that God has to intervene to liberate our free will from enslavement to sin so that we may have a choice. And perhaps there lies the meeting ground of the two positions, for does not both positions have God intervening to give us some crucial component? To give us choice or to give us faith? So the crux of the matter would seem to be that for the libertarian these are one and the same thing… faith is making this choice.
oh… have to continue this later… my wife wants to go out and see the cherry blossoms together.
We can also be free to enjoy the mystery of how an omnitemporal (I believe) God interacts with us who are bound in sequential time. No one’s free choice was violated in the setting up of the myriad of preconditions required to accomplish the several precise sequences involved in the events for Maggie to see God’s sovereignty so clearly.
…back from my walk under the cherry blossoms with just a few more words on this.
The conundrum is easily solved by another identification like that of faith and choice… where salvation is not a reward for doing the right thing… salvation is becoming the person who does the right thing for its own sake. There is a difference between trying to buy your way with the minimum requirements like the rich man in Matthew 19, and “faking it until you make it” where you do the right thing as means to change.
I thought the point of Jesus repeated refrain “your sins are forgiven, so go and sin no more…” was neither of these two extremes…
But the point I saw expressed here is that what matters most is not what you have done but what you will do from now on. It is not about measuring your worth according to a record of your good and evil deeds, it is a matter of which road you take and which direction you choose go from here.
I don’t think Calvinism, rightly understood (and not all who take the label do), does that. I think that is a mischaracterization of Calvinism.
I like that! And it could be that the “fake it till you make it” is merely one of the many tools given us to retrain our habits and to cultivate better inclinations in ourselves that can hold sway even when our feelings aren’t always in line.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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