On Free Will and Predestination

Part 1, The Tree of Free Will

During the Spring semester I was invited to share some reflections about free will and predestination with a small group chapel at school. Many of the students who were attending the chapel had encountered Reformed and Neo-Reformed doctrines, like Five Point Calvinism, and were struggling to make sense of it all. I wasn't the only voice invited to share, but my part was to defend free will and to argue against predestination.

Since most of these students were from evangelical backgrounds, they had a pretty myopic view of the Christian tradition. Their experience of "Christianity" was growing up evangelical, so "Christianity" simply was evangelicalism. Consequently, they mistake the local for the global.

Given this, the first thing I wanted to do is to give the students a sense of perspective. Let's zoom out and look at the whole of Christianity, historically and today, to map out views regarding free will. To do this, I stepped to the whiteboard and drew what I called "The Tree of Free Will." I'll share it here with you:

Having drawn the tree I drew a circle around the branches of the traditions that affirm free will: Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and the free will affirming Protestant traditions. Beyond the branches, the trunk was also included, as the church fathers affirmed free will. Basically, I circled of the whole of the tree except the one Calvinistic, free will denying branch. The point was to give the students a more global view of the Christian tradition, that affirming free will is the deep and wide position of the faith.

Now, when I showed this diagram to my theologian friend Brad East, he raised some questions. I knew he would, and the sticking point is Augustine. As Brad asked me, "What do we mean by free will?"

In Augustine's debates with Pelagius he was concerned that an overly optimistic view of human agency would nullify grace. That is to say, if we go back to Paul's description that we are, without Christ, "slaves to sin" to what degree are we free? And crucially for Augustine, do we have the power to free ourselves from this captivity?

Brad's point, and Augustine's, is that if we mean by "free will" a human capacity to overcome sin all on our own then the Christian tradition denies that vision. So what, then, does "free will" mean in the Christian tradition?

Free will is a snarly theological subject, so let me try to offer a contrast that I think clarifies the issues. Our will involves consent and capacity. To affirm free will is to affirm that the creature can say yes to God. We can consent to being born again. As Justin Martyr, at the very roots of the patristic tree, put it, "We needed a new birth of which we ourselves would be conscious, and which would be the result of our own free choice." Following Justin, Augustine also describes the role of consent in salvation. He says:

But God made you without you. You didn't, after all, give any consent to God making you. How were you to consent, if you didn't yet exist? So while he made you without you, he doesn't justify you without you. So he made you without your knowing it, he justifies you with your willing consent to it. Yet it's he that does the justifying... (Sermon 169)

God justifies you with your willing consent to it. This consent to being born again is what the Christian tradition means by "free will."

And yet, consent does not imply capacity. We consent but God alone does the justifying. Even though we are able to say yes to God, we cannot, by ourselves, make the climb toward God. This was the point Augustine was keen to make in his debates with Pelagius. While we might consent, we remain powerless. Consequently, God has to infuse us with the power act upon our consent. It is this divine power, the gift of the Holy Spirit, which overcomes our slavery to sin.

And going forward and beyond justification, our ongoing free consent in the surrendering of our wills to God--"Not my will, but Yours"--continues in the process of sanctification.

So, let me suggest that this is what free will means within the Christian tradition. We must consent to being born again. But this consent does not imply capacity. When so defined, we can return to the Tree of Free Will to note how the trunk and all of the branches, except one, affirm that view.