Free Will Does Not Exist

Free Will Does Not Exist

Jun 13, 2023 | Philosophy

I imagine how most people will respond when seeing that provocative title. What do you mean free will doesn’t exist! Of course it does, isn’t it obvious? Actually, it isn’t obvious at all when we think about it, and I mean think very carefully about it, and not just react as if it’s unworthy of our thinking because it so obviously exists. As I mentioned in my last post, I was talking to a co-worker about Calvinist soteriology, how people are saved, that God chooses us; we don’t choose him until He first chooses us, and she brought up free will. This is a typical non-sequitur, as if God exercising his sovereignty in salvation des troys the nature of his creation. That does not follow because, well, God is God! As I told her, free will is a philosophical concept that comes out of Enlightenment rationalism and can’t be found anywhere in the Bible. It’s just not there. Certainly, the Bible assumes human freedom in some sense, that people have agency, that their choices matter and have both temporal and eternal consequences, and they are in some way accountable for those choices. Affirming this, however, does not indicate there is such a thing as the philosophical concept of free will.

First, let’s address why this is a discussion at all among Christians when discussing salvation and God’s sovereignty. The biblical writers see no need to explain how God’s sovereignty and human freedom and accountability can co-exist. They clearly do, and that’s that. Even reading Calvin you won’t find any disquisition trying to figure this out, or playing one off the other. This debate started when Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609), a Dutch pastor and theologian, objected to Calvin’s focus on God’s sovereignty in salvation. Calvinism became the Calvinism we know today because Calvin’s followers’ responded to the Arminians at the Synod of Dordt in 1618-19, out of which came the famous acronym TULIP, or the five points of Calvinism. Although Calvin would have largely agreed with the substance, I think his understanding of God’s work in the soul of man is more organic and dynamic, not to mention complicated or easily understood. Most people reject Calvinism because they think TULIP is Calvin. It really isn’t.

All Christians accept God as sovereign and human beings as free and accountable agents. The question on the table today is specifically free will. Are human beings truly free? And what exactly does that mean? The easiest way to approach the question, and it is a deep, complex, and controversial philosophical question, is to consider its opposite, determinism. One definition states:

Determinism means that, in a situation in which a person makes a certain decision or performs a certain action, it is impossible that he or she could have made any other decision or performed any other action. In other words, it is never true that people could have decided or acted otherwise than they actually did.

I would argue that while the biblical doctrine of man made in God’s image, male and female He created them, does not allow for absolute determinism, human beings are in very real ways determined and not absolutely free beings. In other words our choices are in some ways determined by things outside our control. If this is true, free will as a philosophical concept does not exist.

The examples of this truth are innumerable, even apart from the doctrine of original sin which clearly limits our free will and choices. For example, every person is born with a certain personality and dispositions. Some people by birth, for example, are more inclined to self-control and self-discipline; it comes easier to them. This has nothing to do with their choosing. Their choosing is of course involved, but it requires little willpower. It’s almost natural. For others this is a life-long struggle. Are the former more virtuous and moral than the latter? It’s a complicated question, isn’t it. If we take into account our naturally born penchant to sin like the crooked sticks we are, then what? Are we in fact “free” to choose? Or take cognitive capacity. Some people are smarter than others. Or drive. Some people are more driven than others. Others are “natural born” leaders, others are followers. How does free will play into all of this?

Or how about the family we are born into? Everyone knows the environment into which we are born and raised has a significant impact on who we become. Every sociological study proves it, but it’s just common sense. Consider a child born to married parents, yes mother and father, whose family life is harmonious, whose parents are caring and responsible in every way. Chances are that child turns out considerably different from a child born in “the hood” or some mountain hick town in Appalachia who has seven different siblings by seven different fathers. Is the former child more virtuous and moral than the latter? How about where someone is born. Does someone born and raised in Saudia Arabia or North Korea have the same opportunity to choose the gospel?

I could go on, but you get the point. Which is, we are not what the so-called Enlightenment insisted we are, cold, cool, purely rational beings whose choosing is undetermined and totally free. As I heard one person say it, we are not brains on sticks. Our choosing and will is a complicated business, which is why I thank God He is the ultimate judge and not me. It is why in humility I try my level best not to “judge” others as if I were inherently better than they are, and why daily I repent of my sin because, well, I’m a wretched sinner saved by God’s mercy and purely unmerited favor. And thank Him that He chose me!

Having said all this, biblically speaking we do have agency, our choices really do matter; we can change things and alter the course of history. We are also accountable for those choices, both the consequences and the guilt for what we think and do. We are ultimately responsible beings, and taking responsibility for our choices is what truly sets us free to be human. We have no need to play the victim, and wallow in self-pity, or grow bitter and angry because life doesn’t go “our way.” This freedom is the fruit of a biblical worldview, of God as our Creator, we made in his image as co-creators, in contrast to the pagan-secular worldview that insists we are purely material beings and products of random chance. With God we have hope, meaning, purpose, fulfillment, joy; without Him, well look at America today. God’s sovereignty over all things is what roots the Christian worldview in true human flourishing, that we are not merely free agents all on our own in a cold and lonely universe, but that God foreordains all things in his magnificent providence toward His glorious ends.  

God’s grace, speaking of salvation, is also sovereign, choosing on whom he will grant unmerited favor. In this regard, it is instructive to read about Moses when he asks the Lord to show him His glory (Exodus 33:18-20). The Lord tells him He will cause all his glory to pass in front of him, then says something that makes Arminians uncomfortable, or should:

I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.

The very essence of God’s being (name) is reflected in His absolute power and authority to pardon whom he will. And remember, all stand before him justly condemned. We are not free to pursue God because He is our judge, jury, and executioner, and like Adam and Eve we hide when He comes calling. He chose Abram out of all the people on earth to fulfill a promise to make his descendants like the sand on the seashore and the stars in the sky, and he chose us in Christ! Even before the world was created! When my brain gets all discombobulated about this stuff, God’s eternal decrees and His sovereign purposes in election, I always go to Moses’ comforting words in Deuteronomy 32: 

3 I will proclaim the name of the Lord.
    Oh, praise the greatness of our God!
4 He is the Rock, his works are perfect,
    and all his ways are just.
A faithful God who does no wrong,
    upright and just is he.

Amen and amen!

 

Heart of Stone and Flesh, and a Valley of Dry Bones

Heart of Stone and Flesh, and a Valley of Dry Bones

Jun 10, 2023 | Theology

I can’t be reading through the Bible and just pass Ezekiel 36 and 37 without comment. It has to be among my favorite passages in Scripture because it so wonderfully captures the monergistic nature of God’s working in us as I understand our salvation from sin. The word comes from a Greek compound meaning “one” and “energy.” Applied to our salvation it simply means it is God’s work alone from beginning to end (1 Cor. 1:30, Jesus is our righteousness and our sanctification). It’s contrast is synergism which means combined or together energy, and it indicates salvation is a cooperative work between man and God. It’s hard to argue for synergism when you read these passages. I know most Christians are synergists, but that doesn’t make it true. Deep down all Christians are monergists because they know they didn’t and can’t save themselves. It is obvious that somehow our decision making and will are involved, but the degree to which those determine what ultimately happens is the issue.

These are deep and ultimately mysterious questions, so being too dogmatic gets us into trouble. I Corinthians 8:2 is a good verse to commit to memory when discussing or thinking about these things. None of us can come close to understanding the being or ways of an infinite God. It’s unwise to think we can. How does God’s sovereignty and man’s freedom work so God can decree and cause or allow something to happen (a distinction without a difference because he’s responsible for it either way)? Nobody has the faintest idea. We just know from the plain witness of Scripture both are true. People will often bring up the concept of “free will,” but such a thing doesn’t exist. I was once explaining Calvinist soteriology (the nature of salvation from sin) to someone who didn’t accept it, and she said, what about free will? I responded, there is nothing in the Bible about free will, not a single thing. It’s not a biblical concept. She was taken aback at first, but eventually had to agree with me. As I was thinking about this I decided I would write a separate post about that, so I won’t explain my thinking about it here.

The reason the Calvinist position is so powerful in these passages is because of the images God uses to reveal the nature of salvation through Ezekiel. The context is historical Israel and God’s judgement against their wickedness driving them out of the promised land, then bringing them back and transforming them in the process. It is important to understand in reading the prophetic testimony of Scripture that God is always weaving historical and eschatological realities into the text, and it’s often a challenge deciphering which is which. Much of the time it’s both, as in these passages. To say something only applies to historical Israel or only to those saved from their Sin by the risen Jesus leads to distorting the meaning of the text.

The first image from chapter 36 is one most Christians are familiar with, and the words and phrases God uses speak powerfully to the Isaiah 53 nature of our salvation from sin.

24 “‘For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land. 25 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. 26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.

The contrast between stone and flesh could not be any greater, one inert, hard, lifeless, the other the center of beating life itself. God replaces the former with the latter, and does not ask our permission to do it. Once it’s done, we choose him, not before. Stone does not choose. A comparable image is death. As Paul says, “the wages of is death” (Rom. 6:23), a la God’s declaration to Adam if he eats of the tree he “will surely die.” Also, prior to Christ, we were “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1), and he “made us alive even when we were dead in transgressions” (Eph. 2:5). Dead people, hearts of stone, don’t make choices to raise themselves, hearts of flesh. Verse 31 confirms the nature of this change:

31 Then you will remember your evil ways and wicked deeds, and you will loathe yourselves for your sins and detestable practices.

It is only the Holy Spirit transforming the heart with the conviction of sin and the need of a Savior that confirms the transformation is real. God changes our affections from self and sin to Him and holiness, thus we loathe because we now know, and accept, how infinitely we fall short of the holiness of God required for a relationship to him. Because Jesus fully absorbed God’s wrath for our sins we are clean from all our impurities (I John 1:9).

The second image from chapter 37 is of a valley of dry, very dry bones God brings back to life. It’s a thrilling passage as you contemplate the almighty power of God, a God who raises the dead, including our dead spiritual selves, a God who does the impossible. As the Lord is leading Ezekiel back and forth in this valley he sees massive numbers of these very dry bones. He asks him a question with a seemingly obvious answer: “Son of man, can these bones live?” Of course not, they’re dead! Ezekiel gives the right answer, “O you Lord God know.”

4 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! 5 This is what the Lord God says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. 6 I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.’”

Notice the power of our God who can simply decree what to us is an impossible thing, I will, I will, I will, and it happens! Notice also the echo of the you will the same perfectly biblical three times—when God wills, we will! Our Almighty God never tries. We see this same almighty power in Genesis 1 where our Creator God is revealed to us as the one who simply says, and it is.

Then Ezekiel describes how this bringing life out of death happens, watching as the bones make a rattling sound and come together, bone to bone, tendons and flesh magically appearing as skin covers them. He watches as the Lord sends a wind that breathes life into them “that they may live.” That is our God! He makes the dead alive, in his first advent spiritually, and when he returns he will raise all His people physically and bodily at the resurrection of the dead (I Cor. 15).

The Lord tells Ezekiel, “these bones are the people of Israel,” God’s people, us! I reference Matthew 1:21 here all the time because our God is a God who actually saves, not a God who tries to save or makes salvation possible. Jesus is given his name “because he will save his people from their sins.” There it is again, he will! Then to Ezekiel, the Lord says twice the exact same words, a promise to His People, that he will “open your graves and bring you up from them.” His will to raise us physically, bodily, as he raised Jesus from the dead is our forever hope. We can take that to the eternal bank!

 

 

 

Uninvented: To Whom the Rule of the Nations Rightfully Belongs

Uninvented: To Whom the Rule of the Nations Rightfully Belongs

Jun 3, 2023 | Uninvented

As I stated in my last post, in light of redemptive history, the theological argument for uninvented is powerful because of the coherence of the biblical message from Genesis to Revelation. In light of Jesus revealing to us it is all about him in Luke 24, we can see him everywhere. It is impossible apart from the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture by the Holy Spirit for the writers to have had any idea of the ultimate meaning of their words, and thus to have made them up. And I don’t use the word impossible lightly. For much of my Christian life I thought, like most Christians, the Bible was most definitely not made up by the men who wrote it, but at some level thought it could have been. That’s what skeptics have been claiming for 300 years, and that message is everywhere in the suffocating secular cultural air we breathe. My deep dive back into apologetics in 2009 eventually leading to writing Uninvented has convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt, in the vernacular, they just couldn’t make that stuff up!

Another example of this impossibility is from a passage in Ezekiel 21 that ingeniously ties back to a passage in Genesis 49, almost as if it was planned by a divine author! Maybe Ezekiel was so familiar with the book of Genesis that he decided to take the passage there and include the same idea in his writing, but that would make Ezekiel a liar. If you know anything about his very difficult life (being a prophet in Israel was a brutal job), you would know he consistently declares, “Thus saith the Lord,” as he does in this passage. We have a choice, as do all people who come to the text of Scripture, when we read of a prophet who claims the Lord told him to declare something. Either it happened, it is true, and the prophet was a faithful communicator of the Lord’s words, or he was a liar. The skeptic can’t say they had dreams or mystical visions, and so just thought the Lord was telling them these things when it was all in their head. That’s not an option over 400 years of the prophetic witness in Israel. Only what I call in the book, a question-begging anti-supernatural bias would prompt someone to think such a thing. If someone comes to the text without the hermeneutics of suspicion, the text reads real, as I also say in the book, with verisimilitude.

Now to the passage. Ezekiel has been speaking to the rulers and leaders of Israel:

25 You profane and wicked prince of Israel, whose day has come, whose time of punishment has reached its climax, 26 this is what the Lord God says: Take off the turban, remove the crown. It will not be as it was: The lowly will be exalted and the exalted will be brought low. 27 A ruin! A ruin! I will make it a ruin! The crown will not be restored until he to whom it rightfully belongs shall come; to him I will give it.

The obvious question is who is this one or will be this one to whom the crown of Israel, God’s people, rightfully belongs. We have to go back over a thousand years (God is never in a hurry, as I say ad nauseum) to find a clue from Genesis 49. The scene is after Jacob and his family has been saved from the famine in Egypt because of Joseph, and at the end of his life he is telling his sons what will happen to them “in the days to come” (v. 1). That phrase in Hebrew is literally “in the last days,” which if it sounds familiar it is because it is an eschatological Messianic reference as we read in Hebrews 1:2, “in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe.” This passage to Judah is about Jesus, the lion of the tribe of Judah (Rev. 5:5):

8 “Judah, your brothers will praise you;
    your hand will be on the neck of your enemies;
    your father’s sons will bow down to you.
9 You are a lion’s cub, Judah;
    you return from the prey, my son.
Like a lion he crouches and lies down,
    like a lioness—who dares to rouse him?
10 The scepter will not depart from Judah,
    nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet,
until he to whom it belongs shall come
    and the obedience of the nations shall be his.
11 He will tether his donkey to a vine,
    his colt to the choicest branch;
he will wash his garments in wine,
    his robes in the blood of grapes.

As we can see, this one will not only be ruler of Israel, God’s people, per Ezekiel, but also a ruler of the nations. This prophecy is what began the idea of a Messiah, simply an anointed one as were all kings and rulers in the history of Israel. From the time Jacob spoke these words to the time of Ezekiel’s similar words was approximately 1,400 years! That’s a theme with some staying power, and why it had such a hold on Jewish imagination at the time of Jesus. Not to mention why it would be very difficult, I believe impossible, to be a product of man, mere human fiction. 

Which raises the question of who this Messiah would be and what he would be like. While there were many differing ideas about it in the intertestamental period (Malachi to John the Baptist), most Jews agreed he would be a Davidic like king who would rule in Israel from Jerusalem and lead them in victory over their oppressors. Even Jesus’ disciples after he was raised from the dead and prior to his ascension (Acts 1), not understanding it all yet asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” They like all Jews of the time missed the spiritual part of the equation, that the Messiah’s reign over the nations would be through the transformation of the hearts of his people. Which brings us to the eschatological and how we’re to understand Jacob’s prophecy that the Messiah’s rule would include the “obedience of the nations.”

In the Jewish conception of the first century, Messiah’s rule would be physical and temporal from Israel over the nations in this material world. Once the Messiah led them in military conquest over the Romans, everything would be like it was always supposed to be with the nation of Israel and their king ruling the earth. Unfortunately, they would miss the spiritual significance of the Isaiah 53 Messiah who would redeem his people from their sins. When Jesus rose from the dead, it didn’t take long for them to realize Jesus was in fact the fulfillment of Isaiah 53, as it is worked out in the rest of the New Testament. The question for Christians now would be looking back at these passages, what would the “obedience of the nations” look like going forward.” It’s not an easy question to answer, as we can see from the last two thousand years of Christian history.

Like most Christians, until last year and my conversion to post-millennialism, I saw the answer to that question as purely eschatological, meaning it was for the time after Jesus comes again in judgment and we experience the new heavens and earth of Revelation 21. My tendency was to over spiritualize such passages as if they had no relevance to life in this fallen material world. How could they! Look at how horrible things are. It will only, I thought, take a final, supernatural act of Almighty God in Christ to change things. Otherwise, we’re stuck with things getting worse and worse, or at best staying just the miserable way they are.

Now I am convinced Jacob’s “in the last days” prophecy about this ruler started when Jesus rose from the dead and ascended to heaven to reign “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked” (Eph. 1). These days started at Pentecost, as Peter says in Acts 2, that “in the last days” God would pour out his Spirit on all flesh. We by the power of the Holy Spirit as Christ’s body in this fallen world get to be part of God advancing his kingdom and building his church in our day until “the obedience of the nations” is his!