Doctrine of Man (Part 27): Freedom of the Will

Freedom of the Will

In our discussion of the doctrine of man, we’ve been thinking now for many weeks about man as sinner. We’ve just finished a discussion of the doctrine of original sin.

Today we want to turn to the topic of the freedom of the will. The operative question in this section is this: Given our fallenness and sinfulness before God, do we have the freedom to respond to God’s gracious initiatives? Or are we completely passive, if not resistant, such that all of the activity and efficacy of salvation comes from the divine side?

Let’s begin by looking at some biblical data on this question. Let’s first read four Pauline passages from the New Testament that speak to this subject.

First is Ephesians 2:8-9: “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God — not because of works, lest any man should boast.”

Second is Romans 9:6-25. Speaking of Israel’s failure to attain salvation, Paul writes,

It is not as though the word of God had failed. For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are his descendants; but “Through Isaac shall your descendants be named.” This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are reckoned as descendants. For this is what the promise said, “About this time I will return and Sarah shall have a son.” And not only so, but also when Rebecca had conceived children by one man, our forefather Isaac, though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad, in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of his call, she was told, “The elder will serve the younger.” As it is written, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”

What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means! For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” So it depends not upon man’s will or exertion, but upon God’s mercy. For the scripture says to Pharaoh, “I have raised you up for the very purpose of showing my power in you, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth.” So then he has mercy upon whomever he wills, and he hardens the heart of whomever he wills. You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” But who are you, a man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me thus?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for beauty and another for menial use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience the vessels of wrath made for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for the vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory, even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles? As indeed he says in Hosea,

“Those who were not my people
I will call ‘my people,’
and her who was not beloved
I will call ‘my beloved.’”

Then in Romans 10:6-13, Paul goes on to say:

But the righteousness based on faith says, Do not say in your heart, “Who will ascend into heaven?” (that is, to bring Christ down) or “Who will descend into the abyss?” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But what does it say? The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart (that is, the word of faith which we preach); because, if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For man believes with his heart and so is justified, and he confesses with his lips and so is saved. The scripture says, “No one who believes in him will be put to shame.” For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and bestows his riches upon all who call upon him. For, “every one who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.”

Finally, in Galatians 3:6-9 Paul writes,

Thus Abraham “believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” So you see that it is men of faith who are the sons of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “In you shall all the nations be blessed.” So then, those who are men of faith are blessed with Abraham who had faith.

These are the scriptural data that we want to reflect upon concerning the freedom of the will.

Let’s turn now to various attempts to systematize these biblical data.

First, let’s look at what the Protestant Reformers had to say about the question of the freedom of the will. The Reformers held to the so-called “bondage of the will.” Infected with original sin, fallen man is incapable of freely choosing for God and appropriating his grace. So Martin Luther, for example, held that human beings are, as he put it, free in things below but bound in things above. That is to say, Luther was willing to grant that human beings have freedom of the will with respect to earthly affairs, for example, the decision to shop at Publix instead of at Trader Joe’s. But, when it comes to things above (that is to say, spiritual matters), man’s sinfulness has bound his will, so that man is not free to choose for God and to appropriate his grace. Rather, redemption must come entirely from God’s side. It is God who chooses and saves whom he wills.

The Swiss Reformer John Calvin was even more stringent than Luther in his view of the bondage of the will. Calvin emphasized the doctrine of total depravity – that every aspect of the human person is fallen and infected with sin. Being thus totally depraved, you have no ability to respond to God’s offer of salvation. Preaching the Gospel to you is like preaching to a dead man because you are dead in your sins. So God must unconditionally elect those whom he wills to save, and he simply passes over those whom he does not elect to save, and they are damned as a result.

Following on total depravity and unconditional election is God’s irresistible grace. Given that saving grace comes from God alone and that God is omnipotent, God’s grace is irresistible by human beings. Bound in sin, you do not have the freedom to respond to God’s grace, but neither do you have the freedom to resist God’s grace because God has unconditionally elected to save you. Therefore, if by his sovereign decree, he wills that you will be saved, then you will be saved, and his grace will inevitably and irresistibly produce its effect in you. So salvation is totally determined from the side of God.

The foregoing is the sense in which the Protestant Reformers affirmed the doctrine of sola gratia (that is, salvation by grace alone). It is not simply that we are saved through no merit of our own but only by God’s undeserved favor. It is much more than that. The Reformers affirmed an irresistible grace that you have no power to refuse. There is nothing about you that would prompt God to choose you, such as a disposition to have faith in God; rather he simply sovereignly chooses to save whomever he wills, and he gives irresistible grace to those persons alone, and as a result they are saved. So there is no freedom of the will with respect to salvation.

The Catholic View of Freedom of the Will

In contrast to the Reformers’ view stands the Roman Catholic view that was enunciated at the Council of Trent following the Protestant Reformation. The Council of Trent was held over many years and in many sessions between the years 1545 and 1563. It was, as it were, the Catholic response to the Reformation. It epitomized the beliefs and teaching of the Catholic Counter-Reformation in response to the Reformers’ doctrine.

The doctrine promulgated at Trent affirms freedom of the will in contrast to the doctrine of the Reformers. According to Trent, the process of salvation has several steps, or stages as it were, in which God and man each plays his part:

1. God’s prevenient grace. This first step is from God’s side. Against Pelagius the Council of Trent held that no one approaches God, saying “Oh, God, I need you. I want you. I have this God-shaped vacuum in my heart and therefore I am turning to you for salvation.” No, God’s grace comes first – it is prevenient. God’s grace first seeks you out. For sinful, fallen, corrupted, natural man does not seek the things of the Spirit of God. So the first step must come entirely from the divine side. It is God’s initiative in salvation to seek out sinful persons.

2. Preparation of the heart for the receiving of God’s grace. This step comes from the human side. This is the human response to God’s prevenient grace, which is drawing you to himself. This is the point at which freedom of the will enters in. The bestowal of God’s grace is not a unilateral process. It requires some sort of human response in return.

3. Justification. Here, in response to the human preparation of the heart, God infuses his grace into the individual believer. Notice that justification is not a forensic declaration of righteousness, but a transforming power infused into a person. For the Catholic justification increases as one is progressively transformed by God’s grace.

4. Human beings are enabled to perform good works which God’s grace works in you. We are back again to the human response: filled with God’s grace – in the power of God’s grace – we are enabled to do good works. Again, God’s grace is conceived not as unmarried favor, but as a transforming power which enables us to do good works.

5. The merit of the good works that you perform then win your salvation. So the final step in the process is eternal life which, through the merit of the good works that God’s grace has enabled you to perform, you find heaven. Your good works merit salvation, but those works are enabled by God’s grace. So Catholics will claim that they do believe in salvation by grace.

So I think you can see that the Catholic view is a blend of both divine and human factors in salvation. From God’s side we have prevenient grace, his infusion of justifying grace, and his bestowal of eternal life; but from the human side we have the response of the heart to God’s prevenient grace and then the performance of good works through the power of God’s grace working in you that then merit the eternal life that God bestows.

Assessment

Let’s now turn to an evaluation of these attempts to systematize the biblical data concerning freedom of the will. By way of review, we’ve seen that for the Reformers like Luther and Calvin there is no freedom of the will with respect to the reception of God’s grace or finding salvation. We are dead in sin, slaves to sin, bound in sin and darkness, and it is only by God’s grace that anyone can be saved. The initiative in salvation comes entirely from God’s side, and his grace is irresistible. He freely selects certain persons to be recipients of that grace and then irresistibly wins the consent of the creaturely will so as to achieve a person’s salvation. So freedom of the will is excluded.

By contrast, we saw that on the Roman Catholic view as enunciated at the Council of Trent both God and man play a role in the process of salvation. (1) First is God’s role in providing prevenient grace. Then (2) there is the preparation of the human heart to receive God’s saving grace as we respond to the prevenient grace of God. For those who respond affirmatively to God’s prevenient grace, then (3) God infuses justifying grace, so that they are now justified before God by his grace. (4) Through the inner grace of God empowering us and filling us, we are then enabled to perform good works which then merit salvation. The result is finally, (5) eternal life.

How might we evaluate these competing views? Protestants and Catholics agree on the first step – the necessity of God’s prevenient grace in the process of salvation, and rightly so, I think. The natural man left to himself does not seek God. So apart from the prevenient grace of God, no one would ever be saved. God must take the initiative in convicting of sin and drawing persons to himself.

But then it seems that at some point along the line human beings do have the freedom either to accede to that drawing of God’s grace or to resist it and push back and refuse to receive God’s saving grace. We need not think of this as even the ability to receive God’s grace but merely to quit resisting it. Thus, human free will does enter the process at this point.

Someone might say, but doesn’t Romans 9 teach that human beings are completely inert in the process of salvation, that it belongs entirely to God’s will who is elect and who is reprobate and left unsaved. Doesn’t Romans 9 teach a strong doctrine of predestination and irresistible grace that excludes any sort of human role in terms of a free response such as I have suggested? I would like to suggest for your consideration a very different reading of Romans 9 than the one that we so often hear. Typically, people think of Romans 9 as God’s narrowing down the scope of election to just those few people that he wants to save. He passes over the broad mass of humanity to selectively save those few that he has picked out. I want to suggest that Paul’s burden in Romans 9 is exactly the opposite. What Paul wants to do here is to broaden the scope of salvation, not to narrow it down to a select few. He wants to broaden it as wide as possible.

The problem that Paul is dealing with in Romans 9 concerns Jewish persons who think that because of their Jewish ethnicity they have a sort of “leg up” on salvation by God. Those who were ethnically Jewish found it unthinkable that God would reject his chosen people Israel and instead allow these execrable Gentiles to go into the Kingdom of God rather than his own beloved people. How God could prefer over the Jews these Gentile dogs and save them and pass over the Jews was just unthinkable for these Jewish people. So what Paul wants to emphasize in Romans 9 is God’s sovereignty in electing and saving whomever he wants regardless of their ethnic background. Whether Jew or Gentile, it is God’s choice as to who will be saved.

So you notice at the beginning of chapter 9 Paul expresses his anguish concerning those Israelites to whom all of the promises of the old covenant belong but who are not believers in Christ. He says in verse 6 that it is not as though God’s Word has failed. Rather he says that not everyone who is descended from Israel belongs to Israel. Not everybody is a real child of Abraham just because he is Abraham’s physical descendant. Just because you are ethnically Jewish doesn’t mean that you have some sort of a favored status with God. Rather, as Paul illustrates with the story of Jacob and Esau, God has the freedom to choose whom he wills to be saved. Just being descended from Abraham physically is no guarantee.

So in verses 6-24, Paul says God is free to save whomever he wants and that no one can call into question God’s choice. No one has the right to talk back to God; no one has the right to say that God has to prefer his own people Israel over these Gentiles. If God wants to broaden the scope of salvation to include Gentiles in addition to and even instead of his chosen people, the ethnic Jews, then no one can talk back to God. It is God who has mercy upon whom he has mercy and has compassion upon whom he has compassion.

So here is the key question: Who is it, then, according to Romans 9, that God has chosen to elect if it is not those who are ethnically Jewish? The answer is: those who have faith in Christ Jesus. Those are the ones that he has chosen to elect and save. So in verse 30 he writes,

What shall we say, then? That Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have attained it, that is, righteousness through faith; but that Israel who pursued the righteousness which is based on law did not succeed in fulfilling that law. Why? Because they did not pursue it through faith, but as if it were based on works.

So what God has done is that he has decided to save all those who have faith in Christ Jesus – whether Jew or Gentile, it doesn’t matter. It is those who have faith in Christ Jesus whom God has elected. Therefore, given God’s sovereign choice, ethnically Jewish people cannot complain if God has preferred to save certain Gentiles over certain Jewish persons.

This is all based upon the principle of faith that Paul explains back in Romans 3 and 4 with respect to Abraham himself. In Romans 3:21ff, Paul writes:

But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction; since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith.

In verse 27 Paul says, “Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. On what principle? On the principle of works? No, but on the principle of faith. For we hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works of law.” Then he asks specifically, “Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since God is one; and he will justify the circumcised on the ground of their faith and the uncircumcised through their faith.”

So it is through faith that one becomes a true child of Abraham, a member of that elect body that will inherit the Kingdom of God.

Next time we’ll see how this doctrine works itself out in Romans 10. Until that time, have a great week.