A young couple goes to the church office to answer some pre-marital questions with the pastor. The young man, who’d never talked to a pastor before, was nervous, so the pastor tried to put him at ease.
When the pastor asked the question, “Are you entering this marriage of your own free will?” there was a long pause.
Finally, the girl looked over at the apprehensive young man and said, “Put down yes.”
Do we have free will, or are we just puppets of God, or fate, or of a cascade of electrical and chemical processes that originated with the Big Bang.
Is everything in life on a predetermined course, set off at the beginning of the universe? Is everything like the domino effect? Just a chain reaction reaching back to the recesses of the beginnings of time? Are we just players on a stage following someone or something? Do we have free will or not?
I think free will is important to consider when analyzing a person’s potential for wholeness. If it only comes down to God’s choice, and he’s given us no freedom in the matter, then there’s nothing much we can actually take charge of in order to make positive changes in our lives. If, however, God has endowed us with free will, then we can use that free will to make positive choices, responding to God’s gracious initiative, and impact our sense of wholeness, physical, emotional, and spiritual.
I want to dig in a little bit deeper than I was able to talk about in my sermon.
The Fake News I addressed is the saying: “Everything Happens for a Reason.” This way of thinking is called Deterministic Fatalism. It’s a philosophy which teaches humans don’t have free will. Instead, everything is predetermined either by God or by fate, or simply genetics and biology. You don’t have control over anything that happens to you. You don’t have control over your choices. Think about it. A lot of what happens to you is the result of other people’s actions, but they don’t have free will because these happenings were predetermined. Thus, everything you do is also predetermined, so you have no free will.
When you think about this, it means you’re not responsible for anything that happens to you. You could blame the Universe, Fate, or God, or society, or your parents, your DNA, or whatever… anything but you because you don’t have free will.
In a way, a whole lot of what’s going on in popular culture today is related to this kind of worldview, a worldview of fate. Responsibility has been taken out of the hands of the individuals and posited somewhere else: the person’s family, their upbringing, the group to which they belong, their race, their gender, their national origin. Because this person is part of this disadvantaged group, they’re not responsible for their actions. People and society as a whole are now looking for any way of removing responsibility from the self and onto something else, something outside the self, something larger, possibly less personal, a force, impersonal injustice in the system, or simply fate.
But that’s not how the world works. Each individual person is is endowed with freedom to choose. You have free will.
A big influence on my own thinking on this is the Jewish psychiatrist and survivor of the Holocaust, Viktor Frankl, the author of Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl’s parents, brother, and wife died in concentration camps. Before the war, he was a Freudian determinist who believed persons are slaves to their subconscious memories. His experiences in the concentration camps changed all that. He wrote:
“We who lived in the concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms–to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Humans do, indeed have freedom. We don’t have to automatically react to circumstances like an animal acts out of instincts. There’s something higher than the animals in our being.
In the Bible we learn that we are created in the image of God. People of faith have struggled to tease out exactly the Scriptures mean by this and there are a variety of responses. Most agree that at least part of the image of God is free will, as God is the most free being in existence.
John Wesley, in his sermon The New Birth talked about what it means for humans to be created in the image of God. He states there are three aspects, or facets, ways of understanding the image of God. We have been stamped with the natural image, the political image, and the moral image of God.
According to Wesley, the natural image of God includes “a picture of his immortality, a spiritual being endued with understanding, freedom of will, and various affections.” The political image implies that a human is “the governor of this lower world, having ‘dominion’” over the created order. The moral image implies we are created in “‘righteousness and true holiness.’”
Because of the Fall, the image of God was voided or decimated. Obviously humans aren’t by our current, fallen nature, moral beings. The image of God has been marred. But, because of God’s grace, a measure of that image is restored. This is what Wesley labeled “Prevenient Grace.” Through faith, we respond to that grace and we growth in grace, embodying more and more of what it means to be God’s creatures. The more mature we grow in grace and faith, the more like God we become, and the more freedom we have. We exhibit greater degrees of righteousness and holiness because we are reflecting the character of God expressed through the image of God.
As God ministers his grace, we’re free to respond to that grace, which opens our lives more fully to his gracious initiative.
We do have free will, because of God’s grace. The question we must ask ourselves is, what will I do with my free will? Am I to choose to respond to God’s grace or will I fall away from God’s goodness and become a slave to sin? The choice is ours. We can join God in his mission of rescuing the people of the world, largely from themselves, from their abuse of their freedom, and help them discover the New Birth that Jesus Christ made possible, so they can be truly free.
For freedom, Christ has set us free.
Photo by Julian Jagtenberg from Pexels
Comments