Free will

“So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy.”

— Romans 9:16 (ESV)

Free will names the human capacity to choose according to one’s own desires, uncoerced by outside force. Every person chooses freely in this sense: no one sins against his will, and every choice for good or evil flows from the heart’s own inclination (Matt. 15:19; James 1:14). That freedom is not moral neutrality, though. Before the fall man could will either good or evil; after it, his will stays just as uncoerced but is bound by a nature inclined only toward sin, unable to turn to God unless grace renews the will itself, not merely assists it.

Confessional Witness

The Reformed confessional tradition states this doctrine in nearly identical terms across its major documents. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646) and the Second London Baptist Confession (1677, reaffirmed 1689) each devote an identical ninth chapter, titled “Of Free Will,” to the same fourfold statement, differing only in a few words of phrasing.¹² The confession opens with the will’s basic, never-lost condition:

“God hath endued the will of man with that natural liberty and power of acting upon choice, that it is neither forced, nor by any necessity of nature determined to do good or evil.”²

It then traces that liberty through three further conditions, each marking a real change in what the will is able to want, not in whether it is coerced. Before the fall, “man, in his state of innocency, had freedom and power to will and to do that which was good and wellpleasing to God, but yet was unstable, so that he might fall from it.”³ After the fall, the will’s moral condition reverses entirely:

“Man, by his fall into a state of sin, hath wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation; so as a natural man, being altogether averse from that good, and dead in sin, is not able by his own strength to convert himself, or to prepare himself thereunto.”⁴

Regeneration does not restore a liberty the will had lost, since it never lost the liberty of uncoerced choice; it changes what the already-free will is inclined to want. God “freeth him from his natural bondage under sin, and by his grace alone enables him freely to will and to do that which is spiritually good; yet so as that by reason of his remaining corruptions, he doth not perfectly, nor only will, that which is good, but doth also will that which is evil.”⁵ Only in glory does the will’s freedom become fixed on the good alone: “this will of man is made perfectly and immutably free to good alone in the state of glory only.”⁶

Biblical Basis

Scripture traces the same four conditions. God gave Adam a real, if losable, power to obey, setting one prohibition before him with a warning attached (Gen. 2:16-17), and the fall came through Adam and Eve’s own willing transgression of it, not compulsion (Gen. 3:6). After the fall, the will is described not as weakened but as enslaved: the unregenerate heart is “deceitful above all things, and desperately sick” (Jer. 17:9), every intention of its thoughts is “only evil continually” (Gen. 6:5), and “the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot” (Rom. 8:7-8). Jesus states the same bondage as a present fact about every sinner: “everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin” (John 8:34), and “no one can come to me unless the Father who sent him draws him” (John 6:44). Paul describes the unregenerate as “dead in the trespasses and sins” in which they once walked (Eph. 2:1-5), a condition death, not mere weakness, describes. The will’s renewal in grace is likewise God’s own act on the will rather than the will’s own achievement: God promises to give his people “a new heart” and put his Spirit within them, causing them to walk in his statutes (Ezek. 36:26-27), and Paul tells believers it is God “who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:13). In glory, the will’s freedom is fixed: nothing “unclean” will ever enter the holy city, or anyone who practices “abomination or falsehood” (Rev. 21:27).

Historical Development

Patristic origins: Augustine against Pelagius

The questions of sin, grace, and the will were first thoroughly worked out in the Latin-speaking church, reaching definite conclusions in the controversy between Augustine, bishop of Hippo from 395 to 430, and the British monk Pelagius during the first third of the fifth century.⁷ Augustine did not always hold the position he later became known for defending. His earlier treatises On Free Choice of the Will and The Happy Life exalt the free will of man as decisive in salvation, views he came to reject in his own Retractions.⁸ Around 400, reflecting on Romans 9 in his Confessions, he had already prayed Da quod iubes, et iube quod vis, “grant what you command, and command what you will,” asking God to cause the very willing of obedience.⁸ The formal controversy began when Pelagius wrote On Nature and On Free Will, works which, in Augustine’s judgment, said “too little… about divine grace and too much about the human will.”⁸ Pelagius’s position was condemned by councils at Carthage in 407 and 416, at Milevum in 416, and by the ecumenical Council of Ephesus in 431.⁷ The two systems’ contrasting statements on free will, as one nineteenth-century historian of the controversy summarized them, were direct opposites: Augustinianism held that “by Adam’s transgression the freedom of the human will has been entirely lost. In his present corrupt state man can will and do only evil,” where Pelagianism held that “man’s will is free. Every man has the power to will and to do good as well as the opposite. Hence it depends upon himself whether he be good or evil.”⁹

A mediating position arose soon after among monks near Marseille, associated with John Cassian and later with Faustus, bishop of Riez, holding that the fall left the will weakened but still able to take the first step toward God unaided. This position, later called Semi-Pelagianism, was condemned at the Synods of Orange and Valence in 529.¹⁰

The Reformation and its aftermath

The medieval scholastic debate over the will divided along largely the same lines, Thomas Aquinas defending an Augustinian account of grace and John Duns Scotus a Semi-Pelagian one, and the Council of Trent (1546) producing statements Reformed historians have read as Augustinian in general wording but Semi-Pelagian in their detailed explanations.¹¹ In 1525 Martin Luther published The Bondage of the Will, a polemic against Erasmus’s Diatribe on Free Will (1524) that argued fallen man’s will is really and necessarily turned from God apart from grace.¹² A parallel dispute arose within Lutheranism itself after Luther’s death, when some of Philip Melanchthon’s followers (the “Synergists”) argued the will cooperates with grace in regeneration; strict Lutherans opposed them, and the controversy was settled in the Formula of Concord (1580).¹³

Jonathan Edwards and moral necessity

In 1754 the New England theologian Jonathan Edwards restated the Reformed doctrine in explicitly philosophical terms in Freedom of the Will, distinguishing natural inability, a lack of the physical or mental power to do a thing, from moral inability:

“Moral inability consists not in any of these things; but either in the want of inclination; or the strength of a contrary inclination; or the want of sufficient motives in view, to induce and excite the will, or the strength of apparent motives to the contrary… it may be said in one word, that moral inability consists in the opposition or want of inclination.”¹⁴

Because the will, on this account, always chooses according to its own strongest inclination, a choice can be at once necessary, in that the agent’s own nature determines it, and free, in that nothing outside the agent forces it. Edwards’s distinction became the standard Reformed answer to how a sinner can be genuinely unable to choose God and yet freely, and culpably, choose sin instead; this account is known today by the later philosophical label compatibilism.

Opposing Views

Pelagianism denies that the fall affected the will’s freedom at all: every person is born with the same undamaged capacity Adam had, so that “it depends upon himself whether he be good or evil.”⁹ See Pelagianism for the position in full.

Semi-Pelagianism and Roman Catholic theology hold that the fall weakened but did not destroy the will’s ability to take an initial, if partial, step toward God. The Council of Trent affirmed a synergistic account along these lines, one its own text insists is not Semi-Pelagian: “without the grace of God [man] is not able to move himself by free will toward justice in [God’s] sight,” yet a person “has the power to cooperate with [prevenient grace] or refuse it.”¹⁵ See Semi-Pelagianism for the historical dispute and Roman Catholicism for the wider tradition.

Arminianism holds that a universal, resistible “prevenient grace” restores to every hearer of the gospel a genuine power to cooperate with saving grace or reject it. As one contemporary Arminian theologian puts it, “by his prevenient (going before) grace God calls, convicts, enlightens, and enables the sinner to repent and believe; the sinner then must respond to the Spirit’s work.”¹⁶

Open theism shares Arminianism’s libertarian account of the will but draws a further conclusion from it: because a genuinely free choice cannot be certain in advance, God does not exhaustively foreknow how free creatures will choose. Several Arminian theologians, among them Clark Pinnock, Gregory Boyd, and John Sanders, have adopted this position specifically because they judge libertarian freedom incompatible with exhaustive divine foreknowledge.¹⁷ See Open theism.

Molinism proposes that God possesses “middle knowledge”: knowledge, prior to his decree, of what every possible free creature would freely choose under any possible circumstance, which he then uses in decreeing which world to create. On this account God secures his sovereign plan without determining any creature’s choice. See Molinism and Middle knowledge.

Objections and Responses

Isn’t calling a determined choice “free” just determinism wearing a more comfortable label? Compatibilists distinguish determination from constraint. To be free, on this account, is “to have the power or ability to do what we want or desire to do,” which requires only “an absence of constraints or impediments (such as physical restraints, coercion, and compulsion) preventing us from doing what we want.”¹⁸ Determinism is not the same thing as coercion, control by another agent, or fatalism; a choice caused by one’s own settled character is not thereby forced by anything outside that character.¹⁸ Bavinck makes the same point: fallen or redeemed, human persons “act as persons; they are and remain the cause of their own actions. They act, not without reasons, but without compulsion. They are free and in proportion to their freedom remain responsible for their actions.”¹⁹

If sinners are morally unable to turn to God, how can Scripture command everyone, everywhere, to repent? The command to repent proves that repentance is man’s own act, but it does not by itself prove that man has, apart from grace, the moral ability to perform it. Edwards’s distinction applies directly here: what the sinner lacks is not a natural faculty of willing (he has a mind, a will, an understanding) but a right inclination, “the want of sufficient motives in view, to induce and excite the will.”¹⁴ God’s commands reveal what he requires and expose the sinner’s inability as culpable, since the inability is a corrupt heart’s own settled unwillingness, not an external incapacity forced upon him from outside.

Doesn’t Molinism’s “middle knowledge” secure both real human freedom and God’s sovereign plan better than compatibilism does? Bavinck argues it secures neither. The theory makes God’s own knowledge dependent on how creatures happen to choose rather than on his own being, so that “God becomes the chief executive of a world in which he is the slave of his subordinates,” waiting on creaturely decisions he does not himself determine.²⁰ Nor does it actually supply the “indifferent” freedom it was built to protect: on Bavinck’s account, the only freedom Scripture actually describes is not indifference between contrary choices but “rational delight,” a will acting according to its own nature and motives, “integrated into the order of causes that is certain to God and embraced by his foreknowledge.”²⁰

Related Doctrines

References

The Confession of Faith (London, 1647), chap. 9, “Of Free Will.” ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 9, “Of Free Will,” para. 1. ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 9, para. 2. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 9, para. 3. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 9, para. 4. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 9, para. 5. ↩
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 6, “Comparison of Systems,” 96-97. ↩ ↩²
Matthew Michael Barrett, “Monergism in the Calvinist Tradition,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 36-37. ↩ ↩² ↩³
G. F. Wiggers, Historical Presentation of Augustinianism and Pelagianism, trans. Ralph Emerson, 268-70, quoted in Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 6, 97. ↩ ↩²
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 6, 98. ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 6, 99, quoting William Cunningham, Historical Theology, vol. 1, 483-95. ↩
Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1932), 237-309. ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 6, 100-101. ↩
Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will, ed. Paul Ramsey, vol. 1 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 159, quoted in Matthew Michael Barrett, “The Scriptural Affirmation of Effectual Calling,” in “Reclaiming Monergism,” 88-171. ↩ ↩²
Council of Trent, session 6, “Decree on Justification,” chaps. 1, 5, quoted in Aaron Thomas O’Kelley, “Grace and Merit in Late Medieval Theology,” in “A Historical-Theological Critique of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 58-59. ↩
Roger E. Olson, “Repentance,” in The Westminster Handbook to Evangelical Theology, 251, quoted in Matthew Michael Barrett, “The Scriptural Affirmation of Monergistic Regeneration,” in “Reclaiming Monergism,” 240. ↩
Barrett, “The Inadequacy of Arminian Synergism,” in “Reclaiming Monergism,” 317-355, 56. ↩
Robert Kane, A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 13, 18-21, quoted in Barrett, “The Scriptural Affirmation of Effectual Calling,” 115-16. ↩ ↩²
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 12, “The Fallen World.” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, chap. 8, “The Living, Acting God.” ↩ ↩²