Freedom of God

The freedom of God, also called divine freedom, is the teaching that God’s will is not determined or constrained by anything outside himself. God necessarily wills himself and his own perfections, but everything beyond himself, including whether and how to create, he wills freely, “for our God is in the heavens, and he does whatever he wills” (Ps. 115:3).¹ This freedom is not sheer indifference; it is reasoned self-determination consistent with God’s own wise and holy nature.²

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession lists freedom among a series of attributes describing God’s essence: he is “immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, every way infinite, most holy, most wise, most free, most absolute; working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will for his own glory.”³ It adds that God “hath most sovereign dominion over all creatures, to do by them, for them, or upon them, whatsoever himself pleaseth.”⁴ The Savoy Declaration states the identical opening clause almost word for word, naming God “immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty […] most free, most absolute.”⁵ Freedom, like immutability, is Reformed teaching generally, not a distinctive of the Baptist confession.

Biblical Basis

Scripture states God’s freedom toward creation in the most unqualified terms. “Our God is in the heavens; he doeth whatsoever he pleaseth” (Ps. 115:3), and no counsel can overrule his own: “My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure” (Isa. 46:10). Paul asks rhetorically who has given God anything first, “that it should be recompensed to him again” (Rom. 11:35), and Job confesses that God “giveth not account of any of his matters” (Job 33:13). Isaiah presses the same point with the image of a potter: “Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?” (Isa. 45:9; cf. Rom. 9:20-21). Jesus tells the laborers in the vineyard, “Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own?” (Matt. 20:15), and the twenty-four elders confess of God’s creatures generally, “for thy pleasure they are and were created” (Rev. 4:11).⁶

Doctrinal Significance

Bavinck distinguishes God’s will “in relation to himself” from his will “with respect to his creatures”: God “eternally and necessarily delights in himself,” where “freedom and necessity coincide,” but “with respect to creatures things are very different,” and there God “is free to do whatever he pleases.”⁶ On the question why God created the world at all, the only answer Scripture and the church’s theologians have ever been able to give is that he freely willed it: “Because he so willed,” Bavinck writes, following Augustine, who held that to ask further for the cause of that will “demand[s] something that is greater than the will of God; but none such thing can be found.”⁶ Berkhof draws out the same point from the other direction: God necessarily wills his own holy nature, “yet he is under no compulsion, but acts according to the law of his Being; and this, while necessary, is also the highest freedom,” while his creatures are the objects of his “voluntas libera,” a freedom the Bible states “in the most absolute terms.”² Because nothing outside God obligates or constrains him, his acts toward creation, above all his grace toward sinners, remain what Scripture calls them: unearned and freely given, not owed.

Historical Development

Reformed scholastic theology distinguished divine freedom carefully from sheer indeterminacy. Mastricht analyzed two elements in God’s freedom toward creatures: indifference, meaning God is “not determined by nature to one or the other thing nor… determined of necessity by the object,” and free choice, or counsel, by which an indifferent will settles on one thing rather than another. He explicitly distinguished this from the Socinian and Pelagian alternative, which he judged would make God’s will “fully indeterminate” at some point before determining itself, thereby undoing the eternity of God’s own decrees.¹

Berkhof identifies Duns Scotus (d. 1308) as the historic point where this distinction broke down: Scotus “applied the idea of a will in no sense determined to God,” a notion of “blind will, acting with perfect indifference” that “was rejected by the Church.”² Bavinck traces the same trajectory further: from Scotus’s absolute indifference, “Occam, the Jesuits, the Socinians, the Remonstrants, Descartes” all “followed the same path, severing God’s will from his nature and his perfections,” a road of “formal arbitrariness” on which even the moral law and the incarnation could have been otherwise.⁶ Reformed theology took the opposite course, grounding its doctrine of God in God’s nature rather than his will alone, so that his freedom remains a freedom to will only what agrees with his own wisdom and goodness, not power to will anything whatsoever.⁶

Opposing Views

Process theology denies that God is free from the world in this sense at all. Carter describes it as holding that God, as part of the cosmos, “changes along with the world and interacts with it in such a way that God changes the world and the world changes God,” a mutual influence process theologians take to be simply what a real relationship between God and creation requires.⁷

Open theism holds a narrower version of the same denial. Carter reports that on Clark Pinnock’s account, God has made “a kind of covenant of non-coercion with creatures,” which brings with it “certain metaphysical constraints that God cannot avoid.” On this view God’s limits are self-chosen rather than imposed from outside, which Carter notes places open theism “much closer to orthodoxy than process theology,” but it still holds that God is now really constrained by commitments of his own making, rather than free in the unqualified sense the Reformed doctrine states.⁷

Related Doctrines

References

Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 15, “The Will and Affections of God,” sec. XIV: “the will of God is free, and most free. For freedom is of the essence of the will.” ↩ ↩²
Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 64-65. ↩ ↩² ↩³
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 2, para. 2. ↩
The Savoy Declaration (1658), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 8, “The Living, Acting God.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
Craig A. Carter, “Classical Orthodoxy and the Rise of Relational Theism,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 1. ↩ ↩²