Grace and Free Will

Today I’d like to introduce the rather sticky concept of grace and free will. I say “sticky” because, if you think about it, grace and free will don’t go together very well. Philosophers, theologians, and clerics have wrestled with this issue for centuries. I’m not so foolish or naive to believe that we will be able to unravel the puzzle, but I do think it bears thinking and talking about. More importantly, it bears looking at what the Scriptures reveal about it.

I think the question involves an overhaul of long-held beliefs and opinions concerning the relationship between grace and free will. Both elicit strong emotions. There’s something about free will that we are strongly attracted to. It is at the center of much of what we value as humans. We’ve decided that independence is the opposite of grace. The Declaration of Independence extols the virtues of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The concept of freedom to choose, to be, to pursue, is central to the idea of free will. 

Free will is at the root of much of our civil, criminal, and certainly our moral law. Choosing our own behavior makes us responsible for it. The notion of cause-and-effect is central to who we are. I think this is especially true in western civilization: “Don’t restrict me, don’t limit me, don’t tell me what to do. I’m free. I’m able to choose. I’m responsible. This is my exercise of free will.” 

For people of faith, the concept of free will is almost sacred. We are created, we claim, in God’s image, with the power, the responsibility, and the moral imperative to choose. We are responsible for what we say, do, and even think. Overcoming, in the Christian life, is about making good choices in the first place, but seeking forgiveness and turning away from bad choices in the second place. 

Free will is defined as the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act on one’s own, voluntarily making choices. But what does free will have to do with conscience, the Holy Spirit, the inner light, or for that matter with the influences of evil (“The devil made me do it!”). How “free” are you really, anyway? How much true freedom do you have? 

The more we study the social and biological sciences, the more we see the influences of genetics, education, life experiences, trauma, medication, nutrition, poverty, geography, socialization, family, community, and probably thousands more effects. They influence our viewpoint, our thinking, and our actions. So the question remains, how much free will do we really have? How much is our response determined by those influences? 

As we consider all of the influences around and within us, do we place too much emphasis on free will? Do we overestimate its value? Are really grasping at the wind—the wind of free will? We state so categorically that love requires free will, that free will is essential to moral decision making, that personal responsibility requires free will, and that God created us with free will so that we might choose him, and that any choice of God or goodness without free will would be coercion and not in keeping with God’s love. 

How “free” is your free will anyway? Apart from the genetic, social, and the other challenges we just mentioned, the biggest hurdle to free will is the subject we’ve been dwelling on for the last several weeks—namely, grace. Grace is the great underminer of free will. Grace is like the finder in the game of Hide and Seek—here it comes, ready or not. Like oxygen, grace is everywhere. It is plentiful, it is invisible. And it is free. 

You don’t order it. You don’t ask for it. You don’t wish for it. It’s just there for the breathing. You don’t choose oxygen and you don’t choose grace. But if you don’t choose grace, then what is the value? What is the importance of free will? 

The garden of Eden is clearly God’s territory. Nowhere do we see God asking Man for his opinion or for his point of view or for his choice. 

 The Lord God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed. (Genesis 2:8)

There is no asking Man where he wants to go. The whole world is open, but he is assigned to the garden. To be sure, the garden is paradise, but it is God’s choice, God’s garden, God’s will that Man be there—and not only put there, but put to work there:

 Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and tend it. (Genesis 2:15)

There is not a lot of volition to this. Here he is in God’s garden, to dress it and to keep it. Man is created, it seems, to work in God’s garden—no question invited, no opinion requested. And then:

 So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place. And the Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man. (Genesis 2:21-22)

Here we see God again taking things into his own hands. Man needs a helpmate. Why? Because God said so. There is no discussion, no consent. General anesthesia, surgery, rib out, a new creation, woman taken from a man, no explanation, no informed consent, God’s garden, God’s plan, God’s operating room, God’s outcome. Adam has no choice about his partner. God doesn’t ask him if he prefers a blonde or a brunette, with brown eyes or blue, tall or short. Eve has no choice either. This is an arranged marriage. God’s plan, God’s garden, God’s will. 

Did Adam and Eve have free will in the garden before the fall? Is Man actually created with free will, or does Man develop free will as a part of the fall or as a condition of the fall? By the way, does God have free will? Is God free to do as he pleases? Or is God so good that he cannot choose evil? 

In the garden are two trees: The tree of life, which we’ve called the tree of grace; and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the tree of decision making, the tree of discrimination, the tree of free will. Did Adam and Eve have free will? Were they created with free will? They appear to have been created with some limitation, because eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil will open their eyes, Eve is told by the serpent. This is verified in Genesis 3:7 by Adam and Eve themselves who, when their eyes are opened, recognize that they’re naked. It is further confirmed by God in verse 22, where he says that man has now “become like one of us, knowing good and evil.” 

This implies that mankind was limited at the creation. Is he limited in the free will area? Is it even possible that mankind can have a closer relationship with God if he is subject to God’s will and not his own will? Is the ideal relationship with God one based on Man’s will or God’s will? The prayer Jesus taught his disciples to pray in Matthew 6—the Pater Noster—says: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” And Jesus prays in the other garden—the garden of Gethsemane—“Not my will, but Thy will be done.” (Matthew 26:19). 

If it is true that Man’s relationship with God is on the basis of God’s will and not Man’s will, why do we then cling so tenaciously to the concept of our own free will? Did Eve exercise her free will at the tree or was she beguiled? Was she tricked? Was she fooled? And if she was any of these, was she guilty of exercising bad free will? 

The definition of free will implies decision without coercion. The serpent beguiles her and she in turn persuades Adam. And now we see the entry of free will. As they relate to God, they choose fear over friendship, shame over sociability, guilt over grace. They exercise their own free will, trying to solve their own dilemma by hiding from God and stitching fig leaves for cover. 

How is it that closed eyes—being blinded, in a sense—are the way of grace, and that eyes wide open lead to complicity in judgment and therefore come under the very same judgment that they’re complicit with? Were we intended to be free moral creatures, or was Paradise only for those who ate from the tree of God’s will, not from the tree of Man’s will? 

The argument for free moral agency hinges on our decision to make good decisions and good choices—to choose goodness, to choose God. But the argument for grace is that God’s will is more powerful than my will and he extends that powerful goodness to me. Does the way of salvation come from good moral choices and free will? Or does the way of salvation come from surrendering my will to God? 

Do we really have free will? Does the idea that it was never God’s intention that you have free will alarm you? Does Jesus, in the garden of Gethsemane, undo the free will attained in the garden of Eden, by relinquishing his free will to God? How much free will do you really have, and how much do you really need? 

David: I wrote about this in my book about artificial intelligence. I based what I wrote on the book The Tao Is Silent by Raymond Smullyan, a fellow Daoist [whom I misidentified as a Jesuit in class—DE], in which he concocted a very interesting conversation with God about free will. He concluded, and I agree with him, that free will is simply a natural property of the universe, just as equal corners are a natural property of equilateral triangles. That is not something changeable even by God. An equilateral triangle is an equilateral triangle. Free will is free will. It is a natural property of the universe and in that sense even God has free will, since he is inseparable from his creation.

Bryan: If free will is a manifestation of grace in and of itself, it brings to mind choices—the ability to choose right from wrong. With that ability to choose, does predestination become part of the equation, where God knows the outcome of every choice we’re going to make before it’s been made? In fact, do we really have free choice? Maybe it’s an illusion. We think we know we have the right to choose right from wrong and salvation is offered, so it’s up to us to either choose it or reject it. As we go through life, we choose one path over another, which we equate with free choice. But are those choices just part of an algorithm for what might be called predestination, where God knows the outcome before it even happens?

Jay: We tend to see free will as a reflection of God’s love and grace—”God loved us so much that he gave us the ability by which to choose—he gave us free will.” I disagree a little bit. I like the idea of its being a property of the universe, a natural principle. The creation story includes free will in the matter of the two trees. 

But I would argue that the ideal state is not to exercise free will, ever, in any way, shape, or form; that exercising, cherishing, and wanting free will leads to the fall of Man, to more harm than good. The beginning of the Lord’s Prayer is all about “I don’t want my will—it will mess things up. Let thy kingdom come, thy will be done.” It is the sacrifice of my ability to choose, made because as a creative being I’m going to pick the wrong thing, I’m going to mess it up. Unless God is in complete control of what is going on, I’m going to do something bad with his goodness, grace, and love. Especially in Western society, we tie the idea of free will to freedom. We are not enslaved, not robots. We cherish free will as the ideal setting, instead of its opposite, the fallen setting.

C-J: The story of the garden is always about relationship. A child who is being trained to fit into society, be productive, be responsible to others, has to be made aware of cause and effect, to make the better choices. And thank goodness we’re all different. Thank goodness we all have different levels of tolerance—some people live on the fringe but are incredibly creative, spontaneous, and bring joy wherever they go, while others always do what is expected of them. They are kind of boring and they can be brilliant people, but they just get in that track and there are no surprises. 

I think the beauty of living and life is experiential, and relationships are experiential, and we will make mistakes. But that is part of the beauty of learning. If I didn’t have to learn that, life would be pretty boring. If I wasn’t willing to take risks, the species probably wouldn’t survive very long unless without a book of unquestionable, inflexible, absolute rules. We don’t live in such a fixed world. The mandate of the universe is always in a state of flux. And we don’t live in a military society. A lot of what we count as unique and beautiful would never be created, or known about another.

Donald: So “Thy will be done” reflects a choice to yield one’s will to someone else. That is freedom of choice. You don’t have to do that. There are consequences of freedom of choice. What are the consequences of my acting independently of someone else’s way of thinking or doing? We yield our will all the time. When we sign something, we’re actually saying, “I agree. I’ll go along with this. I will fall in line.” God created us with the ability to say Yes or No to him. But that is a choice. And there are consequences to that choice. 

Jay: Free will boils down to one fundamental choice. In the garden, you can choose to live off the tree of life or the tree of good and evil. When you do that, you have zero power of discernment. The choice you’re making is to sacrifice the power of discernment. That’s the default God wants you to accept. He doesn’t want you to know you’re naked, to be able to tell if you’re naked or not. He doesn’t want you to be able to see good and evil as he sees good and evil. We are not made that way. We are not supposed to do that. Fundamentally, that is not our business. We are not supposed to be in that business. 

If we choose discernment, that is to fall. But we do not want to give up discernment because without it we can’t tell whether or not we are saved. We can’t figure it out. In our human brain, only through discernment can we figure out if we are doing the right things. So we cling to discernment, instead of just letting God take care of it and choosing love and grace.

Carolyn: I really feel a lot of it has to do with what God gave us when he went back to heaven and gave us the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit allows us—of our own free will—to acknowledge discernment and the other principles that go with free will. But we also have the knowledge that we have a choice. And I think this is the choice that God gave us. I really feel it is important to acknowledge the importance of the Holy Spirit in our choice to have him on our lives.

Jay: That’s a really interesting point—the role of the Holy Spirit. Is it to discourage discernment because we will screw it up? Or is it to help us to discern more wisely by always pointing us in the direction of love and grace? Maybe it’s both. I don’t know. But there seem to be two different ways of looking at the role of the Holy Spirit: As a discernment helper or discernment hinderer.

Dewan: Free will and knowledge of the Trinity are the foundation of faith and virtue. Knowledge of God and his son Jesus Christ gives us an assurance of faith. The spiritual gifts of grace and peace multiply in our lives.

Reinhard: I think if any “good” came out of Adam and Eve’s not doing God’s will, it came in the form of proof that Man is not a robot, that the Creator really did endow Man with free will. Free will is a precious thing to us. God controls everything except the power of choice, without which there could be no positive relationship between the Creator and the Creature. 

God already knows the outcomes of our choices, but we still call the shots. Everybody has free will—even Jesus. In saying: “Thy will be done,” he was exercising his God-given freedom of choice. It was a hard choice. The consequences of a poor choice can be mild or severe, but there are consequences—there has to be law. There is no freedom without law; there is only anarchy and chaos. 

So the law of God is still in overall control. We need it, if we are to have freedom. 1 Peter 2:16 says: “Act as free people, and do not use your freedom as a covering for evil, but use it as bond-servants of God.”

As God’s people, we are free to act, but we do so within God’s law. 

Jay: Nobody wants to be a robot. Why would anybody then want to be God’s robot? But what’s wrong with being God’s robot? What better robot could there be than God’s robot? We cling so much to free will as a defining principle of God’s love for us, but if it is the result of the fall, or if it is really reflected in the tree of knowledge and good and evil, we are not supposed to be doing that. God said: “Stay away from that!” 

The question is, why aren’t we clinging more to the tree of life? Why aren’t we clinging more to grace and love as much as we cling to our free will? 

David: C-J told us the answer to that: It’s because it is deadly boring. The garden of Eden would not hold C-J for a heartbeat. Handing your free will to God does not make you a robot. A robot is basically a programmed body. It can only do what its master tells it to do. But when, like Jesus, you relinquish your will to God or you subordinate your will to God’s, you are not giving up your free will—you cannot, any more than an equilateral triangle can give up one of its 45 degree corners. You can (and people do) take it back. At some point in the future people may decide change their mind and reclaim their own will. 

So free will is always with us. We can never be a robot but we can certainly subjugate our will to God’s, at least for a while. Consequences, as Donald suggests, may be the key. It is certainly the key in Smullyan’s argument, and Jay touched upon it too. Ultimately, it is about love and care for your fellow creatures, your fellow human beings. If you choose to apply your free will in the care of and love for others then you are doing just what God wants you to do—obeying his will.

It does confuse me a little bit that God must have known from the start that Eden was doomed. It didn’t stand a chance of surviving for long, with free-willed creatures being part and parcel of it. So the fall could hardly have been a surprise to God. 

The universe is what it is. Free will is built into it and choices will be made. But, thank God, the tendency is for people to exercise their free will in a good way. If that were not so, we would not have a universe today. It would have been shattered to smithereens by the anarchy and chaos Reinhard mentioned.

Donald: To look at it from another vantage point: We have talked about what is God’s will and what is our will, but Man’s ways of going about doing God’s will are tied to religion, and that narrows it a lot because it puts doctrine in the mix. It turns doctrine and the way we live into God’s supposed will. This is a lot more narrow than a conversation directly between me and God about what he wants and the way I live—about love and grace and so on. 

What causes us to prescribe particular, narrow ways of doing God’s will? Some of us choose the Seventh Day Adventist way of living. God is a part of that, certainly, and I highly respect it. But when we become a member of a church, I think we’re agreeing to subscribe to certain behaviors in our relationship to God and Christ, and things get complicated.

Jay: When you choose a church or a religion, the process involves a lot of discernment—which you have no business doing! This is the Catch 22 we find ourselves in. Why do we want to exercise discernment in choosing a religious philosophy, a doctrine, a church organization? We do it because—if we’re honest—we want to be on the right side, on the side of what God would see as the best religious philosophy or organization to be a part of. That’s the mental process we going through.

We were not created for that. We were created to stay away from that, to choose the tree of life, to choose grace and love, instead. The religious ideology or organization I’ve chosen to help me do that is the Seventh Day Adventist Church. That’s the different mindset I’m talking about, I think it is important to acknowledge how much we tie free will to freedom. We want to be free beings. We have the right to be free—to not be robots, slaves, or programmed entities. We see free will as the mechanism to prevent that from happening. I’m not so sure that it is the mechanism.

Chris: We say that love, grace, and other things are characteristics of God, part of who God is, so why not free will as well? If we remove free will from the equation, there’s no longer a need for love or grace or any of the key characteristics that comprise God, because everybody does the same thing. It is not necessarily “love” to me anymore. It is just what is there. This personal component of God is removed when we remove free will. It is a bit disturbing, because my construct of God is a Being of love and grace, and without free will, those characteristics mean absolutely nothing.

C-J: I think the word “discernment” is experiential. It is guided learning. The only way that truly happens is to be engaged. It is a process. Where there is conflict in our lives, if we can work through it—me, the situation, other people—it binds us tighter. We have come to an understanding of mutual regard, what benefits everyone. It is not about me only; it is about relationship. But discernment requires guided learning, and you have to be engaged, you have to take risks. I think the beauty of grace is engagement.

Don: Is God indifferent to your free will? Or does God wish you to make good choices and wants to intervene in your life to help you make good choices? If he intervenes, does that violate your free will?

Jay: I don’t know that I can answer that question directly. I don’t have any issue with free will as a characteristic of God. The garden was set up with one choice, so maybe it is a principle of the universe, of God. Maybe we also need to understand that God is love and grace too. I’m not so sure about that. Just because a characteristic exists does not necessarily mean it should be cherished. Again, the story is: Don’t do that! Stay away from that! Don’t get into discernment. Don’t get into making choices. Don’t get into free will. 

To stay true to that train of thought, God doesn’t want us doing that. If there is any intervention, it is to help us understand what the better choice might be. “Let me intervene always to point you back to the tree of life. I’m not intervening in this area. You’re not supposed to be in this area. You are fallen Man, you’re not supposed to be doing it.” If there is an intervention of God, it is to show love and grace. It is another way of looking at the Good Samaritan parable—through the eyes of free will and choice. The Good Samaritan chose the right thing and the priest and the Levite chose the wrong thing. Or you can look at it through the eyes of the Good Samaritan, exercising loving grace while the Levite and the priests appeal to the tree of knowledge of good and evil to make their decision. That is just another way of looking at it. My point is that we cherish choice—free will—so much that we distort our view of grace and love.

C-J: But that can bring people to a place of piety, and you can be blinded by piety. “I always obey the rules. I do everything that’s expected of me. I always defer. I do what the book, the doctrine, says, and I show up.” I think there is danger in that. Relationship is more than obedience. Relationship is understanding beyond discernment. Raising a child is for the long haul. You’re a parent until you die. All the things that the child is going to come to, the adult is going to come to you, that new father is going to come to you and say, “Dad, what do I do when this happens?” 

You have to understand that everyone who has children or who works with children knows they (the children) are going to go through phases, unique unto themselves. We try to nurture that: “That girl, she’s going to do this. And that boy: No one’s going to tell him what he can do in life, he’s made up his mind, he is seven years old and he’s gonna join the Navy, or be a pastor, or an engineer.” And you say, “Well, I want you to work in the family business.” It is not going to happen. Does that show a lack of obedience? Or does that show enough love to say to this child, “It’s in your heart, I want you to be happy. I want to do what God has placed in you to do.” I think that free will is not just standing on the sidewalk; it is doing what God has given you the gifts and talents for, and yes, guided learning. Not everything we want to do is good. But everybody is unique, has a unique story, and a unique relationship with God.

Donald: Guided learning is an interesting concept. I guess I am allowing my will to be altered based upon what I come to understand. To go back to the consequences of free will, there are two environments where consequences take place: One, I can put my hand on the stove and burn it. That’s my choice, I can do it, but those are the consequences; Two, we live in a world that basically is full of sin. That’s when you develop cancer. That wasn’t a choice, that was the will of the world being imposed upon you. So there are your choices, and then there are choices from just living in a war zone that come come by being part of this world,

Don: You are collateral damage,

C-J: Listening to this conversation I hear two people: One who is living to get to heaven, and one who is just living. If everything I do is based on “I got my ticket to get in the gate when I die,” I don’t want it to be the only reason I’m living. If I believe that it’s a mutual contract with God, that I’m going to get off the sidewalk, but if I also recognize those relationships in this dimension where we live, then those consequences have ramifications beyond whether I get into heaven or not. That’s the guided learning that I think this dimension is about—the relationship with others just like we have with God.

Don: Guided learning is influenced strongly by genetic and environmental factors we have essentially no control over. People of faith hold, as a very basic concept, that there’s a good influence and a bad influence going on in our mind, or in our heart; that the Holy Spirit is trying to get us to do good things and the devil is trying to make us do bad things. How does that influence the concept of free will?

Is God indifferent to your free will, or is he saying: “Your free will is the most important thing, but I’m not going to try to influence you to be good because free will is more important than making good moral choices, or me influencing you to be good.” I mean, it seems as if God is complicit in trying to undermine free will, not to mention grace—the subject that brought us to this point. What does grace have to do with free will? Grace completely undermines free will. Grace comes along and sweeps you off your feet. It’s very troubling, very puzzling.

C-J: The problem with the way you describe it is that it is right on the edge of predestination. “You get to go; You, not so much.” I think grace, in its purest form, is the Holy Spirit operating in us, and who can deny the Holy Spirit? I don’t think that the Holy Spirit, having touched someone with a revelation, can be denied. You cannot run from the Holy Spirit. Humanity can make mistakes. But the Holy Spirit is abiding.

Reinhard: We know grace is covered, along with a lot of things in our life here on this earth and in the life to come. Of course, in this life, we have to interact with people. What do we have to do? I think first we have to don the armor of God—the Holy Spirit, the moral law. That’s what we need to prepare. If we make a mistake, if we make a wrong decision, there will be consequences, but God has already taught us what to do. 

I think God very much values our relationship with him. When we accept Jesus, when we accept God as our Creator, that is what he needs from us. In Eden, they didn’t follow his rule. So God is very much interested in our commitment to him as our Savior and in our desire to give our lives to him willingly, without coercion. 

When we deal with life as members of our church, I think church doctrine serves as a catalyst to propel us closer to God. But the main question here is our relationship with God.

Carolyn: In the garden, was it Eve’s free will to stray and walk away and be by herself and allow herself to be tempted? She took part in something that was sinful, and there were consequences. I’m wondering where grace came in. Did she feel any grace at the time? She knew she had sinned, because they knew they were naked. The Holy Spirit comes to us, which is a gift, but I’m thinking of Eve in the garden, doing her free will, and then when she succumbed, the grace that we speak of today at the cross…. It’s just kind of muddy to me.

Don: I propose to continue to study this subject with a deep dive into the story of the prodigal son, which may add light to the concepts of grace and free will. I think we also need to look at the story of Jesus in Gethsemane, where he seems to be giving back something lost in the original garden. And then I’d like to look at Saul on the road to Damascus and what happened to his free will; at what happened to Jonah and his free will; and at Jacob wrestling with the angel. 

They seem to paint a picture of an interventional God, not one who’s particularly interested in free will but who has specific and timely and dramatic and irrefutable interventions into the lives of many people in Scripture. So don’t despair, Carolyn, we will have plenty more opportunity to think about these issues.

David: This has been a most enlightening discussion for me. I subscribe to the theory of process theology, whereby God is both a Being and Becoming. In grace, I now see God as a Being, and in free will, I see God as Becoming.

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Please note: Next week we won’t have class because of a family reunion, but we’ll pick it up the following week.