Free Will or Total Depravity?

On Calvinism and Predestination

A brief notice that this article is, more or less, entirely theological. It doesn’t touch on anything of politics, current events, or the like whatsoever, except insofar as the reasoning here might be interesting to compare to that of the modern Big Evangelical, and against Marxian Gnosticism.

A strict reading of Calvinism finds that man, being of total depravity, has no ability to come to God as a choice of will, as his will is corrupted such that this is an impossibility. In this strict reading it is totally within the will of the Sovereign to harden or soften the hearts of who He chooses, and man has no strength of will with which to resist this, either.

Now, fair enough I’d say from a reading of the pertinent scripture, but there is a problem here jumping off the page at me. Let me assure you that, as always, the problem is ours, and not Gods.

The problem, I think, lies in our own understanding of what we call free will. The Sovereign, being sovereign, certainly can do as He pleases. Though, the very phrase “as he pleases” strongly implies the existence of not merely a will, but also of a decision to do one thing and not another. That is to say that what God pleases to do God chooses to do. But the word “choose” then implies the weighing of alternatives, and selection of a particular among the multiple possible choices. But that, then, would imply a particular moment constrained within time wherein that decision would be applicable, that alternative choices truly exist, and that God is weighing possibilities before exercising this authority to make the decision.

I suspect you’re beginning to see the problem with this. God is not constrained within time, and God does not gain knowledge, as he is omniscient, so there is not a choice to be made so far as we would describe it, as he already knows what will come.

The suggestions that God “chooses” between paths would violate the omniscience, and omnipresence of the Sovereign respectively. God is not constrained by time as He is eternal, the Alpha and Omega, and the creator. God does not choose among alternatives because God knows all that ever was and will be. Further, alternatives to the extant path (other possibilities) seem to be a nonstarter logically, as God must have determined a path from the beginning that precludes alternative possibilities: there is no future in which the devil wins.

That, from my own reasoning here, suggests that from the perspective of the Sovereign the universe looks decidedly deterministic – specifically, everything that will ever come to pass He knows now as He always has – “no stray molecule.” Yet we know that this is not, ultimately, the case as to how God sees and interacts with His creation. God is not an automaton, but a father who cares for us deeply and personally in our present time, in this very moment and all moments to come. He is God with us. He is the God who heals. He entered into His creation as us, with us, among us, and to save us. That doesn’t seem very deterministic.

I can see why some founding fathers of America might have taken the reasonably, though erroneous logical step to suggest that God merely cast the die that started the whole ball of creation rolling and then backed off to let it unfold. That is the result suggested by reasoning this problem of free will through. After all, if you were all knowing you would never gain new information about anything, ever. If you never gain new information, how can you be said to ever make a decision? You can’t according to our conceptualization of decision: a choice among multiple possibilities. If you never make a decision, how do you have free will? If you know everything from the beginning, and the beginning is eternal, then how could you ever be properly said to have cause to intervene in a creation which is indelibly on an unchanging path?

In the movie The Matrix, Neo, the protagonist, breaks a vase immediately after being warned by a fortune teller. She knew he was going to break it, but he did not. But she warned him, and yet he broke it anyway. Yet, had she not warned him, would he have broken it anyway? What’s more, could she have done anything other than warn him? If she knew the future, and she knew she would warn him, could she choose not to warn him? If she chose not to warn him then she didn’t really know the future at all, right?

That’s a reasonable conclusion for our oracle in this story, but it doesn’t suffice for God. You see, the picture I am painting here is this: with our imperfect minds, and our imperfect reason, and our imperfect perspective we cannot fathom what it is to be both all-knowing and still have free will. Our very conceptualization of free will prohibits this, as it, to us, implicates an inherent state of unknowing to exercise agency. One cannot be a moral agent if one knows which choice is optimal with certainty, let alone which choice is deterministically and inexorably ahead.

You see, then, that our very conceptualization of free will is wrapped up wholly in our own perspective as imperfect, limited, mortal, and fallen creatures. This perspective is ours, and it is true to us, in this world, constrained by time and space, interpreted by a mind working through symbolic representations of reality from which it is diconnected, and it is, from our own reason, quite correct. But, we still know enough about God to know that He is Sovereign, and omnipotent, and omniscient, and omnipresent, and also that He exercises His will according to His plan as he is active in His creation daily. What I am suggesting, then, is actually quite simple, and wholly unsatisfying intellectually: humility. I am suggesting that we are not capable of empathy with the Lord our God in this case. We cannot stand in His shoes and reason from His perspective. We lack His mind.

This, then, has its own logical conclusion. If we cannot understand the mind of God, the nature of the free-will/determinism paradox, and the Sovereign nature of our Father in Heaven we cannot, then, fully fathom what it means to choose among us to be redeemed. What is this choice of Gods to both know who among us will be saved from eternity past, yet also do his work in creation at a precise moment two thousand years ago to redeem us all on the cross, and also to do his will over the course of time in our own lives to bring about our hearts of flesh, while we, from our perspectives, perceive it was us who turned to Him?

Likewise, it is true that from our own limited and imperfect perspectives, utilizing our own imperfect reason, that we can see our own conceptualization of free will is not only in this, but in all things wrapped up in Gods sovereignty. As such our conceptualization of free will, whatever that may mean to a perfect God, survives this exercise of Gods sovereignty over His creation in predestination just as it does in all things.

So, as far as I can see it, there is no mutual exclusion to God choosing, as sovereign, which hearts are to be softened to flesh (redeemed), and for a person to say they turned to God willingly. These things can be true simultaneously because God is Sovereign and we are not, and this is not a matter of who is in control, but merely one of perspective. Therefore, predestination does not negate our free will, whatever, exactly, that is, because our free will has always been wrapped up in Gods sovereignty in all things, and it is therefore that will of ours which is seen here as limited, and not God's sovereignty.