Here’s the theological thinking I’m doing this Monday morning…
Free will is a pretty important theological concept but almost any time I hear it discussed it is in terms of human free will. Human free will is an especially important concept to questions of responsibility (If humans don’t have free will can they really be held responsible for their sin?)
and meaningfulness. Those questions of meaningfulness run along these lines:
- If God created us to have to love him would that actually be love in any meaningful sense?
- Is obedience to God still meaningful without the option to disobey?
- If we had no choice in the living of a holy life in what ways would it still be meaningful?
I have heard these discussions about human free will many times but the only time I ever remember hearing God’s free will mentioned it by implication in the context of human free will being part of what it means to be created in the image of God.
The other theological ideas I hear that have implications for God’s free will could easily be seen as arguments against it although I don’t think they are usually meant that way. Statements like:
- It is impossible for God to lie.
- God cannot do anything that is inconsistent with His character.
- God will (the implication being must) always be faithful to His word.
These are all meant to be seen as wonderful and beautiful truths but lets apply the same logic to them that we do to human free will. If God does not have the option to be unfaithful to us then is his faithfulness really meaningful? If God’s only option is to be holy (as He is specifically described in scripture not just “other”) then is it meaningful that He is.
And if there are things God can’t do then doesn't he cease to be God because this means some outside power is acting on Him. After all - a God who “can’t” isn’t really God is He?
Of course the answer to this is to say that those limitations of “can’t do” and “must be” flow from God’s own nature and therefore are not from an outside source and no threat to his Omnipotence but I’m not so sure of that.
I have a ton of limitations. Almost all of them flow from the essential nature of who I am as opposed to being imposed on me by some outside power but that does not mean they are not limitations. I can’t do whatever I want, I can only pick between options. For example my free will does not allow be to fly but it does allow me to go for a walk. But of course there is vast gulf between Omnipotence (I have the power to do absolutely whatever I want) and free will (I have the moral freedom to choose between the options available to me).
So I think that in order for God to be truly omnipotent He must have free will and in light of his omnipotence you could say that he has the only, truly, supremely free will. This is what we see so beautifully active in the creation account. God simply wills the world into existence.
When we have the overactive view of God’s self-limitation that I think is super common in many christian circles it leads us to an impersonalized view of God. God becomes a force or a set of conditions. He becomes an equation, a machine.
When we short sell God’s free will his love for us becomes like gravity. Yes He loves us and yes that is real and it has an effect on us but it ceases to be meaningful, it ceases to be special, it ceases to be beautiful. Gravity holds every one of us to this planet but none of us feel special because of it. We do not wonder at the mystery of why gravity should choose to keep us from being flung out into space. We simply take it as a given and move on.
When we short sell God’s free will His holiness becomes like wetness to water. We like water and water is wet, in fact we like water precisely because it is wet, but none of us feel inspired to become more damp because of our love for water. None of us come to hate our rigid form and wish to be transformed into a more liquid state. And none of us are ever truly amazed at the wetness of water. Water is wet. That’s just what it is.
When we short sell God’s free will his faithfulness becomes like a sunrise. It is wonderful and beautiful but it is completely impersonal. The sunrise does not come earlier simply because you can no longer handle the darkness. The sun rise does not rise for you and it does not send it warmth for you it simply rises when it rises because rising is what it does. We often speak poetically of the rising of the sun as faithful but if we are to be honest it’s really just predictable.
What if God really and truly has free will. What if tomorrow God could choose to stop forgiving you? What if tomorrow God could simply cease to honour His word? What if tomorrow God could cease to be loving and merciful and kind and just and instead be hateful and destructive and unjust and cruel? What if we truly believed that the only thing between Him being the beautiful God we see revealed in Christ and the horrific God of our worst nightmares is His current, active, free will choice? What if God is good first and foremost because he chooses to be?
What impact would it have on us if we saw God as truly, actively, and currently having and exercising free will? Some thoughts…
- We would experience the fear of God.
- We would be compelled to trust God as a person instead of predicting God as a force.
- Our trust in God would become a more daily, conscious, and specific reality.
- We would be moved to deeper and deeper levels of gratitude for who He has chosen to be to us and how He has chosen to act toward us.
- We would see His character as astounding beauty not just abstract fact.
- Our worship would simultaneously become both more intimate and more reverent.
- We would be deeply amazed at His faithfulness to His people in general and to us specifically.
- We would be more drawn to know and experience Him than to understand and explain Him.
- It would change the way we think about forgiveness and repentance and break us of our reliance on cheap grace.
- We would begin to see Holiness not as an abstract and involuntary attribute of God and therefore unattainable for us but as a issue of choice and voluntary character which God, is able to make reality in us so long as we align our free will with His.
What’s wrong with my thinking here? What would you change? What would you add? I think there is something to this but it is still Monday morning…
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