The Free Will Kept (2 of 2)

The opposite collapse is the hyper-Calvinist one, which surfaces periodically and which the mainstream Reformed tradition has consistently rejected. The hyper-Calvinist treats the will as not really real — the human's choices are not really choices in any meaningful sense. The shape of this collapse is the mirror of the Pelagian. Where Pelagius made the human so free as to need no grace, the hyper-Calvinist makes the human so unfree as to make grace into a mechanism operating on a non-person. Both empty the lament of Matthew 23:37. If the human could not refuse, the would-not becomes incoherent. If Jesus weeps over a refusal that was impossible for the humans to make, the tears are theater.

The Reformed tradition at its best held both ends of the asymmetry without flattening either. The Westminster Confession of Faith says, in Chapter 3, that God ordains whatsoever comes to pass, yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of human beings, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established. That sentence holds sovereignty and freedom in one breath, both irreducible, both real, the asymmetry kept.

Behind the dogmatic move is a simpler reality about what love is. Coerced love is not love. And the reason coerced love is not love runs deeper than the definitional point. Love is what God essentially is, on the second Johannine anchor of 1 John 4:8, and the love that the Spirit pours into the heart can do its native work only where it is received freely. A father who programmed his child to say I love you has received not love but the sound of love, and any father who reflected on the difference for ten seconds would prefer the silence of a child who had not been programmed. The Father whose redemption this volume has been describing is not a Father who would prefer the noise. He is making children, and children are humans who love freely or do not love at all.

The freedom is not a concession the divine sovereignty grudgingly makes. The freedom is what the redeemed relationship is for. The Father is not making humans who comply. He is making humans who love — who recognize the One who came down to them, who turn to Him with their own faces, who choose the abiding from inside the connection rather than being held in the connection against their wills.

The pastoral consequence is direct. The disciple brought to poverty of spirit in Chapter 13 is not therefore deprived of agency. He is restored to it. The human who has stopped trying to merit the connection is the human who can now act freely from within it. The will that had been bound by the futile attempt to climb the asymptote is freed, by grace, to do what it was made to do — to love the Father, to abide in the Son, to walk in the Spirit, in the disciple's own person, with the disciple's own choices, in the disciple's own day.

The disciple's day from Chapter 12 — the morning recognition, the work done in the presence, the interruptions received, the drift through the long hours, the recognition that returns — is the disciple's free action all the way down. The Spirit operates on the will in a way that frees the will to act as it now acts. The recognition is the disciple's recognition. The drift is the disciple's drift. The return is the disciple's return. None of it is the Spirit's monologue through a passive vessel. The Spirit is not the speaker in the disciple's place. The Spirit is the One who has made the disciple capable of being a speaker who chooses, again, to turn toward the One who has been there all along.

The free will is kept because the free will is what the Father came to redeem. The disciple at the end of this chapter stands free, willing, abiding, choosing the Father not because he was forced but because he was made for this and has, by grace, become the kind of human he was made to be.