The Free Will Kept (1 of 2)

Part V begins where Part IV ended. The disciple has been brought to poverty of spirit and the disposition is now in place. What follows is the transformation that the disposition makes possible — the slow alteration of the human into the kind of human the rest of the volume will describe. Part V calls this mass transformed, and the phrase is meant to carry the weight Chapter 5 gave to mass — the created stuff of the human, the material and psychological and volitional substance of which the human is made, now under operation by the same Spirit Chapter 10 named as the bridge. And the first thing the chapter has to say about the operation is what it is not. It is not mechanical. The human is not an object being processed. The human is a person with a will, and the transformation happens in and through the will, not over the top of it.

This raises a question that has been put to Christian theology since the first century. If God wants the human redeemed, and God is sovereign, and God is the operator of the transformation — why not simply override the will? Why permit the human to resist? Why keep the will in play at all? The answer is in the goal. The goal is not a processed human. The goal is a person who has come, in his own freedom, to want what the Father has wanted for him from before time. A human redeemed against his will is not the kind of human the Father is making. The Father is making children, not automatons. The freedom is part of what the design is for.

Augustine had this question put to him in his own day. He eventually answered that the will is genuinely free — that the human is a real moral agent whose choices are his own. But the will is also bound by the Fall — bound by the disposition of the fallen human toward what is not God. Grace is what frees the will to its real freedom. The freedom and the grace are not in competition. The freedom is what the grace produces. Calvin and the Reformed tradition extended this a thousand years later — the will is free in that it chooses according to its strongest desires, but the disposition of those desires is itself the territory grace operates on. The human chooses freely. What grace does is restore the kind of human who chooses the right thing freely.

The cleanest framework for holding sovereignty and freedom together is the one Aquinas worked out in the thirteenth century. Aquinas distinguished primary causation from secondary causation. God is the primary cause of all that is — the ground of being itself, the One in whom every human lives and moves and has being, as Paul put it on the Areopagus. Secondary causes are the real causes that operate within the order God sustains — fire causes heat, gravity causes the apple to fall, the moral agent causes his choice. The secondary causes are not God playing puppet with stage props. They are real causes operating at the level of the created order. The fire really heats. The apple really falls. The agent really chooses. None of this is in competition with God's primary causation, because primary and secondary are not at the same level. The Reformed tradition adopted the distinction and used it to hold sovereignty and freedom together against the collapses that have always tempted Christian theology in both directions.

The discipline the distinction requires is to refuse the collapse in either direction. If primary and secondary causation are flattened into the same level, the doctrine breaks. Flatten them upward — make every secondary cause merely an expression of the primary — and the human's choice becomes an illusion. Flatten them downward — make God's primary causation merely one cause among others — and God becomes one agent among the agents, His sovereignty becomes contingent on human cooperation, and the redemption becomes a project the Father is attempting rather than a work He is accomplishing. Both flattenings have happened in Christian history. Both have failed the test of the texts.

The asymmetry is on the lips of Jesus himself in one of the most agonized sentences he speaks in the Synoptic Gospels. Matthew 23:37. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not. The grammar is exact. He says how often would I — his own settled, repeated, sovereign intention to gather them. And he says ye would not — their own settled, repeated, free refusal. Not ye could not. Would not makes the refusal a function of will. The lament is over an active refusal. Both wills are real. The Father's will to gather, expressed in the Son's repeated coming. The human's will to refuse, expressed in the city's repeated rejection.

Two collapses have tempted the tradition. The first is the Pelagian collapse. Pelagius, the British monk active in Rome in the early fifth century, taught that the human has natural capacity to choose God apart from grace — that the will is unbound by the Fall in any way that requires divine operation to free it. Grace, on the Pelagian account, is assistance rather than restoration. The human could in principle make the right choice without it. Augustine spent the last decades of his life dismantling this view. The reason it matters here is structural. If the human has natural capacity to choose God, redemption becomes a human achievement at the moment of the choice, and grace becomes a wage rather than a gift. The whole shape of the Beatitude of Chapter 13 collapses. The bankrupt human was never really bankrupt; he had the capacity all along; he just needed to exercise it. The door closes.