A Brief Look at the Freedom of the Will and the Sovereignty of God
by David Ellingson, Mar 03, 2009
The great Jonathan Edwards wrote the definitive work on the two-fold presentation in scripture of God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility called The Freedom of the Will. Many people believe that the relationship between man’s responsibility and God’s sovereignty is impossible to reconcile and to difficult to understand. Many in the past (including myself) have concluded that the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man is an antinomy (which can be defined as an appearance of contradiction between conclusions which seem equally logical, reasonable or necessary). We know that God orders and controls all things, human actions among them, yet He holds every man responsible for the choices he makes and the courses of action he pursues. Many have simply said “To our finite minds this is inexplicable”. J. I. Packer, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God (Chicago: InterVarsity Press, 1961, p. 23)
This didn’t sound like a contradiction to Jonathan Edwards and if anyone is going to assert that humans can’t understand this “antinomy”, they must first show that Jonathan Edwards has not understood it. In his book, he attempts to show “that God’s moral government over mankind, his treating them as moral agents, making them the objects of his commands, counsels, calls, warnings, expostulations, promises, threatenings, rewards and punishments, is not inconsistent with a determining disposal of all events, of every kind, throughout the universe, in his providence: either by positive efficiency, or permission” (The Freedom of the Will, Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co. Inc., 1969, p. 258. All page numbers below are from this edition.)
Pastor John Piper gives a concise and helpful breakdown of Edward’s argument:
First, Edwards argues that the thing which determines what the will chooses is not the will itself but rather motives which come from outside the will. More precisely, “it is that motive, which, as it stands in the view of the mind, is the strongest, that determines the will” (p. 9).
He defines motive like this: “By motive, I mean the whole of that which moves, excites or invites the mind to volition, whether that be one thing singly, or many things conjunctly” (p. 9). By “strongest motive” he means “that which appears most inviting” (p. 10). Or as he puts it later, “the will always is as the greatest apparent good is” (p. 10), in which case “good” means “agreeable” or “pleasing” (p. 11).
Hence the determination of our will does not lie in itself. It is determined by the strongest motive as we perceive it, and motives are given. Therefore all men are in a sense enslaved – as Paul says – either to righteousness or to sin (Rom. 6:16-23), or as Jesus put it, “Everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin” (John 8:34). We are all enslaved to do what we esteem most desirable in any given moment of decision. We are enslaved to do what we want to do most. We are unable to do otherwise provided we are not physically hindered.
Edwards describes this situation with the terms moral necessity and moral inability on the one hand and natural necessity and natural inability on the other. Moral necessity is the necessity that exists between the strongest motive and the act of volition which it elicits (p. 24). Thus all choices are morally necessary since they are all determined by the strongest motive. They are necessary in that, given the existence of the motive, the existence of the choice is certain and unavoidable. Moral inability, accordingly, is the inability we all have to choose contrary to what we perceive to be the strongest motive (p. 28). We are morally unable to act contrary to what in any given moment we want most to do. If we lack the inclination to study we are morally unable to study.
Natural necessity is “such necessity as men are under through the force of natural causes” (p. 24). Events are naturally necessary when they are constrained not by moral causes but physical ones. My sitting in this chair would be necessary with a “natural necessity” if I were chained here. Natural inability is my inability to do a thing even though I will it. If I am chained to this chair my strongest motive might be to stand up (say, if the room is on fire) but I would be unable.
This distinction between moral inability and natural inability is crucial in Edwards’ solution to the so-called antinomy between God’s sovereign disposal of all things and man’s accountability. The solution is this: Moral ability is not a prerequisite to accountability. Natural ability is. “All inability that excuses may be resolved into one thing; namely, want of natural capacity or strength; either capacity of understanding, or external strength” (p. 150).
But moral inability to do a good thing does not excuse our failure to do it (p. 148). Though we love darkness rather than light and therefore can’t (because of moral inability) come to the light, nevertheless we are responsible for not coming, that is, we can be justly punished for not coming. This conforms with an almost universal human judgment, for the stronger a man’s desire is to do evil the more unable he is to do good and yet the more wicked he is judged to be by men. If men really believed that moral inability excused a man from guilt, then a man’s wickedness would decrease in proportion to the intensity of his love of evil. But this is contrary to the moral sensibilities of almost all men.
Therefore moral inability and moral necessity on the one hand and human accountability on the other are not an antinomy. Their unity is not contrary to reason or to the common moral experience of mankind. Therefore, in order to see how God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility perfectly cohere, one need only realize that the way God works in the world is not by imposing natural necessity on men and then holding them accountable for what they can’t do even though they will to do it. But rather God so disposes all things (Eph. 1:11) so that in accordance with moral necessity all men make only those choices ordained by God from all eternity.
One last guideline for thinking about God’s action in view of all this: Always keep in mind that everything God does toward men – his commanding, his calling, his warning, his promising, his weeping over Jerusalem, – everything is his means of creating situations which function as motives to elicit the acts of will which he has ordained to come to pass. In this way He ultimately determines all acts of volition (though not all in the same way) and yet holds man accountable only for those acts which they want most to do.
By John Piper. © Desiring God. Website: desiringGod.org
