In Acts 2:23, the Apostle Peter states that Jesus was “delivered over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God” (NASB). [My] whole question is on how man’s free will and God’s sovereignty work together.  There is clear Scripture for both, but the working together part is a little harder to understand.

If God foresees everything, but does not directly cause it (affecting free will), how can anything be predetermined?  [Did] God set things in motion and foresee what will happen, but He does not force (cause) anything to happen? I clearly see free will in Scriptures, but how does that work with the sovereignty of God?  The easy answer is that God determines every act, but that ignores statements like, “choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve.”  I do not see how man can be called a secondary cause and God the primary cause.  Man would then be acting only in accordance with how God made [man] to be. . . . How is he then culpable?

Introduction

For most Christians, there is no problem accepting the fact that God is sovereign while affirming that man has free will.  These concepts, as the question points out, are clearly taught in Scripture.  The question is how they work together, or how they are compatible (if they are compatible at all).

This question has boggled the minds of many Christians throughout history.  On the one hand, it appears that God’s sovereignty eliminates any possibility for free will because God is in control of all things.  On the other hand, it appears that if mankind has truly free will, then God is no longer sovereign over his creation because man may work outside of God’s control, even thwart God’s plans.  So, there appears to be tension between God’s sovereignty and man’s free will.  To resolve this tension, several different answers have been given throughout church history so that Christians may affirm both, logically and coherently.  Much of the discussion focuses upon how one defines the terms sovereignty and free will.

Before discussing the options and evaluating them, however, a few preliminary remarks are in order.  First, the question of God’s sovereignty and man’s free will is a question of philosophical theology.  This is to say that it is not a question of biblical doctrine as such.  The biblical text clearly affirms God’s sovereignty and man’s free will, but how they are compatible is not directly answered by Scripture, nor how the terms are to be defined.  The various answers given to this question must be evaluated by their arguments and how well they correlate with what is taught in Scripture.

Second, the question of God’s sovereignty and man’s free will inevitably lead to other theological and philosophical concepts and questions that must be dealt with in order to answer the question sufficiently.  For example, questions arise as to God’s foreknowledge, God’s relationship to time, God’s providence, and even man’s culpability.  Therefore, answering the question of the compatibility of God’s sovereignty and man’s free will takes us into some territory that may have never been charted by some.  Nevertheless, we shall tread where some fear to tread.

Determinism

Interestingly, there are only two ways in which God’s sovereignty and man’s free will have been attempted to be reconciled: determinism and indeterminism.  Determinism is considered here first.

Determinism in general is the idea that God determines everything that comes to pass.  Reformed theologian Paul Helseth, in the book Four Views On Divine Providence, refers to this view as the “omnicausality” view of God’s providence—God causes all (omni) things.  God has, in fact, determined from before the creation what would come to pass in all the history of creation.  There is not one jot or tittle left uncaused by God.  God’s sovereignty is therefore defined in terms of causation.

At first blush, this view appears to destroy human free will.  But here there must be a distinction made between two kinds of determinism: hard determinism and soft determinism.  Hard determinism does indeed destroy human freedom (soft determinism, I believe, does also--more on this below).  It argues that since God causes all things, including human decisions, then humans have no truly free will.  Human free will is a chimera; it does not exist.  Free will and God’s sovereignty are completely incompatible (and hence this view is sometimes called “incompatibilism”).

Hard determinism has not been a very popular view throughout church history, although it has had its adherents, for example, the popular eighteenth century theologian and preacher Jonathan Edwards and the contemporary Calvinist theologian Paul Helm.  Its unpopularity is primarily due to the consequence of making God the author of and responsible for evil while absolving humans of the responsibility of their sin.  Certainly if God determines everything, then evil is one of those things since evil is a reality.  In addition, humans are mere puppets—indeed, God even causes them to sin!  Thus humans are no longer culpable for their sinful actions.  Fatalism rules the day; what will be will be because humans have no control over their choices.  The old cliché of “the devil made me do it” is really “God made me do it.”

As such, this view must be rejected as unbiblical.  Scripture clearly teaches that humans have free will and are not mere automatons; they are responsible for their actions.  “Choose this day whom you will serve!” declared Joshua to the Israelites (Josh. 24:15).  Such an injunction is trickery if it’s impossible to choose.  And certainly Jesus holds humanity responsible for their sin when he declares, “He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God” (John 3:18).  Judgment is indicative of culpability.

More importantly, God is not the author of nor responsible for evil.  It is the devil who is the author of evil: it is the devil who sows evil (Matt. 13:39); he is the “Father of lies” and was a “murderer” from the beginning (John 8:44); it is the devil who entered Judas to betray Jesus (John 13:2).  Specifically, sin is said to be the “works of the devil” (1 Jn. 3:8), which Jesus came to destroy.  As these texts as well as others indicate, the devil is the author of sin, not God.  As one professor of mine once stated, anyone who makes God the author of sin ought to be taken out to the theological woodshed.

Soft determinism, in contrast with hard determinism, argues that God’s determining everything is compatible with human free will.  Hence this view is also called compatibilism.  This view, like hard determinism, defines God’s sovereignty in terms of causation.  God still causes all things.  The difference, however, is that free will is affirmed.  But how is this possible?  Are not determinism and free will contradictory?

It is at this point that soft determinists define free will in a peculiar way: it simply means that a person “does what he most wants to do.”  John Feinberg, in the text Predestination and Free Will: Four Views of Divine Sovereignty and Human Freedom, says, “If the act is according to the agent’s desires, then even though the act is causally determined, it is free and the agent is morally responsible” (p.37).  Free will, then, in this view is not the ability for a human to choose other than he chooses.  A person has the ability to choose only according to his most ardent desire.

With free will defined in such terms, how does this play out with God’s sovereignty?  Here soft determinists introduce the concept of concurrence.  This concept says that God is the primary cause of all things while human decisions are the secondary cause.  (This idea was referred to in the original question.)  Humans choose what they most want to do; God concurs with those decisions.  The fact of the matter, however, is that God is still causing all things to come to pass, and humans can do nothing other than what is in accordance with their desires.

Now, in my opinion, this appears to be a very interesting way to define free will.  In essence, it defines free will with the very concept of determinism in its definition—“the act is causally determined,” as Feinberg says.  If free will is defined as determinism, then does not this view just lapse into good old-fashioned hard determinism?  What is the difference?  To put it another way, if I am acting in accordance with my own desires, then where are those desires coming from?  The soft-determinist has no other recourse than to answer that they are “casually determined” by God.  So, we are back to hard determinism; it’s just backed up one step by inserting the idea that what humans do is in accordance with their own desires. But we must ask where these desires come from, and the answer is ultimately “God” for the soft-determinist.

In addition, it should be observed that defining free will as “doing what one most wants to do” is not a sufficient definition of free will.  Something more must surely be added or defined more precisely.  This can be seen by the fact that those who do not believe in soft determinism also believe that it is true that humans do what they most want to do (at least much of the time).  For example, I am not a soft-determinist and I believe that people do what they most want to do much of the time.  So, defining free will in such a way is not sufficient because both determinists and indeterminists can agree with the statement that people do what they most want to do (but they would not agree with defining free will in this way).  This should indicate to any soft-determinist that there is something wrong with his definition of free will.

But there’s also the question of whether a person is even capable of choosing contrary to what he most wants to do.  On this point the soft-determinist and the indeterminist vehemently disagree.  The soft-determinist says “no,” and hence his reason for defining free will as “doing what one most wants to do.”  The indeterminist says “yes.”  I think the indeterminist is correct—we can choose contrary to what we really want to do.  I can think of examples in which I have passionately desired to choose a particular course of action, say, a sinful one.  But because my mind has told me that such a course of action would be immoral, I refrained from the course of action and did the opposite even though it was what I most desired at the moment.

Another problem with soft determinism is that it has the consequence of making God the author of evil.  This can be seen by the following simple syllogistic argument:

1. God causes all things in the world.

2. Evil is in the world.

Therefore, God causes evil.

Premise 2 is agreed upon by all Christians, and so it is not problematic.  Premise 1, however, is the belief in question.  It is a statement of determinism and the one which soft-determinists believe to be true.  So, from the standpoint of soft determinism, the conclusion that God causes evil follows logically.  But as it was observed in our discussion of hard determinism, this is an unbiblical idea—God is not the author of evil.

So how do soft determinists reply to the accusation that they have in fact made God the cause of evil?  They simply “bite the bullet,” affirming that God is the author of evil.  The soft-determinist and popular theologian Wayne Grudem, in his work Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine, asks, “If God does indeed cause . . . everything that comes about in the world, then the question arises, ‘What is the relationship between God and evil in the world?’  Does God actually cause the evil actions that people do?”  Grudem’s answer is that “God did, indeed, cause evil events to come about and evil deeds to be done” (p.322).

Grudem goes on to say, however, that God causes evil only indirectly through human agents.  People, in other words, are the instruments or tools (secondary causes he would say) God uses to cause evil, much like how a plumber uses a wrench to cause one pipe to be unscrewed from another pipe.  In Grudem’s opinion, then, God cannot be held responsible for evil because he did not cause it directly.  And so, says Grudem, “God never does evil, and is never to be blamed for evil” (p.328).

Does such a reply absolve God from being the cause of evil?  I think not.  It really makes no difference if God causes evil directly or indirectly; he is still the author of it.  If a plumber causes a flood in a kitchen by unscrewing the wrong pipe, we do not say that the wrench is responsible for the flood; we say that the plumber is responsible.  Moreover, when Grudem’s statements about God and evil are juxtaposed, we can see the inherent contradiction in soft determinism:

“God did, indeed, cause evil events to come about and evil deeds to be done” (p.322).

“God never does evil, and is never to be blamed for evil” (p.328).

These statements are irreconcilable.  Either God causes all things, including evil, or he does not.  It cannot be both.  It is for this reason and for the reasons discussed above that soft determinism, like hard determinism, must be rejected as a possible solution to understanding God’s sovereignty and human free will.

Indeterminism

Up to this point, we have discussed determinism as a possible way to understand the coalescence of God’s sovereignty and man’s free will. Both types of determinism—hard determinism and soft determinism—have been deemed either unbiblical or incoherent.  There is a third (and final) way to understand how God’s sovereignty and man’s free will go together, namely, indeterminism.

Indeterminism argues that God’s sovereignty and man’s free will are compatible, contrary to hard determinism yet in agreement with soft determinism.  There is, however, quite a difference between soft determinism and indeterminism.  To recall, soft determinism believes that God causes all things.  In contrast, indeterminism denies that God causes all things.  In this case, God’s sovereignty is defined in terms of God directing or controlling all things.  Theologian Jack Cottrell says, “To say that God has sovereign control over his universe means that he is in control of everything that happens, even though he does not cause everything” (The Faith Once for All, 117).  The point here is that nothing is ever out of God’s control, as if God can only sit idly, watching the world “spin out of control.”  God is always able to, and sometimes does, intervene in the events of the world.  In fact, God even determines some things; he just doesn’t determine everything.

The idea that God does not determine everything allows the indeterminist to conclude that humans have truly free will.  The indeterminist defines free will as the ability to choose contrary options, or “the power to choose between options and opposites, with the ability to actualize more than one choice” (Cottrell, 116).  This view of freedom is often referred to as libertarian free will.  With such freedom, a person has the ability to choose, for example, to eat or not to eat.  In philosophy, this ability is known as agent causation: human agents are such that they themselves bring about events.  They create events ex nihilo, or from nothing, as Cottrell says (Cottrell, 116).  God is not causing humans to do anything (although he may at times).

How does indeterminism fair in reconciling God’s sovereignty and human freedom?  Overall, I believe it does well.  First, it does not make God the author of evil. Free will creatures choose on their own whether they will sin; God does not cause anyone to sin, whether directly or indirectly.

Second, and related to the first, man may be held responsible for his sin because he is the one who committed it, not God.  It is only when humans have truly two options—to sin or not sin—and the power to choose one of those options that they are culpable for their actions.  If humans are capable of only “doing what they most desire,” as in compatibilism, they cannot be held responsible for their sins.  If they can only choose what they most desire, there is no choice to make!

It seems to me, then, that indeterminism is the best way to understand God’s sovereignty and human free will.  This is not to say, however, that indeterminism is without its critics.  One particular criticism that is often brought against indeterminism is its definition of God’s sovereignty.  It is often said that indeterminism ultimately destroys God’s sovereignty by defining it in terms of directing or controlling.  The idea seems to be that if God cannot causally control human beings, then he is no longer sovereign.  Such a response, however, is really just begging the question.  The determinist must provide a good argument (any argument!) of why God must cause everything in order to be sovereign.  One could say just as easily, like Cottrell in fact does, that God’s creation of human beings with libertarian free will is actually an expression of God’s sovereignty—God is so sovereign that he allows humans to make their own decisions but reserves the right to intervene whenever he desires.

A second criticism of indeterminism concerns its definition of free will in libertarian terms.  In philosophical circles the criticism is referred to as the intelligibility problem.  The accusation is that it is impossible to distinguish between libertarian free will—the ability to choose, have options—and mere chance events.  The crux of the so-called problem is that libertarian free will makes human choices arbitrary because nothing is causing humans to choose.  Therefore, it is argued, that human choices are no different than chance events like a lottery or throwing dice.

But is this really the case?  I see no reason to think so.  As mentioned above, indeterminists often rely upon the idea of agent causation, that humans are created in such a way to will, or cause, events.  As philosopher William Craig puts it, “The soul, which is an actual entity, actualizes it[s] own potency to will this or that.  This is right in line with the traditional understanding of the soul as a self-mover” (Four Views on Divine Providence, 57).

In the end, it seems to me that indeterminism is able to withstand its criticisms.  Therefore, indeterminism is the best way to understand God’s sovereignty and human freedom.  There is, however, a question that inevitably arises from this discussion on indeterminism.  If God determines some things and man has libertarian free will, then how does God bring about his plans? To put it another way, if God permits man to do certain things rather than causing him, then how is it possible for God to actualize his plans?  If we can recall, this was a part of the original question.  This question is much more complicated, and so it will be addressed in more detail in another question.

QUESTION

ANSWER

By: Peter Rasor