Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed by Austin Fischer

Author:Austin Fischer [Fischer, Austin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781630871161
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2014-01-13T08:00:00+00:00

7

Free Will, Kenosis, and a Peculiar Kind of Sovereignty

Free Will

Perhaps you have noticed that up until now I haven’t said a thing about free will.87 And that is because it has both nothing and everything to do with why I left my Calvinist home and went searching for a new one.

As alluded to in the first paragraph of the first chapter, belief in free will is no foundation on which to build a theological home, though this is the unfortunate mistake of many. For starters, you can never be sure that you actually have free will because there is no way to know if you could choose to do other than what you actually chose. In other words, while we experience ourselves as having free will, we can never be sure if we really do. But more importantly, to begin with free will is to do theology from the bottom up. It is to begin with what you supposedly know about humans and work to what must then be true of God. As Bruce Ware says:

When the starting place for understanding the God-world relationship is the uncontested reality of libertarian free will, then God must be understood in a matter that “fits” our freedom . . . We begin with what we know to be true about human beings. We know that we are free . . . Therefore, all else that we say about God and any other theological subject must be understood in a manner that accords with, and does not contradict, libertarian freedom.88

And on this point, Ware, a Calvinist, and any thoughtful free-will theist would agree. Theology cannot start from human reason or experience, and if it does we will find that we have merely created God in our own image. This is the house Barth burned down.

So when it comes to free will, the question is not “Do you think you have free will?” but “What does God say about free will?”

Chicken or the Egg?

Looking for free will in the Bible is like looking for gravity: it’s assumed everywhere and holds everything together, so you probably won’t notice it until it’s missing and you float away.

This is why it’s usually easier to rattle off multiple verses that seem to contradict free will than it is to name a single verse that affirms it. We think of God hardening Pharaoh’s heart because the passage sticks out—it cuts against the grain of the rest of the biblical narrative. We don’t think of the sixty-three times Jesus tells people to do or not do something during his Sermon on the Mount, seemingly assuming they had the ability to do or not do what he said, because it flows seamlessly with the pattern of the biblical narrative.89 But to be fair, there are many verses on both sides, so the issue usually comes down to the familiar dilemma regarding priority of order.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Are we to read the free-will texts in light of the

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