The Westminster Shorter Catechism says that God has “foreordained whatsoever comes to pass.” According to this statement, nothing happens outside of God’s pre-determined, comprehensive will. I think the biblical witness affirms this. So where does that leave our choices? Are they actually free? Do we have free will that is actually consequential?
First, an Atheistic Alternative
Christians often ask this from the perspective of divine sovereignty, but it may be helpful first of all to realize that the tension between “free will” and pre-determination exists also from the opposite direction—that of naturalistic atheism.
Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and an avid atheist, wrote an article in 2012 for the Chronicle of Higher Education in which he argued that free will is an illusion. Given his belief that the physical universe is the sum total of reality, his argument against free will is simple:
Your brain and body, the vehicles that make “choices,” are composed of molecules, and the arrangement of those molecules is entirely determined by your genes and your environment. Your decisions result from molecular-based electrical impulses and chemical substances transmitted from one brain cell to another. These molecules must obey the laws of physics, so the outputs of our brain—our “choices”—are dictated by those laws.”
Given atheism, what you perceive as your exercise of free will is actually the inevitable fate of a incomprehensibly long chain reaction of basic physical laws. You cannot be “responsible” for your actions in any real sense. Coyne even acknowledges this at the end of his article, saying that moral responsibility “should be discarded along with the idea of free will. If whether we act well or badly is predetermined rather than a real choice, then there is no moral responsibility.”[1]
Whether you have predestination by a wise, sovereign, and loving God, or predestination by the equations you learned in high school physics, “free will” seems to get the short end of the stick either way. When God’s decrees are properly understood, predestination of some sort appears inevitable. But as Coyne argues, in a pure materialist framework, predestination of a colder and more rigid kind looks inevitable also.
Coyne’s fatalism makes sense in a purely materialist framework. But if mind and consciousness are not purely a product of material processes, and there is a component to life (a “soul”) that is not entirely physically determined and has independent agency, then we can at least say that not every decision is fatalistically pre-determined by physical laws.
But does the biblical doctrine of God’s sovereign decree still entail the same sort of fatalism? Not quite. God does foreordain all things, but not in such a way as to negate the responsibility of the human agent for choices we make.
Bare and absolute fatalism and the elimination of responsibility are implications of atheism, not of Christian faith.
God’s ordination and our real agency and responsibility are both affirmed by Scripture, and we should continue to hold them together. For sure, the relationship between the two is no more fully comprehensible than anything, but below is my attempt to explain how best to understand it. Or at least, the boundaries within which it should be understood.
God Has “Foreordained Whatsoever Comes to Pass”
The comprehensive sovereignty of God is evident all through the biblical witness.
In Isaiah 46:10, the living God distinguishes himself from idols precisely by this, that he is the one “declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose.”
The sovereignty of God extends to the mundane: “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord” (Proverbs 16:33). Again, “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father” (Matthew 10:29). It also covers great events of world history: “The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he frustrates the plans of the peoples” (Psalm 33:10).
References in line with those above could be multiplied, but for a comprehensive statement, we have Ephesians 1:11, “In him we have been inherited, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will.”
It is worth noting here that “predestination” in broad strokes regarding many aspects of our lives is really indisputable simply from human experience. It is manifestly the case that there are major and impactful components of your life in which your “free will” plays no role. Who your parents are, the era and place in which you are born, your genetic inheritance, the social environment of your infancy and early childhood, and any accidents that happen to you. In addition, we are all always operating with limited information, limited options, and a limited perspective. So there are constraints upon us simply by reason of our finitude.
Don’t We Still Have a Choice?
Biblical testimony does at least sometimes include human choices within the scope of God’s sovereignty. “The king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; he turns it wherever he will” (Proverbs 21:1). This foreordination can even include acts of evil: “For truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place” (Acts 4:27-28). Joseph’s response to his brothers is a classic statement in this regard: “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today” (Genesis 50:20).
Of course, this is the sticking point: The relationship of God’s sovereignty to our own “free” choices. In considering how best to understand this relationship, it is helpful, I think, to take a step back and consider the doctrine of creation itself.
The Theological/Philosophical Grounds of this Doctrine
The case for God’s comprehensive sovereignty is not only based on explicit biblical statements. It is also a logical entailment of a proper understanding of the being of God and his relation to his creation. This is important to understand.
When we are talking about God, we are not talking about a being who is just one of the series of beings within the universe. God the Creator, I AM, is not Thor or Zeus, some very powerful but ultimately finite superman.[2] Properly understood, God is the fountain and foundation of all created reality, and utterly distinct from all created reality. The most basic dividing line in reality that can be drawn is the line between the creature and the Creator, and the Creator is the primary cause and condition for the existence of the creature.
Put positively, nothing that is not God exists except by the will and power of God. No created thing has existence within itself, but is finite and contingent. That is what it means to be a creature, while God, by definition, is the self-existent one (this is called God’s aseity). Christian theology holds to creation ex nihilo, that God created all that is created out of nothing, by his spoken word, an act purely of his own power and will (Genesis 1:1; Psalm 33:6; Nehemiah 9:6). The final reason why you or I, or Alpha Centauri, or viruses exist is because God wills that they exist, actively, from moment to moment. In a simple and biblical statement, God “upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Hebrews 1:3); or again, “he is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17).
Preservation vs. Continual Creation
Creation is not self-existent. It is a result of God’s speech. It is his word made flesh. But one further aspect to consider, which is more technical and a bit more difficult, is the distinction between the above doctrine, and an extreme version of it called the doctrine of “continuous creation.” In laying out this distinction, I am drawing from A.A. Hodge’s excellent Outlines of Theology.
God’s creation of all things from nothing, continual preservation of creation, and comprehensive sovereignty over it does mean that from moment to moment, he upholds the existence and faculties of every individual creature. In Hodge’s words: There is a “continued exercise of the divine energy whereby the Creator upholds all his creatures in being, and in the possession of all those inherent properties and qualities with which he endowed them at their creation, and of those also which they may subsequently have acquired by habit or development” (Hodge, 258). So, yes to continuous preservation.
But this is to be distinguished from the “extreme” position of continuous creation, which is the idea that creatures and every cause-and-effect chain are “reproduced every successive moment out of nothing” in their actions and conditions. The implication here—and this is the important point to understand—would be that there is no real causal relation between the condition of a creature from one moment to the next except in the sheer will of God. Jonathan Edwards actually held to this, and put it simply: the existence of things present is not in any way an “effect of their past existence” (quoted by Hodge, 261). In other words, according to this view, if you have blond hair right now, it’s because God actively wills that you have blond hair at this moment, not because you were born with it or dyed it. There are no “secondary causes.”
Hodge argues that this extreme view is false, because, first, it would mean God is the only real agent in the universe, the immediate cause of all that comes to pass, and leads logically to pantheism (the idea that God is the universe and the universe is God). Second, it would violate our intuitions about our own responsibility as accountable agents, and would mean we are deceived at this most basic level. Third, it really would eliminate moral accountability.
A More Balanced Take
Hodge instead takes an intermediate view, which is the more standard Reformed position, and I think a balanced biblical one. This is that every created thing, in its being and attributes and potentials, depends for its continued existence on a positive exercise of God’s creative power, but God’s creative power creates real beings with real agency, so that the actions of these beings are the actions of responsible agents, and not simply and directly the acts of God acted through them. No creature is self-existent; their continued existence is grounded in the will of God, and they are “sustained in being” by a “continued exercise of divine power” (Hodge, 262). At the same time, their agency is sustained by God and is real as well, and in such a way that their own will has real causal impact on the outcomes they experience, and these outcomes are precisely those which God has foreordained.
Put simply: God is sovereign, man is responsible. God does foreordain all things, but that includes causes and means, and in human outcomes, human choices are part of the network of real cause and effect, to reach the ends which God has decreed.
Scripture speaks about things in just this way. For example, consider what God says about his use of the Assyrian Empire as his rod of judgment against Israel:
Woe to Assyria, the rod of my anger;
the staff in their hands is my fury!
Against a godless nation I send him,
and against the people of my wrath I command him,
to take spoil and seize plunder,
and to tread them down like the mire of the streets.
But he does not so intend,
and his heart does not so think;
but it is in his heart to destroy,
and to cut off nations not a few (Isaiah 10:5-7).
The King of Assyria made his choice to do exactly what God intended him to do, but he still has moral accountability for his choices and his reasons for them. Or consider what Peter says about the crucifixion of Jesus:
Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know— this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men (Acts 2:22-23).
The actions of Christ’s killers was wicked, but it was precisely what God determined for them to do, and the wickedness was still properly theirs, despite their actions being what God decreed.
Of course, at the end of the day we can say all this, but the precise relation of God and the creature—the infinite to the finite—especially when it comes to wicked actions, is still ultimately inscrutable. What a proper articulation of the doctrine does, though, is set boundaries and affirm the whole biblical witness. Our experience and perception is that we make choices, and we intuitively feel our own responsibility. That is not nothing, and not an illusion. It is the way God has constituted the world. Our choices are ours. At the same time, there is a deeper reality to them which we call the sovereignty of God.
We can try to label the relation between these levels of reality as “concurrence” or “secondary causes” or whatever, as theologians have done, but these only label and help us speak clearly and within proper bounds (the doctrine of the Trinity is the same way); they don’t actually explain anything. In Marilynn Robinson’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, Gilead, the central character and small town pastor John Ames wisely puts it like this when asked about predestination:
[T]here are certain attributes our faith assigns to God: omniscience, omnipotence, justice, and grace. We human beings have such a slight acquaintance with power and knowledge, so little conception of justice, and so slight a capacity for grace, that the workings of these great attributes together is a mystery we cannot hope to penetrate . . . there are things I don't understand. I'm not going to force some theory on a mystery and make foolishness of it, just because that is what people who talk about it normally do (150, 152).
[1] Coyne is not advocating that we cancel the penal code or law enforcement. He says “we still need to protect society from criminals, and observing punishment or reward can alter the brains of others, acting as a deterrent or stimulus. What we should discard is the idea of punishment as retribution, which rests on the false notion that people can choose to do wrong.”
[2] This is why atheist sneers about not believing in Odin or Apollo or Yahweh (“We just go one god further!”) fall flat. A denial of Yahweh as classically understood might be made, but this is a drastically different proposition than a denial o the existence of Odin. We might deny Odin as we deny unicorns or leprechauns, all finite and discrete beings whose existence, or not, doesn’t really impinge on the nature of reality. But to deny the God who we claim to be the very ground and foundation of reality itself is a metaphysical claim, and involves embracing a fundamentally nihilistic conception of reality itself, free of any transcendence or purpose or aspect outside of its blunt material constituents. Most atheists are not actually atheists all the way down in this sense. For a fuller discussion of this point, see David Bently Hart’s excellent essay.
