Friday, February 20, 2015

The Bible does not teach Free Will

"The question therefore is, Does the Bible teach the freedom of the will? By freedom of the will is meant what most ordinary people mean: the absence of any controlling power, even God and his grace, and therefore the equal ability in any situation to choose either of two incompatible courses of action. There are some semi-Calvinists who, presumably through fear, assert the freedom of the will, and then more or less disguise the fact that they define freedom of the will in a way most people would never guess. In a similar situation the seventeenth-century French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, in his Provincial Letters, excoriates the Dominicans for using Jesuit terms with Jansenist meanings. The Jesuits were too powerful; they were about to crush the Jensenists; and the Dominicans were afraid. Pascal makes the point that Jesuit terms will convey Jesuit meanings to the populace, and hence the Dominican theology, in thought similar to Jansenism, will be defeated by the terms it uses. So too, semi-Calvinists who use Arminian terms support Arminianism, for the populace will never discover their esoteric definitions. Freedom of the will, almost universally, means that God does not determine a man's choice. It means that the will is uncaused, not predetermined. The present book uses free will in its ordinary, commonly accepted sense. The question is: Does the Bible teach freedom of the will?
It is so obvious that the Bible contradicts the notion of free will that its acceptance by professing Christians can be explained only by the continuing ravages of sin blinding the minds of men. To some this sounds like an extreme statement. But the appeal is to the Bible, and the Bible says that the heart of man is deceitful above measure. It will use all possible devices to avoid acknowledging that it is a worm, a lump of clay, a creature, and not an independent, autonomous being. The appeal is to the Bible." - Gordon H. Clark, Predestination

No comments: