Early writing

Freedom of the Will: The Will as Faculty, Not Agent: Personal Responsibility and the Fallacy of Equilibrium

At the heart of this discussion lies a conviction I hold without reservation: that personal responsibility is inherent to every act a human being performs. The error, however, does not lie in the affirmation of responsibility itself but in a mistaken account of the pathway by which responsibility comes to be located. When I insist that the will does not rest in a state of equilibrium—that the choosing of one thing over another is never static, never suspended in perfect balance awaiting some external tip toward decision—I mean to press a fundamental point regarding the very nature of volition. Within a certain pragmatic mode of thought, the will, considered in itself, possesses no autonomous power so long as it remains in this supposed condition of equilibrium, that is, prior to and apart from its actual engagement in choosing. It is precisely here, I submit, that the characteristic error takes root: power comes to be attributed to some agency distinct from the willing subject himself—whether a force, an object, or an external entity—rather than being recognized as belonging properly to the being from whom the will proceeds. Once this misattribution occurs, the act of choosing comes to be processed as though some independent agent, the will itself, exerted power over the decision, as though volition possessed an inherent strength or force of its own; and the object of choice—the goal, the desire, the external circumstance—is thereby mistaken for the true source of the will's power. This misunderstanding issues in a doubly flawed perspective: since the will, thus conceived, cannot will itself into choosing, attention shifts inevitably toward the object of decision, and the cause of the action is sought externally, in whatever seemed to trigger the will's response, so that the will is rendered a passive recipient, a merely reactive force answering to external stimuli. Such a shift—from the internal source of volition to the external object presumed to move it—obscures the true location of personal responsibility, which resides not in the objects that appear to influence choice but in the capacity of the being himself to exercise will.

Consider, in this light, the claim that one possesses the freedom to accept or to reject the gospel. Such a claim, taken at face value, implies that the will possesses a self-determining power of its own—as though the will were a kind of passive doormat, suspended indifferently between two objects of choice, awaiting the moment of decision without any intrinsic direction or antecedent preference. But this cannot be the proper account of volition, for the very nature of willing is to choose one thing over another, and to will is already to possess a preference, a leaning of desire toward some particular object. In every act of willing, one prefers a given possibility over its alternatives, and this preference is itself the act of will; the person is the subject who chooses, and the will is properly the predicate—the act of willing performed by that subject—rather than an independent agent standing between subject and object. To argue that the will functions as a mere doormat, an intermediary suspended between competing objects, is, whether one intends it or not, to install the will itself in the place of the subject, making it the actor that does the willing rather than the faculty through which the actor wills. This, I contend, is a fundamental confusion. The proper account holds that the person, as subject, performs the act of willing; the will is a faculty or capacity within him, enabling preference and choice, but it is never itself the agent that independently initiates volition. The act of willing is rooted, always and only, in the person himself, who chooses consciously and intentionally according to the preferences, desires, and reasons that constitute who he is—a constitution that Reformed thought has long insisted lies under the bondage of sin apart from grace, such that the will, far from standing neutral before the gospel, inclines according to the nature from which it proceeds, and cannot be rightly analyzed as an autonomous mechanism awaiting external stimulus, but only as the expression of the person's own governing disposition, for good or for ill.

Freedom of the Will: The Peach and the Pear: Preference as the Very Substance of the Will

There exists no such condition as a will suspended in perfect equilibrium, poised evenly between competing objects and awaiting some uncaused tip toward decision; whatever such a state might be called, it is not, properly speaking, will at all. To will is, by definition, to possess a stronger desire for one object or outcome over its alternative, and any account of volition that denies this has already ceased to describe willing and begun instead to describe its absence. Consider, by way of illustration, a scenario frequently invoked in defense of an opposing view: one is seated comfortably in a chair positioned between two tables, upon one of which rests a ripe and juicy peach, and upon the other a crisp and sweet pear. It is customarily supposed that this arrangement exemplifies free will in its purest form, the will standing, as it were, equidistant from both objects, unconstrained and undetermined. But this supposition mistakes the very condition it seeks to illustrate, for in this moment of suspended contemplation the will is not, in fact, being exercised at all; it remains, quite precisely, unwilled. It is only when desire for the peach exceeds desire for the pear that willing, properly so called, begins to occur—only in that instant of preference, when one object comes to outweigh the other in the economy of desire, does the will find its true and only expression.

The willing itself, then, is demonstrated not in the interval of contemplation but in the very moment one reaches for the peach because it has come, through whatever confluence of prior disposition and present appetite, to appeal more strongly than the pear. Free will, rightly conceived, does not consist in the abstract capacity for neutral suspension between options, as though liberty were located precisely in the absence of preference; rather, it takes shape only in the concrete act of grasping, the act of selecting one possibility over another precisely because desire has already, and necessarily, inclined toward it. It is not indecision that constitutes the will's freedom but the moment of preference itself—the determinate act of choosing this rather than that, on account of a desire that outweighs its rival. Only in the recognition and enactment of such desire does the will pass from a merely notional or abstract capacity into a real and tangible act of choice, for a will that never prefers, that hovers forever between the peach and the pear without ever reaching for either, is no will in operation at all, but merely the picture of a faculty never yet exercised—and it is precisely this recognition, that willing is constituted by preference rather than by its absence, that must govern any Reformed account of how the sinner, no less than the saint, chooses always according to the desire that reigns within him, whether that desire has been renewed by grace or remains yet in bondage to what it loves.

Freedom of the Will: Desire, Necessity, and the Glass Darkly: On the Will's Motive and the Mystery of God's Unrevealed Counsel

Were one to trace every step of his life back to the very moment of birth, and to array those steps along a single continuous chain, he would search in vain, I submit, for any point at which a choice was made apart from desire. There is no moment, examined honestly, in which decision proceeded from bare necessity rather than from the leaning of desire toward some preferred object; for the will, as I have argued elsewhere, is never the neutral doormat of pragmatic imagination but always the expression of the person's own governing preference, and preference, wherever it is found, is desire in act. This confirms, from another angle, that personal responsibility cannot be evaded by an appeal to some mechanism operating independently of the self, since even what appears most compelled remains, upon examination, an act willed according to the desires that constitute the willing subject.

It is against this backdrop that I turn to a further and, in certain respects, more sobering consideration: that what God has revealed to His covenant people through Word and Spirit stands absolute and certain, while what He has chosen to withhold remains, correspondingly, absolute in its mystery. The difficulty, properly understood, resides not in any deficiency of the revelation itself but in the finitude of the faculty that receives it; our comprehension, being creaturely and therefore bounded, cannot lay hold of the fullness of divine truth even where that truth has been graciously disclosed. And yet the truths God has chosen to reveal arrive accompanied by a spiritual understanding that no natural capacity, however cultivated, and no unaided human effort, however diligent, can attain—a limitation rooted not merely in creaturely finitude but in the deeper incapacity occasioned by our fallen condition. God's own knowledge, by contrast, admits no such qualification: it is perfect and complete, incapable of deficiency or incompleteness, for such deficiency would stand in direct contradiction to His nature as the all-knowing and omniscient one. He cannot be simultaneously fully knowledgeable and partially ignorant without forfeiting the very identity that constitutes Him God; rather, He possesses, without remainder, perfect knowledge of the past, the present, and the future alike, a comprehensiveness that admits no exception and tolerates no gap.

From our own limited vantage, however, we see, in the apostle's phrase, through a glass darkly—our perception obscured, partial, and imperfect, unable to command a clear or total view of the realities it beholds. There remains, then, an irreducible mystery attaching to our knowledge of God, an element of divine truth withheld from us not through any defect in revelation itself but through the twofold constraint of finite minds and a fallen condition that together limit what we are capable of receiving. We perceive, in consequence, only in part; our knowledge remains partial by constitution rather than by accident, and this very partiality leaves room—indeed, requires room—for wonder, for humility, and for faith, as the covenant people continue to seek a fuller apprehension of God through the ongoing ministry of His Spirit and the abiding testimony of His revealed Word, content to know in part what they shall one day know in full, and to trust, even now, what remains for the present veiled.

Freedom of the Will: Subject and Predicate: Reconsidering the Freedom to Accept or Reject the Gospel

Consider the matter from this vantage: to assert that one possesses the freedom either to accept or to reject the gospel is, upon examination, to claim that the will holds a self-determining power all its own—to suggest, in effect, that the will functions as a passive entity, a doormat awaiting some future direction before it renders its verdict upon salvation. Yet the very nature of the will stands opposed to this picture, for to will is inherently to choose one thing over another, an active process of preference rather than a suspended waiting upon external cue. The act of choosing presupposes that the will is no blank slate, no merely passive receiver of stimuli, but possesses, as its very constitution, the capacity to evaluate what is set before it and to arrive at a definitive preference. If, then, the will could freely decide, in the sense commonly intended, to accept or to reject the gospel, it would have to possess the power to determine its own course independently of the person whose will it is—a claim that raises, rather than resolves, the deeper question of whether the will is properly autonomous or is instead, as I maintain, always already shaped and inclined by prior factors belonging to the person himself. This tension invites, and indeed requires, a more searching reflection upon the nature of free will, the true extent of human agency, and the considerable implications that follow from asserting that salvation, or its rejection, reduces finally to an isolated and unconditioned act of individual choice.

To will, properly understood, is nothing other than to have a preference for one thing over another. The act of willing does not, strictly speaking, make the person willing, as though willingness were conferred upon him from without; rather, it reflects an inclination already present, a favoring of one option above its rivals, and this inclination just is the act of will. The person is the subject who exercises will; the will itself functions grammatically, and metaphysically, as the predicate—the act performed by the subject—rather than as the subject performing it. Should one propose that the will is merely a doormat suspended between two objects, awaiting external influence, one would thereby be assigning to the will the very role of subject, casting it as the agent who does the willing passively, receiving impressions rather than generating choice. This view, I maintain, is mistaken at its root, for the will exercises agency actively; it is not itself the subject but the faculty by which the true subject, the person, performs the act of willing. Nor is the will some neutral or static entity resting in equilibrium, a balancing point at which opposing desires cancel one another into stillness; true willing is dynamic, constituted by a greater desire for one object over another, and to will is thus always to choose according to the stronger of one's inclinations rather than to oscillate indefinitely in indecision. The act of willing, in the end, expresses nothing other than the person's own internal valuation, his ordering of certain ends above others, and it moves, invariably and without exception, toward whatever choice his strongest inclination, at that moment, dictates—a conclusion that bears directly upon the gospel, since it locates the sinner's rejection or acceptance not in some neutral faculty poised indifferently between belief and unbelief, but in the settled inclination of the heart itself, which only sovereign grace can turn.

Freedom of the Will: Self-Determination Examined: Edwards, the Arminian Will, and the Limits of Dependent Freedom

I take up this post, then, with the intention of explaining matters in some detail, on the supposition that those who read it are willing to engage seriously enough to make the effort worthwhile; I am aware that a good many are reading, and I hope for their genuine participation rather than passing notice. Edwards, in the passage under consideration, is largely summarizing conclusions he had reached in earlier writing on the question of free will, and here he turns his attention specifically to the Arminian account of that faculty. Within the Arminian framework, as Edwards represents it, the will is held to be free precisely because, upon the presentation of the gospel, the individual retains a genuine capacity either to accept it or to refuse it; his decision, on this view, belongs entirely to himself, proceeding from a will neither predetermined nor coerced but left free to choose or to decline salvation according to its own unconstrained volition. The gospel offer, so construed, is universally extended, and each hearer is supposed to possess the capacity to respond in either direction, a construal that places considerable weight upon human responsibility and upon the ostensible openness of the gospel call.

Understood in these terms, the will comes to function simultaneously as both subject and predicate within the Arminian scheme—a conflation I have elsewhere argued cannot be sustained. But what, precisely, is this will supposed to be? Is it merely the faculty by which choices and decisions are rendered, or does it possess, in addition, some form of mental capacity or consciousness enabling it to determine, to decide, to will? When Edwards represents the will as claimed to be a self-determining power, does this imply an autonomous capacity to choose wholly apart from the influence of anything external to itself? And if the will is found to depend upon something beyond itself—upon prior desires, upon external circumstance, upon internal inclination already formed—does such dependency not undermine the very freedom claimed on its behalf? Can the will, in other words, be rightly called free if its choices are conditioned or constrained by elements it did not itself originate? These dependencies, I would suggest, bear directly upon the coherence of the Arminian position: they disclose the will as inherently limited by the prior state of the person from whom it proceeds, a limitation the Arminian scheme struggles to accommodate without either abandoning the language of self-determination or redefining freedom in terms compatible with such prior conditioning—terms that, once granted, begin to look considerably more like the Reformed account of the will as faculty rather than autonomous agent than like the libertarian freedom the Arminian position originally sought to defend.

Freedom of the Will: Sovereign and Responsible: Reconciling Divine Election and Human Culpability

Does the passage under consideration imply that human beings bear no responsibility for their actions? It does not, and to suppose otherwise is to misread it. A proper understanding requires that every scripture addressing human responsibility be held together with every scripture that describes the sovereignty of the covenant Lord, neither category permitted to silence the other. This passage is to be taken at its plain and literal sense; it admits no interpretive maneuver by which its force might be diminished or explained away. God's sovereignty is absolute for the simplest and most sufficient of reasons: He is God, by nature and by authority alike, and no created will stands as a rival to His own. Humanity, meanwhile, remains responsible because individuals, in Adam, made a conscious and culpable choice to sin, precipitating the fall; and we, bound to Adam by covenantal solidarity, stand implicated in that original transgression. It must be granted, further, that God could justly have judged Adam in the very moment of his sin, and could, with equal justice, have judged the whole of his posterity alongside him. Yet God, in the exercise of His sovereign wisdom, determined before the foundation of the world to set apart some for Himself and to permit others to remain under judgment, destined ultimately for condemnation—a determination that finds its warrant in nothing beyond His own supreme and unchallengeable sovereignty. Unless this priority of the divine will over every created will is granted without qualification, we risk the far graver error of subordinating God's will to our own, effectively rendering ourselves little gods upon whom God's purposes are made to depend. But God is neither weak nor constrained; His capacity to save remains entirely unhindered by the imputation of sin to our account, for, as the psalmist affirms, He does what He pleases in heaven and on earth.

It follows from this same sovereign order that whenever the word of God is proclaimed or taught, the natural tendency of the human heart is to harden itself further, resisting submission and refusing repentance; and this persistent hardness entrenches ever more deeply the spiritual blindness from which it proceeds, rendering the turn back to God increasingly remote. Each act of resistance functions, as it were, like grease upon a wheel, easing the descent toward divine judgment—a movement Paul describes in Romans 1:21, where he records that though they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God nor rendered Him thanks, so that their thinking grew futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. This verse discloses with precision how the possession of a certain knowledge of God, unaccompanied by the honor properly due Him, issues not in neutral ignorance but in a futility of thought and a darkening of heart that alienates the sinner ever further from divine truth. The only hope remaining for such a condition lies in a sovereign and unmerited act of grace, whereby God opens the spiritually blind eye to behold the truth of the gospel. It is the Holy Spirit, moving in and through the preached word, who causes divine light to break into the darkness of the human heart, effecting a regeneration by which mind and heart alike are transformed from darkness into light. Only through this prior, monergistic work of regeneration can a person genuinely turn to Christ in faith, entrusting himself to a saving power he did not himself generate. Salvation, then, is in its entirety a work of grace, received through faith yet never originating in it, a gift that neither merit nor effort could ever secure—as Ephesians 2:8 declares, that salvation comes by grace through faith, and this not of ourselves. Here, finally, is the whole matter laid bare: salvation is God's doing from first to last, initiated and accomplished by His mercy and love alone, and resting upon no foundation of human worth or human working whatsoever.