Lately in my own personal musings I have been contemplating free will. I guess my thoughts naturally revert back to this subject for some reason or other. Anyways, I started reading Anselm of Canterbury’s article on free will and he proposed an idea I hadn’t really thought about, though I recognize it to some degree from Luther’s The Bondage of the Will. The idea is thus: God has perfect, unhindered free will, but God cannot sin. So could it follow that free will has nothing to do with sin?
Theologians and philosophers argue over the existence of free will, asserting that if free will is what allows a man to sin without putting the burden of sin and evil upon God. To hold the view that mankind does not have free will would mean that mankind was predestined to sin, meaning evil was caused by God, and that God is not just and merciful because He condemns people for the sin which He inflicted upon them. Obviously this is a difficult view to hold if one were to be a Christian and believe God merciful and just, etc…
This position that Anselm brings to view is very intriguing. What if free will doesn’t have anything to do with choosing to sin? If God has perfect free will and CANNOT sin then maybe our understanding of free will is skewed. To be free is to be unhindered or unrestricted, being capable of choosing for oneself. A person’s will is what they desire or would choose. So free will is unrestricted, voluntary choice or action. Scriptures speak of sin as being something that is binding and that all men are born into sin. Paul goes as far to say in the book of Romans that we are slaves to sin. Jesus says to His disciples that He no longer calls them slaves, but friends. What if sin actually limits our free will instead of by our free will we choose to sin. God’s grace is to free us from the burden of sin. Being freed from our sin we are then to fulfill God’s will, which is the plan set forth by the only perfect and ultimate free will. That being the case, sin doesn’t allow us to function with free will as opposed to the common view that free will allows us to sin.
Some more thought needs to be put into this…
