The Preacher

From an Associated Press article by  Christopher Toothaker:

President Hugo Chavez said Sunday that foreigners who publicly criticize him or his government while visiting Venezuela will be expelled from the country … “How long are we going to allow a person _ from any country in the world _ to come to our own house to say there’s a dictatorship here, that the president is a tyrant, and nobody does anything about it?” Chavez asked during his weekly television and radio program.

That’ll show ‘em who’s not a tyrant Hugo. That’ll show ‘em…

Over at Bittersweet Life, Ariel, who claims he was just thinking out loud, has churned out a quality post on free will, determinism, and prevenient grace. You should go read it. Right now.

Are you still reading this? Sheesh…

Last week I wrote a bit about free will and now I want to do so a little more. Specifically, I want to talk about the nature of choice.

Choice is a tricky beast, partly because it is a holistic process. The Nature vs Nurture camps can debate all they want but as far as I’m concerned the issue is settled, neither nature nor nurture can be said to reign supreme in shaping our lives (though Proverbs 22:6 does give a big nod to the effectiveness of appropriate nurture). We are as far as I can tell composite creatures, shaped by father Adam’s sin and the sin of our immediate fathers, shaped by upbringing, by knowledge and by experience, by things both physical and spiritual. We are shaped by all of these things, and coupled with the specific circumstances from moment to moment we approach every decision in our lives. And we do not possess the ability to separate these things from who we are and how we choose.

The problem is, if you accept this, then God must walk a very careful line of interacting with us, lest He tip our scales one way or another. In fact, if one were to take this seriously, the list of areas where God would not be allowed to exert His will would be incredibly large. And if He did choose to act, He would have to nudge us back towards perdition every time He did something that pushed us in the direction of redemption, lest He be accused of making our choices for us.

And this leads us to the problem of understanding the nature of choosing. How much chance has to exist that a person will choose either option for it to be properly called a choice? We know that all decisions aren’t 50/50. We know that there are many days that given the choice to live or die (and don’t we almost always have that option) there would be no thought involved, our choice is already made. “But I could have chosen death,” you say, “if I had really wanted to.” But isn’t that part of a choice? Yes, we choose what we want, but many little somethings have gone into making us into the sort of person that wants some specific thing. And how many of those little somethings bear the mark of the work of God? None? One or two? All of them?

I’m not trying to say there is no such thing as free will. I’m trying to say that we have defined it in such a way that it cannot exist with a God who wants to do any specific thing. It cannot co-exist the way we have defined it with a passage such as Romans 9.

Does that make sense?

Free will can be defined in a number of different ways, but lately the definition that I hear most often goes something like this:

Free will is the ability of a man (or woman) to choose what he will do or what he will believe, and while certain situations may limit the number of options he has at any given time (for instance, all men can not choose to be able to dunk a ball, or fly an airplane), there must always be at least two options (one of which may be the choice to do nothing at all).

It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I do not agree with this definition. To those who do hold to this definition I would like to ask the following question:

From where in Scripture is this line of thinking about free will derived?

I will freely acknowledge that Scripture talks about choice, but it doesn’t define choice in such a way that each person must always have two options. When God called Abraham there was no requirement that the possibility of Abraham saying no existed, and it is not obvious from the text that God chose Abraham because God knew Abraham would obey. If anything it makes more sense to say that Abraham obeyed God because God chose him.

Any takers?