Cold Case Christianity: Yes, God’s Sovereignty Robs Us of Our Freedom

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Cold Case Christianity: Does God’s Sovereignty Rob Us of Our Freedom?

Posted: 27 Jun 2018 01:34 AM PDT

Christianity describes a God who sovereignly calls believers to repentance.

And apparently, the original Jewish church didn't realize, until Acts 11:18, that God had called the Gentiles to repentance, despite how often Jesus had previously preached repentance to the Gentiles (Matthew 4:12-17) and many gospel texts saying Jesus' popularity at a prior time was out of control and caused entire towns to trample each other just to go see him (e.g., Mark 1:45).  Only desperate inerrantists would dare speculate that those texts were only talking about towns where no Gentiles existed.

Does this mean humans are mere puppets under the direction of an all-powerful Being who controls all decisions and dictates the final outcome?

Yes.  Otherwise, you need to explain why god wanted the reader to visualize him putting a hook in a person's jaw and pulling them around, when he talks about the reason a future army "gog and Magog" decide to attack Israel.  See Ezekiel 38:4.  If those sinners had already freely decided for themselves to commit this sin, it is error to use the metaphor of "hook in your jaws" to explain.  Hooks in jaws don't exactly bring to mind images of God respecting human freewill.

You also need to explain what God was doing to Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4:33, if it wasn't completely overriding his freewill.  So if God can violate human freewill once, then you lose, and the "God respects our freewill" can no longer be the ultimate show-stopper you think it is when answering questions about evil.  If God has no problems violating Nebuchanezzar's freewill, God cannot have any problems violating the freewill of a rapist just before they commit their crime.  That's right, Wallace:  Daniel 4:33 is the monkey-wrench in your "true love must be free to choose" bullshit. 

And worse, sometimes true love will use force to prevent a loved one from the deadly consequences of their own rebellious stupidity, such as the father who has his 19 year old daughter involuntarily committed because she is so out of control and likely to hurt herself or others.  If true love makes plenty of room to justify use of force, then presto, you can no longer argue that God's true love for the rapist require that He just sit by and let the rapist do whatever he wants.  If God struck the rapist dead just before the act, nothing about "love" would be any more violated in this than in what God himself does many times throughout the bible, using force to overthrow and kill enemies.

Does the Christian God allow humans any freedom to choose for themselves?

Sure, some parts of the bible teach that. But those parts cannot be reconciled with the above-cited passages.  It doesn't matter if God "usually" respects human freewill...his willingness to violate it takes away any intellectual justification you have to hide behind the "god respects human freewill" excuse, as if this was some monolithic unchanging truth.

The relationship between God’s sovereignty and man’s free will has been a topic of hot debate for two millennia; I doubt that I’ll be able to solve it in a blog post.

Good call.

But I do think the definition of free will lies at the root of the confusion and apparent dilemma.

It does.  If God infallibly foreknows what you will choose to do tomorrow, well, HE doesn't think you could possibly deviate from that forecast, because HE doesn't think his predictions can be proven wrong, so if YOU believe you have freewill, it is only an illusion you entertain because you are ignorant of what's in God's mind.  If you could know your own future as certainly as God does, you would not claim you have freedom to choose.  You would instead claim that you cannot do anything other than make the precise choices God infallibly predicts you'll make.

Most of us would like to think that we are free to make any choice possible in any given situation, but if you think about it, that’s really not the case. Even the choices you thought you were free to make were limited by your pre-existing nature (your inclinations, desires, likes and dislikes).

Good call.

Have you ever cleaned out your closet and discarded an ugly shirt, tie or dress that was given to you as a gift? Why did you throw it away? You discarded it because it was taking up space. Every day, as you decided what to wear, you were free to choose that article of clothing, but you never did. Your nature (in this case, your taste in clothing) restrained your choice. In order to understand what the Bible teaches about “free will”, we need to distinguish between two concepts of freedom:

“Libertarian” Free Will:

This view of free will maintains that humans have the ability to choose anything, even when this choice might be contrary to our nature (our inclinations, desires, likes and dislikes). We might call this “Unfettered Free Will”.

“Compatibilist” Free Will:

This view of free will maintains that humans have the ability to choose something, but this ability is restrained by our pre-existing nature (our inclinations, desires, likes and dislikes). We might call this “Self-Fettered Free Will”.

But if God knows the future infallibly, then this would restrict your freedom too. Here's the syllogism:

Premise One:  Infallible means "incapable of failing" 
Premise Two:  God infallibly foreknows that you'll steal a candy bar tomorrow.

Conclusion: Therefore, if God infallibly foreknows that you'll steal a candy bar tomorrow, your future stealing of a candy bar, is incapable of failing.

Here's the scary part:  Suppose a man rapes a child.  Did your god infallibly foreknow that this man would do this?  If so, then because the man's action was incapable of failing, the man was incapable of doing otherwise.  Sure, society as we know it would fall apart at the seams if we allowed criminals to go free since nobody can avoid making the choices they do, but then again, we've chosen to create a society that runs more on perceptions than reality.  We hold people accountable because we need to in order to have the society we wish, not because ability to choose otherwise is some proven scientific fact.

Believing a person is capable of doing otherwise might be what we need to believe to keep America's justice system running the way it does, but expediency doesn't dictate actual truth.  The wife can solve a lot of potential problems in her marriage by turning away from the evidence that her husband committed adultery, but her desire to retain consistency hardly determines actual reality.  She can have her happy marriage if she wants, but she needs to be honest and admit its only happy because she prefers perceptions rather than actual reality.

Our practical experience tells us that we don’t make choices that are completely unfettered (unrestrained) by our nature. There is a local Volkswagen dealership in our area that specializes in manufacturing pink Beetle convertibles. That’s right: Pink. They make them one at a time and sell dozens each year, all to young women, according to the sales manager. I can honestly say that I would never purchase that car, and if I was given one, I would sell it. While I clearly have the freedom to purchase it, my nature (my inclinations, desires, likes and dislikes) prevents me from doing so. While I consistently choose what I want freely, I would never freely chose the pink Beetle. My will is “self-fettered”. I bet you’re just like me. Many of us would never choose to order an anchovy pizza. Many of us would never choose to cut our hair in a “mullet” hairstyle. Our natures (our inclinations, desires, likes and dislikes) restrain us.

But I can imagine you doing a publicity stunt and eating an anchovy pizza while you get your hair cut into a mullet while driving down the road in a pink Beetle...if you thought doing so would increase sales of your book.  Now go have a private talk with your marketing director, and ask them whether the time has come to start taking bigger risks in order to keep the attention of today's attention-deficit "Christians".

The Bible recognizes God’s sovereignty and man’s “fallen” nature (our inclination toward rebellion and the denial of God’s existence).

But it doesn't recognize any sympathy for the fact that our fallen natures aren't our fault.  God's constant bitching about sin leaves the distinct impression that he doesn't think the fallen nature can be blamed for sinful choices.   It also leaves the distinct impression that God is less like an educated dictator and more like an irrational person who can solve a problem facing them, but who prefers to just back and bitch out it.  If you ask me, God is a dumbass, who needs to shut the fuck up and start taking action.

And don't be deceived.  The fallen nature of man is not the inevitable by-product of Adam and Eve's choice to rebel.  You forget that the God answered the Fall with a "curse".  It was God who decided that the earth should become a fucked up place requiring lots of human strain and effort to enable survival:


If God is free, then he could have chosen not to curse the world or humanity, in which case Adam and Eve's sinning wouldn't have had much more cosmic effect than what happens when a three year old steals a cookie before dinner.  Sin? Yes.  Inevitable degradation of the rest of humanity?  No.

16 To the woman He said, "I will greatly multiply Your pain in childbirth, In pain you will bring forth children; Yet your desire will be for your husband, And he will rule over you."
 17 Then to Adam He said, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, 'You shall not eat from it'; Cursed is the ground because of you; In toil you will eat of it All the days of your life.
 18 "Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; And you will eat the plants of the field;
 (Gen. 3:16-18 NAU)

Wallace continues:

We see descriptions of this reality in Jeremiah 13:23, Mark 7:21-22, Romans 3:9-12, and Romans 8:6-8. The Bible also teaches, however, that humans have the freedom and ability to choose the things of God, including the salvation offered through Jesus Christ.

A theory that cannot be reconciled with the puppet-notion that is absolutely necessitated by God's infallible foreknowledge.  If God infallibly foreknows that Billy will hear the gospel but will always reject it unto death, then Billy doesn't have the freedom to deviate from his infallibly foreknown conduct, which would otherwise mean Billy doesn't have sufficient freedom to prove God's predictions wrong.  Remember, whatever is infallibly foreknown is incapable of failing.  That's the dictionary definition for "infallible".  Google it.

This ability to choose is described in passages like Joshua 24:15, John 7:17, and John 7:37-39. So, how do we, as fallen humans inclined to deny God, have the ability to choose God?

That question is utterly irrelevant to people who reject the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.  The Bible teaches God's full sovereignty and man's freedom to choose, because it contradicts itself.  Only inerrantists find the least bit of sense in struggling to live fully in the shadow of obviously contradictory philosophy.  Everybody else says "fuck god, he knows that I wouldn't deny him if he simply interacted with me directly the way a caring friend would."  God's appeal to our 5 physical senses has no less possibility of getting us to change our minds, than the prosecutor's appeal to a juror's 5 senses:  jurors change their minds all the time when convinced the empirical facts justify doing do. If we can make sacrifices in the effort to please other human beings who interact with our 5 senses, there is no reason to think we'd do otherwise if Jesus physically appeared to us and interacted personally with us the way real friends do.  Only desperate apologists, knowing perfectly well that Jesus is no different than a fairy, blindly insist that no more effort on God's part could possibly be to our benefit.  But on the whole, people are far more prone to change their wrongful opinions so as to accord with obviously established facts, when they can tell that doing so will substantially increase the likelihood they will avert disaster.

If God had no problems parting the Red Sea to Pharaoh's notice, he should have no problems giving us infallible visions of whatever terrible fate awaits those who reject the gospel (in light of Ezra 1:1, you cannot deny that god has magically coercive telepathic ability to get people to believe whatever he wants them to believe).  Most people are sane and do not willfully defy common sense when they can tell that their intended course of action is proven to likely result in catastrophe.

Well it appears that God (in His sovereignty) works at the level of our nature rather than at the level of our choices. God changes our hearts first, so we have the freedom to choose something we would never have chosen before (because our nature prevented us from doing so). You and I then have the freedom to choose within our new nature, and we are, of course, responsible for those choices.

Only if you can prove that god has changed the nature of all sinners sufficiently so that they can freely choose a gospel call that they'd otherwise reject. You aren't going to do that, and it wouldn't matter if you did, you are never going to get around the problem of how God's infallible foreknowledge allofor our future choices to be any different than what God predicted they would be.