Why You Don’t Believe in Free Will

This article is the first in a series on man's free will and God's foreknowledge.
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One of the big issues in discussing soteriology (how salvation works) is the question of man’s “free will”.  Let me start right out with this plea: please stop saying that people have free will!  Not because you’re a Calvinist, but because you’re a Christian and you don’t really believe in “free will”.  Let me explain why.  During the Reformation era, a group of theologians formally made this statement:

“Man has not saving grace of himself, nor of the energy of his free will, inasmuch as he, in the state of apostasy and sin, can of and by himself neither think, will, nor do anything that is truly good (such as having faith eminently is); but it is needful that he be born again of God in Christ, through his Holy Spirit, and renewed in understanding, inclination, or will, and all his powers, in order that he may rightly understand, think, will, and effect what is truly good, according to the word of Christ, John xv. 5: "Without me ye can do nothing." 

This grace of God is the beginning, continuance, and accomplishment of a good, even to this extent, that the regenerate man himself, without that prevenient or assisting, awakening, following, and co-operative grace, can neither think, will, nor do good, nor withstand any temptations to evil; so that all good deeds or movements, that can be conceived, must be ascribed to the grace of God in Christ.”

You might be thinking, “What extreme, Calvinist theologians laid out these words denying the free will of man and his innate ability to believe in the Gospel?”  Answer: the followers of Jacob Arminius.  That’s right, these words were laid out in the third and fourth Articles of Remonstrance, which became the foundational statement for the soteriological system we call Arminianism.

So first, realize that when a Christian says that we have “free will”, not only would the Calvinist adamantly disagree, but any self-respecting Arminian would as well, and so should everyone in between (which is where my own position falls.)  The problem is the term “free”.  The dictionary defines “free” as “unfettered, unrestrained, the state of not being enslaved.”  Is that what we believe? That we are not enslaved?  Jesus said that we are slaves to sin. (Jn. 8:34) Do we really believe that our will was unaffected by the fall, such that we are able to come to God on our own?  Again, Jesus counters, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him.” (Jn. 6:44) In other words, man’s will is not free to choose God in its own strength.

In the history of the Christian Church, there was a man who promoted the idea that humans have free will.  His name was Pelagius and he was justly condemned as a heretic in the 5^th century.  He taught that man, in his own natural ability, has the power to attain moral perfection and choose to obey God, thus attaining salvation.  A later revision called semi-Pelagianism (also condemned as heresy in the 6^th century) stated that while man could not attain perfection without the addition of God’s grace, he was yet capable of making the first steps towards God in his own power.  The Apostle Paul takes exception to this, saying, “There is none righteous, no, not one; there is none who understands; there is none who seeks after God.” (Rom. 3:10-11) No man, in his own strength, seeks for God or wills to come to Him.  Rather, God must graciously initiate and draw us to Christ, or we simply will not come. 

I remember reading Martin Luther’s Bondage of the Will a number of years ago.  What struck me was the problem of terms.  I had heard many Christians defend “free will”, but as I read, I recognized that the “free will” Luther was arguing against was something most Evangelical believers would also reject.  Unfortunately, it is not uncommon to hear Christians today affirm that man has “free will”.  In all honesty, I’ve heard a number of pastors from my own tribe say this, though I doubt they really mean what the term implies.  As we have just defined it, we don’t actually believe in “free will”.  My guess is the majority of Christians who say they believe in “free will” don’t really believe that man can come to God on his own, or be the initiator of his own salvation.  I believe that when many Christians speak of  “free will”, they mean “real will”.  We do have a will.  It is real, but it is not free.  It is in the bondage of sin.  And, left to itself, it never chooses God.  For that we need the work of grace, the drawing of the Father upon our will to lead us to Christ.  That does not mean that the will is unimportant, but that it has no ability of its own unless God imparts it.

When the Reformed believer hears a non-Reformed believer talk about “free will”, he likely thinks we mean what’s called libertarian free will.  That is, absolute, innate freedom and power to make any possible choice, including coming to God.  It should then be no surprise that all our careless talk of “free will” makes the Reformed believer concerned that we are in serious, Pelagian-style error.  That would be a serious problem if we actually believed it!  But chances are we simply mean that we have a real will, that our will, enabled and illuminated only by the effective working of God’s grace, must respond to God’s call.  It would be helpful if we just said that, rather than tossing about the misleading term of “free will”.  While the Reformed and non-Reformed brother or sister would still likely disagree as to the exact nature of the gracious work God must do in drawing us to Himself, at least both would clearly understand that no one is promoting the heretical position of semi-Pelagianism.  We do possess a real will, but without God’s interference it will always exert itself in opposition to God.  As the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, “Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.”  Our wills are only “free” to act in accordance with their nature, but that nature is fallen and our will cannot choose what it ought (to come to God) without His initiative.    

So first, let’s realize that the differences between Reformed and non-Reformed brothers are probably not as great as we often make them seem by using improper terms.  Realize that when you say, “I believe in free will,” the Reformed believer hears “man is not completely fallen”.  And when the Reformed believer says, “Man does not have free will”, you probably hear something scary like fatalism where man’s will is completely unimportant or violated.  Don’t.  Because that’s not what either side means.  Stop speaking like semi-Pelagians, since that’s not really what you mean.  Even Arminius would scold you for affirming “free will”.*   

In reality, it is the unbelieving world that is essentially Pelagian.  Modern, western culture tells us that man is basically good and “you can do anything if you put your mind to it”.  I wonder if the modern church in the west hasn’t let its terms be dictated more by our culture than Scripture.  And if we have indeed begun to attribute any small part of our coming to God to our own ability, spiritual openness or insightfulness, rather than to God’s patient and relentless drawing of our hardened hearts to Himself—let us repent and return to a position where God gets all the glory, for He alone is the Author of salvation.

*Note: Some have suggested using the term "freed will" instead of "free will" to clarify this important distinction that man's will must be graciously acted upon by God to be free.  This term, while not clarifying exactly to whom and how that action of God applies, is still a significant improvement.  

The Myth of an Un-contextualized Gospel

You have never heard the un-contextualized Gospel. There is one simple reason: it doesn’t exist. Every Gospel conversation or presentation you’ve ever heard has already been contextualized. If it wasn't, you couldn’t hear it. In a bygone era of the foreign missions enterprise, before anyone came up with the term “contextualize”, people used to speak of “indigenizing” the Gospel. But that term implied that the missionary was seeking to take his own civilized, “pure” Gospel and smuggle it into the receiving culture in native garb. This was all temporary though. The missionaries’ cultural goal was to get the natives to adopt “sensible Christian values”. Of course, this generally meant white, individualistic European and American cultural values. But there was a problem that few missionaries seemed to realize at the time: the Gospel of American and European society had been just as contextualized for them as it had to be for anyone else. This idea only began to be explored in depth later in the 20th century. In reality, the way the Gospel is contextualized in our modern, Western society would look alien to first-century, Near Eastern Christians. Certainly we are not so naive as to think that ours is the first culture that has a grasp on the "pure" Gospel. No culture, including mine or yours, has a monopoly on the Good News. While I’m sure there are more, I want to give you three problems we bring about when we shirk a well-thought-out contextualization of the Gospel. 

A Cultural Superiority Complex

First, by thinking that we possess an “un-contextualized” Gospel, we artificially set ourselves on a plane that does not exist. This is most obvious in the fact that each one of us heard the Gospel in a language we understand. As soon as any particular language is used to convey the Gospel, contextualization has already begun. The claim falters literally as soon as we open our mouths. Nevertheless, it is tempting to assert that ours is an un-contextualized Gospel because it implies the superiority of our own culture. It tickles our pride to think that we have an exclusive claim to the “pure” Gospel. But despite our seeming conviction that the American Evangelical sub-culture is the closest thing to Eden (God save us!), there is no place for bigotry in the body of Christ. To assert that we have an un-contextualized Gospel is to say that the Gospel in its purest form meshes ideally with our Western, individualistic, consumerist way of life. Thankfully, that’s very unlikely.

Yet this underlying assumption of cultural superiority is why some Christians get fidgety when the topic of contextualization crops up. There is an unspoken belief that changing the cultural forms in which the Gospel is presented will automatically lessen or “defile” its purity. Perhaps what we are really afraid of is letting go of the privileged status we’ve given our own preferred cultural forms. We may even be willing to don the trappings of another sub-culture for a short time for the sake of getting our message out, but we are unlikely to admit that these forms are as valid as our own. Fear of contextualization is often just a thin veil for a cultural superiority complex. 

A Shallow View of the Gospel

Secondly, in refusing the endeavor of Gospel contextualization, we rob ourselves of a deeper, more well-rounded understanding of the Gospel. Lesslie Newbigin was a British missionary who lived in the 20th century and served in India for some 40 plus years.  He writes in The Open Secret of a mutual benefit for the missionary and the receiving culture. He warned that we must not see our project of contextualizing the Gospel as merely uni-directional. The missionary himself must allow the unique worldview of the receiving culture to critique his own culturally myopic view of the Gospel. The interaction between the cultures of messenger and listener must, of course, be rooted in the Word of God. We all have a tendency to read the Bible through our own cultural lens. After all, we have no other with which to view it. Sometimes a person from another culture will read the same text we do, but come to a somewhat different conclusion on its meaning or implications. This forces both missionary and “native” to continually return to the Word and re-examine their understanding. Could it be that some aspect of what the missionary had hitherto believed is actually a by-product of his own culture's bias, rather than rooted in the Word of God itself? The interchange of contextualization refines and deepens our understanding; the messenger and the receiver both grow together in the Gospel.

As an American missionary who has been on the foreign field for over a third of my life, I can attest to this reality. Only in stepping outside of our own cultural comfort zones can we come to see the flaws inherent within it. The same is true of the American Christian sub-culture. Too many Christians have begun to view the Gospel through the narrow lens of the American-Evangelical sub-culture. What we fail to realize is that ours is also a contextualized understanding of the Gospel. It's simply tuned to the cultural values of middle-class, Western individualism and consumerism. In taking on the daunting, humbling project of contextualizing the Gospel to others, we also open up the possibility of having our own misperceptions corrected. Contextualization done well and humbly leads to a richer insight into the Gospel for both messenger and receiver.

Incarnation Implications

Lastly, when we refuse to embrace the call to contextualize the Gospel, we are rejecting something in the essence of the Gospel itself. It only takes a cursory reading of the book of Acts to see that the early church took contextualization seriously from the beginning. Those parts of the church which refused the project out of a cultural superiority complex quickly cut themselves off from the power and movement of the Holy Spirit. The Judaizers were a prime example of this.

But there is more. By spurning contextualization not only do we ignore the example of the early church; we contradict the nature of the Gospel. There is no greater “contextualization” than the incarnation of Christ. When God came in the flesh, He showed that there was almost no limit to His willingness to contextualize the Gospel so that we might understand. Jesus was not an ethereal philosophy but a flesh-and-blood man who brought the salvation of God into the cultural context of first-century Israel. His message was was spoken in Aramaic, often couched in agrarian parables sensitively honed to the context of His audience.  

Early in its history, the church rejected a heresy called “docetism”. This heresy taught that Jesus didn’t really become a man. He merely had the outward appearance of a man, but certainly would never soil His perfect “heavenly culture” with the trappings of human flesh. This heresy was roundly condemned at the council of Nicea. All true Christians today readily acknowledge that God Himself unabashedly took on real flesh, conforming Himself to our cultural forms. But the ironic part is that we are often not willing to similarly humble ourselves. We only grudgingly stoop to contextualize the Gospel to others who are culturally different from us—if we do so at all—though the cost for us is much less than it was for Jesus. While we cling to the doctrine of the incarnation, we deny its implications. Christ took on our cultural forms to bring the Gospel to people who would then continue the project of contextualization to bring the Gospel to the ends of the earth. The Great Commission itself implies the challenge of astutely, winsomely, humbly contextualizing the Gospel. In the end, the call for Christians to embrace the project of Gospel contextualization is merely a call to follow the example of Jesus. “Everyone who is perfectly trained will be like his teacher.” (Lk. 6:40)