Will.It is a fundamental characteristic of human beings that they are capable of taking decisions about what they should do, and of carrying them out. According to Scripture such powers are an important part of the imago Dei (‘image of God’). But what, more exactly, is the power to decide and how does it relate both to the divine will, and to the effects of sin and divine grace upon human nature?
Some have thought that the will is confined to the power to execute what the understanding believes that it is best, in all relevant circumstances, to do. The person expresses such preferences by appropriate mental acts, ‘volitions’, which bring about physical actions unless prevented by other circumstances, e.g. physical weakness or the compulsion of others. While some attribute to the will in this sense the power of acting against the understanding, what is sometimes called the power of contrary choice or the freedom of indifference, others have argued that such a theory is incoherent. Augustine thought of the will in more dispositional terms, as the metaphysical and ethical directedness of human nature, as a set of preferences which, if not hindered by external factors, will express itself in actions of a certain character.
On either view there is a prima facie problem of reconciling the activity of the human will with the divine. Those who have attributed powers of contrary choice or self-determination to the human will have often attempted to effect such a reconciliation by limiting the scope of the divine decree in some respect, e.g. by denying that God foreordains all human actions, while allowing that he foreknows them (cf. Predestination). Others have rested content with maintaining that while God foreordains all human actions he is not the author of sin; either because, since sin is a deficiency, God cannot be its author, or by holding that since to be free is to do what one wants to do, the occurrence of such wanting guarantees freedom and responsibility, whatever the exact nature and scope of the divine decree.
The question of the effects of sin upon human nature raises moral rather than metaphysical issues (cf. Fall). No-one in the central Christian tradition has asserted that sin changes human nature into a nature of another kind. And yet if human beings are in bondage to sin, and cannot live in such a way as to please God by keeping his law, then divine grace is needed to renew them, and the question arises how divine renewal of such strength and depth can be efficacious if the human will is metaphysically free to resist and to reject it. So how the divine will in its savingly gracious operations harmonizes with the human will is a special case of the more general question of the relation between the human will and the divine will. Even if it is said that such divine grace constitutes a rescue, it is still nevertheless a rescue which does not violate the distinctive powers of human nature but rather restores and redirects them. Such radical conclusions have been disputed by adopting less radical views of human need and of the divine provision.
Besides these metaphysical issues the effect of sin on the human will also raises ethical questions, particularly the question whether a person without grace is ethically free.
Discussion is sometimes confused because of a failure to distinguish the moral from the metaphysical dimension; at other times the biblical teaching on the bondage of the will to sin is resisted on the grounds that it is mistaken to make a distinction between the moral and the metaphysical. Rather it is asserted that the power of contrary choice is the supreme moral value. But it is clear that according to Scripture redemption in principle secures the restoration of a particular ethical directedness lost at the fall. The freedom that Christ brought is not so much an increase in the range of possible human powers, as a [723] change in that range through release from the corrupting and enslaving power of sin.
In the history of Christian theology Augustinianism, both in its pre-Reformation and post-Reformation phases, has equally stressed the all-encompassing nature of the divine decree, and the bondage of the human will (voluntas) to sin, while still maintaining that God is not the author of sin, neither is violence done to the human will in gracious conversion. Those who, like Jonathan Edwards, are in the Augustinian tradition, but who have adopted a non-Augustinian view of the will, have tried not altogether successfully to mitigate the consequences of this position for human responsibility by distinguishing between moral and natural ability and inability, arguing that while sin disables morally, it does not do so naturally.
One attempt to mediate between Augustinian and Pelagian conceptions of the will has emphasized the idea of co-operation (sometimes called synergism) between the human and the divine will. But such a proposal is inherently unstable, being liable to lapse into a monergism of either the divine or the human will. It is not clear how, metaphysically, such a co-operation could be effected, nor is it easy to see how such a view could do justice to the biblical teaching already noted.
If, on the Augustinian view, the will is wholly dependent on the coming of enlivening grace, could it prepare itself for such a grace (cf. Semi-Pelagianism)? Debate on ‘preparationism’ has been plagued by unclarity of the central terms. Clearly, no consistent Augustinian could hold that a person might prepare himself to be renewed, for such preparation is encompassed in any renewal. But this is not to say that a person may not, unknowingly, be prepared by grace for conversion, or that he ought to adopt a policy of total passivity when faced with the overtures of the gospel.
Bibliography
Augustine, Enchiridion, Free Will, and other works; D. and R. Basinger (eds.), Predestination and Free Will: Four Views of Divine Sovereignty and Human Freedom (Downers Grove, IL, 1986); V. J. Bourke, Will in Western Thought (New York, 1964); J. Edwards, The Freedom of the Will (Works, vol. 1; New Haven, CN, 1957); J. Ellul, The Ethics of Freedom (London, 1976); A. Farrer, The Freedom of the Will (London, 1958); E. Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St Augustine (London, 1961); idem., The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy (London, 1936); J. N. Lapsley (ed.), The Concept of Willing (Nashville, TN, 1967); M. Luther, The Bondage of the Will, tr. J. I. Packer and O. R. Johnston (Cambridge, 1957); D. Müller, NIDNTT III, pp. 1015–1023.
P.H.
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