Thank God None of Us Has Free Will
We were slaves to sin. We are now slaves to Christ.
“We are not nearly as responsible for our success as our popular views of God and reality lead us to think… Most of the forces that make us who we are lie in the hand of God.” - Tim Keller
“What do you have that you did not receive?” - 1 Cor. 4:7, NIV
Suppose the Incarnation is true.
Suppose Jesus of Nazareth possessed a full, undiminished human will and mind—suppose he was fully human.
Further, suppose this same Jesus was fully God.
Finally, suppose that this man, being fully God, was sinless by nature and therefore incapable of rejecting God.
This would mean that Jesus was fully human and incapable of sin. If so, the capacity to reject God cannot be essential to human freedom or nature. Why? Because there was a human who lacked that capacity, yet lacked nothing.
But wasn’t Jesus tempted in the wilderness? Temptation does not prove the possibility of sin—it proves the reality of pressure. An unbreakable wall under siege must remain unbroken, or else it is not an unbreakable wall.
Jesus was incapable of sin and yet was not an automaton. He was a free human being. Arguably, he was the freest.
Anyone who claims that God “respects” your freedom to reject Him assumes that your freedom to sin is a necessary feature of being human.
Where did we get that idea?
Christ’s impeccability did not diminish His humanity. It revealed its perfection. If Jesus was fully human and incapable of sin, then the freedom to sin cannot be a set precondition of being human. The freedom to sin is not freedom at all.
So, what is it? Well, I happen to think it is precisely what it is not.
We must see sin and alienation from God not as natural capacities of the human will but as distortions of it, enslaved privations of the truly human. An absence. A gap. A non-thing with zero strings to pull.
True freedom is not deliberative liberty—the mere knowledge and ability to choose good over evil—but the unimpeded realization of the Good brought to light in and by Jesus Himself.
One free and perfect act of God in the person of Jesus was enough to swallow up all so-called “choices” forever.
We were slaves to sin. We are now slaves to Christ.1
The idea that I can, in the fullness of God’s becoming all in all, freely reject God is about as rational as the idea that I can freely reject my own birth.
P.S.
For a smarter, fuller, and more “fleshed out” treatment of this argument (pun intended), see David Bentley Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved.
The Greek word that recurs here is δοῦλος (doulos), meaning slave, not merely “servant” or “worker.” It refers to someone who is owned by another, whose will is bound to the will of their master.