We are suckers for sappy movies. And its not hard to write a screenplay guaranteed to strum the heartstrings and shrink wrap eyes with tears. The formula is simple: take an forlorn animal in captivity, longing to spread it swings or stretch its paws or wag its fluke, add a plucky kid intent on its freedom, reel in the cash.
Some of you may remember the Free Willy franchise that has stretched a couple decades. I have never seen them and do not intend to, disappointed to hear that the third sequel was not based on an orca revenge plot. But this movie is as good example as any of that liberation porn we love so much. And as far as it goes, is harmless.
The sentiment of these stories is we ought not imprison things which are by nature free. Orcas, wolves, lions, and especially humans ought to be free to roam. When it comes to human freedom, this not only means the freedom to physically go where they would like but the freedom to choose left or right, up or down. The sentiment of human freedom is seen more clearly in captive animal movies, which is why we make so many of them. Animals personified as humans are a stand in for the liberty of choice that we desire and claim as our own.
That mankind makes these choices daily is evident. Choosing is the lot of man; we are doomed to choose. We have been placed in a universe where even to not choose is potential selection.
But what is the nature of our choices? Do we have ‘free will’ at all? Where is God involved in human affairs? Is He the plucky kid, and we the fat orca? Or is He the only Free Willy in the universe and we his captors? Perhaps when we leap that final breakwater, a single tear will trace his pale cheek.
I want to dip a toe into that old, grey bathwater of determinism and toss around some ideas about how we ought to approach the topic of free will and God’s sovereignty.
Free Willy: Biological Determinism
A coworker and I were catheterizing an old lady and we got to talking about free will, as one does. The patient was dug deep into dementia and didn’t seem to mind us pontificating while we worked. My friend is a staunch Darwinist, evo-devo, objectivist sort. He was remarking how he did not want to be doing this particular procedure with all the attendant smells, slough and unpleasantness. To which I mentioned, if his beliefs are true, he could comfort himself in the fact that he really had no choice, since there is no free will in a Darwinian world.
If we are to be consistent with that great Light Bringer Darwin, then our bodies are merely vehicles for DNA to propagate itself, which it will do with varying successes depending on fitness levels. All innate drives for love, work, cohesive families, beauty, relationships, are nothing but the base drives for survival through gathering resources to survive and mate. If that is the case, and unless he is willing to break character and pull some sort of transcendent will out of thin air, then his “choice” to help me catheterize the old lady was his survival instinct driven by the need to get money to buy food so he could feed himself and his kids for the purpose of hand-me-downing his genes.
After market additions to evolutionary biology like the soul and the mind are not allowed in this framework. Everything in the vehicle is built from the ground up based on the rules set forth. There is no weird stuff, no transcending the operating procedures, because the vast scope of the Darwinian worldview can explain all kinds of things except a single free choice made in opposition to biological determinism. All the goings on of man on this blue marble, as magnanimous as they may be, are complex but repeatable patterns of survival instincts.
No free willy here. We are the fat orca and biology is our captor. No plucky kid.
Free Willy 2: Chronological Determinism
I was enjoying a delicious hefeweizen at a local brewery with a good friend and we got to jabbering about Calvinism, as one does. Not the whole tulip, mind you, just that one petal of unconditional election. If you are not familiar with the term, it means that God elects who will turn and believe in Him and who will not. I find the idea of God’s sovereign choice not only amenable, not only radical, but about as clear as crystal in the Bible. My buddy disagreed, citing that God doesn’t want a bunch of cyborgs programmed to love him, as this is not real love. He believes people not only freely choose to love God, but just as freely choose to get a pickle with their Jimmy Johns sandwich.
In response, I asked him what he thought of verses like Ephesians 1:3-5, or the myriad other verses where God seems to butt into a man’s heart and steer it one way or the other.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.
Ephesians 1:3-5 (ESV)
The only way to handle passages like this which clearly denote God’s overriding choice in human’s destinies and maintain man’s free will is to go the foreknowledge route. God can see all ends from the beginning and so has the foreknowledge of man’s choice, but does not make this or that happen. After all, He cannot mess with free will, as all kinds of books and movies testify. Were He to break this command it would amount to the raping of the spirit. Such an adamantine decree of what God can and cannot do with His own power you think would show up in the Bible somewhere.
Free willy 2 differs from the original in who is the orca incarcerator, namely God. It is the nature of man to be free, and this means even free from the sovereignty of God Himself. God must give wide berth to that most precious jewel in the all creation, in all of spiritual Reality – the choice of a human. We can’t have those damned robots walking about.
What does a God who cannot, under any circumstances, affect a human’s free will do to bring people to a knowledge of Himself? He foresees. In 2023, Jonny is free to choose to go left or right, and God, from before creation, simply foresaw his going left. Predestination is the passive foreseeing humans’ self-destiny.
Apart from the hubris of us taking the liberty to limit God’s sovereignty for Him, this also introduces some chronological determinism. Is Jonny now bound to go left? Can he at the last second choose to go right instead? And was that game time decision to go right at the last moment foreseen by God? Must’ve been. No matter what Jonny chooses, he cannot not choose it because it has been written in the books before creation. Jonny’s destiny is a tail he cannot shake.
The only outcome here where the willy can be freed is if God Himself did not know the outcomes of our choices and was hobbling right alongside us in our temporal indecision, waiting to see if He will be invited into Jonny’s heart, or if he will choose the spicy pickle or dill. This would give his omniscience a quick, clean death, not to mention his omnipotence, as he can’t mess with human choice, which, I might add, is what all of history is.
This version of free willy presumes that the most important reality of the universe is human choice and this freedom must be maintained at all costs, even at the expense of the freedom of God. If God and a man choose opposing things, God must give wide berth to the will of man.
Not quite sure how prayer would work in this scenario. I imagine something like Patrick Swayze in the movie Ghost, where he can flick inanimate objects into his lover’s path to let her know he is there, and even possess a Whoopi Goldberg for an erotic pottery scene, so long as she consents. But other than these whiffs of suggestions cannot bust into anyone’s world.
Thus sags the dorsal fin. In this film, God is the tubby monochromatic dolphin and bounded by our will. But we also find ourselves trapped by time, unable to choose freely. I don’t want to see this movie.
Free Willy 3: Theological Determinism
The nugget of any story is a character making choices and walking out the adventure. The Bible has lots of stories where many people make choices. You are choosing the read this and I chose to write it. Clearly, we make choices. So how can we make choices and God still be sovereign over all things?
The gravity of our choices is a real thing and we are held accountable for them by God. Given the near infinite choices we make in our lives, it is not the breadth of our options where the mystery lies, but in the depth. Humans choose, but why do we choose what we do? What are the parameters of our choice? We can get a hint of the reality in ourselves when we look at our Creator.
Here are two passages that seem pitted against each other
The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance
2 Peter 3:9 (ESV)
Who has spoken and it came to pass,
Lamentations 3:37-38 (ESV)
unless the Lord has commanded it?
Is it not from the mouth of the Most High
that good and bad come?
Here we need to square up with some difficult questions. We have the reality of God’s sovereignty over all things facing off with the fact that things don’t always go as He wants. It is His will that none perish, yet perish people do. And at the same time, nothing comes to pass without God commanding it. What is happening here is not two opposing desires slamming in a mid air collision, but different wills on different altitudes.
This is not as impenetrable a mystery as we may think; we do this all the time. It is my will that my kid bathes regularly. When his fifteen year old body remains filthy, my will is not done. But the deeper will of mine that he learns responsibility and to care for himself, not merely that a shower is taken. Superficially, my will is transgressed, but my deeper will is intact, and things are going exactly as planned.
On the one hand, God wishes for all to repent – doesn’t happen. On the other, God is sovereign over all things, so why aren’t all repenting? Such a blatant contradiction did not slip past the biblical writers’ keen observation, so we ought to be clued into a deeper will fathoms beneath us by which all things progress to their intended end.
The temptation is to dive into all the particulars about ephemeral choices: knock a glass off the table and petulantly ask if God made us do it. Here is where thinking principally instead of particularly can make our job easier. Let’s pick the worst thing that has ever happened and see where God’s sovereignty was at work: the death of Jesus
…for truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.
Acts 4:27-28 (ESV)
For the record, I would like to submit the murdering of God in the flesh as the worst act in the history of human acts. Who do we see as the architect of this act? Pontius Pilate, the Gentiles and the Jewish fomenters did whatever God’s hand moved them to do according to the plan he had designed before He created the world. And so we see here the very worst act was planned by God, orchestrated to perfection; an act that came about through the decisions of human actors. God’s sovereign will before the foundation of the earth was for the Lamb to be slain in precisely the way He planned it. Judas, Pilate, the angry mob of Pharisees, all were reciting the parts God wrote for them and they were held accountable for it.
Well, what the crap? How can does God find fault, for who can resist His will? That is the next and obvious question, so obvious that Paul asked it on our behalf:
So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills.
Romans 9:18-19 (ESV)
You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?”
The reader ought to feel safe in the author’s self-awareness. Paul has thought all of this through. Like any good lawyer, he never asks a question he doesn’t already know the answer to. He delivers the answers through a talking pot who took issue over the form he was molded in.
“What’s the deal?” decries the pot. “Why did you make me a commode? I’m made of the same silicon and slip as that other guy, and you made him into a vase.” Paul answers the pot, What if a potter wants to makes a chamber pot and a flower vase from the same chunk of clay? Doesn’t he have the authority to do that?
Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory
Romans 9:21-23 (ESV)
The question of human accountability and culpability is answered, not with reference to the pot to assuage its offended potty-mouth, but instead a declaration of God’s sovereignty to do whatever pleases Him. We should take this as a big hint as to how we approach this whole question. God does not owe it to us to explain His choices, which is what the entire book of Job is about.
From here on out, Paul defends does not defend human freedom, but the rightness of God’s freedom of choice. Pharaoh is called to the witness stand, who has already been declared guilty and sentenced, and testifies to God having poured cement into his heart. God stands above saying in a matter of fact kind of way says “Well, I have mercy on whom I want, and compassion on whom I choose.”
Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.”
Exodus 3:13-14 (ESV)
Several chapters later, God tells Moses He will make all His glory pass by him and declare His name. How God declares His name is an expansion of I AM
And he said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name ‘The LORD.’ And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.
Exodus 33:19 (ESV)
Echoed in this statement is the essence of God’s name: Yahweh, in Hebrew, I AM. Syntactically, God’s name and His actions are identical: I am that I am; I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.
Here is where we need to set aside any offense we may have at being an automaton or a robot and see what God is telling us about Himself. God is absolutely free. He is bound by nothing, He didn’t read an instruction manual on how to be God, He takes no advice, He has no other considerations. All his actions are bound up in the counsel of His own eternal and immutable will. He is bound by no other power in the universe that it would stand as a bastion against the absolute and unhindered freedom of God to act in accordance with His own nature. This includes human self-determination. He does not declare the end from the beginning like a white eyed and rambling soothsayer, but as an Author who wrote it out.
So where does this leave us with self determination? We see two things at work at the same time: God’s sovereign choice and mankind’s recompense of his actions. On the basement level of the divine will, God orchestrates all the comings and going of men according to His inscrutable wisdom and irrevocable plan. On the surface, man freely choosing exactly what God had foreordained. This is a paradox and one that will not be unraveled this side of eternity. Both together stretch beyond the horizon and meet in a perfectly just way.
And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him.
Acts 17:26-27 (ESV)
When it comes to understanding the interaction of God’s sovereignty and free will, it matters a great deal where we start. Starting with free will as the fundamental and unalterable reality of existence, and then allowing God to be sovereign over the slivers slices of real estate our choices don’t own is backwards.
Conclusion
If there is no God and we all dance to our DNA, all choice is corralled by survival mechanisms and we cannot chose but what is in accord with the laws of nature. If we demand God not mess with any human choice, we have to explain the sundry verses of God’s foreknowledge as mere fortune telling, while still trapped by the chronological determinism of our being unable to choose other than what He foresees. We also must figure out how pray for others without God having to ask for more consents than a feminists dating site.
Our modern scientific sentiments of no mystery ever cannot be applied to Biblical realities – God never promised no mysteries; there is no divine prohibition of paradoxes. We need to be able to hold two truths in our heads at once – something God doesn’t seem to have a problem with. God sovereignly chooses all things and mankind is judged in accordance with his actions. Paradox. Para-deal with it.
And enough with the robots thing. We must come to the Bible and submit out philosophical arguments in light of the revealed teachings of scripture, not the other way around. Paul understood the robotic implications of his claims of God’s sovereignty, and had there been a Greek work for robots he may even have used it. Instead, he used “Who can resist His will?” – a fair equivalent.
The real issue is not who chooses, but what freedom of choice means for whose is preeminent. God does not intentionally use His sovereignty to unsovereign Himself and limit His freedom to give human will the right of way. The righteousness of God is seen most pristinely in His dedication to upholding the freedom of His will.
If the universe is created in such a way that I do not have self-determination, and in exchange I get the glorious, life-altering, jaw-dropping, humbling, self-forgetting reality of the righteousness of God’s Free Willy, I feel like I made out pretty good.
Thought Butter 