Free will or predestination?

For St Augustine of Hippo, that wasn’t an either… or question. Yes, our life is predestined and yes, our will is free.

For sure, we make our free choices, but they don’t affect our salvation one way or the other. We are predestined to be saved or damned, and nothing we do can change the predetermined outcome.

There seems to be a conflict there, and I struggled with it for years. Eventually I think I found a way out that works for me, although some theologians may find my musings unsound – or worse.

Christianity is founded on the belief that Christ sacrificed himself to redeem our sins. But which sins? Surely not just a little boy telling his mother to shut up, or a fair maiden turning out not to be quite so maidenly?

Anyway, according to another basic tenet, all individual sins derive from the original collective one. So it was that sin that Christ redeemed by accepting an awful death.

This means that his sacrifice wiped man’s slate clean of the Fall and therefore of wholesale guilt. Yet since man demonstrably didn’t become pristine as a result, a second sin, Mark II as it were, must have replaced the first one.

Logically, this must have been the sin of rejecting Christ. That offence isn’t identical to original sin, though neither is it dissimilar to it. Both, after all, represent rejection of God: the first by disobeying and the second by failing to recognise him.

If Original Sin Mark I was disobedience and therefore rejection, then Mark II is rejection and therefore disobedience. The opposite of the second rejection is the kind of faith to which Paul, Augustine and Luther ascribed the sole justifying power.

But mankind in its entirety never rejected Christ. Some – arguably most – people did so, yet some – arguably few – didn’t. However small the second group might have been, it was made up of people who chose to belong to it of their own accord, thereby, if we follow this logic one step further, cleansing themselves of the new version of original sin. Hence the choice between acceptance and rejection can’t be collective. It has to be individual and it has to be free.

It stands to reason that a man could do nothing to redeem the collective Mark I; Christ’s sacrifice was necessary to achieve that. But it’s equally clear that a man can do something to redeem the individual Mark II.

Hence, whenever we demonise some people for belonging to a diabolical corporate entity, without proof of such membership or any individual wrongdoing, we dehumanise not only them but, by denying free will, all of mankind. A German who belonged to the SS was complicit in its atrocities, by association at least. But if one accuses an ordinary person who lived in Germany at the time, the accuser must bear the burden of concrete proof. The same goes for Russia and her KGB. Neither nations nor religions do murder; it’s people who do that.

One could still argue that, as the world at large demonstrably didn’t accept Christ, we may be slated for collective perdition. But what is undeniable for any Christian is that Christ showed a clear path to individual salvation, and we are free to take that path or not.

Free will thus becomes the most important property of man, and it can only remain so if we stand to gain from a correct choice or suffer the consequences of a wrong one. In fact, if our will weren’t free, if we were but puppets on God’s string, one would struggle to see why God would have bothered to make us so different from animals, or indeed to create us at all.

Moreover, if we accept as a given that God loves us, then we must find it hard to explain how such love could have been expressed by turning us into puppets, or else pre-programmed robots. God’s is the absolute freedom, but if we are truly created in his image, ours has to be at least a relative one. Only God can be totally free, but that doesn’t mean man has to be totally enslaved.

What does that do to predestination then? We have to believe that God has far-reaching plans for the world in general and man in particular. Otherwise we’d fall into deism, which defies logic: it’s hard to believe that God lovingly created the world, only then to lose all interest in it.

Does this mean we are predestined after all? And if so, provided we aren’t entirely happy with Augustine’s explanation of it, how do we reconcile predestination with free will? If the former subsumes the latter, how can there be any freedom in the world?

Luther struggled with this problem, resorting to paradoxes such as, “If it were in any way possible to understand how God who is so wrathful and unjust can be merciful and just, there would be no need for faith.” Such meek intellectual surrender is odd, considering Luther’s character and his insistence on the self-sufficiency of every Christian in dealing with God.

One can sympathise with his problem. Nonetheless, we must still try to come to terms with it. After all, if we believe that it was God who gave us reason, we might as well explore this faculty to its maximum, which can’t be just the ability to calculate compounded interest.

The whole issue of predestination is rooted in the timelessness of God, as opposed to the temporal existence of man. This juxtaposition gave rise to the most elegant solution to our problem, that by the Spanish Counter-Reformation thinker Luis de Molina.

In effect, though he himself didn’t use this terminology, Molina linked the philosophical category of time with the grammatical category of tense. Our lives unfold within three basic tenses: Past, Present and Future. But God, being timeless, has only one tense: the Present Perfect.

What is ‘will be’ for us is ‘has been’ for God. This means that when he predestines each individual for salvation or damnation, God does so not arbitrarily but on the basis of the free choices he knows the individual will have made during his life – before he has actually made them within his earthly timeframe.

This line of thought makes free will trump predestination as a philosophical notion. Predestination, as defined by Molina, is hardly worth talking about; it may be simply taken for granted. If, like God’s omniscience, this concept is based on God’s timelessness, then it resides in the very definition of God.

Using our God-granted free will, we may choose to believe in God or not. But if we accept him, then we have to take the whole package, including predestination.

However, basing, as Luther and especially Calvin did, a complex theology on predestination means assigning to it undue importance. An attribute resident in a synthetic a priori definition hardly rates such distinction, and insisting that it does may in some quarters be regarded as heresy.

Free will, and freedom in general, on the other hand, becomes part of the definition of man, possibly the most important part. The freer we are, the more human and the more godly we are; the further we are removed from animals.

P.S. While we are on such arcane subjects, and before we go back to talking about Trump and Putin, let me run another thought by you.

According to the Bible, a man and a woman become one flesh when they marry. But they had been just that before Eve came out of Adam’s rib and eventually led him astray. In other words, before original sin a woman was contained within a man’s body and they were one flesh. Marriage thus constitutes a return to the pre-Fall state of affairs. One hopes this makes married people sinless, but experience reduces this hope to wishful thinking.