Does Calvinism teach that human beings do not have “free will?”
The charge often leveled against Calvinism is that it denies the free will choices of human beings and, by that premise, makes God the author and cause of the evils committed by men. The logic typically goes something like, “If man has no free will, and God elects only some and controls everything, including man’s sinful acts, then God is responsible for evil.” Oftentimes, it is further concluded that for God to cause men to do evil, where men have no choice in the matter, it would be unjust for God to punish them, since they had no choice in the matter. Therefore, the Calvinist’s God is unjust and the author of evil.
The problem with such charges against the Reformed camp, usually from Arminian Christians, is that they utterly fail to understand the position they are attacking. Calvinism does not deny free-will or that God pulls strings, as though people were marionette puppets, causing them to do evil things so that God can condemn them to eternal damnation later on. That is an uncharitable mischaracterization of the Reformed position, a straw-man. Those who attack the Reformed position on such grounds are merely attacking an argument that a Calvinist would never make.
If you think I am confused on this matter, then please feel free to pick up the works of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Calvin, Spurgeon, Edwards, and countless others to see what they teach on these matters. Feel free to investigate for yourself the teachings of Albert Mohler, James White, or RC Sproul concerning the Reformed position. Indeed, please exercise your free-will by looking into the first fifteen hundred years of church history, to the writings of Paul, and to the teachings of Jesus. What will you find? The Reformed position.
The debate is not, and never was, whether or not mankind possessed a “free-will.” Rather, the real question asked by Calvinists and others of the Reformed ilk is more appropriately expressed as follows: “Is the will a thing? If so, then what kind of a thing is it?” And to this philosophical inquiry, comes the theological exclamation: “The human will is a created thing with an essence or a nature!” In other words, the free will exists as a contingent thing with a nature—that is the Reformed/Calvinistic position.
This might seem like silliness to those of you hearing this for the first time, but it is actually very important. It is important for our purposes here because the Arminian is actually the one ultimately denying the human will. I understand that all of your lives you have been indoctrinated to think the opposite, but that’s because so many churches and pastors have adopted some very unbiblical notions about “free-will” which they got from humanistic and secular philosophers. Yes, Arminianism is a late-comer on the stage of history.
The real debate between Calvinists and Armenians is, and has always been, whether or not the human will is a created thing with an essence. Armenians posit what is called “autonomous” or “libertarian free-will,” while the Reformed position declares “complimentarian free-will.” Notice here that everyone agrees that mankind has free-will. However, to the Calvinist, the will is simply the mind choosing, it is a faculty of the human soul. For the Arminian, the will is autonomous, self-contained, self-sufficient, and self-caused.
Is the will caused or not? There is no “middle road” here, since either the human will is either caused or uncaused. If you say it is “self-caused,” then you are saying that it brought itself into existence before it existed, which is self-contradictory. If it is uncaused, then it must be the first cause, in other words, God. Did you notice above how the Arminian definition of free will actually takes on divine characteristics (autonomous, self-contained, and self-sufficient)?
Seeing how I am writing this to Christians, I don’t think I need to point out the absurdities of either self-contradiction or about human wills being Gods. Therefore, the human will is a thing which was caused to exist. And if it was caused, then it was caused by another thing with a nature. Either that prior thing was also caused or it was God. And that prior thing was caused, either by God, or yet another contingent thing. Ultimately, either God is the first cause, or we have an infinite regression of created things causing other created things to come into existence—an infinite regression of causes and effects. However, if we have an infinite regression, then there was no first thing. And if there was no first thing, then there cannot be a second, or a third, and so on to infinity. Therefore, either God causes and creates the human will, or it does not exist.
Does this mean that man has no free will? No. However, it does mean that will is contingent, which is to say, dependent upon something else for its existence. Otherwise, you are elevated the human will to the level of deity, like humanistic secularists have done. But the will of man is dependent upon the nature of man—his preferences, his passions, his mind, and so forth. It is complimentary to his nature. I don’t choose things arbitrarily, like a sucking on a fudge bar verses my shoe. If I preferred the shoe, I would be sucking on that! And if it was arbitrary, and utterly autonomous, then it should make no difference as to my preferences. However, common sense says that it does depend upon my preferences, my nature.
This what Arminians do not get. They don’t understand Calvinism, and persist in misrepresenting it. I don’t care what you’ve heard about so-called “hyper-calvinists” and so forth—and in actuality, hyper Calvinist exist because they, like Arminians, deny at least one of the five-points of Calvinism—we are talking about Calvinism, the Reformed and the orthodox view. Don’t believe me? Good! Be good Bereans and check it out for yourselves. You’ll find libertarian notions of “free-will” consistently condemned as heresy throughout church history.
Now, if I give my children a choice between chocolate and candybars to eat, verses worms and poop and dirt, which would they choose? Does my foreknowledge or my setting up this state of affairs “violate” their free-will, since I foreknow they will choose the candy? Of course not! I know that they will choose in accordance to their nature, their preferences, and so forth prior to me giving them the choice. I don’t even need to look into the future to know that.
So how much more can our Sovereign God know our choices?
He is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. He created the man and sustains him, even more than like a potter shapes his clay. He even created and fully sustains the will, the volition of man. He fully knows what we will choose.
Since our choices are motioned forth by our natures, just as my own children choose candy over crap, the unregenerate chooses sin over holiness because that holiness is abominable to him. Just as eyes adjusted to darkness shut to hide themselves at the site of such intense, violating light, the sinner cannot choose God because God is abominable to him, painful, and piercing to eyes adjusted to darkness. As Scripture has said, the sinner flees because of their wicked deeds. They cannot choose God because they are slaves to that darkness, slaves to sin and haters of the Light, which is God.
I know this is a great mystery, but praise be to God.
