Time and time again, I hear folks resorting to the notion of free will as part of their account of Christian faith.
And my problems with this are myriad. So let me attempt to lay them out here in as clear a way as I can.
First, there's the deeply theological issue. I don't think anthropology (what it means to be human, in this case with a free will) is all that fine a place to begin when talking about God. It may have worked well for Feuerbach and Freud (not really, but we'll at least pretend), but it won't do biblically. Why would you build any account of Christian faith upon a non-biblical, philosophically contested, scientifically disputed, and perennially controversial anthropocentric abstraction?
A theological reliance upon free will seems sketchy to me, like building on quicksand. Personally, I'd like to see theology come out right because we are getting God right rather than getting humans right. I want my account of Christian faith to make a claim about God instead of about humans -- an extraordinarily contested and controversial claim -- to get there. That's my worry. Why base your soteriology on a dubious and hotly contested theory about human anthropology? It makes your theology so fragile and open to critique. Particularly in this Age of Neuroscience when more and more people are going to be expressing doubts about free will. This is, one might say, the neurological equivalent of being a Young Earth Creationist.
Now, I understand the fear of jettisoning free will. Folks end up thinking that God merely coerces us into salvation. I get it. I really do. My point is, rather, that when you are building a theological structure free will isn't a brick you should be reaching for.
I think there are better anthropological bricks to be using. In fact, the reason I reject free will is because of psychology.
Those who've taken Psych 101 will know exactly where this is heading.
What folks mean when they say "free will" isn't volition at all. What they're talking about is what the philosopher Harry Frankfurt calls volitional unanimity, when my choices are aligned with my desires. The experience of human freedom comes when we are doing what we want to do, when volition lines up with caring.
If you've ever tried losing weight you know just how this works. The junk food is tempting, because you love the sugar kick. But, you desire losing the pounds. So there exists in you an internal struggle. Kind of like the one Paul talks about in Romans 7.
What if our choosing isn't coerced? What if it all comes down -- not to choice -- but to affections, what we care most about?
And, what if the same is true for Christian faith?
The issue, I think, isn't choice. It's affection. Our choices go where our affections go. We don't really choose God. Rather, we fall in love with God. And most spiritual biographies (see the lives of the saints) have this sort of character. A love story, of pursuit and resistance and ultimate union. It's a journey of the heart, not of the "free will". It is as Augustine said, "Our hearts are restless until they rest in You".
With a change of the heart our new God-given will would line up with it: We would be both choosing God and wanting to choose God. And that unanimity is the experience of freedom. We'd feel no coercion.
Thing is, this account of the affections is still lacking something. The problem comes when we think about the nature of selfhood. Specifically, "the self" isn't just about affection. It's about memory, story, biography, integrity, and time. For the self to be the self it has to be recognized, named and embraced. In a certain sense, the self is a story we tell about ourselves over time. And that story has to have a plot, some narrative coherence and integrity. The person I was yesterday has to have some narrative connection with the person I am today. Otherwise we'd slide into insanity.
A simple example of this is waking up in the morning. As we regain consciousness, one of the first things that happens is that the self is gathered and reorganized. We find the bookmark in the story of the self and get ready to move the plot forward. We wake up thinking, "What was I going to do today? Ah, yes. I have that important meeting." We remember ourselves. Our story comes back to us as we prepare to go forward in time.
All this to say that humans are biographical creatures, that the self is narratological.
So what would happen if we woke up one day and found our affections radically disconnected from who we were the day before? We, quite literally, wouldn't recognize ourselves. The prior self would be a stranger, an alien doppelganger.
And this should start sounding more and more biblical to you. Think all that talk about "putting to death the old person" and "putting on the new".
What we must remember is that these are daily tasks.
This is why I think we Christians are also naive when we think God radically changes us in an instant. Those who insist most on free will are usually those who insist most on stark moments of change.
Those stark moments of change, though, have a name in psychology. We call them by words from amnesia to Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder) to dementia. Not exactly less coercive.
True, this narrative fracture might not be experienced as coercion, but it does create a catastrophic disruption of the self. It is still a phenomenological violation of the individual.
We wouldn't see joy or illumination at the moment of transformation but panic and psychological disorientation. The narrative flow of the self would be so traumatically ruptured that the person would struggle, and often fail, to make sense of their memories and life story.
What if transformation were slow, though? Truth be told, I think this is the overwhelming witness of the Bible. That God is slowly bringing each of us along, each at a different narrative pace. A pace mainly set by God's patience -- God's concern to preserve our volitional integrity, to not coerce us, to bring us to grace in a way that keeps our selfhood as biographical creatures intact. Some of us are moving rapidly home. Some of us are taking journeys like the Prodigal Son, walking away from God at this point in the story.
Truly God is shaping us, choosing us, and electing us. It's just that this election is occurring at every moment of our entire life story.
And that's a story, I think, that God is always helping each of us to write. At every moment along the way.