[According to Calvin] One must make
a distinction between saying that people sin from “necessity” and yet saying they
sin “voluntarily.”
[Calvin] agrees with Bernard’s
position: “Bernard says not improperly, that all of us have a will; but to will
well is proficiency, to will ill is defect. Thus, simply to will is the part of
man, to will ill the part of corrupt nature, to will well the part of grace”
and thus, “I will say that the will, deprived of liberty, is led or dragged by
necessity to evil” (Institutes, 2.3.5). He—with Aquinas—says that, while
God is totally good and can only do good, he freely does good [1]. The Devil,
on the other hand, is evil, but he freely does evil. To say it another way,
Calvin quotes Augustine: “Man through liberty became a sinner, but corruption, ensuing as the penalty, has converted
liberty into necessity” and then he adds, “Whenever mention is made of the
subject, he hesitates not to speak in this way of the necessary bondage of sin”
(Institutes, 2.3.5).
IT is hard for this writer not to
conclude that by what he says he is evading the issue. One can readily agree
that Adam freely chose—without compulsion—to disobey God. But how is it that a
person does something “voluntarily” if the “will is deprived of liberty”?
[2] Does not “necessity” refer to what a person must do because of his
nature? True, prior to the fall (of the Devil and man), both had the freedom to
choose among a range of options each compatible with their natures, but now,
according to the Calvinistic views, they have only one option: evil. Only the
grace of God can change this bondage in man by expanding his range of options,
spiritually giving him the ability to respond to the good. Is not Calvin, then,
assuming his conclusion, that is, that despite saying that people sin by necessity,
they nevertheless have freedom? If the will responds to the person’s reasoning
(Calvin affirms this) and is understanding is corrupted (with this Calvin also
agrees), does it not follow that the will only wills (in agreement with the
intellect) what is evil? [3] Is this not implied by Calvin in Bondage and
Liberation? “We say that man’s mind is smitten with blindness, so
that of itself it can in no way reach the knowledge of the truth; we say
that his will is corrupted by wickedness, so that he can neither love God, nor
obey his righteousness” (Calvin, Bondage and Liberation, 320). There can
be no freedom for man—elect or non-elect—apart from the grace of God.
Remarkably, Calvin quotes
Augustine to the same effect, though he would prefer that the word “free-will”
be “abolished” from theological vocabulary:
Augustine hesitates not to call
the will a slave. In another passage he is offered with those who
deny free will; but his chief reason for this is explained when he says, “Only
lest anyone should presume so to deny freedom of will, from a desire to excuse
sin.” It is certain, he elsewhere admits, that without the Spirit the will
of man is not free, inasmuch as it is subject to lusts which chain and
master it. And again, that nature began to want liberty the moment the will was
vanquished by the revolt into which it fell. Again, that man, by making a
bad use of free will, lost both himself and his will. Again, that free will
having been made a captive, can do nothing in the way of righteousness. Again,
that no will is free which has been made so by divine grace. Again, that
the righteousness of God is not fulfilled when the law orders, and man acts, as
it were, by his own strength, but when the Spirit assists, and the will (not
the free will of man, but the will freed by God) obeys. He briefly states the
ground of all these observations, when he says, that man at his creation received
a great degree of free will, but lost it by sinning. (Institutes, 2.3.8)
Perhaps it is fair to say that
this particular discussion of “necessity” versus “voluntary” has led to a
dead-end and is not fruitful. Augustine and Calvin are correct in concluding
that, if the “will is not free,” it leads to a form of fatalism: a person
cannot sin. (Timothy A. Stratton, Human Freedom, Divine Knowledge, and Mere
Molinism: A Biblical, Historical, Theological, and Philosophical Analysis [Eugene,
Oreg.: Wipf and Stock, 2020], 118-20, italics in original, comments in square
brackets added for clarification)
Notes for the above (renumbered):
[1] Aquinas, however, is not arguing
like Calvin. The former speaks of divine freedom dealing with choices related
to sitting or standing, sending rain or withholding rain, etc. God does not
have freedom to do otherwise when it is opposed to his nature, and thus, theologians
would argue God cannot choose to do evil. This does not necessarily mean that
God does not possess a form of libertarian freedom known as “Source Incompatibilism.”
Kevin Timpe writes: “Source Incompatibilism is the claim that what is most
important for an agent’s free will is the agent being the [ultimate] source of
her actions” (Timpe, Free Will, 12).
[2] Lane distinguishes the way “free
choice” is used in Calvin. One he calls “psychological freedom”: “Human choice
is free in the sense that it is not coerced by external forces but moves voluntarily,
of its own accord” (lane, “Bondage and Liberations,” 19). This is the way
Aquinas uses the term. [It is interesting that another Calvinist scholar—G.C.
Berkouwer (1962)—rejects this sense of “free-will.” See Lane, “Did Calvin
Believe?”, 80]. The other way Lane describes free choice he calls “ethical
freedom” or “that a free will has the power to choose between good and evil by
its own strength” (Lane, Bondage and Liberation,” 19)
[3] It is hard to understand Lane’s
conclusion: “If Calvin appears to state that the will cannot but follow the intellect,
this is because he is incautious in his use of language, not because he wished
to affirm something that was patently false and which he was about to
contradict” (Lane, “Bondage and Liberation,” 17). That God’s grace infuses the
elect with “right reason” does not set aside that the will follows the reason,
a reason enabled to see “light and truth” and, in the case of the non-elect—because
of irremediable, dark reasoning—rejects the grace of God. The quotation above
from Calvin’s later publication Bondage and Liberation supports this conclusion.
