The human free choice of personal destiny
It was in response to the fatalistic determinism implicit
in the threefold division of the Gnostics that Irenaeus stressed human freedom
to choose between two possible destinies. In the Gnostic scheme, only the
psychical had any choice. For Irenaeus, the justice of God's condemnation of
people rests on the fact that they have been endowed with reason and free will.
Although the Lord used the separation of wheat and chaff at harvest time as an
illustration of judgment, there is an important difference between the
illustration and reality. The wheat and the chaff are inanimate and irrational,
and were by nature what they were. Human beings, on the other hand, have the
power to decide whether they will become "wheat" or
"chaff." Should they choose to be chaff, their condemnation would be
just, because they made a free choice, even though it was an irrational one (AH
IV,4,3).
From the beginning, humans were created free, with power
over their own souls, so that they could obey God’s precepts of their own
volition, and not by any compulsion from God. God’s will or purpose toward
humanity is always good and he gives good counsel (consilium bonum or gnomēn
agathēn) to all, but people must give obedience to God and preserve that
good which is given to them by God. They have the power to do good and will be
justly condemned if they do not do it (AH IV,37,1). Lawson has remarked that
Irenaeus was so dominated by the interest in human personal moral choice “that
his statements on free will sometimes sound almost Pelagian.”’ He rightly
notices, however, that, in the preceding context of this statement regarding
human ability to do the good, the grace of God (his good will or counsel)
precedes human working. “That ‘working of good’ which is within human power
would therefore appear to be nothing other than a steadfast holding on to the
grace of God.”
While Irenaeus clearly affirmed the necessity of God’s
grace prior to human choice of the good and the decision of faith in God, he
did not consider that grace efficacious in a predestinarian sense. God’s
foreknowledge of all things includes a knowledge of who will and who will not
believe, but it is not elective or reprobationary (AH IV,29,2; cf. AH IV,37,2;
IV,39,4). How people respond to God’s grace is left in the power of their own
freedom. Faith in God is within human power, and they choose to believe or not
to do so, of their own free will (AH IV,37,5). When people do not believe, the
cause does not lie in a deficiency in God's call. God's light continues to shine
but some people blind themselves to it. That they live in darkness is therefore
their own fault and no fault of God's light (AH IV,39,3-4). However, God does
judicially blind these unbelievers, giving them up to the darkness which they
have chosen for themselves (AH IV,29,1;
IV,39,4; III,7,1; V,27,2).
It needs to be noted again that this stress which Irenaeus
places on human freedom to choose personal destiny is in a context of optimism
regarding the opportunity provided for choice of the good. From the beginning,
the Son has been present with his handiwork, revealing the Father to all whom
the Father wills (AH IV,6,7). This included the revelation in creation, the preaching
through the law and the prophets, the visibility of the Word in the
incarnation, and then the continuing working of the Word through the Church's
proclamation and the inspired Scriptures. Irenaeus had no room in his
experience for a category of people who have had no opportunity to believe.
God's just judgment of people rests on their free response to his gracious
self-revelation, and there does not seem to have been anyone, in Irenaeus's
frame of reference, who did not have sufficient revelation to make an adequate
moral response. (Terrance L. Tiessen, Irenaeus on the Salvation of the
Unevangelized [ATLA Monograph Series 31; Metuchen, N. J.: The Scarecrow
Press, Inc., 1993], 218-20)
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