Dr Paul Allen

The question of free will has plagued the minds of philosophers, theologians, and ordinary people for millennia. The debate over what free will is and whether we as humans possess such a trait has not abated. If anything, it has increased in recent years. But what does the Bible say?  Can we find any help in God’s Word to answer the question of what it means to freely choose our actions and to be responsible for them? Since the time of the Reformation, the two basic answers that Christians have provided to this question have primarily centred on the theological legacies of Calvinism and Arminianism. The view of free agency associated with Calvinism is called compatibilism. The view advanced by Arminians and others, known as free-will theists, is called libertarian free will. Proponents of libertarian free will offer two planks to their definition of free will. First, for any choice to be truly free, it must be sufficiently unmoored from the constraints of outside causal forces. Tha...

“Give What You Command, and Then Command Whatever You Will”:  Augustine, Pelagius, and the Question of Original Sin   By  Brad Green Original sin, in particular the relationship between Adam and the rest of humanity, is one of the most vexing doctrines in the history of Christian thought. Henri Blocher captures it well when he refers to the doctrine as a “riddle.”1  Often, the best way to come to terms with a complex theological issue is to go at it through a close study of a key historical controversy that surrounds the doctrine. The doctrine of original sin would entail an analysis of the pitched theological struggle between Augustine and Pelagius (and the Pelagians). This was a literary battle, as Augustine never met Pelagius, although they both were in Rome simultaneously.  1 Henri Blocher, Original Sin: Illuminating the Riddle, NSBT 5 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997). Note: the enumeration of these footnotes differs from those used in the full chapter sin...

Why is there a Satan? Why does a being exist whose name means accuser — a “devil,” which means slanderer, a “deceiver of the whole world” (Revelation 12:9), a “ruler of this world” (John 12:31; 14:30; 16:11), a “god of this age” (2 Corinthians 4:4 NKJV), a “prince of the power of the air” (Ephesians 2:2), a “Beelzebul, the prince of demons” (Matthew 12:24)? Where does he come from? How did it come about that he ever sinned? The letters of Jude and 2 Peter give us clues. Jude 6 says, “The angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day.” And 2 Peter 2:4 says, “God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment.” It appears, then, that some of God’s holy angels (we may assume, in principle, that Satan is included, whether these verses refer t...

Myth 1: We don’t have free will. The Westminster Confession of Faith, the predominant confessional statement of Reformed theology in the English-speaking world, has a whole chapter called “Of Free Will.” Here is the first section of that chapter, in its entirety: WCF 9.1 God hath endued the will of man with that natural liberty, that it is neither forced, nor, by any absolute necessity of nature, determined to good, or evil. The chapter on God’s providence likewise says that when God ordains what will come to pass, “neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes [a category that includes the human will] taken away, but rather established” (WCF 3.1). This myth arises from historical changes of language. Today, the phrase “free will” refers to moral responsibility. It means people are not just puppets of exterior natural forces like their heredity and environment. But in the sixteenth...