If ever there was a theological boogey man, it is this- the notion that if God is sovereign over us and our choices, such makes our love for Him inauthentic and worthless, turns us into robots or puppets. Without humans having libertarian free will, the ability to do that which we do not wish to do, calamity ensues, and every ounce of meaning and purpose in all of reality sinks into a foul smelling goo.
Which, if it were true, would seem to make heaven a rather unpleasant place. This dawned on me some years ago when I received a question from a dear saint who worried that there could be sin in heaven. I addressed her concern here. Her fears were misguided, but precisely because there is no possibility of sin in heaven. No possibility of sin, in the minds of many, means no possibility of obedience, love, authenticity.
But it gets worse. If love cannot be genuine unless there exists in the one loving the capacity for love to change into hate, then God Himself has become a robot. His love for us, if this were true, must either be mutable or inauthentic. Yikes. Heaven now becomes not only a place where we can sin and descend into judgment, but becomes a place where God can simply choose to hate us and send us to hell, even if we love Him there faithfully.
I get the desire we have to not be robots. I get the importance of love being genuine. Amen. The trouble is in assuming that any of this requires libertarian free will. The trouble is libertarian free will, if it were a thing, would lead to horrors far worse than our being mere puppets.
One way I seek to give a modicum of peace to those who think this way is to remind them that we are as free as God is, and He is as bound as we are. This Jonathan Edwards so masterfully explained, unpacking the same points made centuries before by Augustine. We always choose according to our nature. We are absolutely free to do so. We cannot, however, choose against our nature. We are constrained, not by a puppet master, not by a robot engineer, but by our very selves, to only choose according to our nature. Just like the God whose image we bear.
Apart from His sovereign work of regeneration, our inclination is only to evil (Gen. 8:21). We are “free” to do good, but never will. At our glorification, our inclination is only to good. We will be “free” to do evil, but never will. God’s inclination is only to do good. He is “free” to do evil, but never will. Not because there is a power above Him constraining Him from evil, but because of who He is.
This is not the destruction of love, but it’s outworking. Lord, teach us to fear You, and not the boogey man we have made up in our minds.
Beautiful!
Very well said.
Thank you Ben.