The Freedom of the Will

And ye will not come to me, that ye might have life. JOHN 5:40

In 1754, from a frontier village, Edwards published the book that made his reputation as a philosopher. Its full title is forbidding and its argument is dense, but the distinction at its centre is one of the most practically useful tools in pastoral theology. It answers a question every believer eventually asks. If a sinner cannot come to God without grace, how can he be blamed for not coming?

Two kinds of cannot

Edwards’s answer turns on distinguishing two things we confuse because English uses one word for both. There is natural inability. A man cannot fly. A prisoner in chains cannot leave. A blind man cannot see the sunrise. In each case something outside the person’s will prevents him, and nobody holds him responsible. We do not blame the prisoner for staying in his cell. There is moral inability. A devoted mother cannot bring herself to harm her child. A man of settled integrity cannot be induced to betray his friend. Here nothing external prevents anything. The person has every faculty required. What he lacks is the inclination — and the stronger his character, the more truly we say he cannot. Notice that in the second case, the inability is not an excuse. It is a description of the person’s heart, and we praise or blame people precisely for this kind of cannot. The sinner’s inability, Edwards argued, is entirely of the second kind. He has understanding, will and conscience. Nothing binds his hands. What he lacks is any desire for God — and that lack is not his misfortune, it is his sin.

No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him. JOHN 6:44

Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. ROMANS 8:7

Both verses say cannot. Neither offers it as an excuse. Set them beside ye will not come to me, and the two are the same fact described from two angles: the cannot is a will not.

What freedom actually is

Behind this lies Edwards’s account of the will itself. He argued that the will is not some neutral faculty hovering above our desires, choosing between them from a position of indifference. The will always follows what appears most desirable to the person at the moment of choosing. We invariably choose what we most want. Freedom, then, is not the power to choose against your strongest desire — which would be a strange thing to want, and would make every choice random rather than responsible. Freedom is being able to act according to your desire without external constraint. The prisoner is unfree; the man who stays home because he prefers to is entirely free, even though his choice was certain. This is why responsibility survives. You are responsible not because your choices were uncaused, but because they were yours — they came from what you actually wanted.

Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil. JEREMIAH 13:23

Where readers differ

This is Edwards’s most philosophically contested work, and readers should know it. Many thoughtful Christians hold that genuine moral responsibility requires the real ability to have chosen otherwise, and that Edwards’s account, however carefully argued, ultimately makes God the author of sin. Others find the distinction between natural and moral inability decisive and the objection answered. The debate has continued for two and a half centuries without resolution, and it will not be settled here. What is not in dispute among those who take Scripture seriously is the pastoral substance: that sinners are genuinely unable to save themselves, that they are genuinely responsible, and that both are taught in the same passages.

The practical use of the distinction is considerable, and it works in two directions. It removes the sinner’s excuse. A person who says he would come to Christ if he could is invited to examine what is actually stopping him. Nothing external is. He does not come because he does not want to, and that is not a limitation to be pitied but a heart to be repented of. And it directs prayer accurately. If the obstacle were natural, we would need circumstances changed. Because it is moral, we ask God to change the wanting. That is precisely what He has promised to do.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. EZEKIEL 36:26

Both at once

The obvious question raised by this chapter is how divine sovereignty and human responsibility can both be fully true. Edwards’s answer, stripped of its philosophical machinery, is that Scripture asserts both without apology and we are not at liberty to drop either. The clearest case is the one every Christian already accepts without noticing.

Wherefore, my beloved …work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure. PHILIPPIANS 2:12–13

Notice the logic of that for. Paul does not say: work hard, because God has done His part and the rest is up to you. He says: work, because God is at work in you — and God’s work extends to the willing itself. The divine activity is offered as the ground of the human activity, not its replacement. This is the pattern throughout Scripture. God commands what only He can give, and gives what He commands.

Make you a new heart and a new spirit: for why will ye die, O house of Israel? EZEKIEL 18:31

A new heart also will I give you …and I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes. EZEKIEL 36:26–27

The same prophet, in the same book, commands the people to make themselves a new heart and promises that God will give them one. Edwards regarded this as decisive. If the two were genuinely incompatible, Ezekiel would not have written both. The practical consequence is a refusal of both errors that this doctrine tends to produce. The first error is fatalism — the conclusion that since God is sovereign, effort is pointless. Edwards’s response is that God ordains means as well as ends, and that our striving is one of the means through which He accomplishes His purpose. Nobody argues that since God has appointed the harvest we need not plant. The second error is self-reliance — treating the commands as though we could meet them unaided. That is precisely the error the whole treatise exists to demolish. The believer’s position is therefore to work as hard as if it depended on him, and to pray as one who knows perfectly well that it does not.

Edwards saw no tension there at all, and neither, apparently, did Paul.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Where you say you cannot obey God in some matter, test which kind of cannot it is. Is anything actually preventing you but your own unwillingness? 2. Change how you pray for the unconverted. Ask God to give them a new wanting, not merely a new opportunity. 3. Stop waiting to feel willing before you act. Obedience frequently precedes desire, and desire follows. 4. Hold this doctrine with humility. Sincere believers differ here, and it is not a test of orthodoxy. 5. Take Ezekiel 36:26 as a personal request for the area of your life that feels most immovable.

A PRAYER

Lord, I have said that I could not, when the truth is that I would not.

Take away the excuse. Show me that nothing stands between me and obedience except a heart that does not want what You want.

I cannot repair my own wanting. So I ask for what You promised: take out the heart of stone and give me a heart of flesh.

Make me willing, and then hold me to it. Amen.