Sharing thoughts

Oh, my, another entry of some length, but...again, it is well worth taking the time to read. It concerns free will; and those who know me will not be surprised at the content: UR and Free Will?
by John R. Gavazzoni
Whenever the issue of theoretical free will is raised, I must
confess that it pulls my string, since I'm still persuaded that there is much fuzzy thinking about it, even within UR circles, fuzzy thinking at a very fundamental level. So, here I go:
One cannot sort out the meaning of freedom of will, without addressing and including the element of the bondage of the will. While a serious consideration of the bondage of the will is, especially to the western, institutionalized Christian mind, a scandalous and offensive consideration, our predecessors of no less stature than men like Martin Luther, who have passed the torch of truth-seeking on to us, were not of that mindset. They spoke to the subject with a boldness that did not hold sacred the childish notion that men have, left to themselves, either in the microcosm or macrocosm, the power to determine anything.
I'm afraid, brothers; if I may be so bold, that I don't agree even with the comparatively reasonable position that men have determinative power of will in even the smallest matters of life. We are conscious of making decisions/choices all the time, and because we make those
choices---which suit to wear for an occasion, where to invest our money, what to order from a menu, which freeway to take to avoid the worst traffic---that these are necessarily exercises of freedom.
I don't understand it that way. After 53 plus years of the study of scripture, observing the complex of my choices down through the years, and being a student of human behavior, my proposition is that a will is either in a state of bondage or freedom, or in the throes of a mixture of both as the precedent to choices and action of any sort.
As to the bondage of the will and its unfolding in choices and actions, it seems most clear to me that said bondage came from the free will of God to subject all creation---of which we are part---to futility (a most seminal way of describing bondage). Having been---by God acting
freely---subjected to the bondage of futility, that is, "penned up in disobedience...." (that, surely, is descriptive of bondage), all our choices have something of that constitution until we are set free by the
sovereign grace of God in Christ.
Though accomplished by God in Christ for all of us, this setting free involves an eonion process in which what was already accomplished in Christ, is demonstrated and proven in us by Christ in us. What is true of us in Christ becomes experiential by Christ in us. That is the only freedom that scripture speaks of. Nowhere are we told that freedom of will is some kind of autonomous capacity of the human creature, but rather, it is something that God does for us, namely, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
"Whom the Son sets free, is free indeed." Free to do what? Free to sin? Certainly not. That would be an oxymoron. Sin emerges out of bondage, and righteousness out of freedom, and the only freedom there is the freedom of God, and grace is a matter of causing us to participate in God's own freedom.
What is the nature of that freedom? It is that quality of the
Divine Nature which makes God impervious to being limited/bound by anything/anyone so that He would not be able to bring to fruition the totality of His holy desire. God is free to be God, nothing, even in the least measure, being able to thwart Him. Having assertedthat, I hasten to add that God in Christ, freely gave Himself over to bear our bondage with us to bring us to a greater glory than we ever would without that shared crucible with God. Jesus wanted to make it
very clear that His death for us was not a matter of men taking His life, but of Him giving it----freely.
When we are caused by God to share in that freedom, we choose and act in accordance with our true nature in Him. When we are in bondage, we are in an existential state of a disconnect from Christ within us as our life, and we make choices out from bondage, not freedom.
So what about even all those mundane little decisions that we make every day? You think that you're just doing what you choose to do, because you choose to do it, bringing to bear upon those decisions the best of your intellect, emotions and experience. I think not. Most folks
have little understanding of all the forces that come into play in creating choices.
We do not make choices by some ability to reach into ourselves where God, supposedly, has given us some measure of autonomous sovereignty. God is always either dispensing freedom-creating grace, or temporarily withholding said grace, with the effect being bondage of the will. The forces that work upon us, and within us are a complex of genetic-inheritance; family nurturing, or the lack of it; chemical and/or hormonal balance or imbalance, religious, familial, and cultural presuppositions and biases, with all of that traceable back to God's
desk.
Ask yourself how much control, even in the matter of life's little choices, the crack-baby has. Ask yourself how free a man or woman is to be sexually healthy and normal by any definition, who has been sexually abused. Conditions not traceable to any choice on their part circumscribe and hedge about everything that they do.
Allow me a very personal example. I'm still working part-time, that is, I'm semi-retired from the shoe-findings business. I work almost entirely at home, by phone, still serving some of the accounts I handled for years when full-time employed. This semiretirement involves my
needing to drive into L.A. to our company's warehouse every 4 to 5 weeks to take care of some things that require my personal presence there.
One of my coworkers has a disposition similar in some respects to my own, but in many ways, we are very dissimilar dispositionally. He is a mild sort of fellow; remarkably patient and reasonable, rarely, if
ever, seriously tempted to aggressive confrontation, and certainly not any of a physical sort.
I, on the other hand, am a classic mix of the temperaments of my mother and father and grandparents in that, though I'm known in ministry and in my sales work as a man of patience and levelheadedness, I am subject by temperament to an almost constant pressure to, at some point of interactive disagreement, to invite an unreasonable person out behind the barn to "settle the matter like men," and that in a way, and to a
point of such finality, that only one of us will return from behind the barn in relatively good condition.
That I haven't done such a thing for a very long time is, trust me, attributable to the grace of God, and the grace of God, alone. And that, was not of my choosing; I was set upon as a wild teenager by Christ in a manner much like Paul on the Damascus Road, and if you'll read that
account again, you'll note that Jesus did not offer any options to Saul.
Returning to the example of human victimization that creates bondage in lives: Now, it seems to us, that some people so victimized choose to avail themselves of help, while others do not, and we interpret such difference as individual freedom of will---that somehow, where the rubber meets the road, they, themselves, determine their
futures penultimately (I know that we all agree that, ultimately, no human being determines their eternal destiny, that's God's determination, a determination He has already made, and will carry to fulfillment), but I believe scripture is quite clear that when a life is
turned about, penultimately, or ultimately, it begins, follows through, and ends by the initiation, power and fulfillment of God.
There is a will, the will of God, that is at work, and that will,
in the short term works in part by creating circumstances by which, unavoidably, men's wills are bound to and by sin and death as a preparation to assimilate at a cellular level the grace of God that brings us to share the glory of God, but always with the operative principle: "Except a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it
abides alone."
Well, I hope I've not come across as arrogantly pedantic, but I believe we are in a day when the Spirit of Truth is driving us to an in-depth scrutiny of truly fundamental theological issues. That is, we're in a day of theological revolution, and what is driving it is God's insistence that the utterly unqualified determinative nature of
the will of God in all things be upheld to the glory of His grace, and done so without carrying over any of the hideous and/or infantile conclusions of Calvinism or Arminianism.
JG (John's e-mail address: john-gavazzoni@webtv.net)