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RenewingMinds
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- How the Doctrine of Free Will
- Destroys Both the Inerrancy and Veracity
- of the Word of God
The doctrine of free will (so-called libertarian freedom or the concept that man is autonomous) is pernicious--subtly pernicious. It asserts that man, not God is sovereign. It asserts that God does not have ultimate control over His creation. It ultimately asserts that the Creator of the Universe is impotent.
Dr. Lewis S. Chafer aptly noted:
"...the erroneous exaltation of the human ability in the beginning, becomes man's effectual undoing in the end."
When fallible men considers themselves sovereign, they engage in the idolatry spoken of in Romans 1:21-23. With fallible men in the seat of so-called sovereignty, theoretical uncertainties are thereby introduced--uncertainties regarding outcomes over the destiny of creatures, as well as uncertainties regarding the entire process of Divine revelation, inspiration, illumination, and interpretation.
Both the authority and veracity of the Word of God rest upon its inerrancy. Without a God capable of insuring inerrancy, without a God capable of overriding men's fallibility, nothing--absolutely nothing--is certain.
If men have free will, then that free will allows for errors to be introduced at any point in the Divine chain of communication mentioned above. And if errors can be shown at any point, then the entire process falls to the ground, and its value and worth are rendered void.
In his presentation of compatibilistic freedom, Dr. Bruce A. Ware explains:
As evangelical Christians, we believe that all of Scripture--its very words, grammatical structure, syntactical arrangement--is the "outbreathing" of God himself. Paul says that, "All Scripture is breathed out by God" (2 Tim. 3:16). Scripture is entirely the word of God, in that every word of it is exactly what God wanted written.
But we also hold, as evangelicals, that human beings wrote the Bible. The Bible did not descend from heaven, nor was it dictated by God to human secretaries. Rather, as Peter puts it, "men spoke from God" as they wrote the very letters and narratives and historical accounts that they thoughtfully and carefully chose to write (2 Pet. 1:20-21). So, Scripture is simultaneously the word of God and the word of men. Every word is exactly as God wanted it written, and yet every word was written by men who chose to write what they wanted.
Now, given this doctrine of the divine inspiration of Scripture, one must ask whether the freedom by which the authors of Scripture wrote was libertarian* freedom. If so, for every word they wrote, they could have written differently, and God would have been unable to control the choices that they made. Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that even though God couldn't control what they wrote, nonetheless it just happened that every single word they chose to write was exactly the one God wanted them to write! Incredible, to be sure, but let's suppose that this is what happened. But if this had been the case, could we rightly say that Scripture is the product of God's outbreathing? Wouldn't we rather have to say that Scripture is entirely from men, but that God got very, very lucky insofar as it turned out just as he wanted it to be? But if that were so, Scripture really would not be inspired by God, even though it states exactly what he wants.
But let's think just one more moment whether it could be the case that, though God could not control what they wrote, the authors of the Bible nonetheless wrote exactly as God wanted. The problem with this view is that it stretches credibility to the breaking point. Just consider how many words there are in the Bible, and how many choices for other terms might have been available to biblical writers. Consider the various grammatical options, and the different syntactical arrangements that could have been used. Is it even close to reasonable to think that these men, with no control by God over what they actually wrote, made every single selection of words, grammar, and syntax so that the Bible written was exactly as God wanted? Clearly, this defies any reasonable basis for belief.
But if the writers of Scripture had, instead, compatibilist freedom (the freedom of inclination), then the divine inspiration of the Bible makes sense. Peter's larger statement in 2 Peter 1:20b-21 is this: "...no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit" (emphasis added). As "men spoke," they were moved by the Holy Spirit to desire to write just the things that they did write. This is so much the case that Peter makes clear, "no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man." Ultimately, what accounts for the Bible we have is not the will of humans to write it; rather "men spoke from God" so that as God moved them to write, they wrote exactly as God wanted them to write. They wrote as they wanted (freedom of inclination), and they wrote exactly as God wanted (God's sovereign control). Libertarian freedom fails to account for the divine inspiration of the Bible where compatibilist freedom succeeds.
* Dr. Ware explains: "Libertarian freedom," as it is often called, proposes that at the very moment of choice, we are free in making that choice if (and only if) in choosing what we do, we could have chosen otherwise. So we are free when choosing A if, at the moment of this choice, we could instead have chosen not-A, or B. And if this is not the case, then we are not genuinely free. Therefore, they [religious humanists] assert, we must begin with the nonnegotiable "truth" [really satanic illusion and lie] about human life that asserts: 1) that we are free, and 2) that our freedom is libertarian--lest we have no freedom at all [are "puppets"]. p.63 [Bracket comments added.]
Time and again, church history has proved this to be true. Dr. Kenneth Good explains:
That Arminianism creates the climate in which Liberalism may flourish and reproduce itself is a simple fact of history. When Arminian principles are developed philosophically, the reason and the will of man are disproportionately emphasized and elevated. This has produced rationalism which is a parent of modernism/liberalism.
The development of Arminian thought into philosophical concepts deeply affected the Western world. This philosophy produced a Liberalism which gave up the Biblical and historical Gospel. To fill this vacuum the so-called Social Gospel was invented, and the Social Gospel became the evangelistic message of Modernism. This offspring of Arminianism took European and American Christendom by storm, and thus became an integral part of the great Modernist-Fundamentalist Controversy.
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