The Fall & Free Will
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I believe
it’s safe to assume that all Christians believe God is sovereign over all
things and that the fall of Adam and Eve didn’t catch God by surprise. Nor did Satan, as a serpent, deceive God by any means. Yet Catholics and many
non-Catholic Christians radically differ over how God wasn’t taken by
surprise by our primordial parents and duped by the serpent. Without sounding
negative or trying to be polemical, I wish to simply explain how it was neither
Satan nor Adam and Eve who fell from God’s grace by no free will of their own.
Lucifer’s expulsion from heaven and Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden wasn’t
intentionally prearranged or determined by God only so that our Lord and Savior
Jesus Christ could come into the world strictly for the glory of God. Yet,
there are countless Reformed and Evangelical Protestants who believe that’s how
it was. Certainly, there’s nothing good about that.
Protestants
who adhere to the false teaching of double predestination often cite Ephesians
1:5 which reads, “[God] predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus
Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will.” They believe that God
predetermined some people to be destined to glory and other people to be
destined to eternal damnation since no human soul is worthy of being saved by
any natural merit of their own or even supernatural merit in the system of
grace. However, the verb “predestined” is taken from the Greek word προορίζω (proorizó)
which means “to know or declare in advance” by God’s foreknowledge. What God
has known in advance is that faithful Christians shall be called to be adopted
children of God through Jesus Christ but not necessarily to the preclusion of
their free will.
Indeed,
St. Peter refers to “the elect according to the foreknowledge of God the
Father” when speaking of faithful Christians who are sanctified or justified by
the working of the Holy Spirit who prompts and strengthens them to be obedient
to Christ to the point of having to endure persecution and face death because
of their faith (1 Pet 1:2). St. Paul and St. Peter are referring to
predestination to grace, not to eternal glory, which has been foreseen by God
since before the creation of the world and humanity.
Yet we
believe that the martyrs of the faith must have been destined to glory, though
no human creature can know with absolute certainty whether they belong to the
elect who are destined to glory. This is something only God can know from all
eternity outside of time. But, unfortunately, some non-Catholics confuse the
meaning of predestination (God’s foreknowledge of what we choose to do in faith
by becoming Christians) and predetermination (the erroneous belief that God
determines what we will do without any will of our own). Just because God knows
what we will do, it doesn’t mean that He determines what we do. Of course, if
God knows that we will do something, then we will do it, but only because God
knows everything. Nothing escapes his foreknowledge. In our finite humanity, we
can infer that it will rain by looking up at dark, threatening rain clouds that
have covered the entire sky. Should it happen to rain, it won’t be because we
looked up at the sky and declared it will or might rain.
God isn’t
the author of evil. We choose good or evil of our own free will. We choose to
be baptized and/or live up to our baptismal commitment upon reaching maturity.
The early martyrs chose to become Christians and be faithful to Christ by
suffering and dying in union with the Lord because of their love for him. They
weren’t sentient machines designed to walk into the Roman Coliseum so that God
could be merely glorified in Christ and Christ in God. God is forbearing toward
us, not wishing that any should perish, but that everyone should reach repentance.
God desires all to be saved, but our salvation depends on whether we choose to
repent and receive God’s grace by His prompting in the Holy Spirit (2 Pet 3:9).
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He is the Rock, his works are perfect, and all his ways are
just.
A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is he.
Deuteronomy 32, 4
No one, when tempted, should say, ‘I am being tempted by God’;
for God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one.
James 1, 13
It
certainly wasn’t God’s plan before the creation of the world that all humanity
must die in Adam so that all could be made alive in Christ. God didn’t create
sinners for the sake of making them need Jesus to spare them from God’s
justice. Such reasoning does in a sense place the cart before the mule. True,
the fall of humanity didn’t catch God by surprise since He is omniscient.
However, God didn’t preordain or decree that Adam and Eve’s fall from grace
should happen. If God did act on a whim in this way, He would surely have to
take full moral responsibility for their sins. And if this were the case, there
couldn’t be such a thing as sin at all or the need for a savior.
Catholics,
on the contrary, believe God simply permitted the fall to happen, though it
wasn’t something He desired. And God did allow the fall to happen for the sake
of the greater good or else it wouldn’t have happened. But it wasn’t for the
greater good that God directly and intentionally caused the fall of humanity
either. God might be the physical cause of our transgressions since He knew
that by creating Adam and Eve all their descendants would fall along with them
short of His glory (Rom 3:23). But our sovereign Creator certainly isn’t
morally responsible for the sins of humanity. We must also consider the serpent
which has freely played a part in this drama by initially tempting Eve. It
wouldn’t have tempted Eve in the first place if she and her husband had no free
will. The truth is we are morally culpable for our own sins, or else we
couldn’t be justly rewarded or punished by the Lord. God has given us the
freedom to choose between right and wrong, obedience and disobedience, and life
and death (Deut 30:19).
Hence,
Jesus came into the world because of sin. Sin didn’t enter the world because of
Jesus. God did not create the world so that we should sin to allow Him to
flaunt His divine mercy. If God permitted the fall of humanity, it was because
He knew Jesus would come into the world and gain for us a life immeasurably
more glorious than the preternatural life in the original paradise. In His
justice, God has always loved us and has desired our spiritual well-being even
before He created Adam. His omnipotence and sovereignty don’t negate His mercy
and justice. All of God’s essential attributes co-exist harmoniously.
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Rid yourselves of all the offenses you have committed, and get
a new heart and a new spirit. Why will you die, people of Israel?
For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign Lord.
Repent and live!
Ezekiel 18:32
God is not the author of confusion, but of peace.
1 Corinthians 14, 33
In
Catholic theology, there is a marked difference between what God desires and
what God decrees. What God desires is His antecedent will, and what God decrees
is His consequent will. God desires that everyone be saved (Ezek 18:23; 1 Tim
2:4; 1 John 2:2, etc.), but He decrees that unrepentant souls must be cast into
the everlasting fire of Hell in eternal expiation for their grave sins (Matt
25:41; Lk 13:3, etc.). And so, what God did intend, according to what He
desired, was to create a world in which each human being would be free to
respond to his grace as a sign of their love for Him. There can be no true love
without human free will and liberty. The fall of Adam and Eve was a consequence
of their moral freedom which God in His goodness and justice decreed they
should possess in order to truly love Him and make their abode with Him (cf. Jn
14:23). It was because of their inordinate love of self that Adam and Eve were
deceived by the serpent and consequently disobeyed God.
Because
of the fall, which God foresaw when He created the world, it was His
predestined (not predetermined) plan and His grace that went before Him to give
us the chance to be saved once we had fallen from His grace. Therefore, a
person must willfully reject God’s ‘predestined’ plan for his salvation in
order to be eternally damned. God has intended that a soul be saved this way:
by not rejecting His word and resisting His grace. As a consequence of the
reprobate’s act, God has predestined him to eternal damnation by His consequent
will. With this, we perceive God as not being self-contradictory – willing two
different things at once – but as completely faithful to Himself. God does
desire that everyone come to repentance and be saved, but He is also a just God
who doesn’t tolerate sin and will punish those who refuse to repent: “The soul
who sins is the one who will die” (Ezek. 18:4).
Thus,
what God hasn’t intended is to predetermine the eternal destiny of souls either
way (double predestination) which is why He appeals to us to obey His commands
and cooperate with His saving grace (2 Cor 7: 1; Eph 6:11-13, etc.). If God
were, in fact, the author of confusion rather than peace, He wouldn’t implore
us to renounce our carnal ways and receive His Spirit in our hearts so that we
should be reconciled to Him and have eternal life with God.
And he shewed me Joshua the high priest standing before the
angel
of the LORD, and Satan standing at his right hand to resist him.
And the LORD said unto Satan, The LORD rebuke thee, O Satan;
even the LORD that hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke thee: is not this a brand
plucked out of the fire?
Zechariah 3:1,2
Submit therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from
you.
Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands
you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.
James 4, 7
If God
has intentionally created evil over and against the good that He desires, then
God can’t be good. And if God weren’t good, then there could be nothing good at
all in His creation (cf. Gen 1:31). Obviously, if we know the difference
between right and wrong, we can freely decide how to act – for good or for
evil, for or against God who is absolute goodness in His divine essence.
Meanwhile, God in His goodness and mercy has made sure that it shouldn’t be impossible
for us to resist evil temptations by giving us sufficient grace which
operatively enables us to direct our will to what is good and pleasing to Him.
Moreover,
we couldn’t perceive anything as evil unless we first knew what is good in its
proper measure according to our conscience. There would be no point in even
having a conscience if we had no free will and moral responsibility. Nor would
God have given us a conscience if, in fact, He were the author of evil. Love is
good, and thus it originates from God who is love because He is good, but
inordinate self-love isn’t good. Selfishness is an evil that freely arises out
of a vacuum from within our natural selves. God expects us to love ourselves,
but in proper measure, and He expects us to renounce our selfish desires which
often lead to sins against Him and our neighbor. Certainly, we cannot hold God
morally culpable for our own innate selfishness or inordinate love of self
which original sin basically is. Human beings are the moral cause of entertaining
dark thoughts and committing wicked deeds regardless of who created them
physically. They have the moral liberty and capability to renounce their
selfish desires.
Temptations
arise within the order of creation, which Satan has been granted a certain limit
to exploit. It’s because of the devil’s involvement in human affairs that our
temptations are more difficult to overcome. Indeed, God blamed the serpent for
having wrought what had tragically transpired in the Garden of Eden (Gen.
3:14). Nevertheless, Adam and Eve committed a personal sin by choosing to act
on the serpent’s words which appealed to them in their inordinate self-love.
They were morally responsible for their own actions. Instead of remaining in
friendship with God, our primordial parents decided to draw away from Him by
trying to be like God but apart from God and against His will. Satan didn’t
face much resistance from Eve when he attempted to deceive her. This is why he
succeeded. The thing that appealed to her more than her Creator was what He had
created.
Thus, in
His goodness and kindness towards us, God desires that we renounce our pride
and inordinate love of self which are the root of sin, and humble ourselves
before Him so that He will exalt us by helping us prevail over the false
allurements of evil in our short-sightedness (1 Pet 5:6). It’s up to us to
allow God to persuade us from succumbing to temptation with insufficient
resistance because of our inclination to please ourselves with things that
really aren’t good and enslave us.
A clean heart create for me, God;
renew within me a steadfast spirit.
Do not drive me from before your face,
nor take from me your holy spirit.
Restore to me the gladness of your salvation,
and uphold me with a willing spirit.
Psalm 51, 12-14
If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things
that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.
Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on
earth. For you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God.
When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with
him in glory. Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: immorality,
impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.
On account of these the wrath of God is coming.
Colossians 3, 1-6
St.
Thomas Aquinas tells us that perfection in this world amounts to someone or
something achieving its purpose. Human perfection lies in us achieving our
proper end, viz., our intellectual capacities of understanding God and
directing our will towards God by conforming it to His will. As I see it, Adam
and Eve were created perfect in this way, but they were not created absolutely
perfect. It’s a dogma of the Catholic Church that only God is absolutely
perfect. According to the Angelic Doctor of the Church, God is absolutely
perfect because He is entirely actual with no potential. All beings and things
are perfect in proportion to their actuality. Adam and Eve were created
perfect, but not absolutely, since they had the potential to freely fall short
of achieving their purpose, which was to be good and in friendship with God by
aligning their will with His. If God were responsible – though not morally
responsible – for anything, it would be because of His wise decision to create
an imperfect and free world in which we may choose or reject God. God desires
that we want to be with Him in Heaven more than anything else to be there.
Ontologically,
absolute perfection or immutability is an attribute of God as a composition of
His divine essence which binds all His other attributes together. God’s
faithfulness and justice, for instance, stem from His non-moral attribute of
immutability which presupposes God cannot do any wrong by contradicting
Himself. So, God can never be better or worse than He essentially is. Absolute
perfection cannot be improved upon. His righteousness and justice are
immutable. In His essence, God cannot ever be less righteous and just or
unrighteous and unjust than we human beings can be. Nor can He be more righteous
or just. God told Moses, “I am who I am. (Ex 3:14). God cannot be more or less
than who He is.
Thus, if
God had directly caused or pre-programmed Adam and Eve to sin, He would have
acted or sinned against Himself by acting unjustly, and so there would be
mutability in God. No Christian in their right mind can profess belief in a
just and loving God while believing God caused Adam and Eve to sin against
their will so that we would need a savior. An immutable God couldn’t possibly
act on a whim to His own discredit.
As we
noted above, there could be no reason for God to reward the righteous and
punish the wicked if He determined how they should behave without any will of
their own. By nature, in comparison with His creatures, God is perfect. In His
essence, God is absolute perfection, just as He is absolute love,
righteousness, and justice. There is no such thing as less-than-perfect
perfection or a less-than-perfect God, one who deliberately damns people for no
fault of their own or rewards people who don’t merit being rewarded. What we
have here is a contradiction in terms: A god who can’t possibly be God.
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In guilt I was born; a sinner was I conceived.
Psalm 51, 5
I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want,
but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I
agree that the law is good. So then it
is no longer I that do it, but sin which
dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is,
in my
flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the
good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.
Romans 7, 15-19
Catholics
believe original sin (a state) is proper to each human being; that we all have
inherited Adam’s moral weakness in our humanity. But original sin does not have
the character of a personal fault in any of us. Adam’s personal guilt is
something no human being has incurred. I suppose, since we are all inclined to
sin and do, in fact, sin, we are guilty by association and thereby must often
repent of our personal sins. Our human nature must be genetically transferred
by our original ancestors. As soon as we are conceived in the womb, we acquire
a nature that has the potential to draw us away from being good or godly and
thereby less perfect. We do things that we don’t really want to do or hate
doing, or we don’t do things that we know we are supposed to do and want to do
– signs of our original goodness impaired by our moral faults and weaknesses
affected by the stain of original sin. At some point in our lives, once we’ve morally
matured, we commit our first sin. This is inevitable since we haven’t been
created absolutely perfect. Our imperfect world is a moral testing ground that
God has permitted us to inhabit so that we may show our love to be worthy of
making our eternal abode with Him.
Hence, we are deprived of the original state of sanctity and justice because of this potentiality to sin against God. Original human goodness is manifested in our natural inclination towards what is good and comes from God. We all have the ability to direct our will towards what is good and is sustained by God’s sufficient grace since God is good and we have been created in the divine image. Yet, because of the fall, we possess a wounded nature that prompts us to choose what isn’t good and pleasing to God despite our knowledge of good and evil. Pride comes before the fall. Adam and Eve do in fact live inside each one of us. We all have inherited their selfishness which lies in the natural fabric of our being, so we are in daily need of conversion and being restored to God’s grace. However, the shame we might feel because of our sins reveals that human beings are still essentially good, having been created in the divine image, which Adam didn’t forfeit for his descendants (Gen 1:26). It’s just a matter of our living up to it, which isn’t an insurmountable feat and is necessary for our salvation (1 Jn 1:5-7).
Early Sacred Tradition
“Seeing, therefore, that we are the
portion of the Holy One, let us do all those things which
pertain to holiness,
avoiding all evil-speaking, all abominable and impure embraces,
together with
all drunkenness, seeking after change, all abominable lusts, detestable
adultery, and execrable pride. ‘For God,’ saith [the Scripture], ‘resisteth the
proud, but giveth
grace to the humble.’ Let us cleave, then, to those to whom
grace has been given by God. Let us
clothe ourselves with concord and humility,
ever exercising self-control, standing far off
from all whispering and
evil-speaking, being justified by our works, and not our words.”
St. (Pope) Clement of Rome, Epistle to the Corinthians, 30
(A.D. 98)
“I do not mean to say that there are
two different human natures, but all
humanity is made the same, sometimes belonging to God and sometimes to the
devil. If anyone is truly spiritual they are a person of God; but if they are
irreligious and not spiritual then they are a person of the devil, made such
not
by nature, but by their own choice.”
St. Ignatius of Antioch, To the Ephesians
(c. A.D. 107)
“But
neither do we affirm that it is by fate that men do what they do, or suffer
what they suffer,
but that each man by free choice acts rightly or wrongly…The
stoics, not observing this,
maintained that all things take place according to
the necessity of fate. But since God, in the
beginning made the race of men and
angels with free will they will justly suffer in eternal fire
the punishment of
whatever sins they have committed, and this is the nature of all that is
made,
to be capable of vice and virtue.”
St. Justin Martyr, Apologia 2
[c. A.D. 160]
“The
wicked man is justly punished, having become depraved of himself;
and the just
man is worthy of praise for his honest deeds,
since it was in his free choice
that he did not transgress the will of God.”
St. Tatian the Syrian, Address to the Greeks 7
[A.D. 170]
"So
likewise men, if they do truly progress by faith towards better things, and
receive the
Spirit of God, and bring forth the fruit thereof, shall be
spiritual, as being planted in the
paradise of God. But if they cast out the
Spirit, and remain in their former condition, desirous
of being of the flesh
rather than of the Spirit, then it is very justly said with regard to men of
this stamp, 'That flesh and blood shall not inherit the kingdom of God;' just
as if any one were
to say that the wild olive is not received into the paradise
of God."
St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 5:10,1
[A.D. 180]
"You
are mistaken, and are deceived, whosoever you are, that think yourself rich in
this
world. Listen to the voice of your Lord in the Apocalypse, rebuking men of
your stamp with
righteous reproaches: 'Thou sayest,' says He, 'I am rich, and
increased with goods, and have
need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art
wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind,
and naked. I counsel thee to buy
of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and
white raiment, that
thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness may not
appear in
thee; and anoint thine eyes with eye-salve, that thou mayest see.' You
therefore,
who are rich and wealthy, buy for yourself of Christ gold tried by
fire; that you may be pure
gold, with your filth burnt out as if by fire, if
you are purged by almsgiving and righteous
works. Buy for yourself white
raiment, that you who had been naked according to Adam, and
were before
frightful and unseemly, may be clothed with the white garment of Christ. And
you who are a wealthy and rich matron in Christ's Church, anoint your eyes, not
with the
collyrium of the devil, but with Christ's eye-salve, that you may be
able to attain to see God,
by deserving well of God, both by good works and
character."
St. Cyprian of Carthage, On Works and Alms, 14
[A.D.254]
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"Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is
perfect."
Matthew 5, 48
Pax vobiscum