The Case for Christian Universalism II

The absurd question of free will.

John Calvin did not believe in free will. Or rather, Calvin believed that only those who are predestined to be saved will ever have free will, because the life of sinners is one in which we are in bondage to sin, and we cannot will our way free of sin in any way other than God’s grace. For many protestant evangelicals today who cling to Calvinism, this is a joyous doctrine; it means that evangelism and mission do not rest on the success of missionary tools or persuasiveness but on the working of God and of his grace.

Of course, there is a problem here, which is that if this is true God chooses not just who to save but who not to save. Calvin also believed in predestined election, meaning the choice between grace and hell is not a choice, it’s either an irresistible calling or something we are incapable of assenting to out of our depravity and slavery to sin.

If we take Calvin’s interpretations of the bible seriously, which I think we should, we come across two problems, the first is that at least pragmatically free will is hard to deny, and the second is that if we do deny it, we are faced with a God who makes most humans who have ever existed simply to be “objects of his wrath,”¹ whose condemnation we are meant to glory in because it glories God.

The history of much of the church then, reformed or not, is one of tension between these two aspects. Free will is believed enough to somehow expel the idea that God might be the tyrant of tyrants, creating creatures for no other reason than to glory in their torment, and sovereignty is maintained in order to sustain the necessity of God being God.

For many though free will is the sole answer. In the modern era someone like C.S. Lewis stands as a representative of the argument that evil and sin are explained solely by the fact that a true relationship with God depends on his granting us a free will that makes our choice to be in relationship with him meaningful. According to Lewis those who reject God choose to do so, and hell is less a Dantean place of torment than a kind of listless absence of God inhabited by those who still continue to choose to reject him.²

So does this solve the problem? Well, there are two difficulties: first, there is no evidence of the kind of free will that might be required to justify this, and second, there is no philosophical or logical basis for the kind of free will that might be required to justify this.