SUSPENDING THE DEBATE ABOUT DIVINE SOVEREIGNTY AND HUMAN FREEDOM

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Sep 2008 by Ciocchi, David M

Typically, biblical passages that touch on questions of human agency are susceptible both to compatibilist and libertarian readings, in part because the biblical writers are not addressing the sorts of things that sustain the stalemate about free will. This is another claim that is hardly controversial, not to anyone who has taken a careful look at what the Bible actually says, so I will not try to defend it. Instead, I will offer a representative sample of a biblical passage that is neutral with respect to the competing accounts of free will. In 2 Corinthians 8, Paul is writing about Titus, who has gone to Corinth to collect the offering for the needy believers in Judea. Paul writes, "But thanks be to God, who puts the same earnestness on your behalf in the heart of Titus. For he not only accepted our appeal, but being himself very earnest, he has gone to you of his own accord" (w. 16-17 nasb). This passage can be given a classical compatibilist reading very easily. God implants earnestness in the heart of Titus, which results in his strongest desire being to go to the Corinthians, resulting in his going to them. And it can be given a libertarian reading with equal ease. Titus goes to the Corinthians of his own accord; that is, he had libertarian leeway, so he might have either accepted or resisted the divine prompting to care about the Corinthians. In the actual case, he accepts this prompting, which induces Paul to thank God (for the prompting) and to praise Titus (for responding to it "of his own accord").

Turning from particular passages to broad biblical themes will not help end the stalemate about free will. If, for instance, someone argues the biblical teaching about God as the ultimate and sovereign source of salvation (e.g. John 6, Romans 9) implies that human beings have compatibilist free will, someone else may reply that biblical teaching about the human reception of salvation and living of the Christian life (e.g. Hebrews 6; James 1) implies that we have some form of libertarian freedom.

The upshot of all this is that the Bible underdetermines free will theory. No appeal to biblical teaching will settle the question of what sort of freedom is necessary for moral responsibility; the stalemate about free will remains.

III. AGNOSTIC AUTONOMISM

Recall that the DSF debate rests on two assumptions. The first is that we know what sort of freedom is necessary for moral responsibility. And the second is that there appears to be reason to doubt that the existence and activity of a sovereign God is compatible with that sort of freedom. The persistence of the stalemate about free will gives us excellent grounds for rejecting the first assumption. And if we reject the first assumption, we must reject the second assumption as well, and so the case for the DSF debate collapses. We should, therefore, suspend the debate while we work on the logically prior problem of determining what it is about human beings that makes them morally responsible agents. Since suspending the DSF debate requires abandoning our previously held commitments to particular accounts of free will, it leaves us needing to adopt a new, possibly provisional, stance about the freedom necessary for moral responsibility. I call that stance agnostic autonomism, borrowing the term from Alfred Mele.24