Predestination or Free Will?

A friend of mine posed this question: Predestination or Free Will? For me, this was one of my first big stumbling blocks against Chrisitanity as my strong early preconception was that humans must have complete and total free will, yet the Bible repeatedly affirms God’s complete control over everything. We have Ephesians 1:4-6 and Romans 8:28-30 proclaiming unappologetic determinism. God gets to save whosoever it pleases him to save from hell. There is absolutely nothing we can do to avoid hell or choose heaven; it is completley in God’s hands alone. Yet, the oft-sited John 3:16 seemed to me to be saying that God has offered salvation to us, and we have the ability to accept or reject it.

In the end, I returned to my assumption that free will was a requirement for any kind of rational religion. While I could accept the power and authoritiy of God to make whatever He wants to happen happen, randomly earmarking a decidely small minority of human beings for heaven and the rest being sent to hell was not what a moral god would do. The most reasonable answer was that God valued free will over all other possible traits He could have endowed us with. So, it seemed most reasonable that God would only want to be in relationship with those who actually wanted it. Obviously, God would have some influence, whether through people or through some sort of direct action, but, if the word “morality” had any content, then people must ultimately be responsible for their actions, and their choices must be real choices. We can’t be punished or rewarded for something we have absolutely no ability to change. In order to end up with a moral god, I had to have an explanation for the apparent contradiction I saw in the Bible.

God, being omniscient and beyond time, could see how things would turn out. From our perspective, it appears as if God chose everything that happens to happen, but that’s not what is really going on. Though I was only really beginning my study of history at the time of my conversion, I was keenly aware of the odd way in which historical events appear to be predetermined. At any point, people could act in whatever way they want, but they don’t. They have free will to act in whatever manner they so choose, but their circumstances limit some options. The slow accumulation of limitations produces a smaller and smaller number of possible outcomes. Eventually, looking back, it appears that people don’t actually have a choice in the way they act as they are funneled into one, and only one, possible choice. This is the way I imagined God saw the unfolding of our lives. So, I became convinced that we see things as being of our own free will, and God sees things as completely predetermined.

The consequences of that was that at any given time I can choose to accept Jesus as savior, assuming that choice is a credible and known option given my circumstances, yet God has already seen (predestined) my conversion. I am responcible for accepting or rejecting the way that God has prepared for me.