For if the power of ‘free-will’ is not wholly and damnably astray, but sees and wills what is good and upright and pertains to salvation, then it is in sound health, it does not need Christ the physician, nor did Christ redeem that part of man; for what need is there of light and life, where life and light exist already? And if that power is not redeemed by Christ, then the best part in man is not redeemed, but is of itself good and sound. And then God is unjust if He damns any man, for He damns that in man which is very good and sound; that is, innocent!…It remains, therefore, that God is unjust to damn this good, righteous, holy power in man, which even in a bad man does not need Christ! (Luther, The Bondage of the Will)
The argument of Luther (just above) is quite powerful once it is thought about and dealt with. The orthodox position has been that man is totally depraved which is to say that man is depraved in all aspects of his being. But for there to be ‘free-will’ in any real sense, there must be something of man that is not wholly and damnably astray. That part of man must not only be something less than wholly and damnably astray, but it must be something that is able to see and will what is good if it is able to choose what is good and that for salvation.
If the will is indeed free, then there is something in the soul that is free from depravity and that something is able to see and choose what is good. If the will is free to do that, Luther says, then that part of the will does not need Christ as physician and does not need redemption. As the Scripture so powerfully says, “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick” (Mat 9:12). The aspect of the human soul that is healthy does not need a physician. In a different context, that same saying is expanded: “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick; I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:17). In this context we see that Jesus says that He did not even come to call the righteous. The only people that Jesus came to call are sinners. Yet those who adhere to or do not denounce ‘free-will’ have to believe something about the will is not sick and is in fact righteous. That leaves human beings with part of the soul that does not need redeemed.
If there is part of the man that is good and is not sinful, as Luther points out, then God is unjust to damn that part of man. While this could be dismissed quite easily, perhaps it should be thought through. If the mind is not sinful, then the mind itself would not be worthy of wrath and it would be unjust of God to cast the mind without sin into eternal torment. Again, this may sound like an odd way to look at things, but this forces us to look at this issue in a different light. The soul is usually thought to be united in a sense, that is, that each aspect of the soul must be tainted with sin and so the soul as a whole is sinful in all of its parts and as such needs to be redeemed. But the claim of a ‘free-will’ leaves the soul with an aspect of it that is not wholly helpless in sin. How can the soul be sinful in parts and not in others? It is not that the soul truly has different parts that operate apart from each other, but the soul has capacities that work in union with each other. The mind is the soul’s capacity for thought and the will is the soul’s capacity to choose. So how is the soul to be divided into parts so that it is just of God to damn all the soul? The will does not choose apart from the mind and the mind does not think apart from the will. You cannot have one aspect of the will that is not guilty of sin and the other parts wholly and damnably astray.
A very important point in this matter is that if one part of the soul is not guilty of sin or so far gone that it needs to be redeemed, then that part of the soul (or aspect) is not worthy to be damned by God. This one aspect of the soul has enough goodness in it to choose Christ and to decide to be saved, so there is something in this soul that is not worthy to be damned. If God will not destroy a whole city for ten righteous men, will He cast a whole person in hell when the best part of that person is still good? Another way of looking at this would be to note that if ‘free-will’ is true then those in heaven are not completely saved by Christ. Still another way to look at it would be that if ‘free-will’ is true then saved sinners do not need the life of Christ in them in terms of the will.
This alone is enough to show us that there are major problems with ‘free-will’ and the ramifications that fall from it. William Cunningham has shown that the will is where the sinfulness of man and the grace of the Gospel meet. Part of the sinfulness of man cannot be thrown out without having some effect on the grace of the Gospel. It is not just that people have to adjust the sinfulness of man to fit with ‘free-will’ which overthrows the whole biblical doctrine of man’s sinfulness, but that also overthrows the biblical doctrine of grace alone. The doctrine of man’s depravity which includes his will must be left alone because it is biblical, but also because when it is not left alone it is an attack on the sovereign grace of God which is the only kind of grace. If we uphold the teaching of ‘free-will’ in man, then to that degree we dismiss sovereign grace and really change the idea of grace. If man’s will is free, then what we have is man’s will that is free from depravity and free from grace responding to God and then God responding to that free act of man’s will and saving him. This is such a clear departure from the biblical doctrine of grace alone that one would think that it would be glaringly obvious.
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