C. Michael Patton and Rhome Dyke · The Theology Program · 53 minutes
Lecture by C. Michael Patton, Th.M., and Rhome Dyke, Th.M., from The Theology Program, published on their public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
Before anyone argues about free will, the teachers make the class define it, and the definitions do not survive contact with the questions. This session works through the three live options, fatalism, compatibilism, and libertarianism, follows a single moral dilemma through both Christian anatomies of choice, and ends with the question the whole unit has been building toward: is original sin unjust? Listen for Patton’s closing speculation, built from Aquinas’s strange theory about angels, that the imputation of Adam’s sin may be one of the most gracious things God ever did.
Patton opens with a conversation from the weekend. A friend he has witnessed to for a year and a half has come to faith, and, true to the program’s motto, credo ut intelligam, faith seeking understanding, immediately began asking hard questions: why do other people not choose Christ, and why are so many going to hell? Patton confesses his own hesitation: to answer that people cannot choose Christ on their own, and yet are judged, did not sound like it would go over well, and he was tempted to hold back the hard doctrine for later. But if it is true, it must be presented. Why people go to hell has an easy answer, their sins and their rejection of Christ. Why people do not choose God is the harder question, and it is tonight’s.
The class breaks into groups with one assignment: define free will, then say whether, by your own definition, it exists. The definitions come back scattered, and one student stakes out the hard line that there is no free will at all. The exercise makes the session’s method plain: free will is a concept everyone invokes and almost no one has defined, and the debate is empty until the definition is on the table. The discussion quickly finds its central word: desire. Are we free to choose our desires, or only to choose according to desires already in us, and can you desire something you do not even know?
The options sort into three. Fatalism, the naturalistic option, in which things simply happen as they must: a consistently fatalistic society could hold no one morally responsible and could justify no court. Compatibilism: a person’s actions are free, being determined by his or her own character and desires. Notice both verbs: free, and determined. No one compels the choice; you choose exactly what you most want, but what you most want is itself the product of your nature, your makeup, and your influences. Libertarianism, also called indeterminism: a person’s actions are uncaused by any coercion whatsoever, and the agent is the first cause of his or her own actions, the genesis of the decision with nothing prior determining it. On the spectrum of freedom, responsibility grows as you move from fatalism toward libertarianism, and compatibilism holds the middle, insisting that determination and responsibility are both true even where they cannot be fully reconciled.
Church history lines up behind the two theistic options. Compatibilism: Augustine, Anselm, and most of the reformers. Libertarianism: Pelagius, Arminius, and John Wesley. And the teachers insist on charity toward the libertarian side: they are not trying to shrink God’s sovereignty. They are trying to keep man responsible and God’s justice intact, reasoning that God can only justly judge choices that were genuinely free of every determining factor. Both camps are protecting something true. When most people say free will, the teachers note, they mean libertarian free will without knowing the name: no compelling factors at all, full responsibility. Aristotle stands near that view with his old illustration of the stick striking the stone: not the stone, not the stick, not even the arm is responsible, but the man, the genesis of the act.
The session’s running test case: the drive-thru hands you too much change. Go back, or keep it? The discussion traces every thread that tugs at the choice: conscience, or the Holy Spirit prompting it; the fear of getting caught; immediate circumstances, for the man who just lost his job may receive the extra change as a gift from God. The analysis keeps landing on the same law: we choose according to our greatest desire at the time of the choice. Even obeying the Spirit’s conviction means that obeying became your greater desire; even returning the money to avoid exposure means the desire not to be caught ruled the day. And a paradox surfaces for the libertarian: if the Holy Spirit changes your desire, then the Spirit, not you, was the first cause of your choice.
The compatibilist diagram of the drive-thru decision runs downhill. First, nature: your sex, your genetics, and your moral nature, evil or good, predisposing its direction. Then outside influences you never chose: nobody in the room selected their parents, their family, or the country they grew up in, and being American shapes your very way of thinking as visibly as an eastern upbringing shapes another’s. These build your values, your values shape your personality with its desires and passions, and immediate circumstances, a lost job, a hard marriage, a grief, set what the greatest desire is at the moment of decision. Then the scales tip, and you choose the side they tip toward, freely, because it is what you most want, and inevitably, because you cannot choose against your greatest desire. Ronald Nash, in his Christian introduction to philosophy, argues the case through circumstance after circumstance: we always choose according to our greatest desire, no matter what.
The libertarian diagram runs the other direction: the choice comes first, at perfect balance, and the choice then builds the nature, which builds the values, the personality, and so on to the next choice. Actions determine who you are; who you are does not determine actions. The class immediately spots the flaw: then the very first choice, made by a five-year-old at fifty-fifty, sets the trajectory of a whole life, because every choice makes the next like it easier. And if every choice must be perfectly balanced to be free, something must keep rebalancing the scales, which is exactly why libertarian theology needs prevenient grace, arriving again and again to reset the will. Jesus’ own image cuts the other way: a tree is known by its fruit, and it is the tree that determines the fruit, not the fruit the tree; the good man brings good out of the good treasure of his heart. Nature causes actions.
The theology of the diagrams. For the unregenerate man, on the compatibilist picture, God passes by: he does not change the evil nature, yet he remains sovereign over everything around it, for as Acts says he sets the boundaries of every person’s habitation, the family, the place, the circumstances that shape each life; no unbeliever is simply abandoned to randomness. For the regenerate man, God does what prevenient grace never does: he tips the scales, not to neutral but to good, changing the nature itself in regeneration so that the desires now run toward God. The libertarian picture instead has prevenient grace level every sinner’s scales to fifty-fifty, each hearer accepting or rejecting Christ from perfect balance and judged accordingly. The difference between the two graces is the difference between the systems.
The teachers audit both positions without flinching. Against compatibilism: it is genuinely hard to see how an act can be both free and determined, and harder still to answer why God finds fault with the man whose circumstances God himself ordained. Patton is blunt: I do not have an answer; I hold it in tension, under the doctrine of suspended judgment. And this is precisely why Romans 9 anchors his position: the objector there asks Patton’s exact question, why does he still find fault, for who resists his will, and Paul does not correct the premise. He does not say, you misunderstand, everyone has a free will. He says, who are you, O man, to answer back to God; shall the clay say to the potter, why have you made me thus? God, knowing we would ask, left the dilemma standing and commanded trust. Against libertarianism: prevenient grace, the doctrine the whole system runs on, is taught nowhere in Scripture, explicitly or implicitly; a will unaffected by anything is not free but arbitrary, a coin flip that is not you, leaving you seated in the parking lot forever with nothing to break the tie, and no one can be judged for coin flips; and Scripture plainly teaches that choices are shaped by others, from the iniquity of fathers visiting the third and fourth generation in Deuteronomy 5 to the millstone Jesus promises the man who causes a little one to stumble, a warning that would have to read tries to cause if God rebalanced every scale that anyone tipped.
The classic chart compares the systems across the four states. Pelagius: equal opportunity to choose good or evil in every state until glory. Arminius: balanced scales unfallen; predisposed to evil when fallen, with prevenient grace restoring the balance; free will returned in redemption; only good in glory. Augustine: balanced scales unfallen, and Patton admits he does not know how Adam ever chose at true fifty-fifty; in the fall, free will without liberty, able only to sin; in redemption, able not to sin; in glory, not able to sin. The old Latin formulas mark the states: posse peccare, able to sin; non posse non peccare, not able not to sin; posse non peccare, able not to sin; non posse peccare, not able to sin.
The teachers’ answer is yes and no, stated as their own view. No, if free will means libertarian freedom: the influences are too many, there are no fifty-fifty choices, and there is no freedom to choose against our nature, what Augustine called liberty. Yes, if free will means what we actually have: the freedom always to choose according to our greatest desire, bound by the inclinations of our nature so thoroughly that we never choose against them. The bondage passages close the case. Jesus in John 8: everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin, and only the Son makes free, freedom defined as the restored ability to choose God. Romans 6: you are slaves of the one you obey, and thanks be to God that, freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. And Luke 6 again: the mouth speaks from what fills the heart.
The unit’s first question returns for its answer. Pascal is brought in as the honest witness: nothing shocks our reason more, he wrote, than the claim that the first man’s sin implicates those seemingly incapable of sharing it, guilt flowing to a child for an act committed thousands of years before he existed; nothing jolts us more rudely than this doctrine. Then Patton unfolds the speculation he has trailed for weeks, beginning from Aquinas’s theory of angels: each angel, Aquinas held, is its own species, so Christ could not represent angels by becoming one; he would have to become and die for each angel individually. Humanity is different precisely because it is one species under one head. So the speculation: the imputation of Adam’s sin is a gracious act of God, spiritually connecting every person to Adam as federal head, because only a race so connected can be represented by the second Adam, and only those joined to the first Adam’s imputation can receive the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. To the objection that Adam’s sin reaches everyone while Christ’s righteousness reaches those who trust him, Patton answers from God’s knowledge of the future: every individual, given his own garden, would have made Adam’s choice; God could have let each person represent himself and redeemed no one. Asking God for your own chance, Patton says, is the most foolish request imaginable: you would have done exactly what Adam did, and the world, believers and unbelievers alike, would be poorer without the grace that now spills even onto the unredeemed through the church. God’s imputation of Adam’s sin made possible the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, and Dyke lands the unit where it was always headed: the doctrine of sin, presented alone for now, exists to show our desperate need for a Savior, and soteriology, sixteen weeks away, will supply the other half of every verse.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all eighteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. Why did Patton hesitate when his new-believer friend asked why people do not choose God?
2. What is the point of making the class define free will before debating it?
3. What are compatibilism’s two load-bearing verbs?
4. Why could a consistently fatalistic society justify no court system?
5. What charitable point do the teachers insist on about libertarians?
6. What paradox does the Holy Spirit’s conviction create for the libertarian?
7. In the compatibilist anatomy, what sequence produces the decision?
8. What is the law Ronald Nash argues through case after case?
9. What is the first-choice problem in the libertarian anatomy?
10. How does the tree and fruit image bear on the debate?
11. On the compatibilist picture, what does God do with the unregenerate man?
12. How does sovereign regeneration differ from prevenient grace at the scales?
13. Why does Romans 9 anchor Patton’s compatibilism?
14. Which trio of problems do the teachers press against libertarianism?
15. Which Latin formula describes fallen man in the Augustinian chart?
16. What is the teachers’ final yes-and-no on free will?
17. In Patton’s speculation, why is the imputation of Adam’s sin a gracious act?
18. Why is asking God for your own chance the most foolish request, per Patton?
All eighteen correct. Lecture 8 is complete.
Trace one significant decision you made this week through the compatibilist anatomy: what nature, influences, values, and circumstances tipped your scales? Does seeing the chain change your sense of the choice being yours?
Patton says Romans 9 convinced him because Paul refuses to correct the objector’s premise. Read the passage yourself. What does it cost you to let a tension stand under suspended judgment, and where are you tempted to resolve it in ways Scripture does not?
If, given your own garden, you would have chosen as Adam chose, what happens to your resentment of the imputation, and to your gratitude for the second Adam?
Jesus’ words in John 8 carry the whole doctrine of the will: everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin, but if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.
The teachers’ reading trail for the week: Ronald Nash’s Christian introduction to philosophy for the full argument that we always choose our greatest desire, the assigned original sin paper for the Aquinas material behind Patton’s speculation, and R. C. Sproul’s Willing to Believe, the honors text that walks this entire debate from Pelagius forward. The other half of every verse, how marvelous the salvation that answers this sin, waits for soteriology. The course itself now turns to its final subject: what it means, theologically, to be male and female.