Corrupted hearts can make only corrupted choices. To make truly God-pleasing choices, the heart must be transformed, made new, regenerated by the Holy Spirit.

The question of free will has plagued the minds of philosophers, theologians, and ordinary people for millennia. The debate over what free will is and whether we as humans possess such a trait has not abated. If anything, it has increased in recent years. But what does the Bible say? Can we find any help in God’s Word to answer the question of what it means to freely choose our actions and to be responsible for them? Since the time of the Reformation, the two basic answers that Christians have provided to this question have largely centered on the theological legacies of Calvinism and Arminianism. The view of free agency associated with Calvinism is called compatibilism. The view advanced by Arminians and others known as free-will theists is called libertarian free will.

Proponents of libertarian free will offer two basic planks to their definition of free will. First, for any choice to be truly free, it must be sufficiently unmoored from the constraints of outside causal forces. That is, God cannot be said to determine any choice that humans make. Certainly, God and other sources can influence our choices, but in the end, this view of free will says that we alone retain the power to choose in the direction we determine because God granted us this freedom and He does not interfere with it.

Second, libertarian free will espouses what is known as the power of contrary choice. Suppose you are traveling along a road and you come to a “T” intersection. After considering all the factors that might lead you to turn left or right, you freely choose to turn right. If the clock could be rolled back, however, and you came to exactly the same intersection under exactly the same circumstances, you could have equally chosen to turn left for no sufficient reason other than your freedom to do so. This also means that true free will is ultimately unpredictable. It is not possible that anyone, including the person choosing, could know what choices might be made until they have taken place.

Proponents of libertarian free will believe that only this model of human freedom allows for moral responsibility and the opportunity for meaningful relationships. Greg Boyd, a leading proponent of this view, says: “The first condition of love [is] that it must be freely chosen. It cannot be coerced,” by which he means that God cannot determine our ability to love or not to love. Boyd says that humans “must possess the capacity and opportunity to reject love if they are to possess the genuine capacity and ability to engage in love.” No meaningful relationship with God or others is possible without such unconstrained ability to make contrary choices.

Free-will theists such as Boyd believe that this model of human free agency is assumed by the Bible. They appeal to passages such as Joshua 24:15, Matthew 23:37, John 3:16, and 2 Corinthians 9:7. At first glance, passages such as these might seem to support libertarian free will. A different story emerges, however, when these texts are seen in the light of Scripture’s bigger picture of how human actions correspond to God’s actions. Among other problems, this brand of free will undermines the meticulous sovereignty of God over all things (see Pss. 33:11; 103:19; Isa. 14:24–27; 45:5–7; 46:9–11; Dan. 2:20–21; 4:34–35; Rom. 11:33–36; Eph. 1:11). It undermines the doctrine of human depravity in which the Bible makes clear that the unregenerate are all under bondage to their sin (John 8:34; Rom. 3:10–18, 23) and have no power within to escape this bondage (Rom. 8:7–8). Furthermore, libertarian free will cannot account for divine foreknowledge. If a person possessed this sort of freedom of will, then it would not be truly possible for God to know our choices beforehand. How could we have the freedom to choose contrary to what God already knows for certain we would choose?

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