God Reforms Hearts: Rethinking Free Will and the Problem of Evil

By Thaddeus Williams

Must we be free to truly love?
Evil is a problem for all Christians. When responding to objections that both evil and God can exist, many resort to a "free will defense," where God is not the creator of evil but of human freedom, by which evil is possible. This response is so pervasive that it is just as often assumed as it is defended. But is this answer biblically and philosophically defensible?
In God Reforms Hearts, Thaddeus J. Williams offers a friendly challenge to the central claim of the free will defense—that love is possible only with true (or libertarian) free will. Williams argues that much thinking on free will fails to carve out the necessary distinction between an autonomous will and an unforced will. Scripture presents a God who desires relationship and places moral requirements on his often--rebellious creatures, but does absolute free will follow? Moreover, God's work of transforming the human heart is more thorough than libertarian freedom allows.
With clarity, precision, and charity, Williams judges the merits and shortcomings of the relational free will defense while offering a philosophically and biblically robust alternative that draws from theologians of the past to point a way forward.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Release date: Aug 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781683594987

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God Reforms Hearts

Rethinking Free Will and the Problem of Evil

Thaddeus Williams

Copyright

God Reforms Hearts: Rethinking Free Will and the Problem of Evil

Copyright 2021 Thaddeus Williams

Lexham Academic, an imprint of Lexham Press

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You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [e-mail].

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are the author’s own translation or are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

Print ISBN 9781683594970

Digital ISBN 9781683594987

Library of Congress Control Number 2021935525

Lexham Editorial: Todd Hains, Abby Salinger, Abigail Stocker, Jim Weaver, Mandi Newell

Cover Design: Lydia Dahl

For Hendrik

Contents

PART I: EVIL AND THE AUTONOMOUS HEART

Rethinking Free Will as a Condition of Authentic Love

1.1:The Relational Free Will Defense

1.2:The Axiom of Libertarian Love

1.3:True Love

Is Freedom from the Heart Indubitable or Dubious?

Part 1: Summary and Conclusions

PART 2: FREEDOM AND THE ENSLAVED HEART

Depth Capacity and the Case for Libertarian Free Will

2.1:The Moral Imperative Argument

Does Ought Imply Can?

2.2:The Grievous Resistance Argument

Does Divine Grief Imply Human Autonomy?

2.3:The Relational Vision Argument

Can One Guarantee Another’s Love?

Part 2: Summary and Conclusions

PART 3: LOVE AND THE REFORMED HEART

The Scope of Divine Action in Human Love

3.1:Five Models of Divine Action in Human Love

3.2:Heart Reformation and the Bible

3.3:The Problems of Evil Revisited

Part 3: Summary and Conclusions

Epilogue: What a Difference One Word Makes

Appendix A: Taqdir and Trinitas

Divine Power and Human Responsibility in Sunni Islam and Reformed Theology

Appendix B: Is God Vulnerable?

Evaluating Vincent Brümmer’s Notion of Autonomy

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

PART 1

Evil and the Autonomous Heart

Rethinking Free Will as a Condition of Authentic Love

1.1

The Relational Free Will Defense

Don’t let us make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter.

—Oliver Goldsmith, The Good-Natured Man

THE PROBLEMS OF EVIL

A survey conducted by the Barna Research Group revealed that the number one question posed about God by a cross section of American adults is, Why is there so much pain and suffering in the world?¹ In my years of teaching philosophy and theology, students have raised no other question with more frequency and urgency. As Proclus stated the question in the fifth century AD, "Si Deus est, unde malum? (If God exists, whence comes evil?").²

We need neither modern surveys nor ancient sayings to inform us that reconciling the existence of evil with that of a supremely good and powerful Being constitutes an excruciatingly troublesome problem. Evidencing the magnitude of the problem of evil is Barry Whitney’s published bibliography entitled Theodicy, which cites over 4,200 philosophical and theological works on the topic in the three-decade span between 1960 and 1990.³ That factors to a new scholarly publication on the problem of evil every 62.4 hours (in English alone), and the trend shows no signs of abating in the new millennium.

Solving the enduring problem of evil in its multiple and mind-bending forms is well beyond the scope of both this work and author. Rather than arriving at definitive answers to the problem(s), God Reforms Hearts enters the mass sojourn to encourage progress, however small, in the right direction toward answers.

This work seeks progress by focusing on one of today’s dominant strategies for answering evil—the Relational Free Will Defense. The defining premise of this Defense is the claim that authentic love requires free will. Many scholars, including Gregory Boyd and Vincent Brümmer, champion this claim.⁴ Best-selling books, such as Rob Bell’s Love Wins, echo that love can’t be forced, manipulated, or coerced. It always leaves room for the other to decide.⁵ The claim that love requires free will has even found expression in mainstream Hollywood films, including Frailty (David Kirschner Productions, 2002), Bruce Almighty (Universal, 2003), and The Adjustment Bureau (Universal, 2011).

Is this pervasive claim of the Relational Free Will Defense philosophically credible? Does it stray from biblical insights into the nature of love, freedom, and evil? Does the claim that love requires free will clash with a robust relational response to evil in its concrete (rather than abstract) forms? These questions, often unasked in the contemporary literature, form the cornerstone around which I have built this work.

Before clarifying the Relational Free Will Defense and developing the questions above, we must first debunk the idea that there is a problem of evil. In reality, the theist faces a plurality of problems with evil. First, we may discern diverse problems in the abstract realm.

(1) Abstract Problems of Evil in Logical Form. J. L. Mackie has famously argued that the claims evil exists and an all-good, all-powerful God exists are logically incompatible.⁶ In the famous words of David Hume, Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both willing and able? Whence then is evil?⁷ Here the theist faces what is known as the deductive problem of evil. How should the theist respond to the philosophical claim that it is logically impossible for both God and evil to exist?

(2) Abstract Problems of Evil in Evidential Form. William Rowe argues that evil’s existence in the world, along with its heinousness and apparent senselessness, render God’s existence not logically impossible but highly improbable.⁸ This is known as the inductive problem of evil, which takes diverse shapes and forms.⁹ How should the theist respond to philosophical claims that God’s existence is improbable, given evil as we encounter it in the world?

(3) Abstract Problems of Evil in Natural Form. A philosopher could draw a distinction between what Hitler has done and what a hurricane has done, evils caused by persons in contrast to those caused by impersonal forces of nature. There are not only problems of moral evil but also problems of what philosophers often call natural evil (e.g., earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, droughts, and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome). Natural evil arguments can also take either deductive or inductive forms.

Moreover, the abstract philosophical problems outlined above are not identical to the personal problems faced in the wake of a bleak medical diagnosis, a broken relationship, an extended season of God’s hiddenness, or any other personal encounter with the effects of the fall in a post-Genesis 3 world. Here is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart,¹⁰ to quote novelist Peter De Vries. Such problems are not a matter of neat logical syllogisms arranged in black and white in a philosopher’s text. They are messier, often logic-defying problems that persist in a dizzying array of dark shades in a sufferer’s heart. We may add to the abstract problems the following concrete problems of evil.

(4) Concrete Problems of Evil in Intra-Fide Emotional Form. The sufferer may be a believer suffering from inside the pale of faith (intra-fide). In this case, the concrete problem is a distinct problem of continuing to trust the God in whom one has a positive belief and prior relational commitment. It is the form that C. S. Lewis articulated with such vulnerable honesty in A Grief Observed shortly after cancer claimed his beloved wife.¹¹ Long before Lewis, David and the Hebrew prophets wrestled with the concrete problems of evil in their intra-fide emotional form (Pss 10; 13; 35; 88; Lam 3; Hab 1).

(5) Concrete Problems of Evil in Extra-Fide Emotional Form. Conversely, the sufferer may suffer from outside the pale of faith (extra-fide). In this case, the concrete problem forms more of a subjective blockade to initiating trust towards God in whom one lacks any positive belief or prior relational commitment. It is a rejection of God motivated by emotional encounters with evil, independent of abstract philosophical considerations. As Dostoyevsky’s tortured character, Ivan Karamazov, responds to a case for God’s existence, I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I am wrong.¹²

Here we are confronted with the emotional problems of evil, which multiply with virtually every experience of human heartache and may vary significantly in their intensity, effects, and implicit conclusions from heart to heart.¹³ The failure to distinguish these concrete problems from the less personal and more abstract philosophical problems of evil can lead to a wearying assault of misguided and irrelevant counsel. Imagine, for example, expounding Augustinian privationism (the notion that evil is not a real thing but lacks positive ontological status) in an effort to console parents who have lost a child at the hands of a drunk driver. For them, evil is a very real, concrete thing.

We may add to the domain of concrete problems the following existential problems of how to answer the evils in our own lives, cultural contexts, and the invisible world at large.

(6) Concrete Problems of Evil in Personal Existential Form. How do we make moral progress against the lingering, potent, self-destructive, internal bent toward moral evil, or in the Pauline ethical vocabulary, the old man (Eph 4:22–24; Col 3:9–10) or the flesh (Rom 8:12–13; Gal 5:16–24)?¹⁴ Without ongoing engagement with this question, we ourselves become part of the problems rather than part of the solutions.

(7) Concrete Problems of Evil in Cultural Existential Form. Within cultural contexts, how do we confront the forceful and multifronted blitzkrieg of social injustices across the contemporary world? This includes large-scale problems like human trafficking, genocide, environmental exploitation, terrorism, the dehumanizing effects of consumerism, governmental and religious corruption, and any other problems we can all too easily enumerate.¹⁵

(8) Concrete Problems of Evil in Spiritual Existential Form. Add to all the above the problem of the invisible world within a biblical view of reality. Paul says in Ephesians 6:12:

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

To borrow Paul’s vivid competitive combat term, how should believers wrestle (palē) against spiritual evil?¹⁶

A portrait emerges in which evil represents not a singular problem but a complex web of problems that entangles the heart and the hands as well as the head. For the head, how do we understand God’s supreme goodness and power in the many faces of evil? For the heart, how do we foster relational trust in God’s supreme goodness and power in the many faces of evil? For the hands, how do we engage in actions that align with God’s supreme goodness and power in the many faces of evil? What kind of thinking, feeling, and acting can match the combined force of abstract and concrete problems of evil?

THREE CRITERIA OF THEODICY

Given the sheer magnitude of the God whom the problems of evil involve, there is no room for simplistic or cavalier answers. These problems revolve around a Being perceived in a mirror dimly (1 Cor 13:12), a Mind whose judgments are unsearchable (Rom 11:33), and whose foolishness … is wiser than men (1 Cor 1:25). God is too vast to fit into neatly wrapped philosophical boxes. It may turn out that we err on the side of hubris in the quest for answers to some problems of evil. Perhaps meeting the problems is less like breaking through a victory ribbon at the end of a sprint and more like trudging through a marathon, less about answers and more about slow and steady progress.

Progress has often been sought in over-compartmentalized strategies. Forward strides against abstract problems of evil are often formulated and fine-tuned in intellectual isolation. There is a lack of broader concern for how such ideas may impact, positively or negatively, the quest for progress in the concrete realms. We must ask: If we consistently integrated our philosophical theodicies into how we both existentially combat and emotionally cope with evil, would we be better or worse for it?

I am not implying that a given intellectual response to abstract problems of evil must simultaneously meet the challenges posed by concrete evil. Rather, our intellectual responses, at a minimum, ought to comport with how we meet the concrete problems. Hendrik Vroom, a philosopher, theologian, and former hospital chaplain, stated, Whatever cannot be said in a hospital should not be said in a philosophy or theology text attempting to deal with evil and suffering.¹⁷ Epicurus echoes, Vain is the word of a philosopher which does not heal any suffering of man.¹⁸ There should be nothing in the theist’s responses to the problems that evil poses to the head that conflicts with how we ought to confront the evils present in our hearts and performed with our hands.

Imagine a theist, attempting to answer abstract problems of evil, who imports into his theodicy the following fatalistic ideas of the first-century Stoic, Epictetus:

Things beyond our will are nothing to us.… When death appears as an evil, we ought immediately to remember, that evils are things to be avoided, but death is inevitable.… When you see anyone weeping for grief, either that his son has gone abroad, or that he has suffered in his affairs; take care not to be overcome by the apparent evil.… As far as the conversation goes, however, do not disdain to accommodate yourself to him, and if need be, to groan with him. Take heed, however, not to groan inwardly too.¹⁹

Are these ideas compatible with how we ought to address concrete problems of evil?

Even if we lack exhaustive answers to concrete problems of evil, one important normative feature of progress against such problems is that we ought to weep with those who weep (Rom 12:15). We should take people’s pain, grief, and questions seriously, feeling the weight of loss with them to remove the sting of isolation from their angst. Epictetus advises us not to groan inwardly. Encountering grief, death, and doubt at Lazarus’ tomb, Jesus was deeply moved in spirit and greatly troubled, and even wept (John 11:33b, 35). The Greek phrase—deeply moved in spirit (enebrimēsato tō pneumati)—captures an outrage that occurred not merely for outward social show, but with inwardness and sincerity.²⁰ John portrays an anything but Stoic Jesus.

Elsewhere, Jesus confronts concrete evil by expressing a deep internal and action-motivating compassion (splanchnizomai). Jesus expresses this compassion at people’s despair and moral lostness (Matt 9:36; cf. Mark 6:34), sickness (Matt 14:14; cf. Mark 1:40–41), hunger (Matt 15:32; cf. Mark 8:2), blindness (Matt 20:34), and death (Luke 7:13). The New Testament envisions this compassion as a crucial step toward progress against concrete evils.²¹ Therefore, a theodicy in which things beyond our will are nothing to us, mere apparent evil for which we should not groan inwardly, is inconsistent with how we ought to address concrete problems of evil.

From this analysis, I suggest three criteria for responses to abstract problems of evil:

(1) The Criteria of Philosophical Credibility: A viable response to abstract problems of evil must be philosophically credible, able to withstand charges of poor explanatory power, fallaciousness, superficiality, etc.

(2) The Criteria of Biblical Compatibility: A viable response to abstract problems of evil must be biblically compatible, neither explicitly nor implicitly contradicting successive layers of biblical insight into the nature of reality.

(3) The Criteria of Existential Consistency: A viable response to abstract problems of evil must be consistent (though not necessarily identical) with normative methods of existentially engaging the concrete problems of evil.

Are our most cherished responses to the abstract problems of evil philosophically credible, biblically compatible, and existentially consistent?²²

We now turn to the Free Will Defense, the most pervasive philosophical response to evil within the halls of both historical and contemporary theism.

THE INTRANSITIVITY DIMENSION

According to Gordon Clark,

From pagan antiquity, through the middle ages, on down into modern times, free will has doubtless been the most popular solution offered to the problem of evil.²³

In R. K. McGregor Wright’s estimation, the desire to have God freed from responsibility for evil is probably the strongest motivation for assuming free will.²⁴ In particular, libertarian free will is widely viewed as the most promising philosophical response to abstract problems of evil.

We may define libertarian free will as follows: A moral agent has libertarian free will if she has a categorical and irreducible power to act as a first-mover to perform or refrain from performing a given action.²⁵ When faced with doing some action, A—reading the next sentence—or not-A—refraining from reading on—you have the power to do either. Though you have apparently chosen A (for which I am grateful), you could have chosen not-A. Who or what determined your choice? Neither forces outside you (e.g., physical laws, other people, God) nor forces inside you (e.g., reasons, desires, character) are determinative. You, the choosing agent, and you alone determine which way to go (and if to go at all). It is the exercise of this self-moving, two-way power that makes good choices rewardable and bad choices punishable.²⁶

The last several decades have witnessed a remarkable rise of theists appealing to this libertarian notion of free will as a God-vindicating answer to abstract problems of evil. In 1988, George Schlesinger observed,

The Free Will Defense has been subject to a greater amount of discussion by analytic philosophers, in the last 25 years or so, than have the rest of the solutions put together.²⁷

Yet, the Free Will Defense has a very long history. It can be found in early church fathers like Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Maximus, and Lactantius. Some trace the genesis of the Free Will Defense before the church fathers into the realms of ancient Greek philosophy. Indeed, there is a deep resemblance between the notion of free will espoused by ancient Greek philosophers and the libertarian free will forwarded in today’s theological circles. The following table captures this resemblance:

The work of atheologians, J. L. Mackie and Anthony Flew, in the 1950s generated much of the current upsurge of libertarian free will as a solution to the abstract problems of evil.²⁸ Alvin Plantinga emerged as the most vigorous proponent of the Free Will Defense, contending against Flew and Mackie that God could not create free agents who always choose good, since guaranteeing such universal obedience could only be had at the price of abolishing significant freedom, namely, libertarian freedom.

The tide of the Mackie-Flew-Plantinga exchange²⁹ has not ebbed in the last several decades. It has risen within the scholarly community³⁰ and flowed beyond ivory towers to influence minds on a far wider scale. In what way does libertarian free will function as an answer to abstract evil in so many minds? Roughly stated, the Free Will Defense says that God gave humanity a good gift, a gift that remains intact after the fall of Genesis 3, namely, libertarian free will to make morally significant decisions. We abuse this gift by actualizing moral evils. Thus, we (the abusers of our free will), not God (the Author of our free will), are blameworthy for the existence of evil.³¹

To approach the Free Will Defense with clarity, it is helpful to distinguish its three fundamental claims, all of which are tied to the notion of libertarian free will. The first two claims appear in early forms of the Free Will Defense set forth by church fathers from the second century onwards. The third claim emerges more in contemporary versions of the Free Will Defense, and will be the primary focus of the present study.

CLAIM 1—The Intransitivity Dimension: By anchoring moral responsibility in two-way, self-moving power, libertarian free will places blame for moral evil squarely on creatures without indicting the Creator for our immoral actions.

Libertarian free will allows us to trade the frightful claim that God is the author of evil for the seemingly more defensible claim that God is the author of freedom; we are the authors of evil. Geisler says, God is morally accountable for giving the good thing called free will, but he is not responsible for all the evil we do with our freedom.³² Libertarian free will allows blame to affix on those creatures who make evil actual, without ascending the ladder of causation up to the Creator, who merely makes evil possible. This will be called the intransitivity dimension of the Free Will Defense. It has a discernable ancestry in church fathers like Tertullian,³³ Clement of Alexandria,³⁴ and Augustine,³⁵ along with their Hellenistic predecessors, including Plato,³⁶ Cleanthes,³⁷ and Cicero.³⁸

THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL DIMENSION

Why would a good God make moral evil possible in the first place? This question evokes the second core claim:

CLAIM 2—The Anthropological Dimension: Libertarian free will, although it may be abused to actualize moral evil, is essential to the humanness of humanity, namely, our capacity for moral goodness.

As Dante says in The Divine Comedy, The greatest gift that God … made in Creation and the most formidable to His goodness, and that which He prizes most, was the freedom of the will (Paradiso, V.19–24). Claim 2 forms the crux of Plantinga’s influential version of the Free Will Defense:

A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, He must create creatures capable of moral evil.³⁹

C. S. Lewis echoes, A world of automata—of creatures that worked like machines—would hardly be worth creating.⁴⁰

Libertarian free will is a necessary condition of the capacity for moral goodness, and the capacity for moral goodness is, in turn, a necessary condition of being human. We will call this the anthropological dimension of the Free Will Defense, and may trace its lineage in early church fathers⁴¹ and their Greek philosophical predecessors.⁴² Taken together, the intransitivity dimension and the anthropological dimension form what we may call the Traditional Free Will Defense, given its far-reaching historical genealogy.⁴³

1.1.5 THE RELATIONAL DIMENSION

By adding a third claim, the Traditional Free Will Defense has undergone a significant deepening in recent years. In the words of C. S. Lewis, "free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible