Grateful to Crossway for running my article “5 Myths about Calvinism,” adapted from my book:
Today, the phrase “free will” refers to moral responsibility. It means people are not just puppets of exterior natural forces like their heredity and environment. But in the sixteenth century, at the very beginning of the Reformation, one of the key debates was over “free will” in a completely different sense. The question then was whether the will was, by nature, enslaved by sin and in captivity to Satan. Believing in “free will” meant believing that human beings are not born as slaves of Satan. Denying “free will” meant believing that they are. Calvin even called the slavery of the will to Satan “voluntary slavery.”
Dr. Forster wrote, “Myth1: We don’t have free will”. By calling this a myth, Dr. Forster is setting out to show that Calvinists believe humanity does indeed have a free will.
Slightly further on Dr. Forster defined free will as, “Believing in ‘free will’ meant believing that human beings are not born as slaves of Satan. Denying ‘free will’ meant believing that they are.” Dr. Forster does not define free will beyond this. Yet, from this much we can conclude that the person who denies free will, believes that the will is a slave to Satan.
Clearly, it would have been helpful had Dr. Forster defined what being a slave to Satan is. I honestly and earnestly believe Dr. Forster would agree with the following explanation of what being a slave to Satan means: Being a slave to Satan means to have no ability of the will to do any spiritual good, no ability of the will to work toward salvation, and no strength of the will to convert oneself.
So putting these two definitions together, a person who has free will has the ability to do good as well as evil, especially when it comes to salvation.
Dr. Forster appropriately declares that the Westminster Confession of Faith is an important confessional statement of Reformed Theology. He correctly explains that there is a chapter called “Of Free Will”. He then wrote, “Here is the first section of that chapter, in its entirety” followed by the text. This could be misleading to a novice reader who does not understand that chapter 9 consists of 5 sentences. It is hard to understand how Dr. Forster could honestly use the term “entirety” and simply reproduce the first introductory sentence.
Here is chapter 9 of the Westminster Confession of Faith. It should be pointed out that many versions of the confession include many proof texts from Scripture:
1. God has endued the will of man with that natural liberty, that is neither forced, nor, by any absolute necessity of nature, determined good, or evil.
2. Man, in his state of innocency, had freedom, and power to will and to do that which was good and well pleasing to God; but yet, mutably, so that he might fall from it.
3. Man, by his fall into a state of sin, has wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation: so as, a natural man, being altogether averse from that good, and dead in sin, is not able, by his own strength, to convert himself, or to prepare himself thereunto.
4. When God converts a sinner, and translates him into the state of grace, he frees him from his natural bondage under sin; and, by his grace alone, enables him freely to will and to do that which is spiritually good; yet so, as that by reason of his remaining corruption, he does not perfectly, or only, will that which is good, but does also will that which is evil.
5. The will of man is made perfectly and immutably free to do good alone in the state of glory only.
What is clear from point #3 is that man has lost the ability of will as it is laid out in points #1 and #2. Point #3 explains that point #1 is describing the state of man’s will before the fall. If Dr. Forster is ignorant of this fact, then he made a large blunder. If on the other hand Dr. Forster was aware of the fact that point #3 explains that point #1 is describing the state of man’s will before the fall, then Dr. Forster has attempted to intentionally mislead his reader into believing a falsehood.
I see Dr. Forster’s quote of John Calvin in this “Myth #1” in much the same light. That is, a quote out of context and the ignoring of plain and clear text that teaches the opposite. For example, John Calvin famously writes, “We deny that choice is free, because through man’s innate wickedness it is of necessity driven to what is evil and cannot seek anything but evil.”
Of course, my quoting of Calvin here is not to make a competing treatise of the 5 myths – for that too is a quote out of context. I place it here just to hopefully whet the appetite. Instead, I would suggest a careful reading the Westminster Confession of Faith and John Calvin’s Bondage and Liberation of the Will.
The language of the WCF in these passages will not be immediately clear to 21st century audiences, which is why (in addition to space constraints) I did not get into it in that post. The definition you supply (and then attribute to me without warrant) is not in accord with what the WCF is saying.
The language of ability is ambiguous. If you asked me to lift my house over my head I might say, “I could never do that!” and if you asked me to murder my wife for money I might likewise say, “I could never do that!” But the word “could” means something different in those two sentences. This is why the WCF tries to avoid leaning too much on the word “ability,” leaning hard on words like “freedom” and “power” instead. I think it is more helpful – and will help us understand what the WCF is doing here – to distinguish two different senses of the word “ability.” One is natural ability, which means the physical capacity to do something. The other is moral ability, which means the character traits necessary to do something. This distinction is needed, I think, to sustain any anthropology that is neither Pelagian nor materialistic/mechanistic. Where the WCF refers to “liberty” and “freedom” it refers to our natural ability, and when it refers to “ability,” “strength” and “power” it refers to our moral ability.
With this preface, I hope the following things will become clear:
1) WCF 9.1 asserts that we have “free will” in the modern sense, in that we have the natural ability to make our own choices, and WCF 9.3 asserts that we do not have “free will” in the Reformation era sense, in that we do not have the moral ability (after the fall) to do good.
2) There is another alternative besides the two offered above, that I am ignorant or malicious, namely that I read WCF 9.1 and WCF 9.3 as addressing different questions, since they use different language.
3) That it was inappropriate to attribute to me a definition of a contested term that I don’t hold.
I hope that helps clear this question up.