Compatibilism

“…work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”

— Philippians 2:12-13 (ESV)

Compatibilism is the later philosophical label for the doctrine set out in the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession’s own chapter “Of Free Will”: human choice is free without being independent of God’s decree.¹ A choice is free because it is uncoerced, not because it is undetermined; a person always chooses according to his strongest inclination.² A fallen sinner freely chooses sin rather than righteousness, because that is what his own nature inclines him to want (Rom. 8:7). Only the Spirit’s effectual work in regeneration changes that inclination, so a converted sinner freely wills the good he could not previously will.

Confessional Witness

The confession’s chapter “Of Free Will” states that God gave man’s will “natural liberty and power of acting upon choice, that it is neither forced, nor by any necessity of nature determined to do good or evil.”¹ Before the fall, Adam “had freedom and power to will and to do that which was good and wellpleasing to God, but yet was unstable, so that he might fall from it.”³ After the fall, that liberty remains (the will is still uncoerced), but its moral condition changes entirely: man “hath 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.”⁴ The distinction the confession is drawing is between natural liberty, which sin never removes, and moral ability, which sin destroys entirely apart from grace. Regeneration does not add a liberty the will lacked; it changes what the already-free will is inclined to want, “by his grace alone” enabling the sinner “freely to will and to do that which is spiritually good.”⁵

This freedom operates inside, not apart from, God’s own sovereign government of every event. The confession’s chapter “Of Divine Providence” states that although “all things come to pass immutably and infallibly” by God’s decree, “the same providence” governs “second causes” so that they act “either necessarily, freely, or contingently.”⁶ Human choices are one such second cause: God’s decree does not bypass a person’s willing but is carried out through it. This holds even for sin itself. God’s “determinate counsel extendeth itself even to the first fall, and all other sinful actions both of angels and men,” yet “the sinfulness of their acts proceedeth only from the creatures, and not from God, who, being most holy and righteous, neither is nor can be the author or approver of sin.”⁷

Biblical Basis

Scripture describes the same choice as both genuinely free, and morally chargeable to the one who makes it, and also decreed by God down to the particular agents involved. The crucifixion of Jesus is one example. Peter tells the crowd in Jerusalem that Jesus was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” at the hands of “lawless men,” who are never excused for the murder (Acts 2:23). The early church’s prayer names the human agents individually: Herod, Pontius Pilate, “the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel,” gathered “to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place” (Acts 4:27-28).⁸ Isaiah had already put the same truth starkly: “it was the will of the LORD to crush him” (Isa. 53:10). God’s predestining that event does not make the men who carried it out any less responsible for it, nor does their responsibility make God’s plan merely a prediction of what they happened to do on their own.

Jesus states the same principle governing choice generally, not only the crucifixion: a person acts according to what he is. “Every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit” (Matt. 7:17); a sinner “practicing sin is a slave to sin” (John 8:34), because “the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot” (Rom. 8:7). Fallen inclination, not external coercion, is what binds the will; the natural person, left to himself, “does not accept the things of the Spirit of God” (1 Cor. 2:14). Paul commands believers to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” and grounds that command in the fact that “it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:12-13): the willing itself, not only the resulting deed, is God’s gift to produce.

Historical Development

Augustine against Pelagius

Augustine did not always hold the doctrine of efficacious grace he later became known for. His early treatises On Free Will and The Happy Life “exalt the free will of man as that which is determinative in salvation,” views he later rejected in his own Retractions.⁹ Around 400, reflecting on Romans 9 in his Confessions, he had already prayed Da quod iubes, et iube quod vis, “Grant what you command, and command what you will,” a request that God cause the very willing of obedience, not only supply the ability to obey once willed. The formal controversy began around 415, when Pelagius wrote On Nature and On Free Will, works Augustine judged to have “too little to say about divine grace and too much about the human will.”¹⁰

The Reformation: Luther and Calvin

In 1525 Martin Luther published The Bondage of the Will, his reply to Erasmus’s Diatribe on Free Will (1524), arguing that fallen man’s will is really and necessarily turned from God apart from grace.¹¹ Calvin took the same line against the Catholic theologian Albert Pighius: grace does not merely restore to man “the power to act well on condition that they will to, so that they thereafter have the option of willing or not willing.” Rather, Calvin wrote, grace “effectively moves them to will it; indeed it makes their evil will good, so that they of necessity will well.”¹² The necessity Calvin describes here is the will acting according to its own new nature, not a will forced against itself.

Jonathan Edwards and moral necessity

Reformed orthodoxy confessed this same doctrine in the 1689 LBCF’s own chapter “Of Free Will.”¹ In 1754, Jonathan Edwards’s Freedom of the Will restated it in explicitly philosophical terms, distinguishing natural inability, a lack of the physical or mental power to do a thing, from moral inability, a “want of inclination.”² Because the will always chooses “according to the greatest apparent good” or “strongest motive,” a choice can be at once necessary, in that the agent’s nature determines it, and free, in that nothing outside the agent forces it.² Edwards’s distinction became a standard Reformed account of how fallen man can be unable to choose God and yet freely, and culpably, choose sin instead.

Opposing Views

The main alternative within the wider Christian tradition is libertarian free will: the view that genuine freedom requires that a person, under the very same internal and external circumstances, could have chosen otherwise. Jacob Arminius framed the whole dispute as a question about how grace operates: “Is the grace of God a certain irresistible force? … I believe, according to the scriptures, that many persons resist the Holy Spirit and reject the grace that is offered.”¹³ For Arminius, prevenient grace restores to the sinner a genuine power of contrary choice, so that whether a person cooperates with grace or resists it is finally settled by the person’s own uncaused choice, not by grace itself: “All unregenerate persons have freedom of will, and a capability of resisting the Holy Spirit, of rejecting the proffered grace of God… and these things they can actually do.”¹³ Later Arminianism and Molinism both build on this libertarian account of the will, differing over how, if at all, God can know or govern a choice that isn’t determined by anything, including God’s own decree.

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t moral responsibility require the ability to have done otherwise? A person is normally excused for an act he could not possibly have avoided, so the objection runs that compatibilism, by making every choice determined by prior inclination, cannot really hold anyone responsible for it. The Reformed answer distinguishes natural inability, being unable to do a thing even if one wanted to, from moral inability, not wanting to do it at all.² A person coerced by physical force is not responsible, because the choice was never his; a person who freely acts on his own strongest desire is responsible precisely because the choice was his, however certain that choice was given his settled character. Compatibilists further argue that libertarian freedom does not actually secure the responsibility it claims to protect. If a choice for one thing over its opposite has no reason that would not equally explain choosing the opposite instead, the choice is not free in any morally significant sense but arbitrary, “inexplicable” rather than accountable.¹⁴ A choice made for no reason at all is a harder case for moral responsibility to rest on, not an easier one.

Doesn’t God’s decree of even sinful acts make him the author of sin? The confession denies this directly: God’s “determinate counsel extendeth itself even to the first fall, and all other sinful actions both of angels and men,” yet he “neither is nor can be the author or approver of sin,” since “the sinfulness of their acts proceedeth only from the creatures, and not from God.”⁷ God governs the free choices of creatures as their first cause without becoming the agent of what those choices produce; theologians call this relationship concurrence.¹⁵ “The providence of God does not cancel out secondary causes or human responsibility… This divine concurrence is rooted in God’s active and immediate will that covers all creatures and all events… God working through secondary causes does not mean they intrude between God and the effects with their consequences.”¹⁵ A sinner’s choice remains fully his own, arising from his own corrupt inclination, even though God’s decree stands behind its occurrence.

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 9, “Of Free Will,” para. 1. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Matthew Michael Barrett, “The Scriptural Affirmation of Effectual Calling,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 117: “the bondage of the will to sin is not a natural or physical inability of the will, but a moral inability. Edwards states that moral ability consists in the ‘want of inclination.’ … The will … is morally necessitated to choose evil rather than good, but since the will always chooses according to the ‘strongest motive’ such a choice is freely chosen, respecting man’s liberty,” citing Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will, ed. Paul Ramsey, vol. 1 of Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 164. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
2nd London Baptist Confession, chap. 9, para. 2. ↩
2nd London Baptist Confession, chap. 9, para. 3. ↩
2nd London Baptist Confession, chap. 9, para. 4. ↩
2nd London Baptist Confession, chap. 5, “Of Divine Providence,” para. 2. ↩
2nd London Baptist Confession, chap. 5, para. 4. ↩ ↩²
Matthew Michael Barrett, “Monergism, Synergism, and the Will of God,” in “Reclaiming Monergism,” 426. ↩
Barrett, “Monergism in the Calvinist Tradition,” in “Reclaiming Monergism,” 30. ↩
Barrett, “Monergism in the Calvinist Tradition,” 31. ↩
J. I. Packer, “Historical and Theological Introduction,” in Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will, trans. J. I. Packer and O. R. Johnston (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1957), 59, quoted in Barrett, “Monergism in the Calvinist Tradition,” 46. ↩
John Calvin, The Bondage and Liberation of the Will, 136, quoted in Barrett, “Monergism in the Calvinist Tradition,” 57. ↩
Jacobus Arminius, The Works of James Arminius, quoted in Barrett, “Arminian Synergism in Theological Perspective,” in “Reclaiming Monergism,” 296. ↩ ↩²
Bruce A. Ware, God’s Greater Glory: The Exalted God of Scripture and the Christian Faith (Downers Grove, IL: Crossway, 2004), 86, quoted in Barrett, “The Inadequacy of Arminian Synergism,” in “Reclaiming Monergism,” 336. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 10, “Creator of Heaven and Earth.” ↩ ↩²