Do people have free will?

The Bible teaches both that people make real choices, for which God holds them responsible, and that God rules over all things. The passages set against Joshua do not deny human choice. Jeremiah 10:23 is a prayer, spoken as an invading army approaches. It confesses that no one can secure the course and outcome of his own life, and so the prophet goes on, “O Lord, correct me, but with judgment” (10:24). Proverbs says the same in one verse: “A man’s heart deviseth his way: but the Lord directeth his steps” (Proverbs 16:9). People plan and choose; God decides how things turn out.

In Acts 13 Luke places God’s appointing and human refusal side by side. Two verses before saying that those “ordained to eternal life believed” (13:48), he records Paul telling the synagogue, “ye put it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life” (13:46). The unbelievers are not victims of a decree; they have refused. Peter speaks the same way of the cross: Jesus was delivered up “by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God”, and yet “by wicked hands” (Acts 2:23). In Jude 4 the word translated ‘ordained’ is progegrammenoi, ‘written of beforehand’. Jude means that the judgement of such men was foretold long ago, as in the prophecy of Enoch he quotes (Jude 14-15), not that God made them sin.

So Scripture does not present people as puppets, nor as independent of God. It holds God’s sovereignty and human responsibility together without explaining fully how they fit, and Christians explain it in different ways.

Augustinian and Reformed

Following Augustine, Luther (The Bondage of the Will, 1525) and Calvin taught that people sin willingly, not under compulsion, but that since the fall the will cannot turn to God without his grace. They read Acts 13:48 of God’s election, as John Gill does: those whom God appointed to eternal life came to believe.

Arminian and Wesleyan

Arminians and Wesleyans hold that God’s grace goes before every person and restores the ability to respond to the gospel or to refuse it. Adam Clarke argued that the Greek tetagmenoi in Acts 13:48 does not mean ‘predestined’, and read it of people whose minds were disposed, or ready, for eternal life, unlike those who contradicted and blasphemed (13:45).

Catholic and Orthodox

The Council of Trent (1547) taught that free will, though weakened and bent by the fall, was by no means extinguished, and that it co-operates with God’s grace, which always comes first. Orthodox Christians likewise speak of synergy, the working together of God’s grace and human freedom.

How God’s sovereign purposes and human freedom fit together is one of the oldest questions in Christian thought, and Augustinians, Calvinists, Arminians, Catholics and Orthodox answer it differently. Each holds that people are truly responsible for their choices and that God is truly Lord of all.