On Freedom and Predestination

When Christians talk of freedom, they often phrase it as freedom from sin or death--sometimes more poetically as freedom from the slavery of sin or death. This is not an open freedom; it implies no license. In other words, Christians are not, in fact, free to do as they wish. St. Paul cautions, "Christ set us free; so stand firm and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery...do not use this freedom as an opportunity for the flesh...you may not do what you want" (Gal 5). Christians are offered personal freedom only in the sense of making a choice between a "yoke of slavery" or the "flesh," and something else. That "something else" is a different freedom. It is the freedom Christians believe Christ won for humanity: the freedom from death and their own sinfulness.

Because the freedom we are used to talking of is much broader--it is the freedom to do what we wish--it is perhaps difficult to understand why Christianity would narrow the possible choices of action down to simply Christ (and the freedom He offers) and death. But in this distinction Christianity explains that God created us in His image and likeness to be His free lovers and servants. To do anything else is to reject God--no matter how seemingly trivial or meaningless the rejection. Everything action we commit is either selfless and loving (and therefore oriented toward the glory and goodness of God), or else is selfish. So, indeed, Christianity teaches that we have only two real, substantive choices in this world.

Understanding such a stark choice brings up, inescapably, the issue of predestination. Of course we are destined for God; He created us for Himself. His plan for us since the very beginning is that we find our way to Him of our own free wills. It would be then correct to say of a man who goes to heaven, "he was predestined for it." All humanity is. But the criteria for getting there in the first place is the exercise of our free will--we are each responsible for choosing God ourselves. C.S. Lewis captures this idea very well in his book Perelandra, whose protagonist Dr. Ransom has decided to do "the right thing" over his own, selfish, protests.

"You might say, if you liked, that the power of choice had been simply set aside and an inflexible destiny substituted for it. On the other hand, you might say that he had [been] delivered from the rhetoric of his passions and had emerged into unassailable freedom. Ransom could not, for the life of him, see any difference between these two statements. Predestination and freedom were apparently identical."

I believe that we cannot be predestined to hell. That would infringe on our freedom of choice. It is, rather, our path heaven that is predestined. When we do what is right--defined, perhaps, as what is both good and necessary--we are doing no more than that which God predestined us to do when he "called us by name" (to quote Isaiah). Furthermore, however sinful and far from God we grow, He has only made each of us only one path to him in the individual sense, for He created us. One person's calling is not another, and though they may be guilty of the same sins, their redemptions are going to be as individual as they are. Perhaps this is what scripture refers to when it speaks of "the Elect:" those who succumbed to their destiny or enacted their freedom to choose God (take your pick). Those who don't are exiled from heaven--they have lost something essential.

A clue to what they have lost is found in Lewis' pregnant phrase, "the rhetoric of [Ransom's] passions." The word "rhetoric" means "manufactured nobility or grandeur," and the classic art of Rhetoric was taught to politians so they could twist words in order inspire others to their cause (incidentally, St. Augustine was a teacher of Rhetoric, and his Confessions are filled with contempt for that art which teaches men seduce others with good-seeming words). What Lewis is alluding to is the human tendency to to let their passions run away with them in a way that is actually harmful, something that is a result of Original Sin. As an example, it is undeniably human to find a member of the opposite sex attractive, but to follow that passion into adultery is clearly wrong.

The faculty by which we regulate our passions is our reason. We have the ability to rationally decide if any given passion is Good or Bad--whether a particular passion is bringing us closer to God (love for a family member, perhaps) or separating us from him (excessive ambition, for example). The ancient definition of Man (from Aristotle) was a rational animal, a creature subject to physical passions yet endowed with reason for free will. The essence of humanity, then--what it is that separates us from other physical creatures--is nothing more than reason, and our unique place in God's creation as the creatures of His image. To abdicate reason in favor of passions is to reject God's call, and therefore one's humanity. Lewis speculates on this again through the thoughts of Ransom:

"Up till that moment, whenever he had thought of Hell, he had pictured the lost souls as being still human; now, as the frightful abyss which parts ghosthood from manhood yawned before him, pity was almost swallowed up in horror--in the unconquerable revulsion of the life within him from positive and self-consuming Death... The forces which had begun, perhaps years ago, to eat away his [enemy's] humanity had now completed their work... Only a ghost was left--an everlasting unrest, a crumbling, a ruin, an odour of decay."

Understanding this relationship between passions and reason sheds light on the Christian definition of freedom as freedom from the slavery of sin and death. To be free is to exercise reason in determining God's path for us, and then following that path. To choose anything else is to follow one's passions into sin and error. Our only hope for everlasting life is to assume the mantle of full humanity: not an indulgent understanding of "human weakness," not a claim to full, unrestricted freedom of lifestyle, but a responsibility to choose God--and His specific and individual destiny for us--over every other option, and thereby be free.