The Loss of Liberty

How can God hold us responsible for being a sinner when it's our nature to sin? Isn't that the dilemma? Here we have God holding people morally accountable to a standard of righteousness they cannot possibly attain or achieve, and it seems at first blush to be manifestly unfair.

Well, that's a key point in an ongoing debate. How deep is man's depravity and how free is our will? Fortunately, some of the most respected theologians in church history knew the importance of this debate, and today on Renewing Your Mind, we'll consider their arguments as we return to Dr. R.C.

Sproul's series, Willing to Believe. In our session today, we're going to give our attention now to the thinking of Saint Augustine with respect to this question of the relationship between original sin and our free will. Now, in church history, it's generally conceded that Augustine was the greatest theologian of the first millennium of church history, if not of all time, and because his thinking on this question of free will and original sin was so important and profound in the early church, and because it established the basic direction of the thinking of the church for centuries to come, I've decided to give two lectures to an exposition of Augustine's thought on these matters. In our last session, we looked at Pelagius and his negative response against Augustine and what is known as the system of Pelagianism. It's also been observed, painting with broad strokes, that the three major theological systems that have competed with each other over the course of church history are those systems called Pelagianism, Augustinianism, and semi-Pelagianism. Some have renamed that semi-Augustinianism in as much as it represents a middle ground between Pelagius and Augustine.

Now, later on we will look specifically at the system of thought called semi-Pelagianism, but since it arose after Augustine's controversy with Pelagius, we'll look at it in that chronological order. For now, we're going to look at the work of Aurelius Augustine, who in addition to being the great theologian was also the bishop of Hippo in North Africa. He was the founder of the famous concept that was renewed during the Reformation called sola gratia, that salvation is by grace alone.

We remember that for Pelagius, grace facilitates a person's quest for righteousness but was not deemed to be necessary. For Augustine, grace is not only necessary, but it is solely as a result of the operation of God's grace within us that we can ever be set free from our fallen condition and our bondage to sin. Now, Augustine was concerned about the question of free will, and he made a very important distinction that I think is necessary for us to understand, to grasp his line of thought, and that was the distinction he made between the concept of liberium, arbitrium, and libertas. The word liberium, arbitrium means or is translated by the words free will, and the word libertas is translated by the English word liberty. Now, Augustine's point in his distinction was this, that after the fall, man still had free will. What he lost in the fall was his liberty.

Now, let me take a few moments to explain that in a little bit more detail. We can make an analogy between the faculties of thought and that of willing. We know that man was created as a rational creature with a mind and ability to think. He also was made a volitional creature with a faculty that we call the will. He had the power of making choices. Now, at the fall, according to Augustine and the Scriptures, the whole of man's nature was affected.

Something significant was lost by the fall. When Paul speaks about the mind, for example, in the New Testament, he talks about that way in which the human mind has become darkened. And in theological terms, we speak of what is called the noetic effects of sin.

It's called noetic because it comes from the Greek word nous, which is the Greek word for mind. And so the noetic effect of sin simply refers to the effects of sin on our mind. Paul uses words like our thinking has been darkened or clouded. And that means that our powers of acute cogitation have been affected by the influences of our fall.

We know that our bodies suffer certain weaknesses as a result of the fall. They're subject now to disease and to death, but also the mind has been weakened. We don't think as sharply or as clearly as we used to be able to do. In addition to that, the mind has been influenced by bias.

We see how when we are prejudiced that sometimes our bias or our inclinations cloud our thinking to the effect that we don't see clearly the issues as we ought to see them because we have allowed ourselves to be captured by a certain bias or prejudice. But I'm using this simply by way of illustration, that we realize that the mind has been weakened by the fall to such a degree that Paul says the natural mind is at enmity with God, and by nature man cannot know God in a salvific way because of this darkness that has enshrouded his thinking. But this does not mean that in the fall man lost his mind. We still have the ability to think. We can still reason.

We can still add two and two and come up with four. It may be more difficult. We may make more mistakes mathematically than we would have had we not fallen, but nevertheless the faculty of thought remains intact even though it has been negatively and adversely affected by sin. Now, in a like and similar manner, what Augustine is getting at here is that even though the fall has done serious damage to our volitions, to our choices, to our decision-making capability, it has not destroyed the will. Man still has the faculty of choosing. We make choices every day, and we exercise our wills. We are choosing volitional agents. So insofar as we still have the ability to make choices, we still have a will, a will, and that will remains free in the sense that the will is not coerced or forced to the decisions that it makes by any external agency or power.

So Augustine says before the fall man had the ability to make choices according to his own desires, according to his own inclinations, and after the fall man still has a will, and he still has a free will in the sense that the will is free from external coercion. Now, the very word freedom is sometimes very confusing to us. In our own national heritage, the concept of freedom has been one that has been cherished, and we see in our own history the Revolutionary War as being a conflict over freedom.

We think of Patrick Henry's, give me liberty or give me death. And freedom in the eighteenth century tended to be defined in terms of freedom to do certain things, to do certain things without being hindered by some kind of external authority that would prevent us from doing it. Since FDR's regime during the Depression, he redefined freedom for us in terms of defining it as freedom from certain things, freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom from starvation, and that sort of thing.

Now, what are we talking about when we're saying free? Is it a freedom to do something or is it a freedom from something? Well, for Augustine, man's free will still has the ability to make choices according to our desires. However, this free will that he describes here as the will as being free, he says, is nevertheless now in a fallen state of corruption so that though he would use the adjective free to define the human will, he would hasten to add to that by way of qualification that the fallen creature has a free will, but the problem is that will is now an evil will. We still are free to do what we want, but the problem is in the want to, that our desires according to the Scripture are only wicked continuously with respect to the things of God. The idea is that after the fall, man has lost any innate desire to seek after God or to please God or to have God in his thinking.

This is what the Scriptures call a reprobate mind whereby whereby there is a basic interior hostility towards the pure things of God that left to ourselves, given our options, we will not choose God because we do not desire Him. And that's the thing that Augustine is wrestling with in his definitions and his distinction between the liberium arbitrium and libertas. Man still has the ability to choose what he wants, but since he does not want God in his thinking or in his life, and he has no desire for the things of God, he is spiritually dead, that what he now lacks is what Augustine calls liberty.

For him, liberty is the freedom to do good as well as to do evil. It is the power morally to embrace the holy things of God. But rather, Augustine says that this fallen will is free in the sense that it has the power to do what it wants, but not free in the sense that it has the power in and of itself to direct or incline its own heart towards the things of God. Now, to express the difference in the condition of Adam prior to the fall and man after the fall, I'm going to put a table of Latin terms on the board not to obscure things, but the purpose of using the Latin is to clarify things, and we'll borrow this table from Augustine. Augustine first looked at the state of Adam prior to the fall, and he said, Adam before the fall had the posse pacare, and from the word posse we get the word possibility or power, and pacare is the infinitive form of the Latin verb meaning to sin. If we say that something is impeccable, we mean by that that it is without sin.

We may talk about peccadillos. Pecadillos are not those little armor-clad animals that run around the street at night, but peccadillos are little sins, and both of those words impeccable and peccadillo come from the same Latin root. So, the posse pacare simply means the ability or the power to sin. Adam obviously had the posse pacare, and we know that because why? Because he sinned, and what he did was obviously possible or he wouldn't have been able to do it. So that prior to the fall, man had the posse pacare, but he also had the posse non pacare, which simply means the power to not sin. He could sin or not sin, depending upon the decision that he made, and that was the basic structure of his free will.

Now, let me just interject a comment at this point. This idea that free will means the ability to sin or the ability to not sin, we grant, as Augustine granted, was the status of Adam prior to the fall. Now, Pelagius taught that this twin possibility remained intact after the fall.

After the fall. And so, for Pelagius, all men of all time have always had both the posse pacare and the posse non pacare. The humanist and pagan view of free will that dominates in Western civilization argues the same point, that so often when people talk about free will in our society today, what they mean is that I have the equal power to do the good or the evil, that I suffer from no pre-inclination or bias to one or the other. Before the fall, man has the ability to sin and the ability to not sin. Now, there are two things he does not have.

He does not have the non posse pacare. Now, I don't want to confuse anybody here, but now this is simply the ability to sin with the negative put in front of it, which means the inability to sin. Obviously, since Adam had the ability to sin, we couldn't say that he at the same time could have the ability to sin and not have the ability to sin, but the inability to sin is something that you would ascribe to God.

God cannot sin, not because He lacks the physical power to carry out the action if He so desired to sin, but because His desires are only inclined towards perfect righteousness at all time, He lacks the motive ever to sin. Likewise, we look forward to that state in heaven. Right now, if we're Christians, we still can sin.

And how do we know that? Because we still do sin. But our hope is that in heaven, when we have been glorified and our sanctification has been made complete, that sin will be no more. It will now become a virtual impossibility because of the redemption of our lives so that we will be better off in heaven than Adam was in paradise, because Adam still had the posse pacare. But the distinction in this table that has provoked the greatest amount of controversy and trouble in the debate over free will is this next category, which is called the non posse non pacare. Now, that may be a little confusing because here the Latin is using the double negative, which is a no-no in English expressions.

But I use the Latin because I think it's easier to follow in this regard. The non posse non pacare means it is not possible to not sin. It is impossible for a person in this condition to live without sin. And this specifically is the way Augustine describes the moral condition of original sin, that as a result of the fall, we have lost our original righteousness, we have lost our innocence, and we have been so plunged into moral corruption that now it is impossible for us to live a sinless life. We hear the popular axioms erare est humanum, to err is human, to forgive is divine. And even the most optimistic humanists will agree that nobody is perfect. And when we make that stipulation that no one is perfect, the question that is begged by the stipulation is why. Why don't we have some examples of people out there who have lived lives that are flawless and sinless? Well, Augustine is saying it's because of our nature as fallen human beings that we are no longer able to live without sinning. Of course, this brings him on a collision course with Pelagius because Pelagius argued that not only is it possible still for people to live perfectly righteous lives, but in fact, some of them have indeed achieved that and continue to achieve perfection. Not so in the view of Augustine. This is his description of the state of original sin that we are left with, if I can use a more modern theological term, a state of moral inability, which means that by our own power, we do not have the moral strength to incline or turn ourselves to the things of God.

Let me say it again. Moral inability means I do not have the power to choose to choose God by myself because I have no desire to choose God by myself. And without the desire or the inclination, I will never choose that which I do not want or do not desire. Now, obviously, the immediate question that is raised as it was raised by Pelagius is, now wait, if I am born in a state where I cannot but sin, how can God hold me responsible for being a sinner when in fact it is my nature to sin?

Isn't that the dilemma? Here we have God holding people morally accountable to a standard of righteousness they cannot possibly attain or achieve. And it seems at first blush to be manifestly unfair, and as Pelagius believed, an insult to the justice of God. Augustine, as the Scriptures plainly declare, said that this fallen condition that yields this tendency toward sin is already a punishment for sin. The reason why Adam fell into that state, and all of his ancestors fell into that state, was because Adam served as our representative, the head of the whole human race, so that his probation that he failed, as the Bible tells us, through one man's sin, death came into the world, and sin then passed on to all generations. When Adam fell, the human race fell with him as a result of God's judgment on a race of creatures that despised His authority. Well, we'll look in greater detail at Augustine's views in our next session.

We hear a common criticism level against Reformed theology. Many say it teaches that man has no free will. But as we've heard today from Dr. R.C. Sproul, that's a false accusation. But the definition of free will matters. We'll hear more tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind as we continue Dr. Sproul's series, Willing to Believe. In Twelve Lessons, he looks at the views of some of the key figures in church history, men like Luther, Calvin, Pelagius, and Arminius, helping us understand that some assumptions of free will actually undermine the gospel. You can request the 3-DVD set of this series when you give a gift online at renewingyourmind.org or when you call us.

Our number is 800-435-4343. You know, one of my first touchpoints to Ligonier Ministries was in a Sunday school class 30 years ago. I remember they wheeled in a big TV monitor and VHS machine, and we viewed one of Dr. Sproul's teaching series. It had a profound impact on me. And I say that because you may want to use this series in a similar setting.

Each lesson is about 23 minutes, leaving you plenty of time for discussion. Again, the title of the series is Willing to Believe, and we'll send it to you for your gift of any amount. Our number again is 800-435-4343, and our web address is renewingyourmind.org. Well, tomorrow we'll return to this series and we'll consider a couple of questions. Do we choose God or does He choose us? We hope to see you right back here Friday for Renewing Your Mind. Thank you.