A. Our first parents, being left to the freedom of their own will, fell from the estate wherein they were created, by sinning against God.

The world has no answers to the question: What is wrong with the world? It does all sorts of blaming in the present. It makes all sorts of promises to create paradise on earth, but it cannot point to any such place that has ever been: not on their watch anyway. 

This will be divided under four heads concerning the will: (1) its freedom per se; (2) left to itself ad nihilo; (3) in its free fall; and (4) in its sinning against God.

The Will and its Freedom Per Se

The answer here affirms that our first parents truly possessed THE FREEDOM OF THEIR OWN WILL. But what is the free will? And here we are not yet asking the question that Luther pressed upon Erasmus, namely that of what the will can do to assent to God now that it is in bondage to sin. Here we are first asking a question that is actually not abstract at all: Does the human will have a nature and what is that nature? 

The freedom of the will consists in the ability to do what one most desires. A serious definition of the freedom of the will would have to include (1) the ability to do what one most desires, (2) given all relevant natural limitations, including (a) limitations on one’s own psychological or genetic capacity, (b) limitations of available options [known or unknown] external to one’s choice. Since every predicate or property in (1) and (2) are effects, it follows that each must have a cause, and that cause in turn caused by another. But this process cannot go on ad infinitum, and thus one arrives at the First Cause for all effects. So we must circle back to our account of dual agency and apply it to finite free wills as much as to anything else. 

Unfortunately, when we skip the definition work up front, conversations about free will conflate different kinds of liberty and become very superficial. Such shallow treatments poison conversations not only in theology but in moral and political philosophy. Turretin sets us on the right path here:

“Liberty is fourfold: (1) the liberty of independence which belongs to God as the first being; this is opposed to the necessity of dependence which belongs to all creatures. (2) Liberty from coaction by which man acts spontaneously and with freedom; this is opposed to the necessity of coaction seen in those who act through force. (3) Rational liberty from brute and physical necessity by which man acts from choice (ek proaireseos) and not by a brute instinct and blind impulse; this is opposed to the physical necessity of inanimates and brutes. (4) Liberty from slavery by which man is subject to the yoke of no slavery, either of sin or of misery; this is opposed to the necessity of slavery in sinners.”1

What this amounts to is a Compatibilist framework for the free will, rather than the extreme errors of either Occasionalist Determinism, on the one hand, or Libertarian Free Will on the other. Neither extreme error properly accounts for primary and secondary cause. But if God was the primary cause and Adam’s faculties, interacting with his field of options and experiences, comprised the matrix of secondary causes, then Adam’s will was compatibilistically free. Turretin expresses this in terms of his fourfold description of liberty: “The liberty of Adam was not the liberty of independence … But there was in him another threefold liberty: (1) from coaction; (2) from physical necessity; (3) from slavery (both of sin and of misery).”2 Chapter IX, Article 1 of the Confession says it in this way:

“God hath endued the will of man with that natural liberty, that is neither forced nor by any absolute necessity of nature determined to good or evil.”

So what Westminster means by “natural liberty” is just that original liberty, but what Turretin does (and it just anticipates where the Confession goes next) is that, within that threefold liberty of Adam in the original, he makes one more fine distinction, and it’s important. Of those three, the first two—freedom from coaction and from physical necessity—constitute essential liberty. In other words, whatever can be spoken of as a “free will” at all must possess these two. But Turretin continues about the third (freedom from slavery) is accidental. Now the word “accidental” does not mean, in classical thought, what we think of today, We commonly use the word “accident” to mean that which is not done “on purpose.” But for 2500 years, across the span of Western thought, to speak of what is accidental in relation to what it essential is just to speak of what is not essential. In other words, it is a real predicate or property of a thing, but it isn’t essential to that thing being what it is. If you took it away, that being would still be as far as it is. 

The Will Left to Itself Ad Nihilo

We must introduce another element into our conception of original, or essential, free will. For many people, this will already appear implicit, but just in case it is not perfectly clear—all that we have said about the finite nature of the creaturely will includes mutability. The created will is entirely an effect. It is not Being in itself, but becoming, and unless sustained by Being, that becoming is what Augustine called a privation of being. In layman’s terms, it is not a “becoming for the better,” but a becoming of would lead to a defect in that which is otherwise creaturely perfection. Again, let us hear from the Confession:

“Man, in his state of innocency, had freedom and power to will and to do that which is good and well-pleasing to God, but yet mutably, so that he might fall from it” (IX.2).

Those are crucial words. And it is really a matter of common sense when we think it through. How do we explain Adam’s change of will? Let’s at least start with this: he was utterly capable of it! His will was no more immutable than any other part of his being. We somehow get the notion that it is more complicated in this case because it is not merely will involved but also goodness. His will did not have access to any other option but good options. No doubt. That does add a dimension of great complexity in one sense. But it will not change this fact about the Adam’s changeability. Unless he is sustained in that original state, he has no more ability to sustain himself than he did to create himself in the first place.

In Canons of Dort, 3rd Point of Doctrine, Article 1 there is expressed the twin pillars of that first sin of man: “by the instigation of the devil and by his own free will.” So does this most “Calvinistic” account of Adam’s sin deny free will to Adam? Not in the least. For one, would anyone deny that God could have eliminated either the serpent or prevented Adam from his mutability becoming mutation? No serious Christian would want to deny that to God’s power. So one is left with the words of the answer to Q.13, BEING LEFT TO the freedom of their own will. 

We have hinted, in passing, at the larger Augustinian scheme for tracing out the origin of evil. In doing so, we are not pretending to provide anything like an “instant replay,” much less to answer every question that could ever be asked about it. We are not presuming to show what “it looked like” in either Adam or in Lucifer before he became the devil. What we do insist is that the Augustinian account is the only that does not land one in either Self-Creation or in metaphysical Dualism. These are not Christian theistic options. Consequently, what follows is a 10-point summary of reasoning more drawn out in Augustine’s On Free Choice of the Will, written in 397 as part of the larger body of his Anti-Manichean writings.

(1) God has indeed ordained all things: Isa. 45:7, Rom. 11:36, Eph. 1:11.

(2) God never creates, condones, or commits evil;

(3) God hates all sin;

(4) God created all things ex nihilo, that is, “out of nothing,” from which it follows that all creatures are mutable;

(5) God has the ability to withdraw his grace, by any degree, to any creature;

(6) Thus there are two ways in which God causes (or ordains): the one is efficiently, or direct creation; the other is permissively, or the withdrawal of a specific operation, such that a secondary cause is reduced in being by deprivation in that which it is already. 

(7) If God withdraws such grace from a creature with a nature ex nihilo, it has no ability to be anything other than the nature that it is, ad nihilo, or in other words back “toward nothing.”

(8) Evil is not a substance, but the deprivation of goodness or being;

(9) A being with free will is but one species of such a reality (Premises 5-6), and so, as grace is withdrawn, the nature of such a will will will privation of being willingly, and that entirely of its own nature. That is, the evil will is that will inclined, of itself, toward this deprivation of being. 

(10) Therefore it follows that God ordained sin sinlessly, causing it without creating, committing, or condoning it, but rather willing its being for a time and a use. 

I have always used the analogy of a light switch to help simplify what is obviously among the deepest of mysteries we can encounter. When we turn a light switch to an “on” position and an “off” position, in both states we are equally causing the state of affairs of light and darkness. However, there is one crucial difference (and this follows from Premise 8 above). The energy of light (with the “off” command) is not replaced by a positive substance, but rather there is a withdrawal of substance.

In the same way, when God decrees (not efficiently by creating a new thing, but permissively by withdrawal of operative grace, or being) that Lucifer or Adam fall, he need not create any evil principle in them, but it only requires his causal (sustaining) grace to be withdrawn to the precise extent required for their metaphysical deprivation to become moral depravity. Hence Adam’s mutability becomes the presentation of an evil disposition to himself without any necessity of a “new substance” created by God. 

Contrary to how many who are new to these concepts often wrongly articulate things, “permissive will” is not apart from God's decretive will. It is distinct, but it is not divorced. It is a function of it. In permissive causality, God is still ordaining. He is still in control of every detail. But here is the difference: Where God’s efficient causality creates what is not, his permissive causality lets go of what is. Here the more gradual “light dimmer,” rather than the strict “off” command, is helpful to consider, as Adam is no longer sustained in perfection, yet on the other hand, neither is his existence altogether annihilated. 

It should be noted that Hodge had no place for Augustine’s theory, seeing it as typical of the philosophers who always “confounding physical and moral good.”3 Interestingly, Hodge allows that Augustine did not make this particular mistake, seeing how this was the crux of his case against the Manicheans who did treat evil as a substance. At the end of the day, all that Hodge winds up reproving Augustine’s logic for is that it was “philosophical.”

Along those same odd lines—in a Systematic Theology I course at RTS in the Fall 2016 semester—I personally asked John Frame, during a break in the lectures, what he thought of Augustine’s argument. The reason I did so is because Frame himself came close to articulating at least the aspect of the efficient and permissive causation, and (rightly) took issue with the way in which the whole “author of evil” language is often used in order to “get God off the hook.” My mistake was asking that rather than whether Paul implied the same in Romans 8:20. The response was somewhat the same as Hodge’s. We do not want to accept a view because it is philosophical, but because Scripture says so.

Lost in the shuffle of such biblicism (whether from Hodge or Frame) are questions such as: 1. Is it valid and sound? 2. Is it consistent with Scripture? 3. Is it profound in explanation? 4. Is it relevant to refuting heretical views? If we are able to answer Yes to any or all from 1 to 4, then why would deny ourselves the best extra-biblical tools and expressions, when, in point of fact, we will only use our own extra-biblical tools and expressions in the avoidance of that which is “philosophical”?

The Will in its Free Fall

There is a word used here, in both the question and its answer—the word ESTATE. The will is not a separate reality. It exists in a certain state. And at the transition between Genesis 2 to 3, what we are witnessing is a transference of that will from one state to another state. We mentioned in passing the fourfold state of man. Here we can observe the first two. There was Adam and Eve in the state of innocence, and then there was Adam and Eve in the state of sin. As we have seen, the will has an objective nature, and that nature changes from its original state to its fallen state because a crucial part of that nature is accidental and not essential. As a creaturely will, even that original will was mutable. Now we still call it a “will” in both states (so there is continuity in the essence of man), but it is a sinful or fallen will (so there is discontinuity as well).

To say that they, and we, FELL FROM this estate is to say that what changed was man’s state of being. 

In answering the question: ‘What is good about the will?’ we may remember both from Question 1 about man’s chief end and Question 7 about the decrees of God, that it all comes together as one ultimate end of God’s glory. In other words, all creates things (including the human will) are what they are because of what they say about God.

So, in Augustinian language, the being of the will is the good of the will, namely, its directedness toward God. Think about what a will does: It chooses things. But are all things that a will can choose equal? Not at all! In fact, in his First Epsitle, John teaches us a principle of the relationship between the will (or desires) and its choices. He says, 

“And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever” (1 Jn. 2:17). 

It is true that John uses the word “desire” in one half of the contrast and the word “will” in the second half, and that the “will” being spoken of is God’s, not man’s. But if we think through it, the contrast is about what happens to the soul of a man, depending on what he has “set his heart on,” so to speak. A good will lasts because it wills what is good. It becomes more like what it wills—eternal, immutable, infinite good. A bad will corrupts as it sinks itself into the corruptible. A bad will disintegrates as it integrates into itself that which is temporal and mutable and impure. For Augustine, a good will is a “will by which we seek to live rightly and honorably and to come to the highest wisdom.”4

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1. Turretin, Institutes, I.8.1.4.

2. Turretin, Institutes, I.8.1.6.

3. Hodge, Systematic Theology, II:158.

4. Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, XII.83.