Hello, I am have recently embraced Calvinism as true. If I was in a conversation with an Arminian/inconsistent Arminian, and they said Adam had free will in the garden. How would I respond to this? Is the understanding that humans did originally have free will, but lost it in the fall? And how did God work out his plan in the garden exactly? I'd appreciate it if a more experienced Calvinist could explain their understand to me. Thank you.
God is the
primary efficient cause of man’s actions. Man is the
secondary efficient cause of his actions. Therefore, there are two efficient causes of human actions. After Adam, man’s "free will" (the
liberty of spontaneity: the ability to choose according to one's greatest inclinations at the moment one chooses) piggybacks on the free will of God. All born-again men are able to sin or not to sin. All lost men are able to only sin more or sin less.
Two propositions result from this:
1. Adam ate the apple of
his own free will.
2. God decreed that Adam would eat the apple
of his own free will.
Before his sin, Adam was
able to sin and able not to sin, but he did not yet have a sin nature. This is quite important: His nature was not neutral. There was nothing in his nature that in any way prompted him to sin; rather, his nature was righteous and he walked in righteous. He was not yet glorified however and Adam had the capability of sinning (and did), but we must not be mistaken about what this meant for him.
This did not mean that Adam was confronted with all sorts of temptations to sin or situations in which he had to choose not to sin before his encounter with the devil: mutable, earthy, Adam walked in righteousness, according to his nature,
until he was confronted with Satan's temptation and succumbed. In fact all sin was comprehended in this sin, that is, that Adam sinned in every way by sinning in this way.
God does not know this particular evil as merely a possible evil, but as an actual evil because He decreed it to be so. It is not the case that God is the
efficient cause and Adam is the
instrumental cause of Adam’s sin. Both Adam and God are the efficient causes of Adam’s eating of the apple. Adam is not the
instrument of God’s sinful action. Rather God is the
efficient cause of Adam's free action (a freedom which is good, so established by a perfectly good God's decree), which results in the sin of Adam.
No doubt it may then be asked,
If there are two efficient causes of Adam’s eating the apple, why is the primary efficient cause (God) not responsible for the sin, while the secondary efficient cause (Adam) is responsible for the sin?
The proper answer follows:
The motive which God has in actively permitting sin and the motive which man has in committing sin are radically different. Many are deceived in these issues because they fail to consider that
God wills righteously those things which men do wickedly.
But we must always remind ourselves that God contracts no defilement or criminality from such agency. God is just in all His ways, and holy in all His works. While everything that occurs in God’s universe finds its account in God's positive ordering and active concurrence, yet the
moral quality of the deed, considered in itself, is rooted in the
moral character of the subordinate agent (Adam), acting in the circumstances and under the motives operative in each instance. God is not the author (the
doer) of sin. Sin is embraced in His ordaining; it is
accomplished in His
providence. Yet Adam's sin and all sin is embraced in His decree and effected in His providence in such a way as to ensure that blame and guilt attach to the perpetrators of wrong and to them alone.
Blame attaches to actions, and actions are characterized by intentions. The truth of propositions 1 and 2 above includes the fact that
Adam and God perform quite different actions:
1. Adam intentionally eats a fruit; God does not eat a fruit.
2. Adam knowingly breaks a divine command; God does not break one of His own commands.
3. God commanded that Adam should not eat the fruit; God did not command that He should not ordain (decree) that Adam should eat the fruit.
A clear biblical
locus classicus for this sort of dual agency is the story of Joseph in Genesis... where Joseph says, “
you intended it for evil, but God intended it for good."
Even if it cannot be shown how it is that God and man can be the cause of free actions, it does not follow that it is a contradiction. Moreso, per His decree to establish the
liberty of spontaneity,
God is required to cause free actions.
God does not simply cause the existence of free will apart from the actions of free will. God’s causing (
necessarily, freely, or
contingently) the acts of free will is God’s providential sustaining of human free will (liberty of spontaneity). This is what it means by
man’s free will piggybacks on God’s free will.
Nor is it the case that God’s free will overrides man’s free will. God does not overpower or compete with man’s free will. Again, the existence of human free will depends on God’s causing not just the
fact of free will, but the
acts of free will. That is how God sustains free will. For if God did not do so, humans would not be free creatures.
