…seems to be a theme of many evangelical preachers. On first glance, this seems totally reasonable-as God is all perfect, having him direct your life would be one way to stay on the moral path. But, we have the gift of free will-man is free to behave as he wants, knowing (of course) that many behaviors are bad, and in direct conflict with God’s will. So, the question is: if you indeed ask God to actively manage your life, are you not refusing the gift of free will-sort of regressing to the state of man before the fall? And isn’t that what God had in mind all along (humans capable of sin, freely choosing God’s way instead)? Help me make sense of this! Is abrogating free will an act of love or of selfishness?
In the strictest sense, you are abdicating your responsibilities to the world you ACTUALLY live in, as opposed to the one you might, maybe, someday HOPE to live in. After you no longer live. The logic fails in an epic fashion. Further, while in the opinion of some, free will = sin, it also brings everything good that has ever been, so I think inwardly you know the answer, you’d just like someone to back you up…
This sounds very interesting, and perfect for Great Debates IMHO. Either way, I am looking fwd to what people say.
What kills me is giving The Almighty credit for everything good that you do or that happens to you, but if you fail or something ill befalls you, it’s your fault. That smacks of abdicating responsibilty – but whose?
OK, I’m not an evangelical. So I don’t know if I’ll get this right. I’ll try to put it in a sort of generic Christian way, but wish me luck.
God gave us free will. We can use that to choose whatever we want to do.
Our natural tendency, as imperfect human beings, is to choose mostly less-than-good things. We tend to prefer to spend our time being gluttonous and lustful and watching TV, rather than, say, reading Shakespeare and feeding the hungry–even though watching TV doesn’t make us as happy as feeding the hungry usually does.
God gave us commandments that will help us to be happy, and a Savior who will bring us back to Heaven.
To choose to do God’s will is not very easy. It requires work. But it also leads to more happiness, since God knows what’s good for you better than you do. He’ll usually tell you to do something uncomfortable and difficult. Doing those things helps you become more like the sort of person God wants you to be, and incidentally makes you more free.
A person who asks God to manage his life still makes the choices. At every turn, you’re still having to choose again, and again, and again. I’m finding this a bit difficult to explain, but a fantasy book I read the other day got it right.*
Here’s a little analogy. I have a daughter in 2nd grade. She likes to read a lot, especially mystery stories. She’s not such a huge fan of doing grammar homework (which we just now finished and I really ought to be doing math instead of typing). But I know that doing grammar homework will help her in the future; if she doesn’t learn to use her language well, she’ll be handicapped in a way. So if I tell her to do her grammar homework and she chooses to obey me, even though it isn’t fun, when she’s grown she will be able to choose to do a ton of cool things she would be unable to do otherwise; she could decide to be an author or a lawyer or any one of a zillion things she could not be without a good grasp of English. I tell her to do grammar out of love and a vision of the future that she cannot see; she obeys me out of love and a confidence that I know what I’m talking about. But at any point, in any single day, she can decide not to obey me and do grammar–and then she’ll of course fall behind and lose a little bit that she could have gained. If she continues to choose not to do grammar, she will eventually not be able to choose to go to Harvard and become a policy analyst in 2030–but at any point, she can turn around and start choosing grammar homework again. At some time in the future, she’ll grow up more and I’ll start handing control of her education over to her–but for now, she’s too little for that.
That probably didn’t make a ton of sense. But at any rate, there is no such thing as a person who completely manages to give his will over to God and always do what God tells him to do. You’re always going to fall down and keep choosing things that aren’t God’s will–you’ll snap at your wife or whatever. So you have to keep turning around and trying again. And at no time are you going to be relieved of the duty of using your free will to choose; I suspect that it’s going to be rather the contrary.
And now, it is my duty to go have my daughter do math. If she doesn’t know the difference between a pint and a quart, she will never be able to choose to be a Cordon Bleu chef!
*Diana Wynne Jones’ YA novel Crown of Dalemark, if you want to go read it. But it’s the culminating book in a quartet; read the others first. 
Moving thread from IMHO to Great Debates.
Bringing the OP a bit further, it is not just following God, but coming to God and saying I don’t want to do it my own way, I don’t want to be my own god, I want you as my God and I would like you to take me as your person. This is the free will decision, the one God gives us to make.
It is acknowledgment that the serpent’s idea that eat of this and you will be ‘as God’ to be a really bad idea.
Really? Or is it saying “God will provide me a place to live, a car to drive and everything I need if I just sit here and wait for it and believe hard enough”
I suppose, now that this is in GD, that we’ll need to know in what sense the OP meant “giving control” because sure ‘God’ may be the creator of all the known universe, but for the people buying rather than selling, god sucks at economics.
God gives us free will so that we might reject free will?
This sounds a lot like the “theist-deist” question to me, or the long version: God created the universe, but you make all the choices and there is no divine intervention vs. God gives you life and controls every aspect of it and it’s all scripted and nothing you do is a result of your own choices, but rather the will of god. The pilgrims largely believed in the deist version of things, but most Christians believe the theist version and consider deists to be closet atheists.
Yes it is, more or less. Prosperity theology. Although sending money to Preacher Bob and spreading the Word to other people to send money to Preacher Bob is generally considered better than just sitting and believing. Although people believe that too; I recall an incident when some parents sued a school district for carrying The Wizard of Oz because Dorothy was told that she’d had the power to return home via the Ruby Slippers all along at the end; that meant that she could help herself instead of waiting for God to do it, which was sinful.
That sounds very close to the tripe pedelled in The Secret. Except, of course, that’s a well-known scientific principle!*
- YMMV
I get pretty uncomfortable with the language sometimes. I meet people or know people eager to say “God led me to do or say X” or “God moved me to share this with you”
I think we must make it clear that even people who are inviting God to guide their lives are making their own choices and must take full responsibility for those choices and their consequences. Saying, “I had a strong feeling that I should do this” is that kind of language. Being to sure “God moved me to do this” bothers me.
I do think we can strive to tune in to inner connection with practice. Heightened awareness, communing with the Holy Spirit, what ever you call it. It’s not inviting some foreign entity to come and control us and giving up free will. IMO it’s tuning in to a spirit within that has always been within us that will help guide us to better choices.
It means you still get to make things up as you go along, but sound so much better because you can say God led you to do it.
Interesting post.
I think it is extremely common here to confuse free will with self will.
According to the bible, at least, mankind was given the gift of free will; the ability to choose one’s life course. Adam had it. Eve had it. Either could have chosen to follow self will, or to subordinate self will to do the will of their Father (creator)
As the best example of this (although there are hundreds in the bible; the bible is a primer on “self”.) is Jesus Christ. From Matthew 4, after his baptism-----where he is asked to choose whether he will follow his God or submit to Satan-----to the last night of life----where he said, “Let not my will, but your’s take place…”----his free will was never abrogated. He utilized free will to subordinate self will.
Self will is not free will. In fact free will is required to reject self will. It is the difference between living for “self” (read: selfishness) and living for God [and his purpose]. (read: selflessness)
All of which requires free will.
Close…
God gives us free will so that we might reject self will.
Presuming for a moment that there actually was a god, and that you are one of the lucky few to have gotten a magic hotline into his head, and that you cannot possibly make mistaken about his will, and that everything he wills is guaranteed to be the best thing for the benefit of you and those you care about, then you would be well-advised to always do what he wills, from a purely practical standpoint.
At least one of those conditions is impossible and at least two others seem highly improbable, but there you have it.
I don’t get this.
You seem to be defining “free will” as something like “the ability to choose what to do”, and “self will” as “that which we want to do”. Surely, if we choose to give up our free will to God, then it is because that is what our self will is also? We aren’t giving up what we want to do; we are following it.
The same goes for the general argument of giving up our will to God. We are not. If we choose to give up our will, then logically it is because we want to - and thus we are following our own will just as much as anyone who does not follow God’s. We are doing exactly what we want to do.
Some may have this opinion, however it is not supported in the bible.
One never abidicates their “reponsibilities to the world.” On the contrary.
One lives their life consistent with god’s purpose and requirements, all of which require a great deal of personal responsibility.
Rather, one uses his free will to do the will of another. (God) IOW, one chooses a life course that is consistent with God’s wishes, instead of selfish desires.
This strikes me as a distinction without a difference. Do you view these things as separate or is one a subset of the other? Is self will not free?
(I leave the original question open to kanicbird in case his theology differs from yours.)