Love and Free Will

[John The Baptist]

I’m sure most of you have heard something like this:

“God gives us free will because love can only exist in a free will relationship”

How do you normally handle this? I tend to go to Christology, particularly the impeccability of Christ. Christ could not sin, yet he loved and obeyed the Father. Perhaps that is not the best approach, considering the particulars of Chalcedon Christology, I do not know.

I figure this type of thinking is starting off on the wrong foot, but I can’t quite put it in to words. Any help is much appreciated.

In Christ,

 

[RamistThomist]

Even non-Calvinists like Norman Geisler reject the argument that love demands a free reciprocal relationship.

Your comment on Christology is good. It even applies to the doctrine of God. In such a free relationship, could the essence of God change? Obviously not.

 

[Ulster Fry]

Yes, everyone seems to lose their minds when it comes to love, especially when it comes to the Trinity. It causes supposedly rigorous analytic philosophers to throw their own craft out the window. For example, Swinburne's argument for the Trinity: Love requires two people, but another person is required because it's better to share that love with another person. Except, even in human relationships that doesn't actually make any sense. I mean, I certainly don't share my marriage with anyone else...

The point is that no arguments are actually made for these sorts of comments. It's just a series of assertions that, when actually analysed, don't make any sense whatsoever. It's the exact same here with the love requiring free will stuff. Well, depending on what we mean by free will, that rules out love shared between an infant and his/her parents, or the relationship between someone severely mentally impaired and his/her family, and so on.

Then there's the problem of libertarian free will in itself, if we are suggesting that the will is entirely disconnected from one's desires or beliefs, in that it can act entirely contrary to such desires or beliefs. I'm not sure how one would be more loving with such a faculty.

 

[Jerusalem Blade]

Hello John,

You said re something you heard, “God gives us free will because love can only exist in a free will relationship.”

The trouble with that is, since the fall no human can truly love. We are wretched slaves to the will of Satan (2 Tim 2:26; Eph 2:2,3; 2 Cor 4:4), self-centered, and unless the Lord regenerates us we are loveless. When He sets us free, He gives us a new heart – and His indwelling Spirit – and our new heart, alive in His Spirit is filled with His love, and the love we have is the love of God, for such is the spirit of the family we are now in. In Christ I have a free will, and it is because it is God that worketh in me both to will and to do of His good pleasure (Phil 2:13).

In Christ there is freedom; outside of Him there is none. And it is God that has placed us in Him (1 Cor 1:30).

 

[MyCrows]

It's amazing how many theological problems spring out of a denial of our bondage to sin.

Once someone comes to deny all mankind being slaves to sin, and not free in regards to righteousness, it leads to all kinds of distortions.