The year is 523 A.D. and Boethius, a man of scholarship and one of the highest officials in the Roman government, sits in jail awaiting his execution. He is a man who loves truth and justice, yet conspirators have ruined him. He turns to Philosophy for comfort. Boethius personifies Philosophy as a spiritual being, and her presence calms the tumult in his mind. Out of his misfortune, Boethius constructs one of the best-loved books, The Consolation of Philosophy. Although it might seem that Boethius is privileging Philosophy over God, she comes to help him understand God’s love. In a series of dialogs, Boethius creates a powerful argument for God’s redeeming love and unfailing goodness.

Boethius, through Philosophy, tackles the problem of God’s foreknowledge as a stumbling block to human free will. Philosophy asserts that rational beings must be able to make choices, but she also says that those humans who give themselves over to vice lose the ability to choose:

[They] are, as it were, the captives of their own freedom. Nevertheless, God, who beholds all things from eternity, foresees all these things in his providence and disposes each according to its predestined merits. (104)

This argument bothers Boethius, who sees it as "a hopeless conflict between divine foreknowledge of all things and freedom of the human will" (104–5). If God sees everything before it happens, "it is necessary either that things which are going to happen be foreseen by God, or that what God foresees will in fact happen; and either way the freedom of the human will is destroyed" (106). Philosophy patiently marshals the evidence for human will.

To God, past, present, and future all exist on the same plane, whereas man must experience time. Just as the human ability to perceive and understand an object does not change it, so God’s ability to see everything at once does not change the human ability to make decisions: "whatever is known is known according to the nature of the knower, and not according to its own nature…" (115). Furthermore, "you will rightly consider it to be not a foreknowledge of future events, but knowledge of a never changing present. For this reason, divine knowledge is called providence, rather than prevision…" (116). Thus, Philosophy argues, God’s ability to see everything as illumined by his infinite mind does not preclude man’s ability to choose within his own space of time: "this divine foreknowledge does not change the nature and properties of things" (117).

Throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, church theologians relied on the elegant arguments of Boethius to explain the mysteries of God’s foreknowledge. However, arguments kept arising. One of the great thinkers and preachers of the Reformation, John Calvin, argued powerfully for the idea that God chose his elect to be saved. The seventeenth-century Puritans, our most direct religious forefathers in America, based much of their belief system on Calvin’s arguments.

The Puritans staked their claim to a place in the New World on the idea that God predestined them to be saved. However, before long the Puritans were arguing. Those who believed most strongly in election by God argued that humans could do nothing to save themselves. Within seven years of settling Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, these "predestined" began to argue over its meaning. The charismatic Ann Hutchinson, a first settler, became the most vociferous proponent of pure grace, asserting that ministers who talked about good behavior had become guilty of the Arminian doctrine of salvation through works. Eventually, she caused such tension that she was tried for heresy. The doctrine of election had already split the community.

Given the human need to act on one’s own volition, it is not surprising that the Arminian view gradually took hold, if not theologically, at least in practice. One of America’s most famous theologians of the eighteenth century, Jonathan Edwards, best known for his sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," tried to get back to the doctrine of salvation by pure election. In his journal, he recorded his struggle with accepting the doctrine of predestination—God’s sovereignty. Edwards reported that he was always fearful, especially during thunder storms, when he imagined God’s wrath aimed at him.

Finally, one day, the truth and beauty of God’s sovereignty came to Edwards: "The doctrine of God’s sovereignty has very often appeared, an exceeding pleasant, bright and sweet doctrine to me: and absolute sovereignty is what I love to ascribe to God" (467). After he fully accepted predestination, he completely lost all fear, even enjoying storms that had at first terrified him. Strangely enough, though Edwards promoted the doctrine of predestination, he preached so strongly about the terrors of separation from God that his listeners flocked to repent and join churches. What had started in a secure belief in the beauty of God’s sovereignty ironically turned into mass conversions in which people by the thousands chose salvation.

What do we Adventists do with this examination of free will versus predestination? Our lessons for the quarter promote the idea of free will as standard doctrine, so the lessons function more as reminder than as argument that covers territory in dispute. However, we live in a secular world in which free will comes into question. We now know a great deal about how genes affect our choices. Couple genetics with environment and we start moving toward a view that puts our free choice into question. Science becomes the new arbiter of free will versus predestination.

Thus, it is important to be firmly grounded, not only in the biblical arguments for free will, but also in the historical trajectory of the free will versus predestination philosophies.

Works Cited

Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. Richard Green. New York: Macmillan, 1962.

Edwards, Jonathan. "Personal Narrative." The Norton Anthology of American Literature, vol. A. ed. Nina Baym, et al. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003.

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