Reconciling God’s Sovereignty With Man’s Free Will, Part Two
The Historical Perspective regarding the Relationship
Few theological tensions have stirred as much discussion, reflection, and controversy as the relationship between God’s sovereignty and human responsibility. I distinctly remember debating this with my undergraduate peers, and have yet to experience a conversation where one side of the relationship doesn’t need to be addressed. How can God be absolutely sovereign—directing all things according to His will—while simultaneously holding human beings accountable for their choices? Is there a way to faithfully affirm both truths without compromising either?
We will seek to explore this profound and perennial question through historical, theological, and biblical lenses. Drawing on the wisdom of Church Fathers, the insights of the Reformers, and the witness of Scripture, we will examine how these seemingly paradoxical realities are compatible and essential to a robust Christian worldview.
Whether you are a student of theology, a pastor, or simply a thoughtful believer, this series invites you to wrestle with divine mystery—not to unravel it, but to embrace it. For in doing so, we do not diminish God’s glory or man’s dignity, but rather stand in awe of the God who ordains and empowers, who governs and invites, and who reveals truth not in contradiction, but in divine harmony.
In this second post, we will address the historical viewpoint that developed over the life of the early and Reformation-era church.
Historical and Theological Perspectives
Within history and theology at large, the conversation and interplay between divine sovereignty and human responsibility has sat at the forefront of minds both great and small. From Augustine to Calvin, Pelagius to Arminius, and denomination to denomination, there has been no little disagreement as to what each means for the researcher. Each researcher’s findings seemingly build upon another as the prevalent issues of the era evolved and thus call for contextualization, necessitating an overview of the development of the discussion. The diversity of viewpoints has precipitated into questions about how holding divine sovereignty and human responsibility applies to the everyman and how it works out in the practice of certain spiritual disciplines.
The Historical Conversation
In the life of the Christian church, the prominent leaders driving and developing ecclesiastical doctrine have all affirmed divine sovereignty.[1] However, determining the extent of each side’s reach within the life of man, both believing and unbelieving, has persisted and progressed significantly from the 4th Century into the modern era. While the discussion initiated with larger, more definitive points of contention, such as the inherent goodness of man, the present iteration contains more nuance and delicacy, such as the nature of God’s involvement in his creation. Many observations can be made regarding each unique section of church history, yet the most visible contributions can be identified within the Patristic period and the Reformation.
Church Fathers
During the Patristic period, as the early church was establishing its doctrinal stances, the two major figures that drove the debate regarding divine sovereignty and human responsibility were Augustine and Pelagius in the 4th century. Pelagius’s belief centered around man being able to choose without aid to always obey God and live without sin.[2] He placed a great deal of value and emphasis on what man could do, which led to the conflict with Augustine. Augustine, on the other hand, believed two main things: post-Fall total depravity of humanity, and absolute sovereignty of God.[3] In this iteration of the debate, the two figures argued from a soteriological standpoint, pitting monergism, or “the position that ‘the grace of God is the only efficient cause in beginning and effecting conversion,’” against synergism, or “divine and human cooperation in conversion.”[4] Yet, this disagreement did not stop with salvation, but moved further into how mankind lived on either side of the conversion experience, whether God’s grace was necessary for adherence to his decrees.
Reformation
During the Reformation, as Protestantism formed against the traditions of the Catholic Church, two major oppositions formed the debate between divine sovereignty and human responsibility: Luther against Erasmus in the 16thcentury, and followers of Calvin against followers of Arminius in the early 17th century. As the father of the Reformation, Martin Luther’s theology was in the same vein of Augustine and was based on grace and faith alone, beginning with salvation and carrying into the everyday operation of the believer. His opponent, Erasmus of Rotterdam, in a more semi-Pelagian stance, held that grace was needed for salvation, but there must be an act of man so that the grace can be received.[5] The reception of grace, therefore, extends conceptually into daily life, where it must be believed that the gift sustaining grace can be denied. These thoughts he shared in De Libera Arbitrio, translated On Free Will. Such disagreement led to Luther’s authoring of De Servo Arbitrio, often translated as The Enslaved Will or On The Bondage Of The Will, in rebuttal. The nature of the anthropological versus theological debate asks the question: which carries more significance, God’s will or man’s freedom?
As the Reformation progressed and followings around the major leaders grew after the leaders died, what became apparent was, as Noll writes, “the presence of separate Protestant churches in separate parts of Europe… separated not only by geography but also by subtle, but important, differences in Christian teaching that almost no one had noticed so long as their attention had been fixed on reforming the whole Western church.”[6] From this viewpoint emerged John Calvin’s and Jacob Arminius’s followers, whose disagreement came to a head with the Synod of Dort. Leading the charge on either side was Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor in Geneva, and the Remonstrants, a group of Dutch clergymen and laypeople following Arminius’s tradition.[7] The two camps’ main point of disagreement was over the implications of the monergistic supralapsarianism and infralapsarianism. On what the two imply, Olson writes, “Supralapsarians regarded God’s predestining decree as applying to humans as creatures completely apart from their also being sinners, while infralapsarians regarded God’s predestining decree as applying only to humans as fallen sinners. In either case, however, both the saved and the damned are such as they are because God has so decided it from eternity.”[8] While the Calvinist camp affirmed such doctrinal statements, the Arminian side refuted them on the grounds of their implying that God authored sin, thus narrowing the argument not to whether or not the doctrine of predestination was biblical, but to what extent it was applied. When viewed in light of the argument at hand, it raises the question of whether or not all of the actions men take in life are fully authored and determined by God, sinful or not.
[1] Chad Owen Brand, “The Work of God: Creation and Providence,” in A Theology for the Church (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2014), 236.
[2] Roger E. Olson, The Story of Christian Theology: Twenty Centuries of Tradition & Reform (Downer Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 268.
[3] Ibid., 270.
[4] C. George Fry, “Monergism” and “Synergism,” ed. Daniel J. Treier and Walter A. Elwell, Evangelical Dictionary of Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic: A Division of Baker Publishing Group, 2017), 559, 852-853.
[5] Aku Visala and Olli-Pekka Vainio, "Erasmus versus Luther: A Contemporary Analysis of the Debate on Free Will," Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 62, no. 3 (2020): 314, https://doi.org/10.1515/nzsth-2020-0016.
[6] Mark A. Noll, Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity, Third Edition. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), 181.
[7] Olson, The Story of Christian Theology: Twenty Centuries of Tradition & Reform, 454-457, 463.
[8] Ibid., 459.