³² and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” ³⁶ So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. –John 8:32, 36

¹⁵ For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!”  ¹⁸ For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. ¹⁹ For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. ²⁰ For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope ²¹ that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. ²² For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. ²³ And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. ²⁴ For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? ²⁵ But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. –Romans 8:15, 18-25

¹⁵ He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. ¹⁶ For by^[f] him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. ¹⁷ And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. ¹⁸ And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. ¹⁹ For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, ²⁰ and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. –Colossians 1:15-20

I wish I had the time and space to do a proper exegesis of the above passages, but for now they will simply have to hover in the background; I’ll leave it to the reader to discern how they might relate to the rest of what I write in this post.

Freewill has been a matter of deep consternation in the history of the church; not to mention in the history of the Philosophy departments on the university campuses. Whether it be the infamous Augustine/Pelagius binary (the historical particularities notwithstanding); Luther/Erasmus; Calvin/Pighius; Dort/Remonstrants; so on and so forth. While this locus has occupied the minds of many, and still does, I want to argue that it is not a genuinely biblical theological point of doctrinal consideration. In order to aid my argument, I will appeal to a reading of Bonhoeffer’s anthropology (or Theanthropology) which will point up how a genuine doctrine of human freedom vis-à-vis human agency actually functions theologically in the biblical text. Following, I will reflect further on Bonhoeffer’s anthropology, per the report of his reader, and also make a note on how theological ideation, in general, is what’s at stake in these discussions more than is getting personal biographies of past theologians completely right (even though this has its own relative significance). Here is Rachel Muers on Bonhoeffer and freedom:

Freedom is one of the key terms Bonhoeffer uses to specify what it means to be human. In discussing Genesis 1:26 he specifically locates the image of God in human freedom: ‘To say that in humankind God creates the image of God on earth means that humankind is like the Creator in that it is free’ (DBWE 3: 62). At several points—and in terms that we shall discuss later because of the problems they raise for contemporary theological anthropology—he contrasts freedom with necessity as the distinctive mark of human life over against non-human animal life (see DBWE 6: 196).

In the context I have outlined, however, in which the human person is given his or her ‘boundary’ by the other, and this very boundary is what makes the person, just what does human freedom actually mean? Clearly it cannot mean the freedom of unlimited self-assertion or self-creation. In fat, for Bonhoeffer, the attempt to exercise that kind of freedom, to be ‘like God’, to live without limits, is at the heart of sinful existence (DBWE 3: 116). Moreover, and linked to this, in Bonhoeffer’s account freedom is not a built-in human capacity at all. There is nothing about me, taken in isolation, that makes me free: not my rationality, not my will, not even my ‘thrownness’ into the world.

For Bonhoeffer, the freedom proper to humanity is freedom in relationship, both to God and to the neighbour in community. As creaturely freedom, it is received before it is possessed or exerted; it is ‘freedom for’ or ‘freedom in relation to’ another, rather than ‘freedom to’ do something. Insofar as it is ‘freedom from’ anything, it is freedom from the endless circle of the ‘heart turned in on itself’—Luther’s cor curvuum in se (see DBWE 2: 46)—the attempt to secure one’s own existence and meaning, perhaps the prisoner’s ‘lonely question’, to which the sinful human being, excluded from community, is condemned. Again, Creation and Fall makes it clear that this freedom—precisely as freedom-in-relation, freedom-towards-the-other and freedom-for-God—is creaturely freedom and not only redeemed freedom. It is the freedom for which humanity is made, but this is not a freedom to which people ‘reading from the middle’ have access apart from redemption in Christ.

The Imago Dei—i.e. that in humanity which reflects God—is thus given in the relationship of humanity to God that begins as a relationship of God to humanity, the free act of the creator. A key point to note here, of course, is that God’s own freedom, seen in creation and redemption, is freedom-for and freedom-in relation. Humanity images God in receiving freedom-for-God and freedom-for-the-other; and as God calls humanity into relationship and humanity responds, God’s own way of being free is present within creation. In a telling and undeveloped aside, Bonhoeffer suggests that this is the meaning of the patristic texts on the ‘indwelling of the Trinity in Adam’ (DBWE 3: 64): God’s own ‘freedom-in-relation’, God’s triune being, is imaged in human life not just because the human being in some way resembles God, but because human life receives and reflects the freedom that God has.[1]

I submit the above to you as the biblical way to think human freedom vis-à-vis God’s freedom. The problem typical discussions have, in regard to freewill, is that they ALWAYS go beyond Scripture and its reality in Christ; and instead they start having a philosophical discussion that has no ‘point of contact’ with the ‘Scriptural witness.’ Philosophical discussions about human agency and freewill, by definition, think humanity in an abstract manner; or we might want to say in a ‘purely profane’ manner. In other words, to think human freewill in abstraction from humanity’s groundedness in God’s image for humanity in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, is not to think from God’s Self-revelation to humanity about humanity, but to think humanity from an independent humanity (from God’s for us) and then, post-factum project that onto a discussion about Godness. This mode, or hermeneutic, is to attempt to speak for God, instead of to think of God Deus dixit, after ‘God has spoken’ Himself for us in His Word for us (pro nobis), in Jesus Christ.

An Aside on Historical Biography and the Popular

I just watched an interview with Dr. Ali Bonner via vlog done by host, Warren McGrew. Bonner recently released her book The Myth of Pelagianism. It was an informative interview, and the history discussed is important and very interesting. But I am afraid that McGrew, and those of like-mind, become too enamored with the biographical history itself rather than the theological ideation under consideration. Whether or not Pelagius, for example, would affirm what has come to be known as Pelagianism, and he probably would, is beside the point. The issue is whether or not what this doctrine, which has come to be known as Pelagianism, if it actually has correspondence to something like what we just discussed with reference to Bonhoeffer’s understanding of human freedom. McGrew, Leighton Flowers&company do not seem to grasp this, and continue to suppose that simply because Pelagius’ thinking might have been considered the ‘orthodox’ teaching at one point, that this does not mean it should have been per the Scriptural realities. Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda. There must be greater depth, a broader perspective deployed if these folks want to avoid the errors of the Socinians et al. Soli Deo Gloria

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[1] Rachel Muers, “Anthropology,” in Michael Mawson and Philip G. Ziegler eds., The Oxford Handbook of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 202-03.