mondar said:
Since free will is not a biblical term except for the "free will offerings of the OT." I gotta see this definition.
As always, a little thought is all it takes to dissemble the implication behind the claim that "free will is not a Biblical term".
Certainly the argument that "the Bible nowhere uses the term "free will" or "libertarian freedom" or whatever, is not a valid argument. The Bible never uses the term Trinity and yet I assume that we all believe in the concept of the Trinity.
When the writers of scripture sat down to write, they had at their disposal a palette of words and concepts. These are the buiding blocks that they used to write. Each word is essentially a symbol for meaning - words evoke meanings in the minds of the people who read them. This mapping between word and meaning, of course, has nothing to do with the Bible, but rather with the social contract by which people in a society agree to use, for example, the word "dog" to refer that furry four-footed animal that chases cats and barks. So let's disabuse ourselves of any notion that the Bible does not
import "extra-Biblical" mappings between the words that make up the Bible and the "domain of meaning" to which those words refer.
The word "man" is in the Bible, but it is a concept that originates outside the Bible. Same with the words, "fig", "river", "war", etc. Now as Mondar has correctly pointed out, the context in which a word or phrase appears can nuance the meaning. So we properly nuance words like "love" when we read them in a Biblical context. The final meaning we accord to them is a complex mixture of the "standalone"
imported meaning and the meaning as nuanced by context.
What about "free will". Is a "biblical term". Of course not! But neither is "man" or "fig", or "river". Let's not make the blunder of thinking that the Bible does not leverage off the "secular" meaning of words. And in some cases, the "secular" meaning is "copied without nuance, e.g. "river".
Does "free will" appear in the Bible as an explicit concept? No it does not. Just like Trinity does not.
But, this does not mean that the writers of the Scriptures did not intend the readers to understand that it is there implicitly in phrases like "choose this day" or "without excuse".
It is beyond dispute that, in the secular domain of language use, many words have implicit meanings bundled into the them that are not explicitly stated in a definition. If I write "Fred loves Jane", the concept of love implicitly entails a wide range of things that are nowhere in sight in any dictionary or lexicon. For example, we can legitimately claim that the following assertion is
implicitly present in the statement about Fred loving Jane: "Fred will not burn down her house, and kick her cat without a concurrent belief that this somehow is to Jane's benefit". The word "love", like a lot of words -
is a shorthand symbol to refer to a vast set of behaviours and attitutes that cannot possibly be listed in "the dictionary".
Fact: Writers of Scriptures use (yes,
import) non-Biblical concepts to construct their text
Fact: Many words have implicit entailed meanings that will not be listed in dictionaries and lexicons
Fact: Free will, as a non-Biblical concept is a meaningful coherent idea - it
could be true to say that man has free will.
Assertion: "Free will", as a non-Biblical concept, is implicitly present in statements like "without excuse" and "choose".
The question as to whether the assertion is correct or not is properly settled as follows:
1. Determine whether the writers of the Scriptures lived in a society where there was a "social contract" that "without excuse", just as an example, implicitly entails free wiill.
2. If the answer is "no", then the matter has been been settled in the "calvinists" favour.
3. If the answer is "yes" then further work needs to be done. Specific uses of expression where free will
could be implicit need to be analyzed in their "local" context. Does the context nuance things enough to justify overriding the interpretation of the presence of free will? If item (1) is true, then no such grounds for "taking the free will" out of "no excuse" is present in Romans 1:20. If you disagree in respect to what I am saying about 1:20, please tell me how the context would dictate otherwise.
4. If the answer to (1) is yes and, as per (3), there is no justification from the
local context to "take the free will out", then we need to look at the broader Biblical context. Perhaps we will get a situation where (i) text A suggests the presence of free will in man; and (ii) text B suggests its absence.
5. Then we have a problem. But, and here I must appeal to the reader's sense of clear thinking,
it would be a circular argument to "take the free will out of A" because of the teaching of B. This, I boldly suggest, is what many will do -
they will argue that "free will" has been "imported" into A since B shows it is not a Biblical concept. That would be a faulty way to think. And, of course, Arminians will do this as well.
I do, in fact, think we face the situation in item (5). So I think the resolution to the matter is a complex task. But I am quite confident that item (1) is in fact true - there is a "social contract" whereby we implicitly acknowledge the presence of free will in such expressions as "being without excuse".
