Free Will, Causality, Character, and Moral Accountability: Part 2

“If a ‘free’ act be a sheer novelty, that comes not from me, the previous me, but ex nihilo, and simply tacks itself on to me, how can I, the previous I, be responsible? How can I have any permanent character that will stand still long enough for praise or blame to be awarded?”
-William James

“Since your majesty and your lordships desire a simple reply, I will answer without horns and without teeth. Unless I am convicted by scripture and plain reason--I do not accept the authority of popes and councils for they have contradicted each other--my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.”
-Martin Luther during his trial at Worms (pictured here)

I want to mediate on Choice and Character in the church. In my comments to Pecs in the last post I said that I would like the church to begin making the following transitions:

Choice to Character
Rhetoric to Behavior Change
Trying to Training
Evangelism to Moral Formation
Missions to Social Justice
Moral Blame to Moral Luck

Let me elaborate on this list.

Choice to Character: I think the church makes mistakes when she is overly confident in her appeals to choice. The church should rather focus on the formation of character and the acquisition of virtue.

Rhetoric to Behavior Change: Elaborating further, character is not formed by persuasive rhetoric (i.e., a weekly appeal from the pulpit to be a good person). Rhetoric is excellent for changing opinions and, thus, an excellent tool for improving doctrine. But it is a poor tool for transforming the lives in the pew. That is, we are NOT volitionally nimble. We possess characterological inertia and causal forces will need to be brought to bear upon us to form us into the image of Christ. The word form (as in mold or shape) nicely captures the idea. We don't choose. We are formed.

Trying to Training: Thus, the focus of Kingdom living is less about "trying to be a better person" (via what William James called a "slow heave of the will") than about "training to be a better person." Church should be a kind of boot camp for Kingdom living.

Evangelism to Moral Formation: What I mean here is an evangelism that is volitionally-based, the traditional "Do you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior? Yes or no?." The move should be to what Jesus asked for in the Great Commission: "Make disciples." Again, the word make gets at the idea very well.

Missions to Social Justice: These last two go together. Mission work should move away from "persuasion models" to actually changing the world. The question for missionaries should shift from "How many souls were saved?" to "How have you transformed that community into the Kingdom of God?"

Moral blame to Moral Luck: We shift from seeing the moral landscape as populated by the "righteous" and the "blameworthy" to seeing the "fortunate" and the "unfortunate." As Immanuel Kant said: “And how many there are who may have lead a long blameless life, who are only fortunate in have escaped so many temptations.”

If we make this shift, from strong volitional to weak volitional models, what gets lost? Actually very little. And the gains are enormous. By embracing causality and the contingent nature of will--by focusing on Character over Choice--the church might actually start being more effective (a nice causal word) in this world. We will rely less and less on God Talk and more and more on, well, actually doing things. You know, make a difference.

But what does get lost in this shift away from strong volitional models is a robust sense of moral blame or praise. In the contingent picture I paint you can't take credit for your good character and neither can we "blame" others for poor character. Yet much of Christian theology seems to hinge on notions of moral praise and blame. Particularly soteriological visions of Heaven and Hell.

But let's reflect on this a little. Do any of us really “take credit” for our character? I don’t. In my reflective moments I really just feel fortunate. I feel fortunate for my family, my wife, my opportunities, my friends, my church, and, ultimately, my God. I see myself as the product of a myriad of causal influences and I simply feel fortunate. Thomas Talbott, philosopher and theologian, in the book Universal Salvation?: The Current Debate, puts it this way:

“So how, then, do the [theologians of free will] explain the supposedly final division within the human race? Presumably by an appeal to human freedom: We ultimately determine our own destiny in heaven or hell. But if that is true, then the redeemed are also in a position to boast, it seems, along the following lines: ‘At the very least, some of my own free choices—my decision to accept Christ, for example—were a lot better than those of the lost, and these choices also explain, at least partially, why my character ended up to be a lot more virtuous than theirs.’

So the question I would put to [these thinkers] is this: Do you really believe that the differences between you and those who will supposedly be lost forever, or even between you and the world’s worst criminals, lies in the superior character of your own free choices? For my own part, I can find nothing either in myself or in the New Testament that would justify any such belief as that. I also find it revealing that few first person accounts of conversion sound anything like liberation free choices. To the contrary, a persistent theme in such accounts is how the Hound of Heaven gradually boxes someone in and closes off every alternative…God drags people to Christ by closing off their options and by undermining over time every conceivable motive for resistance. In that way God gradually restricts and then eliminates altogether one’s power to resist his grace…”

In sum, God gets us to a point where our character is formed like that of Martin Luther. Where we can stand for the Kingdom and the Cross and declare, not our freedom, but of a divine and blissful failure of freedom:

"Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise."