The goal of this article is to apply the ideas behind What Is Free Will? to the theme of A Humble or a Haughty Spirit. Having read both of these will be helpful in reading this article, as I justify in those articles some of the assumptions that I will take for granted in this one.

Anyone familiar with Catholic theology will know of the Seven Deadly Sins. Most severe among these sins was pride, for the reason that it was the sin of Lucifer and the ultimate cause of all sin. Though it is easy enough to arrive at that conclusion by saying that pride caused Lucifer to bring a multitude of sins into the world, it is more direct than that. Pride in its sinful sense is often thought to be synonymous with arrogance - an undue love of self relative to others, but the sin of pride is much more extensive and pervasive - and much more serious - than we might think. More than elevating ourselves against other people, the sin is to elevate ourselves at all against God, by the belief that there is inherent good - of any sort - that we somehow merit.

This pride, the pride behind individualism and self-actualization and nearly every society in the history of the world, is the fundamental motivation for sin. The relationship is neatly summed up by the quote from Milton, “Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven”. It is the motivation behind every act of selfishness, of rebellion against God, of any sin: the notion that the self is a good to be striven for. That though he is apart from God, he has himself and his pride, and that this tradeoff is not only good in its own right, it is preferable to the good of God Himself. This is the pride of Lucifer that not a single human being is exempt from.

The notion that one’s self is an inherent good is what constitutes sin nature. From the time we are born we inevitably think of the self as a good, and thus inevitably sin. Since the self is all we initially know, it is the foundation of all our subsequent knowledge, which is why all our righteousness apart from God is like filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6). It is only through the replacement of our foundational knowledge and belief, brought about by the Holy Spirit, that we can internalize the knowledge that it is indeed not better to reign in Hell, since without any inherent good in himself or his comrades the individual finds no pleasure in reigning over the damned.

But even a head knowledge is not sufficient belief, for truly internalized belief affects behavior. If any of us truly believed in the worthlessness of self and the ultimate good of God, we would never seek our own pleasure in any endeavor. I’ll be the first to admit that I have not achieved a perfect belief (or anything even resembling it), but I do pray that God would grant me the faith to believe that He is the ultimate good. This continued refinement and perfection of internalized belief, through the percolation of head knowledge into the subconscious where decisions are made, is the key to the Spirit’s continued sanctification of the believer. Indeed, this is why seeking the Truth about the nature of God is paramount to redemption and a changed life.

The question of free will is whether, and in what sense, rational agents exercise control over their actions and decisions.
-Wikipedia, Free Will

Rational agents, by definition, act based on what they know and believe in order to maximize their expected total enjoyment(/pleasure/utility/etc.). Though intuitively it would seem that not everyone is rational, the definitions of rational and utility are far more expansive than is usually assumed. For example, a thief judges the odds of him getting away times the payoff to be greater than the odds of getting caught times the penalty. This is usually not a conscious calculation, but a subconscious one (Scott Adams has called the subconscious nothing but an odds-calculating machine). And though it may seem utterly irrational to an outsider, it was, based on his (likely flawed) knowledge and belief, the best thing he could have done.

So what of free will? Could the thief have chosen not to steal? For this to happen, there would have to be more thrown into the mix. A moral person judges the moral costs in addition to the purely material costs, balancing the payoff with guilt or shame. The more trepidatious criminal just calculates the odds differently, or assigns a different value to the payoff relative to the likely punishment. This framework of rational choice is actually the fundamental underpinning of all economic study.

Quite simply, free will is not the ability to make random or arbitrary decisions. What would be the point of it then? Free will is the ability to act in your own long-term self interest, and so is a function of (and can be constrained by) two things:

1: Knowledge is fundamental to free will both in the long term and short term. Most stupid actions that people would assume are irrational are just a function of lack of knowledge. Let’s turn back to the thief again for an example: the thief decides to rob a convenience store. The owner has a gun, and shoots the thief in the chest, severely wounding him and sending him to jail. Why did the thief still rob the convenience store? He had no knowledge of the gun. Had he known the owner had a gun and was experienced in hunting, he would not have robbed the store. How many times has the lament “If only I had known” been uttered? Free will is a function of knowledge, and poor decisions are a function of imperfect knowledge.

If you’re still not convinced, then join me on a small thought experiment: Imagine you’re suddenly omniscient. You can see the future, and even see what will happen as the result of any decision. How would you act? You would, of course, act in such a way as to make your life more enjoyable. You could calculate your way up the corporate ladder and become rich and famous, or if you’re altruistic, you could maximize your enjoyment by making the world a better place. Either way, you would act in such a way as to get the most of what you value most. You wouldn’t - you couldn’t - do anything else.

2: Beliefs and Preferences. Preferences are fundamental to short term behavior: if I choose strawberry ice cream over vanilla with no compulsion either way, it means I prefer strawberry to vanilla at that point, for whatever reason. But preferences are just a type of belief: preferring strawberry to vanilla means that I believe that I will get more enjoyment from strawberry ice cream than vanilla ice cream. Material preferences (such as strawberry vs. vanilla) are usually refined over the course of a lifetime to the point that they are rarely wrong, in that you are usually correct that you will derive more pleasure from strawberry than vanilla.

But preferences encompass more than tastes, and beliefs encompass still more than that. Many poor decisions made with complete foreknowledge of the consequences are just a result of preferring short term pleasure over long term pleasure, which can come with an unpleasant wait. These long term preferences are more often wrong than tastes (The deathbed lament “I wish I’d have spent more time with my family”). Thus regrets are the result of wrong (or at least changed) preferences.

Belief, however, is ultimately the most important to the overarching trend of one’s behavior. Morality, for example: many people believe that they will be rewarded after death for good behavior, thus they act in ways that would appear counter to their self interest. Many believe that such behavior is simply good for society, and act generally morally because they value self-respect. Many don’t believe in an afterlife and value their own pleasure over other peoples’ and over society at large; thus we get “immoral” (in the traditional sense of the word) people.

This is the reason that much of the world considers religion and faith as synonymous. Most religions believe in an afterlife - more specifically, Heaven and Hell. Most also include requirements for escaping Hell and going to Heaven (or at least attaining the best afterlife). It is of course in our best interest to assure for ourselves the best afterlife - even a minute improvement magnified by eternity outweighs even the most enjoyable of lifestyles. One must have faith in the religion in order to believe in these requirements. Thus true believers are thus much rarer than one might imagine. True belief in God and in the severity of choices affecting ones’ afterlife would require nothing less than a full life commitment.

So why don’t we see this? Most religion is built on a series of external incentives. In the Muslim world, you are often ostracized for converting out. Many televangelists promise a healthy and wealthy lifestyle after converting in. Even more than that, there are often social benefits for appearing devout (but not too devout), namely peer respect and involvement with a close-knit group of people.

Hence, because choice springs directly from belief and lifestyle is the aggregate of choice, we can see that the nominal believer is not a believer at all. Their motivation is not belief in God or the divine of any sort: the lack of assumption of the costs of religion to one’s lifestyle shows the fact that their goal is to reap the social benefits (self-deception on this point is, I would guess, much more common than consciously and deliberately impersonating the religious). To narrow the discussion to within the Christian circle, Romans 10 speaks specifically to the point that choice is directly influenced by knowledge and belief. Salvation comes by faith (belief), faith comes by hearing (knowledge), and hearing from the Word of God. Furthermore according to James, faith without works is dead, for true faith means we believe that works are the evidence of the Holy Spirit and that the Holy Spirit is the evidence of salvation. And what is more important to the true believer than securing and assuring his own salvation?

So what exactly is salvation, and what does it do to free will? Belief is always informed by knowledge. Our faith comes by hearing that the Word of God is the way to salvation, and a belief that this is true, imparted by God Himself. This is the point at which we receive the Holy Spirit (This means depravity is a result of imperfect knowledge and belief, in that we cannot act to please God (which is in our ultimate self-interest) without proper knowledge and belief).

A cursory reading of Romans 8, a discussion on living by the spirit vs. the flesh, might lead one to believe that the Spirit removes our free will and substitutes it with God’s. This is not the case at all. Our will is not free to begin with, due to a lack of knowledge and/or belief. We cannot act in our own long-term self-interest, that is, get to Heaven and escape Hell, without knowledge of how to do so and the belief that that knowledge is correct and reliable. Thus when we are imparted the Holy Spirit, He teaches us our self-interest primarily through knowledge of the Scriptures, gives us the faith to believe it, and changes our preferences accordingly (no longer does short-term sinful pleasure outweigh the consequences thereof). The knowledge and true belief imparted over time by the Holy Spirit that eternal rewards outweigh short-term sinful pleasures will, without fail as God Himself, produce a Christian with a freer will.

Or, How God Works Through History to Suppress Bad Theology.

The history of the Church over the past few centuries may be surprising to many who consider the world to be in a perpetual state of moral decline. The 18th and 19th Centuries were particularly dark times for Protestantism and Evangelicalism worldwide. Having fully accepted the anthropocentric philosophy of the 18th century and positivism of the 19th century - first that man is the measure of all things and second that only what is experienced can be certainly known (Schleiermacher, often called the Father of Liberal Theology, was a particular proponent of this last point) - theology became less of the study of God and His relation to man, and more of a purely academic discipline, steeped in the historical-critical tradition. Many would claim to be simply following the Protestant Principle - that is, searching out historic Christianity by removing accretions (such as, many of the time would say, the divinity of Christ or the election of God) - but stripped of any meaningful distinction from generic morality, people began to, as Piper would say, “follow the Protestant Principle right out the door of the church”.

There seemed to be no turning back from Liberal Theology - the idea that simple, general and universal religious truths were the primary aim of the specific stories and letters of the Bible - by the early 20th century. And leaving little to commend Christianity over any other religion, the future of the Church looked quite grim. Fast forward to the 1960s. Evangelicalism was back on the rise with the Baptist denomination (which would quickly become the fastest growing denomination in America and eventually the largest in total number), mainline Liberal denominations were beginning to split off into evangelical segments, and Liberal Theology was virtually dead. What happened in the interim? Quite simply, two world wars happened.

The death of Liberal Theology and the rise of Evangelicalism was directly and immediately thanks to Kaiser Wilhelm and Adolf Hitler. During the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, Germany was the center of the Western philosophical renaissance, with eminent philosophers from Kant and Hegel to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Incidentally Liberal Theology of that era was built upon defending the Christian faith upon a foundation of the popular philosophy of the day. Thus, Germany was also the theological center of the Western world. There was hardly a theologian of that day, Karl Barth notes in The Humanity of God, that did not also consider himself a professional philosopher.

The problem with Liberal Theology in Germany in the early 20th Century was, however, as Barth also notes in the same book, “He who in 1933 may have still been spellbound by the theology of the 19th century was hopelessly condemned … to bet on the wrong horse with regard to National Socialism”. Liberal theology was built upon the same philosophical tradition as the Nazi Party, and thus was prone to endorse it. Barth even describes the day he became disenchanted with Liberal Theology at large - when in 1914, 93 German intellectuals, including nearly all of the theologians he most revered, endorsed Kaiser Wilhelm’s war policy. Without a firm Christological foundation, Liberal Theology could do no other than be swept away in Europe’s brief mass enchantment with Fascism.

In the aftermath of World War II and following the discovery of the concentration camps, Hitler and the Nazi party came to and continue to carry such a strong stigma that even failing to display proper moral revulsion at their idea was sufficient to pick up the stigma. This was even more pronounced in Christian circles, in which the deeds of Hitler and the Nazis stood in even starker contrast to ideal Biblical morality. How could the greatest theologians of our time have stood by the greatest evil of our time?

Thus the Nazi stigma stuck to Liberal Theology, and it is now widely discredited. Germany never since has returned to the philosophical and theological prominence it once enjoyed. In this instance, we can see the hand of God working in history to stamp out the theology that had castrated the Christian faith for over a century.

So what does this have to do with George Bush and American Constantinianism? Far be it from me to compare Bush directly to Hitler (though it is a popular, if dramatic, comparison among those who oppose his policies) - my point is rather the stigma associated with them. George Bush is by far the most unpopular president in recent memory, and he is even more despised worldwide than at home. And with the national debt as it is, even if we manage to pull out of Iraq soon, his legacy is likely to be even more strongly negative in the future, both in America and abroad.

But even though his stigma is still significantly less than that of Hitler’s, his connection to the group we will focus on is much stronger. Though the Liberal theologians of the early 20th century gave Hitler moral support, there is one group that was singlehandedly instrumental in Bush’s rise to power: The Christian Right.

I have written much before about the danger of Christian Right theology to the Church at large, from engendering materialism to engendering undue disrespect from the World (not that we should actively seek its respect, but we are to appear blameless and shine our lights that the gentiles may “see your good works and glorify your Father in Heaven” (Matthew 5:16)), so I will not argue its harm here. But it seems to me that American Constantinianism - the Christian Right, which seeks to bring the Church into government - may soon face a similar decline to Liberal Theology of the mid 20th century. If Bush’s stigma continues to grow (which is likely) and the Christian Right makes no major move to distance itself from him (which wouldn’t likely matter much, even if it were likely to happen), then mainstream American Evangelicalism could likely move quickly and sharply away from its current state of political activism.

Even now we are beginning to see this happening. I recently ran across a book mirroring many of my own ideas in Books A Million called Jesus For President, that besides the alarming title and artsy layout choices, makes a compelling case for the abandonment of Constantinianism. Though the book does not rail against any particular politicians, it is clearly inspired by a disillusionment with the political fruit of the Christian Right. These ideas, though widely looked upon with scorn by the Evangelical establishment not so long ago, are now gaining steam from the bottom up as more and more Christians recognize the failure of Constantinianism to bring about the good of the Church, or more severely, the glory of God.

Picture from Newsweek’s cover story Bush & God

Over the past year I’ve been playing around with musical composition, and I think the result is finally ready to go public. It goes by the name Epta Astera (Seven Stars in Koine Greek), and consists of influences from gregorian, medieval, neofolk, black metal, post-industrial, and a few other musical styles (varying from song to song; it would be pretty difficult to stuff all of that into each one). Check out the website www.eptaastera.com for more information and to download the album.