THE NOTION THAT ALL people have "free will" is a blatant lie from Hell. Such a view is NOT in the Bible. Some "Church Fathers" taught this false view but they were wrong.
In his excellent chapter titled "Free Choice And The Divine Will In Greek Christian Commentaries On Paul," in the book "Paul And The Legacies Of Paul" (Southern Me...thodist University Press, 1990), Robert L. Wilken, William R. Kennan, Jr. Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia, documents in detail how St. Paul in the Scriptures undermined the free-will-Greek-thinking which infected some early Christians.
For example, Theodoret of Cyrus is paraphrased as having taught (Affect. 5.1-4.) that "the scriptures gush out streams of living waters, and by free choice (authaireton) those who are thirsty come to drink and those who have no desire turn away. The physician of souls does not coerce the will of those who do not wish to savor goodness. He has created human nature independent and free...he does not compel us against our will to partake of better things."
Noting that "a large measure of the intellectual effort of antiquity was given to discovering a certain path of virtue, to achieving self-sufficiency by rational means in a world that seemed to work against one's best efforts," Wilken quotes Martha Nussbaum as saying, in her book "The Fragility of Human Goodness: Luck And Ethics In Greek Tragedy And Philosophy" (Cambridge, 1986), that: "This splendid and equivocal hope is a central preoccupation of ancient Greek thought about the human good. A raw sense of the passivity of human beings and their humanity in the world of nature, and a response of both horror and anger at that passivity, lived side-by-side with and nourished the belief that reason's activity could make safe, and thereby save, our human lives --- indeed, must save them, if they were to be humanly worth living."
Alexander of Aphrodisias is paraphrased to have believed (De fato 16, trans. R.W. Sharples, Alexander of Aphrodisias on Fate: Text, Translation, and Commentary, London, 1983, 66, text on 95) that: "The life of a virtuous person is evidence for free choice. Virtue lies within our own power."
Wilken says the first mention of "free choice" in Christian writings occurs in Justin Martyr's "First Apology" where he defends free will with
some Old Testament verses and a line from Plato's "Republic" (!). Says Wilken: "Justin's argument is, of course, commonplace. What is not traditional is the claim that he learned the doctrine of free choice from the scriptures. Although the arguments are well worn, the claim that free choice is a Christian teaching appears here explicitly for the first time. Justin...cites only those texts from the scripture that support free choice, ignoring those that intimate the reverse."
Then we come --- thank God! --- to St. Paul who, repeatedly, drives nail after nail into the coffin of the absurd notion that man has a "free will" apart from God. Wilken notes St. Paul's preaching about Jacob and Esau, how God says He loved the former but hated the latter. He quotes St. Paul's use of Exodus 33:19 where God says: "I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion." He quotes St. Paul re: how things depend not on man's will, but on God's mercy (Romans 9:15-16). St. Paul mentions the story of Pharaoh, about whom it is said that God used him to "show forth his power." Romans 9:17-18 tells how God has mercy on whomever he wills, and hardens the heart of whomever he wills. And St. Paul introduces the metaphor of the potter who makes from the same lump of clay a vessel for beauty and another for menial use, asking: What right has the clay to speak back to the potter? (Romans 9:19-21).
Says Wilken of St. Paul's language: "undefined must have startled Christians and pagans alike....Paul's language shatters conventional assumptions, and its examples offend common sensibilities."
Noting that Christian expositors were reluctant to relinquish the acquired wisdom of Greek antiquity, and that what St. Paul preached was "offensive to Greek thinking," Wilken says that "the cleavage between the scriptures and classical thought is deep and unbridgeable....In the scriptures, however, nature is always subject to God's will....it hardly needs saying that the idea of divine will is foreign to classical thinking." Wilken says that St. Paul's letters "thrust on Christian thinkers a new and discordant vocabulary with which to speak about God....as a way to break out of natural determinism or fatalism....Romans was first and foremost a book about God's purpose in the history of the Jews and in the life of the Christian community."
In conclusion, Wilken says: "One cannot but be impressed at the power of [St. Paul's] scriptural language, in the context of the biblical narrative, to alter well-established ways of looking at the world....The problem of freedom can no longer be formulated in terms of necessary or accidental events but now has to be viewed in the light of the purposeful actions of a gracious God. Paul's language, his metaphors and images, rearranges the conceptual world the commentators were accustomed to inhabit....There was something new in Paul, and in the Bible; and the task of exegesis was to find out how the language of the Bible worked, to draw out its implications, to try out a new vocabulary in relation to received wisdom....
"The language of the scriptures was not the language of Homer or Plato or Chrysippus; and one way to see how much difference it made for Christianity that the Bible was the church's book is to read the early Christian commentaries...to look closely and patiently at the way the early Christian commentators read the Bible, the way Biblical language enters into their vocabulary, the way new words and images shape and mold their patterns of thought."
Well, amen! And this is precisely what Christians must do, again, today. We must think and act Biblically! Indeed, we must bring "into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ" which will result in "casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God" (II Corinthians 10:5) --- one of the most idiotic and sinful of these imaginings being this wretched "free will'' heresy.
