Jimmy Akin explains to a caller why Jesus’s words in John 6:44, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them,” do not contradict the doctrine of free will, and clarifies the sense in which it does limit the actions we are able to choose.
Transcript:
Host: Ryan in Michigan, listening on AM 990, you are on with Jimmy Akin. It’s open forum, what’s your question?
Caller: My question has to do with the doctrine of total depravity. So in the Fifth Canon of the Council of Trent it says, “If any man says that after the sin of Adam, man’s free will was extinguished, let him be anathema.” And also in the Council of Trent it affirms prevenient grace. John 6:44, “No man can come to the Son unless the Father who sent him draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day.” And so I was a little confused, because if I can’t come to the son unless the father draws me, then it seems like my free will is extinguished, so it seems like the Council of Trent’s Fifth Canon is both contradicting itself and John 6:44, so I was wondering why that’s not a contradiction.
Jimmy: Okay, there are several ways of looking at this, and one of them is to recognize that when when Trent says that man’s free will was not extinguished by the fall, it doesn’t mean that it wasn’t damaged by the fall. Something can be damaged but not extinguished, and in the case of the Council of Trent, what they were dealing with were some viewpoints that were being entertained in various circles, particularly in the Protestant community, that either denied that man had ever had any kind of free will–that just everything we do is, we’re like robots, you know, we’re God’s windup toys and never had free will of any kind– and then there was a kind of mitigated form that said, “Well okay, maybe we had free will before the fall of man, but then when Adam sinned we completely lost it, and now our wills are wholly bound to sin, so that we don’t have any freedom, and the only way we can do anything good at all, if we can do anything good at all, is if God causes us to do it, so we don’t have free will.”
And that’s what Trent is reacting against. So it’s not reacting against the idea that our free will wasn’t damaged. Trent’s perfectly happy to say that our free will was damaged, but we still actually retain freedom. We don’t have a complete lack of freedom. So that’s one way of reconciling these two things. You could say, well, so maybe our free will was damaged in such a way that we couldn’t come to God unless he gives us prevenient grace, which is the grace that enables us to respond positively to God’s message, so we couldn’t come to him in that sense unless God gives us this grace to compensate for the damage that was done to our free will by the fall.
But there’s another way of looking at it too, which would be to say this: Man doesn’t automatically have what theologians call a supernatural vocation, that is, a vocation to be with God and in spiritual union with him. God could have created man in what theologians refer to as a state of pure nature. In a state of pure nature we wouldn’t have sin, but we also wouldn’t have the grace of being spiritually united with God. We might know certain things about God that we could tell by natural reason, like the fact that He exists, but we wouldn’t have the supernatural desire in our hearts to be in union with Him.
And so that’s another way of looking at this. You could say, well, in order for us to have that desire for spiritual union with God, it requires a gift from God. It requires that, just like He gave us free will in the beginning, He also needs to give us the gift, which is a kind of free will, to desire union with him spiritually, and that’s an elevated thing above simply natural freewill, it’s a kind of supernatural-ized freedom where we have the desire and the ability to pursue those desires to have union with God, which is something he didn’t have to offer us. It’s a grace. He could have created us in a paradisaical environment with no sin and no suffering, but He just didn’t bring us into full spiritual union with Himself. That’s a gift. And so that’s another way that you could look at how the the existence of freewill squares with the fact that we need God’s grace in order to come to Him.
Caller: Okay, I’m still wondering about that the specific ability to to come to the Father without Him drawing you. I mean, you don’t have the free will to do that, you know?
Jimmy: Correct, but there are a lot of things that I don’t have the ability…when we talk about free will, I think you may be thinking of some kind of unlimited freedom. And that’s not what’s meant by saying we have free will. There are lots of things I can’t choose. Not being Spider-Man, I can’t choose to crawl on the walls, you know? Not being Superman, I can’t choose to fly. But there are a lot of things that are within the scope of things that I can choose. And so I have freewill with respect to those things that I can choose, I’m not just a puppet. That’s what’s meant when we say someone has free will. We don’t mean there aren’t things that they’re incapable of choosing; we mean that they do have freedom within whatever scope of freedom they have. And so that’s one of the things that applies here in terms of the ability to choose God.
There’s also the fact that God ensures that everybody has the grace needed to come to him. This is something the Second Vatican Council teaches, that even if it’s in a mysterious way, in ways known to God, He can make it possible, and does make it possible, for everybody to come to Him. So it’s by His grace that that happens, but He ensures that that grace is given to everybody.