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Free Will and Christian Freedom TWO

Free Will and Christian Freedom TWO

Last updated on: June 16, 2026 at 8:56 am by Ted Peters

Free Will and Christian Freedom TWO 2026-06-16T08:56:30-07:00 Ted Peters

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Patheos SR 1032 Libertarian Free Will and Christian Freedom TWO: Ted’s Dyothelic Hypothesis

Here in post TWO we continue the discussion begun in “Libertarian Free Will and Christian Freedom ONE.” We turn now to the Protestant Reformation and Martin Luther’s paradox between the bound will and Christian freedom.

Free Will and Christian Freedom

The Freedom of a Christian

What does Luther say in his important essay, “The Freedom of a Christian” [De Liberate Christiana]? He opens with a shocking, paradoxical aphorism.

— “The Christian individual is a completely free lord of all, subject to none.

— The Christian individual is a completely dutiful servant of all, subject to all” (Luther, The Freedom of a Christian 2015-2020, 488).

Free Will and Christian Freedom

Distinctively Christian freedom consists in the coincidence between our sovereignty over everything and everyone, along with our servitude under everything and everyone (Vestrucci 2019, 35). Somehow God bequeaths to the Christian individual a share in divine sovereignty that is exhaustively expressed in loving servitude to the needs of the neighbor. Somehow God replaces your and my self-centeredness with a divine-centeredness or even neighbor-centeredness that liberates us from the determinism of self-centeredness.

In the context of justification by grace in faith, Luther’s language is “inner” versus “outer” or “old” versus “new.” When Christ becomes present to the “inner” you, you become a “new” person. This is what makes Christian freedom happen.

Freedom from Self to Pursue Loving Justice

Christine Helmer at Northwestern University repeats Luther’s formula so that justification energizes action on behalf of justice. On the one hand, the individual soul is gifted by God with justification, with an alien justice not earned. On the other hand, God’s own passion for justice becomes the passion of the community of justified souls.

“If Christ dwells in the soul, thereby creating a new person, then justice enacts intersubjectively constituted existence in the community….Justice means taking on someone else’s struggles as one’s own, and then working to acknowledge, alleviate, and transform struggle into joy” (Helmer 2021, 74-75).

Christine Helmer

If the pursuit of justice includes a liberation component, then what the Christian community is doing is removing political or economic or cultural constrictions to someone’s libertarian free will. For more on this theme, see the new book by Carlos Santos, A Liberation Theology of the Brain: Neuroscience, Theology, and Decolonizing Emotions (Fortress Press 2025).

In the meantime, do not confuse libertarian free will or political freedom with Christian freedom. The 2025 Social Statement of the ELCA, Faith and Civic Life: Seeking the Well-being of All, tries to keep the distinction clear.

Article 31. Christian freedom is a matter of the Gospel whereas the right of free exercise of religion is a matter of human law. Christian freedom has only indirect legal significance for organizations and individuals in the civil realm. However, it gives us the positive freedom to love God and neighbor.

Union with Christ and Christian Freedom

The logic here is complex and convoluted. Yet, it is extremely important. Let me repeat Luther’s argument with the help of Eberhard Jüngel (1934-2021), former director of the Evangelisches Stift at Tübingen University.

First, as we already said, God and only God is free in the radical sense of the causeless cause. “Freedom as an exclusively divine predicate can and must now be claimed as a mark of the Christian” (Jüngel 1988, 69).

Second, the uniqueness of God’s freedom renders you and me unfree in our relationship with God. God is the all-determining reality. To be God’s creature in the image of God is to be a self. Our creaturely will is bound to self-service. We are never free from our self, the self that engages in self-determination. Self-determination is what is denoted by the concept of libertarian free will.

Third, God can bestow upon you and me Christian freedom as a divine gift. God does this through mystical union, wherein God becomes present more deeply to you than you are to your self. When the Holy Spirit places the union of the divine and human in Jesus Christ within your or my innermost dimension, a transfer takes place. Lutherans call this transfer the “happy exchange.” Setting aside the exchange for a moment, let’s concentrate on the distinctive way in which you or I become free in faith.

When in Jesus Christ God comes nearer to me than I can be to myself, then, because at work in me he takes me out of myself I am an “inner man,” who as such can go out of himself and in that very act is a free lord of all and subject to none” (Jüngel 1988, 75). Further, “…as a free lord he [the person of faith] becomes the dutiful servant of all, who again does not live in himself, but as himself lives in the neighbor”(Jüngel, 76).

Christian freedom, according to Luther and Jüngel, is a divine gift within which the divine self is exchanged for the human self so that neighbor love can become selfless love. Didja git that?

Union with Christ and Christian freedom, again

Tuomo Mannermaa

Let’s examine Luther’s argument once again. This time with the help of Kirsi Stjerna at California Lutheran University and the late Tuomo Mannermaa at the University of Helsinki.

How does God accomplish this exchange at a level deeper than the self? Through the mystical union of your and my innermost self with the self of the crucified and risen Jesus Christ. “Faith…unites the soul with Christ…Christ and the soul are made one flesh” (Luther, The Freedom of a Christian 2015-2020, 499). The Christ self and your or my soul are united in the one flesh of our body. Regardless of what determinist philosophers classify as a physical cause, for Luther one’s inner life with Christ is liberated due to its sharing of divine sovereignty over the human heart and its selfish proclivities.

“For the inner person—conformed to God and created in the image of God through faith—is joyful and glad on account of Christ…that person has only one concern: to serve God joyfully, with boundless love and with no thought of earning anything….serves the world and tries seeking after that belongs to it” (Luther, The Freedom of a Christian 2015-2020, 511). “Each person lives only for others and not for himself or herself” (Luther, The Freedom of a Christian 2015-2020, 520).

Kirsi Stjerna, along with her colleagues in the New Finnish School of Luther Research, emphasizes two points. First, we sinners do not “cause” our own justification or salvation. Rather, it is a gift. “Justification by faith by grace is a free gift” (Stjerna 2021, 181). Second, that gift is made present to us in faith by the Holy Spirit who places the living Christ within our soul. The person of faith enjoys the presence of Christ, mystically.

Kirsi Stjerna

Now, it gets tricky again. Here is Tuomo Mannermaa, Kirsi Stjerna’s mentor. “When the relationship with God is understood within the framework of God’s Love…the active agent and subject is God, not the human being….The ‘old self’ of the Christian dies and is replaced by the person of Christ” (Mannermaa 2010, 45,39). It seems to me that in this union with Christ the very self of Christ shares its sovereignty with the person of faith in free acts of love.

Reformation scholar Michael Root criticizes Mannermaa on this point. Root fears that “the human agent seems to disappear, becoming only a channel for the one true agent here, God” (Root 2019, 243).

Is this a minus or a plus? Regardless of whether divine love expressed in human loving requires single or double agency, the takeaway point is that the human experience of love is itself the experience of God’s love. And if God is sovereign – if God exhibits Sapolsky’s causeless cause – the divine free will empowers human freedom.

Without using the term ‘double agency’, Roman Catholic ethicist Sebastian Bastianel colors in Luther’s silhouette. “Rooted in the gift of the theological virtue, in communion with God, Christian charity is a love like that of Christ: recognized in him, made possible through him, learned from him” (Bastianel 2010, 110).

In sum, the union with Christ that takes place within the soul bestows upon the person of faith a taste of divine sovereignty, the capacity to transcend the self with love for God and for neighbor. This capacity for self-transcendence is itself an attribute of God as manifested in the divine diremption that led to the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the second person of the Holy Trinity.

Freedom by God’s absence or God’s presence?

One more thing. In Luther’s case, it is the very presence of the sovereign and free God within faith that empowers human freedom. Luther’s view of human freedom stands in sharp contrast to today’s kenotic theologians, for whom human libertarian freedom is due to a withdrawal of divine determinism.

Theologian Thomas Jay Oord, for example, holds that God is essentially kenotic, involuntarily kenotic. God’s power is metaphysically limited. By denying total determinism to God, this opens up freedom for human beings to fill the power vacuum. Creatures exert creaturely power within the world because divine determinism is absent.

Did I interpret Tom Oord correctly? He does not think so.

In a delightful Substack debate with me on this matter, Tom Oord countered what I just said by asserting:

“The Holy Spirit empowers all complex creatures to act freely and all simpler creatures to act with agency, spontaneity, or at least indeterminate action. On this issue of God’s presence rather than absence, Ted and I might agree.”

Although I’m glad Tom affirms divine presence as contributing to creaturely freedom, I suspect this might be inconsistent with his notion of divine kenosis. Kenosis means absence. Kenosis means absence. Can Tom have it both ways?

Take the theodicy question, for example. By appealing to divine absence, Tom can exculpate God from evil. What is Tom’s logic? He attributes evil events solely to us creatures and not to our Creator. “God neither causes nor allows this evil….God can’t prevent evil by acting alone” (Oord 2020, 63). This argument works only if God’s power is absent in the course of creaturely events.

Here’s Ted’s take. With libertarian free will, you and I can elect to do evil. With Christian freedom, you and I can elect to love the neighbor selflessly. Disciples of Luther, in contrast to Tom Oord, would emphasize that it is God’s presence, not God’s absence, that frees the creature to freely fight evil and love the good.

Even if Tom Oord resists my placing him in the camp with kenotic theologians who rapture God so that God can avoid the messiness of creaturely history, I simply wish to emphasize that one of the ways God works in the world is to empower freedom in all its forms. If Tom affirms this point, I’m grateful to Tom.

Somehow, we need to find a model other than the kenotic model for understanding how God’s freedom becomes our freedom. Somehow, we need to account for a kenosis transplant. As God became kenotic in Jesus Christ, we become kenotic when loving our neighbor. Just how do we account theologically for this?

In sum, I think Luther’s view is that God shares power with us. God’s sovereignty expressed in unpredictable self-transcendence makes possible the divine gift of distinctively Christian freedom. Your and my love of neighbor for the sake of the neighbor’s flourishing is godly.

Conclusion

Libertarian Free Will and Christian Freedom

If you’ve read this far, you’ll see why I propose Ted’s Dyothelic Hypothesis. Again, here are my two propositions. First, by libertarian free will, we mean self-determination. Second, by Christian freedom, we mean selfless-determination or self-transcending determination.

Sometimes I wonder if there is any Anknüpfungspunk or connection at all between the philosophical debate over libertarian free will and the theological treatment of Christian freedom. As long as Robert Sapolsky and other determinists confuse the “causeless cause” freedom of God with any reasonable or workable definition of human “libertarian freedom,” the two discussions blend together like oil and water.

My own proposal follows two steps. In the first step, we resolve the scientific or philosophical problem by positing three-part rather than two-part determinism. For determinists in Sapolsky’s camp, nature and nurture—that is, the ubiquitous laws of neurobiology and the way our parents raised us – are the only two determinants. This eliminates the very existence of a human self and renders what appears to be libertarian free will a delusion.

But a three-part determinism – nature, nurture, and the self – would place free will within the determinist frame. In this case, free will would become defined as self-determination. Self-determination would obtain when neither nature nor nurture accounts for all agency in an action. To be sure, nature and nurture determine the context and the array of unactualized potentials. But the self elects some, though not all, of the potentials to actualize. Libertarian freedom is finite freedom.

In the second step, we resolve the theological problem by distinguishing between the natural self and the divinely empowered self. Now that the self is itself a determiner, theologically speaking, the self becomes a slave to itself. Recall these three elements to what we experience as freedom: (1) deliberation regarding an array of potentials, (2) decision regarding which potentials to actualize, and then (3) action upon that decision. All these become self-expressions.

The self cannot by itself deny itself to love another self for the sake of the other self. It is divine empowerment that makes selfless loving possible. The capacity to love another for the sake of the other is what we mean by genuine freedom. It is a particular gift that persons of faith experience, appreciate, and are grateful for.

This may not happen every day for every act of free will. Christian freedom in this life is not a single uninterrupted, continual, plenary, uncontradictable experience. It is episodic. Even Saint Paul had his moments when the old libertarian free will expressed a self that was selfish, leading to evil choices on occasion. The biblical saint yearned for those moments when the Holy Spirit would empower the self to transcend itself so that he could love God for God’s sake and the neighbor for the neighbor’s sake.

Well, that’s Ted’s Dyothelic Hypothesis. Do you find it reasonable? Can you improve upon it? Let me know.

Patheos SR 1032 Libertarian Free Will and Christian Freedom TWO: Ted’s Dyothelic Hypothesis

Substack SR 1020 Anselm Ramelow, AI, and Free Will

Substack SR 1021 Chang In Sohn Puts Free Will in Jail

Patheos SR 1022 Is our free will really in jail?

Patheos SR 1023 Braden Molhoek on Free Will

Substack SR 1024 Michael Spezio on Imprisoning Free Will

Substack SR 1025 Roger Olson on Divine Determinism and Human Freedom

Substack SR 1026. Thomas Oord, Open Theism, and Free Will

Substack SR 1027 Kirsi Stjerna’s Freedom Theology: Freedom is the Reformation’s Gift to Modernity

Substack SR 1028 Oord and Peters on Free Will: The Debate Goes On

Substack SR 1029 Spezio vs Oord and Peters on Free Will: The Debate Goes On

Substack SR 1030 Peters Responds to Spezio on Free Will: The Debate Goes On

Substack SR 1031 Libertarian Free Will and Christian Freedom ONE: Ted’s Dyothelic Hypothesis

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Meet Ted Peters. For Patheos and Substack, Ted Peters posts articles and notices in the field of Public Theology. He is a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and an emeritus professor at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union. His single-volume systematic theology, God—The World’s Future, is now in the 3rd edition. He has also authored God as Trinity plus Sin: Radical Evil in Soul and Society as well as Sin Boldly: Justifying Faith for Fragile and Broken Souls. He recently published. The Voice of Public Theology, with ATF Press. See his website: TedsTimelyTake.com and Patheos blog site.

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References

Aquinas, Thomas. 1485. Summa Theologica. https://www.newadvent.org/summa/. Paris: New Advent.

Barth, Karl. 1936-1962. Church Dogmatics, 4 Volumes. Edinburgh: T&T Clark.

Barth, Karl. 1968. The Humanity of God. Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox.

Bastianel, Sergio. 2010. Morality in Social Life. Tr Liam Kelly. Miami FL: Convivium Press.

Griffin, David Ray. 1998. Unsnarling the World-Knot. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.

Hefner, Philip. 1993. The Human Factor. Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press.

Helmer, Christine. 2021. “Eccleslial Practices of Resistance.” In Truth-Telling and Other Ecclesial Practices of Resistance, by ed Christine Helmer, 1-10. Lanham and Minneapolis: Lexington and Fortress.

Jüngel, Eberhard. 1988. The Freedom of a Christian: Luther’s Significance for Contemporary Theology. Minneapolis MN: Augsburg.

Luther, Martin. 2015-2019. “The Bondage of the Will 1545.” In The Annotated Luther 6 Volumes, by Kirsi I Stjerna, Timothy Wengert, eds Hans J Hillerbrand, 2:153-258. Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press.

Luther, Martin. 2015-2020. “The Freedom of a Christian.” In The Annotated Luther, 5 Volumes, by Martin Luther, 1: 467-538. Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press.

Mannermaa, Tuomo. 2010. Two Kinds of Love: Martin Luther’s Religious World. Tr Kirsi Stjerna. Minneapolis MN: Fortress.

Oord, Thomas. 2020. “Genuine but Limited Freedom for Creatures and for a God of Love.” In What’s with Free Will? Ethics and Religion After Neuroscience, by eds. Philip Clayton and James Walters, 51-66. Eugene OR: Cascade.

Pagels, Elaine. 1988. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. New York: Random House.

Root, Michael:. 2019. “The Individual Theologian and Ecumenical Engagement: Case Studies on Being, Grace, and Love.” In Apprehending Love: Theological and Philosophical Inquiries in Honor of Risto Saarinen, by eds Pekka Kärkkäinen and Olli-Pekka Vaino, 228-251. Helsinki: Luther-Agricola-Seura.

Sapolsky, Robert. 2023. Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will. New York: Penguin.

Spezio, M. 2025. Chapter 22. Theology Engaging AI: Constructs of Human Intelligence and Metaphors of Translation. In PROMISE AND PERIL OF AI AND IA: New Technology Meets Religion, Theology, and Ethics (pp. 365–383). ATF PRESS.

Stjerna, Kirsi. 2021. Lutheran Theology: A Grammar of Faith. Edinburgh: T & T Clark.

Tillich, Paul. 1951-1963. Systematic Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Vestrucci, Andrea. 2019. Theology as Freedom. Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck.

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About Ted Peters

For Patheos and Substack, Ted Peters posts articles and notices in the field of Public Theology. He is a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and an emeritus professor at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union. His single-volume systematic theology, God—The World’s Future, is now in the 3rd edition. He has also authored God as Trinity plus Sin: Radical Evil in Soul and Society as well as Sin Boldly: Justifying Faith for Fragile and Broken Souls. He recently published. The Voice of Public Theology, with ATF Press. See his website: TedsTimelyTake.com and Patheos blog site. You can read more about the author here.

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