Freedom of the Will

Doing it My Way

Human freedom both exists and is acted upon when a person chooses or wills to act in a certain way. When an individual's actions are self-determined, then he is truly free.That is why we believe and teach that mankind descending from Adam by ordinary generation are dead in their sins and cannot believe and follow God because they cannot see, apprehend, embrace and love the truth about Him.  But they disbelieve freely; their disbelief is genuinely their own and they will to act in open rebellion against, or careless neglect of Him.

Here is Charles Hodge's account of the matter:

"There is no such thing," Hodge argues, "as a purely intellectual cognition of a moral truth. It is the exercise of a moral nature; it implies moral sensibility. It of necessity, involves feelings to a greater or less degree. It is cognition of a being sensitive to moral distinctions, and without that sensibility there can be no such cognition."

What this suggests, the, is that for Hodge a moral agent is genuinely free not just when his actions are determined by his will, but more precisely when "his volitions are truly and properly his own, determined by nothing out of himself, but proceeding from his own views, feelings, and immanent dispositions, so that they are the real, intelligent, and conscious expression of his character, or of what is in his mind.". . .

According to Hodge, "the scriptures . . . clearly teach that holiness is necessary to the perception of holiness.  In other words, that the things of the Spirit must be spiritually discerned: that the unrenewed have not this discernment, and therefore, they cannot know the things which are freely given to us of God, i.e., the things which he has graciously revealed in his word.  They may have that apprehension of them which an uncultivated ear has of complicated musical sounds or an untutored eye a work of art  Much of the object is perceived, but much is not discerned, and that which remains unseen, is precisely that which gives to these object their peculiar excellence and power. 

Paul Kjoss Helseth, "Right Reason" and the Princeton Mind: An Unorthodox Proposal (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 2010), p. 43, 45.

This can only be remedied by the Holy Spirit re-generating the individual, who then not only apprehends the truth about God, but loves and longs after God.  Repentance and faith then follow, as a free act of the will, informed by a reconstituted mind and affections.