Let me expand by taking up themes from many earlier blogs. I embrace a “free heart” [i.e. affectively defined] rather than a “free will” [a volitional self-determination or autonomous] version of the soul.

That is, we are constituted as lovers who choose things on the basis of what we love; and not as free-will moral agents who choose to love God in a self-directed volitional act. At an applied level we are responders: those who love on the basis of the object of our love. The object of our love rules us through our affectively defined desires. Spiritually (i.e. most fundamentally & as those who are real believers) we are those who love God because he first loved us. We respond to his love rather than “choose to love”.

This opposed pair of views was at the center of the debate between Augustine and Pelagius; between Luther and Erasmus; and it was elaborated at length by Jonathan Edwards in his Freedom of the Will (in which he dismisses any freedom of the will).

Given the affective understanding of the soul we approach the question of predestination differently than do the supralapsarian theologians who start with a God who is “pure will” or “pure act”. I call them the Stoic Christians because central Stoic assumptions are present in their portrayal of the soul.

Here’s their basic theology: God is necessarily defined by absolute volitional determinations that lack any affective engagement with his creation. With that version of God comes a symmetrical premise that humans are, like God, defined by our own volitional determinations. So the quandary of competing wills (God’s will versus our own) becomes the feature issue of salvation.

If we dismiss this tradition and listen instead to the Bible’s own narrative we find a relational God who comes to us out of his eternal triune communion. In the spreading goodness of his affective and winsome love he created us as lovers who are bonded to him in love, so that all our “choices” are responses to his love – with love viewed as a mutual and reciprocal delight.

Sin – taken to be a violation of our bond of love with God – came as all humans, in Adam, preferred to become independent from God’s love and instead embraced autonomy as a self-elevating identity, i.e. self-love. And with that seduction the Edenic version of a self-absorbed monadic deity (Satan’s own preference) allowed a theological basis for will-based autonomy: God is re-conceived to be the Great Monad (the ‘unmoved mover’) and humans are mini-monads (individuals).

When we repent of these monadic themes (by our utter and delighted dependence on God in response to his wooing love) we find ourselves where we were first meant to be: as lovers of God and others, bonded by the Spirit’s ongoing love poured out in our hearts.

At the heart of your question, if I read you correctly, is the seeming dilemma of why “some but not others” respond. My response: if we try to answer that question from a context of separate and competing volitions/choices we’re left to say that one will must be determinative and the other passive.

If, on the other hand, we understand a heart – in affective rather than Stoic terms – to be the shaping feature of every soul (i.e. that we’re responders, either to God or to the serpent’s portrayal of autonomous selfhood) we find a compatibilistic solution: two hearts can have a shared love without either heart being ruled by the other. We are free to choose together through an alignment of desires.

To press your basic question: how is it that some respond to God’s love, then, and others resist that wooing? Paul’s conversion is a workshop that can be explored here: his heart is captured by God but only after he recognizes that God has pursued him despite his zealous misdirection into religious responsibilities.

The “mystery” of why God pursues some (e.g. Paul) until his heart finally responds and Paul reciprocates God’s love; and why God “gives over” some to their persistent self-love is addressed in terms of Exodus 34 after the golden calf fiasco. God has mercy on some but not all. Perhaps to shame the “wise”? Or to humble those who see themselves as “powerful”? In any case we see Jesus treating the latter group as those who refuse to listen & respond because they insist that they don’t need a physician, aren’t blind, have all they need, are already righteous/good, etc., etc..

Here’s a bottom line: don’t use the common premise of a Stoic self-determined will as the basis for determining the affective portrayal of the soul. That is to beg the question.

You really touch on what I’m thinking in that last paragraph: Who responds and who doesn’t, that seems to be a huge mystery. God know’s but we don’t. Is that what predestination is all about? He know’s who will turn to him but the whole scenario still has to play out.

What I mean by ‘how much do we have to do with our own salvation’ is the question about faith and works. You can’t earn the right to enter the nice side of the afterlife but once you start to walk the path your life does need to change. How much of the change is down to us? (Or predestination? – which is perhaps just God knowledge of the future). Depending on what you believe about that whole question you may or may not be motivated to really try and ‘walk as He did’ (I guess the only real motivation come from loving light?).

There’s a lot in the Bible about how salvation is down to God and also a lot that talks about our own freewill. i.e if we live a certain way or don’t do certain things we may well find ourselves ‘nashing our teeth’ when all is said and done.

So it seems that there must be a balance between the two. We dont have a right to salvation and can’t buy it – buy we can ‘not work/not change’ our way out of it. Parable of the talents etc…

It’s that thought that says to me that we really need to understand the balance between what God does and what we do. Salvation is a gift from God and we have a part to play. A choice.

Do you agree? (Sorry if I’m using you as a study aid!)

In our self-love I think we’re all very prepared to find & fulfill a duty or task to offer back to God as a basis for our own salvation. But Paul, interpreting Christ for us, tells us that just doesn’t work (e.g. Galatians). Instead faith works through love; and that love is poured out in our hearts by the Spirit. John summarized the same theme in his first epistle: we love [God] because he first loved us.

So we are merely responders; God is the initiator. Some respond & others simply harden their hearts until God finally gives them over to their desires. Paul spoke of this not only in Romans 1 but also in 2 Thessalonians 2, “They refused to love the truth and so be saved.” And, we can add, truth has its ultimate center in the one who is “the Truth”. When we begin to abide in his word and thus begin to “know the truth” we find the freedom of meeting our Father whose love captures us (all in John 8:30 and following).

So in this framework we find a hurt lover (God) wooing a faithless, loveless person to himself: and he succeeds with those of us who respond as we find the emptiness of sinful self-love (in separate Bible images: as those who know we’re blind; or know we need a physician). This still involves a mystery (of why some respond and not others) but it’s a mystery set in the narrative of an original love; a love lost; and love restored. Hosea certainly understood.

You’re making me think about the whole point of salvation rather than whatever rules need to be met or characteristics displayed in a person to know whether or not salvation has been achieved. We always seem to be debating such things as ‘once saved always saved’ etc…

Seems rather irrelevant when you put it in that light.

As you say, salvation is the transformation back to what was always intended. What should have been and what will be. This must be a process that we all enter into from differing points and move through at varying speeds. The love we aim for and (hopefully, increasingly) display whilst we are doing it is what holds it all together. And what will always hold it together. God (and us combined).

So how much of a role do we have to play in our own salvation?

It would be great if you could let me know what you think about that. I’ve thought about it a lot, perhaps unnecessarily. It seems that we all have many issues, hindrances to salvation, that didn’t necessarily start with us but that we need to finish with and because of these issues many may have real difficulty even believing.

Thanks for your post.

Thank you for that Ron it really gets the synapse firing hopefully what I have written isn’t too convoluted where there are big jumps, as brain to keyboard gets lost in translation.