The Bondage of the Will

This article is based on the translation made in 1823 by Edward Thomas Vaughan. The language has been modernized with the assistance of CoPilot AI, with further alterations and final approval by Thirdmill’s editorial staff.

It’s essential—and deeply beneficial—for Christians to understand this: God doesn’t foresee things by chance. Instead, He sees, plans, and brings about everything through His eternal, unchanging, and flawless will. This truth is like a thunderbolt that shatters the notion of human free will. Anyone who insists on defending free will must either reject this truth, distort it, or find some way to deflect its force.

But before I present my own reasoning and scriptural support, let me begin by engaging you, Erasmus, with your own statements. Didn’t you just affirm that it’s in God’s nature to be just and merciful? If that’s true, then His justice and mercy must be constant—unchanging for all eternity—because His nature doesn’t change. And what’s true of His justice and mercy must also apply to His knowledge, wisdom, goodness, will, and every other divine attribute.

So if you’ve rightly and reverently declared these things about God, why do you now contradict yourself by claiming it’s irreverent, presumptuous, or pointless to say that God necessarily foreknows all things? Are you suggesting that God either foreknows what He doesn’t will, or wills what He doesn’t foreknow?

But if God wills what He foreknows, then His will is eternal and unchanging—because it’s part of His nature. And if He foreknows what He wills, then His knowledge is likewise eternal and unchanging.

Therefore, it logically follows that everything we do and everything that happens—though it may appear to be random or changeable—is, in reality, necessary and unchangeable when viewed in light of God’s will. God’s will is effective and cannot be resisted. His power, being part of His nature, is also wise and cannot be deceived. And because His will cannot be thwarted, whatever He wills must come to pass at the exact time, place, and in the precise way He has foreseen and determined.

If God’s will were like human will—where, for example, a person builds a house and then no longer wills anything about it (especially after death)—then we might say that some things happen by chance or change over time. But with God, it’s the opposite: the work itself may cease, but His will remains. In fact, if we’re going to use words properly, Latin allows us to say that a work is done contingently, but not that the work itself is contingent.

In other words, a work may be carried out by a changeable and uncertain will—but that’s not true of God. And a work can only be called “contingent” if we do it without planning, as if it just happened to fall into our hands. That’s how human actions work: we stumble upon something and act without prior intention. But God never acts by accident or without forethought.