In part 1 of this series, I highlighted how the problem of evil is probably the single greatest challenge to the idea that the Creator of all things could be (as Christians would have it) simultaneously all-knowing (omniscient), all-powerful (omnipotent), and all-good (omnibenevolent). The only solution to God allowing evil in this world at all is that he must have plans to not only conquer all evil, but to transform it into a good which, by comparison, is inconceivably better than the evil was bad. And crucially, this he would do in a total way, for all things, rescuing and restoring and redeeming and recreating everything (restitutio omnium) which had been touched by evil, or else one or all of his “omni” characteristics would be false. According to the logic of the very nature of God, he would want to save all because he loves all, would know how to save all because he knows all, and would have the power to save all because he is ‘all-mighty.’ After all, what could stop the power of God?

According to many, the free will which God has bestowed on rational creatures is the one thing in all of creation which can thwart the love, knowledge, and power of God. It is precisely that created rock which he himself cannot lift. Or, to put it a more reasonable way: the free will of rational creatures is the self-imposed boundary which God could cross, but which he will not allow himself to cross because of his respect for each rational creature. It’s a willing limitation he sets upon himself. To willingly empty himself of his own divine glory is, after all, at the very center of the Christian Gospel story: God’s kenosis, or self-emptying, was demonstrated when he assumed the form of a slave and died an ignominious and agonizing death at the hands of his own creatures. It makes sense that if God were willing to do that, he would also be willing to respect the boundary of a rational creature’s own ability to choose to love him or not. He wants children, not automata; true relationship, not artificial love. Simply stated, God will respect the will of every creature either to ultimately accept or reject him, the former choice resulting in the creature’s complete fulfillment and joy, the latter in complete sorrow and anguish.

Very well. Rational creatures have the choice to love God or not to love him, and they are saddled with the terrible freedom to reject him if they choose. What exactly does it mean to choose, though?

“It’s fair to say the general question of human freedom and cosmic determinism is one of the biggest questions in all of the history of philosophy and theology,” says Dr. David Opderbeck in his essay But the Problem of Free Will. The “problem of free will” begins with our intuition that we have the capacity to consciously choose one thing or another; but then this intuition is questioned by some, postulating a deterministic world which might mean that our sense of free will is only an illusion and that actually everything (including our behaviors and “choices”) are predetermined either by blind physical causality or by immediate divine providence. I won’t give that question a full treatment here but will rather just state my agreement with those who conclude that both consciousness and free will are genuinely what they seem to us to be and not mere illusions.

So given that free will is authentic, what’s its nature and how does it work? For any rational creature, human or angelic or otherwise, free will does not mean solely the capacity to choose one thing or another regardless of the meaning and outcome of the choice. That notion of free will (sometimes termed “voluntarism” or “libertarian free will”) would be more like the randomness we might find at the quantum level of particle behavior rather than anything like a reasoned “choice.” Our free will is by nature teleological, aimed at a goal (that is to say, a “good”). To use a well-worn example, if I were given the “free choice” between choosing to open one of two doors without being told that a million dollars was behind the first door and a hungry tiger was behind the second, my “free choice” in this instance would be a sham. If, however, my ignorance was removed about what was behind both doors and I still approached the decision with complete randomness or commitment to the naked freedom of choice without rational regard for the consequences, it would be safe to say I had some pathology that inhibited me from acting as a rational agent—which in reality made me not entirely free. The same is true at the finality of creation for every creature: to be completely free in one’s choice is to choose the ultimate Good for oneself, which is one’s perfectly Good, Wise, and Powerful Creator.

But we’re told in divine revelation that not every creature does initially choose the ultimate Good of union with God; and we see that, even now in this life, people frequently don’t choose the good, or at least not the highest or most proper good. For, in choosing some “goods”, if those goods are not in the service of higher goods, then they are bad. All “goods” must be set in the proper hierarchical order, at the top of which is the ultimate Good: God. [The reason God is the ultimate Good is because God is both the fount of Being from which all Creation flows and subsists, and the ultimate culmination of all lesser goods: power, virtue, beauty, truth, love, etc]. But if any goods are chosen out of order and set up as a more ultimate good than a higher good, especially of the highest Good who is Deus Omnium, then an occasion of sin, or “missing the mark,” has occurred. “Missing the mark” is literally the definition of sin (hamartia). Choosing an easy theft over a more difficult legitimate acquisition, choosing an extra-marital pleasure rather than honoring a wedding vow, or ultimately and eschatologically choosing self-ownership over creaturely/filial gratitude are all examples of missing the goal of putting goods in their correct hierarchical order. Sin isn’t “choosing the bad”, and no creature ever chooses evil purely for the sake of evil; they are always wanting to get something out of an evil choice that they perceive as good for themselves. Sin is aiming for the wrong “good.” And this happens because of a creature’s finitude.

If a creature had infinite knowledge of good and bad and zero hindrances for choosing the good, then that creature would be in perfect relationship with God and be perfectly fulfilled. But in our finitude, not knowing good and bad perfectly, erring in our reasoning, and hindered by weakness and various pathologies, we miss the mark and do not have a perfect relationship with God and are not perfectly fulfilled. St. Paul, St. Maximus the Confessor, and many others have tried describing this complex dual condition we have of desiring the good but missing the mark. St. Paul describes it as two “laws” at work in us (Romans 7:14-25); St. Maximus postulates two “wills” at work in us, one which is uncorrupted (the natural will) and one which is corrupted (the gnomic will). In whatever metaphysical or psychological terms we describe it, this phenomenon means that, though we do have genuine free will operating in us which seeks the good, that free will isn’t fully free to choose the right good every time due to our creaturely finitude.

I just mentioned above that our finitude can limit our will in three distinct ways: ignorance/misinformation, miscalculation, and pathology. Let’s take a mundane example to demonstrate this. If a child is taking a math test in school and answers a problem about functions incorrectly, the cause may be that 1) he has never learned about functions or was taught about them incorrectly; 2) he simply made an honest miscalculation in some stage of his process; 3) his thinking was clouded by some bodily or psychological malady at the time. Other mundane examples abound, but this problem becomes the clearest at the eschatological register. The only way a creature would make the ultimate wrong choice to not embrace and be embraced by the God of perfect goodness, truth, and beauty as far as I can see it—especially if rejection of God meant suffering some sort of metaphysical, spiritual, or psychological pain—would be that the creature was in some way inhibited from that obviously good choice by either severe misinformation, miscalculation, or pathology (or some combination of the three).

Am I saying that nobody’s really responsible for their own choices, actions, and sins, and that we can all just blame our finitude (and by extension, our maker)? The question of culpability is, I admit, a tough nut to crack. But no, nothing in the Scriptures or tradition or in lived experience itself suggests that we aren’t all at least somehow guilty and responsible for our sins, crimes, and misdeeds. But the scope and severity of our sins, the degree to which we’re culpable of them, and whatever is required by true justice to punish us and repair the damage caused, are all finite. And don’t forget that God is in the business of forgiving sins and wiping them away for those who ask it. For those who don’t though, after all of the finite punishment and reparation is accomplished, all that’s left separating them from God would be the orientation of their heart (assuming that wasn’t repaired in the chastising process they would have endured). And what besides ignorance, error, or pathology would keep their heart locked in a non-divine direction? And isn’t God the ultimate Truth, the greatest teacher, and the greatest healer?

The Bible describes sin as “bondage” and “slavery” (Jn 8:34; Gal 5:1; Rom 6:6; 2 Pet 2:19), because to choose anything other than God and the goods which flow from God in their proper order is to not be fully free. But Jesus came to set prisoners free—free from death, yes, but also free from the sins whose wages are death. For a rational but finite person enslaved to sin to turn to God and see God as the true and ultimate Good, they will need deep reformation and liberation—the circumstances of which only God could bring about. We, in and of ourselves, truly could be fixed permanently in sin and error, trapped; but God can remove the barriers to sanity and a truly free will even when we can’t. If God can rescue us from death, he can rescue us from the law of death in our members, or our gnomic will, or whatever name we give the part in us that misses the mark. And in doing so, he would not be violating our free will, but finally liberating it to recognize and move toward the True, the Good, the Beautiful: himself.

My argument in summary is that finally, in whatever ultimate age it happens, the God who would not rest until every one of his creatures is saved, every “sheep” found, will remove every barrier of ignorance, error, and pathology that could possibly bar a creature from recognizing God as its ultimate Good, turning to God, and being saved. Or as I put it in Part 1: Is it intrinsically possible that God could save everyone without violating their free will, say, through unarguable reason and an undreamt of vision of compelling beauty that stirs the deepest and most fundamental desire for God even in the most wicked and rebellious of his creatures? Of course it’s intrinsically possible. Therefore, God could do it. Therefore God would do it. When you think about it, how could it be any other way given God’s unsearchable love, wisdom, and power?

In the next part, I want to address a handful of elephants now crowding the room, namely what the Scriptures and Church tradition have to say about death, judgment, heaven, and hell (the quattour novissima), and also what they don’t say.