Few have defined what free will is, although it repeatedly occurs in the writings of all. Origen seems to have put forward a definition generally agreed upon among ecclesiastical writers when he said that it is a faculty of the reason to distinguish between good and evil, a faculty of the will to choose one or the other. Augustine does not disagree with this when he teaches that it is a faculty of the reason and the will to choose good with the assistance of grace; evil, when grace is absent. ... John Calvin (1509-1564), The Institutes of the Christian Religion, ii.2.4 [1559]
Reformed definition of free will: "The power to choose according to one's strongest motive, nature and character." In the unregenerate, to freely choose evil. In the regenerate, to freely choose God and the good. Byron Curtis
No more soul-destroying doctrine could well be devised than the doctrine that sinners can regenerate themselves, and repent and believe just when they please...As it is a truth both of Scripture and of experience that the unrenewed man can do nothing of himself to secure his salvation, it is essential that he should be brought to practical conviction of that truth. When thus convinced, and not before, he seeks help from the only source whence it can be obtained. CHARLES HODGE
Freewill. It's a bitch. -- John Milton aka Satan, in Devil's Advocate 1997
If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will...then we may take it it is worth paying.-- C S Lewis--Mere Christianity
If any man doth ascribe aught of salvation, even the very least, to the free-will of man, he knoweth nothing of grace, and he hath not learnt Jesus Christ aright. Martin Luther
. . the issue of free will, like so many great truths, is a paradox. On the one hand, free will is a reality. We can be free to chose without "shibboleths" or conditioning or many other factors. On the other hand, we cannot choose freedom. There are only two states of being: submission to God and goodness or the refusal to submit to anything beyond one's own will - which refusal automatically enslaves one to the forces of evil. We must ultimately belong either to God or the devil.
Scott Peck, - People of the Lie
We must believe in free will. We have no other choice. -- Isaac Bashevis Singer
I do not come into this pulpit hoping that perhaps somebody will of his own free will return to Christ. My hope lies in another quarter. I hope that my Master will lay hold of some of them and say, "You are mine, and you shall be mine. I claim you for myself." My hope arises from the freeness of grace, and not from the freedom of the will. Charles Haddon Spurgeon
I infer that God's decrees, and the necessity of event flowing thence, neither destroy the true free-agency of men, nor render the commission of sin a jot less heinous. They neither force the human will, nor extenuate the evil of human actions. Predestination, foreknowledge, and providence, only secure the event, and render it certainly future, in a way and manner (incomprehensibly indeed by us; but) perfectly consistent with the nature of second causes. Augustus Toplady
The greatest judgment which God Himself can, in this present life, inflict upon a man is, to leave him in the hand of his own boasted free-will. AUGUSTUS TOPLADY
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