Free Will, Moral Responsibility, and Reformed Theology - Analytic ...

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Paul L. Manata © 2011
good thing for God to choose. While God may not be able to do other than good,
He may have many good options to choose from. The Arminian will say that
there’s no reason to think God has only one choice he can make just because he
must always choose good.
Reformed Christians who use the above argument to refute Arminian
conceptions of man’s freedom are not making the kind of progress that needs to
be made. It is often thought that the lion story quells the worries of the Arminian.
But, it only does so by uncharitably assuming that Arminianism entails that we
don’t choose according to our nature, or that we have the ability to lead sinless
lives (no doubt, some Arminians have said this, but it’s not an entailment of
Arminianism), and by confusing nature determinism with act determinism.
Reformed theology entails both, but it is the latter Arminians object to. However,
there may be something to this argument in response to ultimate sourcehood or
responsibility. But to make that argument other premises would need to be
invoked and Arminians might deny those. In any case, the argument would need
to be developed and doing so is beyond our scope.
4. Reformed Theology, Free Will and Moral Responsibility
Given that Reformed theology is a type of determinism, how must it understand
free will and moral responsibility? It cannot deny that we are morally responsible,
for our perimeter fence will not allow us thoroughfare in that direction. Also, if
man is to have freedom, our perimeter fence will not allow us to hold to
libertarian theories of free will along with their attendant constraints, like the
principle of alternative possibilities and ultimate sourcehood (cf. sec. 2.2 and
2.3). Pretty clearly, then, Reformed theology will need to invoke some kind of
compatibilism. That is, it will have to say that our free and morally responsible