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

7. Closing Remarks
75
Paul L. Manata © 2011
It was my aim that this paper would give my fellow Reformed Christians a good
introduction to the topic of free will and moral responsibility. I hope to have
made clear that Reformed theology is a kind of determinism, and that there are
some confessional statements that serve as a perimeter fence which protect us
from going too far but also allow a wide range of movement inside the fence. The
Reformed doctrines that get us determinism are taken from statements on God’s
decree, God’s providence, and God’s knowledge. The information we have in our
Reformed confessions is enough to give us some general rules to go by, but it
does not present to us a robust and worked-­‐out model of compatibilism. Thus,
Reformed believers have freedom to develop or latch on to their own favored
models, two of which I presented in this paper. 99
I also presented the view of freedom held by the majority of Christians today,
especially in academia. I sought to provide a brief introduction to this view, which
we called ‘libertarianism’, and I also briefly presented a few arguments Reformed
Christians could bring to bear against this view. I also interacted with a view I
called “Reformed libertarianism (or something near enough).” This view is gaining
in popularity but was seen to be subject to vagueness, ambiguity, and
philosophical-­‐theological objections. It wasn’t clear that the motivations for this
view gave us anything that theological determinism could not provide.
I did not attempt to prove determinism in this paper, or that there was a
99 Michael McKenna offers several more in the article “Compatibilism” written for
the SEP, see , last accessed
7/18/11.