Bible Studies

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We finish this study here in Part 7.

THE CONTEXT IN WHICH THOSE EARLY CHRISTIAN WRITERS SPOKE OF FREE WILL. I have already demonstrated that they agreed that our salvation is dependent on the enabling, saving grace of God in Christ to become Christians and to think and live as Christians. The pagan world ((including many of the religions, very much including Gnosticism (which was a powerful opponent of true Christianity for a long time; the Gnostics spoke of Jesus, used parts of the Bible, practiced water baptism, etc., but they denied that sin is the problem and rejected the atoning blood of Jesus and had many other super-serious problems; those Fathers had to deal with Gnosticism on a much more serious level than the writers of the New Testament did); the occult (including astrology); and many of the philosophies)) in which these writers lived and wrote was given over in large measure to fatalism, which, by definition, denies the Biblical teaching of free will (limited free will after the fall). Another of the religions of those ancient days that denied free will was Manichaeism; Augustine followed that religion before he became a Christian.

The First Few Sections Of The Article On "Fatalism" In The "Catholic Encyclopedia" (on the internet) Give Some Insight Regarding The Widespread Fatalism That The Early Christian Writers Had To Contend With. I'll just quote two sentences from the paragraph titled "Fatalism and Christianity": "The pagan view of an eternal, inevitable force coercing and controlling all action, whether human or divine, found itself in conflict with the conception of a free, personal, infinite God. Consequently several of the early Christian writers were concerned to oppose and refute the theory of fate." (The writers of the New Testament didn't spend hardly any time, if any time, directly opposing this viewpoint, but they certainly rejected this viewpoint. They spent much of their time laying the foundation for new-covenant salvation and its relationship with the Old Testament and Judaism.) It is important to understand that when those early Christian writers spoke of free will they were reacting against the widespread viewpoint of fatalism; they were not denying our dependence on the enabling grace of God to become Christians and to live as Christians. The New Testament is quite clear on these points (as I demonstrated above). As I mentioned, I am not suggesting that the early Christian writers always emphasized grace enough, and especially when it came to dealing with the sin of Christians.

I'll Quote A Little From The Two-Page Article On "Fate and Fatalism" In The "New Catholic Encyclopedia" (McGraw-Hill, 1967), pages 850-852. The subheadings in this article are "Fate, Fortune, Chance, and Destiny

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