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echo: bible-study
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from: Matthew Johnson matthew_
date: 2005-01-19 22:45:00
subject: Re: Free WillY.COM

In article , David Glenn Misner
says...
>
>
>
>Do we REALLY have free will or is it an illusion?

Yes, we do.

>  My dad says we
>really do not have free will

Is he a Calvinist?

> but I say that we do but I can't find any
>place in the Bible that says we do

Not in so many words, no. But it _is_ implied. So, for example, as St. Augustine
so brilliantly explains in De Gratia et Libero Arbitrio, whenever Scripture
records God giving Man a commandment, Scripture is implying that we have free
will.

You can find De Gratia et Libero Arbitrio in a rather old-fashioned English
translation on the web at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1510.htm

I will only quote the opening of Chapter 2 here, since that most directly
addresses your question:

Begin quote-------------

CHAP. 2 --PROVES THE EXISTENCE OF FREE WILL IN MAN FROM THE PRECEPTS ADDRESSED
TO HIM BY GOD.

Now He has revealed to us, through His Holy Scriptures, that there is in a man a
free choice of will. But how He has revealed this I do not recount in human
language, but in divine. There is, to begin with, the fact that God's precepts
themselves would be of no use to a man unless he had free choice of will, so
that by performing them he might obtain the promised rewards. For they are given
that no one might be able to plead the excuse of ignorance, as the Lord says
concerning the Jews in the gospel: "If I had not come and spoken unto them, they
would not have sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin." Of what sin does
He speak but of that great one which He foreknew, while speaking thus, that they
would make their own--that is, the death they were going to inflict upon Him?
For they did not have "no sin" before Christ came to them in the flesh.

End quote-----------------


-- 
---------------------------
Subudcat se sibi ut haereat Deo
quidquid boni habet, tribuat illi a quo factus est.
(St. Augustine, Ser. 96)

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