God's kenotic affirmation of our free will

God carries out His plan for His children like a loving parent

“Even the most perfect, harmonious, and most beautiful world would not be worthy of the dignity that God wanted the human being to have—the dignity of a free being. Freedom manifests itself in the capacity to create and to love. As free beings, humans can determine who they are going to be and how. Their ‘likeness’ is manifested in their capacity to shape this ‘open project’ of their existence.” — Davor Džalto

¹In a previous post, we explored how God affirms our free will in what I think of as a kenotic act (a self-emptying). In another, we contrasted such a perspective of God with that of the atheist Mikhail Bakunin’s, who believed God, if He existed, would be inherently unable to affirm free will in created beings. In both cases, the focus was on the negative: the affirmation of our freedom to reject God. Now, let’s consider the positive.

I think God also affirms our free will in letting us choose, to a degree, how we would like to serve Him. God created and arranged existence so “perhaps” some of us would reach out to Him; we need not all serve Him in precisely the same way, as though God “needed anything” (Acts 17:24-27). It is precisely because He does not need anything from us that He is willing to let us flesh out (pun intended) His perfect will through our own. The late Dallas Willard summarized the idea this way:

Where God has no instructions to give, we may be sure that is because it is best that he does not. Then whatever lies within his moral will and whatever is undertaken in faith is his perfect will.

Think of it this way: no decent parents would obscure their intentions for their children. A general principle for interpreting God’s behavior toward us is provided in Jesus’ words, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how mulch more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” [Luke 11:13]²

Willard is able to make such a statement because those who set their minds on the things of the Holy Spirit will live accordingly (Rom 8:2-6). God doesn't micromanage our behavior—what good parent wants that for their children?!

This means His perfect will allows for different outcomes, and He wants us to have a hand in His perfect plan and so relinquishes (for a time) the potter’s right over His clay.³ It’s not that we’re qualified for the job, but that God pours Himself out on us (you might even say He empties Himself) and lends us His qualifications. He enables us to act on our own accord while a river wells up inside us with the greatest guides for decision-making: a river of faith, hope, and love. Carrying out God’s perfect plan might even be rightly considered part of the fruit of the Spirit.

Blessed is the one

   who does not walk in step with the wicked

or stand in the way that sinners take

   or sit in the company of mockers,

but whose delight is in the law of the Lord,

   and who meditates on his law day and night.

That person is like a tree planted by streams of water,

   which yields its fruit in season

and whose leaf does not wither—

   whatever they do prospers. (Psa 1:1-3, NIV)

How far from Bakunin’s is such a perspective of God! I hope we we reflect the true nature of God to those around us.⁴

“A world of automata—of creatures that worked like machines—would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they've got to be free.” — C.S. Lewis

1. Opening quotation from Anarchy and the Kingdom of God: From Eschatology to Orthodox Political Theology and Back. Fordham University Press, 2021.

2. Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God. InterVarsity Press, 2012.

3. I think this is not unlike Kierkegaard’s idea quoted in both prior posts on kenosis, that only a truly omnipotent being could withdraw itself at the same time it offered itself, thereby granting genuine freedom.

4. Ending quotation from The Case for Christianity. 1943.