I was in a coffee shop a few days ago when I overheard a teenage girl tell her mother, “I didn’t ask to be born.”
From the look on their faces, I could tell progenitor and offspring were in the middle of some kind of kerfuffle. I didn’t know what dustup was about, but I remember the roller-coaster of adolescence well – when hormones are flowing, and kids realize the shibboleths their parents’ issue don’t cut the mustard anymore. I’m sure I’ll hear those words come out of my daughter’s mouth one day. How to answer her? Maybe the answer lies in free will.
To grossly oversimplify, theologically at least, man has free will to choose and God, out of respect for that freedom, will not compel anyone to do anything against their will. That, of course, brings up interesting conundrums like, “If God is omniscient and knows everything you’re going to do anyway, then how is your will truly free?” Good question, but we don’t need to go into that here.
Over the years, however, I’ve noticed free will is used by religions to terrify their followers into submission. “If you choose to sin,” they say, ‘If you decide to reject God then He, out of respect for your freedom, has no choice but to let fall into hell.” This is problematic on many levels, not the least of which is reconciling the idea of a good and merciful God who lets his children be consigned to an eternity of torment. If your child sticks his head into an oven, would you, out of respect for their freedom, let then bake their brains? You’d pull that kid right outta there – but craziness is exactly what these so called religious types are selling. A good example of this is when a Sunday school teacher horrified my daughter by telling her eighty percent of people will end up in hell, that life is a test most people flub.
But there’s something these free will jihadists always fail to consider; if God truly respects your freedom, then, logically, he’d have to ask if you wanted to be born. If he just threw you into the world by fiat, then the whole free will thing is bullshit. “You knit me together in my mother’s womb,” the Psalmist sings. “My frame was not hidden from you when you made me in that secret place, when I was woven in the depths of the earth.” Therefore, in that primordial moment, God would have to ask if you wanted to be. But for you to make a proper and free choice, he’d also have to let you know what was in store for you – which is no brainer for him because, as that same psalm says, “Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”
That means that’d you see life on earth wasn’t going to be a picnic – that you would inevitably suffer from sickness, loss, evil and death. But let’s up the ante and say that Sunday school teacher was right and that, if you don’t do X, Y, & Z right during your scant time on earth, there’s an eighty percent chance you’ll end up suffering an eternity of torment. You’d be an idiot to take those odds, which means the only souls who’d say “yes” would be those who knew they were a shoo in for Heaven. Since we know some of those people turned out to be absolute monsters, however, that doesn’t make any sense. The only way out of this eschatological pickle, at least in my mind, is that every soul that ever was had to have said yes to being born. Knowing what was coming, why on Earth would they do that?
I don’t pretend to know how this all works but I imagine, as we were being “knit together” we were given the knowledge – or at least the assurance – that, in the end, “all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.” That it’ll all work out. That all shall be saved. Now, there’s lots of objections to this “universalist” take on salvation, namely, “If we’re all getting into Heaven no matter what, then why should I be good on earth?” I can see where those people are coming from but ask yourself, do you really think the only leverage God has is by threatening us with eternal torture? To rule by fear? We’ve had enough of those tyrants on earth, thank you very much.
Pollyanna views on how damaging sin can be have no place in the spiritual life. Evil is real and we must wrestle with its effects in both society and our hearts. Somewhere along the way, however, sin made us lose or forget that “assurance” we received when God summoned us from nothingness – kind of like a traumatic source of amnesia. As we stumble around this world, we do indeed stick our heads into ovens of egoism, selfishness, and anger because our ability to make an informed choice is corrupted by sin. Freedom, you see, doesn’t mean being able to do whatever you want whenever you want. Freedom means allowed to choose wisely – to do what’s good for you. Separated from The Divine, we just don’t have all the information to make those proper choices – at least not always – so our free will isn’t as free as we like to think it is. So, what kind of parent would let their kid bake their head in an oven out of some facile respect for their freedom, to blithely let them suffer from an insane choice? A monster that’s who. On the cross, Jesus saw how enslaved and crazy sin made us when he uttered. “Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing.” He knew we were all NVTS – NUTS.
The entire point of the spiritual life is to return to Original Innocence – to regain that divine assurance we’ve lost – to be “born again.” Not an easy thing to do and it won’t be free from pain, but I refuse to believe in a barbaric God who’ll let us stick our heads into a never ending oven. If we do, if we think Heaven is a “success” that’s only sweeter because “others must fail” then that tells us more about ourselves than Him. No, our salvation was assured long before we even asked to be born. That is the good news Christ preached and his Apostles shouted from the rooftops. “Don’t be afraid! It’ll work out more wonderfully than you can possibly imagine!” And the way we find that ‘assurance” once again is by feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, slaking people’s thirst, clothing the naked, welcoming the stranger, visiting those in prison and letting people do that for us. As any child knows, things would be better if we everyone just played nice – and God is very much like a child.
Looking at that teenager as she sulked over her sugary, high fat, caffeinated beverage, I knew she was at that stage in her life where she’s all about “having freedom.” My daughter is starting to move into that stage and, while I know I have to respect her freedom, part of my job will be help her make wise choices, – but make her feel like it was all her idea. Trickery? No, more like the guile that comes age and experience helping youngsters get on the right path. I think God in his omniscient omnipotence also does something similar for, as Edith Stein once wrote, “Human freedom can be neither broken nor neutralized by divine freedom, but it may well be, so to speak, outwitted.”
I think the odds are good God will eventually outwit us all.
