Heavenly Freedom and Free Will

The Problem of Heavenly Freedom

• The redeemed in heaven have free will but are incapable of sinning
• Philosophers find this problematic, asking how someone can be free and yet incapable of sinning
• If the redeemed are kept from sinning then their wills must be reined in, and if that is the case then it doesn't seem right that they are free

Traditional Christianity

• God endowed humans with free will
• Because humans have free will, they can choose to sin, as they did in the Fall
• Despite human sin, God provides for the justification and sanctification of sinners
• Sinful humans who accept God's grace through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ can be reconciled to God and share in his everlasting happiness in heaven as the redeemed
• Christian theologians and philosophers traditionally thought the redeemed will be free but incapable of sinning, without the possibility of a second Fall
• This conjunction of theses is the traditional view of heaven, but it seems to be in internal tension

Responses to the Problem of Heavenly Freedom

• The first response accepts compatibilism, the view that an agent's free choice is compatible with her being determined to choose thusly
• The second and third responses are strategies of concession, agreeing that the redeemed in heaven can sin
• The second response says that it is a live possibility the redeemed sin, and if they do so they will fall from heaven
• The third response claims that while the redeemed in heaven can sin, it is not a live option for them due to God's counterfactual guidance based on middle knowledge
• The fourth view is advocated by James Sennett, who offers a revised form of compatibilism

Compatibilism as a Solution

• To avoid the Problem of Heavenly Freedom, understand freedom in such a way that being determined can be consistent with being free
• If an agent's being free is consistent with that agent's being determined not to sin, then the dual theses are not inconsistent
• If God can determine how agents use their free will, then by determining them never to sin he can ensure that the redeemed in heaven do not sin without taking away their free will

The Free Will Defense

• According to the Free Will Defense, moral evils do not contradict God's essential goodness because the existence of free will justifies the existence of the moral evil that it makes possible
• On the supposition that free will is compatible with determinism, God could actualize the good of free will without the possibility of moral evil by determining all free creatures never to do evil, rendering the Free Will Defense impotent
• The supposition of compatibilism makes the logical problem of evil more acute, making it disadvantageous to a response to the Problem of Heavenly Freedom
• There are philosophical reasons to reject compatibilism, thus in what follows the assumption of incompatibilism is preferred

The Concession Strategy

• Another way to avoid the Problem of Heavenly Freedom is to allow for the possibility of sin among the redeemed
• If the redeemed can sin, there is the possibility of further falls from heaven, as Origen posited
• Freedom is essential to the Christian view of heaven, thus Donnelly thinks the redeemed can use their free will to do evil, earning an eviction from Heaven
• This answering of the Problem of Heavenly Freedom is consistent with incompatibilism insofar as one's free actions can't be determined, and it does not make the problem of evil more intractable
• "To think that the redeemed aren't free "is to misunderstand the Christian notion of heaven,” as such to allow the possibility of heavenly evictions is to misunderstand the Christian notion of heaven
• Heaven is essentially a place of ultimate happiness, and no state is a state of ultimate happiness if one could be in a different state and be happier
• On the Concession Strategy, one can't be certain of eternal life with God since eviction is possible
• The concession strategy's heaven is not a place of ultimate happiness, and hence is no heaven worthy of the name

A Molinist Strategy

• It could be argued that heaven does not allow the possibility of heavenly sin
• According to the Molinist, God pre-volitionally knows what all possible created persons would freely do in every possible circumstance, called 'middle knowledge,'
• A counterfactual of creaturely freedom is a contingent proposition about how a creature would freely act in a particular situation, which has the following form: If agent A were in circumstances C, A would freely do X.
• God could use the Molinist's understanding of divine providence to provide a solution to the Problem of Heavenly Freedom
• Those in heaven could retain their libertarian freedom, on the basis of His middle knowledge, God could make sure that once in heaven, the redeemed will find themselves only in circumstances in which they will freely not sin
• God providentially ensures that each of the redeemed is only in sin-free circumstances, and never in sin-prone circumstances, and while the redeemed can sin, sinning is not a live possibility due to God's guidance
• If the redeemed are able to sin given their moral characters, then they are not perfected, however if they are not able to sin given their moral characters, the truth of Molinism would be superfluous to the Problem of Heavenly Freedom

Sennett's Solution - Proximate Compatibilism

• Proximate Compatibilism is developed and defended by James Sennett.
• Sennett thinks that free will is compatible with an agent's being determined in certain ways, provided that the agent brings about this determination by earlier free and undetermined activity
• After death, the redeemed in heaven are determined by their own freely formed character such that certain choices and actions are no longer possible
• There is no libertarian free will in heaven at all
• There are some actions that are determined, but have not always been determined such as someone that is determined not to swindle money from a homeless shelter in order to pay for a luxurious vacation because she sees no good or motivating reason for such behavior
• While she wasn't remotely determined not to swindle, she is proximately determined not to swindle, and while whether or not she swindled was remotely undetermined, it is not proximately undetermined

A Preferable Solution

• There can be the ability to form a moral character which later precludes that person from willing certain things
• Our characters are such that we can choose to perform morally good actions, but our freely formed characters preclude us from doing morally bad actions insofar as those characters lead us to evaluate reasons for acting, or not acting, in certain ways
• The blessed in heaven could be derivatively free because even if all the decisions of the blessed in heaven were determined by their characters and the reasons they see for acting in various ways, that by itself wouldn't render them unfree
• There can be non-derivative freedom in heaven as well,
• On this view, even if one's character determines that one not perform certain actions, it doesn't determine all the actions that one does perform; rather, one's freely chosen moral character underdetermines at least some of one's actions
• One's character needn't determine the choice between actions in heaven i.e. sing in the heavenly choir or to play the harp
• Our moral characters, and the reasons we see for acting in various ways as a result of having those characters, don't determine all the actions we do perform, but they do preclude those actions we cannot perform i.e. We rape, pillage and plunder
• • The view in this study paper is that you can have non-derivative free will, but it is circumscribed by the moral characters that have been previously formed
• Free will is the ability to do evil isn't essential to having free will. According to Acquinas Even if the blessed are determined not to sin, they are still able to choose freely among alternate goods.
• This view emphasizes the importance of a robust form of free will, as the Concession Strategy does, protects against the live possibility of sin in heaven, as the Molinist Strategy does, and provides a way of showing how the ability to sin may be curtailed in heaven

Objections and Rebuttals

• One potential objection to the solution to the Problem of Heavenly Freedom is that it brings with it heresy like Pelagianism, in that one can earn or merit one's way to heaven apart from a unique grace given by God God's grace can still play an important role in the formation of characters and we can (and do) keep the initial infusion of God's saving grace as God's gratuitous prerogative.
• Michael Martin argues that it is doubtful that the traditional view (where the belssed will be unchangable) can be reconciled with standard Free Will Defense arguments, since God would have actualised a heavenly world from the point of inception,
• In contrast to the above: if a non-divine agent is free and has a moral character that precludes sin, there must have been a prior time when that agent was free and didn't have a moral character that precludes sin.
• So if God were to bring a world into existence that is intrinsically identical a world from the point in time forward, but only where denizens of the actual world would be free because their freedom would not be determined
• A point of contention can be that it doesn't preserve the presence of significant free will in heaven in the true sense.