By Mark W. Christy, PhD
(Note: Before reading, please be aware that no one save God is like God in the ultimate sense. Nevertheless, the Bible does call upon humanity to be like God (and like Christ) in terms of their character. This article will therefore use ‘like God’ in this manner.)
Classical Arminians agree with Calvinists concerning the bondage of the human will due to the original sin of Adam. Nevertheless, they disagree upon whether or not God’s prevenient (saving) grace was distributed to all people through the resurrection of Christ (the Arminian position) or only to a chosen few (the Calvinistic position). In the Arminian view, every person has been accorded saving grace through Christ to the extent that their wills are no longer in bondage allowing them to freely respond to the gospel. Conversely, Calvinists believe that God chooses those to whom He distributes saving grace in such a way that the deciding factor in one’s salvation is God’s will alone. Within this historical debate, a popular third option has arisen and is quickly gaining ground at least in America. This view, which could be called the libertarian freewill position, holds that people are born in such a way that their wills are not in bondage to sin to the extent that they can make a freewill response to the gospel without any need of saving grace. While many Scriptures are often employed in an attempt to support at least the two historical positions (because the third one invokes the Pelagian heresy), this article will only explore the event related to the Garden of Eden to demonstrate the proper stance among these views.
In the Garden of Eden, humanity existed in a perfect relationship with God whereby they exhibited perfect holiness, righteousness, goodness, etc. Their beings were perfectly in sync with God’s divine Person to such an extent that they enjoyed the immediacy of His presence at all times. In this way, they were created ‘like God’ in the sense that they bore the image of God, and could, unlike animals, personally relate with God. All of this was perfectly good according Genesis 1:31, and all of it was solely due to the will of God. In His creative work, God never once sought out the opinions of His creation; rather, He created everything including humanity solely according to His own desires. Up until this point, whatever will humanity had remained completely subverted by God’s will.
Within the Garden, God chose to place two options before humanity. Both options were once again solely decided upon by God. Appearing in the form of trees, these two options came with consequences already determined by God. Humanity could choose life by refusing to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good, or they could choose evil by choosing to disobey God and eat of the tree that would lead to death. As the Lord Himself declared, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die” (Gen 2:16-17).[i] By God’s sovereign will, humanity was given the freewill choice concerning whether or not they would eat of this tree.
Before proceeding, one should notice the already built-in constraints upon this initial freewill choice. The choices given to humanity were solely at the behest of God. Humanity could indeed freely choose to eat from either tree, but they had no say in the consequences. God did not even give an in-depth understanding of the full nature of death and its associated characteristics that come with choosing to disobey God.
As the Genesis account reveals, humanity chose to disobey God by eating of the tree He had commanded them not to. To initiate this fall into sin, Satan appears in the Garden. His arrival and admission to this perfect place where humanity communed with God could have only been by God’s design. Likewise, the commission of his evil deed began to unfurl even while humanity remained in that perfect communion.
In his remarks to Eve, Satan enticed her by telling her that she could be “like God” if only she would disobey God and eat the forbidden fruit (Gen 3:4). As has been noted, Eve was already “like God” because God chose to make her so apart from any effort, desire, or will of her own. Satan essentially tempted Eve to seek to obtain Godlikeness by an act of freewill and through her own effort by disobeying God. Eve, and ultimately Adam, chose to trust Satan over God and pursue Godlikeness by her own agency. By doing so, she fell out of Godlikeness and entered into a sort of Satanlikeness. Hence, Jesus labels all people children of Satan (John 8:44).
Returning to the initial choice given to humanity, one must observe that the freewill aspects were only marginally free in that they were limited solely to taking a small bite from a given tree. While Eve went further due to Satan’s temptations, her choice to be like God was completely powerless to alter her circumstance such that she could obtain the Godlikeness which she had freely (albeit disobediently) chosen. To put this another way, she could choose to be like God but she could not affect that choice. She had been given no means by God to make herself like God even while she clearly and sinfully attempted to do so.
In the aftermath of Adam and Eve’s disobedience, the consequences remained solely within the freewill choice of God alone. Even so, His freewill was constrained by His already pronounced word (which was given previously by His freewill choice) that Adam and Eve would die, and the fullness of the meaning behind the Lord’s words had already been chosen and would now be applied by God with no counsel sought from humanity.
Once banned from Garden and removed from God’s immediate presence by an act of God’s will, Adam and Eve were left with no means to re-access the Garden or to return to a face-to-face relationship with God. Their choice in the matter had been abandoned the moment that they chose to disobey God. Outside the garden and prohibited from readmittance, humanity became slaves to sin as Paul teaches (Romans 6:6-20). Until the coming of Christ, Scriptures readily demonstrate that humanity’s freewill remained in total bondage due to the sin of Adam and Eve.
Up until this point, it is likely that most Arminians and Calvinists would agree, but now that Christ has come and grace has in some way been made available the debate begins. As Arminians would have it, Christ’s resurrection somehow reverses the effects of the initial fall into sin in the Garden of Eden. Significantly, His resurrection under their system did not do anything for the ongoing sins of humanity post-fall so much as it reversed (at least partially) the damage done due to the original act of rebellion. To be particular, the Arminians would argue that Christ’s resurrection positively changed the sinner despite their sins to the extent that all sinners can now, in a way, return to the Garden because the freewill choice has been made alive by Christ whose death and resurrection loosened the chains placed upon it by the original sin.
If the Arminians are correct and people have been essentially empowered to at least revisit the trees in the Garden even while they remain outside of God’s presence due to their own sinfulness, one could say in a sense that they have already become born-again. If this is not so (and Arminians would likely say that it is not), then people have at least been placed in some quasi-state between salvation and damnation.
Assuming that such a state exists and the freewill choice has once again been made available to humanity, one should consider the nature of the choice. If, as the Arminians would have it, humanity has now been made alive in their freewill choice (through Christ) to the extent that they can freely choose Christ and by extension Christlikeness, it should become readily apparent that this freewill choice is wholly unlike the one offered by God in the Garden. In truth, it is the complete opposite. In the Garden, God only gave humanity the option of abandoning Him by being unfaithful and choosing death as opposed to life. He made them like God (as noted above) and never gave them a choice in that matter. The only one who gave them the choice to be like God was Satan, and when humanity chose to act on it, their freewill choice failed to render them to be like God and instead did quite the opposite. This being the case, it would seem that Arminians are taking a position alongside Satan and offering humanity a choice to be like God, and such a choice lies beyond the revealed truths associated with God’s creation narrative.
In opposition to the Arminian stance, Calvinists hold firmly to the sovereignty of God in all matters including the doctrine of election. They affirm that God endowed humanity with a freewill even while He Himself placed the aforementioned constraints upon it. Even to this day, humanity can continue to choose death as the freewill of Adam and Eve dictated in the Garden. Even so, this freewill choice of the first couple led to the bondage of their progeny who themselves were never allowed access to the Garden much less a choice between two trees with eternal consequences lying in the wake. In this desperate situation whereby humanity was found hopelessly trapped in sin due to the choice of Adam and Eve, God graciously sent His Son that those who chose Him would have life and become like God. The power behind that choice and the initiator of that choice, however, remains the same as the One revealed in the Garden account. God, the author of life (Gen 2:7; Rom 4:17), is the only one who can awaken someone to inherit life via Christ. For this reason, all Calvinists proudly adhere to Christ’s words in John 15:16 as a necessary part of the gospel: “You did not choose Me but I chose you.”
In conclusion, the Garden of Eden reveals that God’s choice completely overrode all aspects of the limited freewill of humanity. Before the fall, humanity never had the ability to choose to be like God for they were created so. Their only choice was whether or not they wanted to remain so by continuing in fellowship with God via ongoing faith. When they chose otherwise, they and their descendants were plunged into disfellowship with no hope in themselves of return because the power to be like God in their own strength and by their own will had never been granted. Thankfully, God sent His Son to suffer for the sins of fallen humanity. Moreover, by His grace, He has chosen to power those whom He wills back into full fellowship by allowing their sins to be consigned to Christ.
[i] All Scripture references are taken from NASB1995.