Ryan in Michigan listening on AM 990 you are on with Jimmy Akin. It's open
forum, what's your question? My question has to do with the doctrine of total
depravity. So in the Fifth Canon of the Council of Trent it says, "If any man says
that after the sin of Adam, man's free will was extinguished,
let him be anathema." And also in the Council of Trent it affirms Prevenient
Grace. John 6:44, "No man can come to the Son unless the Father who sent him draws
him, and I will raise him up on the last day." And so I was a little confused,
because if I can't come to the son unless the father draws me, then it seems
like my free will is extinguished, so it seems like the Council of Trent's Fifth Canon
is both contradicting itself and John 6:44, so I was wondering why that's not a
contradiction. Okay, there are several ways of looking at this, and one of them
is to recognize that when when Trent says that man's free will was not
extinguished by the fall, it doesn't mean that it wasn't damaged by
the fall. Something can be damaged but not extinguished, and in the case of
the Council of Trent, what they were dealing with were some viewpoints that
were being entertained in various circles, particularly in the Protestant
community, that either denied that man had ever had any kind of free will--that
just everything we do is, we're like robots, you know, we're God's windup
toys and never had free will of any kind-- and then there was a kind of mitigated
form that said, "Well okay, maybe we had free will before the fall of man, but
then when Adam sinned we completely lost it, and now our wills are wholly
bound to sin, so that we don't have any freedom, and the only way we can do
anything good at all, if we can do anything good at all, is if God causes us
to do it, so we don't have free will." And that's what Trent is reacting
against. So it's not reacting against the idea that our free will wasn't damaged.
Trent's perfectly happy to say that our free will was damaged, but we still
actually retain freedom. We don't have a complete lack of freedom. So
that's one way of reconciling these two things. You could say, well, so maybe our
free will was damaged in such a way that we couldn't come to God unless he gives
us Prevenient grace, which is the grace that enables us to respond positively to
God's message, so we couldn't come to him in that sense unless God gives us this
grace to compensate for the damage that was done to our free will by the fall.
But there's another way of looking at it too, which would be to say this: Man
doesn't automatically have what theologians call a supernatural vocation,
that is, a vocation to be with God and in spiritual union with him. God could have
created man in what theologians refer to as a state of pure nature. In a state of
pure nature we wouldn't have sin, but we also wouldn't have the grace of being
spiritually united with God. We might know certain things about God that we
could tell by natural reason, like the fact that He exists, but we wouldn't have
the supernatural desire in our hearts to be in union with Him. And so that's
another way of looking at this. You could say, well, in order for us to have
that desire for spiritual union with God, it requires a gift from God. It requires
that, just like He gave us free will in the beginning, He also needs to give us
the gift, which is a kind of free will, to desire union with him spiritually, and
that's an elevated thing above simply natural freewill, it's a kind of
supernatural-ized freedom where we have the desire and the ability to pursue
those desires to have union with God, which is something he didn't have to
offer us. It's a grace. He could have created us in a paradisaical
environment with no sin and no suffering, but He just didn't
bring us into full spiritual union with Himself. That's a gift. And so that's
another way that you could look at how the the existence of freewill squares
with the fact that we need God's grace in order to come to Him. Okay, I'm still
wondering about that the specific ability to to come to the Father without
Him drawing you. I mean, you don't have the free will to do that, you know?
Correct, but there are a lot of things that I don't have the ability...when we
talk about free will, I think you may be thinking of some kind
of unlimited freedom. And that's not what's meant by saying we have free will.
There are lots of things I can't choose. Not being Spider-Man, I can't choose to
crawl on the walls, you know? Not being Superman, I can't choose to fly. But there
are a lot of things that are within the scope of things that I can choose. And so
I have freewill with respect to those things that I can choose, I'm not just a
puppet. That's what's meant when we say someone has free will. We don't mean
there aren't things that they're incapable of choosing; we mean that they
do have freedom within whatever scope of freedom they have. And so that's one
of the things that applies here in terms of the ability to choose God. There's
also the fact that God ensures that everybody has the grace needed to come
to him. This is something the Second Vatican Council teaches, that even if
it's in a mysterious way, in ways known to God, He can make it possible, and does
make it possible, for everybody to come to Him. So it's by His grace that that
happens, but He ensures that that grace is given to everybody.