free will

It’s a common objection to the doctrine of particular redeeming grace: What about free will? With a free will can’t we desire God, and decide to follow him on our own initiative? But that argument begs the question; what needs to be proven is merely assumed. We need to know what Scripture teaches...
Do Calvinists believe in free will? Jonathan and James point to the Westminster Confession of Faith chapter 9 to help us tackle this turbulent topic. The Confession is very careful to qualify what it means for man to have free will while establishing the boundaries of human freedom. What does it...
iv. When God converts a sinner, and translates him into the state of grace, He frees him from his natural bondage under sin; and, by His grace alone, enables him freely to will and to do that which is spiritually good; yet so, as that by reason of his remaining corruption, he does not perfectly, or...
ii. Man, in his state of innocency, had freedom, and power to will and to do that which was good and well pleasing to God; but yet, mutably, so that he might fall from it. Along with the trivial sense of free will - what today we term free agency - Adam also possessed free will in the important...
i. God has endued the will of man with that natural liberty, that is neither forced, nor, by any absolute necessity of nature, determined good, or evil There is something of interest about the location of this chapter within the Confession. It falls immediately after a chapter describing all that...