In order for such a truly intimate relationship to blossom within created existence between a infinite creator and a finite creation, such a relation by necessity must be based on trust and faith on the part of the created. For instance, it is only by faith in our Creator that we commit ourselves to submit our lives to His providence, trusting that His Vision is of the upmost benefit to our existence. This is to say that due to our limited awareness of reality and our inability to discern all future possibilities, contingencies, and outcomes, it is only by faith that we trust that God has our best interest at heart and that His absolute competency and trustworthiness deserves our allegiance. Since, we cannot fully know how it is that His will for our lives is the most advantageous; it comes down to a matter of personal conviction and devotion. Moreover, apart from personal commitment and devotion, a relationship cannot exist. Such bonds of a relationship can only be shaped by a commitment stemming from a free choice. An act of freely surrendering to the will and plan of Providence is only possible by a creature that possesses the ability to depart from the will and plan of Providence, which is to say that it must be possible for such a creature to stubbornly defy Providence instead of humbly submitting to Providence.
To illustrate why freedom of the will is necessary for an intimate relationship to unfold, imagine that you find yourself encircled by a crowd harassing and jeering at you because of a riot that ensued due to racial discrimination. Now imagine that your best friend, of the same race as those persecuting you, jointly shares with you the onslaught of the crowd’s hate because of his apparent commitment to you that supersedes his loyalty to his race. This is to say that he was not initially a target of the crowd’s hate due to the crowd’s prejudices, but he indirectly became the object of hatred because of his apparent act of standing up for you. The pain of everything is not as bad when shared with a friend. Imagine that your friend remains alongside you and his loving presence provided buffer for you against the hate of the crowd. Or so you thought…
Imagine now that that this apparent devotion of the one who you presumed was your best friend was false. Imagine that you learn that it was not due to devotion, commitment, or love but that the friendship relations between you both had only been fabrications of your mind that you imposed on the relationship. There were no relations between the both of you, no real friendship. The self-imposed illusion made you convinced that he freely chose and willed to remain alongside you, in spite of the consequences. You believed that he willingly shared in your suffering out of an unconditional and loving heart. You thought his decision to remain with you was based on a voluntary commitment, but while you are in this situation, someone so cruelly reveals to you the ugly truth: that your supposed friendship is a farce and the relations between you and his actions toward you were a product of involuntary or automatic impulses. The coldness of it all would grip your heart and suddenly all the realities revolving around the relations between you dramatically shifts away from the category of friendship and the emotional support provided by this fidelity shatters. Subsequently, your inner vision of this other person dramatically changes along with your feelings and thoughts towards him.
The refuge, warmth, confidence, and strength that had flowed from this relationship during a moment of crisis dissipate, and they are replaced by thoughts and feelings of desertion, coldness, insecurity, and brokenness. You suddenly become overwhelmed with a distressing sense of loneliness and instability, and it seems as though your world has been turned upside down and you succumb to the despair to the now exponentially heightened existential crisis at hand. The shock of the present revelation eclipses that of the persecution because it is an internal crisis of the heart that causes a deeper suffering of a different kind than even the internal suffering brought upon the self and inflected upon the self due to the persecution. The emotional distress caused by this disclosure overshadows the physical pain inflicted by the persecutors.
One can see from this illustration and by reflection upon the human situation that the negation of the factor of voluntary choice, devotion, and affection cancels the illusive bonds of commitment central to a true friendship. As one’s inner vision of the other person goes through a drastic change that lasts as long as his affiliation with you relies on automatic actions and reactions, the future possibility of any sort of personal relationship is thwarted. Now it is easier for you to see how essential voluntary commitment and freely offered devotion is to the bonds of a relationship between one life form and another.
Our Heavenly Father’s aspiration to participate in a loving relationship with each of us led Him to endow within each of us the faculty of freedom and innate aspirations to strive towards eternal realities. This necessity is based on how essential freedom is in human existence’s category of willingness in order to actualize such a loving relationship envisioned by the synthetic operation of our Creator’s heart and mind when He brought to mind each of us. Freedom of the will is indispensable for the realization of the God-relationship, because freedom is requisite for relations of trust, commitment, and devotion that form a truly loving relationship between the Creator and us His beloved children. A loving relationship between an infinite being and a finite being must be rooted in faith and trust. And the activity of faith and trust in the will’s ascent to action depends on the presence of freedom, for faith and trust only take shape within our soul if and only if it was ordained for us to be faced with the decision to either volitionally commit our existence to the Creator’s Vision or to depart from His Vision altogether.
Thus, the absolute possibility of departure from the Creator’s Vision would have to be in place, which will be discussed later, in order for us to have the true possibility of a free choice to commit or to not commit our faith in our eternal destiny and the goodness our Creator’s Vision. Apart from free will, there can be no authentic trust. Without trust there can be no authentic commitment. Without commitment there can be no authentic conviction or devotion. Without conviction and devotion there can be no authentic hope. Without hope there can be no authentic faith. And without the willfully active presence of all these, true love cannot appear. Faith, hope, and love are all dependent upon a heart that is free, because only such a heart can produce the authentic hunger and thirst that provides the grounds by which these eternal virtues are procured. Freedom is the essential means by which the key of faith is formed, and this key alone gives one access to the God-relationship.
Our Creator ordained that it was most fitting for each of us to be free to choose whatever final end to pilot the disposition of our soul towards. And we choose with with the conviction that is what we believe to be the most befitting of us. Our disposition turns towards whatever vision we place as the criterion of our identity or humanness. This initial choice was either choosing the Creator’s Vision as most befitting for delineating one’s trueself or choosing another vision shaped by one’s imagination or by a foreign intelligence other than the Creator. Thus, the crossroads lies also in either placing our resolute trust in the Creator by believing His Vision for our lives as in our best interest or not placing our resolute trust in the Creator, which would lead us down the dark path void of the Light of the Creator’s Vision due to our departure from the will of God. This freedom is exercised through the autonomy made available to a person to direct the disposition of his will towards the pursuit of the chief good he or she has set up, and that chief good can be money, popularity, things, success, or God. Such a chief good that a person not only believes in but dedicates his or her life in pursuit of can be either one in accordance with the Creator’s Vision (such as glorifying the Creator and making our Heavenly Father proud) or in accordance with a vision and final end not demarcated by the Creator’s Vision such as the glorification of self, sensual pleasure, fame, fortune, power, or other conceptions of greatness, success, and happiness shaped by the thoughts and ways of our mind.
Furthermore, only by presupposing the freedom of human will can we legitimately call ourselves capable of being moral agents and creatures of conscience, of being either righteous or lawless. Only by being moral agents can we reflect the righteousness of our Creator and earnestly pursue His righteousness out of a passionate earnestness. In order for a person to be a moral agent, he or she must be a type of un-moved mover, someone whose righteous actions echo into eternity while possessing a strong and steadfast faith and a power over his or her will likened to the power of God over His will. This means that in a certain sense the ascent of our will to action whether internal or external must be influenced by a source that resides our soul alone and is not dominantly affected by another substance or governed solely by instinct. Only then can crossroads be present on our will’s ascent to action with the possibility being present in each instance for us to take alternative paths with alternative outcomes. This is to say that we must possess a type of un-caused casual influence by which we are freely able to influence our will’s ascent to action.Such power over one’s will is necessary for there to be a viable choice between abiding in or departing from our Creator’s ordained standard of eternal oughtness. Only by freely ascending to righteous acts and activities by one’s own willingness to do so and so abiding in His standard of oughtness is a person counted as righteous as God is righteous. If one could not have done otherwise, then oughtness demarcating what one should or should not do is an empty notion. This is to say that without possessing influence over our will, all human action would have no moral value, because each action was absolutely necessary according to the circumstances at hand without any possibility for another action. Declaring that I or someone else should not have done something would be a meaningless assertion, for we would have had no control to begin with.
Without the presence of human freedom, acknowledging a person's righteousness for doing an action would be meaningless because it was not possible for him or her to act otherwise. Remember that the standard of righteousness weighs the category of inwardness or what is within one’s self and will. The standard of righteousness then is only a possible measure if we have the ability to influence the disposition and ascent of our will towards glorifying God or an entity other than God, so that we can legitimately assert that we had any responsibility concerning our will to action. Without responsibility, accountability and duty become empty notions. A righteous action necessitates doing so in view of the light of eternal realities and in such a way that through faith and trust an individual can freely inclines himself towards the pursuit of his Creator’s Vision. Such a righteous action must be done with a conscious awareness and a humble heart based on accepting the limitations of one’s mind. A finite mind on its own cannot ascertain the absolute certainty that the Creator’s Vision is the most befitting of his existence.
Without the freedom of the will, authentic faith and genuine trust is impossible. Without the possibility of faith and trust being active in the ascent of man’s will, it would be impossible for him to be a moral agent. If this was the case, then it would necessarily be the case that we would live as we ought to before God out of instinctive impulse and lack the capacity to defect from the requisite order of His standard of oughtness. We could not resist him, it would be futile. Thus faith, hope, trust, and love would be empty realities in relation to the operation of a human being, because these virtues depend on the free exercise of the will over both the mind and heart of a person’s soul. Thus, in order for us to be righteous creatures who are capable of participating in the God-relationship in a theocentric orientation of the self arrived at through internal states of humility, trust, surrender, and devotion all revolving around one's faith in the Creator and His Vision, we must possess the freedom to pilot the inner disposition of our soul in accordance with the category of willingness of the heart and mind, and it must do so in such a way that we become a type of first mover or causal agent who volitionally engage in Theo-centralizing our individual selfhood. Like the rudder on a boat that directs it towards its destination and the engine that moves it along the way, so do we act as a type of first mover to direct and push where our ship should go. And the Creator is the fuel by which we get there, seeing as the He is the one who makes this opportunity for freedom possible in the first place because He brought us into existence out of nothingness and endowed each of our soul's will freedom mirroring His own. Thus, in order to become a theological self we must be free, through the inner striving directed by our willingness, to make our Creator's Vision the goal and criterion of our existence.
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