In the last book I read on free will, the author lined up historic Christian writers to prove his Calvinistic case that God has worked out every aspect of our lives in advance. In spite of this, we're still to blame for the wrong we do.
Boyd's book calls this mode of thinking the "blueprint" model, and finds it raises more questions than it answers. He proposes instead his "warfare" model, in which free will has a valid place. He believes his view is closer to the way the early Church thought, a view that was pushed aside by Augustine and later writers.
He points out firstly that if our view of God is inconsistent with God's ultimate revelation of himself in Jesus Christ, then it's a false view. Jesus spent his life fighting evil; a God who incorporates evil into his "plan" for our lives, is a different God entirely.
Boyd's warfare model takes into account all the variables of our lives. Our world has an infinite number of laws, and these impinge on us. God made it this way; He can't undo His laws on a whim; we must be able to rely on the basic stability of the world.
God's creation is stable but He still intervenes in it - Jesus is the prime example of intervention. However He can't shift creation around at our request - other people may be asking for something entirely different! Mix up five billion people who all think they're the centre of human existence, and you get huge complexity. Neither can He change the will of people in a moment, though through His Spirit He draws them, influences them. He also has the unseen spiritual world to deal with.
God has given us free will, (otherwise how could we love Him in any true sense?) but the unseen spirit world, both angelic and demonic, also has freedom to work. Boyd is very strong on his readers understanding the reality of the spiritual realm, where much of the angelic host is in rebellion against God and causes havoc. We ignore this at our peril. Westerners tend to put the spiritual realm aside, blaming humanity's propensity for evil, but Boyd shows there's more than that.
It's hardly surprising, then, that we can't always understand why our prayers aren't answered, why accidents happen, why certain people struggle throughout their lives when others seem not to. Boyd has great concerns about people who profess to know why something bad happened, or why God didn't answer a particular prayer.
If this seems to make prayer more complex than less, it does. However, it also gives us hope that when particular prayers aren't answered, it isn't necessarily our fault, either because we didn't pray enough, or because someone didn't have enough faith. I found that Boyd's arguments for his warfare worldview actually made me more willing to pray. Perhaps for the first time, I was more aware of the complexity behind answering any prayer, and the need to persist in prayer to break through the variables that may be hindering it.
Boyd is very concerned to make sure we understand prayer is of absolute importance, both in regard to our relationship with God, and in seeing things change, but he is realistic as to how much they can change. Some prayers won't be answered, because God cannot change something that's against his will. Some prayers won't be answered because God allows Satan, for a time, to work - such as in Jesus' death on the cross, or Paul's thorn in the flesh. Some prayers will take time to be answered because other things have to change first - people's hearts, for instance - or because there is a spiritual element that needs to be overcome. He quotes the Daniel story more than once, where the angel informed him that his prayer had been answered, but was delayed for three weeks.
In the last chapters he spends some time dealing with the verses that appear to argue for predestination, and deals with them well. I thoroughly enjoyed this book for its good sense, and its willingness to admit we don't know everything!
Published by IVP, 2003 - $27.95
