Why True Freedom Only Ever Chooses the Good
We have been sold a broken definition of human freedom. In today’s world of endless options, we tend to think of free will as a neutral matching game. We look at it like standing in a supermarket aisle, completely free to choose between a healthy snack or junk food, or choosing between virtue and vice.
According to this popular idea, you are never more "free" than when you are standing at a moral crossroads, completely unbothered, deciding whether to step into love or plunge into selfish destruction. If we choose the destructive path, we call it our “free choice.”
But the early church fathers - ancient thinkers like Gregory of Nyssa, Origen, and Maximus the Confessor - would look at this modern view and call it a complete delusion. To them, choosing evil is never an expression of freedom. In fact, it is the exact opposite. A truly free will can only ever move in one direction: toward what is good.
The Anatomy of True Freedom
To understand this ancient perspective, we have to change how we define the "will" itself. The early church writers didn't see the human will as a machine for making random choices. They saw it as a tool designed for a very specific purpose. Just like our eyes are built to see light and our lungs are built to breathe air, the human soul is hardwired to connect with God - the source of all goodness, beauty, and truth.
True freedom, then, isn't the liberty to do whatever we want; it is fulfilling our design. A bird isn’t free because it has the option to swim underwater and drown. It is free when it flies in the sky, doing exactly what it was made to do. When we choose what is good, we are operating according to our true nature. We are functioning the way we were built to function.
On the flip side, when someone chooses evil, they aren't acting freely. They are acting out of a deep and tragic limitation. Think about a person with a severe fever who drinks poisoned, stagnant water because they are delirious with thirst. We wouldn't praise their "free will." We would recognise that their illness hijacked their ability to think straight. The early church saw sin in exactly this way: as a sickness of the will, a state of mental and spiritual captivity.
“Sin is not a power of the soul, but a weakness... To turn away from the Good is to turn toward nothingness, because God is Being itself. Therefore, he who leaves the Good leaves reality.” — St Gregory of Nyssa
Sin as Deception and Blindness
If we are hardwired to love the good, why do we ever choose evil? The early church fathers argued that no one ever chooses evil simply because they want evil. No one wakes up and decides to ruin their life just for the sake of destruction. Instead, we are tricked. We get deceived by our broken desires and a deep ignorance of who we really are.
When we chase power by being cruel, comfort through addiction, or security through greed, we are pursuing things we think will make us happy, safe, or peaceful. We are chasing a counterfeit version of the good. Sin is a mistake in perspective - a misjudgment of reality. It’s an identity crisis where we forget that we are made in the image of God, and we end up acting completely against our own internal architecture.
The Apostle Paul gives us a perfect, brilliant picture of this internal conflict in his letter to the Romans. He describes the agonising experience of wanting to do good, but ending up doing the exact opposite. He writes:
"Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it." — Romans 7:20
Look closely at what Paul is saying here. He doesn't say, "I am fundamentally evil, and I am freely choosing to do bad things." He does the exact opposite. He completely separates his true self ("it is no longer I") from the power of sin that has set up camp in his broken humanity ("but sin living in me"). Paul is diagnosing himself as a hostage. He is showing that when a person acts out of selfishness or malice, they aren't acting in true freedom - they are acting under the influence of a spiritual squatter that has hijacked their true nature. Of course, as he moves into his next thoughts, he presents the beautiful solution to this entire dilemma: "Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!"
(Side Note: earlier in his letter, in Romans 1, Paul talks about people being led away by their own foolish and darkened desires. But he isn't contradicting himself. He is building an argument step-by-step. In Romans 1, Paul is simply describing the symptoms of our brokenness from the outside looking in. It certainly feels like we are the ones in control when we chase our vices. But by the time he gets to Romans 7, Paul pulls back the curtain to show the root cause: those "own desires" are actually the product of a deceived, captured mind. We are the ones suffering from the disease, but the disease is not who we are.)
Modern teachers like Shane Willard and Baxter Kruger often point out that Jesus confirmed this on the cross. When He prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” He didn’t say, “Forgive them, because they used their free will to kill Me.” He exposed their actions as deep deception and blindness. They were sleepwalking through an illusion, trapped by religious anxiety and political fear.
Where a Healed Will Ultimately Lands
This reality - that human nature is hardwired for God and that evil is just a temporary delusion - is the engine behind the early church's hope for apokatastasis, the ultimate restoration of all things in Christ.
Theologians like David Bentley Hart suggest that if choosing evil is always the result of a trapped, blinded, and broken mind, then an eternal hell doesn't align with a universe created by a perfectly loving God. Because God is entirely good, His nature wouldn't allow Him to leave His creation in a permanent state of spiritual insanity. And because He is love, He doesn't resort to coercion to force us to change. Instead, He beautifully honours our design by restoring our freedom through healing.
Imagine a soul leaving this life, after a lifetime where its vision was clouded by externally inflicted trauma, or even broken brain chemistry. In the age to come, the pure presence of God strips away every single lie, misconception, and wound. This judgment isn't about payback; it is the precise surgery of love.
Once that soul is fully healed, and it sees God clearly as the absolute answer to its deepest longings, it will choose Him automatically and inevitably. It won't be able to do anything else. To look directly at perfect love with a fully restored, healthy mind and say “No” would require a level of insanity that a healthy mind simply cannot have.
We need to stop flattering our dysfunctions by calling them "free will." When we hurt people, isolate ourselves, or hold onto bitter grudges, we aren't being free; we are wearing chains made from our own blindness.
True freedom doesn't look like the chaotic ability to destroy ourselves. True freedom looks like a child of God waking up from a nightmare of scarcity, and walking clearly down the only path that makes any sense - the way back home to the Father.