Freewill is Central to Creation

Sep 8

Today's message can be found below.

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I Choose You Kiana Ledé

Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing Elenyi & Sarah Young

Opening READINGS

From Biblical & Hebrew Scripture

Jeremiah 18:1-11

The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: "Come, go down to the potter's house, and there I will let you hear my words." So I went down to the potter's house, and there he was working at his wheel. The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter's hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him. Then the word of the Lord came to me: Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done? says the Lord. Just like the clay in the potter's hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. At one moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, but if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring on it. And at another moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, but if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will change my mind about the good that I had intended to do to it. Now, therefore, say to the people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem: Thus says the Lord: Look, I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you. Turn now, all of you from your evil way, and amend your ways and your doings.

Deuteronomy 30:19-20

This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

From Swedenborg's Theological Writings
Click here for free ebooks of Emanuel Swedenborg's Theological Writings

Freewill is Central to Creation

By Rev. Cory Bradford-Watts

Anyone else ever wonder if there truly is freewill? I mean, not just the feeling of choice, but a real ability to make decisions without being beholden to the past or our upbringing and genetics.

Crazy enough, this isn’t something that our science seems close to being able to test. We can test differences between people and how certain stimuli tends to impact different folks, often with varying results. But we can’t discern if freewill is a real phenomenon in human reality or not – we only know so much about how our brains work and are still finding new elements that surprise us.

But interestingly, in a way I think we can see evidence of a type of freewill in other sciences, especially in physics. In quantum physics especially, we are told that our classical ideas of cause and effect most clearly break down with the small particles that make up the universe. This emphasizes that the elements of creation actually have a type of choice as to how they behave, and this partly how we see the diversity of creation around us. This means that the input from the past and the environment do not entirely influence behaviors, although these things do limit the choices available and increase the chance of certain outcomes. On a theoretical level, we’re told that this idea of freewill is necessary to understand the fascinating laboratory and real-life evidence of quantum physics that we’ve collected.

Moving away from the strict science, we also hear this idea of freewill uplifted all the time in the earth’s spiritualities. Our readings from the Hebrew and Christian traditions today uplift our ability to choose between good and evil, while encouraging us to choose goodness for our own sakes. But these traditions and texts also uplift the idea that God’s providence is in both the details of creation and in its milestones. We see the same complete power ascribed to Divinity in the Qur’an (Islam), the Vedic scriptures (Hinduism), and others. How do we reconcile these things? How can God(dess) encourage goodness, have control of all details, and still allow for evil and our freewill?

It’s a question that can sometimes seem to plague religion and philosophy: the question of evil, of hell, of providence vs. freewill – it takes many forms and sometimes we’re told not to ask it, or to accept the mystery on faith. But I don’t think that’s what faith is all about! I don’t think it’s about not asking questions or not allowing Divinity through story and in life to help us understand our universe. Surely, learning as much as we can about the mysteries of God and Creation is invited in scripture and won’t exhaust those mysteries, just as a lifetime with a spouse won’t exhaust the mystery within them.

So, what does our insight and spiritual inspirations tell us about how there might be both freewill and providence? Well, our unintentional namesake, the scientist turned mystical thinker Emanuel Swedenborg believed that scripture and his spiritual experiences both emphasize that God gives and upholds limited freewill in all of creation due to its importance to God’s plan. Although Goddess still holds sway in the details and ensures that her kin-dom will continue to come, a central component of the life she creates is its freedom to choose to not be emboldened by God’s love and care in its own limited capacity to act.

Goddess desires truly living beings in the image and likeness of herself. In fact, this is the point of creation according to Swedenborg: to have loving, living beings that make up the kin-dom of heaven. Freewill is necessary to have beings that truly love, even though this means there may be beings that hate, or more common perhaps, beings that do both. God’s love is such that he uplifts a creation that has true freedom to turn both towards God, as well as away toward destructiveness and selfishness: a full sphere of spiritual orientations. Without this freedom, we’re told that our universe couldn’t exist, because Divinity has no need of a creation forced to do her will since she is already infinite and whole.

So, according to the dictates of Divine Providence, we have the freewill to support life in the universe as well as destruction, just as nature seems to have a type of freewill for similar patterns of both mind-blowing growth and literally mind-blowing deconstruction. It is through this freewill that Creation was able to go from the big bang, where there was a largely homogenous landscape of particles, to the diversity of beauty we see in the universe today. It is this freewill that allowed for the almost endless series of diverse avenues of growth that allowed for humanity.

But how does God play into this besides offering that freewill to Creation?

Well, our Higher Power empowers our steps and encourages them upward. God provides the ladders into heavenliness that we can either climb or descend. And because Sophia Krishna Christ is infinite goodness, infinite humanity, infinite life, we choose to either receive aspects of her in our own living and shaping or we choose to try to remove them and do the opposite. Goddess holds our hands and allows for and encourages our growth, but doesn’t force it.

Fascinatingly, although our readings today uplift this idea of freewill to choose to love the life within and around us or choose to lean into death, they also emphasize God’s involvement in that process. The book of Jeremiah describes Divinity as a potter that shapes the clay within his hands; however, the vessel he’s making may spoil. Sounds like the Potter’s problem, doesn’t it? And yet, due to the type of vessel the Potter is creating, he chooses to use a clay with a heart of freedom so that the vessel can have the majesty and spirit of humanity as well as all the other forms of life.

Unfortunately, we see aspects of that spoiling in the world around us and within ourselves sometimes, don’t we? Right now, our science and experiences tell us that we’re faced with the promise of natural disasters of epic proportions due to human-made climate change. The disasters take the form of more intense storms, flooding of our cities, and changes in climate impacting our water, our farming, and all other aspects of our living, which will lead to pain, death, and refugee crises of beyond-epic proportions. Like Noah’s flood is described, the coming and current earthly horrors are clearly of our own making.

As a community, we must come together in freedom to transform our living and our world to stave off climate change and the negative impact of the changes that are past avoiding. This takes our collective freewill to choose to uplift life instead of habits of destruction.

Much like how the levels of creation choose to form greater and greater structures, from quarks to molecules to cells which can perform greater and greater feats of both creation and destruction, we must choose to transform humanity’s greater forms, our communities, into wondrous vehicles of life and creation. God will provide the ladder upward if we choose to seek it, but at the heart of God’s providence, of God’s allowance of evil, is her love of humanity and its freedom. As they say, “If you love something, let it go.”

We further see similar disasters coming and passed in our lives as well, and these we have a much harder time dismissing as out of our hands. Much like an atom in a molecule, if we aren’t stable and choosing life in our individual living then part of the greater form, our closest community, will probably crumple or further our destructive tendencies. As persons within the body of society, we must choose health from the smallest things to the largest in order to survive the promise of cataclysm, large and small.

Ultimately, Emanuel Swedenborg says that although God gives us freedom, our choices can take us toward a true and diverse state of freedom or one of spiritual slavery: “Doing harmful things in freedom seems to be freedom, but it is actually slavery. It comes from selfish and materialistic loves, which come from hell” (The Heavenly City #142). To this mystical visionary and interfaith-Christian theologian, hell is a state that we craft within and around us.

But there is a hope to escape such a hellish slavery. The hope is all around and within us, enlivening our steps, enlightening our minds and freeing our spirits. She whispers in the details and in the milestones, in our hearts and in our stories, our scriptures, our parables, our lives. Her name is whatever we freely call it and yet always points to the greatest things in and around us, calling us to life, love, wisdom, and freedom. As Swedenborg said, “freedom, or a life of freedom, is solely and simply being led by the Lord” (Secrets of Heaven #892.2). Amen.