Veritas ✝️🇺🇲⚓⚡💊 on Nostr: ...liberty and ability are distinct and should not be confounded. We are conscious of ...
...liberty and ability are distinct and should not be confounded. We are conscious of liberty. We know ourselves to be free in all our volitions. They reveal themselves to our inmost consciousness as acts of self-determination. We cannot disown them or escape responsibility for them even if we try, and yet no man is conscious of ability to change his own heart. Free agency belongs to God, to angels, to saints in glory, to fallen men, and to Satan; and it is the same in all. Yet in the strictest sense of the words, God cannot do evil; neither can Satan recover, by a volition, his lost inheritance of holiness. It is a great evil thus to confound things essentially distinct. It produces endless confusion.
Confusion of thought and language, however, is not the principal evil which arises from making liberty and ability identical. It necessarily brings us into conflict with the truth and with the moral judgments of men. There are three truths of which every man is convinced from the very constitution of his nature: (1) he is a free agent; (2) none but free agents can be accountable for their character or conduct; and (3) he does not possess ability to change his moral state by an act of the will. Free agency is the power to decide according to our character; ability is the power to change our character by a volition. The former, the Bible and consciousness affirm belongs to man in every condition of his being; the latter, the Bible and consciousness teach with equal explicitness does not belong to fallen man. The two things, therefore, ought not to be confounded.
Systematic Theology by Charles Hodge
Confusion of thought and language, however, is not the principal evil which arises from making liberty and ability identical. It necessarily brings us into conflict with the truth and with the moral judgments of men. There are three truths of which every man is convinced from the very constitution of his nature: (1) he is a free agent; (2) none but free agents can be accountable for their character or conduct; and (3) he does not possess ability to change his moral state by an act of the will. Free agency is the power to decide according to our character; ability is the power to change our character by a volition. The former, the Bible and consciousness affirm belongs to man in every condition of his being; the latter, the Bible and consciousness teach with equal explicitness does not belong to fallen man. The two things, therefore, ought not to be confounded.
Systematic Theology by Charles Hodge