Who Is the One Who Wills?

The debate between Guillaume Bignon and Dinesh D’Souza centers on a familiar question: if God is sovereign, are human choices truly free? Bignon argues from a Calvinistic form of theological determinism. God determines all that occurs, yet human beings remain responsible because they voluntarily act according to their own desires. D’Souza pushes from the opposite direction. He argues that meaningful responsibility requires real choice, and that if God determines every intention and action, then the problem of evil becomes unavoidable. If a person intends murder, betrayal, or some other evil, who is ultimately responsible for originating that intention?

Both men are pressing legitimate biblical concerns. Bignon is right that God is not a passive spectator. Scripture presents God as sovereign, purposeful, and active in history. Joseph tells his brothers, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good” (Genesis 50:20). Isaiah 10 presents Assyria as an instrument God uses for judgment. Acts 2:23 places the death of Jesus within God’s deliberate purpose while still holding the human actors responsible. D’Souza is also right that Scripture treats human beings as real personal subjects. Cain is warned before murdering Abel. Israel is repeatedly called to turn, listen, repent, and stop rebelling. Jesus can say that people “were not willing” (Matthew 23:37).

Yet both sides begin too late. Bignon asks whether a determined will can remain responsible. D’Souza asks whether responsibility requires genuine alternatives. But before asking what the will can do, Scripture forces a more fundamental question:

Who is the one who wills?

Before the Will Comes the Living Soul-Being

Genesis 2:7 provides the biblical starting point. God forms man from the dust of the ground, breathes into him the breath of life, and the man becomes a living soul-being. The text does not describe three detachable pieces being assembled. It presents two constituent realities, one physical and one spiritual, whose union results in the emergence of one unified human being.

Within that living soul-being, body, soul, and spirit can be distinguished as real aspects. The body aspect connects the person with the physical world. The spirit aspect is the spiritual reality through which the person is constituted for relation to God and the spiritual realm. The soul aspect is the personal “I,” the unique self that thinks, remembers, desires, learns, loves, reasons, intends, wills, and chooses.

The soul aspect is not a third ingredient inserted beside the physical and spiritual elements. It emerges with the living soul-being. It begins to exist and remains completely dependent upon the constituted human reality in which it emerges. In that narrow sense, it is not separately manufactured as another constituent object. God alone is uncreated absolutely, eternal, underived, and dependent upon nothing.

This is what makes the soul aspect extraordinary. It is not merely a location where decisions happen. It is the unique personal history of a human being. Memory, affection, fear, loyalty, suffering, courage, rebellion, repentance, trust, learned wisdom, and formed character all become woven into the lived history of that particular “I.” One soul is not interchangeable with another because one personal history is not interchangeable with another.

And will belongs here. The will does not float independently inside a human organism. The soul wills.

Why Volition Matters to the Soul

Adam is already a real person before the prohibition concerning the tree. He tends the garden, recognizes the animals, and gives them names. These activities demonstrate intelligence and purposeful agency. Genesis 2:17 does not suddenly make Adam a person.

What changes with the command is that a real contrary alternative is placed before the personal “I.” Adam is confronted with a choice between remaining in dependence upon God and intentionally acting contrary to God’s expressed will. The capacity from which volition arises belongs to the soul’s personal design, but free volition becomes operative when the soul confronts a genuine alternative.

This matters because the soul must remain the personal source of its own intention. God can teach, warn, reveal, confront, discipline, and arrange circumstances. He can permit an intended act or prevent it from being carried out. But if God directly manufactures the soul’s desire, intention, and act of willing, the question becomes unavoidable: whose willing is it?

The soul develops through its own lived responses to God, to others, and to the world around it. God does not preserve personal uniqueness by turning the soul into an independently self-existing being. He preserves personal uniqueness within complete creaturely dependence upon Himself.

Free Choice Does Not Make the Soul a Source of Life

This is where both sides of the debate can miss the deeper biblical problem. A soul may truly will and still remain radically unable to produce the Life it needs.

Scripture speaks about life in more than one sense. Bios concerns biological life. Psychē concerns personal soul-life. Zōē can point toward the higher Life humanity needs and, in its fullest biblical sense, toward the Life found in God Himself. These words should not be forced into rigid formulas in every passage, but the distinction exposes something important.

Adam possessed biological life and personal soul-life, yet the Tree of Life testified that he did not possess divine Life as an independent source within himself. The human “I” was real, but the human “I” was never its own Life-source.

This creates the fundamental tension of creaturely existence. The creature possesses real selfhood and volition while remaining completely dependent upon God for Life. The Fall therefore was not humanity successfully becoming independent of God. That is impossible. It was humanity attempting to live according to the illusion of independence while remaining dependent upon God even for the ability to make the attempt.

The distinction is crucial: the soul can be the source of its intention without being the source of its Life.

Sin Is Independence Enacted

Sin is therefore deeper than a list of outwardly bad behaviors. Sin is the personal enactment of independence from God, especially the attempt to establish, produce, possess, or sustain Life through the self rather than receive Life in dependence upon God.

This explains why Scripture can expose sin where human beings see religion. A person may pray, fast, study Scripture, pursue moral discipline, and seek righteousness while still operating from the same principle of self-produced Life. Jesus tells His opponents, “You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life… yet you refuse to come to me to have life” (John 5:39–40). Romans 10:3 similarly describes people seeking to establish their own righteousness rather than submitting to God’s righteousness.

The outward action therefore does not reveal the deepest root by itself. Murder and self-righteous Bible study are obviously not morally equivalent actions. Their victims, consequences, and moral severity differ enormously. Yet both can arise from the same underlying principle: the personal “I” attempting to establish itself apart from dependence upon God.

This is also where Paul’s category of flesh becomes important. Flesh is the personal “I” attempting through self-human effort to produce or sustain the Life that can only be possessed through dependence upon God.

Evil Is Independence Systematized

Sin is personal enactment. Evil is the larger systemic order of that same independence.

When conscious beings participate in and perpetuate this principle, independence becomes expressed through relationships, communities, institutions, governments, religious structures, and entire cultures. A person can therefore be called evil because that person participates in and carries that order. An intention or action can be evil because it serves or advances it. A system can become evil because it organizes collective life according to the same underlying principle.

Evil can appear almost personal because personal beings animate it. But evil is not another metaphysical substance, another Life-source, or an equal power competing with God.

What Bignon and D’Souza Are Each Seeing

We can now return to the debate with a much clearer anthropology.

Bignon is right that fallen humanity has a real inability. But inability does not require the conclusion that the human will is no longer personal or that God must determine every volitional act. Romans 7:18 presents something more subtle: “For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.”

The personal “I” remains the subject who desires and wills, while the inability remains equally real. The problem is not that the soul cannot will. The problem is that the soul cannot produce divine Life.

This is also where the uniqueness of the soul’s personal history becomes important. The soul’s intentions, responses, acts of trust, failures, loyalties, and choices become part of the lived history of that particular “I.” If God directly originates those intentions, then the very acts that help constitute the soul’s personal history no longer originate in the person whose history they become. The issue is therefore larger than whether an action can technically be called voluntary. It concerns whether the soul remains the actual personal subject of its own willing.

D’Souza is right to protect real personal agency, but free will cannot carry the weight of salvation. A creature may genuinely choose while remaining unable to make itself alive. The soul can desire, respond, resist, trust, reject, obey, or rebel, but it cannot become its own source of zōē.

This also clarifies grace. Grace is not a spiritual substance injected into a defective will so that personal agency can finally begin functioning. Grace is God’s undeserved favor expressed through His action. God acts to remedy the death-condition and provide the Life humanity cannot generate from itself.

Predestination Without Making God the Author of Every Intention

Predestination can now be discussed without equating sovereignty with exhaustive determination of every personal intention. Romans 8:29 speaks of believers being predestined to be conformed to the image of God’s Son. Ephesians 1:5 speaks of predestination for adoption. In both cases, the emphasis falls upon God’s purpose and intended destination.

Genesis 50:20 provides a remarkably clear pattern: “You intended evil against me, but God intended it for good.” One event contains two genuinely distinct intentions. The brothers remain the personal source of their evil intention. God remains sovereign over what He accomplishes through and beyond their action.

Creaturely volition does not occur in some neutral realm outside God. “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Creation remains completely dependent upon the reality God sustains. God can know, permit, limit, restrain, redirect, judge, or terminate what the creature attempts without becoming the personal originator of the creature’s intention.

The distinction is simple: God sustains the creature who wills. The soul does the willing. Sovereignty does not require volitional authorship, and freedom does not require autonomy. Complete dependence upon God does not erase real personal distinction.

God’s purpose is certain because what He has predestined rests upon what He Himself has purposed and will accomplish, not upon His having to originate every creaturely intention encountered along the way. The brothers in Genesis 50 can intend evil while God’s own purpose remains certain because the certainty of God’s purpose does not require identity between His intention and theirs.

The Question the Debate Needed First

The debate over predestination and free will becomes confused when it begins with abstract theories of freedom rather than with the biblical human being.

Before will comes the soul aspect. Before the soul aspect comes the living soul-being. Before the living soul-being comes the constituent union described in Genesis 2:7. Only after establishing that anthropology can we properly ask what it means to desire, intend, choose, sin, rebel, receive grace, or be predestined toward God’s purpose.

The biblical picture is neither a human machine whose intentions are secretly authored by God nor an autonomous self capable of producing Life apart from Him. The human being is a personal soul-being whose unique “I” truly wills while remaining completely dependent upon God for existence and Life.

That is the tension the usual debate misses.

The soul truly wills. The creature truly depends. Sin is the personal enactment of attempted independence. Evil is that independence systematized. Grace is God’s action toward the creature who cannot give itself Life. And predestination is God’s purpose moving toward its appointed end without requiring God to become the personal author of every intention along the way.