contingency or necessity

Today I saw something that may not have grabbed anyone's attention. If so, the only response may be, "oh, how cute." It was a young boy, about 5 or 6 years old, running his figures though his mom's hair as if he were brushing it. It got my attention. I watched for a few minutes. He was doing this so naturally. His mom didn't seem to even notice, although I am sure she was soaking it up.

Was this young boy "choosing" to enjoy his mom this way? Did he feel a duty or responsibility? Was this something he had been told is a way to love his mom? I doubt it.

In his treatise "The Bondage of the Will," Martin Luther is trying to explain something really difficult for us to understand theologically. Maybe it takes a simple picture like this young boy loving his mom is an unspectacular but amazing way.

Luther explains the difference between contingency and necessity. Contingency is a setup where actions by A cause a response by B. Necessity is when the mere presence of A results without even thinking the response of B. You might say, "what's the difference?"

In cases of contingency the actions of A are designed (act of the will) to influence the motivation of B. Here, the will of A is limited (in bondage) to how A thinks he/she can get B to happen. In the case of necessity, the response B is automatically connected or naturally flows out of A. Here the will of B is constrained by the inherent conditions of A's will.

Luther is not rejecting that all people have a "will." After all, the "will" is a part of each human's psychology. The very meaning of motivation is that we "choose" what we try to do. But what Luther is explaining is that this "will" we have is ALWAYS constrained by something. There is a long list of influences on our will that we are not even aware of, such as personality and culture.

In the case of the Christian the constraint on our will is the Father's love. We, like this young son, naturally and without options (necessity), direct our affection and actions toward the Father. This is not a contingent relationship, where we must do A to get B response from God. But rather a relationship of necessity where our response to God is not choosing out of our own options. The will of the Christian is under the Sovereign will of the Father. That's what Sovereign means. Luther believes that to see our will as "unbounded" is to deny the very essence of God as Sovereign. We can only really "know thyself" when we know the limits of our will and the limitlessness of God's.

In my Southern way, the young boy "can't not" stroke his mother's hair. His actions flow from a will that is a natural consequent of his love for his mother. His actions are by necessity what they are.

This is what Luther means by "the bondage of the will."

Since human nature sees everything through the lens of exchange, or cause and effect thinking, we cannot understand our will within the context of the love of a Sovereign Father unless the bondage of our flesh on our thinking is broken by His will.

Transformation starts with pondering what a Sovereign Father really means .....