Do we have free will?

Justin Martyr c. 100–c. 165 ADFirst Apology 43.2–6

If all things happen by fate, nothing at all is in our power. For if it is fated that this one is good and that one wicked, the one is not to be praised nor the other blamed. And again, unless the human race has power by free choice to flee what is shameful and choose what is good, it is not responsible for anything it does. But that by free choice it both acts rightly and goes wrong, we show this way: we see the same person turning to opposite things.

Justin answers the pagan belief in fate. Free choice was the common Christian position against fate and against Gnostic "natures" fixed at birth.

Irenaeus of Lyons c. 130–c. 202 ADAgainst Heresies 4.37.4–5

Because man has been of free judgment from the beginning, and God, in whose likeness he was made, is of free judgment, he is always given counsel to hold fast to the good, which is brought to completion by obedience to God. And not only in works but also in faith the Lord kept the will of man free and in his own power, saying: "According to your faith be it done to you."

Irenaeus writes against Gnostics who said some people are saved by nature.

Origen of Alexandria c. 185–c. 254 ADOn First Principles 3.1.1 (Philocalia 21)

The preaching of the Church includes the teaching that God judges justly. Believed as true, it stirs its hearers to live well and to flee sin in every way, plainly because they agree that what deserves praise or blame is in our power. Come, then, let us also deal briefly, and on its own, with free will, a question as necessary as any can be.

The opening of the first Christian treatise on free choice. The Greek of On First Principles 3.1 survives because Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus kept it in the Philocalia (chapter 21); the library's Philocalia book holds this opening in Robinson's 1893 text. Origen goes on to sort living things by where their movement comes from, and to answer the hardening of Pharaoh.

John Chrysostom c. 349–407 ADHomilies on John on John 1:11

God, who loves mankind and does good, does and arranges everything so that we may shine with virtue. Wanting us to be approved, he draws all who are willing, not by force or compulsion but by persuasion and kindness, and pulls them to himself. That is why, when he came, some received him and others did not. For he wants no servant who is unwilling or forced, but all willing and choosing.

The Eastern way of holding grace and freedom together: God draws, but never by force.

Augustine of Hippo 354–430 ADOn the Spirit and the Letter 30.52

Do we then make void free choice through grace? God forbid! Rather we establish free choice. For as the law is not made void but established through faith, so free choice is not made void but established through grace. ... Through grace comes the healing of the soul from the fault of sin, through the soul's health freedom of choice, through free choice the love of righteousness.

For Augustine grace does not remove free choice but heals it. Without grace the will is free only to sin.

Council of TrentSession 6, Canons on Justification Canons 4–5

If anyone says that man's free choice, moved and stirred by God, does not cooperate at all by assenting to God who stirs and calls it ... but does nothing at all, like something lifeless, and is merely passive: let him be anathema. If anyone says that after Adam's sin man's free choice was lost and destroyed, or that it is a thing in name only, indeed a name without a reality, a fiction brought into the Church by Satan: let him be anathema.

Aimed at Luther, who had called free choice "a thing in name only" (1520) and wrote On the Bondage of the Will (1525).

Westminster AssemblyWestminster Confession of Faith 9.3–4

Man, by his fall into a state of sin, hath wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation: so as, a natural man, being altogether averse from that good, and dead in sin, is not able, by his own strength, to convert himself, or to prepare himself thereunto. When God converts a sinner, and translates him into the state of grace, he freeth him from his natural bondage under sin.

The Reformed form of Luther's "bondage of the will". The same chapter says the will is not forced by any necessity of nature (9.1).