God’s Bounded Freedom

According to Rowan Williams (Arius), the central concern is with the freedom of God’s will. Arius insists that God is self-subsistent, and because he is immaterial he is “without any kind of plurality or composition.” If the Son is eternally with God, then there is something beside God that qualifies or limits Him, and God is unlimited. To be in relation is to be limited and qualified, and God is absolute. As Williams says, “if God is free in respect of every contingent, mutable and passible reality, the Word exists because God chooses that he should.”

But the Arian assumption creates far more problems than it solves, because God who is free in every respect is a God who is free to be whatever. He might even be free to become the devil.

In rejecting Arianism, the church rejected too this abstract notion of freedom. For the Nicene party, God’s freedom is bounded freedom. The Father is not free to be other than Father, other than the One who loves and gives to the Son. The Son is not free to abandon His Father, to become un-Son. The Spirit is not free to become a free Spirit, free of the Father and Son. In their boundedness to one another and in their relations, they are free. We might even say, paradoxically, that this is precisely the form that God’s infinite freedom takes. God’s infinite freedom doesn’t mean freedom from all and every definiteness or boundedness, but freedom to be unboundedly the God that He is.

Only on this basis is the Trinity a summation of the gospel. Once He adopts us in the Son, the Father is no more capable of ceasing to be Father to us than to the Son. When He comes in flesh to carry out the Father’s will, the Son is not free to change course; His freedom, like His food and life, is to do the Father’s will. The Spirit is not free to carry us off somewhere other than toward the Father through the Son. A God of bonded freedom is a God who saves.