What is Freedom in front of God?
It has been a basic doctrine that every believer has to trust in the power of God. There are two viewpoints elucidating whether human beings are free or not. Firstly, human beings are totally free given the fact that God is going to give a reward or a punishment to each human being due to her or his acts. It really means that their acts are free of the predestination of God, and they are free for doing anything they want to do.
Hence, in that perspective, God is absent from determining anything what human beings will do, so that the freedom of human being is completely absolute. As a matter of fact, this viewpoint tends to be the postulation of deism, that God is a sort of a clockmaker as once God had finished creating the world, God went away and would not care for what and how the world would be processing.
Conducive to developing civilisation, the freedom of human being is invincible, so that the risk of it appears, that the power of God is less in front of human being’s freedom. The freedom resounds with the arrogancy of human being itself, because human being will subjugate the power of God one more step. There has been normal that God is dead as the logical consequence of the concept of God being absent from the world.
But what if human being is unfree both of and for? Does that mean that God determines everything human being has done and will do? What about the consequence of those acts? Because God could not punish an act which human being does not do freely? This likely sounds an absurd thing to understand. Anyway, it has been a sort of historical phenomenon that human being, in particular each believer, is inclined to be unfree in front of the Supreme Reality.
Despite the lack of the concept of predestination being conspicuous, a believer feeling defenceless and vulnerable can be nearer to God than a believer who does not. Nonetheless, feeling unfree in front of God can make a believer trapped in a pitfall of alibi, that what (s)he has done is wrong does not come from her or him but from God. This is an act of religion which is full of pretences.
We need another perspective placing human being’s free will and God’s power to be in good proportions: on one hand, human beings have freedom, and at the same time on the other hand, God does not lose the human-swaying power. How could the two be balanced? God’s omnipotent power, however, can abruptly be reduced by a little power of human being and vice versa.
We need to infuse another standpoint on both the work of the world and the existence of God itself. We should shift our old concept of God, that God is not a static being in the world. Otherwise, we are continually snared in the same pitfall on and on. God should be regarded as alpha and omega of the process of the world itself. God is a being in each process as human being is. Hence, whatsoever human does does not mean that God is absent from it, but within it God participates in creating and renewing such a fluctuant event.[]