Free Will and Rationality: Our Most Precious Gifts

Throughout this article I use the male pronoun to refer to God. I do this because God chose to take the male form on earth, and because I want to avoid dehumanizing God by making Him too abstract. However, God's teaching clearly states that men and women are equally created in God's image.

Free will and rationality make us human. Because we have the gift of free will, we can choose to become good or evil, strong or weak, mature or immature, and anything in between. The New Church teaches that God guards our freedom, "as the apple of His eye."^* Our freedom is this important to God because He wants to love and give happiness to independent, free people. God would rather have us freely reject Him than accept Him against our will.

Rationality is the other gift that makes us human. God would rather have us freely reject Him than accept Him against our will. By "rationality" I mean the ability to understand and reason. When we choose to do something that we understand, we make it part of us. When we understand, our action is not something we do because the preacher said so, or because Mom and Dad said so, or because the latest authority said so. We do it because we believe it for ourselves as mature adults. That's acting rationally.

The New Church teaches that we can never be compelled to believe. God loves our need to understand before we believe. In fact. He is more concerned with how hard we try to understand something than whether we end up with the right answer.