Tertullian on Free Will

"It is a fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that every man should worship according to his own convictions: one man's religion neither harms nor helps another man. It is assuredly no part of religion to compel religion--to which free-will and not force should lead us." -- Tertullian, 217 AD

This is the fundamental point on which the institutions of Christianity have so often gone wrong: the Catholicism of the Inquisition, the various repressive Reformed communities, the harsh religiosity of the post Awakening churches. Even twentieth-century American Evangelicalism--the religious right--is guilty of this to a great degree. This sense of the latter that our great commission means the constant preaching, nagging, and haranguing of every single person we can reach, to agree with our doctrines and become like us is, in my opinion, a great perversion of the Gospel, and is demonstrably supremely ineffective anyhow. You can't trick, force, coerce, or browbeat someone into truly turning to Christ. You may get someone to repeat the "sinner's prayer" but that doesn't mean that person is really ready to surrender to God. I once read that Billy Graham estimated that less than ten percent of the "conversions" at his crusades were sincere and actually led to a changed life.

Our task as Christians is not to try and ensure that everyone else around us conforms to our own convictions. Our task is to live what we believe, to love God and man with all our strength, and to show forth the Light of Christ through our lives more than our words. There is a time and place for the actual preaching or proclaiming of the Message. But the far more effective message is that of living a life of conspicuous goodness and love, without an agenda.

"Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world." -- James 1:27