What does it mean to be genuinely and humanly free? Must we settle for some philosophical abstraction arrived at like libertarian free agency (aka “freewill”), or on the determinist side, some form of what is often referred to as compatibilism? Do you believe that you have freewill; and if you do, how do you define freewill (as a Christian) before God? While 
this might seem a knotty discussion, nonetheless, it is significant and impinges on everyone’s daily life.
According to my reading of the Apostle Paul to be humanly free is to be for God. Since only God, ultimately, has freewill and absolute freedom, and since, further, humans were, ultimately, created to be for and in koinonia (‘fellowship’) with God, what it means, thusly, to be free as a human, is to be in right relationship with the God of freedom. Human freedom, in this frame, only obtains as they are living in the mode of being that God created for them from Himself in His image, in Jesus Christ. As such, Jesus’ kenotic activity, from before the foundations of the world (as Logos incarnandus) as the imago Dei (Col 1.15) for us, grounds humanity’s way of being which is, that what it means to be truly human, and thus experience genuine freedom, is to be in participation with the triune God, who in fact is the only ousia (‘being’) who is free (without external constraints) in Himself (in se).
If we adopt, what I take to be the theo-logic, particularly of the Apostle Paul’s teaching, to heart—as that has been sketched above—when we come to the oft thorny issues surrounding salvific discussions, like those classically held on the Protestant side, between Calvinists and Arminians, we can offer an alternative way forward that elides the philosophical foundations that stand behind such kerfuffle. In other words, we can categorically reject salvific systems that are funded by grammar like synergism and monergism as that pertains to a person’s ostensible capacity, as the case may be, to cooperate with God in their salvation, whether that be on the ‘libertarian’ (synergistic) side of the coin, or the compatibilist (monergistic). Both sides of said coin, respectively, are funded by an a priori commitment to philosophical and speculative abstractions that first, as anything does, start with a concept of God[ness].
Alternatively, if we are slavishly committed to the ‘Scripture Principle,’ as Protestants are wont to assert, then we will allow Scripture’s attestation to its reality in Jesus Christ, and thus its triune theo-grammar and logic, to dictate the way we think these matters. As I have already noted, I believe the Apostle Paul’s teaching, in particular, offers the biblical way forward in regard to parsing these issues in way that are in keeping with God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ; that are, indeed, in keeping with what has been identified as the analogy of the incarnation. In order to broach this discussion with greater precision let’s read along with Jeff McSwain as he interrogates and introduces Karl Barth’s reading of the Apostle Paul on these loci for us.
It is true that man’s God-given freedom is choice, decision and act. But it is genuine choice; it is genuine decision and act in the right direction. It would be a strange freedom that would leave Man neutral, able equally to choose, decide, and act rightly or wrongly! What kind of power would that be! Man becomes free and is free by choosing, deciding, and determining himself in accordance with the freedom of God. [Barth, Humanity of God, 76-77]
WHEN IT COMES HUMANS AND JESUS CHIRST, BARTH HAS MADE AN EXTRAVAGENT CLAIM: “There is no one,” asserts Barth, “who is not participating in Him.” Without questioning the idea that free choosing is part and parcel of the true human experience, Barth is clearly reformulating the categories for what freedom and choosing really are for the iustus human as designed by God. We have described Barth’s actualism as the freed human faith and obedience of every person as located in the Spirit and, on the most concrete level, participating in the ongoing humanity of Jesus Christ. In Christ, iustus humanity has been given a fullness (Col 2:10) that cannot be added to or subtracted from; everyone is irresistibly implicated. Such a counter-intuitive concept may be at first difficult to differentiate from theological monergism, which for matters of sanctification brings with it undesirable by-products such as antinomianism, false comfort, and universalism. With the help of the simul, we will consider in this chapter how Barth interrogates predominant strains of monergism and synergism in early Protestantism, questioning the extent to which Barth can, while categorically rejecting synergism, avoid the typical alternative of monergism. Barth’s reading of Deuteronomy 30 with its commands, as it connects with creation and the new covenant, demonstrates his refusal to trade dehumanizing constructs of agency and obedience for humanistic ones. Instead, Barth relentlessly points us to the hidden “Person in the imperative.”
Barth’s Hercules allusion is a favorite. He turns to it throughout Church Dogmatics because it provides the perfect foil to his own notion of human freedom and choosing. Hercules, as related by Xenophon, agonizes at the crossroads of decision between the beautiful maidens Virtue and Vice. Hercules eventually chooses to follow the heroic path of the angelic Virtue, spurning the enticing Vice. Because Hercules epitomizes for Barth the inappropriate muscularity of humans determining their own destiny, his emphatic “No Hercules at the crossroads” functions to clear the ground of all non-christological starting points, whether they be soteriological, pneumatological, or epistemological.[1]
McSwain offers an accurate picture of Barth’s thinking on these things; but more to the requisite point, he points-up what I take to be the proper reading of the Apostle Paul’s thinking and theo-logic on these loci. Even as McSwain starts his section out with a quote from Barth on human freedom, it is just this that ought to alert us to what it means to be genuinely human and thus free; it is a freedom to be free in the One who alone is free in Himself as the triune Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have eternally fellowshipped, one-with-an-other, in the singular reality of what it truly means to be free as the God a-se.
If the implications of this aren’t clear yet, let me say it this way: the Christian God alone is genuinely free in Himself; there is no other category of freedom, divine or otherwise, apart from participating with the One who is, indeed, free; as such, what it means to be humanly free is to be in right relationship with the God who is first free for us that we might be free for and in Him. For this ‘elevation’ to obtain, that is, for humanity to experience what it means to be human (and thus) free be-fore God, God deigned it necessary, according to His freedom, to become us in Jesus Christ, and consummate what in fact it had always already been determined to be for humanity to be human (and thus free) in its ultimate telos to participate, to fellowship with and in God’s triune life. Since humanity was never intended to live outside of this relationship, as pre-determined by God in His free choice to become us, that we by grace, might become co-heirs with Christ, there is no abstract notion of human freedom available; there is no ontological category of freedom that is independent of God’s freedom, and what He has determined for what it means to be teleologically free as a human being. To be purposefully free as a human, then, in God’s oikonomia ‘economy’ (both in se and ad extra) can only be actualized and realized first pro nobis (for us) in God’s freely chosen humanity as that was both elected to be by the electing God and elected humanity of the eternal Son in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, is God’s image, is the image of humanity, in His singular person, through which mediation between God and humanity and humanity of God is achieved in hypostatic union. That is to say, that as McSwain and Barth have helped us to see, there is only one genuinely free human being before God, and that is Jesus Christ for us. He has already fulfilled what it means to be human before God, and it is revealed that what that entails is that it is to be truly free for the triune God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It is in His union with us, by the Spirit, and our union with Him, by Pneumatologial agency, that the human comes to finally experience what it means to be free; that is, to be free for God, from and in God’s person for the world in Jesus Christ.
Hopefully, after this brief development, it has become clearer how the false offering of synergism and monergism, among other theological entailments, are put to death in the condemned body of Jesus Christ for us (Rom 8.3). There is no freedom of God that is abstract from God’s life for us in Jesus Christ. There is no actus purus (‘pure nature’) wherein humanity can think of itself, even if it is claimed purely at an epistemic level (whatever that would mean), in abstraction from God’s concrete givenness for them, for us in the humanity of Jesus Christ. And yet this is exactly what continues to embroil various sectors of the Christian environ (especially online, but even off). Until Christians learn to think genuinely theologically and dogmatically about theological doctrine, these types of binaries (such as synergism and mongerism represent), will continue to shape the theological discourse in the most unfruitful and irretrievable of ways. But alas, this is the lot of many.
[1] Jeff McSwain, Simul Sanctification: Barth’s Hidden Vision for Human Transformation (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2018), 98-9.