Among the difficulties, of which not a few crop up in Holy Scripture, there is hardly a more tangled labyrinth than that of “free choice,” for it is a subject that has long exercised the minds of philosophers, and also of theologians old and new, in a striking degree, though in my opinion and more labor than fruit.
The opening paragraph—consisting entirely of just this one sentence—sets out the basic thematic foundation which the essay will proceed to pursue. Credit should be given to the author for admitting right up front that this pursuit is not made in an effort to explicate original thought. As he points out, the debate over free will—here situated precisely as “choice”—is one that goes back through the ages of Biblical interpretation. Of course, that honestly does not applying to withholding an opinion that all this debate has produced little fertile commentary. More labor than fruit is an acknowledgement that the debate still continues because it has not satisfactorily arrived at a conclusion, but it also subtly hints that perhaps the author himself is proposing something more substantive. Only a close reading will determine whether that is the case.
For there are some secret places in the Holy Scriptures into which God has not wished us to penetrate more deeply and, if we try to do so, then the deeper we go, the darker and darker it becomes, by which means we are led to acknowledge the unsearchable majesty of the divine wisdom, and the weakness of the human mind.
Here we go, and it does not take long to get to there. The problem that a great many secular critics of religious philosophy have—especially when it comes to Christianity—is that too many scholars and too much philosophy eventually winds up explaining things by simply not explaining them. This quote is the inevitable escape hatch for Christian philosophizing. Whenever a big black hole in explicating the universe according to logic appears, the temptation to pull the cord on this hatch becomes too great. Although posed and framed in almost infinite number of ways, it call boils down to the same essential thought: God moves in mysterious ways so leave any attempt for the puny human mind to understand things behind and just accept that God knows what He is doing. Convenient, but it no longer carries the quite the power to convince as it once did.
“God made man from the beginning, and left him in the hand of his own counsel. He added his commandments and precepts. If thou wilt observe the commandments, and keep acceptable fidelity forever, they shall preserve thee. He hath set water and fire before thee; stretch forth thine hand for which thou wilt. Before man is life and death, good and evil; that which he shall choose shall be given him.”
At the time that Erasmus wrote this essay, this particular book had not yet been consigned to the Biblical Apocrypha. While it was not a part of the Hebrew canon, the Church of Christ had welcome it alongside books which Erasmus derisively dismisses as less purposeful like Song of Songs. And, indeed, the content expressed through Sirach’s wisdom does seem far more suitable for inclusion into the Christian canon than Solomon’s erotic love poetry. Especially this particular excerpt which Erasmus identifies as being one of the strongest pieces of scriptural evidence supporting the contention that God has endowed humans with unrestricted freedom of choice in the expression of their own free will independent upon interference by a creator deity.
Then again, maybe that is precisely the reason that this little work was subsequently banished to the inherently questionable validity of the Apocrypha in favor of reading poetry comparing a beloved to a perfumed pouch precariously perched between breasts. After all, as Erasmus makes clear from the start, debate exists over the mere existence of free will therefore there must certainly have been debate over the desire for people to believe in the existence of free will.
