Free Will in Eden and Heaven: From Innocence to Maturity12 min read

AI SUMMARY: This essay explores how both angels and humans were created with legitimate but potentially competing desires—self-fulfillment and union with God—and how sin arises when those desires are wrongly ordered. Drawing on sources from Augustine to Aquinas, it argues that moral maturity, not instant perfection, is God’s design for both human and angelic creatures. Sanctification—growth in spiritual maturity—was what God intended Adam and Eve to pursue through obedience, and it is this matured holiness, sealed by God and accompanied by glorified bodies, that will preserve free will in heaven while precluding the possibility of sin.

“God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes.” — Ecclesiastes 7:29

From the very beginning, God gave both angels and humans a profound dignity—the capacity to desire what is good. Chief among these were two legitimate appetites: the desire for self-fulfillment and the desire for union with God. These were not rival forces by design, but complementary aspects of one’s created nature, meant to flourish in harmony. Yet they required a hierarchy—one desire ruling the other in love.

When rightly ordered, the desire for self-fulfillment becomes an expression of union with God, aligning our aspirations with divine purpose. When disordered, this desire competes with that union, leading to sin.

Anselm, in De casu diaboli (“On the Fall of the Devil”), explains that God granted rational creatures two fundamental affections or “wills”—the will for happiness (affectio commodi) and the will for justice (affectio iustitiae)—so that they might act freely, initiating action from themselves rather than by necessity:

“In order for the angels to have the power for self-initiated action, they had to have both a will for justice and a will for happiness. If God had given them only a will for happiness, they would have been necessitated to will whatever they thought would make them happy… The same thing would have been true…if God had given them only the will for justice.

Since God gave them both wills, however, they had the power for self-initiated action. Whether they chose to subject their wills for happiness to the demands of justice or to ignore the demands of justice in the interest of happiness, that choice had its ultimate origin in the angels… The rebel angels chose to abandon justice in an attempt to gain happiness for themselves, whereas the good angels chose to persevere in justice even if it meant less happiness.”

These two inclinations correspond precisely to our categories: self-fulfillment (happiness) and union with God (justice). They are complementary by design but require a proper ordering—a hierarchy where justice governs happiness in love.

Augustine notes a similar principle in City of God, XIV.13:

“When the creature is loved for its own sake, and not for the sake of God, the love is disordered, and this disorder is the root of sin.”

Likewise, Thomas Aquinas reflects on the fall of Satan:

“The devil sinned by seeking to be as God, not in the sense of equality, but in the fact sense of desiring his own excellence independently of God.” (Summa Theologiae, I, q.63, a.3)

Angels and humans thus confront the same spiritual challenge: the legitimate longing for happiness must never undermine the orientation toward justice—especially as it culminates in union with God. This ordering constituted the test in Eden. Humanity, like the fallen angels, inverted that order, elevating the will for self above the will to divine union, thus unraveling the harmony of creation.

1.0 The Purpose of Freedom: Growth into Maturity

Eden was not the final destination for humanity, but the beginning of a journey. Adam and Eve’s innocence was meant to develop into mature holiness—they had merely the potential for maturity and fuller likeness to God. Adam and Eve were not created with virtue, but with the capacity to grow into it. Gregory of Nyssa captures this developmental model of virtue:

“The soul grows by free choice toward what is better… and the perfection of the soul is the result of its own movement toward the good.” — Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection ¹

Likewise, Geerhardus Vos emphasizes that Adam and Eve’s innocence and access to eternal life in the Tree of Life was probationary and based on continued obedience:

“The principle of probation is this: that life with God must be acquired through obedience, not possessed automatically by virtue of creation.” — Vos, Biblical Theology, p. 30 ²

This obedience was intended to produce sanctification—a growth into spiritual maturity. Adam and Eve were called not merely to avoid sin, but to be formed by resisting it. Their ultimate reward was not only eternal life, but a sanctified character sealed by God. This is the pattern for all the redeemed, now including us. We grow in sanctification by the power of God.

2.0 Good Desires Disordered

Christian tradition has long affirmed the multiplicity of created desires—some horizontal, others vertical. Legitimate inward or human desires meant to be kept in order by submission to God and His ways include pleasures of the mind and body, including creativity, intellectual endeavors like science and logic, as well as the pleasures of sex and food. Their goodness is never the issue. It is their priority with respect to our love and obedience to God (our vertical desires) that determine their and our moral character.

Martin Luther, who once wrote that reason is “the most important and the highest among all things” (Lectures on Genesis, LW 1:75), wrote of reason used outside of submission to God in a different way:

Reason is the devil’s greatest whore; by nature and manner of being she is a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the devil’s appointed whore; whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed…” — WA TR 1568, Luther’s Works, Vol. 54, p. 330

Luther’s point is that good desires, even the use of reason, become sinful when out of order with a love for God.

2.1 How the Serpent Lied

In Eden, Adam and Eve’s desire for the knowledge of God’s and evil—”to be like God” as the serpent opined, was not evil in itself. But they took the shortcut. Instead of trusting that God had a plan to share that information,  they believed the serpent’s lie, that God was withholding that information. But the truth was, resisting sin was meant to teach them the knowledge of good and evil while producing virtue.  Bernard of Clairvaux helps trace the inward transformation God intends:

“At first, man loves himself for his own sake… then he loves God for his own sake… until finally, he loves even himself only for God’s sake.” — Bernard, On Loving God, ch. XV ³

In short, the serpent’s offer was not for forbidden knowledge—it was not forbidden at all. Adam and Eve were meant to learn about sin by resisting it, not participating in it. Satan’s lie was the temptation to take the shortcut and bypass maturity.

3.0 The Four States of Human Freedom

Augustine articulated a now-classic fourfold framework for understanding man’s capacity for sin across redemptive history:

• (a) Created Man: able to sin, able not to sin (posse peccare, posse non peccare)
• (b) After the Fall: not able not to sin (non posse non peccare)
• (c) Regenerate Man: able not to sin (posse non peccare)
• (d) Glorified Man: unable to sin (non posse peccare) ⁴

Adam and Eve’s tragic freedom lay in that first state. They were free NOT to sin, but also free to love themselves more than God. In contrast, our future state in glory will preserve freedom yet possess the virtue to not want to choose sin.

4.0 Why We Will Not Sin in Heaven

4.1 Maturity in Virtue and Free Will

A common question arises: If free will enabled the fall, will we not be at risk again in heaven? Conversely, if we are not able to sin, or no one sins in heaven, does that mean we no longer have free will? Because if that’s the case, God could have made us that way in the first place!

But this misunderstands the nature of the necessary process of voluntary love and the final, freely chosen maturity accomplished in salvation:

“In that final peace, we shall be free, and shall see that we are free, because we shall then be incapable of willing to sin.” — Augustine, City of God, XXII.30

“The will of the blessed cannot be evil, for they are in the fruition of the supreme good which fully satisfies their desire.” — Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q.109, a.9 ⁵

In heaven, our final state is not like that of Adam and Eve. They necessarily (due to fairness and free will) lacked maturity, though they possessed initial innocence. In heaven, we will have gained, if not earned, maturity, and our innocence is regained through the redemption of Christ.

4.2 Final Sanctification’s Mystery

The sanctification begun through faith and obedience in this life will be somehow mysteriously completed by God’s sealing power. Glorified bodies, united to glorified souls, will embody desires so rightly ordered that sin will not even attract. In this way, free will remains—but matured and sealed by God’s power. Here are some passages that indicate this:

He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. (1. Philippians 1:6)

Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely (1 Thessalonians 5:23a)

For by a single offering He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. (Hebrews 10:14)

This concept deepens what we have been exploring, the free will theodicy by integrating it with a companion concept – the two-worlds or soulmaking theodicy

This approach to understanding why sin exists proposes that the best possible system to preserve liberty and virtue requires two worlds – one in which we could pursue free and authentic moral development; and a second where we could then enjoy the eternal life of those pursuits with God.

In short, maturity must be earned—not as meritorious salvation, but as a real moral history of choosing God’s will over self. And it is this earned maturity that explains why heaven is secure: not because freedom has been removed, but because desire has been perfected.

5.0 Heaven as Desires in Order for Eternity

God’s plan for His creatures always included desire—but desire in harmony with His will. Sin entered not because of bad desires, but because of impatience and inversion. The Fall, then, was not merely about breaking a rule—it was about refusing the path of growth, resisting the call to maturity.

Through Christ, the Second Adam, we are not merely restored—we are advanced toward the final state of glorified holiness, where love for God will order all else within us. Sanctification was the goal for Adam and Eve, and it remains the goal for us—a maturity in which freedom and righteousness are no longer in tension, but in harmony.

Heaven will not be, however, a static state, but a continued growth in holiness, in intellectual, creative and moral growth and satisfaction. And in the presence, glory, and love of God without our lack of holiness being a barrier between us and God, nor between one another.  And it will be sealed forever by the grace of God, who completes what He begins.

“We shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.” — 1 John 3:2