Robert W. Jenson on the Will.

Robert W. Jenson is easily my favorite living theologian (My all-time favorite is Dietrich Bonhoeffer). Here is an interesting take from him on the topic of "free will."

Contrary to any presumption that 'the will' decides between it's own two possible orientations (good and evil), Augustine insists that God alone makes this decision. Some, he says, are elected by God to attain righteousness and some are not, and this settles the matter. Yet nevertheless the first group "believe, because they so choose," and the others "do not believe because they do not so choose."

But how can both be true, that we believe or do not believe "because" we choose to believe or not to believe, and that we believe or do not believe because God chooses us to do the one or the other? Both can be true because, although Augustine of course never puts it just this way, between God's will and a creature's will there is no zero-sum game, because God's deciding something in the the manner of God and my deciding the same thing in the manner of a creature are not on the same plane of being. In a typically lapidary and and nearly untranslatable Augustinian dictum: when we do the good, "both we do it, and God does that we do it."
- From On Thinking the Human: Resolution of Difficult Notions.

Difficult to understand? Yes. Just reread it slowly, and be blessed.