Brakel begins straightaway defining his terms: intellect, will, and judgment. Intellect involves judgment, along with conscience and comprehension. Judgment involves determining whether some proposition is true/false, some argument is valid/invalid/sound/unsound, some term clear/unclear, or some person/place/thing is [fill in your desired predication]. Judgment is involved with seeing whether or not something is to loved or hated. The Will is connected to ability. I agree. But Brakel connects it with the ability to love/hate. This is a sneaky move. Brakel seems to just make it an analytical truth that abilities are necessarily tied to affections. It will be a short, expected move if Brakel now wants to enslave the will to the affections. If he does, this will have to be demonstrated before I assent. He mentions that these terms are discussed more in chapter 10, so we'll have to hold off for more detail until we get there. Until then, any conclusions deduced, akin to Euclid and his axioms, are only as good as the axioms themselves.
Dutch Reformed Theologian Wilhelmus à Brakel (1635-1711) wrote a chapter called Man’s Free Will or Impotency and the Punishment Due Upon Sin in his four-volume work The Christian's Reasonable Service (published in 1700) The title in Dutch is De Redelijke Godsdienst (which translates to 'Reasonable Religion'). It's in the first volume, second section (Anthropology: Doctrine of Man), 15th chapter. I'm very interested in the Free Will debate and I've been recommended this chapter as a Biblical perspective on the issue. From what I can tell, it is a defense of compatibilism from a Biblical perspective. The following series will consist of my thoughts on the chapter.
