Divine Grace and the Question of Free Will

Abstract

As a Finnish American born in the mid-1960s and raised in a rural northwoods Upper Michigan town surrounded by an Ojibwe reservation, it was not until I attended college in another state that I realized my hometown’s particular combination of immigrant and indigenous cultures was not common in the United States.1 Nevertheless, as a child, I had a sense of providence about having come into existence when the larger world seemed to be changing for the better. If only inchoately, I was aware of the civil rights movement and of women moving into all spheres of the workforce. In my Lutheran denomination, women were beginning to be ordained as pastors in 1970. Although later I would recognize that two world wars had interrupted nineteenth-century notions of progress, as a child, I wondered if God had willed that I be born in a time when ideas of equality were bearing fruit in society. At the very least, I was certain that the Spirit of God was driving these changes, although participating in them seemed to mean moving to more highly educated urban places with more support for intellectually intense women who were theologians in the making.