1 16 The Problem of God’s Immutable Freedom Jesse Couenhoven It is not an accident that questions of freedom and responsibility have been among the most hotly debated topics in Christian theology since its inception. How one thinks about freedom or responsibility has significant implications for how one thinks about Christian teaching—and vice versa. The most obvious examples of this cross-fertilization have been the endless debates over the implications of Christian soteriology (especially doctrines of original sin, prevenient grace, divine foreknowledge, and predestination) for views about free will. Perhaps less obviously, Christian doctrines of God have also promoted long-standing debates about the nature of freedom. Michael Frede has speculated that one of the first libertarians may have been the Neoplatonist Christian philosopher Origen, who developed his theory of agency with the problem of evil in mind. 1 The ancient controversies about Christology were, in part, 1 Frede 2011, ch. 7.