This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

The Clarification of the Incarnation

I am a regular reader of Darren's Nicene Theology blog. And you should be, too. (It's bookmarked under my blog links, down the left-hand side of the main page here. If I'm not mistaken, Darren is from a Wesleyan background, though he will correct me if I'm wrong.) Yesterday he replied to my post on monergism, with his own post, God Saves His Enemies. It's not my intent to start another "me-and-Kevin"sort of diablog, but I thought it important to offer some clarifications, since my monergism post is not the most well-written example of blogging.

One example of that problematic writing is Darren's seeming misunderstanding that I am basing the charge of heresy with regard to monergism on the fact that synergism is the historic Church's understanding of soteriology. Of course, what each of us means by "historic Church" may be part of the reason he denies that either monergism or synergism has ever been the settled disposition of the Church. In any case, this is not a point about which I wish to argue, as it takes me from my main point with regard to monergism. So, in terms of my seemingly attributing heresy to monergism based on the consensus fidelium of the Church, he, rightly, claims this is question-begging, since, in fact, I did not prove that synergism is the faith of the Church.

In another related aside, I would also contend that St. Augustine is not the monergist that monergists claim. It is true that the Bishop of Hippo did, in his godly-intentioned fight against Pelagius, depart from the balance of the Church's soteriology (leading those who followed his line of thought in the West to such notions as inherited guilt, double predestination, and other departures from the Church's deposit of faith), but I am convinced that making of the saint a monergist is to extrapolate extracontextually from his anti-Pelagian works a meaning that he, himself, never intended. But once more, this is not an argument I will be making here, nor for which offering any further support.

Further, I also freely admit that my understanding of Reformation theology and Calvinism is pretty much limited to the infamous TULIP. I have based my understanding of monergism wholly on the website linked in my post criticizing monergism. I can understand presuppositions and premises and argue toward their logical conclusions. But it may be that Calvinism does not follow the logical progression I think is necessitated by its presuppositions.

All that being said, in point of fact, I do happen to believe that monergism is a heresy because, in part, it is not what the historic Church taught. But actually, my point of contention in the post was that monergism necessarily must come to the conclusion that Christ had only a divine will, which is monothelitism--or minimally, that his human will was not operative, which is at least a form of monothelitism--and monothelitism is a heresy. In other words, I contend that to properly understand human nature, including free will, and how human nature is redeemed, it is absolutely essential to start and end with the Incarnation. For it is precisely in the God-man, Jesus Christ, that we properly understand what it means to be human and therefore what it means to be saved. Christology is anthropology. Christology is soteriology.

First, I find it inconsistent that monergists claim that humans have free will, but that free will can do nothing with regard to any aspect of salvation. Darren writes:

In short, monergism describes the state of fallen humankind as incapable of actively participating in God's saving action. Men and women are dead in their sins (not merely weakened), and therefore unable to work for their salvation, or actively take hold of God's offer of salvation, or even prepare themselves to receive saving grace.

I will argue in a moment why we must start and end with Jesus, the God-man, when we discuss human nature and redemption. But let it be stipulated for now, in proleptic anticipation of the later argument, that monergism must be applied to the God-man if it is to apply to humans. Let us walk through the consequences of such a position.

If we apply monergism to Jesus, then, though Jesus' human will was "free," in reality it was completely unable to cooperate with the divine will. In fact, by this reasoning, it could only, by its very nature as fallen, be in opposition to the divine will. Yet, this division of wills in the Person of the God-man runs counter to Chalcedonian (and o/Orthodox) Christology, and is, in fact, heresy.

Thus it must be posited that, though ostensibly free, the human will of Jesus was not fallen (and Darren will do this below), it was just incompetent to cooperate with the divine will. But fallenness is the predication of monergist human volitional incapacity, so what sense does it make to say that Jesus' human will was unfallen but unable to cooperate? And furthermore, if Jesus' human will was unfallen, it did not need to be saved. But if his human will was not saved, then it was never assumed into his Person in the first place, and so neither is our human will saved. Nor can it ever be. But if human will can never be saved, then it can never be appropriated in the Kingdom. And thus, it can only follow that we do not have human will in any meaningful sense. But if Jesus did not assume a human will, then we have the monothelete heresy.

But perhaps monergists will posit that Jesus' human will was fallen but not opposed, indeed, could not have been opposed, to the divine will. But if the human will could only will the divine will, the only will essentially operative in the God-man was the divine will. But if only the divine will was essentially operative, then we will have to make sense of Matthew 26:39 and how it is that the Second Person of the Trinity could in any way will something different from the First Person of the Trinity, and what sense this would make of the unity of Father and Son Jesus reveals in his "high priestly prayer" (cf. John 17:21). And really, this position, though technically different from monothelitism in certain respects, is just another form of it.

Darren, though, does attempt to account for the freedom of the human will.

. . . the traditional Reformed position does not deny the existence of free will -- it merely denies that any exercise of the will can contribute to justification, the reconciliation of men and women to God and the initiation of the Christian life. We have the ability and the right to make our own choices, but in our fallen and sinful state remain incapable of initiating our reconciliation to God or of answering his call from our own ability. Just as my free will does not enable me to decide, "Today I shall walk on the moon," neither does it enable me to decide, "Today I shall be reconciled to God."

Total depravity is a necessary presupposition of monergism, but free will is not excluded. Rather, it is put in its proper anthropological context. As free will in no way implies omnipotence, we still rely wholly on God's act for us and our salvation.

It is here that Reformed theology, as Darren constructs it, falters and must ultimately fall. It predicates opposition between omnipotence and human free will.

Frankly, if this be so, then I cannot see how double predestination is not an inescapable and necessary conclusion. For if the saved can only be saved if God wills it, since they themselves can do nothing either to want or to receive salvation, and indeed, any notion of such free will denies God's omnipotence, then those who will be condemned must necessarily be condemned because God so wills it, for their willingness or unwillingness to be condemned is irrelevant. If Darren, or monergists in general, thinks the historic Church has taught double predestination, I'd like to see dogmatic evidence for it (and just to be fair, let's make it prior to the Schism).

But more to the point, if free will cannot be in opposition to omnipotence, in what sense can it meaningfully be called free? It can and must always only do that which God himself wills, which means that damned persons, even if they will their own damnation, do so not because they were ever meaningfully free to will such an end, but because God from before time willed that they would be damned. The Church has never known such a god.

In point of fact, the divine kenosis of Jesus, exemplified in Philippians 2:5ff shows us that omnipotence can, indeed, limit itself, that is to say, omnipotence is not more powerful than itself such that it must always be the case that God cannot refrain from using his omnipotence, and therefore must so work that human free will can never oppose his will. But by the very definition of omnipotence, God must be powerful enough to self-limit his power so as to allow for free will. In other words, humans do have free will, have it meaningfully, use that free will to oppose God's will, and God, in fact, wills for this to be the case and self-limits his omnipotence so that humans may so freely act.

If I may interject here and head off a potential criticism about whether "self-limiting omnipotence" itself has any meaning, let me state that I am arguing in terms that I don't fully accept. That is to say, in speaking of God, we are always ultimately brought to apophaticism, whether that be in speaking about his Triune Person, or the essence of the Trinity which all the Persons share. What has been revealed to us of God has to do with his Person. We know God as Father because Jesus the Son has revealed him so to us in the Holy Spirit. We are led to certain limited truths regarding God's "essence" on the basis of that revelation (i. e., how it is that these three Personal revelations--Father, Son and Holy Spirit--share a common nature), but even what we positively know of his Personal revelations to us finally collapse into silence as we pass beyond the limits of human reason.

Which is to say, in speaking of God's omnipotence, which is attributed to God's essence, we really are unable speak kataphatically, as though we could really know what we mean by his omnipotence, but must lay the emphasis of such declarations on apophasis. That is to say, God is, indeed, all-powerful, but in a way that must go beyond omnipotence, so that we can also say, without contradiction, that God is not all-powerful.

Thus the seeming contradiction of my assertion of self-limiting omnipotence is not in fact a contradiction, but an attempt to hold two truths together: what has been revealed to us is a God who acts as he wills, whom no one or nothing can hinder, and, being a Person, this God has chosen to limit himself since in the exercise of that power he is powerful enough, indeed, more than powerful enough, so to do (e. g., the Incarnation).

Furthermore, to return to my discussion of omnipotence and free will, if the human will cannot resist in any way the divine will, then we are back again to an understanding of the human will in Jesus being fundamentally inoperative, or at least such a concept has no real meaning.

But it has now come time to make good on the stipulation above. I must now argue for the fact that Jesus is the Alpha and Omega of human nature and only in him can we fully understand redemption.

First, let me note Darren's contention:

Of all human beings who have ever walked the Earth, Jesus Christ is, of course, the single exception to the rules of sin and depravity. He is thus a terrible example to envoke in this conversation, because Scripture has declared in no uncertain terms that he was born without sin. Human will is in bondage (and men and women therefore "totally depraved") strictly because of sin. But because sin is an acquired and not a created condition, Jesus was able to take on human nature yet remain sinless. Sin is not a fundamental part of who we are.

Just as we cannot consider a doctrine of salvation without reference to the Incarnation and the cross, so too can we not articulate a proper anthropology by assuming that, as the perfect man, Jesus was also the example par excellance of the depraved man. Christ's human will was fully human, and fully free of sinful depravity.

In responding to Darren, a fundamental tenet of the Church with regard to salvation must be that of the Incarnate assumption of all things human, apart from sin. This is articulated throughout the ancient Church, as exemplified in the following:

. . . the only true and stedfast Teacher, the Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself. (St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, Book V, Preface)

For He was made man that we might be made God. (St. Athanasios the Great, On the Incarnation of the Word, 54)

. . . He was transfused throughout our nature, in order that our nature might by this transfusion of the Divine become itself divine, rescued as it was from death, and put beyond the reach of the caprice of the antagonist. For His return from death becomes to our mortal race the commencement of our return to the immortal life. (St. Gregory of Nyssa, The Great Catechism, 25)

For when he had come to be the God-man,
God came to an end as man, to honor me,
so that, by the very things he took on, he might restore,
and destroy sin's accusation utterly,
and, by dying, slaughter the slaughterer.
(St. Gregory the Theologian, "Against Apollinarious," lines 5-9 [carm., 1.1.10, 5-9], On God and Man, tr. by Peter Gilbert, SVS Press, 2001, p. 81)

In other words, the ancient principle of soteriology, predicated on the Church's understanding of the Person of Christ (a human nature and a divine nature and a human will and a divine will in one hypostasis as the Second Person of the Trinity), is that if it was not assumed in Christ's Person, then it cannot be saved, for Christ is the Alpha and Omega of God's saving work, the recapitulation in himself as the Second Adam of what it means to be human (cf. Romans 5:12-19; 1 Corinthians 15:42-49; Hebrews 2:6-18, 4:15, 5:6-9). Christ, not Adam, is the archetype of humanity.

The biblical assertion is that Christ became like us in every way, save sin. It is clear that Christ's humanity was subject to exhaustion, hunger, temptation and so forth. Thus, the human nature Christ assumed was a fallen human nature, though that fallenness entailed no sin on Christ's part.

But if the human nature Christ assumed was fallen, so, too, was the will that Christ assumed. But if Christ's human will was fallen and yet he was without sin, then it is inescapable that a fallen human will can freely cooperate with the divine will.

So, to return to Darren's quote above, the implications of Darren's contention is that Christ must have been depraved (though not sinfully) since he took on human nature that was (sinfully) depraved, and this precisely illuminates the necessary point. But if depravity is sinful, then Jesus could not have taken on our depravity, which means we are not saved from our depravity.

At this point, it is not clear to me what the intent of "sinful depravity" means. On the one hand, if it means that by our own personal choices, humans put themselves in bondage to sin, and that that bondage to sin leads to consequential limits on human willing, I am not in substantive disagreement. Indeed, I do believe that the exercise of a free will in sin does ultimately lead to a condition in which an otherwise free human will cannot but will sin and cannot any longer repent or even want to repent. This I think is clear in Scripture.

But if by depravity is meant a condition of humanity such that humans are born into such bondage (i. e., based on an understanding of original sin as inherited guilt), then we are back to the principle that what is not assumed is not healed.

The problem with Reformed soteriology, insofar as I understand it and has Darren has explicated it, is that it starts its anthropology and soteriology with man. But the only revelation we have of man, and our only experience of him, is a fallen one. Even the few verses in Genesis which depict the prelapsarian state give us only the basic fundamentals recapitulated in Christ. But to predicate our anthropology or soteriology on a fallen archetype is to go wrong from the beginning. No, to fully understand humanity we must understand "God-humanity" insofar as it has been given us to grasp the truth of and about Christ.

I repeat: Christology is anthropology. Christology is soteriology.

In short, I think it fitting that we end with an appropriate text from the much-and-wrongly-maligned Saint John Cassian, which reiterates that if in Christ we have the full and complete union of human willing and divine willing, then we must also predicate the cooperation without contradiction of the human and divine willing in salvation by grace through faith:

And so these [i. e., free will and omnipotence or providence] are somehow mixed up and indiscriminately confused, so that among many persons, which depends on the other is involved in great questionings, i.e., does God have compassion upon us because we have shown the beginning of a good will, or does the beginning of a good will follow because God has had compassion upon us? For many believing each of these and asserting them more widely than is right are entangled in all kinds of opposite errors. For if we say that the beginning of free will is in our own power, what about Paul the persecutor, what about Matthew the publican, of whom the one was drawn to salvation while eager for bloodshed and the punishment of the innocent, the other for violence and rapine? But if we say that the beginning of our free will is always due to the inspiration of the grace of God, what about the faith of Zaccheus, or what are we to say of the goodness of the thief on the cross, who by their own desires brought violence to bear on the kingdom of heaven and so prevented the special leadings of their vocation? But if we attribute the performance of virtuous acts, and the execution of God's commands to our own will, how do we pray: "Strengthen, O God, what Thou hast wrought in us;" and "The work of our hands stablish Thou upon us?" We know that Balaam was brought to curse Israel, but we see that when he wished to curse he was not permitted to. Abimelech is preserved from touching Rebecca and so sinning against God. Joseph is sold by the envy of his brethren, in order to bring about the descent of the children of Israel into Egypt, and that while they were contemplating the death of their brother provision might be made for them against the famine to come: as Joseph shows when he makes himself known to his brethren and says: "Fear not, neither let it be grievous unto you that ye sold me into these parts: for for your salvation God sent me before you;" and below: "For God sent me before that ye might be preserved upon the earth and might have food whereby to live. Not by your design was I sent but by the will of God, who has made me a father to Pharaoh and lord of all his house, and chief over all the land of Egypt." And when his brethren were alarmed after the death of his father, he removed their suspicions and terror by saying: "Fear not: Can ye resist the will of God? You imagined evil against me but God turned it into good, that He might exalt me, as ye see at the present time, that He might save much people." And that this was brought about providentially the blessed David likewise declared saying in the hundred and fourth Psalm: "And He called for a dearth upon the land: and brake all the staff of bread. He sent a man before them: Joseph was sold for a slave." These two then; viz., the grace of God and free will seem opposed to each other, but really are in harmony, and we gather from the system of goodness that we ought to have both alike, lest if we withdraw one of them from man, we may seem to have broken the rule of the Church's faith: for when God sees us inclined to will what is good, He meets, guides, and strengthens us: for "At the voice of thy cry, as soon as He shall hear, He will answer thee;" and: "Call upon Me," He says, "in the day of tribulation and I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify Me." And again, if He finds that we are unwilling or have grown cold, He stirs our hearts with salutary exhortations, by which a good will is either renewed or formed in us. (Conferences, XIII.11, emphasis added)

Posted by Clifton at March 17, 2005 10:04 AM | TrackBack