This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

Till . . . We Have Faces

Kevin has responded to my last reply to him in his Till...God's Great Judgment Seat. He has also replied to Perry's comments (at Kevin's "Synergies of Christ") in his (Kevin's) most recent post Real Union and Legal Talk. I'm grateful for both his replies, as they offer some important clarifications. But as Perry will doubtless wish to take on Kevin's (lengthy) "Real Union and Legal Talk" I will not direct my comments to that post per se. Making use of his clarifications, I will direct my own comments to the concepts embedded in "Till . . . God's Great Judgment Seat."

In our discussion, Kevin has reiterated that he bases human action in human willing which is constrained by nature. Kevin claims that personhood is real and not merely nominal, that a person exercises a will, but that that will is constrained by that person's nature, thus eliminating the possibility that a human person could will in opposition to their nature. Or, to state it positively and perhaps more correctly, that a person will always will according to their strongest inclination at the moment of willing. Kevin also admits to a synergistic account of human action after regeneration (or in the context of progressive sanctification), though he also claims that the work of Christ done in a person cannot fail. Presumably by this he means that since after regeneration a person's nature is regenerate, the inclinations of the nature will always most strongly incline toward God, so a person cannot but will (progressively ever greater) union with God.

Part of the issue, it seems to me, is that Kevin wants to maintain a theological determinism (that God is in some way the necessary and sufficient cause of all events, including human acts, though Kevin would, I suspect, subscribe to divine-human joint sufficiency in determining human acts) while at the same time preserving ultimate moral responsibility and a concept of personhood which embraces these presumably fundamental tenets. But if this is the case, then human willing cannot meaningfully be a function of personhood but a function of nature (either depraved or regenerate), and “person” here is a mask of sorts identifying the particular instance of a human nature.

I will grant that Kevin can make an argument for ultimate moral responsibility for a will that is free only insofar as it is constrained by its nature--though I, myself, find such arguments thin--but I fail to see how his understanding of personhood can be hypostatic as opposed to prosoponic. The person here seems to me to be only in such a way as to instantiate a particular human nature. It is the will of the nature that does all the work. The person, even if real in a certain way, is little better than a name by which is identified a particular instance of a nature.

I am, perhaps, overstating the case somewhat, ascribing to Kevin an Aristotelian notion of personhood that he doubtless will reject. But I wonder if he doesn't see what I take to be the logical entailments by which I reach my conclusion. If the human will is a faculty of the nature, if that will always wills according to its strongest inclinations, and if a person cannot exceed his own nature, and thus is always constrained to will according to that nature, even if it is the person that wills, how is it that a person is anything other than his own will? What sense does it make to say that a person directs his own will, if that will cannot but will what the nature dictates?

Kevin thinks to escape this dilemma by predicating to nature all the things that a person (in the hypostatic sense) would do anyway. That is to say, a person only wills and does what a person wills and does because those are the natural constraints on what a person wills and does. But how is this not subsuming personhood to nature? And if we subsume personhood to nature, we have made will the operative agency. Personhood is will, but will is a faculty of nature. Thus personhood is a faculty of nature.

Kevin admits that his use of "coextensive" for personhood and nature confuses what he intends to say. But it strikes me that he is constrained by his own paradigm to say just this. If a person does not exceed his nature, if a person's will is constrained by his nature, and if a person cannot will except in accordance with his nature, then personhood is coextensive with will and coextensive with nature, and the charge I have been making of Kevin that person and nature are identical in his schema appears to me to hold.

Furthermore, on Kevin's schema, a will cannot but will what its nature directs, specifically, it will always will in the direction of its strongest inclination. This is problematic, however, in the case of Jesus. Kevin and I agree that Christ had two natures, human and divine, and two wills, human and divine. Kevin notes that in Christ the union of those wills was accomplished in that the wills both willed the same thing. However, I don't think the Scriptural witness bears him out. I turn to the Garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 26:37-44/Mark 14:33-41). There Christ asks that if it be possible that the cup he was about to drink (his death) might pass from him. Then he says, “Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done.” Kevin's view that Jesus' two wills both willed the same thing cannot hold in light of this verse. For if they willed the same thing, then Jesus had no need to deny the object of his human will (drawing back from death), and would simply have acquiesced to the Father's will.

Note carefully, though, what I am not saying. I am not saying that Jesus' human will was opposed to his divine will. Nor am I saying that Jesus' two wills were not in union. Let me be clear: there is no opposition, and there is union. But under Kevin's schema, this cannot be the case.

How do I explain, or rather, how has patristic teaching explained, this seeming discrepancy. Namely, that the two wills both willed according to their nature, which is to say, each will willed its own object (the human will the good of preservation of life, the divine will the atoning sacrifice ordained by God), and that the human will turned away from the good object it intended (preservation of life) toward another equally good object, the acquiescence to God's ordained work of salvation.

That is to say, under Kevin's schema, asserting strongest inclination as the object of a will simply cannot work. But why not? It fails to work in two ways. First, the texts themselves explicitly describe a denial of Jesus' human will to serve the divine will. But if Jesus did no sin, and if his human will's strongest human inclination was not sin, how is it that his human will was denied? It seems to me that Kevin can give only one answer: that the divine will subsumed the human will. But this is monothelitism.

It also fails to work not because Christ had a sinful nature like us, but rather it fails because under Kevin's model, even Christ had a nature that could have been corrupted (else he could not have been tempted in every way such as we are), and thus like Adam, could have resisted his strongest inclination. He could have done this in two ways. If Kevin asserts that Christ had a human nature like Adam, then he could resist his God-ward inclinations for sin (as Adam did). Or, if we posit that Christ's strongest natural human inclination is to live, and we affirm that such is an unqualified good, then Christ resisted that strongest inclination to submit it to the will of God. Either way, Christ, in his human nature, could have resisted his strongest human inclination (and in the patristic understanding of the Garden, he actually did).

Kevin, however, will likely argue that, however we explain the two wills in Christ, humans born under the Federal Head of Adam do, indeed, follow the strongest inclination of their will, which just happens to always be sin. They are unable to do anything else. But if this works for unregenerate man, it also has to work for regenerate man: he will always will according to his strongest inclination, which, now that it has been regenerated, can and does will the good (or God). Presumably this is why he also says that the work of Christ cannot fail. There is a synergy, of sorts, after regeneration, but if the synergy of which Kevin speaks is that exemplified in Christ under Kevin's schema, it has the same problems it must overcome.

In other words, the personhood of which Kevin speaks cannot be more than the nominal particularization of a human nature and will, for no matter the particular state of that nature and will, it cannot will against its nature (sin if it is unregenerate; holiness if it is regenerate). Kevin will doubtless point to his explicit commitment to progressive sanctification, that it is still possible for regenerate beings to sin. But this hardly deflects the points I make, for I would be quite surprised if Kevin believed the regenerate could ever truly fall from grace by their own efforts.

But given all these, to me, logical entailments of his position, then his denial of equating personhood with nature, while genuine and sincere, cannot follow from his own understanding of nature and will. Indeed, if we map these entailments onto God we end in modalism, and if onto Christ, we end in monotheletism. But if Kevin gives up his monergistic schema, and adopts hypostatic personhood, he can preserve that which he seeks to maintain.

Posted by Clifton at April 8, 2005 04:54 PM | TrackBack