HUMAN INTEGRITY AND VALUE
One Power in Salvation and Christ
Christ’s true humanity also becomes a problem
within Calvinism. A key idea within Calvinist thought is called monergism,
the belief that only God works or operates in salvation. This is opposed to synergism,
which holds that human cooperation has a part.
Calvinists hold a variety of opinions as to how
widely monergism should be understood and applied, but the gist of it is this:
Since God is not, in any way, dependent upon his creation or creatures,
according to Calvin, any human co-operation is nothing more than what God
predestined and brought about. It is not free.
Although monergism attempts to guarantee God’s
absolute sovereignty over creation, it actually conceives of creation as being
in competition with its Creator. God’s freedom and human freedom are pitted
against each other, like two people eating slices from the same apple pie. The
more slices one person eats, the fewer slices are left for the other.
Therefore, if there is anything other than God operating in the cosmos (like
human free will), then God is not truly free, nor is he truly God. A
non-monergistic cosmos is impossible under the Calvinist understanding.
Calvinist monergism has drastic consequences when
it is applied to the Incarnation. How should we understand Christ’s human will?
Was it truly free, or was it predestined by the Father? Author Robin Phillips
comments:
If we say that Christ’s human will was exempt from
divine predestination, then it is hard to avoid the implication that there must
have been true non-monergistic synergy and co-operation between the divine and
the human wills of Christ. But if so, then it is equally hard to see why it
would be problematic to assert a similar non-monergistic synergy and
co-operation between the divine and the human wills when dealing with the rest
of humanity, especially since Christ typified the appropriate relations between
humanity and divinity. (Robin Phillips, “Why I stopped Being a
Calvinist—A Deformed Christology (Part 5),” Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, Ancient Faith
Ministries, January 23, 2014)
If Christ’s human will was nothing more than a
passive instrument irresistibly moved by his divine will, we find ourselves
back in the radical Monothelite camp mentioned earlier, which implies that Christ’s
saving work on the cross was not meritorious. Since merit is possible only by
something capable of moving toward perfection, only an authentic free human
will can do something truly meritorious (Tending to perfection refers to Christ
in his humanity. It is in this sense that Christ “learned obedience through
what he suffered” [Heb. 5:8]. See also Gregory of Nazianus [Orat. 30.6]).
Calvin’s solution was to argue that Christ’s death
and obedience were meritorious—not in themselves, but by divine decree:
The free favor of God is as fitly opposed to our
works as is the obedience of Christ, both in their order: for Christ
could not merit anything save by the good pleasure of God, but only
inasmuch as he was destined to appease the wrath of God by his sacrifice,
and wipe away our transgressions by his obedience: in one word, since
the merit of Christ depends entirely on the grace of God (which provided this
mode of salvation for us), the latter is no less appropriately opposed to all
righteousness of men than is the former. (Calvin, Institutes 2, 17, 1)
Here we see the nominalist idea that God declares
non-meritorious actions meritorious in his sight, even though, in truth, they
are not. One also wonders how Calvin can speak about Christ’s obedience, since
his human will is destined to obey God. It would be like calling a chair
obedient because it does what it is destined to do by its construction. The
word is robbed of its meaning.
Philips concludes:
To be consistent Calvinism must deny that the
human will possesses such self-determining powers. Thus, Christ’s obedience to
the Father to the point of death becomes either a kind of fake dramatization or
something attributed to his divine nature only. The notion that the humanity of
Christ was simply a passive tool surfaces now and against in contemporary
Reformed polemics. (Phillips, “Why I Stopped being a Calvinist.”) (Gary
Michuta, Revolt Against Reality: Fighting the Foes of Sanity and Truth—from
the Serpent to the State [El Cajon, Calif.: Catholic Answers Press, 2021],
178-81)
For
those curious, Gregory of Nazianus (alt. Nazianzen), Orat. 30.6.
referenced above, reads as follows, for those curious:
The same consideration applies to another passage,
"He learnt obedience by the things which He suffered," and to His
"strong crying and tears," and His "Entreaties," and His
"being heard," and His" Reverence," all of which He
wonderfully wrought out, like a drama whose plot was devised on our behalf. For
in His character of the Word He was neither obedient nor disobedient. For such
expressions belong to servants, and inferiors, and the one applies to the
better sort of them, while the other belongs to those who deserve punishment.
But, in the character of the Form of a Servant, He condescends to His fellow
servants, nay, to His servants, and takes upon Him a strange form, bearing all
me and mine in Himself, that in Himself He may exhaust the bad, as fire does
wax, or as the sun does the mists of earth; and that I may partake of His
nature by the blending. Thus He honours obedience by His action, and proves it
experimentally by His Passion. For to possess the disposition is not enough,
just as it would not be enough for us, unless we also proved it by our acts;
for action is the proof of disposition.
And perhaps it would not be wrong to assume this
also, that by the art of His love for man He gauges our obedience, and measures
all by comparison with His own Sufferings, so that He may know our condition by
His own, and how much is demanded of us, and how much we yield, taking into the
account, along with our environment, our weakness also. For if the Light
shining through the veil upon the darkness, that is upon this life, was
persecuted by the other darkness (I mean, the Evil One and the Tempter), how much
more will the darkness be persecuted, as being weaker than it? And what marvel
is it, that though He entirely escaped, we have been, at any rate in part,
overtaken? For it is a more wonderful thing that He should have been chased
than that we should have been captured;--at least to the minds of all who
reason aright on the subject. I will add yet another passage to those I have
mentioned, because I think that it clearly tends to the same sense. I mean
"In that He hath suffered being tempted, He is able to succour them that
are tempted." But God will be all in all in the time of restitution; not
in the sense that the Father alone will Be; and the Son be wholly resolved into
Him, like a torch into a great pyre, from which it was reft away for a little
space, and then put back (for I would not have even the Sabellians injured by
such an expression); but the entire Godhead…when we shall be no longer divided
(as we now are by movements and passions), and containing nothing at all of
God, or very little, but shall be entirely like. (NPNF2 7:311-12)
