Tuesday, November 16, 2021

Gary Michuta on how Calvinism Undermines the True Humanity of Jesus and Results in a Blasphemous Christology

  

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)