Old Sandals

Hebrews 13:9
Do not be carried about with various and strange doctrines. For it  is good that the heart be established by grace.

It’s much more than words. It’s not about clever arguments. Established by grace.

Hebrews 12:25
See that you do not refuse Him who speaks. For if they did not escape who refused Him who spoke on earth, much more shall  we  not  escape if we turn away from Him who speaks from heaven.

Do men have free will? Sort of.
We can’t say yes, but we can say no.

You can’t lose your salvation, but you can throw it away.

Hebrews 11:37-38
They were stoned, they were sawn in two, were tempted, were slain with the sword. They wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented—of whom the world was not worthy. They wandered in deserts and mountains, in dens and caves of the earth.

The world was not worthy of these sons and daughters of God, even as it was not worthy of the Only-Begotten. The world did not esteem them. They were forsaken by all. Yet God did not forsake them, even in (especially in) their suffering.

Hebrews 10:29
Of how much worse punishment, do you suppose, will he be thought worthy who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, counted the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified a common thing, and insulted the Spirit of grace? 

• The Lord…[is] not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. 2 Peter 3:9
• For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God. Ephesians 2:8
• You did not choose Me, but I chose you.  John 15:16
• I have set before you life and death…therefore choose life.  Deuteronomy 30:19

I am beginning to think there is no fully satisfactory way to harmonize these verses, and many others like them. According to the Westminster Confession of Faith, “the infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself”.  But which Scriptures interpret which Scriptures?

Hebrews 9:13-15
For if the blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer, sprinkling the unclean, sanctifies for the purifying of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God? And for this reason He is the Mediator of the new covenant, by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions under the first covenant, that those who are called may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance.

Steve (www.undeception.com):
Most Calvinists agree that Scripture talks of our choosing God, but they make sure we know the caveat that it is only because God chose us to choose Him. Yet I don’t know of any non-Calvinist who believes, or who thinks that any biblical author ever believed, that God is merely a reactor to our whim and will. “In Him we live and move and have our being.” Insofar as He reacts to our “whim and will”, it is because it is His prerogative to do so. This is a bit of a red herring, but all’s fair in love, war, and heresy hunting, it seems!

Andy (www.oldsandals.net):
First timer. If you don’t mind, I would like to share with you my own blog post regarding what I call ‘Biblical synergism’. I am coming at this as a rather eclectic member of a Reformed denomination, I would appreciate your take…

“I sought the Lord, and afterward I knew—He moved my soul to seek Him, seeking me. It was not I that found, O Savior true; no, I was found of thee.”  The first verse of this 19th century hymn (author unknown), expresses a biblical synergism at work in our salvation.

Synergism is a word that needs some unpacking.  The World English Dictionary defines synergism as the working together of two or more agents to produce an effect that is greater than the sum of their individual effects.  Thus, in a theological context, it has to do with the way in which, or the extent to which, one’s eternal salvation is the result of both divine and human activity.

From the beginning, the church catholic has held that man cannot save himself by simply doing good deeds.  The kerygma has always been, “Repent of your sins; believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved.”   Furthermore, she (the church catholic) has always maintained that it is even beyond man’s ability (in some autonomous way) to decide to place his faith in Christ for salvation.  Rather, God must take the initiative.  He must act first, or all is futile.

The essence of the gospel is that God has acted first, in sending his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, to be our Savior.  And God has acted first, in sending his Holy Spirit, to stir the hearts of men to believe and embrace the gospel.

God’s actions call for a response, one that it is incumbent upon us to make.  Choose you this day whom you will serve (Joshua 24:15).  Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded (James 4:8).  Come unto me, all you who labor (Matthew 11:28).  Seek the Lord while He may be found  (Isaiah 55:6).  When I choose, when I cleanse, when I come, when I seek, I am actually, self-consciously, doing something.  I am not in a trance.

God acts first.  He takes the initiative.  While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8)  Then I act.  I respond in faith unto salvation.  This is a synergy that is surely biblical, is it not?

Yes, it is, but there’s a bit more unpacking to do.  God and I may be the two agents in this synergy, but it’s not the kind of synergy where two agents bring their independent work together to achieve a greater result.  We are never independent of God.  How could we be? “For in Him we live, and move and have our being (Acts 17:28).  Or, to paraphrase, “in Him we live, and move, and choose to follow Him, and cleanse our hands, and purify our hearts, and come unto Him sinful though we are, and seek Him as He commands.”

This is synergism of a kind, but not of a kind that detracts from God’s sovereignty.  The domain of our hearts is the very kingdom of God.  The kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:21).  This is also monergism (God acting alone) of a kind.  “He moved my soul to seek Him, seeking me.” And yet it is not of a kind that detracts from man’s responsibility. Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish (Luke 13:3).

The salvation of God, wrought through the atoning sacrifice of Christ and by the working of the Holy Spirit in hearts that are wide open, is ultimately a mystery—a wonderful mystery which cannot be fully explained by any fine-grained theological system.

Perhaps synergism and monergism thus understood are just two ways of expressing the same ineffable reality.

Steve:
I certainly appreciate the attempt at reconciling these, Andy. I welcome it in theory. But the emphasis in Reformed circles is clearly and unequivocally on God’s role; treating man’s response as anything but the direct effect of God’s intervention to change the human will despite itself is typically decried as Pelagian synergism. For them, if a man does anything good, it is really God; if a man wants to do anything good, it is really God. Now, I don’t have problem with this in one sense, but not because of Paul’s quotation of Epimenides, which if applied here would also attribute all the bad I do to the divine will; rather, I am glad to credit God for any good that I do because anything good done by anyone is by definition God’s work, since He is the source of all goodness. That is not the Calvinistic understanding of monergism, however: God gets the glory from programming the things He wills into our operating systems, which He has to hack because of our corrupted software, so that any crediting of the robot’s performance to the robot ludicrously and blasphemously robs the designer of all deserved glory. In synergism, the relationship is parent/child: the source of our being comes from God, and He is the one who instructs us to do as we ought, and takes all delight from our willfully sitting at His feet to learn what He wants to teach us to do and then doing that out of our own individual will.

Put another way, receiving a free gift steals no glory from the giver, yet in mainstream Calvinist theology, the very reception of the gift is accomplished wholly by the Spirit’s work within the recipient: regeneration precedes repentance (n.b. in Calvin, not Luther). There may be dissenters amongst Calvinists, and I’ve seen attempts at trying to chalk the tension up to mystery, but this is central to Calvinist logic because of the Augustinian understanding of original sin as fully corrupting our will and even our reasoning. Am I missing anything?

Andy:
Thank you for responding so very quickly! (I wasn’t even sure I’d get a response.) I’m afraid monergism is a closed system. My pastor (reformed, PCA) didn’t like my post either. I was trying to articulate what I feel in my gut so to speak—that both things are happening. I’m choosing and God is choosing. But it is not as if it’s a zero-sum game. We are dealing with the interplay between the infinite (the infinite!) and the finite.

The New Testament story that works for me is the one about the man with the crippled hand. The Lord passes by and says to him, “Stretch out your hand!” (God’s initiative.) Now the man could have said, “Na, I don’t think it’ll do any good.” (He could have resisted.) But instead, the poor man stuck out his hand, and it was healed! (A contrite spirit. A miraculous change. A conversion.) Now, no one in the crowd gave any kudos to the man. He just stuck out his hand. But he stuck it out! All the credit, amazement, etc. went to the Lord instead. This is how I think it works.

Your comment about receiving the free gift from the giver. Same thing. Synergism is not Pelagian, or Semi-Pelagian. In fact, I personally believe that no true saint in church history, of whatever stripe, would want any of the glory for themselves. “‘Tis mercy all”, as the song goes. What are the twenty-four elders doing in Revelation anyway? They are given crowns, and they toss them back! The Psalmist said, “Not unto us O Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory.” You get my drift.

The best soteriological statement I’ve seen was written by an Eastern Orthodox bishop, Kallistos Ware (I’m drawn to Eastern Orthodoxy in many ways), who wrote: “What God does [in saving us] is incomparably more important than what we humans do; yet our voluntary participation in God’s saving action is altogether indispensable. Our cooperation with God is genuinely free, but there is nothing in our good actions that is exclusively our own. At every point our human cooperation is itself the work of the Holy Spirit. The inter-relationship between divine grace and human freedom remains always a mystery beyond our comprehension.”

Steve:
Haha…thanks for noticing my mistake (wrong heresy!).  Yes, I too have a PCA pastor whose depictions of the Reformed view I was trying to represent in my comment. It is indeed rather tightly closed off. At least Lutherans say that repentance precedes regeneration, which helps a bit. BTW, if you were to look at some of my more recent posts, you’d see my own attraction to Orthodox theology. One thing they make a point to say is that the imago dei is not so marred by the Fall that we cannot will or choose the salvation offered to us.

Because forms of both monergistic and synergistic thought are found in Scripture, those who will admit no tension between or lack of clarity within the minds of its authors are forced to iron it out one way or another. Seeking the truth on these issues is admirable and worthwhile, but their professed high regard for Scripture is contradicted by their willingness to contort bits of it to make it mean what they think it should.

Andy:
Yes. I wonder if this tension is why the Church fathers seem to be saying different things at different times.

Hebrews 8:11
None of them shall teach his neighbor, and none his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them.

Knowing the Lord and knowing about Him are two different things. We can know Him—in fact, that is His strong desire, as this text makes clear.

We can only know Him by obeying Him, by keeping His commandments.

Hebrews 7:15-16
Another Priest…has come, not according to the law of a fleshly commandment, but according to the power of an endless life.

“Without body, parts or passions”. God is a Spirit. He has no body. He is everywhere and fills all things. And yet, the promise is that we will see His face—the face of our Savior, Jesus Christ, who is the image of the invisible God, both in His incarnation and in eternity.

“Without body, parts or passions”. God does not have mood swings, but He is passionate. Zealous. “The zeal of the LORD of Hosts will accomplish this.”

Hebrews 6:1
Therefore, leaving the discussion of the elementary principles of Christ, let us go on to perfection, not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God.

The “light of nature and the works of creation” do not, by themselves, manifest the goodness of God, although they certainly manifest the wisdom and power of God. The providence of God is an article of faith, a truth revealed in the Scriptures, but not otherwise comprehended.

Athanasius, writing in A.D. 367, rejected the Apocrypha as canonical, but added that “there are other books besides these not indeed included in the Canon, but appointed by the Fathers to be read by those who newly join us, and who wish for instruction in the word of godliness”.

The Apocrypha are “books proceeding from godly men”, and “offer instruction in godly manners”, as described in the Geneva Bible of 1560.

The Confession would seem to regard them in much less esteem.

Hebrews 5:7

He…offered up prayers and supplications, with vehement cries and tears to Him who was able to save Him from death, and was heard because of His godly fear.

And He was the Son of God!

Hebrews 4:11
Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest, lest anyone fall according to the same example of disobedience.

Be thankful, even when things are difficult. It’s God’s way of reminding us how much we are dependent on Him.