The Importance of the Nature/Grace Distinction, Pt. 2

By: Jay Dyer

In part one, I was discussing the implications of classical, Reformation Protestantism's skewing of the nature/grace distinction into erroneous views that ultimately end up with a heretical Christology.  I intended on making that post much longer and filled out, but had to leave in the middle.  Let's move to the pre-lapsarian man to further show the implications of these different views.

Oddly enough, both Pelagianism and Calvinism have the same views of pre-lapsarian man.  Man in the garden, for both Pelagius and Calvin, is not in a situation to need grace.  For Catholic readers, I'm not avoiding using the term "sanctifying grace" because I deny it, but because most Calvinists don't know about the Catholic view to begin with, except that whatever the Catholic view is, they hate it.  Anyway, its undeniable that both Calvin and Pelagius viewed man in the garden in the same way-in no need of what Catholics call the donum superadditum, the super-added gift of grace, which is the divine life itself--the Holy Spirit.  Man in the garden was created naturally good and thus needed no grace.  Now where Calvin and Pelagius differ is the fall, and most of us know the rest of this story. 

For Luther, the fall meant that man lost not just the likeness of God, but also His image.  Thus, man's nature became hopelessly corrupted, and so grace was necessary for salvation.  For Calvin, although man didn't totally lose the image, he lost the ability to do any good in God's sight, and was totally depraved.  Man's fallen will, in both systems, is constrained by the necessity of sinning.  For Pelagius, its the opposite error: the fall is virtually meaningless, bringing only physical death and temptation: but the human will is free from injury to the extent that it can move itself towards God without the action of supernatural grace.  This is precisely the same view that the modern "Church of Christ" have.

The Catholic position avoids both of these extremes, but let me fill this out some more.  In our view, man was given both the divine image, which is human nature, and the likeness, which is deification, or the divine life.  Human nature and divine nature and not the same, and we affirm the Creator/creature distinction.  When man fell, he lost divine life--the life of the Holy Spirit.  He was cast out of God's presence and died, spiritually.  But man didn't lose, in our view, the natural faculties, and by natural here, I mean what pertains to and is constitutive of human nature.  He retained a body, soul, will and rational mind--the elements defined by the Ecumenical Councils to make up Christ's human nature (and this is the key to my whole argument). 

Now, I know that many modern Calvinists and Lutherans will qualify their views to be less extreme as their forebears.  I have met many who would deny that, for example, an unbeliever necessarily sins in every act, such as cooking french fries or brushing his teeth.  But, as one critic responded, the Westminster Confession says that our good works are not without some stain, being always tainted to some degree with sin.  This is precisely my point.  The reader doesn't understand that we say there are naturally good works and supernaturally good works. No, it is not true that even the works of the saints are always tainted with sin.  We see that in Job, "in all this, Job did not sin."  Many other texts have been brought forth to show that not every act is tainted with sin.  The very fact the confession says that proves my point. 

Now, someone will respond that what I am saying is Pelagian.  Not at all, since Pelagius denied the necessity of supernatural grace for conversion and good works.  Ephesus condemns this.  Ah, then I must be semi-pelaigain.  The ones who speak this way are unaware of what semi-pelagianism was.  Semi-pelagianism denied that God's grace moves us to conversion and inspires all our good works.  For example, you can read John Cassian's Conferences, the exemplary semi-pelagian, who argues that faith originates in us, and then God moves with our will to confirm and sustain it.  We deny this, and it is condemned in the Indiculus which is cited early on in Denzinger.

The reason I said the will becomes sin in Calvinism and Luther is well established, since its well known that they do not believe that concupiscence is the movement of the fallen passions, but is sin itself.  For Calvin, the desires we have are sinful, in the unbeliever for sure, and tainted with sin at least in the believer.  I've read the entire 1556 Institutes and I know this is his view.  Luther is a bit more erratic, and often said conflicting things, but no one can deny that the entire point of his diatribe against Erasmus was to deny free will.  Now, why did he do this?  He did this because he lost sight of the nature-grace distinction.  Since man didn't need grace in the garden, the fall must mean that his human nature was so corrupted as to be unable to do any good, even in a redeemed state, that wasn't still sinful.  And I've read tons of Luther.   His famous dictum was that believers are snow covered dung-hills.  A naturally free will is constitutive of human nature and is an integral part thereof.  To deny this, as Luther does, is to make man determined, and he explicitly says this in Bondage of the Will. 

Why?  Because human nature after the fall is now evil.  Now, I'm not defending Erasums, since Erasmus' response tends towards semi-pelagianism.  But the point is that Luther errs on removing an integral part of human nature, the naturally free will, and makes it determined by an irresistible, necessary captivity to sin in the fallen man.  This is why I said that for the Reformers, the will becomes sin, since fallen men will only sin.  But this cannot do justice to James' statement in chapter 1:

"...each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. 15 Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, brings forth death."

Clearly the desire itself is not sin, nor is temptation.  It's the consent that is sin.  We see also that sin is not a perpetual state, but a specific act.  What about original sin?  Isn't that a state? Yes, but for Catholics, the essence of original sin is that its a privation--a lack of the divine grace given in the garden.  Now certainly it carries with it the legal penalty of exclusion from heaven, but it is not a perpetual state of sinning.  It has corrupted our nature by introducing death, a kind of parasite, and thrown our passions out of whack so that we desire the world the flesh and the devil, but this nature, though fallen, is not inherently evil.  Why?  Because nature is not and cannot be evil-God said it is good.  When Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden, they fell to a merely natural existence, and certainly their heart and desires were no longer focused on the divine, but on earthly things.  But they didn't lose human nature: they retained their wills, minds, souls and bodies. These faculties became injured and began to be used for purposes other than the glory of God.  But they never and can never become evil in themselves.  They are tools used for evil or good.  This is why we say that even Lucifer's nature, as given to him and all angels, by God is not evil, but good.  Lucifer shares the same nature as St. Michael, but St. Michael's nature is graced, while Lucifer lost grace by an evil action of his will.  This is why St. Basil, in harmony with the Westerns, defines a good angel as an incorporeal, intelligent essence with sanctifying grace in his letters.  Thus we see the same nature/grace distinction.

Now someone will say, as many Orthodox do, that we introduce a tension--a dichotomy.  Nature is against grace.   Nothing could be further from the truth.  Nature is the foundation of grace.  This is the meaning of the Catholic dictums heard for centuries, that grace builds up, perfects, raises, elevates and deifies nature.  Both are gifts from God, and neither are the rightful claim of any creature.  No angel or man earned the right to force God to give him his respective nature or divine grace.  This is why you will find all the Catholic Doctors saying that strictly speaking, there is no merit.  But, in a qualified sense, there is merit in that God has deemed to award his own gifts to us. 

But back to my main thesis: The Catholic anthropology is based on both Scripture and the Councils.  And what better example could we have of human nature than the God-man Himself, who assumed human nature? Again, this is why we view Monothelitism as being so bad: it denies Christ's full humanity, because the only will in Christ is the divine. In this scheme, the natural human will is replaced with the divine will.  Some objected to my use of human will having a natural energy proper to itself in part 1.  But they haven't read St. John of Damascus' On the Orthodox Faith in the sections where he combats Monothelitism and makes this very point.  Many others, both East and West, have drawn the same parallel I'm making, and I'm getting it from them.  Calvinism begins with soteriology and leaves Christology as an afterthought.  The two are often not connected.  Catholic theology, as well as Orthodox theology, has always begun with Christology, and worked out the soteriology therefrom.  This is why we see Christ's two wills in the Incarnation as the means for the deifying our fallen wills.  This is the teaching of the Fifth and Sixth Ecumenical Councils:

The "Definition of Faith" of the Sixth Ecumenical Council (680) states:

"For it was right that the flesh should be moved but subject to the divine will, according to the most wise Athanasius.  For as his flesh is called and is the flesh of God the Word, so also the natural will of his flesh is called and is the proper will of God the Word, as he himself says:  "I came down from heaven, not that I might do mine own will but the will of the Father which sent me!" where he calls his own will the will of his flesh, inasmuch as his flesh was also his own.  For as his most holy and immaculate animated flesh was not destroyed because it was deified but continued in its own state and nature, so also his human will, although deified, was not suppressed, but was rather preserved according to the saying of Gregory Theologus (St. Gregory of Nazianzus):  "His will [i.e., the Saviour's] is not contrary to God but altogether deified."

So, if you deny human free will, you must deny Christ a free will.  If you do so, and replace it with the divine will, you are Monothelite. Or, from the vantage point of determinism, if there is no genuine free will, after the fall, then Christ's human will is determined.   This, again, is monothelitism.  If he doesn't share the same nature as us, then, as the Father's say, what is not assumed is not healed.  If He didn't assume a fallen, yet not inherently evil, nature, then our nature is not deified.  But note that the councils sees his mentioning of His own will in conformity with the Father's (and there is only one divine will), as biblical proof that even after the fall, human will retains its own natural energy.  Now, in us, apart from grace, its merely natural--this is why St. Paul calls the man without the Spirit of God the "natural man."  To a natural man, supernatural grace and its ways are foolishness: he cannot, in a merely natural state, believe or understand divine things.  And so the Holy Spirit must move his free will to believe in Christ.  But never in conversion does he lose his will, since this would be to lose a fundamental faculty of his nature. And again, in the ultimate paradigm, Jesus Himself, the human will was elevated-deified, to ever be in conformity with the divine.

 

Hopefully, now, the point is clearer.  Fallen man, in our view, is not naturally evil, but he sure does do lots of evil.  He spews forth a ton of sin, but he doesn't do this by necessity, and sin is not a legal state, since, by definition, its an act of the will.  Fallen man goes to hell because of the penalty of Adam's sin and because of his own personal transgressions.  But even if, theoretically, he was only in original sin, he could not go to heaven, since he lacks divine life.  Heaven would be a misery to him, as in CS Lewis' The Great Divorce, since he does not have the love of God, which is the supernatural, deifying gift of the Holy Spirit.  He may have had great natural love for his family and country, but this doesn't suffice for salvation.  This is why we aren't Pelagian.  For Pelagius, nature is grace, and it remains virtually unchanged after the fall.  For Calvin and Luther, since man needed no added grace in the garden, the fall almost becomes a denial of the goodness of human nature, and ultimately a denial of human nature.  One can see this in their views of Christ Himself, and in their sacramentology (since all these are connected).

This is why we say in our catechism that fallen man can still know true things about God by nature.  The Catechism states:

"286 Human intelligence is surely already capable of finding a response to the question of origins. The existence of God the Creator can be known with certainty through his works, by the light of human reason, even if this knowledge is often obscured and disfigured by error. This is why faith comes to confirm and enlighten reason in the correct understanding of this truth: "By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear."

As a side note, this is also why the Clarkians are so off, since they deny that fallen man can know anything at all.  This is because they are more consistent in their denial of the nature/grace distinction.  But they are totally at odds with the Councils and their anthropology, and ultimately with Scripture.  In our view, grace enlightens and raises nature: in this example, reason is a natural faculty of the human mind.  Grace doesn't replace it, as it would in a hardcore Calvinistic system, but elevates and enligtens.  It deifies it. 

In part 3, I will fill this out further, and touch on St. Cyril and Nestorianism, and how errors and misconceptions on this affect one's entire worldview, whether evangelical, Calvinist, Orthodox or rad trad.    

Comments

[Perry Robinson]

What constitutes "Free will" in your view?

[Sophocles]

Jay,

Hope you are doing well.

I just posted this:

http://molonlabe70.blogspot.com/2008/07/response-to-dr-carson-thoughts-on_21.html

and:

http://molonlabe70.blogspot.com/2008/07/post-listing-discussions-ensuing-from.html

[Jay Dyer]

Perry,

I freely concede that you would defeat me in a debate. To save time, I read the entire exchange between you and Fr. Kimel, and many times in the discussion on ADS you brought up your view, and what I take to be the more consistent Orthodox view. I say more consistent because categories like prevenient grace, for example, do have eastern precedence in the Confession of Dositheos, as you know. So, I think where you and I would differ is where to "stick the mystery," if you will. In that lengthy discussion you mentioned that your view was more consistent, and that Thomism appealed to mystery when it met with a conundrum. Although not the topic of that debate, you did hit on free will several times, disagreeing with the Thomistic view. My position is Lagrange's position, since I think he's the best modern Thomist, and, while I admit the force of many of your points, I believe the better biblical position is the one which affirms operative grace and unconditional election, while maintaining that the human will always retains its own natural energy. This is where I stick 'mystery' because I think this is where Revelation sticks the mystery, and I just cannot agree to the idea that freedom means that we can always turn towards or against God, even in eternity, which is what it seemed your position leaned towards, unless I misunderstood you.

Jay

[Jay Dyer]

Sophocles,

I read over your posts, but Im not sure I have the time to get into a lengthy debate. I tried to lay out in my retraction and in these nature/grace posts further reasons why I didn't go Orthodox.

Jay

[MG]

Jay--

Where do you see unconditional election taught in the Bible? I'm not necessarily thinking "explicitly taught", but maybe implicitly, or something like that. Any thoughts?

[Photios Jones]

"I just cannot agree to the idea that freedom means that we can always turn towards or against God, even in eternity, which is what it seemed your position leaned towards, unless I misunderstood you."

Jay, if this is your assessment, you missed the thrust of Perry's view of the Eschaton. You need to read my paper Synergy in Christ where this is directly addressed.

[Jay Dyer]

Photios,

Is that on energetic processions? I would dig reading that.

MG,

I see unconditional election in many texts, especially Romans 9, but also in Ephesians 1 as well, and I take St. Augustine's double-view of this text as being written to a visible congregation, speaking of predestination to grace and Sonship, and in an eschatological sense, of being ultimately true of the elect. I also believe in the principle of predilection as formulated by St. Augustine and improved upon by the Thomists, which is that a thing or man is only better inasmuch as it or he is loved more by God.

Jay

[Photios Jones]

http://energeticprocession.wordpress.com/2005/05/04/synergy-in-christ/

You may have to go to Monachos.net and grab the greek font as I believe the link that I provide is an old one.

Photios

[Jay Dyer]

Photios,

Thanks. Just downloaded it and I look forward to reading it.

Jay

[MG]

Jay--

Would you be so kind as to produce the specific arguments from Romans 9 and Ephesians 1? I know that's asking much, but let me explain. I think I have seen most of the arguments for unconditional election (note: *think*--I'm not sure), having read Calvinist exegetes' defenses of the Augustinian readings of Romans 9 and Ephesians 1--Schreiner, Piper, etc. I have also read the other side, within Evangelical New Testament theology: those mischievous Arminians :). People like Witherington, Shank, and Abasciano make some extremely sophisticated counter-arguments to the Reformed folk. I'm pretty confident in saying that there's at most equal weight on both sides of the argument; but on my adventurous days I'd go so far as to say that there's more plausibility to the Arminian case.

My mindset is that the burden of proof is on the person who believes in unconditional election of particular individuals to eternal salvation. If you can't show that the Augustinian read of texts like Romans 9 and Ephesians 1 is the most plausible, then I think we should side with what seems to me to be a more common-sense view of free will, that fits better with biblical passages that seem to teach non-Augustinian soteriology, and has lots of early patristic attestation, and is confirmed by its Christological implications. So it seems to me that in order to have good reason to believe in Augustinianism, the Augustinian read of the texts can't just be *a possible read*--it has to be more plausible than the alternative, or (ideally) the only possible read.

I would like to see how you argue for an Augustinian interpretation, if you would be gracious enough and willing to show me. And perhaps I can contribute some criticisms here and there, if that would be okay with you.

[Jay Dyer]

MG,

I am aware of much of what you say. I'm a former Calvinist seminarian (Bahnsen Seminary) and am familiar with many of the criticisms. Honestly, Im not really interested in a lengthy argument for election, and I would simply reference St. Augustine's own anti-pelagian works as far better at proving the point than I could. I also think, as Ive recommended many times, that Lagrange's book from TAN called "Predestination" is excellent and shows that the Catholic view is not Calvinism, Jansenism or anything else. My view is the Catholic Thomistic view, not Calvinism. I dont believe its plausible, I think its the correct reading.

Im aware of the Eastern arguments against predestination based upon Christology. I'm aware of daniel and perry's points that they think it tends towards Nestorianism, based on certain statements in Augustines works on predestination. I don't believe this.