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I remember how visibly shocked an atheist friend of mine was when I told him that the core message of Christianity was NOT a moral one. Perhaps you are shocked and are sure that Christianity’s chief concern is our morality. Perhaps you are well past personal moral striving (self-righteousness) and into justification by faith but still sure that the whole point is our moral dilemma before God and that Jesus is the solution for our guilt as a result of our immorality. I hope to offer a glimmer of a much bigger plan which Jesus announced and is still being unveiled.
The Synergy of God and Man
The title of this post is unavoidably provocative. It implies that God and Man are working together in life towards some goal. Of course, many times, we work against God but the point is that sometimes we work with Him and the interplay of His actions and our actions, His Grace and our response is what we call the “Relationship with God”.
Monergistic Salvation
The Calvinistic objection will be, as I understand it, that salvation, at least, is monergistic – i.e. wholly from God and Man does not play more than a passive role. I disagree on this point and see the Bible as teaching that God is the initiator and source of salvation in sending Jesus and the Gospel and that we are active and not passive recipients. If salvation is given to us regardless of our willingness or response, as Calvinists maintain, then we have several ethical and biblical problems to solve.
Problems with Monergism
Firstly, if God is saving people by sprinkling salvation on some but not others regardless of what each individual is doing (i.e. unconditionally) we have an unjust and arbitrary salvation. Unjust because it is a great reward (eternal life) with no consideration of the actual person in question. Of course, one might say, that’s just what Christianity is all about: unearned salvation, unmerited grace. But that is not what unconditional election says: “unconditional” is not synonymous with “unearned”. One could quite easily envision an individual who received grace because he/she repented asked for it even though it was undeserved. We should be talking about Unmerited Election.
This brings me to my second point about biblical problems in which much of the Bible ceases to make sense in light of Unconditional Election. Perhaps the most common biblical theme is the exhortation to repentance and the promise of salvation if (i.e. on condition that) we call on the name of the Lord. However, if salvation is unconditional, there should be no “if”. God should have said “Do nothing, and I will save some of you”. Jesus should have said “Come all ye elect and I will give ye rest” and “Seek and you will find if you are elect“.
If I am charitable I could consider that unconditional election simply means that salvation comes by faith and not on condition of moral effort but surely the Calvinists at the Council of Dort already knew we had a description of that: Sola Fide – Justification by Faith (and not by Works) as we see spelled out especially in Romans 3 but also many other places. The phrase “Unconditional Election” is misleading and one wonders if it was not simply used because the “U” fits nicely within TULIP. I’d like to point out that “Unmerited” also has a “U”…
Nevertheless, we all know that Salvation is from and by the Lord and that we are recipients. In that sense salvation is unidirectional but this is to zoom in on one aspect and miss the seeking bits. Interestingly, there are examples of bad non-seekers who were saved - Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus is the prime example and there are many others even today for whom this applies. Yet because Paul was saved whilst still persecuting Christ does not mean that those who are seeking Him can give up and wait for God to act. If this were true, Matthew 7:7 becomes false. Even IF (big “if”) Paul’s salvation was not based on his seeking Christ it does not follow that God had no reasons or that Paul was not desperately seeking God and blindly missing Christ.
Living the Christian Life
Setting aside the issue of salvation I now turn to the issue of Living the Christian Life. Is it me living or God living in me? We Christians know of the exhortation to “let the self die” and the idea of “giving our lives to God”. Now, without doing a full analysis of where these Self-Death ideas come from I think it is safe to say that regardless of how much God does for me a) it is still me albeit me-in-a-changed-form and b) he is working through me and not for or instead of me (remember, I’m not talking about salvation). We do not stop being individuals when God regenerates us but instead become more truly the persons we were made to be. God perfects us but does not “delete” us and the death we die is to the old, selfish, corrupt and decaying human nature and not to our true self/soul.
Once again, this analysis, wil fall foul of the Calvinist doctrine of Total Depravity which, as I understand it, sees unregenerate Man as the spiritual equivalent of a corpse who can do nothing good. I’m going to leave this point uncontested at this juncture because it refers to pre-salvation and instead return to the Christian Life and ask the hopefully uncontroversial question: in what sense am I involved in what God is doing?
The Greatness of Man
There is a funny situation in one of Adrian Plass’s writings in which members of a small Christian group try to prove to each other that they are each more worthless than the next. If one person sees himself as a worm, the next will claim to be the “dirt on the worm” and so on. This kind of self-degradation is obviously not the remedy to Pride and Self-Exaltation.
God made humans in His image and our true purpose is to reflect His glory. When we put ourselves down we fall short of His glory just as much as when we vainly puff ourselves up. God does not want us to have a “positive” or “healthy” self-image – He wants us to have a true idea of who we are so that He can take us where we need to be. This true idea of self is simply called humilty.
Jesus calls us to humility but says that we are the light and salt of the world which should be on display for all to see. We are fallen humans and we should recognise this but also keep in mind the glory we hope to maintain and strive for this restoration in the only One who can get us back there.
The Great Dance
C.S. Lewis observed:
the more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become (Mere Christianity, p. 189).
To, from and for God are all things and we are one of those things which are from, for and proceeding to God. Let us not puff ourselves up but let us not live as worms passively waiting for God to act. When we act in good Faith we are acting in Him and we are His body on earth granted power and authority to shape the world. We are also intimately involved in the great interplay of love which strengthens every relationship and lifts us up to Him to whom we belong.
