Soteriology Is Lame
April 28, 2010
I was asked to write a five paragraph reflection on whether or not I am a “Calvinist” or an “Arminian.” As is my wont, my answer avoided the question, mostly because I do not care and I am a rubbish Systematic Theologian.
In our increasingly pluralized world, it’s important to step back occasionally and ask just what it is that makes us Christian. Debates over the precise role of God versus the individual in salvation are important and historic but also decidedly, “in-house” matters. They are reflections that most often take place after salvation, by Christians who are attempting to explain “what has happened” rather than, “how to make something happen.” This is not to say that the conversation isn’t important, but it is to recognize that the distinctions between Calvinism or Arminianism no longer function the same way as they did in the centuries following the the Reformation nor even during the previous century.
With that said, I believe prolonged reflection and emphasis on the grace aspect of salvation will and should become a central tenant of any Christian conversation about Soteriology—especially when this discussion involves non-Christians. In some sense this represents a “back to basics” approach but it should not mean that our theological reflection should thus become elementary. Rather, I believe the discussion of Grace—an aspect of Salvation that all Christians can gather around—can serve the Church, not only in ecumenical dialogue but also in the Gospel we hope to represent to the twenty-first century world.
First, in our own context, I believe that authentic Grace is ironically one of the hardest theological concepts for modern Americans to accept. This is not because we have trouble believing in a benevolent God, but because it has been ingrained into our consciousness that anything of value has a cost—often quite expensive—and that as Americans, our primary function is to earn and consume. However, historic Christian teaching tells us that Grace is neither something that can be achieved by “pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps” nor something that can be consumed, improved nor marketed. Grace is a gift—an undeserved one. In a society that often uses so-called “gifts” as a gimmick for selling something else, it can be difficult for us to accept a gift from God without waiting for some strings to be attached. These strings come in many forms—getting all of our doctrinal ducks in a row, practicing impeccable personal moral discipline or perhaps having an appropriately “tolerant” attitude towards this or that group. But the fact is, no matter how right or beneficial these ideas may be, they are not a requirement of salvation. We may look at them as additional gifts if we wish, but they can never stand in for THE gift..the BIG one…Grace.
Second, in an increasingly post-Christian context, Grace is a concept not often associated with Christian history. The reality is that many young people in our country grew up nominally or even anti-Christian and this group stands to increase for the foreseeable future. Rightly or wrongly, the dominant post-colonial interpretation of Western History associates Christianity with much of what is seen as the worst facets of Western culture including materialism, colonialism, patriarchy, fundamentalism and hypocrisy. There are a host of complexities that make this interpretation debatable but the cold fact is that this is the popular perception of the bulk of Christianity. We need only turn on the TV to see this confirmed.
Grace however, can change these attitudes. I believe that a Christian who is fully aware of the Grace that he or she has received lives in a radically different posture that is observable by others. If this person is a Christian, they challenge popular stereotypes in a fashion that is unavoidably admirable. The Gospel steps in when we acknowledge that what is being admired is not human effort but the grace of God. An individual who lives gracefully is an anomaly. A community who lives thus is a curiosity. But a movement that does so is magnetic.
Augustine, Luther, And The Development Of Predestinarianism In Reformation Thought: Part II
September 16, 2009
Luther and Predestinarianism in the Reformation
The similarities between Augustine and Luther extend beyond Luther’s experience as a monk of the Augustinian order, which seems a forgone conclusion at first. Clearly, Augustine heavily influences Luther regarding presuppositions that underpin their predestinarianism. Bayer contends that Luther’s interpretation of Scripture leads him to the same conclusions about human nature as Augustine: the nature of sin in man is both, “superbia and desperatio.”[1] However, Luther has more in common with Augustine than just a hermeneutical predisposition. Augustine affected Luther’s thinking so significantly because of a shared soteriological need. Luther offered more than intellectual obeisance to Augustine; he needed Augustine to lead him down a philosophical path that would clear his conscience.
Luther’s life was plagued with the same kind of religious upheaval that Augustine experienced. An important difference, though, is that Luther seemed to be cognizant of an internal upheaval that drove his various religious experiences. Augustine sought explanation for his seeming reluctance to seek Christ wholeheartedly, but Luther was so consumed by a pursuit of piety that he could not easily find solace. Luther’s early life lacked the wholehearted embrace of sinfulness that plagued Augustine, but his angst over the origin, nature, and effect of sin were strikingly similar. As a monk, Luther sought consolation in works of grace hoping for absolution and justification. However, even a strict regimen of sacramental observance and contrition left him with the dread of damnation. Luther became so obsessed with absolution that he pathologically pondered his sin and found that confession only intensified his guilt. After a foray into mysticism, Luther abandoned his strict sacramental pursuit for an endeavor in loving God. Sadly, his childhood experience with severe authority figures left him hating God instead.[2]
At the behest of his confessor, Luther entered into a lectureship at the University of Wittenberg. His superior hoped, as in the case of Jerome, that Luther would find his temptations and guilt abated in the study of Scripture. This appointment now seems providential. While preparing a lecture in the Epistle to the Romans, Luther concluded that both faith and justification are the work of God, alone.[3] This revelation about the nature of grace and its correspondence to both faith and justification were the balm that Luther required. Augustine’s work on predestination in relationship to Romans provided the fine-tuning that Luther needed. This predestinarianism, then, became for Luther what it had been for Augustine, a means of confidently receiving grace. Luther was lead to affirm predestination both because, “it was a corollary of justification by faith as a free gift of God, and because he found it amply supported by the authority of Paul and Augustine.”[4] However, this doctrine also provided a point of attack for the increasingly Pelagian Catholic Church.
Just as Augustine found cause to sharpen his predestinarianism in Pelagius, Luther found cause to refine his position because of Desiderius Erasmus. Luther and Erasmus, who had averted being involved in the conflict with reformers to this point, engaged in a published dispute over the ability of humanity to cooperate with God in achieving salvation. Erasmus’ view that the human will is capable of fighting “against the flesh or for the Spirit,”[5] was rejected wholly by Luther. He countered with arguments, which reasoned, “Man can contribute nothing toward his own salvation good enough to be juxtaposed with any work of God.”[6] Interestingly, Luther sided with the most revered scholars of the Catholic Church, Augustine and Aquinas among them, against Erasmus and the church. Luther’s defense of Augustinian predestinarianism would not be emulated by the rest of the Protestant church, though. The other Reformers took the example of Luther and the work of Augustine a step further.
The Reformation’s Departure from Augustinian and Lutheran Predestinarianism
The various incarnations of Augustine and Luther’s soteriological doctrine eventually yielded to a theological system that expunged human cooperation in faith and broadened the doctrine’s scope to the entirety of God’s providential rule over creation. Certainly, many agreed with Luther and sought to expand his influence and teaching. Many hoped, though, to expound upon or deviate from the teaching of Luther. In fact, Luther found his ideals and doctrine caught between the Catholic Church and the likes of Carlstadt and Calvin.[7]
Nevertheless, the remaining important issue revolves around Luther’s resolve in pursuing Augustinian predestinarianism, though not likely out of any inordinate dedication to Augustine himself. Nonetheless, McGrath observes that, “Of the reformers, it is Martin Luther who is closest to Augustine in his teaching on justification.”[8] He remains the closest to Augustine because he did not attempt to derive a theological system out of his notions of predestination. While Luther spoke plainly of ecclesiastical and priestly behavior he found contradictory to Scripture, he did seek to know the word of God truly, even if it meant agreeing with the church. Melanchthon viewed Luther within the Reformation context as a voice “interchangeable” with Augustine: a voice that was renewing the early teachings of the church.[9] In fact, according to McGrath, “Augustine’s conflict with Pelagianism in particular is seen by Melanchthon as an exemplar of the Lutheran protest against the Pelagianism of the sixteenth-century church.”[10]
Wallace provides helpful categorization of the change that occurs after Luther in the Reformation:
“A more significant division between doctrines of predestination is not whether it is single or double, but between those versions where its soteriological impact remains central and those where the doctrine becomes an organizing principle for a theological system and is thus intertwined with the whole consideration of providence, something which became increasingly the case in the later part of the sixteenth century.”[11]
This kind of predestinarianism seems present in Augustine and Luther. However, historians and theologians alike have long commented on the polarizing, often inflammatory, nature of both Augustine’s and Luther’s polemical treatises. Wallace notes that while there is a strong predestinarianism in Luther’s reply to Erasmus in the Bondage of the Will, a marked emphasis on double predestination does not occur in the English Reformation until it is formulated by the Swiss and Rhineland Reformed traditions.[12] These reformed traditions inherited their emphasis on double predestination from the likes of John Calvin.
It would be a mischaracterization to promulgate a claim that Calvin merely expanded the scope of Augustine’s theories. McGrath notes that Calvin, in his Institutes, does not wholly approve of Augustine’s treatment and departs from Augustine’s belief that “Christ is the source of man’s righteousness, in that the Spirit is poured into man’s heart on account of his obedience.”[13] Calvin insists that the transformative work of faith and grace are completely alien to the human nature. God is sovereign over all of creation and its redemption, and humanity is utterly depraved. Calvin’s departure from Augustine and Luther occurs most notably in the creation of a theological system that locates double predestination as one of its pillars of thought.
This shift in theology has been rejected by church councils for over a thousand years. It demands that all of Scripture bow to its methodology. Geisler points out that the consequences of this system burden humanity with a God that is the direct author of evil and that hates the non-elect.[14] As one who worked tirelessly and meticulously to avoid those very consequences in his own theology, this outcome would have been completely unacceptable to Augustine
However, it also suffers from crippling philosophical contradictions, and it should suffice to note that Augustine’s predestinarianism has been relegated to an element of theology until the emergence of lapsarianism. This system of decrees and there seeming authority, even over the biblical text, create a web of presuppositions that rest squarely on Augustine’s philosophy of the origin of evil. Robert Brown identifies the philosophical problems associated with using Augustine’s predestinarianism as a foundational system of thought, explaining that Augustine’s explanation of first sin is at best incomprehensible.[15] If it becomes something more than incomprehensible, then the system’s other claims regarding God’s nature or his culpability in creating evil is suspect at best. Geisler has already hinted at this in his theological critique of double predestination, but this is clearly his point of reference for making the claim.
Conclusion
While predestination is an unavoidably biblical concept, Augustine and Luther intended to direct the hearts of men toward God in gratitude for grace received, not to establish a lens through which all other Scripture must pass. Predestination achieved, for Augustine and Luther, a different end than what is achieved by a system based on double predestination. Augustinian and Lutheran predestinarianism provides a soteriological framework to understand how humanity, in its plight, is able to receive and be confident in justification. This predestination declares the God is the author and finisher of our faith, and that there is no person or thing that can separate us from that work.
[1] Oswald Bayer, “Freedom? The Anthropological in Luther and Melanchthon Compared.” The Harvard Theological Review, 91 (October 1998): 375.
[2] González, The Story of Christianity, Vol. 2, 16-17.
[3] Ibid., 19-20.
[4] Ibid., 42.
[5] Oswald Bayer, “Freedom,” 377.
[6] Roland N. Bainton, Christianity, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000): 253.
[7] Though for very different reasons. Ibid.
[8] Alister E. McGrath, “Forerunners of the Reformation? A Critical Examination of the Evidence for Precursors of the Reformation Doctrines of Justification.” The Harvard Theological Review, 75 (April 1982): 230.
[9] Peter Fraenkel, Testimonia Patrum: The Function of the Patristic Argument in the Theology of Philip Melanchthon, (Geneva: Droz, 1961) 32.
[10] Alister E. McGrath, “Forerunners of the Reformation,” 229.
[11] Wallace, Dewey D. “The Doctrine of Predestination in the Early English Reformation.” Church History, 43 (June 1974): 203-204.
[12] Ibid., 202.
[13] Alister E. McGrath, “Forerunners of the Reformation,” 233.
[14] Geisler, Systematic Theology, 567.
[15] A term Brown utilizes as an expression of a temporal happenstance with a transcendent cause. The sin of Satan and Adam may have happened temporally, but its cause is outside of our closed finite system. Brown argues that any other explanation of Augustine’s postulations results in grievous philosophical error. I contend that Brown is reading Augustine through the lens of Calvin and a theological system. If Augustine can be read concerning the origin and effect of a sinful will in relation to humanity’s ability to save itself, then Augustine has accomplished what Brown had hoped he would, a structure for interpreting one’s present existence (324). See Robert F. Brown, “The First Evil Will Must Be Incomprehensible: A Critique of Augustine.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 46 (September 1978): 315-329.
Augustine, Luther, And The Development Of Predestinarianism In Reformation Thought: Part I
August 29, 2009
I felt like I would try to tackle the “free will vs. predestination” debate from a different angle. I am pretty sure that I have settled the argument here (bring on the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes – read sarcasm, if you’re not sure). Consequently, I’m off to solve world hunger and the problem of evil after I have a midnight snack.
Introduction
As Augustine’s predestinarianism was developed by Luther and assimilated into Reformation thought, an inexorably flawed theological system based on double predestination quickly emerged. Prior to Luther’s utilization, prominent figures in church history left Augustine’s doctrine relatively intact. As early as the Synod of Orange in 529 and notably in the Belgic Confession of Faith in 1561, church leaders rejected the assertions of double predestination.[1] Gottschalk hazarded an attempt at interpreting Augustine in a theory of double predestination in the ninth century, but was condemned of heresy because of it in Maiz. Anselm of Canterbury promoted the Augustinian position in the eleventh century. Thomas Aquinas elaborated the Augustinian position by differentiating between God’s general will and his special will in the soteriological realm in the thirteenth century. If any real deviation from Augustine’s predestinarianism took place, it was in the Catholic Church’s general trend toward Pelagianism.[2]
For eleven centuries, then, endeavors to deviate from the Augustinian position on predestination were generally met with condemnation by the church. Though Luther played a seminal role in the Protestant church’s schism with Catholic thought, he too maintained an Augustinian predestinarianism. Scholars cannot agree concerning a cause for the longevity of Augustine’s postulation. However, history makes clear the fact that attempts to create a system of thought centered on his postulation would not be tolerated. The Reformation, though, provided grounds to contradict the wishes of the Catholic Church. This provided opportunity for the Reformation’s thinkers to speculate the value of theological system based on Augustine’s philosophy and theology independent of church councils.
Unfortunately, only one of those thinkers really understood Augustine’s agenda and, perhaps, the doctrinal consequences of basing a theological system on it. The correlations between Augustine and Luther reveal that their theologies sought to accomplish a different goal than those found in the reformed tradition that emerged from Calvin’s influence on the Reformation. The predestinarianism of Augustine and Luther was born out of a personal struggle with sin and served as the means to a soteriological end, not as the framework for a theological system.
Augustine and Early Predestinarianism
Religious upheaval, bearing profound consequences, regularly struck at the core of St. Augustine’s life prior to conversion. This upheaval centered on Augustine’s lifelong struggle over the problem of evil with near exclusivity. While his mother had trained Augustine in the tenets of Christianity, he could not reconcile the existence of evil in the world with that worldview. This and other early irreconcilable differences with Christianity drove Augustine to dabble in Manichaeism and Neo-Platonism. Fatefully, once again through the influence of his mother, Augustine agreed to hear the preaching of Ambrose, and came to a point of personal crisis regarding Christianity. Namely, Ambrose’s preaching inadvertently quelled Augustine’s most vexing contentions. However, having many of his intellectual disputes settled, Augustine struggled with the moral demands that following Christ placed on a person’s life.[3]
Ultimately, this internal upheaval replaced the external, intellectual upheaval that had dominated the landscape of his life prior to conversion. Augustine long remembered the internal struggle, and the point of his will’s desire to fight off grace’s apprehension influenced his defense of the faith. Some like Gerald Bonner suggest that Augustin’s theology of predestination began here long before the Pelagian controversy, and, in fact, that his predestinarianism was a result of his stress on original sin and internal struggling against the Spirit of God. [4] Gonzalez also identifies this internal upheaval as the point of contention between Augustine and Pelagius, noting that Augustine rejected Pelagius’ claims to the simplicity of human will. Because of Augustine’s personal struggle with sin, the reader finds him postulating, “the will is not always its own master, for it is clear that the will to will does not always have its way.”[5] For Augustine, something overrode his internal will that wanted to continue in iniquity; he identifies that “something” as the grace of God.
Consequently, predestinarianism is something that Augustine grows into. Fendt argues that Augustine’s writing in Confessions, De Libero Arbitrio, and the anti-Manichaean works adequately developed the predestinarianism “about which Augustine seems to grow more adamant as he ages.”[6] This predestinarianism, though, analyzes the role of the created will relationally to the holiness of God, not the role of God’s providential rule over the created order. This remains the important difference between Augustine’s predestinarianism as means to understanding justification and subsequent developments of the doctrine as a theological system.
At every point, Augustine’s evaluation of the will indemnifies the Creator against the guilt of creating evil, and at the same time locating the responsibility of justification squarely on the good pleasure of the greatest Good, God. Therefore, God has not created evil, propagated evil, or preemptively damned the existence of any created will; but He alone reserves the right to express grace or not to express grace to that created will. Augustine writes, “The supremely Good thus turning to good account even what is evil, to the condemnation of those whom in His justice He has predestined to punishment, and to the salvation of those whom in His mercy He has predestined to grace.”[7] Accordingly, Augustine’s predestinarianism involves itself with the business of offering salvation or offering consequences, whereas subsequent theological systems create a priori criteria and preexistent decrees that stem supposedly from the providential rule of the creator. Then all of creation is bound by the content of these decrees and restrained within the parameters of a system where God expressly creates wills in order to damn them.
The seminal stages of Augustine’s predestinarianism play a significant role in the aftermath of the Pelagian controversy as well. If, as Fendt suggests, Augustine cultivates an increasingly rigid predestinarianism, then it is because of polemics and not because of conviction. Augustine seemed destined to contend for Christianity against enemies of the faith and Fendt warns that Augustine’s later writings bear the mark of rhetorical certitude and not necessarily that of an increasingly severe idea of predestination. Fendt writes, “Augustine must feel at the time of writing this part of DCD the threat of Pelagian huzzas, for if we do not make salvation the direct determination of (predestining) grace, it sounds like it is within our power to save ourselves.”[8] Augustine, then, has polarized the issue with Pelagius somewhat. Later writings carry the weight of a hard predestination, only if the reader ignores the rhetorical context. Fendt concludes his argument by observing that Augustine not only has a vaster education in rhetoric than he does in the intricacies of philosophy but also that it is, “required of a bishop in the pressing situation to be forceful and obvious.”[9]
From start to finish, the student of Augustine can appropriately understand his predestinarianism within the context of a personal struggle with sin and the philosophical quandary over the existence of evil. Though the content of Augustine’s later writing bore the mark of reactionary pontificating, his writing should not be held hostage by a situation that can be explained within a historical context. Augustine wrote extensively concerning his early life and conversion, documenting in brilliant commentary the skirmish that he personally waged against the sinful will. This propensity for documentation not only provides modern scholars with insight into his thinking, but it also provided a young Augustinian monk going through a very similar struggle with the means to articulate his own treatises on predestinarianism.
More on that young Augustinian monk in Part II…
[1] Norman Geisler, Systematic Theology. Vol. 3, Sin, Salvation. (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2004): 565-566.
[2] Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1998): 925.
[3] Justo L. González, The Story of Christianity: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation, Vol. 1 (San Francisco: Harper, 1984), 208-211.
[4] See Gerald Bonner, Freedom and Necessity: St. Augustine’s Teaching on Divine Power and Human Freedom, (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2007) This contention is indeed the thesis of Bonner’s entire work, and is argued to the effect that Augustine’s predestinarianism stemmed more from this soteriological source than a polemic against Pelagius. See also Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology, 2nd ed., (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1998), 922.
[5] González, The Story of Christianity, Vol. 1, 214.
[6] Gene Fendt, “Between a Pelagian Rock and a Hard Predestinarianism: The Currents ofControversy in ‘City of God’ 11 and 12.” The Journal of Religion, 81 (April 2001): 211.
[7] Philip Schaff, ed. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: First Series. Vol. 3, Augustin: On the Holy Trinity, Doctrinal Treatises, Moral Treatises, (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers Inc., 2004), 269.
[8] Fendt, “Between a Pelagian Rock,” 222.
[9] Ibid.
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