Too many Christians, I’m afraid, have the disaffected God of the Greek philosophers in mind when they pray or when they plan their day. The Greek versions of God are all about power—about having control over everything—rather than about his forming and sustaining relationships with a treasured creation.
The full post has been published in the Cor Deo website and may be seen at www.cordeo.org.uk/a-passionate-god
Lewis Ayres in Nicaea and its Legacy offers a helpful summary of the “pro-Nicene” theology of fourth century church leaders. The Council of Nicaea (in 325) set out an acceptable manner for speaking of God’s oneness while still affirming his eternal distinctions as Father, Son, and Spirit. Yet the debate over how best to speak . . . [for more go to www.cordeo.org.uk]
Years ago I read a thought-provoking article by Heiko Oberman: “Calvin’s Critique of Calvinism” [in The Dawn of the Reformation, ch. 11, see p. 265]. There he noted Lucien Richard’s The Spirituality of John Calvin that demonstrated that Calvin turned from a spirituality of devotio (spiritual devotion) to a spirituality of pietas (spiritual piety). Devotio was a spirituality of rejection—a denial of the world through personal discipline. Pietas was a spirituality of engagement with the world—grounded in Christ’s life and love. According to Oberman, Richard’s research offered “a major advance” in Calvinist studies and highlighted a divide between Calvin himself and the later Calvinism. The latter had “relapsed”—Oberman’s term—into the themes of spiritual devotion. I once presented this theme in a formal academic setting. Here I’ll discard most of the academic references (while still noting some key figures) and summarize some of what I learned.
We all live within a web of traditions. By that I mean that each of us has a complex set of beliefs and values that we’ve inherited from earlier generations and have then arranged in our own particular ways. So each person’s tradition will at the same moment be derivative and unique. Derivative in the sense that we’ve drawn our view of life—our tradition—from church, family, societal values, and academic training. And unique in the sense that the particular set of cords that form our personal tradition will differ from the collective cords that form the rope of life for anyone else.
Before I move to my main consideration let me offer an example of how a given tradition can shape us. Consider the notion of “progress”. For many people the idea of progress is a life-defining faith—a metanarrative—usually formed in alignment with Darwinian evolution. For others the tradition of progress is much more limited: merely a nod to the increasing human ability to collect, to process, and to distribute information; and with that information to be able to manipulate the physical world more effectively.
What are some of the differences?
In the former view anything new is necessarily superior to anything old since progress is implicitly good. Even human spirituality is always improving, so that today’s expressions of faith are superior to older versions.
For the latter group, progress is limited to external matters—to changes in technology. That means progress is properly linked to things like the printing press and to the more recent benefits of computing and digital processing devices. Such progress, however, doesn’t define humanity or involve moral or spiritual development. Even more than that, an overstated view of progress sets up an idolatry of change that damages our confidence in anything historical, including the viability and value of the Bible.
So each of us will see the world in separate ways, depending on where we stand in our view of progress. So a secular naturalist will dismiss the viewpoint of a Christian, and vice versa. Those who deify evolution will treat the past as largely irrelevant; while those who treat progress as merely material and external—of making cars that have better mileage and reliability; of flying faster and higher; of increased processing speeds in computers; and so on—will enjoy those benefits but will still view the past as important. Why? Because the past gives meaning to the present era in matters of life and value because God’s self disclosures through creation, revelation, and the life & ministry of Christ are historical realities. In other words, God alone defines meaning, while discussions of progress are merely descriptive and lack any sort of innate meaning.
With this reminder of what constitutes a tradition and why it make a practical difference to us, let’s now turn to the topic of this post: to two competing traditions of spirituality.
First, there is a spirituality of Devotion that featured the duties of faith that prospered in the century before the 16th century Reformation. It portrayed faith as a synthesis of Christian teachings and certain axioms of classical Greek philosophy. Thomas Aquinas, of the 13th century, was a leader here, along with some others who held somewhat varied alternatives—Duns Scotus for one. I mention these figures to help students who want some particulars. That said, let’s move on.
The other tradition of Piety featured inward transformation and was employed by the early reformers: Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, and, later, Calvin. This tradition was affective—meaning that it stirs an immediate sense of God’s presence and love (as in Paul’s reference to the Spirit offering believers a sense of God as “Abba—Father”). It has been labeled by some as “mystical” but it must be distinguished from the mysticism of Pseudo-Dionysius who emphasized God’s ultimate unknowability and who promoted non-discursive encounters with God—a uniting with him as One who dwells in the ineffable “darkness” of pure being.
The Devotion tradition sought to balance the role of God and the human role in the spiritual life—wrestling to identify whose initiative is prior and critical in forming spiritual transformation. With that tension there was also a second feature: a profound reliance on dialectical process. This reflected a heritage of the classical Greek era and was expressed through the priority of human rationality as explained by Aristotle. A third feature is their shared confidence in the relative reliability of the human mind. The reliability of the human will, however, was questioned because of it can be distorted by sinful passions.
The chief feature of Piety, by contrast, was a confidence that the passions are both the cause and cure of sin. Furthermore, the will and the mind are held to have been stricken by the Fall, remaining deeply flawed even after regeneration. In their anthropology the Pious mystics held that the affections—the “heart”—ultimately guide one’s conduct. Jean Gerson (1363-1429), chancellor of the University of Paris, summarized this divide at the beginning of the fifteenth century. “Mystical theology” he wrote, “begins in the doctrine gathered from the internalized experiences lived in the hearts of devout souls, just as the other half of theology proceeds from those matters that operate extrinsically” [On Mystical Theology in Gerson: Early Works, 1:266].
Historian Steven Ozment comments on Gerson’s point: “Scholastic [i.e. the Devotio promoters] and mystical [i.e. Pietas] theologians were seen to differ, first of all, in their basic sources.” That is, “they studied the Bible, church history and read theological commentaries” while the mystics looked to “evidence of divine presence” in direct experience and in historical reports. Secondly, “scholastics relied on reason and distrusted the emotions, while mystical theologians trusted the affections—provided they had been disciplined by true doctrine—and believed that the reasons of the heart were closer to God than the speculations of the mind” [Ozment, The Age of Reform, 74].
This division was evident throughout the heritage of Christianity as in the separate trajectories of Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas that developed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Here we return to Richard who comments on this conflict in the opposed definitions of key terms being used by the two approaches:
The medieval period may be regarded as a period dominated by two opposing tendencies manifested in the schools of St. Bernard and of Thomas Aquinas. Their opposition lay in the dominantly affective character and spiritual teachings of the one versus the dominantly speculative character and dogmatic teaching of the other. Thomas spoke of devotio as an act of the virtue of religion. Bernard and his followers spoke of devotio as an affective state [Richard, Spirituality, 84].
The differences were obvious to medieval believers as illustrated by Gerson’s account. Both the ‘head’ and ‘heart’ were seen to play a part in identifying orthodoxy, but in practice one or the other tended to dominate the approach of a given theologian. Gerson, in fact, specifically applauded the Franciscan theologian, Bonaventure, for attempting to find a balance.
Bonaventura inflames the affections while at the same time instructing the mind. Where so many others only confuse the mind and burden it with [scholastic] “qualifications,” “prior and posterior arguments,” “signs,” and “contingencies,” Bonaventura unites one with God in ecstatic love [cited by Ozment, 77].
By the coming of the sixteenth century there was in place in northern Europe a clear distaste for the methods and outcomes of the scholastic tradition. The activism of the Christian humanists, including Gerson, Francesco Petrarch, and Desiderius Erasmus; and the simple biblicism of English Lollards, all reflect a broad reaction to the fruit of the late medieval scholastics. The systemic speculations that were at the heart of Thomistic theology began to face increasing opposition by the time of the Reformation.
On the other hand more affective expressions of spirituality were offered in popular writings such as The Cloud of Unknowing, The Imitation of Christ, and others. Luther’s first effort in publication was his 1516 edition of the anonymous Theologia Germanica, reflecting his own early engagement with the tradition of mystical piety.
Oberman summarizes the goal of Luther’s theology:
He [Luther] can place Bernard before Augustine as the preacher of Christ but refers to Bonaventure as “the highest among the scholastic doctores [academics].” It is exactly where Bonaventure straddles the two schools and combines the theologia speculativa [speculative theology] with the theologia affectiva [affective theology] that Luther deviates from him and testifies: “he almost drove me out of my mind, because I wanted to feel the union of God with my soul, as a union of both the intellect and the will” [Dawn, 136].
Thus, the theologians of the sixteenth century were well aware of two broad traditions, one affective and the other scholastic. And Calvin, in his conversion to the faith of the Reformation, moved from his heritage in scholastic Devotion to his enduring commitment to the affective spirituality of Piety. “Calvinism”, on the other hand—as Oberman noted above—reverted to the values of scholastic Devotion after Calvin’s passing.
Why is this significant to us today? Because much of the current tradition of academic Christianity has followed the path of Calvinism back into a spirituality that the early reformers dismissed. For those of us who have, on the other hand, found the scholastic theology of duty and devotion to be empty of the Spirit’s life, we have an alternative and more biblical tradition to embrace—one that this blog site seeks to represent and promote.
So we can, indeed, “taste and see that God is good” without needing to gain the approval of those who prefer an arid faith that even Calvin dismissed. Two traditions, but only one is captured by God’s heart. His heart is what makes all the difference.
I’m told that the best way to have a useful conversation with those who hold different convictions is to step into their shoes—to view the world as they do. So it’s time for me to try on a Stoic view of faith. Here are some insights I’ve taken from the exercise.
But first I need to explain to new readers what I’m talking about—what is Stoicism?
In a nutshell it’s a philosophy from the classical Greek era formulated by Zeno. He portrayed God as the ultimate Mind whose presence diffuses to all humanity as a fine, intangible substance. The ambition of the Stoic was to achieve tranquility through an informed self-rule. In various forms it carried on into the Roman era and was promoted by Seneca. It remained a popular option during the New Testament era as reflected in Paul’s meeting with some Stoics in Athens (Acts 17:18). In early church history it was embraced by Evagrius Ponticus who, in turn, passed it along to later generations of Christians.
One of the most significant of these was the semi-Pelagian, John Cassian, who in turn was followed by Benedict of Nursia and, later, by the Benedictine Pope, Gregory the Great. Through Gregory and the Benedictine Order many of its assumptions became an embedded presence in the medieval church. So while Stoicism—as a formal school of philosophy—disappeared long ago, its portrayal of the soul’s operations was and still is widely held by Christians.
What features of Stoicism remain active today? The key premise is that the soul is self-ruled so that all choices are products of a person’s private, inward conversation. The conversation relies on the activities of three motivational centers in the soul: the mind, the will, and the affections. Each of these faculties offers a unique dimension: the mind processes information; the will processes options and takes action; and the affections process various appetites and desires.
The result is a continuing and sometimes competitive conversation among the three faculties. The mind and the will are held to be primary because they represent the stable features of the soul—the faculties aligned with God’s own being. The affections, on the other hand, are viewed as disruptive and unstable—and not found in God’s being. Thus they need to be ruled by the informed mind and the disciplined will. In classic Greek terms the goal of the Stoic practitioner was to achieve a stable life—what they labeled “apatheia“. To follow the affections is to be ruled by the ungodly aspect of life.
As Luther helped launch the Protestant Reformation, all this was sub-biblical nonsense and was central to his reforming efforts—something he argued with exceptional force in his Bondage of the Will in opposing the implicit Stoicism of Erasmus. Luther held, instead, that according to the Bible there is only one motivational center of the soul: the heart. The heart, in turn, is meant to be affectively attuned to and aligned with God’s heart: in a love of ongoing response to God’s love as freely offered by the Father, revealed by Christ, and poured out into the hearts of believers by the Spirit. The mind and the will, in this view, are merely instruments of the heart, without any motivational power of their own.
Readers are welcome to pursue matters of Stoicism on their own with Evagrius deserving special notice. It’s time, now, to ask why this approach has such enduring force even if it’s not promoted in the Bible. What are some of its advantages?
Advantage 1: It establishes human responsibility before God. By celebrating the duopoly of the mind and the will the Stoic worldview portrays us as suitable conversation partners with God. In Stoicism the problem of sin resides in the realm of the affections. This is where human appetites, passions, and desires override clear thinking and self-control—qualities that God, as a pure Spirit, does not share with a material world.
Thus we are called to overcome sin by employing education to separate right from wrong; and to then to apply personal disciplines so that we always choose the right behaviors God expects. Our feelings are abandoned, treated as the irresponsible features of our being and meant only for private use. In this arrangement we are given a basis for achieving true moral freedom. In effect we become like God, knowing how to determine and fulfill matters of good and evil on our own initiative.
Advantage 2: It reduces the disruptive role of love in our day-to-day life. In the Stoic vision of life we are to approach God in strictly rational and volitional terms. God, who lacks any of passions or desires associated with affections, is seen to deal with us in strictly objective terms. This, in turn, sets up Christian relations with God as contractual and judicial functions: He gives us the requirements he expects us to follow and we then apply our minds and wills in achieving those demands.
These contracts present certain benefits—to the degree we meet and fulfill them—and penalties when we fail. The key task of this approach, then, is to determine the boundaries of God’s will—i.e. the lines where we need to stop short or else face the threat of judgment.
To love God on the basis of an affective devotion, on the other hand, is vastly more involved—as is love in any human relationship. The Stoic version of faith replaces an affective version of love with a rational and volitional version. The biblical term, heart, is in turn redefined by Stoics to represent our collective mind and will—as a disaffected center for choices to be made. So we are not expected to “like” God (i.e. in affective terms) since he doesn’t actually like us. Instead faith is all about our obedience. This is manageable for the good Stoic and it allows us to keep our actual affections hidden—used in strictly private and personal ways. The great benefit, then, is a disaffected God and a disaffected faith that allows our actual desires to go unexposed and our outward moral efforts to be rewarded.
Advantage 3: It gives the uniquely intelligent Christian the burden of leadership. Since God is seen as the ultimate Mind, all intellectuals who are Christian contract-keepers (i.e. those who affirm the key doctrines of Christianity) and who are exceptionally bright, deserve to be treated as priests. They alone can determine which of God’s many demands need to be taken more seriously and those which can be treated as optional or as culturally obsolete. They set up wonderful systems of theology that collate and refine the awkward documents that the Bible represents. In place of wandering narratives, unfocused and subjective poetry, and the “occasional literature” of New Testament letters that make up the Bible we are now given pristine books of Systematic Theology that largely displace the Bible in our newly rational faith. The great benefit, then, is that the intellectuals are our true guides in faith and we, the less brilliant, only need to listen to them in order to make proper decisions.
There are many other benefits, I’m sure, but these are useful starters. What we might notice is that each of the three listed advantages share this common benefit: they make God’s calling a bit easier to deal with. The alternative call, to love him with a truly affective devotion—a love of heart, mind, soul, and strength—is much too complex and involved for many of us. It intrudes on our freedom to do what we really want to do.
But somehow I prefer the latter alternative because that’s how he first loved us: with the same expansive and expensive passion that he and the Son have shared for all of eternity, and that the Spirit now offers all of us who are captivated by Christ’s beauty. For all the non-Stoics among us, let’s enjoy his love with all the delight it invites.
Let me ask a question: do we think and learn by collecting and affirming every idea we’ve ever heard, so that all we’ve heard grows into a single collection of “truth”? Or do we try to sort out the things that are true from the things that aren’t true? If for instance, someone tells us, “Buy this food supplement and you’ll become strong and fit without ever having to exercise!” And someone else tells us, “You’ll never be strong and fit unless you exercise!” Can the two claims fit together as parts of a whole? Or is one right and the other wrong?
That sort of “right or wrong” polarity sets up the question for this week’s entry: how is Jesus seen “in faith”? Do we determine to believe certain things about Jesus so that we get our doctrinal foundations well established? Or do we come to Jesus as one who tells us about himself, and then discover that in our meeting him he changes the way we view him and ourselves? In other words, is faith a responsibility to be performed, or a response that we experience? Is the focus of faith on our conduct, or on Christ’s initiative?
Last week I wrote about the division that emerged among the English Puritans when federal theology was imported from Heidelberg by William Perkins—with a few others—and many Puritans soon embraced it. But there were some who resisted it because it portrayed faith as a human activity that God rewards with salvation.
Here’s some context for that resistance. The 4th-5th century church leader, Augustine of Hippo, may have done more than any other figure in the Latin-speaking world to portray God as a Triune One who exists in his communion of love. As Augustine read Scriptures and tracked the conversations of the great church councils just before his days, he saw that God’s relational being explains his creation and his conduct. He was appalled by the British moralist, Pelagius, whose theology was formed in the context of duties and contracts: God expects right behaviors and rewards those who make right choices with salvation.
Puritans embraced Luther’s Augustinian insights. Richard Sibbes (1577-1635), as his own career matured, became a leader in this movement. Sibbes called sin “a base slavery” in which our creation design, to love God, is usurped by a love for lesser things. The solution?
“He that cleaveth to the Lord is one spirit,” as the apostle saith [1 Corinthians 6:17]. . . . Indeed, our affections transform us anew. As it is with the fire, it transforms cold and gross bodies to be all fiery; so God and heavenly things work upon our hearts, they transform us to be like themselves [Works, 5.230].
Sibbes was, at times, very clear in citing Augustine—he knew many other Puritans would not agree with him so he anchored his most important points in a rock-like authority. So, like the ancient bishop, Sibbes set out the “chief end” of humans in God’s triune love—the basis for creation. And it is only by entering God’s eternal communion that anyone finds their true end:
As Saint Augustine saith, “Thou hast made us for thee, and our hearts rest not till we come to thee;” as the rivers never rest till they discharge themselves into the ocean. And being not his own end, it is his wisdom and understanding to look principally to that which is his last and best and main end, which is God, and union and communion with God in Christ, who is God in our nature, God-man, the best of all, and therefore it is fit he should be the last [Works, 5:300].
Sibbes, in citing Augustine, addressed God’s purpose in creating humanity. The search for our “hearts rest” is satisfied by union and communion with God in Christ who is our “last and best and main end”. In other words, an affective union with Christ is the basis for an effective spirituality.
Here the question of choice comes into play. Is this union a product of human initiative or a response to God’s initiative? Only the latter answer—a response—fits the full-orbed portrayal of Scripture. Believers are invited to “see” Christ in biblical promises, which is the ground for the formation of a love relationship [Works, 7:423].
We must be wholly moulded anew. . . . “Flesh and blood, as it is, cannot enter into heaven,” 1 Cor 15:50; that is, the nature of man, as it is corrupted; we must have new judgments of things, and new desires, and new esteem, new affections, new joys, new delights, new conversation, new company [Works, 7:257].
At the very beginning of the process of transformation, the question must be raised of how one who is steeped in sin and disaffection toward God can be brought to have “new affections”. Any decisions therefore belong to the person but must be accounted for by God’s grace.
Christ is the focus of spiritual vision, displacing the viewers self-awareness: “By looking to the glory of God in Christ we see Christ as our husband, and that breeds a disposition in us to have the affections of a spouse. We see Christ as our head, and that breeds a disposition in us to be members like him” [Works, 4:271].
So, according to Sibbes, the cause of change is always in the one perceived rather than in the will of the perceiver. This comes, in turn, through a new capacity to see: “God created a new eye in the soul, a new sight which they had not by nature; for even as the natural eye cannot see things that are invisible, so the natural man cannot see the things of God, which are seen not by a natural, but by a supernatural eye” [Works, 7:424].
We agree with Sibbes. Spiritual sight—given the challenges of transformation—calls for the Spirit’s work in overcoming Satan’s distortion of God’s character. One of the primary issues of pastoral ministry, Sibbes believed, is to face “the wicked, poisonful disposition that the devil stirs up” against Christ and his elect [Works, 3:488].
Thus, as lost trust through rebellious unbelief caused Adam and Eve to fall, so a restored vision of Christ’s trustworthiness discloses a person’s conversion and initial sanctification:
They trusted not in God, they began to stagger at the promises, to stagger at the word of God. Satan robbed them of the word. He observes, and continues the same art still, to take the word from us, and to cause us to stagger and doubt whether it be true or no. . . . So Adam fell. Now we must be restored by the contrary to that we fell. We fell by unbelief and distrust, by calling God’s truth in question; we must learn to stand again by the contrary grace, by faith [Works, 3:519].
With the supernaturally restored “eye of faith”, the gradual process of restoration begins through the soul’s encounter with the truth about God as he really is.
The affective (heart-based) must be set against the Stoic (mind-and-will-based) view of the soul. The matter is crucial. If readers affirm the response-based Trinitarian theology, on the one hand, yet still insist that the real task of knowing and engaging God is something we can also accomplish by our willpower, the resulting spirituality will be confused and blind—like driving into a dense fog! The two approaches are incompatible.
As an added note, the marketing industry uses the heart-based understanding of how the soul operates as their basis for doing business: marketing shapes behaviors, not through precise reasoning and firm choosing, but by capturing emotions and stirring responses. Some major figures in modern and even in contemporary philosophy have begun to unpack a response-based approach to life. One of America’s greatest thinkers, Jonathan Edwards, simply cannot be understood apart from a heart-based, affective anthropology. And even some significant research in current neurobiology has shown that we do all our “thinking by feeling.”
As we have said here before, we were made to be lovers because God himself is a lover. We were made as relational beings because God himself is relational. And we were made as responders because God is our great pursuer and he made us as suitable partners for an eternal life of shared love, joy, life, and good works in companionship with God: not because we have to but because we want to. And we want to because we find God—as Father, Son, and Spirit—to be more attractive than any other alternative in life.
This entry is more technical, more historical, and longer than usual: be warned and be patient, please. I also think it’s important. As my elementary teacher used to say, “Put on your thinking caps!”
After recently stepping away from my years as a theology educator I’m starting to see some academic blind spots we tend to miss from close up. One of these is critical: we don’t get God’s motives right. It’s a problem of the Christian educational community at large. We tend to speak of God as if he is mainly defined by using and defending his power—as if his omnipotence is what drives him. And, biblically, that’s just not right.
I say this even though I know scholars who promote other motives, especially a divine ambition for glory. In some settings his love is also exalted; and sometimes his holiness; and maybe one or two other qualities. But after some time to ponder I’ve concluded that it’s really his power that academics see as God’s main motor.
I should say right away that I don’t doubt God’s omnipotence: all power ultimately resides in him; and all his purposes are being played out in the creation. The Scriptures affirm this. And he would be less than God almighty if it were not the case.
What I deny is that his power tells us anything about his motives. Proclamations of his power only tell us that as God he has no true competitors and that he has every capacity he needs to maintain that status. He is wholly secure.
Here’s why the question of motive matters. If power is what moves God, then he is an unapologetically and appallingly disaffected divinity. Appalling to us relational beings in that it suggests that the creation is actually relationally barren, only set up to display divine might. We would be the participants and the audience for a grand performance of power. God would be a grand utilitarian ruler; with us as his objects to be ruled.
I call this a blind spot because no one sees this summary as applicable to their own theology even when they teach it in some fashion. And in teaching it we are kept from coming to grips with the true God and with his real motives.
Let me offer the English Puritan, William Perkins (1558-1602), as both a source and an example of the problem. In his day he presented a power-concerned God to England, and his portrayal continues to influence theology until today. Yet he is never viewed as promoting a disaffected God. He was, in fact, famous for his piety and spoke often about God’s love—rather ironically, given what he actually believed and taught his students.
Perkins’ key work, the Golden Chaine, was first published in Latin as the Armilla Auria in 1590. It introduced young theology students at Cambridge University and elsewhere to the structure and import of “federal theology” as formulated in Heidelberg, Germany, in the mid-1500’s. This federalism was a mitigated contractual model of salvation—I’ll say more about it below. The scheme drew directly from a version of how salvation works that was first synthesized by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century.
That may sound innocent enough, but what Thomas offered in his day was what made Luther furious in 1517: it violated the Scriptural portrayal of God, faith, and salvation. Thomas had drawn heavily from axioms he found in Aristotle’s self-concerned, and unmoved-mover version of God. Yet even with this dubious heritage Perkins’ book sold like hotcakes!
Opposition to his view was very firm and sustained by some—including my doctoral subject, the irenic Richard Sibbes—and a group of ministers known as the “dissenting brethren” at the Westminster Assembly in the 1640s, who followed his lead. But the new federal model soon became an assertive and self-proclaimed orthodoxy that most Puritans accepted. All who rejected the contractual nature of the system were castigated as “antinomians” even as they accurately cited Luther again and again in their own favor.
What was Luther’s view? He complained that Thomas made God’s grace into a something: an infused disposition or habit that God gives only to the elect. This habitus gratiae equips them with a supernatural disposition to begin making righteous decisions. Thomas and the later federalists thus saw faith as a human “act of the will”. The mitigation is that God himself makes it happen. How? By the magic of the habitus—or “enabling grace”—that ensures an act of faith. By this newly embedded grace the elect then conceive the adequate act of faith God requires of them, and he then rewards them with salvation. To Luther this was just a bunch of human-centered nonsense. In fact he, Zwingli, and Calvin all dismissed grace portrayed as habitus.
They all held, instead, that grace is relational—the activity of someone—namely God’s love in Christ disclosed by the Spirit. This captures some, but not all, in personal, Heart-to-heart meetings. The apostle Paul’s conversion displayed all of this. Thus for Luther faith is our response to God himself. A new entrustment overcomes a prior willful distrust and the believer becomes united to God by faith. In all of this the heart still has freedom to move, but where it once always moved away from God, once God’s beauty is revealed in Christ, he effectively draws people to himself. Most people, however, remain disaffected and hostile to God, and are finally given over to their stubborn desires despite God’s love for them and his free offer of eternal life.
The Golden Chaine was an effort to stamp out Luther’s version of salvation. In his foreword Perkins said just that: he was offering a supralapsarian version of God’s plan-for-the-ages in place of the “Lutheran” infralapsarian version. If we translate this jargon, what Perkins rejected was Luther’s conviction that the human heart is free either to respond or not to respond to God. Perkins, by contrast, treated the human will as the place where habitus operates and where faith is birthed with this divine assistance.
For Luther, however, the heart has real freedom—but not the will. As Luther had explained in The Bondage of the Will all of humanity is ruled by sin unless and until God’s love captures the heart. The will is simply an instrument of the heart—enslaved by the heart’s desires, either for good or for ill.
Why did Perkins want to dismiss Luther’s version of faith? Because, he believed, it violated God’s rule over the universe—his omnipotence. According to Perkins all that ever occurs—even sin—is under God’s absolute control. And God has just one goal in mind, a goal Perkins posted at the very bottom of a full-page fold-out diagram he included in the Golden Chaine: “Gods Glorie”.
Perkins’ diagram—as inspired by an earlier and less overt diagram by Theodore Beza—set out two tracks in God’s program for creation: a single divine decree of predestination that was subdivided into two subsequent decrees of “Election” and “Reprobation.” And after those decrees God then created the heavens and the earth. The order here explains the title of Perkins’ position—”supra” means God determines all things before the “lapse” or fall of Adam—so that it is only by God’s inexplicable determinations that some go to heaven and others go to hell. The people involved are simply objects to be ruled.
Luther, on the other hand, had insisted that God created Adam even though he knew that Adam’s sin would soon follow. And, given the certainty of the coming fall (hence the term infra or subsequent to the lapse) God created humans and declared that some would be drawn out of death—a death of humanity’s own choosing—by his wonderful mercy. These elect ones would be drawn to God not on the basis of their own goodness, but by his mercy—a mercy most often embraced by the weak, the poor, and the despised. All people, however, are invited to come. Only when the arrogant persist in denying the offer of God’s grace are they finally given over to their sinful disaffection. God knew, of course, beforehand, those he would draw in and those he would finally give over, but he is never the author of their sin.
The differences between Luther and Perkins were not chronological differences over how God works in time, but represented two competing versions of God’s character and his operations as he determined the course of the creation.
For Luther God is understood to love and to be loveable, and allows the human heart a freedom either to love or not to love him, with faith expressing a trust birthed by God’s wonderful benevolence. This version of faith was also embraced by John Calvin.
Perkins, on the other hand, held that God’s sovereign rule is ultimate, even if God implicitly creates sin and sinners: “God created all things for himself, and the wicked man for the evill day. Prov. 16:4. Hath not the potter power over the clay to make of the same lumpe one vessel to honour, and another to dishonour. Rom. 9.21.” [at the head of Perkins' diagram, emphasis added]
Perkins was so deeply committed to his portrayal of God’s omnipotence and absolute rule that he made two other determinations about God that allowed him to be consistent. First, he located God’s love as a function of his will in the Golden Chaine. This, in effect, allowed him to maintain a Stoic version of divine conduct: that God’s mind and will are absolute; and no divine affections are involved.
But what is love like when it is defined by divine will? Does it involve any affection or compassion? Perkins answered this in the Golden Chaine [Works, 1.25]: God’s underlying essence is “void and free from all passion”.
So, too, in Perkins’ Treatise of God’s Free Grace and Man’s Free Will, “I answer [whether God has any human-like affectionate love] that affections of the creature are not properly incident unto God, because they make many changes, and God is without change. And therefore all affections, and the love that is in man and beast is ascribed to God by figure [of speech]” [1.723]. In the jargon of high theology this is called an anthropopathism. His axiom about the dangerous instability of the affections could be found in the glossary of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (s.v. affectus) but not in the Bible.
In other words, it was a question about how God is to be viewed that was at stake. Luther would, for instance, pin much significance on the human ability to reject God, even if he also knew that no one would ever choose God because of their sin. He looked to texts that affirmed God’s ambition to save and human heart-based culpability: “But the Pharisees and the lawyers rejected the purpose of God for themselves . . .” [Luke 7:30, emphasis added].
Let me return now to the blind spot commentary we began with. It was not that I hadn’t seen the differences between Luther and Perkins after my doctoral days. The blind spot was in my failure to see how much the theme of God’s omnipotence still shapes much of our current theological training. The academy, by a wide margin, prefers Perkins’ version of God over Luther’s version. Luther certainly had the Bible and the Augustinian tradition on his side, but the power politics of faith seem to be in the majority.
Or, to be more to the point: the scholastic programs love to portray a God who rules us but doesn’t actually like us. The biblical alternative is a God who loves us with a love that has real passion but who never forces us to love him in return. The choice is one of coercive power versus the power of love. Luther got God right. I pray we all will too.
God’s grace is amazing—he offers it freely to the poor, the broken, the sinful. It is the basis for salvation as Paul wrote in Ephesians 2:8, “For by grace you have been saved through faith.”
The only problem we have with grace is knowing what it is. Is grace, for instance, the quality of goodness offered to us by God—as well as by any departed saints who have a surplus—as something of a commodity that we engage through sacraments? Or is it an energy source—as in an “enabling grace” or “infused grace”—that helps us to start being more godly just as a battery helps to start a car? Or is grace relational—a summative expression for God’s care towards us? Or is it something else?
This is not an arcane question. Differing answers produce very different forms of faith, some of which Christ himself would never believe in. And fights among Christians over the meaning of grace have been never-ending. Yet you may be thinking, “Huh? When and where have there ever been fights over grace?”
Actually, the fights have been about salvation: over what constitutes salvation. But the underlying issue in any salvation debate is a disagreement over how grace is defined. Salvation is, after all, the product of grace. It’s just that the link between grace and faith is not always kept in focus.
So the product of grace—salvation—is what usually captures our attention. And by not keeping the full sequence of sin-grace-faith-and-salvation in view some participants among the competing versions of Christianity then fail to spot the deepest tensions. Indeed, when many people think about salvation their own understanding of grace is assumed to be true and reliable—not something that calls for real reflection. They are wrong.
Even when grace is noticed in some salvation debates the definitions used are not always carefully developed. For instance, the debate of some years ago between John MacArthur and Zane Hodges was, at one level, about grace. But it was ultimately about who is saved and who isn’t—of what it means to have Christ as lord and savior. Yet neither faction was careful in tracing the different definitions of grace used by the church through her history. Some historical awareness would have illuminated for them ways in which their separate readings of key Bible texts had been shaped by assumptions from earlier debates over sin, grace and salvation.
Let me suggest that one big problem is that the definition of grace has migrated through the centuries with the result that competing definitions are now available—with some that are Biblical and some not. So a person’s particular view depends on what definition and what era of history he or she applies.
With that as a warning let me offer a snapshot tour of history.
The early church—in the New Testament era—understood grace to be God’s goodness. Grace was, in effect, a matter of “who” and not “what”. And from the God who is full of grace came graces: in his charis he produced charismata. Salvation was by his grace and that grace was then extended through gifts given to one and all—extended in order to allow each of us to care for others in wonderful and unique ways. We receive grace and, in responding to his grace, we offer our own graces to those around us.
In Romans 5, for instance, the milieu of faith and grace are unpacked by Paul. He starts with faith—the basis for our righteousness before God—as the great benefit we have in Christ. He even wrote of how faith is the entry point “into this grace in which we stand” (v. 2) so that it sounds as if faith precedes grace. Yet it’s clear that the context is that we are justified in Christ—the meaning of “this grace”—and that the prior event that accounts for this justification is our relationship with Christ. And the source of that relationship comes into view only in verse 5: “because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”
Paul, that is, understood what Jesus had told Nicodemus (John 3:6): “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” It is only in the coming of the Spirit that we are “born again”—and that is God’s grace! It is expressed in the great act of Christ on the cross of restoring what Adam discarded: a love relationship with God.
For the young church the wonderful celebration of God’s grace was memorialized in the shared meal each Sunday—the day of the resurrection—as a response to the sacrificial love of Christ and his power over death in the resurrection. This, the “Lord’s supper”, was the proper focal point of church life. Yet it soon took on a hypostatic quality—with a tangible reading of John 6 in view. Hypostasis—the Greek term for “being”—was the label given to the manner in which Christ became incarnate: the Word who became flesh and lived among us. His existence is now acknowledged to be one of “hypostatic union”—of being fully God and fully man while being fully one in that union.
The church began, then, to extend the union of the unseen God to the seen expression of God in the bread and wine of the weekly remembrance. That is, the elements of the meal came to be seen as objects of God’s grace: of Christ’s body and blood hypostatically present. And with that began to grow a notion that grace is “something”—the elements—that we consume and rely on to have more and more grace. And with that there grew the notion of sacramental grace—that all the acts of obedience we find in faith are carriers or instruments of grace.
But that was not all. The question of what is meant by grace became even sharper late in the 4th century through a debate between Augustine of Hippo and a Brit named Pelagius. In a nutshell the Brit was scandalized by the low moral standards he found among believers in Italy. True faith, he believed, is demonstrated by real godliness and it was time for every so-called believer to clean up his or her act. He even quoted Augustine’s teachings on the human will as offering a way to be godly: start using your god-given free will to make godly choices!
Augustine, however, didn’t buy the Pelagian line even though Pelagius had quoted him accurately. The problem for Augustine was that both his own conversion and his deeper beliefs about sin and salvation didn’t line up with what had once written about the moral power of the human will. So he corrected himself. Sin and grace were, Augustine began to teach, matters of love. Sin is self-love: “concupiscence”. Grace is God’s love that, alone, can overcome self-love.
So while both men held that salvation is by grace through faith alone, Pelagius viewed grace as external: as God’s teachings about right and wrong in Scripture that people are then able to affirm or to ignore. Augustine held that to be nonsense because, biblically, the heart is said to be distorted by sin and will never choose the good. Instead grace is God’s love that draws us out of false love. So God alone gets credit for salvation!
Augustine’s views were affirmed by the church as trustworthy and Pelagius was dismissed. But soon after that debate another teacher, John Cassian, insisted that grace is present in each soul—as a capacity for goodness—that God then matches once it is used. In effect it was a premise that God helps those who help themselves.
Later on, in the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas dismissed that idea by insisting that grace is a spiritual energy for good that God infuses in the souls of some but not all. This gave room for a continuation of the hypostatic view of grace—of grace as “something”—and it also supported a sacramental theology. In some respects it was similar to Cassian’s view in that it elevated human responsibility for offering God faith in order to be saved. But Aquinas held that only some were given this grace and that, once given, it is certain to be effective. So God “creates” and controls such grace but only certain humans have it and are then obliged to use it.
It was this objective view of grace and its corollary of human-initiated faith that Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and others utterly rejected at the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Once again they returned to the New Testament premise that grace is ultimately a “who”—the triune God, revealed to us in Christ—and not a “what” that we control. Yet within a few decades a new version of Protestant faith—”federal theology”—reverted to the model Thomas Aquinas had used and grace was again defined by many as a newly created capacity: the enablement of our wills to do good.
So it is that today we happily sing about God’s amazing grace but, amazingly, we have very different views of what we mean by it!
Let me suggest that we all return to the New Testament conviction that grace is God’s love for us, as in Romans 5:8-9—”but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.” And then in 5:20—”Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more . . .”
Faith, then, is our response to the one who loves us and who sets us free from our sin. His gracious love is, indeed, truly amazing!