Responding to John's "Straw Man" Challenge

Note: As I did in my St. John Cassian post below, I have emailed John Hendryx to alert him to this post and give him a fair chance to respond. Though a private email exchange between us took place on Monday-Tuesday, 04-05 April, he has not replied to my last email to him on Tuesday 05 April 13:30 CST.

If you haven’t been following the discussion between John, Perry and me in the wake of my post on St. John Cassian, you will likely find yourself overwhelmed coming at it today. (Depending on your webbrowser, if you printed off the post and all the comments, it would be over sixty pages.) But let me encourage you to take the time and read through the comments, because the issue itself is extremely important, and the issues and problems raised in the discussion will be made clear, or so I hope, with some careful and slow reading.

One of the respondents is John Hendryx, who runs the Monergism.com site. In his A Prayer That a Synergist Won’t Pray article, he has issued the following challenge:

I often post full debates on these topics at monergism with both sides answers full showing. If you feel I have set up a straw man in my portrayal of your theology you should be able to answer a few easy questions on what it takes to receive Christ. If you can answer these questions and show that you still believe in salvation by grace alone, apart from any merit (or sheer chance) then I shall admit defeat. (“I don’t know” doesn’t count) Here are the questions:

• Why is it that one unregenerate person believes the gospel and not another?
• Was he able to generate a right thought, produce a right affection, create right belief, while at the same time man #2 did not have the natural wherewithal to come up with the faith to be saved?
• If they both made use of the same grace, did one make better use of it than the other?
• If prevenient grace places us in a neutral state, then what motivates one man to believe and not another?
• What principle in him made him choose what he did?
• If all men are neutral in prevenient grace was it by chance that one believed and not another?
• Is it the grace of God that makes you differ from unbelievers or is it your faith?

As with most of these sorts of challenges, the challenger assumes his own position to be true, and the questions are framed with that assumption. This, of course, begs the question, for if monergism is not true, then these questions are meaningless. Take for example the final question:

• Is it the grace of God that makes you differ from unbelievers or is it your faith?

Implicit in this question is that regeneration is an either/or reality: either the grace of God is the cause of belief and regeneration, or personal choice is the cause of belief, with which God cooperates by bestowing his grace. But this is not what the synergist believes. The synergist believes that both the grace of God is the cause of belief and regeneration and that the person chooses to believe and so freely cooperates with God’s grace. On a synergist reading, then, this question is meaningless, for synergists do not accept a natural opposition of human willing to God’s grace. Synergists posit a personal opposition to God’s grace. In other words, synergists distinguish between personal operation of the will and the natural ordering of the will.

So a synergist cannot answer John’s question on his terms, for the synergist does not accept monergism. The proper question would be, Where does the opposition to God’s grace lie: in the human person, his hypostasis (or his person) or his nature (his will and desires)? From there either respondent can proceed to make their case.

This is why it is that for a synergist to answer the questions prima facie is to concede the implied argument that monergism is true. On the other hand, if monergism is not true, and if the challenger’s understanding of synergism is false, then these questions not only prejudice the discussion, but are nonsensical.

But John’s challenge is a helpful one in that it will bring to the fore the problems of monergism and why the historic Church was right to reject it and adopt a synergist understanding of regeneration.

• Why is it that one unregenerate person believes the gospel and not another?

The simple answer, on synergist terms is that one unregenerate person hypostatically directs his will away from the belief that God has graced him with, while the other unregenerate person hypostatically directs his will toward the belief granted him.

What is highlighted here is the diametrically opposed understandings of personhood, nature and willing that monergists and synergists have. Monergists, because they believe that God is the only operative agent in regeneration, must posit that man is both incapable of belief and unable to believe. Only in this way can God’s regenerative work–which monergists believe necessarily excludes human choice–be preserved. Thus monergists posit a view of the human person such that the will is determined by nature, and the hypostasis (or personhood) of an unregenerate person is inextricably fused with that nature. Since, monergists believe human nature to be sinful, then the human hypostasis cannot but choose to sin. But this view requires that persons are identified with their nature, which effectively negates personhood.

This view ultimately leads to modalist heresies in God, for if persons are identified with their natures, then God’s person is essentially and necessarily his nature. But if this is so, then the Trinitarian Persons are mere nominal realities, and this is Sabellianism. Furthermoe, this person-nature identification applied to the Godhead, requires that God must create because it is his nature to create. His act of creation is not predicated on a free act of love, but on the necessity of his nature and its will. And this necessity is simply pagan Plotinian absolute simplicity.

Thus, from the very first question, we see the heretical entailments of monergism.

• Was he able to generate a right thought, produce a right affection, create right belief, while at the same time man #2 did not have the natural wherewithal to come up with the faith to be saved?

Once again, this question is mistaken. Human act, in this case believing, does not arise from affectional or mental states. An act, which is the “fulfillment” of a potentiality, must arise from some cause. Mental states are, as the word implies, static. They do not move, they do not cause anything. An act is caused by a choice. Thus neither a regenerate or an unregenerate person believes or disbelieves on the basis of any affectional or mental state. Either person believes or disbelieves on the basis of a personal choice, which choice is caused by the hypostatic operation of the natural will.

That is to say, both persons, having been given God’s grace, have, by that grace, the natural wherewithal to believe, or to disbelieve. God’s grace does come first, middle and last in this. But that grace can be resisted, as the hypostatic operation of the natural will, which is naturally ordered to God, turns that will and nature away from its natural object in the greatest Good to a lesser apparent good.

• If they both made use of the same grace, did one make better use of it than the other?

Here is another glaring difference between the synergism Perry and I espouse, and the monergism John espouses. In reality, the regenerate person makes better use the natural will than does the unregenerate, and the regenerate is able to do so on the basis of God’s grace. Neither God’s grace, nor the natural will given such grace, is deficient. The deficiency precisely lies in the character of the personal operation of that will which has been energized by God’s grace. And this is why an unregenerate person is morally responsible for his choice. Monergism must necessarily ascribe to God the moral responsibility for the lack of belief in the unregenerate, for the only difference, in monergism, between the belief of the regenerate and the unbelief of the unregenerate is God’s work. And if it is God’s work, it is God’s responsibility. If the human person cannot author his own acts, since his will is in bondage to his fallen nature, and a person is identified with his nature, then he logically cannot have any moral responsibility for their act.

(But this contention of mine involves some argumentation on the issues of compatibilism and moral responsibility which I need not go into here. It is enough to simply elucidate the differences.)

• If prevenient grace places us in a neutral state, then what motivates one man to believe and not another?

This is another example in which the monergist necessarily posits human nature in a relation of opposition. In other words, for a monergist, the opposition between humans and God is predicated on the nature of human persons. But, if human nature is inherently opposed to God, then it is inherently evil. But then the question becomes: Whence this evil nature? If human nature was originally created good, how could a good human nature be an evil human nature, especially in light of the fact that no person has ultimate responsibility for his evil nature, since that nature was merely inherited from his ancestors? Indeed, if we reject the preexistence of souls, then we must accept that God is involved in the creation of each personal instance of human nature. But this has God involved in the creation of evil human nature. But this is little more than Manichean dualism, and is, of course, a heresy.

So, it is not that grace (prevenient or otherwise) puts us in some neutral position, but rather, grace energizes our hypostatic operation of the will which makes us able to freely choose.

Furthermore, it is ultimately irrelevant what motivates human choice. Both regenerate and unregenerate persons are “motivated” to choose the ultimate Good that is God. But the regenerate freely chooses to believe, while the unregenerate chooses to disbelieve.

• What principle in him made him choose what he did?

The principle of the choice in regeneration resides in the graced-by-God human hypostasis. It does not and cannot reside in the human hypostasis per se, but does lie wholly both in the energies of God and the energies of the human person. Far from being a contradiction, this synergistic principle is that which is seen in the Incarnation.

In fact, this is why monergism must logically entail the heresy of montheletism. For if the human nature is inherently opposed to God, then Jesus could have had only one operative will: the divine one. But this has been condemned in the Sixth Council.

• If all men are neutral in prevenient grace was it by chance that one believed and not another?

This question confuses indeterminism with chance. Simply because human choice is undetermined does not then logically entail it arises by chance. On the contrary, it is not either determinism or indeterminism, which is a false dilemma, but rather is there an explanatory schema such that we can give reasons why an act happened. In this case, the reasons why one believed and another did not have to do with God’s grace and the operation of the will by the human person. Thus, the agent is undetermined, and thus free to choose, but that choice is not merely a chance event.

Is it the grace of God that makes you differ from unbelievers or is it your faith?

Since I handled this question above, I’ll simply reiterate: Once again, we are presented with a false dilemma. What makes a believer differ from an unbeliever is precisely both grace and faith. There is no essential relation of opposition between grace and faith here, but a synergy of hypostatic operation of the will.

So, on some of its most fundamental tenets, monergism entails heresy, which is just another way of saying, monergism itself is a heresy.

And that is what I contended in my original soteriology post.