Credit, Carlos Padilla for giving me the idea to make something like this LOL
I am just starting to write my very first rough rough rough draft for my proposal. The below represents the opening section. Just know, this is off the top at this point. I will come back later and redraft, and then redraft, and then redraft, inclusive of footnotes peppered here and there throughout. Cleaner turns of phrases. More precise explication. Better structuring, so on and so forth. The total proposal runs between 15 to 20 pages. This, below, is the very first substantive section of it. And again, extremely rough. But I’m thinking of doing this at points in case anyone wants to give me feedback, or press me on things.
III. Why does human agency in a doctrine of sanctification in a ‘Christological Objectivism’ invite further engagement?
A doctrine of sanctification is typically understood as the ‘subjective’ aspect of the soteriological combine (juxtaposed with a doctrine of justification and glorification). That is, sanctification within a Protestant frame, is that aspect of salvation wherein the human agent is understood to be actively ‘working out’ their salvation. As the Apostle Paul writes, “Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose” (Philippians 2:12–13). This locus classicus points up what might appear to be competing themes; that is, between the human agent, ‘the one who works out salvation,’ and God ‘who works in you to will and to act,’ in this agential fulcrum of salvific workings. More pointedly, this apparent competition between God and humanity, in the soterio-logic of the Gospel reality, appears to potentially place divine agency into a contraposing position vis-à-vis the human agent wherein the divine being swallows up the human being, to the point that the divine being is the only one who has performative agency in the totality of the salvific event. Hence, a ‘Christological-objectivism’ ostensibly obtains wherein individual human beings/agents have no real personal agency within the circumscription of God’s life for them in Jesus Christ.
Conversely, Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, and his best Anglophone student, Scottish theologian, Thomas Forsyth Torrance, both have been charged with operating with a Christological obejectivism within their respective soteriological offerings. That is, because of the emphasis these theologians, respectively, place on ‘God’s being in becoming’ for the world in Jesus Christ, as God is understood to be the electing God who has freely and graciously become the elected man, the elected human for the world, they are criticized with constructing a ‘metaphysical human,’ a human (in Christ) operating behind the back of individual human beings (in totality). As such, the concern is that if this were to be the case, that both Barth and Torrance, respectively, sublimate an integral human agency by the singular human agency of Christ for them. Thus, human agency becomes a mere phenomenological phantom acting out a determinacy absolutely funded by God’s agency, as that is diffuse for humanity, in the singular humanity of Christ. Therefore, in this understanding, the criticism maintains that both Barth and Torrance are guilty of misoffering an account of human agency, particularly as that is played out in a doctrine of sanctification, wherein the human agent is freely and ostensibly ‘working out their salvation,’ compelled by their own, albeit contingent, gift of human freedom coram Deo.
The dilemma this thesis seeks to provide dénouement for is the ostensibly competitive relationship between God and humanity in a doctrine of sanctification. Wherein, the purported ‘Christological objectivism’ present in both Barth’s and Torrance’s theologies, constructs a situation that so makes God, as ‘the author and perfector of faith,’ the absolute terminus of the total event of working out one’s salvation, that the human agent ends up having no real integral agency of their own in the process of becoming ‘set apart’ (sanctified unto God).
After the details of Barth’s and Torrance’s doctrines of sanctification have been presented vis-à-vis human agency, within that doctrine, this thesis will constructively engage with the themes present within said theological themes, and make a turn to the ethical question of a doctrine of sanctification and human agency within the question of the Christian’s role in the violences of war, pacificism, activism, and like ethical dilemmas the Christian is oft faced with in the 21st century global geo-political landscape. The application of a doctrine of human agency within this ethical and sanctificational ambit, particularly as these themes have already been treated by engagement with both Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance, respectively, will provide a concretization in the real and present world where Christians attempt to ‘work out their salvation’ when confronted with the ethical and political events this current age offers up. As a case study, in this section of the thesis, I will engage with Dietrich Bonhoeffer as he was faced with the reality of Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer will make an excellent study, insofar that he was a known Christian pacifist, but who also ended up engaging in a plot to commit tyrannicide against Hitler.