Category Archives: Jeff McSwain

Human Freedom in Triumph Over Hercules’ ‘Synergistic and Monergistic’ Ways

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What does it mean to be genuinely and humanly free? Must we settle for some philosophical abstraction arrived at like libertarian free agency (aka “freewill”), or on the determinist side, some form of what is often referred to as compatibilism? Do you believe that you have freewill; and if you do, how do you define freewill (as a Christian) before God? While this might seem a knotty discussion, nonetheless, it is significant and impinges on everyone’s daily life.

According to my reading of the Apostle Paul to be humanly free is to be for God. Since only God, ultimately, has freewill and absolute freedom, and since, further, humans were, ultimately, created to be for and in koinonia (‘fellowship’) with God, what it means, thusly, to be free as a human, is to be in right relationship with the God of freedom. Human freedom, in this frame, only obtains as they are living in the mode of being that God created for them from Himself in His image, in Jesus Christ. As such, Jesus’ kenotic activity, from before the foundations of the world (as Logos incarnandus) as the imago Dei (Col 1.15) for us, grounds humanity’s way of being which is, that what it means to be truly human, and thus experience genuine freedom, is to be in participation with the triune God, who in fact is the only ousia (‘being’) who is free (without external constraints) in Himself (in se).

If we adopt, what I take to be the theo-logic, particularly of the Apostle Paul’s teaching, to heart—as that has been sketched above—when we come to the oft thorny issues surrounding salvific discussions, like those classically held on the Protestant side, between Calvinists and Arminians, we can offer an alternative way forward that elides the philosophical foundations that stand behind such kerfuffle. In other words, we can categorically reject salvific systems that are funded by grammar like synergism and monergism as that pertains to a person’s ostensible capacity, as the case may be, to cooperate with God in their salvation, whether that be on the ‘libertarian’ (synergistic) side of the coin, or the compatibilist (monergistic). Both sides of said coin, respectively, are funded by an a priori commitment to philosophical and speculative abstractions that first, as anything does, start with a concept of God[ness].

Alternatively, if we are slavishly committed to the ‘Scripture Principle,’ as Protestants are wont to assert, then we will allow Scripture’s attestation to its reality in Jesus Christ, and thus its triune theo-grammar and logic, to dictate the way we think these matters. As I have already noted, I believe the Apostle Paul’s teaching, in particular, offers the biblical way forward in regard to parsing these issues in way that are in keeping with God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ; that are, indeed, in keeping with what has been identified as the analogy of the incarnation. In order to broach this discussion with greater precision let’s read along with Jeff McSwain as he interrogates and introduces Karl Barth’s reading of the Apostle Paul on these loci for us.

It is true that man’s God-given freedom is choice, decision and act. But it is genuine choice; it is genuine decision and act in the right direction. It would be a strange freedom that would leave Man neutral, able equally to choose, decide, and act rightly or wrongly! What kind of power would that be! Man becomes free and is free by choosing, deciding, and determining himself in accordance with the freedom of God. [Barth, Humanity of God, 76-77]

WHEN IT COMES HUMANS AND JESUS CHIRST, BARTH HAS MADE AN EXTRAVAGENT CLAIM: “There is no one,” asserts Barth, “who is not participating in Him.” Without questioning the idea that free choosing is part and parcel of the true human experience, Barth is clearly reformulating the categories for what freedom and choosing really are for the iustus human as designed by God. We have described Barth’s actualism as the freed human faith and obedience of every person as located in the Spirit and, on the most concrete level, participating in the ongoing humanity of Jesus Christ. In Christ, iustus humanity has been given a fullness (Col 2:10) that cannot be added to or subtracted from; everyone is irresistibly implicated. Such a counter-intuitive concept may be at first difficult to differentiate from theological monergism, which for matters of sanctification brings with it undesirable by-products such as antinomianism, false comfort, and universalism. With the help of the simul, we will consider in this chapter how Barth interrogates predominant strains of monergism and synergism in early Protestantism, questioning the extent to which Barth can, while categorically rejecting synergism, avoid the typical alternative of monergism. Barth’s reading of Deuteronomy 30 with its commands, as it connects with creation and the new covenant, demonstrates his refusal to trade dehumanizing constructs of agency and obedience for humanistic ones. Instead, Barth relentlessly points us to the hidden “Person in the imperative.”

Barth’s Hercules allusion is a favorite. He turns to it throughout Church Dogmatics because it provides the perfect foil to his own notion of human freedom and choosing. Hercules, as related by Xenophon, agonizes at the crossroads of decision between the beautiful maidens Virtue and Vice. Hercules eventually chooses to follow the heroic path of the angelic Virtue, spurning the enticing Vice. Because Hercules epitomizes for Barth the inappropriate muscularity of humans determining their own destiny, his emphatic “No Hercules at the crossroads” functions to clear the ground of all non-christological starting points, whether they be soteriological, pneumatological, or epistemological.[1]

McSwain offers an accurate picture of Barth’s thinking on these things; but more to the requisite point, he points-up what I take to be the proper reading of the Apostle Paul’s thinking and theo-logic on these loci. Even as McSwain starts his section out with a quote from Barth on human freedom, it is just this that ought to alert us to what it means to be genuinely human and thus free; it is a freedom to be free in the One who alone is free in Himself as the triune Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have eternally fellowshipped, one-with-an-other, in the singular reality of what it truly means to be free as the God a-se.

If the implications of this aren’t clear yet, let me say it this way: the Christian God alone is genuinely free in Himself; there is no other category of freedom, divine or otherwise, apart from participating with the One who is, indeed, free; as such, what it means to be humanly free is to be in right relationship with the God who is first free for us that we might be free for and in Him. For this ‘elevation’ to obtain, that is, for humanity to experience what it means to be human (and thus) free be-fore God, God deigned it necessary, according to His freedom, to become us in Jesus Christ, and consummate what in fact it had always already been determined to be for humanity to be human (and thus free) in its ultimate telos to participate, to fellowship with and in God’s triune life. Since humanity was never intended to live outside of this relationship, as pre-determined by God in His free choice to become us, that we by grace, might become co-heirs with Christ, there is no abstract notion of human freedom available; there is no ontological category of freedom that is independent of God’s freedom, and what He has determined for what it means to be teleologically free as a human being. To be purposefully free as a human, then, in God’s oikonomia ‘economy’ (both in se and ad extra) can only be actualized and realized first pro nobis (for us) in God’s freely chosen humanity as that was both elected to be by the electing God and elected humanity of the eternal Son in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, is God’s image, is the image of humanity, in His singular person, through which mediation between God and humanity and humanity of God is achieved in hypostatic union. That is to say, that as McSwain and Barth have helped us to see, there is only one genuinely free human being before God, and that is Jesus Christ for us. He has already fulfilled what it means to be human before God, and it is revealed that what that entails is that it is to be truly free for the triune God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It is in His union with us, by the Spirit, and our union with Him, by Pneumatologial agency, that the human comes to finally experience what it means to be free; that is, to be free for God, from and in God’s person for the world in Jesus Christ.

Hopefully, after this brief development, it has become clearer how the false offering of synergism and monergism, among other theological entailments, are put to death in the condemned body of Jesus Christ for us (Rom 8.3). There is no freedom of God that is abstract from God’s life for us in Jesus Christ. There is no actus purus (‘pure nature’) wherein humanity can think of itself, even if it is claimed purely at an epistemic level (whatever that would mean), in abstraction from God’s concrete givenness for them, for us in the humanity of Jesus Christ. And yet this is exactly what continues to embroil various sectors of the Christian environ (especially online, but even off). Until Christians learn to think genuinely theologically and dogmatically about theological doctrine, these types of binaries (such as synergism and mongerism represent), will continue to shape the theological discourse in the most unfruitful and irretrievable of ways. But alas, this is the lot of many.

[1] Jeff McSwain, Simul Sanctification: Barth’s Hidden Vision for Human Transformation (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2018), 98-9.

Christologicam Determinatam, Christologically Determined Rather than Decretively

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In our Protestant Reformed circles, we often orbit around terms like unconditional election, and its causal theory of determinism, as that is funded more broadly by an Aristotelian theory of causation. For classical Calvinists this total locus can be described as, what Barth identifies in the Latin as, the decretrum absolutum (absolute decree) of double predestination. This is the idea, roughly, that God, based on the gratuitous purposes of His own inner-divine will, chooses some (the narrow few) for election, and others (the broad many) for reprobation, and an eternal conclusion that results in the conscious torment of hell. This, in nuce, is how classical Calvinists (and Arminians, from different emphases) understand a doctrine of election and reprobation; they think it from God’s decree vis-à-vis individual people in abstraction from God’s humanity for them in Jesus Christ.

Alternatively, as an Athanasian Reformed, I would propose an understanding wherein all of humanity is Christologicam determinatam (‘Christologically determined’). This is really nothing new, if you have been reading me (or Barth or Torrance) for any amount of time. But I think this reality needs to be constantly reiterated, insofar that the deus ex machina of classical Calvinist doctrina on theological determinism is simply presumed at every turn in such environs. In an effort to re-alert the reader to what just in fact it means for humanity to be Christologicam determinatam, I thought it would be prudent to hear from Karl Barth, once more, as he cogently distills just what it means for God to choose all of humanity for Himself; that is, to choose all of humanity as first His humanity as primordially pre-destined for Himself the ‘Word to be incarnate’ (Logos incarnandus). He writes:

The true man who lived and lives here as the man of God and therefore in direct unity with God as the God of man, did not and does not live for himself, but as the “first-born of all creation” (Col 1:15), as the last Adam who in order is the first (1 Cor 15:45), he lived and lives for all men in the place of all. All people, therefore, are elected, justified, sanctified and called in Him.[1]

And:

In Jesus Christ there is no isolation of man from God or of God from man. Rather, in Him we encounter the history, the dialogue, in which God and man meet together and are together, the reality of the covenant mutually contracted, preserved and fulfilled by them. Jesus Christ is in His one Person, as true God, man’s loyal partner, and as true man, God’s. He is the Lord humbled for communion with man and likewise the Servant exalted to communion with God. He is the Word spoken from the loftiest, most luminous transcendence and likewise the Word heard in the deepest darkest immanence. He is both, without their being confused but also without their being divided.[2]

This type of determination doesn’t come from an abstract gratuitous decree of God ‘behind the back of Jesus,’ instead this is a trinitarian determination, a pre-destination of God’s life for the world that He freely determined for Himself, and thus His history for the world in the person of Jesus Christ. This determination is personalist and thus dynamic, and not ontologically independent or at competition with who He is in se (‘in Himself’). Christological determinism, if we should call it that, is one that sees the person and work of God in Christ for the world together rather than apart. In contrast to the ‘absolute decree,’ that thinks humanity from some abstract determination of God apart from who He is for the world in Jesus Christ, Christological determinism is rife with the resplendence of God’s one being (ousia) working as One God, in perichoretic and coinherent union, for the one genuine humanity before God, as that has been freely assumed (assumptio carnis) by the eternal Son, Jesus Christ. The Christological determination to be with us, is first funded by His choice to be us, as both the electing God, and elected human as Barth so eloquently articulated this previously.

I set these two courses before you this day. Is it the decretum absolutum or the Christologicam determinatam? The former ends up separating the work of Jesus from the person of Jesus, thus reducing Jesus to an organan, a mere instrument of salvation. In this schemata Jesus becomes the ‘means’ by which God (the Father) purchases the elect for eternal justification. As such, Jesus might as well be a demi-urge of Gnostic flora and imagination in the absolute decree environ. While latterly, to be Christologically determined entails the notion that Godself, in all of his ineffable resplendence has stooped down in His person and done the work of salvation that we could not do ourselves. He came and personally personalized us in His person for us in Jesus Christ (an/ -enhypostasis). Christological determination thinks God, and His acts, from God rather than from an absolute decree as that is understood through the vestiges of God ostensibly littered about throughout the created order (can-o-worms).

Choose wisely.

 

[1] Karl Barth, The Christian Life, 125 cited by Jeff McSwain, Simul Sanctification: Barth’s Hidden Vision for Human Transformation (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2018), 57.

[2] Karl Barth, Humanity of God, 46-7 cited by Jeff McSwain, Simul Sanctification, 58-9.

The Doctrine of the Vicarious Humanity of Christ Cannot Be Overstated for The Evangelical Calvinist Understanding of All Things

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For Karl Barth, Thomas Torrance, and us Evangelical Calvinists following, what it means to be human is grounded in our participation in and from Jesus Christ’s vicarious humanity for us (pro nobis). This has broad reaching implications for theoanthropology, soteriology, and other important theological loci. I know I have iterated this before, and multiple times, but I thought I would reiterate it again because the significance of this point cannot be overstated if you are going to be an adherent to the mood of Evangelical Calvinism we are presenting to the church catholic. I am just now starting to read Jeff McSwain’s published PhD dissertation Simul Sanctification: Barth’s Hidden Vision for Human Transformation, which he accomplished under the watchful eye of Alan Torrance at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He offers a nice precise description of what the doctrine of the vicarious humanity of Christ entails in the theology of Barth. He writes:

For Barth, when God becomes a human being he lives not only as a singular Jewish man of humble origins, but  he also represents in himself every human being—the whole spectrum of the human race. Jesus Christ is the true and original human being beloved by God, and at the same time the representative human sinner—and therefore “the greatest of all sinners”—being forsaken by God. In his person, Christ defines the goodness of humanity, and he also delimits the evil and brokenness of humanity. The implications are somewhat startling: every single human being exists in the human being of Jesus Christ, eternal Son of God. In terms of Barth’s beloved Colossians, we describe the simul iustus et peccator as the simultaneous, twofold, “Christ is your life” (see 3:4) and “Christ is your death” (see 3:3). In Barth’s view, then, righteousness is not primarily a forensic term to be fitted into a legal scheme of atonement but signifies true life from above, life derived solely from the life of God. Righteousness and life cannot be separated in Barth’s view any more than sin and death.[1]

We see foreshadowing’s of McSwain’s thesis on Barth’s simul, but for our purposes we get a sense of the radical nature of Barth’s understanding of the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. We see what Luther and the tradition calls the mirifica commutatio (‘wonderful exchange’), or what the Apostle Paul notes here, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich” (II Cor 8.9). We get a sense of Barth’s doctrine of election, even though McSwain doesn’t explicitly refer to it; to be sure, that is what is underwriting this understanding of the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ: viz. in eternity past the eternal Logos freely elected, with the Father, by the spiration of the Spirit, our humanity for Himself thus by becoming us He has graciously allowed us to become what He is for us in His elected humanity; and all that implies vis-à-vis participation in God’s triune life.

Much more to be said, but this will have to suffice for now. I simply wanted to elevate this doctrine once more because I do not think it can be overstated for those who are seeking to affirm an Evangelical Calvinist posture. Without this doctrine, grounded in the primacy of Jesus Christ as it is, the Evangelical Calvinist project doesn’t work. As McSwain underscored, “righteousness is not primarily a forensic term to be fitted into a legal scheme of atonement but signifies true life from above, life derived solely from the life of God.” This represents the deeper reality, the depth dimension of what Evangelical Calvinists are seeking to offer the church catholic as it reflects upon the reality of God become man, and how that affects all else. We don’t ultimately elide the forensic aspects of the atoning work of Christ, but we don’t see that as the frame of how atonement theory ought to be understood; instead we see the frame grounded in the ‘ontological’ reality of the God-human relationship rooted in the hypostatic union of God and human in Jesus Christ. Herein is the emphasis that Evangelical Calvinists promote in regard to the way we see God’s relationship to and for us; it isn’t ultimately based on a legal brief, but in a marriage proposal of the Son of Man for us (cf. Eph 5.18ff).

[1] Jeff McSwain, Simul Sanctification: Barth’s Hidden Vision for Human Transformation (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2018), 4.