Editor’s Note: The following essay is the seventh in a series dealing with topics of interest and importance to Presbyterians. Author Johnson explains: “The report from the General Assembly Task Force on Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church provides us both the occasion and the urgency for theological dialogue within the PC(USA). This and succeeding essays are offered as a constructive effort in that direction.”
Sola gratia–grace alone–may well be the heart of the Gospel for Presbyterians, going back to the Reformation and beyond. Salvation, that is, comes from God alone in Christ alone through faith alone by grace alone. Grace preserves the gift character of each item in the list. Without grace each of the other items could become a mere means or a method we humans can manage or manipulate on our own. When that happens, God is irrelevant. One way to move beyond the deep divisions within the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) may be to recover the historic, Reformed vision of grace.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) highlights the issue of grace with his celebrated talk about cheap grace and costly grace (The Cost of Discipleship). “Cheap grace,” says Bonhoeffer, “is the grace we bestow on ourselves.” Cheap grace occurs in two ways. First, we can cling to certain absolute principles or moral practices as the only way to be Christian. Clinging to these “laws,” we focus more and more upon what we and everyone else must do to be right or good, but less and less upon God, from whom the laws came. The result is “the grace we bestow on ourselves.” Second, we can dispense with the commandments and their petty legalisms altogether, as contrary to the Gospel and love. Seeking to “do what is within us,” we release ourselves permissively from the demands of any biblical laws that in our judgment no longer pertain to us. The result is still cheap grace.
Of course, law and the absence of law are not our only options, nor does the Gospel inherently set grace and law at odds with each other. In the Bible and the Protestant Reformation the problem of the law is not legalism but idolatry. Idolatry is putting something in the place of God that is not God, though like law or freedom it may be God-given. Idolatry of any kind happens when we simply take matters into our own hands, making it a grace we bestow on ourselves. Even the Gospel can be cheap grace if it merely shows us how to satisfy our own religious, moral, or personal needs.
Costly grace, on the other hand, is costly because it joins us with Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is God-with-us (Emmanuel), or God as a human being (the Word become flesh). His death and resurrection are God’s costly act for us and for our salvation. With his birth, life, teachings, death, and resurrection Jesus Christ fulfilled every demand and requirement of the law. Doing this, he replaced the law with himself. United with Christ by faith, our attention is now redirected to the grace that comes from God instead of the grace we bestow on ourselves. Costly grace is our sharing in the costly life of Christ, communing with (read: glorifying and enjoying) the living God now and forever.
But note well: Sharing in Christ’s death and resurrection, walking in the Spirit, living in communion with the living God, will not leave us “doing what is within us.” Though we no longer have to make ourselves good (= cheap grace), we cannot live in the presence of the God who is good and not pay attention to that goodness. Where do we find it?
After Christ but never without him, the commandments still tell us something about the goodness of the God from whom they came, who keeps them still, and about the Christ who fulfilled them. The law, that is, provides us with real, descriptive clues as to who God is, i.e. the kind of God who wants us not to kill, covet, lie, commit adultery. The commandments help us discern what God’s purposes are, where to look for God, what God is doing at the moment, and what we want to be doing in communion with God. Life with the living God thus transforms us. Shaped and formed specifically by Jesus Christ, we become in God what we could never be just as we are or left to our own devices (= cheap grace and sin). Having been touched by the Spirit of God, having participated in the love of God (Phil. 2:1), we will make heroic efforts to “seek the Lord while he may be found” (Isaiah 55:6).
Predestination is supposed to protect “costly grace.” Only God gives us this grace, hence the truth that salvation comes from God alone, in Christ alone (God-with-us), through faith alone (the work/gift/fruit of the Holy Spirit uniting us with Christ). Since God alone saves us, we are released from the burden of having to accomplish our own righteousness or salvation. We are free, that is, to get on with the more important task of doing the will of God. The law, in turn, provides believers a clear, concrete vision of the presence and activity of God before us–Calvin’s third use of the law.
So, we will keep the commandments eagerly with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, for to live with God is an end in itself: there is no higher joy in life. Further still, we can have confidence that what is begun with God’s blessing, God will bring to completion in the right time (Phil. 1:6). So, we cannot fail, no matter how difficult the task, no matter how weak our effort may be or how great the opposition against it, and no matter how limited the resources available to us. We can throw ourselves into doing God’s will for mission, evangelism, social action, or whatever, with total abandon and disregard for our own safety. By all accounts predestination had this impact in early Calvinism.
During the Protestant Reformation (1517-1650) the focus of election/predestination was upon the God who predestines. During the Pietistic/modernist era (1650-1950) the focus shifted to the condition of the believer who is predestined. The main question for Pietism was and for many still is, “Who’s saved and who isn’t saved, and how do we get there?” Pietism flourished against the backdrop of scientific interest in natural necessity and determinism (every cause has its effect, and every effect its cause). By the latter half of the 19th century and throughout the 20th century the Pietistic question settled on the human freedom to choose as the way for sinners to take hold of the Gospel and bring in the kingdom of God. God, that is, may provide the means of salvation, Christian love, and justice–namely, Jesus Christ–but we humans still have to choose whether to accept the offer, be saved, and seek the kingdom, or be condemned by our refusal to do so. Free will has become the hallmark of Americans in both church and culture, from right or left. More sophisticated Presbyterians have adopted the language of response, but the outcome is the same.
Where does free will leave costly grace? How does free will avoid making salvation and social justice the grace we bestow on ourselves?
With a bold and brilliant grasp of Scripture and Reformed theology, Karl Barth (1886-1968) restated the doctrine of election/predestination (Church Dogmatics, Volume II, Part 2). Jesus Christ, he says, is both the electing God and the elected human. No individual human is more damned than the individual, Jesus Christ, who died the death of a condemned sinner. The salvation of humanity depends on it (II Cor. 5:21). Similarly, says Barth, no human individual is more saved than Jesus Christ rising from the dead, and no one is saved except in him (II Cor. 5:14ff, Romans 5:15-6:11). Barth thus restates the whole issue of who’s saved and who isn’t saved in terms of what God has done as the human individual, Jesus Christ, not in terms of what we humans must do. He preserves therein God’s saving grace toward humanity together with the mystery of God’s election/predestination located in this one, particular human.
We can say more. Going back to our own PC(USA) confessions, the soft underbelly of predestination is an extraordinary emphasis on the human will, just not free will. The “freedom” in “the freedom to choose” is actually separate and distinct from the choosing. This freedom claims a capacity or potential or unfilled space where we can make impartial, value-neutral choices, unaffected by internal bias or outside influences. Unfortunately, we don’t ever make choices in such a vacuum. The choices we face in life come at us relentlessly, moment by moment. We are weighed down by the people, problems, and situations that surround us. We are predisposed by our own prior choices, experiences, and inner feelings. Do we ever choose in a vacuum what to eat three times+ a day? Or whom to marry? Or how to treat our cancer? Or what to think or believe? The freedom (to choose) does not help us sift or process all the things that go into our choices. Such freedom is a complete and total abstraction from the actual choices we have to make.
Which brings us back to predestination. God makes choices, too. And God’s choices at the moment overlap our choices utterly. There is here no obliteration of human choosing. Neither is there any space between God’s choosing and ours–no freedom from God. By that very closeness God establishes our choosing. The closeness makes our choosing more important, not less, because our every act is done in conjunction with God’s activity at the moment (Psalm 139:1-18). The Bible calls our attempts to live without God sin. The aim of the Gospel is to free us from our sinful bondage to idolatry and from the cheap grace we bestow on ourselves. The aim of the Gospel is to free us for life with God. Such freedom comes from God’s grace alone. “If the Son shall make you free, you will be free indeed,” says John (8:36). “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom,” says Paul (2 Cor. 3:17). The PC(USA) confessions concur.
How do I get all this out of predestination? The “destination” in “pre-destination” refers to the time line of history from beginning to end (you can draw the line on a sheet of paper, with a clear beginning for creation, a clear end for the Last Day, and a clear mid-point for the Christ event). On the other hand, the “pre-“ in “predestination” locates God outside the time line of history (you can draw God as a point above the time line somewhere–it doesn’t matter where). God, who creates both time and history, is not bound by time or the sequences of history as we creatures are. The “pre-“ could as easily be “post-“ or “mid-“ or “two-thirds-destination.” The point is that God from outside of time acts at every moment of time … at the same time (now you can draw lines from wherever you have located God to every point along the time line), pre-eminently as the human, historical Jesus.
The last sentence boggles my mind and probably yours. In recent decades this very mystery of time has fascinated scientists and science fiction authors alike. Predestination really does elevate the particularities and importance of our human lives one-by-one, moment-by-moment, because our every effort is “wrought in God” (John 3:21). That is the opposite of obliterating our humanity in some kind of fatalism, natural necessity, or predeterminism.
One more quick observation. “Participation” is a better word to use than “response” to talk about the human engagement with God. “Participation” suggests simultaneous, overlapping activity, God choosing and acting at the same time we humans are acting and choosing. “Response” suggests a sequence: God acts, commands, calls, and … we respond. The sequence appears to create a space between our activity and God’s. Sequence is where “free will” gets its traction and leads us away from the concrete choices we are bound to make. In my hearing of it, Reformed theology gravitates toward the language of “participation.”
Somewhere in his massive survey of Christian theology through the ages, Adolf Harnack observes that every major reformation in the history of the Christian Church to date (for him the 1920s) was accompanied by a recovery of the doctrine of predestination. Maybe now is the time for the PC(USA) to do the same. Maybe, just maybe, the time has come for the PC(USA) to rediscover what we Presbyterians really can contribute to the world-wide Christian movement today: the vision and the vigor and the message of God’s grace.
Merwyn S. Johnson is professor of historical and systematic theology emeritus at Erskine Theological Seminary, Due West, S.C., and visiting professor of theology at Union-PSCE in Charlotte, N.C.
