Soteriology and Creation

Any idea of cooperation with grace rests on a nature/grace dualism. To say that I cooperate with grace implies that I have some sort of independent power of action that is not always already the product of grace. That is, it depends on the assumption that there is some independent realm of “nature.”

If, on the other hand, my very existence depends on God’s gift, IS God’s gift, and if God is always concurrently active in my every action, then I have no independence at all. My acts of “cooperation” will be as completely the product of God’s gracious operation as the “grace” that is offered to me. But this cooperation is really just another kind of operation of grace, and not at all my “independent” cooperation, or a cooperation in which I act on my natural reserves, or do my best with what has been given me. At every point, we work because “God works in you to will and to do according to His good pleasure.” This has been obscured by the fact that both Catholics who affirm cooperation with grace, and Protestants who deny it have tended to operate with an implicit nature-grace scheme. If the scheme is rejected at the outset, the issue of “cooperation” simply cannot arise.

Another related issue, that of the nature of freedom and love. I heard from a Roman Catholic theologian recently that man must have the capacity to say No to God, else his love is not free. But does not the Father love the Son in freedom? And is there any possibility of the Son every saying No to the Father or the Father to say No to the Son’s love? When this point was brought up, it was suggested (by an Orthodox theologian) that the difference between divine love and human love was “time” or “creaturehood.” That is, because we are created, the possibility of a No is of the essence of love, while for God this is not so. The question then becomes whether man can ever reach a state of impeccability, a state of non posse peccare, and remain human. The answer of the Orthodox theologian: In glory, we are elevated out of time, and participate in the sempiternity of God, and therefore can love without the possibility of betrayal. But this of course causes more problems than it solves, raising serious questions about the goodness of temporality and creaturehood, suggesting that there is some “bias” toward sin in creaturehood.

This again suggests that notions of creation are in the background of soteriological considerations. If we can affirm that the creation is good all the way to the ground, and affirm that creation is utterly gift and utterly dependent upon God’s working and operation, many of our soteriological dilemmas would be clarified if they did not simply evaporate.