Active and Passive

Here is a hypothesis or suspicion, not a conclusion, much less a conviction:

The notion that God rewards what we do with what we have, and the notion that we are purely passive in salvation are not, as they appear, extreme opposites, but are two positions within the same framework.

From one end: The notion that we can do something of our own clearly implies that we have some powers of action that are not given, that are not already the result of God’s work in us. The notion that we can do something of our own rests on a faulty doctrine of creation.

But, on the other hand, so does the opposite notion, that we are wholly passive; or rather the whole notion of a sharp dichotomy of active and passive rests on a faulty doctrine of creation. At least, this is the subtle argument of Michael Hanby in his treatment of the Pelagian controversy (in Augustine and Modernity ). Hanby characterizes the conflict between Augustine and the Pelagians as cosmological and Trinitarian, not merely soteriological, and argues that “Pelagianism institutes a rupture in [Augustine’s] christological and trinitarian economy, and, insofar as it determines the direction of subsequent Christian thought, creates possibilities for human nature ‘outside’ the Trinity and the mediation of Christ.”

For Augustine, “the doctrine of creatio ex nihil entails the notion of divine immutability as a corollary. Creaturely existence or prime matter can have no prior claim to God’s activity without locking God into a real relation to his creation (to use Thomistic language). Hence the relation of divine cause to created effect cannot be dialectical. This compromises God’s transcendence and immutability, and ultimately, his status as creator. Rather, God’s causality of temporal effects cannot in any way be thought to effect a change in God’s own agency or a compromise of God’s simplicity. It must be understood as sheer gratuity even though, paradoxically, it is internally reciprocal.” When Augustine insists that “merit cannot be antecedent to the activity of grace without similarly rendering the divine act finite and reactive,” he “simply transposes” the logic of creation ex nihilo into a soteriological context.

Further, Hanby argues, “Since creation is an act of utter gratuity which does not merely impose a hylomorphic form on a passive ‘substrate’ by immanent force, but brings being out of nothing, this ‘causal’ activity is manifest in the creature as effect, precisely in the creature’s own actuality and activity . Consequently, a strict dichotomy of action and passion – the precondition for the Pelagian opposition to Augustinian grace – will simply have no place here.”

We can think of this in Thomistic terms: For anything to be, it must be in act, actualized; when God created the world, He didn’t move unactualized matter to actualization, but brought things into actualization from nothing. Thus, the effect of God’s creative act is the act, the in-act-ness, of the creature.

Or, non-Thomistically: Let’s think of the original creation. To assume a purely passive creature is to assume that there is some “stuff” on which God operates causally. But in a creationist system, there is no such stuff except what He already created. Further, God’s acts in and on the creation once its formed are evident as the activity of the creation itself. God says “Let the earth bring forth plants,” and the effect of that divine act is an act of the creation. All of God’s acts on the creation, arguably, are evident as acts of the creature itself, so the action, not the passivity, of the creature is precisely what evidences God’s activity. (There is probably some intertwined problem of causation here – a zero-sum idea that any attribution of causal power to the creature is at the expense of God’s causation.)

If this is right, then it has significant implications for soteriological formulations. Especially in the Reformed tradition, it is insisted that human beings are “passive” in salvation. The intention of this language is to protect the utter gratuity of grace, and the total inability of man to do the first thing to save himself; and with those intentions I am in full agreement. But formulating this in terms of “passivity” bumps up against various problems.

Faith, for instance. Faith is in all normal senses a human act. We don’t normally think that trust is a purely “passive” disposition or act. But if the human being is completely passive in salvation, then how does faith fit in? To protect gratuity, are we forced to the extremity of saying something like “God believes for us”? It seems preferable to say that faith is both God’s gracious act on a sinner, His gift, and that it is also, and precisely for that reason, an act of a human being.