SYNERGISM (Greek, synergos, “working together”) denotes the belief that the human will cooperates with divine grace in effecting salvation. The original Reformation message regarding salvation—the message of, for example, Melanchthon’s first Loci Communes (1521) and Luther’s Bondage of the Will (1525)—reiterated that of Paul and Augustine, asserting that the unregenerate natural will, though capable of conforming to civil laws, was not only incapable of fulfilling divine law but even unable to respond to the gospel. Instead the sinner was justified by God’s free grace experienced through faith (“monergism”). To convey their conviction that one’s belief was God’s choice, the reformers embraced the Pauline/Augustinian language of predestination and employed the deterministic-appearing simile that God acts toward the individual as a sculptor toward a block of wood. Rightly understood, however, this soteriology was not deterministic: faith was an experience of the human, and the reborn soul, while in mortal flesh still bearing the burden of sin, was thus freed in the will to respond in love toward God and fellow humans. The resolution of the problem came in the treatment of free will in article 2 of the Formula of Concord 1580). Informed opinion has always regarded its rejection of synergism as a rejection of the Melanchthonian perspective and the triumph of the Gnesio-Lutheran position. And indeed ‘conversion” was limited here to the narrow sense of the act, in which situation the will would be only a passive recipient of grace. (For the lifelong process the Formula of Concord used the term sanctification). Therefore such phrases of Melanchthon as the tree causes of conversion, the ability to apply oneself to grace, God drawing the person but drawing him or her willingly, and the will not being idle in conversion, were rejected. The simile of the block and other such expressions were approved, as was the notion that the natural will was worse than a block, since it refused God’s word until grace converted it. ~Luther D. Peterson (excerpts, from “Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation” Vol. 4; pages 133-135)
Posted on: Thu, 25 Dec 2014 21:34:24 +0000
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