Feb 9, 2014 Daily Thoughts Mertons Grace vs Free Will Pt 1 By Thomas Merton Theological disputation about free will and grace, especially since the Reformation, has ended in many theologians unwittingly running off with the Prodigal Son. Once the question of grace and free will is reduced to a juridical matter, once witnesses line up with plaintiff or defendant and the jurors strive to determine who is entitled to what, we are inevitably tempted to act as if everything that was given to free will was taken from grace, and everything conceded to grace was withdrawn from our own liberty. On both sides of the debate, whether one is arguing “for grace” or whether one is a defender of “nature,” it seems that everyone is more or less obsessed with this great illusion of ownership and possession. What is strictly mine? How much can God demand of me – how much can I demand of Him? Even if I come up with the answer that nothing is strictly mine at all, I have still falsified the perspective by asking a foolish question in the first place, “How much is mine?” Should such a question ever be asked? Should such a division even be made at all? To ask such a question makes it almost impossible for me to grasp the paradox which is the only possible answer: That everything is mine precisely because everything is His. If it were not His, it could never be mine. If it could not be mine, He would not even want it for Himself. And all this is His, is His very self. All that He gives me becomes, in some way, my own self. What, then is mine? He is mine. And what is His? I am His. But when this becomes clear, there is no place left in the picture for anything resembling Prometheus. Unless great care is taken, and unless the real theological issue is kept in sight, the argument, grace vs. free will, becomes a Promethean battle between man and God. It is true that the dramatic aspects of the struggle are left in the background, since the whole affair is treated less as a battle than as a lawsuit. But the fact remains that man begins to fix his attention on what God “has to” give him, and at the same time to measure up just how much he himself “has to” give to God in return. In tallying up the account, how much is a free gift of God and how much is a payment due to us in strict justice? To what extent do we have to act like beggars? What do we have to pray for humbly, and when, if ever, can we throw our humility to the winds and make a categorical demand? … In this atmosphere of theological litigation it comes to seem as if God did not want us to be free, as if freedom were something He envied and begrudged us; as if grace, while making us “safe,” took all the sting out of this dangerous faculty of free will by robbing us of spontaneous initiative; in other words, it seems as if man saves himself and arrives at divine union by bartering his freedom for Gods grace. The price of happiness is the renunciation of his natural autonomy, and the acceptance of a slave-status in the household of a God who is powerful enough to make slavery worth while. The extreme development of this view does not even leave man free to drive the necessary bargain. God simply makes an arbitrary decision to grant grace to this one and that one. The grace works infallibly. It takes away their free will and saves them in spite of themselves. They are bound hand and foot and thrown into the wedding banquet, no doubt to be fed through a tube. Continued … From Chapter “Promethean Theology” in The New Man, Thomas Merton, 1962.
Posted on: Mon, 10 Feb 2014 16:09:11 +0000
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