The Trinity

The Trinity

In order to understand the Trinity, it is important to understand what it is not. The Trinity does not deal with the relationship between humanity and God in Jesus. If you are interested in knowing why Christians consider Jesus to be (in some sense) God, please see the page on the Incarnation. Many (perhaps most) criticisms of the Trinity really involve issues that the Incarnation deals with.

Historically, the Trinity came before the Incarnation. It was originally an attempt to deal with a group of people who saw Jesus as a supernatural entity somewhere above a human being but below God. At the council of Nicea, it was decided that this was wrong. In response, Nicea formulated a concept that has come to be called the Trinity.

However the decision at Nicea was only the beginning of a century-long process that ended in the doctrine of the Incarnation. You should be aware that I'm going to discuss the Trinity as it finally came to be understood in the West at the end of this process. Some of this was only implicit in the original formulation, and the Eastern church has somewhat different ways of talking about it.

The Trinity as Foundation of our Concept of God
The Trinity is not about the number 3. It most specifically isn't about trying to believe that 3 = 1.

The Trinity results from the following question: If (as Christians believe) Jesus shows us what God is like, what kind of God does he show us?

Christians believe that when humans needed help, the way God chose to do it was to join us as a human being. Because this human being was God's presence, he was able both to live as humans are intended to, and to pass this ability on to others around him through spiritual union with him.

So what Christianity says is that God is inviting us to join him in his way of living, his love.

But what does that show us about God? In unitarian religions such as Islam and Judaism, God is outside us. He is the creator, father, and lawgiver. He loves us, but he experiences love only from one side: the side of the father. But Christianity says that God also experiences the other side: the obedient son who dies for his friends. A unitarian God asks of us a loving obedience, but that kind of love is one he hasn't experienced himself. The Christian God invites us to join him in a relationship between Father and Son that started with God.

So what the Trinity says is that God is both Father and Son. This doesn't make him two Gods: these are two separate ways in which God experiences love, two roles or two "modes of being".

Because the Bible speaks equally of the Holy Spirit as God's way of being present with us, the Holy Spirit is included in the Trinity, representing the presence of the Father with the Son and with us. God's presence is always personal, so it is best expressed as a person in the Trinity, rather than simply as something impersonal like "God's power." (Contrast the personal presence of the Holy Spirit with a concept like "the Force", which is essentially impersonal.)

There is some debate among Christians whether one should think of the Trinity as three persons as we currently use the term "person". The danger in doing this is that we think of people as being essentially separate individuals. Thus calling God three persons would effectively lead to three Gods.

However many writers argue that this is a sign that our concept of person is deficient. In the context of the Trinity, "person" refers to a center of relationship. In effect the persons are constituted by their relationship to each other. The persons of the Trinity are not individuals that then decide to love each other: the relationship of love is what defines them. However they act as such a tight unity that we need to think of them as one.

Many believe that this should be seen as the ideal for human persons as well, although it is one that we don't currently conform to very completely. Being a person isn't about being something independent of everything else. A person is constituted by relationships with others. For human beings, a person is always a separate individual. But it need not be so. God shows us a model of persons whose love is so complete that their unity of action makes it appropriate to see them as a single actor.

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
The Trinity deals with the relationship among the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Be aware that the term Son is used in several different ways in Christian theology. When we're talking about the Trinity, the term "Son" refers to the eternal Logos, God's creative power, not primarily to Jesus as a human being. (Of course it's impossible to completely separate them.)

Jesus and early Christians often referred to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This terminology is used both in the Bible and in other early Christian writings. At a minimum, they can be understood as referring to different ways in which God works. The Father typically refers to God's role as creator and father. The Logos refers to God's word, his creative power. The Holy Spirit refers to God's presence with us and the rest of his creation.

As used in the Bible and other writings, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit seem to have a certain distinction among them. That is, they seem to be more than just different ways in which God works with us. Rather, each seems to have a distinct personal existence. Nevertheless, it is clear that they are intended to be distinct roles of a single God, and not separate gods. The Latin term used is "persona". This originally referred to a theatrical role, and the mask used to define it.

In fact there are at least two slightly different ways of speaking of the Trinity. In the West, theology tends to start with God as One, and see the persons as being distinguished only to the extent necessary for a personal relationship to exist. The Father is the source of the love, and the Son its recipient. The Holy Spirit can be understood as the presence of the Father with the Son. Thus these are separate personal roles within a single God.

In Eastern theology the distinction is often described as a different in "origin." That is, the Father is the source of the Trinity. This single source is the basis of God's unity. The Son is begotten from him and the Spirit proceeds from him. A few Eastern writers tend to speak of the three persons more as individuals. Thus at times God starts to look like a community. However there's a limit to how far this can go, because all of Eastern theology is clear that God is a single "actor," with a single will. Everything God does is an act of the entire Trinity, acting as one, not as a committee.

Gregory of Nyssa, in To Ablabius, looks at whether to say there is one God or three. One of his major arguments is that God has a single activity. Every action "starts off from the Father as from a spring; it is effected by the Son, and by the power of the Spirit it completes its grace. All providence, care, and attention of all ... and the preservation of what exists, ... is one and not three."

God praying to himself?
You'll often hear people say something like this: "The Bible shows Jesus praying to God. If Jesus is God, that would mean that God was praying to himself."

But Christ is God incarnate, i.e. God and man. Christ prayed to his Father because he is a human being, and the way humans communicate with God is by prayer.

However there's more to it than that. In Christian theology, Jesus is seen specifically as the incarnation of the Logos. While Jesus shows us all of God, he shows God specifically from the perspective of the Logos. But the Logos is the obedient Son, the recipient of the Father's love.

The second person of the Trinity is the Son of God, his "Word" or Logos. To speak in this way of God as Son and Father is at once to imply a movement of mutual love, such as we indicated earlier. It is to imply that from all eternity God himself, as Son, in filial obedience and love renders back to God the Father the being which the Father by paternal self-giving eternally generates in him.
Kallistos Ware, in The Orthodox Way, quoted at http://agrino.org/cyberdesert/kallistos.htm. I strongly recommend looking at this link for a good presentation of the Trinity from an Orthodox viewpoint.

I don't know what sort of communication occurs within God, but a personal relationship implies some kind of communication. Thus we have to assume that there is something like communication between the Father and the Logos. Jesus' prayer to his Father is the human image of the communication between the Logos and the Father.

What do we mean by Son?
When we're talking about God, the term "Son" is somewhat metaphorical. This shouldn't be a surprise. God is rather different from human beings. When we use human language in talking about him, we're always straining the limits of language.

With human beings, father and son are completely separate people, who come into existence at different times. This is not true of God. The relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is part of what God is. Father and Son aren't exactly separate people in the usual sense. They are equally eternal, because they are both essential to God's being what he is. You can't have a Father without a Son. The term "Son" is used because the relationship between Father and Son in the Trinity has close analogies to the relationship among human fathers and sons. Indeed the human relationship is modeled after God's. But it is an analogy. It shouldn't be pushed farther than makes sense.

Christian language sometimes talks about the Son being "begotten" by the Father. A few people (primarily Moslems) have taken this to mean that the Son is the result of a sexual relationship between God and Mary. That's impossible, since God is a purely spiritual being. The term "begotten" was used to emphasize that the Son is just as much God as the Father is. Just as human beings beget other human beings, the Father begets a Son who is just as much God as he is. But you shouldn't push the language any further than that. It doesn't mean that God reproduces in the same way that human beings do. In fact the son is "eternally begotten". That is, he isn't born at one time, as a human child is. The Father is the source of the Son continuously, as a spring is the source of a river.

Terminology
I have avoided the traditional terminology of "person" and "substance" because I don't think it's likely to be meaningful to the people who are reading this document. However if you're going to understand Christian theology, you need to know about them.

The Trinity says that there is one God, existing as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In order to talk about this, we need a word to refer to God "as a whole", and a word to refer to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit individually. Traditionally Christian theology talks about three "Persons" with one "substance" (or possibly "essence"). You will often see the Greek word "hypostasis" instead of Person, because many people think Person is a potentially misleading translation.

While these basic terms are common, the East and West tend to speak of them in different ways. The West typically starts with the concept of one substance. While the term "substance" is open to different understandings, in the typical Western understanding, God is thought of as one "thing." [The following discussion, through the quote below, is largely based on the treatment in the Catholic Encyclopedia.] We can classify properties into properties of a thing itself (size, color, etc), and relational properties (e.g. one thing is to the left of another). God is considered to be one in all respects except a couple of relational properties: begotten and proceeding. His power, eternity, etc, are all one. If you try to count God, you end up with only one: none of the distinctions that would allow you to identify separate entities apply to God.

The only distinctions within God are the relations "begotten" (the relation between Father and Son) and "proceeding" (the relation between Father and Holy Spirit). Initially one might think that a relation implies at least two different things. However that's not necessarily the case. There are relations such as "identity" that apply to just one thing. Thus begotten and proceeding are not seen as relations that result in multiple gods. Rather, Father, Son and Holy Spirit are different ways in which God exists, i.e. different personal roles. But they are not separate things. The Catholic Encyclopedia gives the following answer to the question of whether there are three self-consciousnesses in God:

Neither person nor mind is self-consciousness; though a person must needs possess self-consciousness, and consciousness attests the existence of mind (see PERSONALITY). Granted that in the infinite mind, in which the categories are transcended, there are three relations which are subsistent realities, distinguished one from another in virtue of their relative opposition then it will follow that the same mind will have a three-fold consciousness, knowing itself in three ways in accordance with its three modes of existence. It is impossible to establish that, in regard of the infinite mind, such a supposition involves a contradiction.
The East tends to start with persons. The Trinity is the model for personal existence. Several Greek writers saw the key to God's unity as being unity of action. The three persons aren't a committee, each acting separately but in a coordinated way. Rather, they are so closely tied together that they act with a single action. Furthermore, all the things that make God God are only one. The three persons act together as a single authority. So there is one ultimate authority, one God.

As a result of discussions about the Incarnation, the Church came to an agreement that Christ had two wills, the will of God and a human will. Technically, this associated wills and action with the nature (of which there are two in Christ) rather than the person (of which there is one). This pushed discussions about the Trinity to be clear that God has a single will, since the Trinity has only one nature.

It's worth noting that the terms "substance" and "person" came to be technical terms with specific theological definitions. They were originally taken from Greek philosophy, although in the context of the Trinity and Incarnation they don't necessarily mean exactly what they meant in general philosophical usage. In common English usage, talking of three persons with one nature could mean three separate people who are alike in many ways. However in this context, nature is an actual thing. I am tempted to say that God is thought of as a single "thing", who however knows himself and relates to himself in three ways. That would probably be true for the West. It may not be precisely accurate for the Eastern model.

One key difference between East and West focuses on a change made to the Nicene Creed in the West. The Western Church added the Latin word filioque ("and the Son"), so that instead of saying that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, in the West it says "from the Father and the Son."

From the Eastern point of view, this is a big problem, because the unity of God depends upon the fact that there is only one uncreated, the Father, who is the source of the entire Trinity. However many Western writers seemed to be thinking of the relationship between God and us here. Jesus talks about sending the Holy Spirit to us. Hence from our point of view the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son, although probably "through the Son" would be better language. If "and the Son" is simply referring to Christ's role in sending the Spirit to us, it's not a problem. However the context in the Creed is one that is describing the relationship among the Persons. In that context, "and the Son" is questionable.

Critical Comments
I think the Bible commits us to think of God as a Trinity. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are described as distinct. They are all described as God. But there is one God. So we need to see a single God, with a distinction within him.

I am completely unimpressed by arguments that the Trinity is incoherent because there's no way three persons can constitute one God. Either he's one or he's three. These arguments are based on knowing just human beings. But the moment we move beyond that into science fiction or computer science, people have no problem conceiving of separate entities tied so tightly together that they form a single being (colonial telepathy and distributed systems). Computer science also gives us examples of a single entity that interacts with the world as multiple actors (a multiprocessor). I am not suggesting that God is actually a computer. I am simply indicating that once you start thinking more broadly than human beings, it's easy enough to conceive of all kinds of other ways of being. In fact even among human beings, marriage may be taken as an example of two persons becoming one actor. With us this is largely a metaphor. However in some particularly successful marriages it begins to go beyond just the metaphorical. The Trinity provides us with a model for ways in which persons can relate that avoids the opposite problems of a tyranny and a committee.

Predestinationand Free WillThis page discusses the way in which human responsibility interacts with God's responsibility. A proper balance here is critical to the Christian life. If human responsibility is overemphasized, Christianity turns into legalism, without an appreciation for God's power active in our lives. If God's responsibility is overemphasized, Christianity turns into fatalism, losing the emphasis on obedience to God and service to others. Both of these problems have occurred at times.
The orthodox position maintains both of the following:
God is in charge both of history in general and of our lives. We are unable to come to know and serve him on our own. We are completely dependent upon his decision to save us, and his work in our lives to transform us. Humans make responsible decisions. We will be judged by God for how we respond to him, and how we deal with each other. As we'll see, there are different approaches to these issues. Some emphasize either God's responsibility or ours. As long as they manage somehow to do justice to both, I would consider them orthodox. However there are positions that are clearly unorthodox:
Sometimes Christians so emphasize human decision that they lose sight of our dependence upon God. Christianity then becomes a demanding moral code, but it loses contact with Christ's work to redeem people who are unworthy of it. This tendency is called "Pelagian", after Pelagius, a monk who was thought to have taught this position. Sometimes Christians so emphasize God's responsibility that they lose sight of the need for our lives to be transformed, and for us to be active in working with others. I will call this tendency "fatalism", although Catholics often refer to it (incorrectly) as Calvinism. Since about the 5th Cent (when Pelagius was condemned), almost no one intentionally holds either of these extreme positions. However they can easily occur in practice, whenever Christians lose track of the fullness of the Gospel. This dual emphasis presents an obvious problem: How can our decisions be responsible if we are completely dependent upon God's decision? Christians have taken two approaches to this:
In some way we share responsibility with God. We would be hopeless without God's initiative; he must initiate our relationship with him. But his work in our hearts enables us to respond. This is a free response, although our ability to make it is dependent upon his work with us. Thus it is possible for us not to respond, or to respond initially and then reject God. I will refer to this approach as "synergism". I include it in Arminianism and one end of the Catholic spectrum. (This is a slightly non-standard use of the term "synergism", as I will note below.) God's decision and ours occur on two different levels. Thus it is possible for God to be completely responsible for us, but also for us to make responsible choices. I will refer to this position as Calvinist, although the most general description is probably Augustinian. (I am not a scholar of Augustine. There are aspects of his teaching that suggest the other approach. I am not passing judgment on his actual intent.) It's worth noting that there is a spectrum of acceptable views within the Catholic Church. Two of the major Catholic theologians (Augustine and Aquinas) held views very close to the one I describe here as Calvinist. Historically it might be better to call the position Augustinian. However as a Protestant, I am in a better position to describe Calvin's version. Other Catholics hold a position very similar to Arminius. It's my impression that this is the more common Catholic position.
This area is a difficult one in Protestant/Catholic relations. By the 16th Cent, doctrine in this area had become quite confused. Unfortunately no ecumenical council had clarified this area, so there were no unambiguous standards. The closest was probably the Council of Orange, in 529. Unfortunately it appears that the results of Orange had become almost completely lost by the 16th Cent. By the late medieval period, some Catholic theologians were holding positions that appeared to be for all practical purposes Pelagian.
The Protestant reformers thought that many of the things they objected to in current practice could be traced to this de facto Pelagianism. As a corrective, they adopted an aggressive form of Augustinianism, which I'm calling Calvinism.
On the Catholic side, the Council of Trent adopted reforms in this area, which rejected overt Pelagianism. On the Protestant side, views in this area moderated over time. Indeed in some cases they eventually became effectively identical to Catholic ones. Even in their original form, Protestants were never actually fatalists.
However much of the 16th Cent rhetoric involved Protestants accusing Catholics of being Pelagian and Catholics accusing Protestants of being fatalists or of failing to require Christians to obey God's requirements.
While some of the causes have been eliminated, these accusations have never completely died down. Synergists and Calvinists often do not see their positions as being two different orthodox approaches. For example, while Trent did rule out Pelagianism for Catholics, it also ruled out Calvinism and other Protestant positions. Protestants have generally returned the favor.
Indeed even those who hold variants within the synergist family commonly do not acknowledge any connection with other views that I classify as belonging to the same family.
This page is organized as follows:
Introduction (this section) Calvinism Predestination and Responsibility When are people responsible? Summary Synergism Arminianism A Common Catholic Position Lutheranism Special Issues: Can you be sure? Once Saved, Always Saved How can you preach the Gospel if you believe in Predestination? CalvinismI'm now going to review the major positions. I'm going to spend the most time with Calvinism. That is largely because many of the ideas involved in Calvinism are the most foreign to 20th Cent Christians, and thus require the most explanation. I am largely a Calvinist, in the sense described here.
In the classical Protestant approach, justification is a permanent thing. It establishes (or is part of) a reliable relationship within which our sin can be dealt with. Note that at no point does God require our consent. Justification is given before we are in any position to respond to God. It continues even during times when by our sin we have rejected God. Since it does not require our consent, it would appear that God determines who is going to be saved when he chooses whom to justify.
This is in fact what the Reformers intended to say. It is based on a viewpoint going back to Augustine. He believed that the addictive effect of sin is so serious that we are unable even to give consent for God to save us. We certainly might say that we want to be in heaven rather than hell. But we would not seriously desire to give up our sin, without God already working in us to begin healing us.
Once God has justified us, i.e. forgiven us and grafted us into Christ, we are on the path of salvation. In some synergist models, it takes our continuing cooperation to remain in our saving relationship with God. This is not true of the Reformers. As explained in the page on the Gospel, in the Protestant model, all the resources needed to save us come from Christ. Thus any "cooperation" is a result of God's justification and sanctifying grace, not a precondition for it to continue.
The Reformers were unwilling to acknowledge that any part of our salvation depends upon something in us. This is due to their concept of the seriousness of sin. Suppose God required our free consent before proceeding. In order to give that consent, some part of our will has to be free from the effects of sin. [If that part of the will needs renewal first, then it's not our choice. Our decision depends upon whether God renews that part of our will.]
This is not just pessimism. It results from serious concerns about the nature of the Christian life. Protestant piety focuses entirely upon Christ. He is the source of our strength. All the resources for salvation are in him. As soon as we make salvation dependent upon our continued cooperation or consent, we are back with the Catholic model in which our relationship with God is dissolved by sin. At the time we most need his help, direct access to his grace is no longer available.
The Reformers saw Biblical support for these concepts in Romans (particularly chapters 9 through 11) and Galatians. One could also cite various passages in John where Jesus speaks of his followers as if they were a predetermined set of people given to Christ as his sheep. (This is not intended as a complete review of Scriptural evidence. It is clear that there is extensive evidence for human responsibility as well, and alternative exegeses of Romans 9-11 are possible.)
Calvinism: Predestination and ResponsibilityThere are several obvious issues raised by the Reformers' idea. One is called "predestination". If justification does not require our consent either to establish or maintain, that seems to mean that God decides who is going to be saved. Anyone that he justifies will end up saved. If people are not saved, it must be that he didn't decide to justify them.
This is an issue because Christians believe in human responsibility. This belief is based on many passages in the Bible, including Jesus' teachings and other documents. If God decides who is going to be saved, how can there be any real human responsibility?
Of the things I've seen from the 16th Century, Calvin dealt with this the most clearly. He maintained that predestination does not remove human responsibility. In effect, he suggested that there are two different accounts for the same event, one in human terms and one in God's terms. God has a plan for our individual lives and history as a whole. Everything that happens fits into that plan. However he normally works through secondary causes. When someone does something, it is because they make a decision to do so. God knew what that decision would be. Indeed because the person's character, motivations, and situation is under God's control, there's a sense in which we can say that God determined the action. But his plan is carried out by the working out of human decisions and other historical causes.
Calvin looks at the example of the Sabeans' violence against Job's household near the beginning of Job. There are three levels of responsibility here. The Sabeans are responsible for the violence, motivated by whatever motivates vandals, presumably a desire for loot. But they are also acting as Satan's agents to test Job. Thus in another sense Satan is responsible. His goal is to show up Job. He somehow moved the Sabeans to attack Job's family. However even Satan is acting accordance with God's plan. God's intention is to vindicate Job's character and his own justice. The event is completely intelligible on any of these three levels: human, Satan's plan, and God's plan. In fact all three accounts are true.
Calvin also points out that God carries out his plan differently when dealing with people who have faith in him and those who do not. Everyone ends up acting in accordance with his plans. But with those who have faith, there is a conscious collaboration. God works with them through the Holy Spirit, and moves them directly in the way he intends. The ungodly do not intentionally cooperate with God. They still do his will, but they do it because he has set up the situation so that they end up doing what he wants.
Luther expresses this difference by a variant of predestination that is often called "single predestination". He says that God is responsible for the salvation of those that he chooses. Those that he does not choose are responsible for their own damnation. Calvin's language is more symmetrical. He says that God chooses both those he will save and those that will not be saved. He intends both results and is responsible for both. This is called "double predestination." However there is still a difference in how he works with those who are saved and those who are not.
I believe "single predestination" and "double predestination" are different perspectives on the same thing. Single predestination emphasizes the fact that God regenerates those whom he elects, and is present with them. He does not have this direct involvement with others. Double predestination emphasizes the fact that God chooses both results equally, even though he is involved differently with those he elects and those he does not.
[Note: while Calvin did in fact say the things I attribute to him, there are places where he seems to lose sight of the balance described here. At times he does appear to emphasize God's sovereignty in ways that would remove human responsibility.]
Calvinism: When are people responsible? You will often hear arguments that we can't hold people responsible for what they do if what they do is determined by their heredity or environment. This is the basis for a lot of the criticism directed against predestination. If God knows that someone is going to sin, and in fact if God has overall responsibility for the history of which this action is a part, then it's God's fault. The person is being forced to sin, so he is not responsible.
This is probably dealt with most clearly in later writers. Jonathan Edwards' book "Freedom of the Will" is a classic here. Edwards points out that there is a confusion here. There are two ways in which a person's actions can be known in advance. One way is real force: we threaten to kill them if they do something else, or in some other way we compel them. The other way is that we know their character and motivations so well that we can be sure what they are going to do.
In the first case, we rightly say that the person is not responsible. Their actions do not reflect their nature, so we can't reasonably draw any conclusions about them from what they did. In the second case it's not so clear. The person is not being forced to make a specific decision. It's just that their nature leads them into doing it.
Edwards identifies actions as responsible as long as they properly reflect the person's character and goals. In this case it is quite possible for a person to be responsible for their actions even though God is responsible for the history that leads them to be the kind of person they are.
Edwards's opponents were primarily Arminian. (This viewpoint will be described below.) The Arminians had a different idea of what makes an action responsible. They felt that we couldn't say a person was free (and thus responsible) unless there was something intrinsically unpredictable in their decision. As long as the decision could be predicted, they were being forced into it by their background, and it wasn't free.
Edwards points out that this doesn't make any sense. When people's actions don't reflect their character and motivations, we don't call it freedom, we call it insanity.
Christian theology maintains that God can be relied on. We know that he will always act on the basis of his character and his covenants with us. Does this mean that he isn't free? I would maintain that as we become closer to God, we become easier to predict. Our characters and motivations become more coherent, and our decision-making more disciplined. Christians historically have seen this as a growth of freedom.
Since the time Edwards wrote (around the American revolution), we've had a chance to see the consequences of the two approaches. In general our culture now accepts the Arminian definition of responsibility. There is a growing tendency not to hold people responsible if we can see how their environment affected them. People can almost always find some way of blaming what they are on something else. Thus the concept of responsibility is quickly vanishing altogether, or being applied in incoherent ways. Even Arminians see this and are disturbed by it. What they don't see is that this general cultural tendency is a direct consequence of Arminian ideas.
I maintain that we need to return to the concept that people are responsible as long as their decision properly reflects who they are. External force or constraint diminishes responsibility. So do medical conditions that make the decision process not work properly. But the fact that we know some of the things that made the person who they are does not reduce their responsibility.
Calvinism: Summary In summary: Calvinism says that God is wholly responsible for salvation. God forgives us, engrafts us into Christ, regenerates us, and moves us through the power of the Holy Spirit.
However this is looking at things from God's perspective. There is another account, that looks at things from a human perspective. God normally operates through historical causes. These various influences shape our character and our goals. However we still make decisions, for which we are properly held responsible.
The balance of responsibility is somewhat different with those who are God's children and those who are not. With those who are saved, God operates in a personal way, through the presence of the Holy Spirit and our union with Christ. While we make responsible choices, the basic decision to save us is God's. There is no equivalent for those who reject God. While their rejection is part of an overall history for which God is responsible, God does not take specific actions to make them reject him, as he takes actions to redeem his children.
Synergism In this section I'm going to describe two different traditions: Armianism and one common Catholic position. I believe they share one characteristic: In one way or another they share responsibility for our ultimate salvation between God's decisions and ours.
Synergism: Arminianism The most common alternative among Protestants today is Arminianism. Most modern Protestants are Arminian. The most prominent source of Arminian influence (at least in the U.S.) was John Wesley. A large fraction of the Protestant churches outside the Lutheran and Reformed tradition have Wesleyan roots.
Arminians typically use the classical Protestant language, including justification by faith, imputed righteousness, and the distinction between justification and sanctification. They differ from Calvinists primarily in that they believe (1) that God seriously calls everyone, and (2) that we may refuse grace.
Arminius talks of grace and free will cooperating. But the cooperation is a result of renewal by grace. Cooperation has sometimes been used to imply that the fall is not complete, and thus that man can still contribute something to his salvation. Arminius uses the term to refer to a response, which can exist only because of grace.
He seems to use the term because he does not want to refer salvation either entirely to grace or entirely to man. He does not want to refer it entirely to grace, because it requires our response. God deals with us as people, not as an irresistible force. Carl Bangs summarizes: "Man in sin is unable to exercise his will to do any good at all except he be regenerated and continually aided by grace. The grace of God is a gratuitous affection, infusion of the gifts of the Spirit, and perpetual assistance which is "the commencement, the continuance, and the consummation of all good," but it is not an "irresistible force"". ("Arminius", p 313)
Arminius believed that grace can be resisted. "Whomsoever God calls, he calls them seriously, with a will desirous of their repentance and salvation." Thus God does not predestine some to destruction. "The whole controversy reduces itself to this question, 'Is the grace of God a certain irresistible force?' ... I believe that many persons resist the Holy Spirit and reject the grace that is offered." Bangs comments "For him grace is not a force; it is a Person, the Holy Spirit, and in personal relationships there cannot be the sheer overpowering of one person by another."
All variants of Arminianism would be unacceptable to the Reformers. Indeed one of Luther's best works was written against Erasmus, who maintained a position much like Arminius'. Under Arminianism, humans determine who is saved and who is not, by the way that they respond to God's grace. This was not acceptable to the Reformers, because it seemed to ignore the seriousness of sin. They thought it left a tiny corner of our will that did not need to be renewed: the corner that decided whether or not to accept God's grace.
Aside from this theoretical concern, they believed that there are practical problems with Arminianism. The whole Protestant concept of justification is based on predestination. Recall that in the classical Protestant position, justification is a permanent thing. It establishes a relationship with God that continues even through serious sin. But this only makes sense if the relationship with God is established unilaterally by God. If we can reject it, then the key to salvation is within us. It's whatever motivates us to continue cooperating with God's grace.
Synergism: a Common Catholic Position Catholics all accept predestination, in one form or another. However there is a range of permissible positions. Aquinas held a position that seems to me identical to Calvin's. Other Catholics hold positions that seem to me rather similar to Arminius'. The official standard in this area is the Council of Trent. The canons from Trent include a couple of statements that seem unambiguously Arminian. E.g. it is stated both that God does not predestine anyone to damnation, and that the operation of grace can be resisted. However it is possible to understand these in a sense that is compatible with Aquinas (and Calvin).
Aquinas uses the term "predestine" to refer to God's action in moving people to salvation. For those who are not saved, he uses the term "reprobation." As described above, these are not completely symmetrical. God does not move people to damnation in the way that he moves them to salvation. He simply leaves them alone. To say that God works the same way in both cases would be making God the source of sin, which no Christian would want to do. Thus one can read Trent as saying simply that God does not predestine anyone to damnation in the same sense as he predestines people to salvation. Such an interpretation is consistent with Aquinas/Calvin.
The statement that the operation of grace can be resisted can be taken in such a sense as well. It can be taken as a description on the human level. Calvin certainly agrees that people act as intelligent beings, with a will. There are people to whom the Gospel is preached, but they reject it. On the human level, we can say that they have rejected grace. However when you look at things from the point of view of God's plan, God's plan included that rejection, as well as the factors that led the person to reject the Gospel. Calvin tends to use the term grace only for God's actions to save the elect. In that use, grace can't be successfully resisted, since when God chooses to save someone, he makes sure that what he does is sufficient to overcome any obstacles.
Catholic theology tends to use the term "cooperation" to describe the human reaction to grace. For many Catholics, this represents a reaction to God's grace that accepts it, and results in justification. As a result, whether a person is justified is not solely up to God, but requires also this cooperation. However the term cooperation can also be understand in a sense compatible with Aquinas or Calvin. In this sense it refers to the fact that human beings are not machines. When God gives grace, he does it in a manner that results in a real change in the human will, such that the person responds to God. The elect do God's will intentionally, while those who are not do it unintentionally. I should note that from Calvin's point of view, this is part of sanctification, not justification. But Catholic theology doesn't distinguish these as consistently as Protestant theology.
The 1908 Catholic Encyclopedia reviews the range of Catholic views in its article on predestination. While this is an oversimplification, it describes two major types of approach. All Catholics accept predestination, in that there is a fixed number of people who will be saved, which God knew from creation. However there are two different ways God can know it. One is that he first decided to save a specific set of people, and took the necessary steps. The other is that he knows how any individual will respond in any circumstances. So those who are predestined are those who God has foreseen will respond to grace.
The first position is that of Aquinas and Calvin. The second is very close to Arminius (at least with respect to predestination; as a Protestant theologian, he disagrees with Catholics on many other issues). Arminius was willing to use the term predestination, but for him, predestination was in Christ. That is, God predestined all who would have faith in Christ to be saved. The Catholic Encyclopedia regards the second (Arminian) approach as superior, although it acknowledges that both are acceptable. (Of course it rejects Calvin's presentation of predestination, but I think there's good reason to believe that this is a misunderstanding.) My sense is that the great majority of Catholics take a position that I would classify as Arminian in terms of its approach to predestination.
So how do Catholics differ from actual Arminians? One major difference is in the role they attributed to baptism. In baptism, we are freed from the effects of original sin. Formally, it is baptism that makes it possible for us to respond to God's grace. This is referred to as "baptismal regeneration".
With infants this appears to be literally true. With adults, I would say that there is some qualification. Trent describes the process of that goes before baptism in terms that are consistent with Arminianism: God initiates, and we respond. It is expected that the adult candidate for baptism will have faith and will have repented of his sins. Thus by the time the act of baptism is performed, it would appear that at least some of the effects of original sin have already been overcome.
Thus it is probably best to say that the "grace of baptism" may to some extent be present before the actual action is performed. This is supported by the fact that someone who dies while in the process of preparing for baptism is considered to have the "baptism of intent".
I believe Catholics also differ from Arminians and Lutherans (i.e. those Protestants who think it is possible to lose salvation) in the way they think of "mortal sin". But agree that it is possible for someone who is saved to reject salvation. For Catholics this happens primarily through mortal sin. Protestants normally do not use this concept.
Arminius was guarded in the way he answered questions in this area. However he seems to have held that it is possible for someone who has been justified to reject salvation. I believe such a person would be considered to have rejected the faith, and no longer to be a Christian.
So how does this differ from the Catholic idea of mortal sin? The objection in the Lutheran documents seems to be that Catholics separate faith from our relationship to God. Thus mortal sin breaks our relationship to God, but faith may continue. (If we lost faith as well, we would have lost the ability to make use of the sacrament of reconciliation.) This is partly due to the usual difference in how Protestants and Catholics use the term "faith". For Catholics it has tended to mean intellectual belief. For Protestants it refers to our trust in and reliance on God. Protestants don't believe that purely intellectual faith -- separated from an active trust in God -- has any religious value.
I am going to have to confess some uncertainty here. However I think that Arminians and Lutherans tend to differ from Catholics in that the only sin that they see as truly mortal (i.e. fatal) is essentially apostasy: a rejection of Christ. As long as faith remains, it does not matter how serious our sin is: any sin represents a rejection of God's command, and is sufficient to condemn us; but Christ's death is sufficient to deal with even the most serious sin. However at a certain point we may presume that someone has rejected the faith completely.
The Lutheran Position I am least certain about this section of the document, because I find it hard to make sense of the Lutheran position. Note by the way that I'm speaking of the Lutheran confessional documents, not Luther personally. Luther was close to Calvin on the topic of predestination. There are some differences between Luther and later Lutherans.
The main problem is that the Lutheran confessional documents make assertions that appear to be in conflict. Furthermore, they do not try to resolve the conflict, because they believe that doing so would require going beyond what God has revealed to us.
The starting perspective is similar to Calvinism. Due to the fall, we are powerless to do anything related to salvation. It's not enough for God to offer us salvation. He has to work in us even to get to the point where we can listen to the offer. Just as Calvin, the Formula of Concord says that those who are saved are elected by God. God establishes all the means needed to redeem the elect. He doesn't just foresee their decision, but does what is needed to bring about their salvation. This is done primarily through preaching the Gospel and the sacraments. "In this his eternal counsel, purpose, and ordinance, God has not only prepared salvation in general, but he has also graciously considered and elected to salvation each and every individual among the elect who are to be saved through Christ, and also ordained that ... he wills by his grace, gifts, and effective working to bring them to salvation, and to help, further, strengthen and preserve them to this end."
God only foresees the fate of the rest. There is no negative election. Those who reject the Gospel are responsible for their own fate.
God wants all to be saved. The offer of the Gospel is seriously made to all.
Before justification, we do not have the ability to do anything towards our salvation. Justification is done entirely by God, through his election of us in Christ. However justification renews our will. At this point the possibility exists either to continue in faith or to reject it. That is, it is possible to be justified and then fall away.
God does foreknow who of those called will believe, who will persevere, and of those who fall away, who will return. In sum, God knows who will be saved and who will not. However he has not revealed this to us, and we are not free to speculate on it.
There are some logical problems in maintaining all of these at the same time. Lutherans are aware of this. They feel bound to assert that election is only positive, that God wants everyone to be saved, but that God's plan includes everything that happens, good and bad.
I believe that Calvinism properly explained is consistent with many of these points. Calvin also acknowledges that God works differently with the elect and others. There's no negative form of regeneration. So on the level of how God works with people, he regenerates those who he will save; the rest are lost because of their own sin. God becomes equally responsible for both only when you look at his plan. But that's the level that the Lutherans consider God's secret counsel and refuse to talk about. Thus the emphasis on predestination being entirely positive makes sense.
I think the idea that some may fall away after justification can be understood as well. Calvin maintains that election is irreversible. You can't fall away from being elect. Yet he recognizes that on a human level there are people who give every appearance of being saved, but fall away. He would maintain that they weren't really elect, nor were they actually justified. They had the appearance of faith but not its reality. But this distinction is really on the level of God's plan. He knows who the real elect are. The Lutherans refuse to talk on that level. If you look at things in visible terms, such people believe the Gospel, and then later fall away. So as long as we are explicitly not dealing with God's secret plan, it may make sense to speak of them as being justified and then lost.
However there may be at least some theological difference here. The Lutheran position would seem to attribute more power to human will after justification than Calvin would. (Both agree that before justification, the will is completely in bondage to sin. Thus it is basically powerless as far as doing anything involving God.)
The statement that God wants everyone to be saved seems harder to deal with though. In an Arminian this makes sense. But for Lutherans, people are saved only when God elects them and sets up the means to bring them to faith. So what can it mean to say that God actually wants everyone to be saved? If he wants everyone to be saved, and salvation is entirely up to his election, why isn't everyone saved? The Lutheran answer is clearly: this is part of the God's hidden counsel, so we can have nothing to say.
At the start of this document I said that there are two approaches to reconciling human responsibility with God's overall responsibility for history. One approach sees these two issues as being on two different levels. This is the approach of Calvin and Aquinas. The other approach sees God's grace and human will as combining to produce a result. This is the approach of Arminius and many Catholics.
In terms of this dichotomy, I think the Lutherans are on the side of Calvin and Aquinas. Indeed they separate the levels of explanation more radically even than Calvin would, to the point of basically refusing to talk about God's eternal plan.
Analysis: God as Author So far I've tried to explain the most common positions, but I haven't given you my evaluation of them.
My basic position is the Calvinist one. I don't see any way to maintain the standard Christian idea that God is in charge without saying that ultimately he is responsible for both salvation and damnation. However I think it's important to realize that this does not remove human responsibility.
Calvin's discussion goes a long way towards reconciling God's election and human responsibility. However there's an additional set of ideas that I'd like to look at. I think it's important how we think of God's relationship to the world. If we think of predestination being carried out in a mechanical way, there is little room for human freedom or responsibility in any but the most abstract sense. However if we think of God as being more an author than a watchmaker, I believe it is possible to reconcile God's responsibility and human responsibility.
When human authors describe their work, it seems clear that they have to deal with the same sort of issue. They have a story they want to tell. But the characters take on a life of their own. A good author will manage to say what they want to say, but also respect the integrity of their characters.
Thus I suggest that God tells the story that he wants to tell in the way he wants to tell it, but that he also maintains human responsibility. Thus the problem of reconciling God's election with human responsibility is not primarily a doctrinal issue. Rather it is a matter of a master artist at work.
While I believe God is completely responsible for his story, I also think that there is room for traditional Christian ideas about free will. There are things that God will not do, because they would violate the integrity of one of his characters. It is not that he is unable to do it, but that as an artist he has chosen to create a certain kind of story, and that commits him not to write in certain ways. Yet it remains his story.
Double predestination in its purest form bothers me. Calvin sometimes gives the impression that God starts out with a list of people whom he sets out to save and another list of people that he sets out to damn. This seems to be an oversimplification of his task as an artist (and a violation of the Scriptural assurance that God wants all to come to him). That does not mean that I want to save God from taking responsibility for salvation and damnation -- Like Calvin, I think God is responsible for both. With the Reformed tradition in general, I affirm that Christ died, not just to set up the possibility that some might be saved, but actually to save people. But the two classic choices for God: that his goal in creation was to save specific people, or that he simply foresees what choices we will make, do not either seem to do justice to his artistry.
To return to Calvin's analysis, I'm suggesting that we need to look at things on two different levels. On the human level (from inside the story) things make sense on their own. People make decisions for which they are really responsible. But God is still responsible for the situation as a whole, and for the overall story. These two kinds of responsibility are not in competition with each other. Every action makes sense both in terms of the motivations of the people involved, and in terms of God's overall plan.
Let's look at situation when someone does something evil. I believe we need to look primarily to the person who does it. Christians have sometimes thought that everything bad is a punishment from God, and have tried to identify something wrong that we did. I believe this approach was rejected in the book of Job.
However the evil act is also part of a history over which God has overall control. God brings good out of evil, and will see to it that the ultimate result is what he wants, not what the evil person wants. "God writes straight with crooked lines" (a saying that I've seen attributed to several different sources). Thus I believe that even evil actions are part of God's plan. Not that God intended the evil or its results in themselves, but that he chose to use characters who he knew would do those things.
I would also suggest that God has two different kinds of responsibility. One is this general responsibility for history, which is analogous to the responsibility of an author for his story. The other is the more direct and personal responsibility which he takes for those he justifies. Justification is God's decision to engraft us into Christ and to work within us to regenerate us. Thus his connection in the lives of his people is direct and personal.
By contrast, his responsibility for the damned is that of the author. But it does not involve this direct, personal component. God does not directly inspire people to be evil.
Thus I would suggest that both single and double predestination are appropriate ways to look at things, but in slightly different areas. Single predestination reflects the way God works with people: he works directly with those who are justified, but simply passes over the rest. There is an asymmetry here. Double predestination reflects God's responsibility as an author: he is responsible for the final results. Even the evil end up doing his will, although not intentionally.
SPECIAL ISSUES:Can You Be Sure? Some of the major debates about salvation center around the question "Can I be sure I'm saved?" First, some caveats. The question is about me, not anyone else. All Christians agree that it's impossible to be sure whether someone else is saved. You may have fairly good evidence. Christ said you will know his followers by the fruit that they bear. In a few cases there may be essentially no doubt. But most commonly, we simply can't be sure. And we should be happy to leave such decisions up to God.
Second, note that the question is about me, not about God. Everyone agrees that when we accept Christ as Lord, we will be saved. There are some practical issues, as we'll see. But the question is never about whether God will accept us.
Finally, let me note that this is primarily an issue for Protestants. One can ask the question of Catholic theology, but it isn't a major theme of Catholic theology, and Catholics don't generally seem to have worried about it seriously. So for the purposes of this section I'm writing primarily from a Protestant perspective.
OK, now let's look at the question in more detail.
From the Catholic perspective, it should be possible to tell that you're saved now, but probably not whether you will end up in heaven. Catholic doctrine is fairly straightforward about what you need to do to be saved. There are additional opportunities, so that it is possible that a pagan might be saved. But for a normal Christian there are pretty clear sufficient conditions: be baptized, make use of the means of grace supplied by the Church (e.g. going to Mass regularly), and use the sacrament of reconciliation to receive forgiveness for sins when you fall back.
Protestants often attack this answer, based on Luther's experience. He could never get any peace, because he could never be sure he had met the requirements. Did he remember every sin he had committed? Was he sufficiently sincere in repenting them? But his confessor thought he was being unreasonable in this, and I think that's the typical Catholic reaction. God never required absolute perfection, but primarily required the proper intention and doing whatever was reasonably possible.
The more serious problem from a Catholic point of view is whether we can now be confident that we are going to be saved in the end. The answer to that is no. We can't be certain now that we won't at some time in the future commit a mortal sin and die before we can repent, or even that we won't completely abandon the faith. Thus Trent is very clear: we can't be sure we will finally be saved, without some special revelation from God.
For classical Protestantism things are more interesting. One of the standard doctrines is "perseverance of the saints". That is, if someone is truly justified, they will stay that way. This is an obvious result of the Protestant idea of justification, as explained above. God justifies us before we are able to respond. Justification is a permanent relationship.
Luther and Calvin both accepted predestination. (Note however that modern Lutherans accept it only in a very qualified sense.) Thus God "elected" certain people to be saved, and justified them, engrafting them into Christ and starting the process of sanctifying them. Their status before God rested on God's decision to save them, not on anything they did. Thus justification and salvation are permanent.
It seemed to Luther and Calvin that this was a major source of assurance to Christians. Because salvation depended entirely upon God, we did not have to worry whether we had been sufficiently complete or sincere in our response. Because of their understanding of the severity of sin, the Reformers felt that no one could rely on salvation if it depended upon us. They felt safe in relying on God.
Unfortunately there's a practical problem. You can be sure that if you have ever been justified, you will continue to be. But there's no entirely safe way to know whether you are justified in the first place, i.e. whether you are one of the elect that God has chosen to save. Certainly anyone who has a real faith will in fact be saved. But we know from practical experience that people may appear to have saving faith when in fact they don't. They may have been carried away by some religious enthusiasm, or they may only have the appearance of justifying faith, without the reality. A real justifying faith is only possible as a gift from God, and there's no clear way to tell whether this has happened.
These issues did not seem to bother either Luther or Calvin. They acknowledged the possibility of illusory faith, but they and most of their followers did not seem overly bothered by that possibility.
However their later followers were not so fortunate. Particularly in Calvinism, developing confidence that you are among the "elect" became one of the biggest practical problems for Protestants. This was the Protestant equivalent of Luther's uncertainty.
If you ask for evidence that you're saved, the only sensible answer was the one that Jesus gave: you could tell that you were one of Jesus' followers because of the fruit you bore. While this didn't exactly make salvation dependent upon good works, it made any confidence in salvation dependent upon good works. The result was that from a practical point of view people focused their attention on their own works, not on Christ. The Reformation ideas had thus been turned on their head.
Assurance of salvation is an important Reformation idea. But the original point was that assurance came from our confidence in God. Justification by faith made sense existentially because the Reformers felt they could have confidence in God's intention to save them, where they couldn't have confidence in their own proper performance of what the Catholic system required of them.
My conclusion from all of this is that assurance of salvation is real, but somewhat elusive. It doesn't appear to be something that we can go after independently. That is, there is no test for being saved that will always give the right answer, even when employed by those who are not saved. This should not be a surprise: without God's help we are unable to understand our spiritual situation accurately. We need his assistance even to grasp the reality of sin. So those who don't have this help are going to assess their condition incorrectly. There is no test we can set up that will prevent that.
I believe assurance is real, but that valid assurance occurs only in the context of an ongoing relationship with God. Consider a normal human relationship. When I love someone, whether a parent or spouse, I am willing to rely on that person. My confidence in them is a basic part of my relationship with them. However it would be very hard to prove in any objective way that the confidence is justified. People do sometimes love people who do not return their commitment. Furthermore, requiring external proofs would be a sure way to poison the relationship.
Thus I believe the Reformers were right that in our relationship with God we can trust him to save us. We should be able to have confidence in this. But we have to realize that others may have a similar confidence and be wrong. Any attempt to produce proofs of our salvation is likely to be self-defeating.
Assurance in our relationship with God is just like trust in a human relationship. You can trust God for your salvation. As long as you do this in the context of a relationship with God, the result in helpful. As soon as you ask for objective proofs, outside of your personal relationship, the question becomes self-defeating.
Can You Be Sure?: Once Saved, always Saved The discussion so far has applied to the Calvinist position, and possibly with some qualifications to Lutherans. However some Baptists also hold a variant of this. It's often called "Once saved, always saved".
Baptists were originally Calvinists. However most modern Baptists (at least in the U.S.) are not. It seems likely that "once saved, always saved" entered the Baptist tradition through Calvinism. However it continues even among Baptists who are Arminian.
"Once saved, always saved" has a rather different implication in an Arminian setting than in a Calvinist setting. For Calvinists, assurance of salvation is one implication of the doctrine of election. God chooses people to be saved. He sees to it that their faith perseveres to the end. For a Calvinist, it makes no sense to talk about someone who has rejected Christ being saved. If someone has rejected Christ, then they are not one of God's children. They may have appeared to be saved, but it was just religious enthusiasm.
But for non-Calvinist Baptists, "once saved, always saved" is quite different. It means that once you have met the minimal requirements for salvation, you are in, no matter what you do. A prototypical presentation of this position is given by Charles Stanley (a well-known Southern Baptist writer), in "Eternal Security: Can you be Sure?" In the book, he includes a brief prayer turning your life over to God. If you pray it sincerely, you are guaranteed to be saved, no matter what happens with your life later.
This seems appalling to most other Christians, because it seems to say that God isn't serious about requiring a transformation of our lives. To avoid this, he maintains that there are levels of honor in heaven. It is true that you will end up in heaven if you pray his prayer and do nothing else. But you may find yourself in a very remote part of heaven, with a very small crown and a very skimpy robe. You will be eternally frustrated that you didn't take God's demands more seriously.
How can you preach the Gospel if you believe in predestination? Predestination means that ultimately God is responsible for who is saved. While God's grace is offered to everyone, only those who he regenerates are able to take advantage of it. So how can you honestly say to someone: "Have faith, repent of your sins, and you will be saved" when you don't know whether God has chosen him or not?
First, we have an explicit authorization from Jesus to preach to everyone. So there is no question that we are permitted to offer salvation to everyone. (Indeed we are required to do so.)
Second, when preaching the Gospel it is not necessary to tell each individual that God has definitely chosen them. All that we need to say is that Christ has died for his people, and that if the person repents of his sins and responds in faith, he will be saved.
The fact that God is responsible for the overall story does not change the fact that people are saved through faith and repentance. Yes, God knows who will be saved, and at one level he is responsible for it. He works in us to regenerate us. But God commonly works through human agents, and the result of his work is human response and change. It is a privilege to be invited to participate in God's work of regeneration.
In the Gospel according to John, Jesus uses a metaphor that may be helpful here. Several times he speaks of himself as a shepherd calling his sheep. But it's clear that not everyone belongs to his flock. His sheep recognize his voice. Others do not. When we preach the Gospel, we are calling in Jesus' name. Those who are Jesus' sheep will respond. We don't need to know in advance who they are, or how many they are. We can hope for everyone.
In fact I think it can cause problems if we assume too much responsibility for the salvation of others. In I Cor 3:6-7, Paul discusses a similar issue. He points out that he simply sows seeds. God makes them grow. If we assume that we are responsible for saving people, we may be led into using overly emotional or coercive approaches. These can lead to the appearance of success, but their long-range effect is questionable.