The matter of the sovereignty of the grace of God in salvation can be put in other terms. Salvation, we may say, is not an autosoterism, nor a synergism, but to the glory of the grace of God it is a divine monergism. We define the terms briefly as follows. “Autosoterism” means essentially “self-salvation,” or salvation that is achieved by one’s completely unaided efforts, by one’s own design and implementation. It means that in one way or another man saves himself. If one were to hold to the pure Pelagian theory and if, therefore, he insisted that he needed no outside help at all towards salvation, he would be claiming the complete efficiency and effectiveness of a system of autosoterism. “Synergism,” on the other hand, means that a cooperation of some form of outside help is necessary to salvation. Semi-Pelagianism, with its notion of congruent grace, is a form of synergism. To the extent that the present-day evangelical church holds to forms of cooperation between man and God in salvation, it propagates some form or other of synergism. That most usually comes to expression in contemporary evangelicalism through its insistence, against biblical argument to the contrary, on the freedom of human will. The relevant doctrinal issues will be discussed more fully in the following chapters.
Some theologians and commentators who have held to the necessity of the grace of God in the movement of the soul to salvation have in several ways, and in semi-Pelagian form, oriented their argument on the concept of the cooperation of man with divine grace. The following example will illustrate the kinds of difficulties involved in such doctrinal formation. There has occurred an “emphasis upon both the initiating power of God’s grace and the need for willing cooperation with it.”22 As to the efficiency of the human will in its fallen state, it is said that while “our own wills [do not] contribute anything towards the attainment of eternal life . . . they have a kind of negative veto which can obstruct the work of salvation.”23 The concept of that negative veto is to be recognized carefully. For it is said in such theologies that “our only capacity for making a contribution to our spiritual renewal is the capacity to say yes or no to what is divinely initiated.”24 There is a “malaise of the fallen human condition” for which there is “no non-Christian remedy.”25 But it appears, in the semi-Pelagian schemes we are currently noting, that the best to be said about the human contribution to righting the condition of things is that “disciplines have to be imposed on the appetites and desires” leading the individual astray, such that the grace of God is inhibited from intervening in the soul in a manner necessary to salvation.26 In something of an apparent contradiction, the author whose conclusion we have just referred to also observes that “Whatever else being saved may involve, it can never possibly put you in the position of being able to tell God his business.”27 But the damage has already been done. For the previously claimed ability of the will to say yes or no to the grace of God has already “told God his business.”
All such theological inventions as these deny in one way or another the sovereignty and the irresistibility of the grace of God. If, however, it is held, consistently with the expansive testimony of the Scriptures, that salvation is by the grace of God alone, then it is held that salvation is a divine monergism. “Monergism” means that only one efficient cause is operative in, and solely capable of bringing to effect, the objective of salvation. The doctrine of salvation that came down to us from the theology of the Reformation is unambiguously monergistic. The argument as to why that is so will be seen to lie at the heart of the scriptural statement of the status of man in his fallen and sinful state and the remedy in the substitutionary work of Christ that God has addressed to it.
The Way Ahead
The testimony of the church to the world at large rests essentially in the gospel of salvation. That gospel states that in the predeterminate council of the Godhead before the foundation of the world a Covenant of Redemption was formed, the substance of which was that redemptive offices were assumed by the respective Persons of the Godhead. The Second Person of the Godhead would come into the world to become Jesus Christ, taking a true human nature in body and soul, with all the faculties of human soul, into union with his divine nature. In that human nature he would, by his sinless life and substitutionary death, redeem those whom the Father had given to him for that purpose. The Holy Spirit undertook to call to Christ and apply to those for whom Christ died the gifts and benefits he purchased for them, to complete within them the sanctification to which they were designed by eternal decree, and to conduct them to glory. To bring to full effect the designs and objectives of that Covenant of Redemption a Covenant of Grace that guaranteed the fulfillment of God’s promise of redemption was formed and instituted, the parties to which were God on the one hand and his chosen people as represented by Christ on the other. The more expansive meaning and implications of the gospel of God’s grace will engage us in the chapters that follow. The essence of what remains to be addressed has to do with the ways in which, in the providence of God, the terms of his eternal decrees have been worked out in historic fact. That calls for a discussion of the consequent relations between God and man, having regard to the true status and competence or otherwise of man, and the realization and full expression of the benefits that Christian salvation implies and involves.
In short, if the biblical integrity of the gospel is to be preserved and maintained in the witness of the church, the critical questions that demand answer are “Who, in fact, was Jesus Christ?” and “Why did Jesus Christ come into the world?” Then if those who are the beneficiaries of the redemptive acts of Christ are in fact joined in union to him, what are the highest blessings and privileges that union carries with it?
We turn immediately in the following chapter to the first of those questions.
1. Protagoras’s (480–410 BC) statement has been understood as “indicative of his relativism which ultimately rests upon his theory of perception according to which we know only what we perceive but not the thing perceived,” Fishler, in Runes, Dictionary of Philosophy, 257. To that extent, Protagoras stands as an anticipator of the epistemological theory of Immanuel Kant to which we shall refer below, particularly the latter’s claim that no knowledge of the ding an sich, the thing itself, is possible, that having been consigned by Kant to his so-called noumenal realm.
2. Pope, Essay on Man, 770.
3. Descartes, Discourse on Method. His “cogito, ergo sum,” “I think, therefore I am,” appears in Part IV of the Discourse.
4. Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 172. Van Til later referred to his own system of thought as set “over against the man-centered view of men like Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Leibnitz, Kant, etc.,” in Geehan, Jerusalem and Athens, 125.
5. Van Til, Christian Theory of Knowledge, 12–13.
6. Among numerous discussions of Kant’s epistemological theory see Windelband, History, 537–50.
7. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 19. See the evaluation of Schleiermacher’s theology in Mackintosh, Types of Modern Theology, 60–100. Mackintosh concludes