Two Book Reviews

Men, that is all humanity, has one thing in common: they are descendants of Adam and as a result, can do nothing but sin. The term used in the New Testament is that all men are “slaves to sin” (Romans, 6:15). The use of the word “slave” affects the will directly: a slave has no free will and has no ability to use it if he did. Before Christ's grace, men were universally merely objects, subjects of cause and effect and nothing else. While this view might deny free will in all things, it only denies free will when it comes to converting to Christianity. Men do freely destroy themselves and seek after their own selfish interest. They are morally responsible for that. However, this will collapses when God is concerned. “Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God” (Romans, 8:8-9). Nothing can be plainer than this. The sin of Adam passed on to all its descendants a mind that cannot see things spiritually. It can only see material objects that satisfy personal self-interest. What is the Calvinist view of free will and divine election? The organization is to go from the foundation, the Bible, to the history of theology and finally, to pastoral considerations. It moves from the most fundamental to the most practical. Given this, it is natural that the overarching purpose of the book is to show God's total sovereignty over everything: hence the title. The basic Calvinist and Puritan position is that human beings are depraved; they are, of themselves, opposed to the sovereignty of God and will act against him willingly. Salvation is the action of grace that cancels this irrational will. Faith in God and providence is something God grants freely and cannot be earned either through reason or works. The foil for the authors here is the Arminian view of God's knowledge. This Dutch movement, stemming from the “Remonstrance of 1610.” Reading the Remonstrance, there seems to be no real differences with Calvin. Yet,they are there and they are significant. First, the Arminian view stresses that man's free will does pertain to faith: in other words, a man, elected by God, can refuse election. Another way of putting that is to argue that God's grace grants the free will that exists nowhere else. This implies that grace can be rejected. The Calvinists respond with the doctrine of “unconditional' salvation, meaning that there is no freedom to resist salvation. Grace and election are ultimate and absolute. The big difference between the two systems is that for the Calvinists, behavior does not have any effect on salvation or election. The Arminian, stressing the restoration of free will though grace, implies that one can lose this grace through an irrational rejection of it.1 The Calvinist position, it is said, offers a certain peace in that no matter what occurs, God remains looking over his world. The concept of “absolute and unconditional election” implies that man can never know why certain things happen to the people they affect. In Chapter XIV of the book, “Preaching and the Sovereignty of God,” we read:

The point is that one has to go beyond the conception of election and salvation only. That is an important, but limited, element of God's sovereignty. This should be spread over all events throughout history. These events are never random, but manifest God's purposes and knowledge. Nothing happens without God's consent. Free will implies that God voluntarily limits his power for the sake of human freedom. Since this freedom is not worth anything in the Puritan view, to think that God's own essence will be compromised for its sake is absurd. In one of the more memorable passages in the third section of this collection, we read: “Time and time again, indeed, epoch after epoch again, God carries forward His purpose, and the impossibilities that stagger our minds are made tributary to His plan, for they are included in His purpose” (Clowney, 340). Part of the reason why human beings have a history is so that God's power can be manifest within it. Human suffering is used to bring about salvation. God is not obligated to man at all, and certainly is not obligated to create a utopia for him. However, man can find peace by understanding that the chaos of the modern age is part of the process of creating God's kingdom on earth. It is easy to condemn God the Father for permitting and even creating human suffering. However, several things need to be said: first, there is no such thing as an “innocent bystander.” All have sinned and all are deserving of punishment, Second, the suffering of a person at specific time is not suffering at all when seen sub specie aeternitatis. Suffering comes from man's will being frustrated. However, that has more to do with man's irrationality than God's alleged sadism. The fact that the sins of the elect were destroyed by Christ in the Garden shows that the Father is not even beyond tormenting his own Son for the sake of a greater good later on. Speaking about the nature of the Christian ministry, Clowney states, “The ministry of the gospel is not a mere leadership role or speaking assignment. It is part of the eternal plan of God to accomplish His purposes (Clowney, 340). The point is that all human will and all human ability as no value in itself, even if dedicated entirely to God. In Chapter V, “Are There Two Wills in God?” John Piper argues that there is no contradiction between the two concepts of first, that God desires all human beings to be saved and second, that only a handful are. That God has a desire that will not or cannot be fulfilled is neither a contradiction nor indicative of more than one will or desire in God (Piper, 124). The distinction between the ideas of God's “decree” versus his “command” is a subtle one, but an important one. Piper reminds his readers that Calvin and the Puritans did not reject free will tout court. He rejected the ability of man to come to God from his own desires or volition. Man acts freely and usually wrongly, but none of these has any indication of an inherent desire to come to God. Piper argues that men act freely. God might give a command upon all men to come to him, but ultimately, the sins that keep man from God derive from man's own volition and desire. The “decree” however, is irresistible and is God's specific intervention into the lives of men. In St. Paul's letter to the Romans, he writes:

This passage comes up again and again in the present book. The idea is that God chooses only a handful from each generation to save. The reasons for this can only be grasped sub specie aeternitatis. The superficial mind will call God “cruel” and, worse, “undemocratic” when reading this, but God need not conform to modern standards. The Arminian interpretation says that God foresees man's salvation because he can see future events in the present. He sees a man's conversion and his coming to God out of his own will. However, this view is rejected in this book. In SM Baugh's chapter “The meaning of Foreknowledge” the interpretation rejects the Arminian libertarian view by describing that the Greek root to “know in advance” is not just cognitive, but active. It means to choose as well as to foreknow. This is to say that foreknowledge in God, through Paul's use of the Greek term, refers to a knowledge that is absolutely certain because the actor has created it. God does not merely record and recognize acts that he sees beforehand, but brings them about. They “choose” to become Christians because God makes them that. A similar argument is used in Wayne Grudem's Chapter, “The Perseverance of the Saints.” He writes on the term “to be enlightened” that is, elected by God:

Similar to the question on “foreknowledge” here too, what is implied is not an action on the part of the enlightened, but their intellectual grasp of theology. No action is implied. This means that the many synonyms of “Enlightenment” such as to be chosen or elected, among others, refers to the opening of the mind to God, not that one has “converted” due to one's free will. God foreknows not so much what a man will do, but what he will do to a man. When this is universalized, that is, spread out over all events in human history, the Calvinist position becomes that the world acts according to God's decree. In the Arminian view (or any that assumes some version of theological free will), the world works according to its own, autonomous, rules. Grudem will go so far as to argue that Sociniasm was the natural outgrowth of Arminianism and denies God's foreknowledge in general. It posits a world that is totally autonomous and closed off to God. In the Arminian case, the argument is reasonable in that it says God has limited himself for the sake of human liberty. The Sociniast idea is that the world is opaque to God and hence, God is not omniscient. More accurately, the Sociniast will argue that God knows possibilities only, never actually events beforehand.

The clear implication is that the ascetic life, the attacks on the very passions that lead to sin, have been abandoned. In their rejection of the Roman church, they have removed the positive elements along with the negative. It is not just modernity that created this error, but also in ancient Christianity where, once martyrdom was no longer a real danger, the church, now a worldly bureaucracy, made certain accommodations to social life. It became a worldly institution, so he argues, and as such, lost its world-rejecting aspect. On the other hand, the rise of the monasteries, taking John the Baptist and the prophet Elijah as their models, maintained the earlier “martyric” idea as a matter of protest against this development. The problem was that Bonhoeffer thought this was a world of what might be termed “liturgical specialists” that the rest of the world was not meant to understand or emulate (47). Rather, he sees a resurgence in the much older idea in the rise of Luther, whose central idea was that real sanctification and forgiveness is costly; it is not “freely granted” in the sense modern Protestants use the phrase. In other words, it “registers the final, radical protest against the world” (49). Without this, there can be no Christianity. To treat the Reformation idea of sola fide as merely an easy way to be forgiven without the Catholic conception of salvation by works is wrong. Salvation is not by works, of course, but works are a manifestation of the faith. This is our sanctification, our struggle against the world steeped in sin. It was easy to preach the ease of one's forgiveness. It was more difficult to speak of its cognate: discipleship. This is why so much of his work is about the “Visible Community” which for him is the essence of discipleship and something Protestantism has long lost (248). The “visible church” was associated with the Catholic papacy or the Orthodox synod. Yet, Protestantism errs if it goes too far and rejects the of the specific community Christ founded to organize his followers (248). The same goes for the sacraments. While rejecting the “magical” view of the Roman church, this does not give anyone the right to reject the two sacraments Luther retained: baptism and the Lord's Supper (251). These are the visible marks with which Christ has manifest his humanity and are marks of his church. The central notion, the thesis here, is that Protestants have stressed justification at the expense of sanctification. It is one thing to call out to God to destroy our old sins, the “old man” that must be demolished, it is quite another to maintain that forgiveness. Sanctification concerns “the promise of God’s activity in the present and future” (278). Our past sins are blotted out, but this need not refer to our propensity to future sins. This is the arena of struggle. We are forgiven, but we are also called to minimize the chance of relapse. What does this all have to do with discipleship? It is to lay the groundwork for the argument that the visible community of “justified sinners” is the proper place for our Christian work. Outside it, what seems to be zeal is actually a personal arrogance and idolatry (280). He writes about this separation in a striking way:

The separation from the body of the faithful is either a) a rejection of costly grace and a turn to Bohemianism or b) the desire of “perfection” that turns away from the sinful body in the pursuit of personal sanctification that is “superior” to the brethren (281-284). Sin, the rejection of grace, over time, is almost identical to idolatry. When one rejects the simplicity of the Gospel for worldly “systems,” this is an example of “creating one's own world” (284). This includes the creation of one's own “god” and Gospel that is almost always in conformity to some worldly demand. This is the most certain mark of a false disciple and is the result of sin. Since the world is constantly assaulting our Christian life and sense of mission, the struggle must be continual. This is “costly grace” because, at least while we are in the world, all that is promised is pain, though pain with a strong sense of hope. The true disciple maintains faith and rejects the “worldly wise” regardless of what others might think or do. The connection between grace and discipleship is obedience. This is not a common theme for Protestants of any stripe. Faith alone justifies, but this does not imply the work is done. This is only the first step. The argument relative to both grace and discipleship made by Bonhoeffer is that there is never a clear distinction between faith on the one hand, and works such as obedience and struggle, on the other. Discipleship is of this sort: it is a product of faith that also puts faith and trust into action. He writes in clarification in Chapter 1:

He is stating here that grace comes first. The moment we are picking and choosing our agenda, sin has been committed and grace has been rejected. The worst form of cheap grace is the “once saved always saved” doctrine that implicitly rejects any notion of sanctification. The simple schema is that justification comes first. Sanctification is the lifelong struggle to maintain it. From this, discipleship is connected to the cross, since sanctification cannot come without suffering. The “dying of the old nature” is something that is a lifelong work that comes subsequent to faith (92-93). Discipleship is to make Christ the very center of one's existence. The notion of a single act of faith being identical to salvation and sanctification rejects this. To claim that this single act of will is identical to salvation means that the rest of one's life can be totally secular (93). It is the very destruction of the church in Bonhoeffer's view. The disciple is not very far from the apostle. The difference is really only a matter of time and proximity. For those called to the apostolic labor, Christ grants to these people the gift of being able to recognize and cast out demonic forces in the world (204-205). Without grace however, there would be no way to distinguish between one's own ideology and the truth of the Gospel. It would be all too easy to fall into the idolatry of one's own ideas. Hence, a disciple is precisely one that, through grace, is free of his own will (207). The moment any of these gifts (that is, gifts consequent to grace) are used outside the visible communion, there is a loss of grace and a lapse of faith (157). Therefore, through grace, obedience is the gateway to discipleship. Obedience is the cutting off of one's own will. Unlike most – if not all – Protestants, discipleship in Bonhoeffer's view implies asceticism. He writes: “The real difference in the believer is that he is more clearly aware than other men of the rebelliousness and perennial pride of the flesh, he is conscious of his sloth and self-indulgence” (170). Obedience is a gift, but this does not imply that it is without labor. It is not earned, but it must be maintained. It is this “other” force in our person that forces us to deny ourselves, to train our psyche to reject the things of the world. Grace does even more than this – in creating disciples, it permits the wisdom of daily life to be ignored. All is surrendered for Christ and the Gospel, and even possessions are used only for their immediate necessity, not to be saved as “insurance” against any future need (178). All is to be thrown on Christ. The moment one “saves” for the future, faith has been breached, since one's own desires – security in this case – have intervened between the person and Christ. In chapter Six of The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer uses the Sermon on the Mount to provide a set of criteria by which one can understand what a true disciple is. When one has surrendered totally to God, where all future worry has been jettisoned, these are the “poor in spirit.” This is also the notion of “meekness” or the refusal of worldly wisdom and also contains “purity” or the total surrender in innocence rather than the deviousness of the world. These are all elements of the same notion of personal surrender. The disciple “mourns” since the world is steeped in sin. Only a few will ultimately come to God. The “peacemakers” are the persecuted. Since all worldly wisdom has been rejected, they realize that few will understand them, many will mock them or worse. So in Bonhoeffer's view, the Sermon on the Mount is really a means to understand the true disciple from the false. Grace is tightly connected to discipleship in Bonhoeffer in numerous ways. First, it creates obedience and the ability to seek and understand the truth. Second, it permits a decisive break with the world and its confusion of deviousness with intelligence. It permits the disciple to withstand persecution and remain “happy” or to be in that “blessed” state the Sermon on the Mount keeps repeating. In other words, in toto, grace keeps the disciple from the world and its demands, desires and vices. The idea of “disciple” has been radically altered in modernity. One of the more severe problems is the exaggeration of the “faith-works” distinction so easily identified with the Reformation. It can be argued that the later Anglo-American Puritan tradition sublimated the ancient ascetic life to the search for scientific and financial gain. Rejecting any “works” is quite convenient for this new ideology of individualism. The modern Christian Protestant is so influence by this ideology that the idea of discipleship is strange, if not totally superfluous. Paul Barna (2001) tries to redefine the idea of discipleship – or recovers the lost idea of it – as the total dedication of the self to Christ. Using empirical surveys and other quantitative forms of data analysis, he skillfully proves the almost total hollowness of contemporary Protestants, but struggles by way of solution. The results of his empirical work are alarming, especially in that parishioners have no idea what a goal would look like in spiritual growth and cannot even provide a coherent definition of the term. They seem to believe that salvation is something granted solely from church membership or a one-time declaration of faith. Without searching the individualist and nominalist tradition inherent to Protestantism, Barna instead uses “leadership” as the cause for this lack of knowledge. Holding the Puritan aspect of the Reformation innocent, he seems to suggest that the total secularization of churchgoers is a matter of spiritual maturity. However, without works or even an idea of Christian culture, Barna has nothing to build upon. Being a disciple is not necessary if faith alone saves. The minute Barna brings up the lack of leadership and secularization of social life, his avoidance of the Puritan Calvinist influence is heroic. His mental gymnastics was already predicted by Bonhoeffer as the main problem for Protestants and the issue of discipleship. Barna writes:

Yet, there is nothing in his description of the believer that is outside of Protestantism. The Puritan mind explicitly states that's all required for salvation. Without any motive for good works (which is essentially what Barna is arguing), there will be none. If the world (that is, our daily environment) is inherently individualist and nominal, then it is secular. Further, he states, in a summary way: “All God wants to do is transform our hearts from focusing on self and the world to focusing exclusively on Him.”2 In stating this as a solution, he is just restating the problem. To turn away from the world cannot lead to discipleship, since going into this world and confronting it is essential to discipleship. Yet elsewhere, he writes “it matters because we cannot influence the world unless we demonstrate faith-based transformation” which does not separate Barna from the Council of Trent (Barna, 2001, 10). Finally, he writes in despair: “For most of us, regardless of our intellectual assent to the importance of Christian growth, our passions lie elsewhere--and our schedule and energy follow those passions” (ibid). Yet this is the essence of Puritanism. Without the ascetic life of service in God's name, all that is left is to focus “elsewhere.” The book is incoherent for this reason, restates the Catholic doctrine of works and acts surprised at a demystified, secular world. If Puritanism was the origin of capitalism, then it was the origin of individualism and nominalism. The culprit here is not hard to seek. Even with his broad and vague definition of discipleship, there seems to be no good reason to pursue it within that Americanized, Puritan context. Bonehoffer justifies this line of criticism by stating:

This sort of criticism is unavoidable when reading these important authors on the question of discipleship. “Cheap grace” is sola fide taken to an extreme: if Scriptures are the only source of religious truth and our salvation exclusively by the statement of belief, then the concept of discipleship is – ipso facto – eliminated. Dallas Willard (2006) clearly recognizes the criticism of Barna above, and states as a summary, “Grace is opposed to earning, but it is not opposed to effort.” Willard still cannot square that circle. The problem here is that Willard restates a Christian anthropology as if it is the product of modern philosophy and his personal contemplation. The fact is that each and every like could have been taken from St. John of Damascus or Basil the Great. He writes “We have knowledge of a subject matter when we are able to represent it as it in fact is, on an appropriate basis of thought and experience” (Willard, 2006, 140). What he implies is that the external world is distorted through sin and false belief. This is opposed to the early Protestant teachers in England and Holland, since they were strict empiricists. There was nothing “internal” that could distort that which is “external.” Arguing for a sort of Trichotomism, he separates the “spirit” from the “soul.” The same was done in St. Gregory of Nyssa, a millennium before him. This epistemological category was taken in its identical form as an argument for the ascetic life, since only by purging oneself of the filth, self-will and materialism of the world could the ascetic only begin to see things they way they really are. If the will is the engine to clarity, then the Reformation as preached by Luther is denied. Without a belief in this sort of “work,” Willard is forced to not answer the question as to how this epistemological change can occur. Only “it requires the will to be logical.” (Willard, 2006, 182) Suggesting the opposite of what the ancients taught, that self-will is the very nature of sin rather than its solution. The will cannot force anything to be logical since it is the disordered will of fallen man that is responsible for sin in the first place. Stating that “The soul is a substance in that it is an individual entity that has properties and dispositions natural to it, endures through time and change, and receives and exercises causal influence on other things,” Willard seems unaware that this very verbiage was a patristic commonplace (Willard, 2006 139). Relative to making disciples, the argument fails because, being a nominalist, Willard does not grasps that the ancient view of the soul was part of a holistic and ascetic life and world. Discipleship is something along the lines of what Spinoza meant by “clear and distinct” truths. Once the “spirit” is liberated from that which obstructs it (there is no idea of what this might be), it can see the external world apart from the taint of sin. The will acts as an engine for this, though it seems to be magically purified from sin. It gives the would-be disciple a false start to a problem solved 1500 years ago. Willard is an outlier among these four authors due to his overriding concern with epistemology. This is not a problem, but rather a necessary corrective to the more “practical” advice from the other authors. Willard's philosophical foundations provide the endpoint of the Christian life, which is truth. “Truth” in its broadest sense is the ability to grasp the reality of our world (ourselves included) precisely as it is, rather than as our desires make it. There can be no transformation without this foundation, and transformation is the ground of all discipleship. In Willard, the stress on the spirit as distinct from both body and soul gives him the tools to bring human action out of the world of modern desire and passion. Bill Hull (2006) uses almost the exact same phrase as Willard above by stating “Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning.” Neither author defines what “effort” really amounts to, as both use excessive verbiage and extremely dubious distinctions to avoid any reference to “works.” These two authors give 1500-year old patristic arguments as if they are modern discoveries. Totally cut off from the source of ancient Christian wisdom (and the men who put the 66 books of the Bible together) leads these writers into contradiction. The refusal to cite the patristic writers who developed the idea of real discipleship leads to the inability of any of these writers to successfully “recover” the tradition. It is this isolation from Christian history that Bonhoeffer will take issue with (see below). To illustrate this, Hull writes: “The principle of God's plan of discipleship is the impact of one life on another - the character, skill, and perspective of one godly person influencing another willing person” (Hull, 2006, 270). This is exceptionally vague and, except for the token use of the term “godly,” a totally secular idea. If this is the general idea of discipleship, then anything is. The problem for any work on discipleship from the Puritan or broadly Calvinist tradition is the motivation for this sort of labor. On the other hand, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's (1949) work situates the problem extremely well. As if answering Hull's statement above, Bonhoeffer states: “There is no faith without good works, and no good works apart from faith. If the Christian would be saved, he must do good works, for those who are caught doing evil works will not see the kingdom of God” (Bonhoeffer, 1949, 333). The distinction between “faith” and “works” has been distorted, not by Luther, but his Puritan successors at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Stating the problem with great expertise, he writes:

His use of the term “bourgeois” is strategic, since the general view is that capitalism and the mercantile life was justified on the coattails of the Reformation. In contradistinction to Willard, Barna and Hull, Bonhoeffer argues that Christ laid down the law of ascetic labor within strict limits as the essence of discipleship. Summarizing the authors above is not easy, especially given that Bonhoeffer is so radically different than the other three. Rather than dance around the issue, he forces Protestants to see the malformation of the “grace and works” distinction laid at the feet of later Anglo-American Puritans. Willard is important because he offers a foundation complimented by Bonhoeffer. Kant is famous for arguing that moral goodness cannot be measured by any physical standard. The Categorical Imperative is in part based on the pure will. “Pure” in this context is a qualitative term emphasizing its lack of any self-interest, the lack of any desire for gain. As Hegel replied to Kant, the Lutheran tradition of Bonhoeffer replies to the Anglo-American concept of sola fide. Discipleship is based on works, and salvation is designated by God judging the nature of these works. Faith is the standard, but works are not a separate category, but the unfolding of faith in time. Ultimately, the purpose behind an argument of this type is to glorify God and make clear the doctrine of grace. Nothing can manifest God's glory better than this, so the motives of putting together a volume like this is self-evidence. Beyond that, the church has to be fully aware of these doctrines and preach them accordingly. Yet again, this has everything to do with manifesting God's glory. It is not that God “needs” these truths to be shared with all, but more that human beings do. Then, these doctrines, rightly understood, provide the church with a strong sense of peace. This is to say that, no matter how rotten things seem, God's will is irresistible, what appears to be chaotic or painful at the present moment, from God's eyes, is a necessary step to the full manifestation of his glory at the last days. The editors also stress that when these doctrines are known, this motivates man to pray. The problem here is that prayer smacks of Arminianism. To pray that God come to us violates the notion of absolute election. Prayer is creative only of a conditional election by definition. In fact, taken to extremes, the Calvinist doctrine even removes the motivation for a church at all. Ultimately, the book argues that false doctrines of grace are part of the reason for the secularization of western society over the last several centuries. When human wills are made totally creative, then God is demoted. If God is so demoted and the human will exalted, then the autonomous nature of worldly life makes it easier to reject our dependency on God. If the world is separated from God and hence totally autonomous, then God is not a necessity for us. Only when God is seen as totally and unconditionally sovereign does have a proper place in our lives.