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To my readers: Pardon me for this somewhat technical post. For context, see a previous post at URL: http://christocentry.blogspot.com/2010/10/justification-and-sanctification.html
Define "voluntarism" as the doctrine that our wills are the controlling factor in the progress of our sanctification. Voluntarism does not necessarily deny free and sovereign grace, because God can freely and sovereignly ordain the movements of our will and spirit, while those movements appear to us to be initiated and carried forward by our own volition (with God's help in power). In other words, free and sovereign grace can theoretically coexist in the same theological system with a strong doctrine of the human will, voluntarism. Things can be all of sovereign grace (in the hidden background), while they simultaneously appear to us to be ultimately dependent on our positive volition, though that volition is helped forward in execution by the power and grace of God.
Giving other names to this conception, we could say that "calvinism" can contain within it a bubble in which our consciousness lives and moves, and in that bubble, all our progress can appear to be regulated on "arminian" principles. This is the nature of the strongest accusation that can be made against the nature of the spiritual piety characteristic of much Puritanism.
But, I assert that if it walks and talks like "arminianism," then that is what it is. For it not to be "arminianism," in our subjective experience, we have to deny the voluntarism in some degree. That is, it must not be the case that our sanctification is subjectively totally regulated by our own volition. Put simply, we are made better by Christ through the Spirit even when we do not want to be. Though we are reconstructed as new men by Christ, and we ought to begin to act like it and to fight the spiritual warfare, it is an absolute fact, and must be an experiential fact, that our sanctification is not in our own hands, but is in Christ's hands. To make ourselves implicitly the "lords" of our own progress is the path of despair, not victory, and is even a kind of blasphemy.
Define "voluntarism" as the doctrine that our wills are the controlling factor in the progress of our sanctification. Voluntarism does not necessarily deny free and sovereign grace, because God can freely and sovereignly ordain the movements of our will and spirit, while those movements appear to us to be initiated and carried forward by our own volition (with God's help in power). In other words, free and sovereign grace can theoretically coexist in the same theological system with a strong doctrine of the human will, voluntarism. Things can be all of sovereign grace (in the hidden background), while they simultaneously appear to us to be ultimately dependent on our positive volition, though that volition is helped forward in execution by the power and grace of God.
Giving other names to this conception, we could say that "calvinism" can contain within it a bubble in which our consciousness lives and moves, and in that bubble, all our progress can appear to be regulated on "arminian" principles. This is the nature of the strongest accusation that can be made against the nature of the spiritual piety characteristic of much Puritanism.
But, I assert that if it walks and talks like "arminianism," then that is what it is. For it not to be "arminianism," in our subjective experience, we have to deny the voluntarism in some degree. That is, it must not be the case that our sanctification is subjectively totally regulated by our own volition. Put simply, we are made better by Christ through the Spirit even when we do not want to be. Though we are reconstructed as new men by Christ, and we ought to begin to act like it and to fight the spiritual warfare, it is an absolute fact, and must be an experiential fact, that our sanctification is not in our own hands, but is in Christ's hands. To make ourselves implicitly the "lords" of our own progress is the path of despair, not victory, and is even a kind of blasphemy.
Good stuff Boyd, thanks! It may have been Hodge that said something to this effect: it is not the ghost of Pelagius we need to fear but that of "Semi"!
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