THE PROBLEM OF GOOD WORKS
FOR NOMINALISTS

SALVATION BY GRACE ALONE WITH NO HUMAN
COÖPERATIVE RÔLE WHATEVER?

© 2000, 2003 by Orchid Land Publications

[rewritten 20030414 (ter)]

     The Nominalist framework invented in the latter Middle Ages formed the basis of the Protestant Reformers' assumptions of reality:  Its basic premise was its quite revolutionary insistence (it called itself the via moderna "modernism") that every existent thing is a separate reality--unrelated, except verbally, to other individual things that are commonly supposed to group together to form an ontological class.  Not only could Christ's Immolation not be repeated (as all believe); there would be not later offering up of His Body and Blood by Him IN His ontological members.   Nominalism elevated will and imputation about ontology:  God imputed Adam's sins to subsequent newborns, and Grace became simply an imputation of virtual righteousness to a given sinner.  (For  the rise of Nominalism, CLICK HERE (as well as the links to that page); and see also HERE, where the idea of a "spiritual" body is mooted.)  CLICK HERE FOR "WHAT IS SALVATION?" AND SEE ALSO HERE.   

     Nominalism was called the via moderna; Luther call himself a modernus as a way of expressing his embrace of Nominalism.  Luther had a second modernism--the devotio moderna.  Both modernisms fostered individualism, the ethelothreskía "self-invented piety/worship" denounced  in Colossians 2:22.  Thinkers influenced by spiritualizing trends like the devotio moderna had and have a Gnostic view of the non-utility of created matter (incarnation, resurrection of the flesh, Mysteries) and time (tradition, development) in religion.  They illogically interpret John 6:63 ("The Spirit is what gives life; flesh is profitable in no manner") in a two-valued way, as though a tool or vehicle (flesh) were useless simply because its user (Spirit) is what makes it work.  

The sense of the foregoing verse is obviously that matter by itself, i.e. not energized by Spirit, is of no use.    Another misunderstood passage has been John 15:5:  "As for one who dwells IN ME [an impossible idea for a Nominalist if taken ontologically] and Me in Him, that person bears much fruit; for apart from Me you all are unable to do a single thing."  Of course, if Grace is not God's uncreated Life (the Orthodox believe that it is), it follows that Christ's worshipers cannot be ontologically one with Him since they do not share his divine Life.  (The three conceptions of Grace discussed elsewhere on this site [CLICK HERE] will be take for granted in what follows.)  Western Christians in general have had no way out in their understanding of unity with God's Essence (which is ontologically imparticipable) but to hold that it is virtual--intentional (conceptual) among the Thomist Latins; volitional (covenantal, imputed) among Protestants.  The Orthodox of course accept an ontological unity with God's participable uncreated Energies.  Any reader can see that Western theology exists in a thought world with a view of reality vastly different from that of the Greek New Testament (with 26 instances of energy words in St. Paul alone) and Greek-speaking Christians from the beginning (two centuries in Rome itself) until the present day.  This resulted from the speculations of Punic jurists--Tertullian, Cyprian, and above all Augustine--and those influenced by them--but just as much, or more, by the influence of the Muslim Aristotle, which brought to the West the knowledge (in Latin translations) that ended the Dark Ages and provided the forms for the two Western theologies.
     Grace and works conflict in the Nominalist framework because one is exclusively of God and the other exclusively of a human.  A good work that a worship allows the Spirit to energize in oneself (see Philippians 2:12-13 below) is not acceptable to a Nominalist.  As Nominalism is ontologically individualist, one individual cannot "be in" or "share the being of" another the way the divine Energies are share in by Christ's members.    Because there is a war between the uniting two entities for some thinkers (Luther stepped over the line when he said, "Sin boldly [fortiter]!"), the synergy (synergós "coöperator, coworker" is found a dozen times in the New Testament) of the Head of Christ's Body (viz. Christ) and His members cannot be understood ontologically, as already pointed out.  Calvinists even interpret the Eucharist in virtualist terms.
      When a person of one orientation reads the New Testament, the axioms of her or his paradigm impose given senses of the words read.  This happens when readers of the three different thought worlds already mentioned read the following:

(SEE HERE ON ENERGY & HERE ON SYNERGY.)  

     Note that the synergy described in these and other passages is a one-way or uneven synergy in which the Energizer is the all-holy Spirit, and the member of Christ simply volunteers to coöperate with the Energization.  It is to be emphasized that the result good works are Christ's as much as those of the member of Christ; the Augustinian-Western either-or conflict of Grace and works is foreign to the energy framework.

It is possible to cite in this connection many "energetic" passages in the New Testament as sources that the preceding Orthodox teachings have been built up from.  Aside from 1 Cor. 12:6, 2 Cor. 7:10, Eph. 2:2, 3:20, Col. 1:20, 1 Thes. 2:13, and especially Philp. 2:13: "For 'tis God energizing in you all both to will and to energize for the sake of what is pleasing [to Him]" (cf. the preceding verse 12), there are others (CLICK HERE).     

     The Reformers thought that even with Grace, believers cannot please God except in the sense that he attributes or imputes "righteousness" to them.  To think otherwise in their framework would be to detract from God and Grace (as understood by the Reformers).
     It is totally different in Orthodoxy, whose presuppositional framework makes it obvious to speak of Grace and life as Energies--uncreated Energies of God that can be and are channeled in the incarnate vehicle of the divine LOGOS ("God's Reason") that was Jesus Christ--which can be and are shared by Christ's real members; and which can be and are channeled through the material vehicles of water, oil, bread, wine, an icon (as St. John of Damaskós so eloquently said), and so on.   The Community of Saints is just a metaphor in a Nominalist thought world, a virtual reality rather than an ontological reality.   The idea of Christ's members' ontologically becoming one with Him and sharing His death and Resurrection--in short, participating in His Life (the uncreated Energies of God [cf. 2 Pet. 1:4]), that fill and operate in them--is not on the Nominalist screen.  One of this background can at most speak of "covenantal unity."  The Orthodox idea that what is Christ's becomes His members' is absent in both Western interpretations of Grace.  Even more alien to them is our teaching that the good works that a member of Christ allows the Head of the Body to perform in oneself are ontologically Christ's as well as that member's. (Of course, the members are disequal; some are hierarchs, some hands, some feet, some procreators, etc.)  The ideas of God's imputing an ancestor's guilt to a newborn and its inheriting a moral flaw "by natural generation" are as remote from commonsense for an Orthodox worshiper as are the teachings of imputed righteousness, a virtual  Body and Blood in the Eucharist, and a virtual unity with God's Essence.
     One can contrast the Western idea of a "state" of Grace (it is static or state-like in different ways, since  ontological and uncreated as well as non-operativa in Roman Catholicism; imputational among the Reformers) contrasts with the energetic-ontological view of Grace in the East.  Nothing could be more obvious than that the opposed views represent different thought worlds, cognitive orientations, or paradigms.  These outlooks or phronémata go back to the Muslim Aristotle.  One's view of Grace affects and is affected by one's view of Salvation.  Some might say that, while good works do not have any connection with Salvation, we do them anyway as things commanded and willed by God.  In all of this, we see an unintegrated picture, a gulf and antinomy between Grace and works that vanishes when one thinks of Christ and His members unified by and sharing His Life, His uncreated Energies, saving Grace.
         The long and short of it is that the conflict between Grace and works so prominent in the West from Augustine onward just does not exist in Greek-language Christianity.  Instead of being at war in the Nominalist manner, the are synergistic . . .  though of course there may be a war between one's relying on one's own efforts (without Grace, as with Pelagians) and the traditional Eastern understanding.   In fact, the Eastern view is often interpreted as Pelagian when read by someone of a Western orientation or paradigm.  Eastern ontology is poignantly condensed  in the words of the Orthodox divine Liturgy when Christ is addressed as "You are both Offerer [in us] and the Offered."  It is correspondingly true that Christ's members are offered up in His Body.
     For SS. Eirenaios, Maximos, and others, human reason and freewill (the Icon of God, not lost at the Fall) remain mere potentials without the Energy or Grace of the Assimilation of God (lost at the Fall) cannot avoid sin and are incapable of pleasing God as He deserve and as far as being saved are concerned.  At holy Baptism and in the holy Communion, the Assimilation is restored, though it often gets set back or thwarted by sin in adults capable of reasoning.  It can be lost.  The New Testament uses (h)omoiótes "similarity" as a metaphor.  (H)omoíoma is an image or resemblance, the result of the Assimilation to God.  

     The word for "Assimilation," (h)omoíosis occurs eight times in the LXX; (h)omoioma "likeness" occurs about forty times.    Jas. 3:9 speaks of those made according to God's Assimilation.  (Rom. 1:23 uses both omoioma and eikon in the same verse--"into the resemblance of a corruptible human icon/image.")  St. Eirenaios and later writers built on the distinction in Genesis  between the icon of God and the Assimilation to God, though the distinction is sometimess less than strictly adhered to in some passages of the New Testament.  The idea of  Salvation without Grace is as un-Orthodox as it is un-Latin or un-Reformation.     In the Reformation view, Grace comes to a believer by "faith [volitionally interpreted as "confidence, loyalty"] alone."  That the human believer has no rôle in the matter is no problem for Luther and Calvin, who taught that believing or not is predestinated by God.
     Traditionalists, however, see a necessary rôle for believers--who can accept or thwart Grace.  The Orthodox understand both knowledge and will (consent) to be necessary aspects of virtue and sin or guilt.  This is why a newborn cannot inherit an ancestor's sin, let alone by physical generation.  Christ was born of a Virgin so that, being a true human, He would not inherit the loss of the Assimilation that characterize his forbears other than His Mother, who received the Assimilation by a special donation, as we read in Luke 1.  (She is called Mother of YHWH in 1:43; note that Jews substituted "my Lord" for YHWH, which they were forbidden to say.)  

     That there is no Salvation without Grace hardly means that Salvation is by Grace alone --an instance of illegitimate two-valued thinking.  That Salvation requires Grace but not Grace alone, the human worshiper playing no part, is simply the commonplace logical distinction between a necessary and sufficient cause or condition vs.   a necessary but not sufficient one.   Grace is an unearned reward here.  Grace "alone" would leave out the human acceptance and will therefore not prove an acceptable doctrine for non-predestinationists--or for other Nominalist, in whose thinking "this alone, that alone" is pretty solidly ensconced, whereas shared Energy and "synergy" are more typical of Orthodoxy.  These statements do not bespeak an insufficiency on the part of Grace, but the necessity of a human's freedom to reject or work with (be energized by) Grace.  Calvinists insist that Grace is irresistible.  The Orthodox believe that co-operating with Grace leads to the reward of more Grace for Grace (John 1:16), something distinct from "earning" Grace through using Grace to perform good works. 

No traditional view of Grace presumes that it can be "earned"; certainly, Augustine, who quote John 1:16 now and then, did not think Grace could be earned.  Christ's parable in Luke 17:10 is worth reading again.
      Since synergy is often misunderstood in an objectionable sense in which the human works and the divine works more or less equally as joint agents; in fact, that's about all it can mean in nominalism.   In the Orthodox framework, however, the divine side is that of the Origin and true Agent, whereas the human is partly passive in accepting the gift of Grace and partly active in striving with the aid of uncreated Energy against the devil to do good to please God.  God is pleased with the good works performed by the Spirit's working in Christ's members.  And they receive some assurance--which would be lacking if they weren't obeying Christ--that they are on the right side of the war between Christ and satan.
     Before discussing Bible references to synergy (discussed also HERE), let it be said that what is ontologically no problem for a person setting out from Biblical and traditionalist assumptions is of course untenable and in fact gobbledygook for anyone starting out from the Nominalist framework invented in the late Middle Ages.   Orthodox views cannot make sense under Nominalist premises.  Can you imagine the walls of a Calvinist meeting house furnished with icons that surround the congregation with reminders of the unity of heaven and earth?  That contravenes the Calvin who forbade meeting-house walls to display anything but Laws--the Ten Commandments, whose rôle and position near the beginning of the old Calvinist service (and the Elizbethan Book of Common Prayer) were very similar to that of the Beatitudes in the Orthodox divine Liturgy.  But how different the import of Moses' Decalogue and Christ's Beatitudes are!  The moral is that you cannot get here (sharing Christ's Life and Energies) from there (Nominalism).
     A Nominalist would have to (improbably) step out of one's Nominalist shoes and view the world energetically/ontologically to understand why there is no conflict between faith and works--but rather a synergy between them.  One can cite synergeîn not only in the LXX but also in 1 Cor. 12 and the beginning of Rom. 12 (on the Body of Christ) as well as Mark 16:20, Rom. 8:28, 1 Cor. 3:9, 2 Cor. 6:1, and of course James 2:22--though here it is faith and works that are synergetic, rather than the Head and the members of His Body.  Synergós usually has a purely human reference in the New Testament (though Rom. 16:9 refers to fellow-workers "in Christ['s Body]," or possibly [by Christ"].  (Cf. also 1 Thes. 3:2; in 2 Cor. 1:24, "fellow-workers, coöperators" are in the context of "faith."  Cf. also cf. Rom. 8:16.  [Incidentally Phil. 4:3 refers to St. Clement, who wrote the early Epistle describing a church under bishops, priests, and deacons.])  While Philp. 2:13, already cited, does not use synergetic terminology, its energetic terminology expresses the idea so inspiringly that the passage deserves to be repeated here:   "For 'tis God energizing in you all both to will and to energize for the sake of what is pleasing [to Him]" (cf. the preceding verse 12).

SEE ALSO HERE & for background HERE