(This post is one of a sporadic series on the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles)
I am not the world’s greatest fan of St Augustine, however much I might admire his intellect. Even less am I a fan of Augustinianism. When that is refracted through the systems of later Calvinism I like it even less. So, unsurprisingly, I have some problems with the tenth of the Church of England’s articles. Let me quote it, and then tease out the issues.
X. Of Free Will
The condition of Man after the fall of Adam is such that he cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and good works, to faith, and calling upon God: Wherefore we have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing us, that we may have a good will, and working with us, when we have that good will.
(I note that archaic “preventing us” means “going before us”)
Those who read the last post in this series will know that I think we must find new ways of re-envisaging the myth of the Fall, that I see it as an ahistorical story, whose theological content needs to be re-expressed in the light of all we know now about the evolution of life on earth. That is one of the first problems I have with the article’s implication that we were created as free moral beings. The second is the concomitant implication that Adam and Eve (within the framework of that story) had the natural strength to do good works pleasing to God without the grace of God “preventing” them.
So maybe I need to back off a bit from the article and look at two ideas that seem to me to be what the article is working with, and see where they take us. The first is the idea that humans are meant to be moral agents. The second is that human beings reach their moral potential only with the grace of God.
It is a part of our everyday experience that we make choices. For many of them we feel that they are choices we freely make. Sometimes we are all too aware that they are heavily constrained by circumstance. Even then, however, maturity is usually seen to involve taking some responsibility for them. Reaching a state where we may be more free in our choices is usually seen as desirable. At the same time, when we are in retrospective mood, we can often see that, rather like a magician forcing us to pick a pre-selected card with the words “Take a card, any card”, life has constrained our choices.
When Christians engage in the same retrospection, as well as those constraining factors, they also shape the narrative of past choices and events in the light of experience of, or subsequent identification of, the work and grace of God. It is another level of explanation which shapes our understanding of our personal history. We do for ourselves what the Deuteronomic historian did for Israel. In the light of what we believe about good and evil, God’s grace and our human sin, we tell the story of our past in ways that help us make sense of it and of our present.
Augustine is really the first exemplar of this, inventing the modern autobiography along the way. Being one of the brightest and most organised intellectuals of his day, he ended up producing a system out of his own psychology. The remembrance of things past in the light of God became dogmatic declarations of divine ability and human inability. The relational dimensions of both morality and grace got lost in the process, and so we ended up with something like this article.
So where does that leave me? I want to affirm, with this article, that God is always graciously going before us, and drawing created order out of chaos, and free moral choices out of random coincidences and constrained actions. I want to affirm that we are in the process of becoming human, and the world on its way to becoming good creation, and that this is initiated, sustained and will be completed by God’s acting graciously.
I want to affirm that process takes shape and focus from the incarnation, death and resurrection of the Son of God. God created (creates) and re-creates the world in such a way that he might enter into its estranged otherness, in order to bring it to completion. In that sense, our very existence, never mind our individual moral acts, depend on the prior gracious initiative of God, and his desire for our good and, indeed, our becoming good.
Learning to become moral actors depends on being tuned in to that loving activity of God (known or unknown), which frees us from being constrained only to act in accord with nature, seeking our own benefit, or that of our immediate people group, according to the “morality” (to anthropomorphize) of evolution. So in that sense, only with the grace of God, can we act morally at all. But naming it as the grace of God comes from being able to see and experience that grace more fully in knowing oneself in relationship to God. In that sense, we can only affirm that we can do no good act without God’s gracious loving involvement, once we have come to see ourselves as existing because of, and in fulfilment of, that underlying and all-encompassing love.
What I object to most in the article is the way in which Christians may take it – indeed have taken it – and the ideas it contains as a club with which to beat the other. “There’s no morality without God.” “You can’t do anything good until you repent.” “Only Christians can be really moral people” Those sorts of statements seem to me at best unhelpful, although I would tend to describe them as smugly repugnant.
As a vision for the sort of world we want to live in, as a perspective from which to tell our personal and collective histories, as a source of prayerful gratitude and repentance as we consider our actions, however – as these things it seems to me these ideas have something helpful to say to us. They affirm both the good intentions of God for his creation and his continuing care within it. God wants to bring us to that point where our free moral choices will also be for the bringing of order out of chaos. God wants to free us from the constraints of struggling for existence, and fit us for the freedom of self-giving love.
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