The Latin Lens on Grace & Works | The Viral Knechtle-Orthodox Debate

Part 2 of 3 — Theological Letters

The following piece is adapted from a podcast I did on the exchange that went viral many months ago between Cliffe & Stuart Knechtle and an Orthodox Christian at MIT. While my typical written work includes extensive citations, I have not added references to this particular post. In addition, I have largely preserved my manner of speech, which can be a bit more colloquial than my usual writing style. Perhaps, when time permits, I’ll revise this piece to accommodate a more formal tone with proper citations. But in the meantime, I trust my prior should suffice to instill confidence that the philosophical, theological, and historical claims presented here are sound and can be verified by an investigation of the figures and sources reference.

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Before you read on, you’ll want to read part 1 and watch the clips here.

The second thing I wanted to address was something that kept arising for Stuart: this question of works and faith. He returned to this repeatedly, speaking about how his real concern is the gospel and expressing his worry that certain things being said sound like salvation by works. He kept invoking the word “grace.”

I want to focus on this because it arose again in the second clip we heard from Stuart, where he was relinquishing a number of historical positions—either stating he had no problem with them or was agnostic about them—while maintaining that the thing he’s really concerned about is this. And what is that thing? The gospel itself, and the question of works and faith and grace.

The problem I have with what’s being said there is that these are very loaded terms that are not being defined and are not being properly discussed. I think they really do go to major divides between how the Christian East and the Latin West understand historical Christianity. By “Latin West” in this sense, I’m using it in both the Catholic and the Protestant sense. I wanted to dig in here because this was one of those things that was quickly passed over. At no point did even the Orthodox participant ask, “What do you mean by works? What do you mean by faith? What do you mean by grace? Can you define your terms so that we can actually have a substantive discussion about where we might agree and where we might disagree?” That is an area I want to dig into.

The reason I want to dig down here is that I think there’s a tendency for a lot of Christians—Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox—to use a common vocabulary and presume that they’re using those terms with the same meaning. But this is actually a disadvantage when Orthodox and Catholics or Orthodox and Protestants dialogue, because there is a sense in which the meaning of terms is more closely aligned in the Protestant and Catholic world—the Latin West—than it is in the Orthodox world. This can be a point of confusion because there’s a tendency with a lot of Western discussions, specifically Protestant discussions, to presume that there’s a certain set of options with regard to any number of topics. For example, you can dig up books like “Three Views on Predestination” or “Three Views on Baptism” or “Four Views” on whatever topic. The reason is because within systematic theology—systematic thinking within the Protestant world—there’s normally a certain set of dichotomies or trichotomies for the available options. And the presumption is that anybody you’re talking to, including an Orthodox person, must fit within one of these boxes. But the problem is that the terms of the game that set those options are really reflective of certain Latin Western ways of thinking about Christianity and the topics of Christianity generally. Oftentimes Orthodoxy does not actually share those underlying presumptions that give rise to those options and paradigms in the first place.

Sometimes people will ask me what I think about equating the Orthodox view with a position within these Protestant dichotemies or triochotomies. The problem is placing Orthodoxy within these paradigms concedes the underlying foundations of the discussion, which Orthodoxy cannot concede. If people really want to know about Orthodoxy, we have to take the time to disrupt their presumptions about theology. We need to help them realize that they’re wearing certain lenses inherited from the Latin West in terms of how they approach the Bible, how they approach theological topics, and how they read certain theological terms. We have to help them see those lenses, remove those lenses, and consider a different perspective.

The great irony is that protestants often presume Orthodoxy must be closer in its presumptions to Catholocism because of certain superficial similarities between them about services or vestments. The truth is, protestants and Catholics have more in common with each other than either do with the Orthodox.

When we consider the Protestant Reformation, and the sorts of positions that emerge with Luther and Calvin and others, what you find is that these Reformers really are medieval Catholics at bottom. Even though they’re diverging from the traditional Catholic teachings, they’re still working within a broadly Catholic paradigm. If you’re going to delve into a discussion using terms like faith, works, and grace, they must be defined because how these terms are understood differentiate between Christian East and Latin West in significant ways. So that’s what I want to look at now.

Beginning with the Latin West, the best place to begin is with Augustine of Hippo. Augustine is somebody who sets the stage for the Latin discussion more generally. Prior to Augustine, there had already been talk in the Latin West about things like merits and demerits, but it ends up being formalized by Augustine. You can read about the early pre-Augustinian view on predestination here on my series on predestination.¹

And this is largely due to the Pelagian controversy. The Pelagian controversy is named for Pelagius, but it was really sparked by his student, Celestius, who is considered heretical by all stripes of Christianity, East and West, because he claims things like Adam’s sin only affects Adam, nobody dies in Adam, nobody is raised by Christ, that infants are born into the world unaffected by Adam’s sin, that the law of Moses and the gospel of Christ are equally good ways of salvation. It was basically a form of moralism that didn’t really believe in any sort of human collective or the idea that anybody is affected by the fall of Adam or affected by the redemptive work of Christ. Obviously that would have been considered heretical by all Christians.

The Pelagian controversy causes the Latin West to grapple with questions like: What can we do to affect our own salvation? What about our salvation belongs to us? What about it belongs to God? It was in that context that you start getting a lot of systematic thinking about free will, original sin, grace, and about salvation that ultimately sets the table for medieval Christianity and ultimately for the Reformation.

Before this controversy, Augustine had already started wrestling with the question of how we understand the nature of righteousness, merits, demerits, and the role of the will. The early Augustine had come to the conclusion that whenever we engage in any sort of activity our free choices ultimately reflect some sort of priority of affections. So if I’m laying on the couch and I would like to continue doing so because it’s just so cozy, but at the same time I’m thinking I haven’t worked out in a while and I really should get up to exercise, what occurs within me, the choosing being, is a conflict between competing loves or affections. On the one hand, I have a love for ease. And then on the other hand, there is the love for health, and they are currently in conflict with one another. When I make a choice, I will ultimately elevate one love over the other. Whenever we face choices, we face conflicting loves. This point dovetails with something that Augustine believes about the world. Augustine is of like mind with many of ancient thinkers who see in the world a certain hierarchy of goods.

This concept is sometimes referred to as The Great Chain of being, which says our world displays a hierarchy of being. Some are extremely godlike, and others are much more simple and less godlike. Very low on the hierarchy are rocks, which have very basic properties. Above this we have plants, which are superior to rocks because they have life. Above these are animals, which have life, locomotion, and sentience. Above these is man, which is a rational animal. And if we believe the Psalmists, man is made a little lower than the angels. In short, the ancient thinkers saw in the world either ascending or descending hierarchies of beings, who display a hierarchy of goodness.

The reason this is important is because Augustine believes that even though we have subjective preferences of certain goods, there are objective hierarchies of goods. Objectively speaking, in terms of ontology or metaphysics, and reality itself, an angel is superior to a rock as a being. And so Augustine recognizes that there is a subjective hierarchy of goods within us, reflected in our order of loves when making a choice, and there is the objective hierarchy of goods in reality.

The reason this is particularly relevant is because of what Augustine sees when answering the question, “What does it mean to be righteous?” I should love animals more than I love plants. And I should love plants more than I love rocks. And I should love man more than I love other animals and so on. And obviously, love of God should be above all other beings. When answering the question, “What is the just man like? What is it that makes him just?” the answer is that his internal order of loves ultimately mirrors the external order of goods that are out there in the world, prioritizing them accordingly, rendering to each its due, loving it according to its actual share of goodness, as opposed to a distorted share of goodness. If, for example, I am a glutton who loves the pleasures of food more than I love the good of health, or I’m enslaved to lust such that I love the pleasures of sex above chastity, then this is reflective of disordered loves. And for that reason, I’m not a just man. I am unjust.

For Augustine, when he’s identifying the difference between acts that derive from a properly ordered set of loves, they have merit before God, because they are just acts. If they derive from a disordered set of loves, then they have demerits. This also creates a distinction between the external character of the act and the internal character of the act. Let’s take as an example the act of shunning adultery.

If a man is propositioned by a woman who is not his wife, and has an opportunity to engage in some form of adultery, his refusal may not be virtuous. It might be! One might flee, like righteous Joseph, out of fear and love of God in which case, his deed would be virtuous and have merit. But alternatively, one might flee out of self-preservation, fearing the wrath of his wife. In this case, it wouldn’t have merit. Both deeds cohere with the law, but one derives from properly ordered loves and has merit before God. The other does not, it has no merits and even demerits before God because of the disordered loves from which it derives.

All of this sets the stage for what happens within the Pelagian dispute and the discussion of grace. Early Augustine put it within the capacity of man’s own free will to correct any disordered states of loves — a claim that Pelagius himself echoes. This is one of the reasons why Augustine is forced to back off of that claim in his later works.

This is where you end up getting the dynamics of grace and how grace is interpreted within the Latin West, as well as some of the dynamics of the doctrine of original sin in the Latin West after the Pelagian dispute. One of the effects that Augustine understands to be true with regard to original sin is that after the fall, what happens is man is in a position where we have disordered loves, and it is outside of our capacity of will to correct those. Basically, Augustine ends up arguing against Pelagius that when Adam was created, Adam didn’t yet have distorted loves, and he also had this supernatural assistance known as original righteousness, a form of grace—I’ll get to that term in a second—but supernatural assistance that allowed him to do deeds that were just and pleasing to God from a properly ordered set of loves.

Then in the fall, what happens is that grace is cast off. So now Adam’s loves are distorted. He’s incapable of doing truly just deeds before God. And now his deeds no longer have merit before God. According to Augustine and the doctrine of original sin then, that distorted order of loves ends up passed on to you and me. We are born into the world with our loves already disordered and distorted so that even when we do good deeds, even when we are obedient to the moral law or the laws of God, those deeds do not have merits. Why? Because the internal character of the act is disordered. It is not from a properly ordered or just set of loves.

That’s the condition of man post-fall: even when we do things that are externally good, the internal order of loves is distorted such that it has no merits before God. And that sets the stage for the understanding of grace within the later Augustine and then within the Latin West.

According to Augustine, what is the remedy to this? Augustine’s answer is grace. In this context, what grace means is some sort of supernatural assistance or effect enacted by God by which you are capable now of doing deeds that are pleasing to God from a properly ordered set of loves. Grace for Augustine actually affects or remedies that internal distorted set of loves. And by remedying the disordered set of loves, I can now do deeds from a pure love of God that is in this sense truly just internally and externally.

Without God’s assistance, I cannot do something that’s pleasing to God, even if I were a moralist like Immanuel Kant. Even if I externally started to succeed in doing that, I would still be doing it—if it’s from my own natural capacity—from a disordered set of loves. And for that reason, it wouldn’t have any merit before God. But if God, by His Holy Spirit, offers me prevenient grace, then that grace has the effect of reordering my loves, enabling me now to do deeds that are morally upright externally and internally. And from that pure love of God, I begin to do deeds that have merit before God.

This actually becomes the standard anti-Pelagian line within the Latin West. The medieval discussion continues to carry on this way of thinking. Yes, there is absolution or forgiveness of sins that comes to a person through Christ and is administered through the church. But salvation is not mere absolution. Salvation also requires that you produce positive merits before God, which can only be wrought with the assistance of prevenient grace.

This raises all sorts of questions in the medieval period, especially concerning predestination. Tthe natural question is, if I don’t have a natural capacity to turn toward God in a way that is salvific, then doesn’t it just mean that it’s up to God whether I’m saved or whether I’m damned? The natural worry is that this undermines free will. We all intuitively recognize that moral culpability depends on two things: I know what I ought to do and ought not to do, and I have the capacity to do it or not do it. That’s borne into us, ingrained in us from the start, and it’s echoed by the church fathers. So if God’s going to hold me accountable for turning to Him and you’re telling me that none my deeds have any merit before God without a renewed will, and it’s not in my power to renew my will, how can He hold me accountable for not turning to him in a way that has merit?

That’s really what sparks the medieval discussion about predestination, because there are certain people who want to say—in echo of church fathers before Augustine — that God chooses people who are worthy of being chosen, foreknowing their responsiveness to him.

The one thing you can’t be in the medieval era is a Pelagian. But when saying that God chose somebody because of foreknowledge that he would turn to him, that sounds like they have the capacity to produce merits of their own accord. And that would be Pelagian. Others question whether foreknowledge of someone’s response to prevenient grace is also Pelagian, identifying something of merit in the person’s responsiveness. There is a manifold wrestling in the wake of the Pelagian dispute asking what role, if any, free will has to play in a person’s salvation without slipping into some form of Palagianism.

I’m not going to go through that entire history because this is not a study on predestination. But suffice it to say that what Augustine wants to say, at least—and this does seem to be largely in keeping with where the Roman Catholic Church ends up during the Protestant Reformation at —is that we have no natural capacity to do deeds that are pleasing to God and have merit, that God gives prevenient grace to people, and that prevenient grace makes it possible for us to produce deeds from a properly ordered set of loves that have merits before God. But because we are free beings, we also have the capacity to cast off that grace and sin and rebel against God. And when we do that, we are putting ourselves back into a state where we have disordered loves and can no longer do things pleasing to God. And we’re in need of more grace.

On this view, whenever we do something good, it’s attributable to that supernatural aid or grace that’s been given to us. If we ever lose that grace or cast it off, that’s due entirely to ourselves. And so ultimately, demerits and sins fall to us, and merits are attributable to God. Yes, we cooperate, but ultimately we couldn’t cooperate, we couldn’t produce merits, unless God had first provided the prevenient grace necessary to do those good deeds. That’s what the medieval context ultimately says about works and grace.

When you get to the Protestant Reformation and people begin asking about whether salvation is by works or by faith, they’re asking that as medieval Catholics. They’re asking that as people who are already working within a system that has, for example, original sin and wants to presume that you have no natural capacity to do things that are pleasing to God. This is actually the real meaning of total depravity, or when Luther talks about the bondage of the will. This is the claim that says the natural man is always in need of grace. What prevenient grace does—what it really does—is it reorders your loves such that you can engage in good works. And good works here meant things like almsgiving—helping the poor or helping the sick. Whether or not you can engage in good deeds from a properly ordered set of loves that therefore have merit before God was the Catholic side of the discussion, whereas the Protestant side of the discussion started questioning whether or not salvation is by good works at all.

So what’s the alternative?

The alternative was that salvation is by grace through faith. Here, the first act of grace, as proposed by the Protestants, where salvation is by grace through faith alone, is the idea that salvation comes by a person turning to Jesus and putting their faith in Him, that there is a looking to Him that says, “I am a sinner who cannot save myself, and I need you to save me, and I put my faith in you to wash me clean of my sins and present me upright before God, even though I am not upright.” That’s the notion of faith that’s there.

Remember, for the medieval Catholic, a good deed does not have any merit before God, unless accompanied by prevenient Grace. For the Protestant, you find something similar. Calvin, for example, draws a distinction between historical faith and saving faith. There’s a difference between a person coming to some sort of intellectual assent that Jesus may have been the Son of God and a person coming to saving faith in Jesus. Just like in the Augustinian framework, the saving faith requires divine assistance by the Holy Spirit called grace.

The protestants still believe that grace goes on and works in the individual, helping them to become a better person and put to death sin and grow in holiness. This is where the protestants start to draw a distinction between justification, which they understand as you being declared righteous before God, even though in practice you’re not, and sanctification by which God helps you be a better person who is slowly becoming more like Christ. Yet, within the protestant framework whatever improvement might take place in the convert, still never produces merits.

This ends up being the dichotomy that works out in the Protestant-Catholic dispute sparked in the Reformation about whether salvation is from faith derived from grace or meritorious works derived from grace.

The reason I point this out—and all of this is necessary background—is because you can see that the terms works, faith, grace, salvation, justification, sanctification—all have a very specific and clear Latin history. The reason this is important is that when someone like Stuart asks a question like whether salvation is by works or by faith, or asks about grace, his understanding of these terms are all reflective of a very specific Latin discussion, which is entirely different from the theology of the Christian East. When someone asks these questions from a doggedly Latin Western perspective, the Orthodox Christian really can’t answer. It’s like asking, “What color is the G-chord in music?” I’m not sure that question makes sense. It’s not color. But then the reply comes, “No, I need you to answer. Is it blue or is it green?” This is what it’s like when you try to force an Orthodox Christian to answer these questions. Questions predicated on a uniquely Latin discussion that is alien to the Orthodox mind.

This is why when engaging on these topics, it’s important to flesh out what the terms mean in the Latin West and explore how this contrasts with the Christian East. We’ll look at that next week.

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