After a short year and a half of exposure to Orthodox theology, I'm
hardly fit to delve into weighty issues such as this one, but since it
was a rather important issue to us as Lutherans converting to Orthodoxy,
I pray I am able to do it at least some justice. The impetus for me to write this was actually a very nice discussion several of us had on a Lutheran forum recently, where someone took a very hard position that (paraphrasing) "the will is bound to sin, and Scripture teaches this clearly." Since it was a Lutheran forum, I did not want to wear out my welcome as a guest, so rather than dive neck deep into the issue I merely pointed out that if it was so clear, we would all agree on that point, and since we do not agree, perhaps the issue is more complex than it was being presented as being. I also pointed out -- and this is more the point I am trying to make -- that the Orthodox view of "free will" and the Lutheran notion of a "bound will" are not as far apart as most Lutherans seem to believe when we Orthodox say we believe in "free will." That is not to say they are identical or even similar, but they are not the polar opposites most Lutherans, unfamiliar with Orthodox theology, think they are. In that light, I do not mean to be polemical, though I will discuss differences and compare and contrast. As always, this is written from the point of view of a layman, and a very young one in the faith at that. I welcome
correction from Orthodox readers, as well as from Lutheran readers since
I will be discussing some points of Lutheran theology as well.
Lutherans hold that the human will is bound to sin. By this, they
mean that before conversion, the human will is incapable of willing and
doing the good and can only sin. Lutherans do make a distinction
between freedom of the will in "things above" (i.e., pertaining to God)
versus "civil righteousness" or "things below" (i.e., whether to give to
charity, what color shirt to wear, etc.). But the basic understanding
is that before conversion, the human will is bound to sin and
can do no good in the eyes of God. Luther's "Bondage of the Will" is
the seminal text on this issue, and while it is a very difficult read
(my copy is well worn and has notes and underlines all over it), it is
well worth the effort for any serious Lutheran. Luther was, in my
estimation, a master theologian in many respects. While I disagree with
a lot of what he wrote over the years, and while I further disagree
with some of the dogmatic points in the Book of Concord including those based on Luther's understanding of the human will, sin and how these apply in salvation, I want to say up front I remain an admirer of his work and in
particular this text. It has been a while since I read "Bondage of the
Will," so I will not delve into it in great depth. Rather, as noted above, my focus
will be on the Orthodox understanding of the human will, the human
person, the human nature and how the three concepts interact with one
another. This will be contrasted in part against the Lutheran
understanding as I understand it, but only to demonstrate my belief that
the Orthodox understanding of the freedom of the human will and the
Lutheran understanding of the bondage of the human will are not as
incompatible or mutually exclusive as might appear at first blush.
To be clear, we do not agree on this issue. My point here is not to pretend we do, but rather to point out that I do not think the
disagreement is what most Lutherans think it is. We
Orthodox do not have a problem with the Lutheran understanding that we
cannot "work our way to heaven," nor do we have a problem with the
Lutheran understanding that the human person, bound as we are in our
mortal flesh, is inevitably prone to sin. The disagreement is in large
part based upon how one categorizes person and nature, and how the will
relates to those two philosophical categories. Since I am at best a hack philosopher, I also welcome correction on
any points of philosophy I raise here.
For the Orthodox, the issue of the human will and its relation to
the human nature revolves around the questions of Who is God and who are
we. God, we would say, is eternal, He is life itself. Put another
way, there is no life without God, for there is no existence without
God. Thus, God's nature is eternal, life-giving, and good. We are, by
contrast, naturally dependent on God for our existence. Any life we
have, whether mortal (i.e., subject to death) or eternal is from Him.
"For in him we live and move and have our being." Our nature as created is good, even "very good" (
see Genesis
1:31), but cannot subsist in and of itself without God sustaining it.
This brings up a second distinction in Orthodox theology -- essence and
energies. We can never communicate with God in His essence. In this
sense, "essence" is roughly synonymous with "nature." We can never be
as God in our essence/nature, for we are created and not by nature
eternal. But we can communicate with God's energies, and in that
communion we can have eternal life through Him. This is the state of Adam and Eve
before the Fall -- they were in communion with God's divine and
life-giving energies. Note: they were
not naturally immortal, because they were not divine. Rather, they were creatures with the ability to live eternally through communion with God. What Adam and Eve lost in the fall was this
communion, not the ontological properties of the nature itself.
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| The Holy Fathers of the Sixth Ecumenical Council |
So with that as a very simple and rudimentary background, I'll turn
to the human will. Most Lutherans are familiar with the heresies of
Nestorianism and Monophysitism. The former was the heresy that the
human and divine natures of Christ are disunited from one another. The
latter was the heresy that Christ only had one nature -- a human/divine
nature. Less familiar, in my experience at least, is the heresy of
Monothelitism. Monothelitism is a middle ground between these two
heresies, and it held that Christ had two distinct natures that
communicated with one another, but only one will, which was a
divine/human will. The Monothelites held that because Christ was one
divine person, He had only one will, and His human will was essentially
subsumed by His divine will. The 6th Ecumenical Council at
Constantinople rejected this heresy, holding that the human will
pertains not to the person, but the nature. The Council stated it
thusly:
"Following the five holy Ecumenical Councils and the holy and approved
Fathers, with one voice defining that our Lord Jesus Christ must be
confessed to be very God and very man, one of the holy and
consubstantial and life-giving Trinity, perfect in Deity and perfect in
humanity, very God and very man, of a reasonable soul and human body
subsisting; consubstantial with the Father as touching his Godhead and
consubstantial with us as touching his manhood; in all things like unto
us, sin only excepted; begotten of his Father before all ages according
to his Godhead, but in these last days for us men and for our salvation
made man of the Holy Ghost and of the Virgin Mary, strictly and
properly the Mother of God according to the flesh; one and the same
Christ our Lord the only-begotten Son of two natures unconfusedly,
unchangeably, inseparably indivisibly to be recognized, the
peculiarities of neither nature being lost by the union but rather the
proprieties of each nature being preserved, concurring in one Person
and in one subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons but one
and the same only-begotten Son of God, the Word, our Lord Jesus Christ,
according as the Prophets of old have taught us and as our Lord Jesus
Christ himself hath instructed us, and the Creed of the holy Fathers
hath delivered to us; defining all this we likewise declare that in him
are two natural wills and two natural operations indivisibly,
inconvertibly, inseparably, inconfusedly, according to the teaching of
the holy Fathers. And these two natural wills are not contrary
the one to the other (God forbid!) as the impious heretics assert, but
his human will follows and that not as resisting and reluctant, but
rather as subject to his divine and omnipotent will. For it was
right that the flesh should be moved but subject to the divine will,
according to the most wise Athanasius. For as his flesh is called
and is the flesh of God the Word, so also the natural will of his flesh
is called and is the proper will of God the Word, as he himself
says: 'I came down from heaven, not that I might do mine
own will but the will of the Father which sent me!' where he
calls his own will the will of his flesh, inasmuch as his flesh was
also his own. For as his most holy and immaculate animated flesh
was not destroyed because it was deified but continued in its own state
and nature (ὄρῳ
τε καὶ λόγῳ), so
also his human will, although deified, was not suppressed, but was
rather preserved according to the saying of Gregory Theologus: 'His will [i.e., the Saviour’s] is not contrary to God but
altogether deified.'
We glorify two natural operations indivisibly,
immutably, inconfusedly, inseparably in the same our Lord Jesus Christ
our true God, that is to say a divine operation and a human operation,
according to the divine preacher Leo, who most distinctly asserts as
follows: “For each form (μορφὴ) does in communion with
the other what pertains properly to it, the Word, namely, doing that
which pertains to the Word, and the flesh that which pertains to the
flesh.”
(emphasis mine, parenthetical Greek in original).
If this is true -- if the will is
natural and not personal -- this leaves us in a bit of a quandary when
examining the Lutheran position that the will itself is bound.
Lutherans typically hold that the nature in man is not destroyed, but
totally corrupted such that it is unable to will and do the good. If
this is understood as a corruption by virtue of the broken communion
with the divine energies, I believe we Orthodox would agree to a point. But if this corruption is natural -- if the nature itself is
marred and ontologically changed such that it has lost the natural will
as it was created and cannot be used by a human person to either will or
do the good -- then we have a Christological problem. St. Gregory the
Theologian wrote "what is not assumed is not healed." Therefore, Christ
either assumed a human nature that was ontologically corrupted and
could not be used to do anything but sin, or Christ assumed a different
nature than Lutherans holding to this view would say we as human persons
share, such that our nature is not actually healed. I should note here that some Lutherans who are friends of mine
do not go as far as to say the will itself is corrupted in an
ontological sense. I should also note that the Formula of Concord seems
to reject that view as well, holding that the nature itself is not sin (but, in my opinion, being quite unclear on that point when read in context). But that is the problem we see and that is the view we reject, to the extent
any Lutherans or anyone else holds to it (and it is my experience that
many Christians do). To the extent the will is seen as existentially
corrupted, we would say there is an irreconcilable Christological
problem.
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| St. Maximus the Confessor |
Having thus described the Lutheran and Orthodox views, I would say at
this point that I don't think the two positions end up all that far
apart at the end of the road. We Orthodox would say that in our
person, insofar as the natural will remains disconnected from the divine
energies, we are inevitably bound to sin. We can will the good on occasion, and we
can even do it in part (the natural will remains, but is obscured by
what St. Maximus the Confesser referred to as the "gnomic will," which is a mortal use of the will that deliberates between good and evil rather than knowing and doing the good and knowing and rejecting the evil). But we cannot consistently will the
good or do it. We are typically confused and blinded, trying to decide what is good and evil, and we are usually wrong -- even our choices to do what might otherwise be called "good" are marred by our self-interested, inwardly focused narcissism that is a result of our mortality. In addition, while we don't hold to the primarily forensic
notion of salvation that many Lutherans do, we would agree that our good
works do not "please God" in the sense that they cannot attain our
salvation (we, of course, would say salvation is not about "pleasing
God" in the first place -- regardless of how
many "good works" we do, we still "miss the mark" -- we are still
sinners). So the same problem of sin Lutherans see is also present in
Orthodoxy. It is just present in a different philosophical and
theological framework. When we say our will is free, we are
not saying that our ability to
use the will apart from the grace of God is free, only that the will is by nature free and capable of
being used by a person to choose between good and evil. What we as
individual human persons enslaved by our mortal flesh and focused on ourselves and putting our needs above all others are actually capable of accomplishing with this natural will is a
different matter entirely.
As should be obvious, we maintain a sharp division between person and nature. Because of this, we would
say that natures do not sin, people do. Which is to say, we cannot
attribute our sinfulness to the nature, which is and remains good, but
rather the nature is "sinful" only insofar as it is bound up in a specific person who uses it to sin. There is no unhyposticized nature. There is no such thing as a nature
that is disconnected from a person. It is my observation that when some Lutherans discuss the bondage of
the will, they often use words like "our will" or "my will," and the possessive indicates that this is a conflation of person and nature. No one has a nature that belongs to them, except inasmuch as that nature is hyposticized -- bound to their person. As one example, I have
heard it said frequently among Lutherans that "our will is bound to sin unless and until Christ
converts us, after which our will is free to will and do the good." My reading of the Book of Concord would agree with this view as being representative of Lutheran theology. But
in this sense, if we are to reconcile the Orthodox and Lutheran views, it must be that the use of the will is what is at issue,
not the natural will itself. If that is not the case, we would reject the Lutheran view because if it is true, the
regenerate man has a different nature than the unregenerate man, and we
have a category error. If the regenerate man has a different nature than the unregenerate man,
one of them is no longer truly human ("nature" means
the essential properties of being for any given thing, in this case,
humans).
We would say, by way of contrast, that the natural will remains free, but we as
persons are bound, imprisoned, obscured, blinded, etc. We are so bound
because we are disconnected from the divine energies of God, not because
our nature is ontologically changed. We see the contrary claim as a
confusion of person and nature. A frequently used Lutheran liturgical
confession says "I confess that I am
by nature sinful and
unclean." We reject this out of hand. But what we
would agree with is that if, when one says "my nature" that is understood to
mean the human nature as I possess it in my person, then that nature is inevitably used
by me (as a person) to sin.
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| The Annunciation |
How Christ rectifies this situation is perhaps another distinction
between Orthodox and Lutheran beliefs. We would say that Christ assumed
our human nature, and in His person, He reunited that
nature with the divine and life-giving energies (which subsist in His person because He is a divine person and He eternally has a divine nature). In this sense, Christ
did not assume a "glorified" nature, but rather He glorified the same
nature you and I share in His divine person. Glorification in this
sense is not primarily forensic, as if Christ assumed a nature that is
without sin in order that He might meet the demands of the Law, while we
have a "sinful nature" that cannot possibly meet the demands of the
Law. This, again, would mean that Christ assumed a nature that was not fully
human (or, alternatively, that we are not fully human). Rather, we
would say the nature itself is not sinful, but Christ, in His Person,
did not put it to use to sin as we do. He assumed our nature, albeit without sin. We,
then, are able to put the will to good use through union with Christ. In that union, we are able now to both will and do the good. This is, in a sense, similar to Lutheran theology which holds in the Formula of Concord that "before conversion" we cannot cooperate with God, but "after conversion" we can and must cooperate with God, albeit in weakness. The primary difference being that we see this as being part of the ongoing and never-ending process of Theosis, whereas Lutherans would tend to sort out justification and sanctification, and keeping our cooperation in the latter category. As a side note, I was surprised to learn recently that some Lutherans deny that we can cooperate even in sanctification, which is not how I was taught when I was a Lutheran, and is certainly not how I read the Lutheran Confessions.
For the Orthodox, union with Christ is not obtained either by
not sinning or by having our will (and thus our nature) ontologically
changed in some sense. We obtain union with Christ by communion with Him, i.e., by communion with the divine energies of
God, i.e., through the Sacraments, i.e., through the Church. God
saves us by reuniting our nature to His divine energies in the person of His Son,
and by uniting us as persons to His Son in the Sacramental life of the Church. Our nature
remains as it was before, but illumined, having abilities and power that
it lacked before. This union is ongoing -- it is a process rather than
an event. But it is the union that we see as salvific, not merely the
juridical status before the Law (though, we would say, that is certainly
part of salvation, and an ongoing part at that). The Lutheran Confessions use the iron/fire analogy to
discuss the two natures of Christ in the Formula of Concord. We would
use the same analogy (and the Fathers did as well) to describe not only
proper Christology, but also our union with the Godhead. Our nature
(typified by iron) is not ontologically changed. But once illumined, as the analogy goes, the iron
can heat, give light, burn, etc. And yet it remains iron, such that if it is removed from and therefore without illumination, it can do none
of those things. It is cold, dark, lifeless. This is analogous to how the human
nature is healed according to the Orthodox. Not by being changed in an
existential sense, but by being illumined by the divine energies of God.
I am certain this does not do justice to the topic, and I am sure I
have erred somewhere in all of this, but I do hope it offers a basic
framework of understanding and perhaps a springboard for further
discussion. I have also not dealt with the Orthodox understanding of
synergy, which is the next logical step in this discussion. But I do
hope I have given at least a simplistic understanding of what the
differences are and, more to my point, what the similarities are,
between the two views. Please forgive me where I have erred.
