Is God pleased with good works?

Last updated on: November 26, 2016 at 10:02 pm by Gerald McDermott

Is God pleased with good works? 2016-11-26T22:02:42-04:00 Gerald McDermott

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Chad Raith II, After Merit: John Calvin’s Theology of Works and Rewards

Gottingen & Bristol, CT: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016

Chad Raith is a professor of theology at John Brown University in Arkansas, where he hosts the annual Paradosis conference, which each year brings together Catholic, Orthodox, and evangelical scholars to discuss a single book of the Bible.

His new book on Calvin’s doctrine of salvation charges that there is tension between Calvin’s accounts of works and rewards. This suggests that the recent argument between NT Wright and John Piper over justification owes something to an unresolved tension in Calvin’s theology. Indeed, if Raith is right, and I think he is, it also goes back to a feature of late medieval nominalism.

There are many fascinating findings in Raith’s careful historical analysis. Let me list some of them.

Calvin’s insistence that good works after justification are still worthless in God’s sight was an innovation in the history of Christian thought. Even Melanchthon, the principal author of the Augsburg Confession, believed that the works of the regenerate are “truly meritorious” and produce “different degrees of return.”
Yet Calvin also said that good works are “inferior causes” of salvation (Institutes18.1) because God chooses to reward them.
1. God’s rewards for good works are not because of the intrinsic worth of those works, but simply because God knows that in our human nature we need rewards in order to be motivated to obey.
Heaven, according to Calvin, consists of degrees of participation or enjoyment. In other words, there is not “pure equality” there. “There is a connection between one’s sanctification on earth and one’s participation in eternal life” (36).
Thomas Aquinas taught in the Summa Theologiae that eternal life is obtained by God’s mercy, not human merit.
1. In human obedience to God, both the human being and God act in non-competitive fashion. God gives that obedience worth only because the obedient act is by grace and he (God) is the principal mover. The act has value because it is the activity of the Holy Spirit (44).
2. If that act creates a kind of debt, it is God’s debt to himself.
3. Aquinas talks about “merit” but insists that our merits are only by participation in Christ’s merits, that they add nothing to Christ’s merits for redemption, and that God saves people by predestining “how much merit will exist throughout the entire Church, both in the head and the members” (sermon on Colossians #61).
4. Aquinas took the position that nominalists, especially Ockham, would later reject—namely, that an act of obedience comes both from grace and from human free will. God and man don’t act apart from each other, as if God does part and we do part, or that God starts and we finish. As Edwards would later say, “God does all and we do all.” As Raith puts it, “Since God and the human are not on the same ontological level, God’s movement causes the human movement without being temporally prior to it” (48).
Scotus granted more autonomy to the human will, saying that God grants a certain sufficiency that we must complete. Scotus and later nominalists distinguish between the human and divine roles in ways that Thomas did not.
1. For Thomas, we participate in God’s willing. For the nominalists, we cooperate with “God’s provision for the act” (49).
  1. I would add that Thomas is closer to what Paul means when he tells us in Phil. 2.12-13 to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”
    1. God gives us both the desire and the power to act, so that we are acting and God is also acting. Paul merges the divine and human acting, but the nominalists, in their attempt to give more autonomy to the human, wanted to pry apart the two agents, divine and human.
  2. Scotus spoke of God’s “pact” in which he accepted human works even though they were not intrinsically acceptable, and chose by divine will to reward them with salvation and degrees of glory.
    1. This was one of the medieval precursors to Reformation and post-Reformation covenant theology.
    2. Raith adds that nominalism (think here of Scotus, Ockham and Biel) created an ontology of
      1. Greater human autonomy, and
      2. an emphasis on God’s will in human salvation rather than God’s wisdom (as found in Augustine and Thomas).
      3. Nominalists asserted that universals are simply names constructed in the mind of the knower, so their ontology became this-worldly and human-centered, while the high medieval (Thomistic) ontology rooted in universals stressed participation in transcendent reality and ongong divine activity (56).
      4. “Ockham’s razor” which favored fewer agents in causality tended to limit causation to one actor at a time. Rather than a Christian acting mysteriously in God’s acting, she acts “in a practically autonomous manner” to use the gifts God has given her (57).
    3. Ockham taught a “purely forensic” view of merit, with God choosing the elect by foreseeing who would respond to his gracious offer of salvation (60-61).
      1. Scotus and Aquinas, on the other hand, appealed solely to God’s hidden will.
    4. In sum, “mainstream nominalism” emphasized human effort and responsibility in ways Thomas and Augustine would have found problematic (65).
  3. So what about Calvin?
    1. He distinguished justification and sanctification in ways Luther did not.
      1. He believed growth in sanctification was a necessary sign of genuine justification.
      2. He also believed there were degrees of sanctification, that some saints are obviously more sanctified than others, and that the former would be rewarded in heaven with higher degrees of glory than the former.
    2. But because he taught that even the best good work is tainted with sin and thus deserved damnation, Calvin had no logical way to connect those degrees of sanctification with degrees of reward or glory.
    3. Calvin’s recourse was to say that God does not reward the works in themselves, but simply wills to reward them differentially to show his liberality and generosity.
    4. This use of divine will rather than divine wisdom shows nominalist influence on Calvin.
  4. Raith finds tension at this point in Calvin’s theology.
    1. Rewards are “pervasive” (179) in the Reformer’s thinking.
      1. And it is clear that for Calvin works play a causal role in our final end (176).
      2. But “it is hard to see the inner ratio between Calvin’s claims regarding justification . . . and sanctification, works, reward and degrees of glory” (177).

There is “tension” between his affirmation of real change in the those who are justified and his refusal to connect rewards to the works of the regenerate—other than to say that God accommodates himself to our need to be motivated.
1. God “purifies” our tainted good works that are otherwise damnable, but for no other reason than his will to do so.
2. This is part of the mystery of the divine will.

Where is the Bible in all of this? Does the God of the Bible find all of the believer’s good works to be damnable?
1. Calvin pointed to Isaiah’s description of Israel’s good works as “filthy rags” (64.6), but these were outward religious performances by people who might not have been regenerate.
2. The letter to the Hebrews says God is “working within us that which is pleasing in his sight” (13.21), and Jesus tells us that his elect will be greeted with the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant” (Matt 25.23).
Because the Bible suggests that God is pleased with the good works of his people, there may be good reason why Calvin’s insistence on the worthlessness of works was, as Raith points out, an innovation.
1. It also suggests that opposition to NT Wright’s view of justification because of its role for works and rewards might be misplaced.

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