The next contrast between the soils of spiritual formation I want to consider concerns synergism versus monergism, how we think about divine/human agency.
Historically, Catholicism and Orthodoxy have understood salvation as synergistic. That is to say, God initiates, empowers, and sustains, but human beings genuinely cooperate with grace. As Paul says, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you...” Divine and human action are not in a competitive or rivalrous relation. Synergism espouses a non-zero-sum vision of salvation. That is to say, God’s agency does not displace or shove aside human agency. Nor does human agency displace or shove aside God’s agency. The vision is that the more fully God is at work within us, the more fully we become ourselves.
As should be obvious, this synergistic vision is good soil for spiritual formation. Synergism makes perfect sense for practices like fasting, prayer, contemplation, confession, silence, and acts of mercy which require effort, discipline, and perseverance. Spiritual growth implies our cooperation with grace. We strain. We struggle. And we sweat. And we exert this effort not because God’s grace is absent, but because God’s grace is, in fact, empoweringly present. Human effort is not the opposite of divine action. Human effort is, rather, the very manifestation of grace in our lives.
Historically, however, Protestantism has tended to cultivate a different instinct. To be clear, there are important differences between Lutherans, the Reformed tradition, Wesleyans, and others in how they envision things like free will and God’s actions in our salvation. But particularly in the wake of Luther’s Bondage of the Will and later Calvinist emphases, Protestant spirituality has often been shaped by a monergistic imagination. That is to say, salvation is God’s work alone. Human beings contribute nothing.
Within this monergistic imagination, divine and human action are pitted against each other. The agency of God and humanity is imagined to be competitive. That is to say, the more God does, the less I do. The relation here is zero-sum. Grace and effort are experienced as opposites. Thus, any human effort at all feels suspiciously like a works-righteousness.
Which brings us back to transplant shock.
Many of the practices Protestants are trying to recover were cultivated in synergistic soil. The practices assume discipline, work, effort, sweat, and toil. Spiritual growth involves real human exertion in cooperating with grace.
When these practices are transplanted into monergistic soil, however, all this effort becomes spiritually unsettling. This is why Dallas Willard had to say, over and over again, that grace is not opposed to effort. It is, rather, opposed to earning. Willard’s line has become one of the most quoted sentences in evangelical spiritual formation precisely because of what I’m calling transplant shock. Within a synergistic context, Willard’s clarification is unnecessary. Of course, effort and grace are not competitors. Prior to the Protestant Reformation no one imagined that fasting or contemplation would threaten grace.
The popularity of Willard’s distinction illustrates how invitations to the spiritual disciplines within Protestantism must overcome a default suspicion of effort in spiritual formation. That is to say, the monergistic soil of Protestantism is resisting the synergistic plant. The difficulty here isn’t persuading Protestants to practice the disciplines. It’s that many Protestants have inherited a theological imagination that makes the disciplines themselves feel spiritually suspect.
