Melancthon's “Synergism.”

MELANCTHON'S "SYNERGISM." MELANCTHON'S "SYNERGISM." A STUDY IN THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGICAL DOGMATICS. BY REV. FRANK HUGH FOSTER, PH.D., Professor of Church History, Theological Seminary, Oberlin, Ohio. The problems of anthropology depend for their solution in an unusually large degree upon psychology. While the evangelical church looks to the Bible for the materials of its theology, it still depends upon the use of human reason in the interpretation and adjustment of the materials there pre- sented. Especially is this true in the matter of conversion and related doctrines. The language of the Bible is general, rhetorical, theological, practical, or popular, as you may choose to call it, but not strict, philosophical, theoretical, or scientific. The ultimate facts of the doctrine may be per- fectly clear to the biblical student, but the adjustment of those facts in a dogmatic system will depend largely upon his ability as a thinker to see in the facts what the biblical writers have not thought fit to utter in express terms, and this upon his mental equipment for his task, or, in other words, upon his knowledge of the constitution and operations of the human mind, within which the process of conversion goes on. The history of Melancthon's " synergism " brings this peculiarity of the subject before us in a very interesting way, for clearer ideas as to the nature of the soul went, in his case, hand in hand with the alterations of the theological system ; and thus his efforts to arrive at a statement of the process of conversion which should be at once true to the Scriptures and to the consciousness and the moral necessities of man, are not only interesting as the mental history of a great mind, but throw light upon the interrelations of an- 185 186 Melancthori's " Synergism." thropology and psychology, give us many suggestions as to the interpretation to be put upon the Reformation theology at the present day, and may serve to reveal the lines upon which all progress in respect to these questions is to be sought. I. THE ORIGINAL WITTEMBERG DOCTRINE. When Melancthon arrived in Wittemberg, though a famous scholar, who had declined calls to two great universities, and the author of a Greek grammar, he was still a young man, but twenty-one years of age. With a training such as his had been, though inclined to liberal ideas by the humanism in which he had been educated, and of which he was himself a representative, it is impossible that he had acquired a deep knowledge of the evangelical system as taught by Luther, or that he was prepared for the work of a theological teacher. The circumstances of the time and place, however, demand- ed that the Greek which he was called to teach, should em- brace not merely the classic writers, but also the New Testament, and he began accordingly to lecture upon the Epistle to Titus, one of the most practical and least exacting in a theological sense, ^that he could have selected. But, once within the circle of theological activity, he was carried forward to the devotion of more and more strength to theological studies, by the course of events. The disputation at Leipzig led to his transfer to the theological faculty. The following year, while still but twenty-three, he gave his first course of lectures upon dogmatics, which were published one year later as t"he first edition of the famous Loci Communes. In all this period he was Luther's pupil; and for many at least of his theological conceptions he must have been en- tirely dependent upon his teacher. In no place was this more the case than in the department before us, where the character of Luther's theology had been determined by his deep religious experience, and where, no doubt, it seemed to him and to his followers that the cause of the Reformation stood or fell with the truth of those forms of thought which he had adopted. This dependence upon Luther makes it Melancthoris " Synergism." 187 necessary, as the first step in our study of Melancthon's theories, to see what Luther's teaching was. (1) Luther's " De Servo Arbitrio." Luther's first theological training was received, next to the Bible, from the writings of Augustine, whose treatise, De Spiritu et Litera, was a favorite with him.1 His theology rested upon Augustine, but it out-Augustined Augustine. It may be taken as a generally accepted result among scientific students of Augustine, that his doctrine of the bondage of the will relates to the material rather than the formal condition of the will. In Luther's favorite treatise, and elsewhere, he often makes the distinction between liberum arbitrium, the faculty of free will, which remains unchanged by the operation of divine grace, and voluntas, which is the individual volition, the character of which grace determines.3 Hence the bondage of the will which Augustine teaches, is the persistence of evil choices (voluntates) on the part of a will which has, in every moment of evil choice, power to choose otherwise (liberum arbitrium), and the freedom of the will is that state in which the free will (arbitrium} under the operation of grace, freely chooses the%ood (by the particular voluntas), is thus healed (sanitas), and becomes fixed in holy choices (voluntaria felixque necessitas).s Thus the faculty of the will is left intact in its nature, and all Augustine's doctrines, including even his predestination, however strongly stated, must be interpreted so as to save the metaphysical freedom of the will. This theory was the production of a theologian, who was also a philosopher. The keen mind which had been trained in the schools of the ancient rhetoric and which had antici- pated the sceptical struggles of Descartes, and with its " Si fallor, sum," found his solution too, could distinguish be- 1 He refers to it in the De Servo Arbitrio, e. g., ch. 84. ' " Liberum arbitrium non evacuatur per gratiam, sed statuitur, quia gratia sanat voluntatem, qua justitia libere diligatur." Ch. xxx., § 52 ; comp. ch. xxxiii., § 58. 3 De Spir. et Lit., § 58. De Perf. Justit. Horn., ch. iv., rat. 9. 188 Melancthon's "Synergism" tween what belonged to theology and what to philosophy. Augustine depended upon the Scriptures, but he did not take the glowing and popular language of the word of God for the balanced and selected terminology of philosophical schools. But Luther could make no such distinctions. He was first and last a theologian, and one who purposed to derive his theology from the Scriptures. The theological, the religious motive predominates throughout his work, displaces and even annihilates every conscious philosophic consideration. We see these characteristics the moment we begin to read his work upon the bondage of the will {De Servo Arbitrid), written against Erasmus. He teaches that God is the sole ruler of the world, that he has predetermined all events and even the slightest actions of the will, that he has chosen certain men unto salvation and reprobated others unto eter- nal destruction without the least regard to merit in either case, and he denies utterly all free will. Yet it is evident upon the slightest examination that he is not speaking meta- physically in any of these statements apparently so clear and logical. Like Augustine, who taught that " all good was from God," ' Luther exalts God to the position of sole cause not from a cosmological but from a theological interest. God is all in all, and hence he must "control, {ntovere et agere) all in all."2 " These things are reasonable and certain," he says, " if we believe that there is an omnipotent God. " 3 The necessity of the election of God rests upon the fact of his foreknowledge, 4 but both foreknowledge and election are dear to Luther's heart because otherwise " one cannot believe God's promises, or certainly trust and rely upon them." ° In his strongest expressions about election, the same feature repeatedly appears. For examole, he says : 1 " Omne bonum aut Deus, aut ex Deo." References in Thomasius, Dog- mengeschichte, I., 496. * De Servo Arbitrio, ch. 148. * Ibid., ch. 149. 4'' Deus nihil' prascit contingenter, sed omnia incommutabili et ceterna infal- libittque voluntate et prcevidit el proponit et facit." Ch. 17. " Pugnat itaque ex diametro prascientia el omnipotentia Dei cum nostro libero arbitrio." Ch. 159. " Si Deus prtzscit, ipsum necessario fit. Hoc est, liberum arbitrium nihilest." Ch. 163. 6 Ibid., ch. 21. Melancthorl's " Synergism." 189 " If free will has the same limits and the same impotence in all men, there is no reason which can be given why one man attains grace and another not, if nothing else is preached than the lenity of the enduring, and the chastisement of the pitying God. Then God, robbed of the virtue and wisdom of electing,—what will he be but an idol of fortune, with whose approval all things may be rashly done? . Men may then even be saved without God's knowing it! " ' When he says that God " damns those who have not deserved it," * it is his object to emphasize the fact that all decrees are like the decree resulting in salvation, which does not regard the merit of men. " Let us assume," he says, " that God ought to respect merits in damning men, shall we not equally contend and concede that he looks upon merits in saving them ? " Supralapsarianism is thus necessary, in his mind, to the defence of free grace. In like manner, the expressions which are used in setting forth the bondage of the will are such as point exclusively to the material bondage which Augustine had in mind ; but they are not balanced and guarded with the care which that teacher employed.

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