A Ramble About "Irresistible Grace"

Contrary to John Calvin, the uncreated energies of God are not irresistible. They surround us and fill us constantly because all life depends on His existence, but they are not irresistible. If His energies were irresistible, there should be no one in danger of being forever lost to eternal suffering. His energies must be cooperated with in the same way that a patient must cooperate with his course of treatment if he wants to get well. If a patient refuses to do what the physician prescribes, it isn't the physician's fault if the patient gets worse and worse. The first rule a physician follows is that if you can do any good for the patient, at least do no harm. Forcing a patient to submit to treatment is dangerous and can have the exact opposite effect you are looking for. It can cause harm to the patient. God knows this better than any human physician. And few if any physicians would treat a patient against their own wishes regardless.

It is said that we cannot respond or cooperate with God unless God first initiates it. We cannot have faith unless God first initiates this as well. And if God first initiates this, is this not irresistible Grace? And yet I would counter that it is perfectly possible for a person to spurn God's advances towards him or her. Even those who are joined to Him through baptism into Jesus Christ do this on a daily basis, to our shame. God doesn't play games with those He doesn't wish to be destroyed, and He doesn't wish any of us to be destroyed with our own eternal suffering. Grace requires cooperation on our part.

We trust in something. We have faith in something even if it is not in Jesus Christ. Many people put their faith in their own abilities, or in the abilities of others. More often then not we have faith in our delusions of material security. Faith itself, the ability to believe something as true and act on it, is not a product of Grace, but is something we do by nature one way or the other. We have to do this in order to remain sane. We instinctively have faith that when we go to bed, we will wake up the next day. We instinctively have faith that the sun will set tonight, and rise tomorrow. We instinctively have faith that when we sit in a chair, it will hold our weight, even if we have never seen that chair before. We base this faith on previous experiences with these phenomena from the time we are born. This goes down to the foundations of our psyche where we must have faith that certain things are true in order for the psyche to function properly and make sense and order of the world. Otherwise, it goes insane if there is nothing it can have faith in as being true as opposed to false.

We must direct this faith towards Jesus Christ in order for His energies to become active within us. This doesn't preclude Him arranging circumstances outside of us to induce faith in Him within us in order to activate Grace. It doesn't take much faith in Him to activate Grace, it only takes faith itself. As Jesus said, even faith the size of a mustard seed can rip a mountain from its foundations and throw it into the sea. Once Grace has been made active, it then moves within to induce more faith to continue the cycle of cooperation to initiate the salvific transformation. As long as Grace is active within the person in any way, it will continue to draw the person towards deification, union with God in His energies (though not His essence). But if the person refuses to cooperate with that Grace, it will result in his shifting the focus of his faith towards something else other than Jesus Christ. This will render Grace more and more inert proportionately drawing the person away from deification and towards eternal suffering.

I say again though, that we must direct this faith towards Jesus Christ Himself, and not towards a particular teaching, or system of theology, or any other person, but Jesus Christ Himself. There are a great many people that put their faith heavily in their denomination's system of theology or dogmatic teachings, and there are also a great many people that put their faith heavily in their church leaders. They do this, and yet Grace often seems stunted among them. Why? Because they trust more in these things than they actually do in Jesus Christ. Perhaps this has been the problem with the Church for centuries. It isn't that the truth, the Gospel, hasn't been there, it's that the people within the churches have put their trust in their leaders, theological systems, and dogmatic teachings, and not in Jesus Himself. Deifying Grace is only made active when we put our faith in Jesus Christ, and it is made active in proportion to this faith.

No, Grace isn't irresistible. If it were, we should all be mature, complete Saints with transfigured bodies right now. That we are not is testimony to this fact.