Mary and synergism

Over the weekend I finished John MacQuarrie’s Mary for All Christians (excerpt here) and thought I’d jot down some thoughts on it. MacQuarrie, a Scottish Presbyterian turned Anglican is a noted theologian who has been involved in various ecumenical endeavors, particularly with Roman Catholics.

One of the interesting contentions MacQuarrie makes is that the division betweeen Catholics and Protestants on the importance of Mary is related to the vexed question of monergism vs. synergism. To oversimplify, monergism says that in matters of salvation God does everything. This is associated with Calvinism and the idea of “irresistible grace.” Synergism, by contrast, is the view that there is an element of human cooperation in salvation, that God actually waits on us for our response. Of course, most adherents to synergism would say that God’s grace in some way enables our response, but it doesn’t determine it.

The “Catholic” view, being more synergistic, thus attributes far more importance to Mary. Because of Mary’s response, “Let it be to me according to your word,” the Incarnation and human salvation are made possible. God has allowed the fate of the human race to depend on the response of a single young girl.

Calvinists and many Lutherans would strongly object to talking like this. God’s will doesn’t require human cooperation to be effective. But MacQuarrie argues that the very nature of salvation is such that it requires a free human response. Salvation isn’t something that is external to us, or happens “above our heads” in some heavenly transaction, as some Atonement theories seem to portray it. Salvation is being freed from the power of sin, which essentially involves a change in us, and our willing cooperation.

MacQuarrie criticizes the view, which he attributes to Karl Barth, that salvation is an event outside of us, and which might not even have a “subjective” effect:

I was careful to say that there are ambiguities in what Barth says about salvation and the human beings’s part (or lack of part) in it. Though salvation is, in his view, an objective act accomplished by God, he does believe that it is important for human beings to become aware of God’s redemptive work and to appropriate it in their lives—he can even at one point introduce the controversial word ‘synergism’ or ‘co-working,’ though he envisages this as something which does not belong to redemption itself but is subsequent to it. I do not think, however, that his occasional modifications are sufficiently clear or that they are fully integrated into his main argument. Certainly, he never concedes what is for me a vital point—that from the very first moment when the divine grace impinges on a human life, it needs for its fruition a response, however feeble, of penitence and faith. Not for a moment is it being suggested that the human being initiates the work—the initiative belongs to God. But if it is merely outside of us, without us and even against us, then nothing worthy to be called ‘salvation’ can take place. There has got to be something corresponding to Mary’s reported words to Gabriel: ‘Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word’ (Lk. 1:38).

[…]

In theology and probably in many other subjects as well, highly one-sided solutions to problems are rarely satisfactory. As far as our present problem is concerned, I believe that in any adequate theology there must be a place both for divine grace and for human effort, for divine initiative and for the human acceptance and active response. When [E.P.] Sanders speaks of getting these things in the right order and well balanced, I take him to mean that God’s grace comes first, and presumably it is grace that evokes and enables the human response, but the priority of grace does not for a moment render the human response superfluous, or suggest that the person who is the recipient of grace is in any way delivered from the imperative to bring forth ‘fruits worthy of repentance’ (Lk. 3:8). It is the combination of divine grace and human response that is so admirably exemplified in Mary. She is ‘highly favoured’ of God (or ‘full of grace’ in the familiar Vulgate rendering), but she is also, in words which I quoted from W. P. DuBose, the one who ‘represents the highest reach, the focusing upwards, as it were, of the world’s susceptibility for God’. If we accept that the human being has been created by God, endowed with freedom, and made responsible for his or her own life, and even if we accept in addition that there are limits to freedom and responsibility, and especially that through the weakness of sin no human being can attain wholeness of life through effort that is unaided by divine grace—even Kant in spite of his insistence on autonomy conceded as much—yet we are still bound to say that there must be some human contribution to the work of redemption, even if it is no more than responsive and never of equal weight with the grace of God.

Though this kind of talk is liable to drive confessional Lutherans to drink, MacQuarrie enlists the aid of Philip Melanchthon, Luther’s right-hand man:

It is often claimed that [Melanchthon] taught a doctrine of synergism, though some Lutherans have tried to play down this side of his teaching. But others have accused him of betraying the Lutheran cause and of subverting even the key doctrine of justification by grace alone. The truth is that Melanchthon retained a strong humanistic bias through the passionate controversial years following the Reformation, and therefore he could never feel at ease with doctrines which seemed to him to threaten such essential human characteristics as rationality, freedom and responsibility. So he was obviously unhappy with such notions as predestination and irresistible grace. He could not accept that, as he put it, ‘God snatches you by some violent rapture, so that you must believe, whether you will or not.’ Again, he protested that the Holy Spirit does not work on a human being as on a statue, a piece of wood or a stone. The human will has its part to play in redemption, as well as the Word of God and the Spirit of God. Such teaching might seem to us to be just common sense, but in the highly charged atmosphere of Melanchthon’s time, it needed courage to say such things, and it brought angry rejoinders from other Lutherans. But Melanchthon shows that even at the heart of Lutheran theology an effort was being made to find an acceptable place for synergism or co-working between God and man in the work of salvation.

MacQuarrie concludes:

Perhaps we do have to acknowledge that Barth and others have been correct in believing that the place given to Mary in catholic theology is a threat to the doctrine of sola gratia, but I think this is the case only when the doctrine of sola gratia is interpreted in an extreme form, when this doctrine itself becomes a threat to a genuinely personal and biblical view of the human being as made in the image of God and destined for God, a being still capable of responding to God and of serving God in the work of building up the creation. This hopeful view of the human race is personified and enshrined in Mary.

Protestants may see an exalted role for Mary as a threat to “grace alone,” but MacQuarrie’s contention is that the extreme sola gratia position isn’t sustainable for just these sorts of reasons. And so, he can say that Mary represents the model of a cooperation between the human will and God, and that she is rightly seen as the “preeminent and paradigmatic member” of the Church.

Hopefully I’ll get chance to post on MacQuarrie’s accounts of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption and then offer some thoughts of my own.