A Heretical Meme

I recently saw a meme that read “We are not saved because we believe, we believe because we are saved.”  The person who posted the meme was a Calvinist who presumably thought that the meme was a nugget of theological truth about God’s sovereignty in salvation.  Internet memes, however, are merely the democratization of the sound-byte and sound-bytes do not gain in accuracy and truthfulness by being created by the average Joe rather than by the corporate media.  In this case, the meme is heretical.  It is heretical even by the standards of Calvinism.

 

The meme basically asserts that salvation is the cause of faith, rather than faith the cause of salvation.  This, however, mutatis mutandis, is what orthodox Christianity asserts about works rather than faith.  Protestantism, of which Calvinism is a strand, is particularly insistent upon this point.  To assert the same about faith, therefore, is to eliminate the distinction between faith and works and to make faith into a work.  The entire point of the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith, however, is that justification is by grace (a gift) rather than by works (a wage earned), and that justification can be by grace because it is by faith, since faith is not a work.

 

That faith is the cause and salvation the effect is clearly stated in multiple verses.  Any one of these can be quoted to demonstrate the point.  I will quote Romans 5:1 “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”   If faith were the effect, this wording would be nonsense.

 

The question is what kind of cause is faith?  The answer to this question brings clarity to many other questions concerning grace and salvation.

That there are multiple kinds of causes was recognized two and a half millennia ago by Aristotle in the second book of his Physics.  He identified four types of causes and provided several examples of each.  Subsequent writers have usually thought it best to provide a single illustration for all four causes.  We will follow this example and use a bookshelf as our illustration.  The bookshelf is, of course, the effect.

 

The first cause Aristotle identified was the material cause.  This is the stuff from which the final product is taken and made.  In the case of our bookshelf, the material cause is wood.

 

Aristotle’s second cause is the formal cause.  This is the idea of the product.  The person who took the wood and put it together to assemble our bookshelf did so in accordance with an idea of what the bookshelf should look like.  If he is a designer, he may have come up with the idea himself and sketched it out.  If the bookshelf is of the self-assemble type, someone else did this and printed it out in the schematic/instructions that came in the box with the pieces.

 

In these first two causes we have the basic Aristotelean concept that everything in creation has both form and matter.

 

Aristotle’s third cause, he called the primary source.  It is more usually called the efficient cause or the Agent.  This is the person who took the matter and made a concrete example of the form, or, if you want to put the other way, who took the form and shaped the matter.  In the case of our bookshelf this is the person who built it.  That could be us, if we bought the ready-to-assemble type that a particular Swedish furniture store is famous for, or, if we bought it pre-assembled, it was the craftsman who put it together in his shop or the factory as the case may be.

 

Aristotle’s final cause, in the sense of the fourth out of the four, is the final cause, in the sense of the end or telos.  This is the purpose or reason, for which the Agent, applies form to matter and vice versa, to produce the effect.  The final cause of our bookshelf is, of course, to store books.

 

The Reformer John Calvin is not ordinarily thought of as an Aristotelean.  Aristotle was “the Philosopher” to St. Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth century Dominican Scholastic whose Summa Theologica significantly shaped the late Medieval theology to which Calvin and his associates objected, especially its popular form the abuses of which were often very far from what the Angelic Doctor wrote, although the Reformers found it in their interests to minimize this distinction.  For Calvin, the great theologian was St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Augustine was a Platonist.  Calvin, however, who like the Father of Latin theology, Tertullian, approached the study of Scripture and God with a legal education as his background, was also like his second-to-third century predecessor in regarding secular philosophy with disdain and suspicion.  This makes his application of Aristotle’s causes to salvation all the more interesting.

 

In the fourteenth chapter of the third book of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin identifies “the mercy of the Heavenly Father and his freely given love toward us” as the efficient cause of our salvation.  Christ, Calvin says, is the material cause and our faith the formal cause.  Obviously he would not be on board with “I believe because I am saved.”  All three of these causes, Calvin said, were found in one sentence in John 3:16.  The fourth cause he identified as “the proof of divine justice” and the “praise of God’s goodness.”

 

Calvin clearly did not understand these causes properly.  Since the efficient cause is the Agent it would have been better to identify God Himself as the efficient cause of our salvation.  Or, to be more precise, Jesus Christ, God the Son Incarnate, is the efficient cause or Agent of our salvation, which is why we call Him Saviour.  That in turn means that the material cause should be more precisely identified as the events of the Gospel, especially the Atoning death of Jesus Christ.  To be fair to Calvin, he did write “Surely the material cause is Christ, with his obedience, through which he acquired righteousness for us.”

 

In his identification of faith as the formal cause of our salvation he wrote “What shall we say is the formal or instrumental cause but faith?”  There is a basic misunderstanding here, because instrumental cause and formal cause are not the same thing.  Calvin was correct to identify faith as the instrumental cause of our salvation – or rather an instrumental cause – but not in identifying it as the formal cause.  This is somewhat surprising when we consider what the formal cause of our salvation actually is.  If we understand formal cause to mean what Aristotle meant by it, then applied to salvation, the formal cause must be God’s eternal design.  One would expect John Calvin of all people to have gotten this right.

 

Aristotle did not speak of an instrumental cause, but the concept is simple enough to understand.  Think back to our bookshelf illustration.  The instrumental cause would be the hammer, screwdriver, Allen wrench, and whatever other tools the efficient cause used in putting the bookshelf together.  The instrumental cause, therefore, is not synonymous with the formal cause, but a subcategory of the efficient cause.  

 

Faith is indeed an instrumental cause of our salvation but not in the way the Allen wrench is an instrumental cause of our self-assembled Swedish bookshelf.  The equivalent of that kind of instrumental cause in the order of salvation would be the cross.  Faith as an instrumental cause of our salvation corresponds more with the delivery truck that brings a pre-assembled bookshelf to us.

 

Here the Lutheran dogmaticians are particularly helpful.  That salvation is a gift of God, the New Testament is absolutely clear on and all Christians affirm.  It is a gift that was given to the world in a general sense in the Incarnation and the events of the life and death of the Incarnate Son of God, something that we especially remember at this time of year.  It also has to be given in a more particular sense to each of us personally and here the Lutheran dogmaticians identify two different types of means through which this is accomplished.  There are the media or organa dotika, the means or instruments of giving.  These are the means through which God gives His saving grace to us.  Then there is the medium or organon leptikon, the means or instrument of receiving.  This is the hand with which we receive the gift of saving grace.   The ministry of the Gospel, which God has entrusted to His Church in the modes of Word and Sacrament, is the means through which God gives us His saving grace.  Faith is the organon leptikon, the means by which we receive it.  It is in this sense that it is the instrumental cause of our salvation.

So yes, whereas when it comes to salvation and works salvation is the cause and works the effect, when it comes to faith and salvation faith is the cause, the instrument of receiving cause, and salvation the effect.  The meme is heretical by the standards of all forms of orthodox Christianity, including orthodox Calvinism.

 

Perhaps the lesson to be learned here is that theology should not be done by meme.