Have you ever been told by a well-meaning evangelical that the way to
achieve a victorious Christian life is to “Let go and let God” or “stop
trying and start trusting”?
As a teenager, I remember being given this advice by people who were
eager to help me achieve Christian victory over sin. “Stop struggling
against your flesh”, they would say. “Whenever you’re struggling, that
simply proves you’re trying to overcome sin in your own strength rather
than in God’s strength. Sanctification has got to be a God-thing, not a
man-thing.”
But I could never understand the actual mechanics of how to overcome
sin without trying to overcome sin. In fact, I didn’t even know how to
get up from a chair—let alone keep to a routine of Bible reading—without
using some degree of will-power. Yet I kept being told that will-power
was displeasing to God. One person told me that my problem was that I
was trying to stop trying to stop trying, which showed that I didn’t really get it.
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| Watchman Nee |
In my early twenties I turned to the writings of Watchman Nee
(1903–1972), since I had been told that he had written the best
explanation of the “let go and let God” process. In Nee’s book The Normal Christian Life,
he argues that God can only get the glory for a person’s sanctification
when no human effort is involved. Though Nee denies it, the human agent
becomes essentially passive in the work of sanctification since
will-power and struggle play no part in the normal Christian life. Nee believed that phrases such as “human effort”,
“willpower” and “trying hard” were words of the devil.
When I turned to Nee’s book Release of the Spirit, I began to
understand that these ideas arose out of a Platonic-like anthropology.
In this book, Nee makes clear that we need to not only escape from the
will, but also from the body, the mind or the soul—in other words,
everything that makes us human! That’s when I saw that the life Nee was
describing was not the normal Christian life at all, but a very abnormal
Gnostic one. The problem with Nee’s anthropology was aptly summarized
by Ranald Macaulay and Jerram Barrs in their excellent book Being Human: The Nature of Spiritual Experience.
“According to Nee, the person is composed of three parts: the inner man (the spirit), the outer man (the soul) and the outermost man (the body). Because they belong to the outer man, neither the emotions nor the mental thoughts have the same nature as God. Only the spirit relates to God. …He seems to be rejecting not merely the sinful nature but the self, for is not the self constituted by the emotions, the mind, the will—Nee’s ‘outer man’? Consequently he devalues the human. He says that natural compassion and tenderness are still sinful because they are only human. These too must be broken to allow the Spirit to do his work.”
The antithesis
that Nee and some of the Keswick teachers have posited between the
“natural” and the “spiritual” often arises out of a deep discomfort
acknowledging that God works through natural processes and means.
According to this line of thought, if God is to get all the credit, then
man’s will cannot be involved, not even as an instrument used by the
Holy Spirit. If God is to get all the glory, then the involvement of
man’s will must be reduced to nil, or at least consigned merely to
“choosing to believe” or “choosing to trust.” The idea is that it is
somehow more spiritual for God to work when we are passive than when we
are actively struggling.
Behind these notions of monergistic sanctification is the same
assumption which animated much of ancient Gnosticism, namely that the
divine and human are quantitatively rather than qualitatively
distinguished, so that they must be negotiated or rationed between God
and human persons. If that is your starting point, then of course we
want God to swallow up the human, and for God to be glorified by us
losing our identity. Gnosticism took this to the extreme of teaching
that we had to shake off the shackles of the physical body, whereas
teachers associated with the Keswick tradition merely teach that we must
shake off the shackles of the will to become passive instruments of the
divine. Both ideas are essentially Gnostic.
By contrast, when we understand that God works through means, then it
is non-problematic to assert that one of the means or instruments He
uses for our sanctification is human will-power, just as one of the
instruments He uses for our justification is human faith. (I say “one of
the means” because will-power is not the most important aspect of
sanctification. But it does play a crucial part.)
This isn’t about trying to earn favour with God through “works
righteousness”—heaven forbid! Indeed, God is the one that makes it
possible for us to exercise will-power in the first place, just as He is
the one who makes it possible for us to exercise faith (Philippians
2:13). Remember that we’re talking here about children of God who
already have faith, already love God and who are therefore already
filled with the Spirit in some sense.
The point is that in both sanctification and justification, God’s
sovereign work occurs through the vehicles by which He sovereignly
chooses to work. The believer works because God works. It’s not a
question of either/or but both/and, as the human and the divine co-operate synergistically.
The Bible is full of this synergistic both/and approach to
sanctification. As I pointed out in my earlier article 'Is Will-Power Good or Bad?', the apostles constantly taught that one of the ways you surrender
yourself completely to Christ is precisely through God-directed
will-power and human struggle. Indeed, throughout the New Testament the
apostles frequently speak of human struggle as a good thing. See Rom
7:14–25; 1 Cor 9:24; Gal 5:17; Eph. 6:18; Col. 4:2; 1 Tim, 4:7-8; 1 Tim.
6:11–12; Heb 12:1–3; 2 Pet 1:5–7, for just a few of the numerous
references. Moreover, we know from the gospel narratives that Christ’s
time on earth was full of struggles, especially towards the end when He
wrestled with the Father’s will in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Further Reading
- Is Will-Power Good or Bad?
- Are Calvinists Also Among the Gnostics?
- Is Charles Hodge Also Among the Gnostics?
- Is Jonathan Edwards also among the Gnostics?
- Resources for Understanding Gnosticism
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