Synergism

Synergism (from Greek syn, “together,” and ergon, “work”) is the view that saving grace and the human will act as two distinct causes cooperating together in a person’s conversion, so that grace can be resisted and the human response is a real, uncoerced contributing cause of one’s own regeneration and faith. Herman Bavinck’s illustration captures the structure of the claim: on this view, divine grace and the human will are “conceived as associated causes working with and alongside each other, like two draft horses pulling a wagon, though one may be stronger than the other.”¹ In its Arminian form, grace takes the initiative but its effect still “depends… upon human co-operation.”² It has been held, in different forms, by Rome, by Eastern Orthodoxy, and by Arminian and Wesleyan Protestants, in contrast with the monergism that Reformed confessional theology holds.

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession teaches monergism, not synergism, as its doctrine of effectual calling:

“Those whom God hath predestinated unto life, he is pleased in his appointed, and accepted time, effectually to call, by his Word and Spirit, out of that state of sin and death in which they are by nature, to grace and salvation by Jesus Christ; enlightening their minds spiritually and savingly to understand the things of God; taking away their heart of stone, and giving unto them a heart of flesh; renewing their wills, and by his almighty power determining them to that which is good, and effectually drawing them to Jesus Christ; yet so as they come most freely, being made willing by his grace.”³

The next paragraph states the point synergism denies, directly:

“This effectual call is of God’s free and special grace alone, not from anything at all foreseen in man, nor from any power or agency in the creature, being wholly passive therein, being dead in sins and trespasses, until being quickened and renewed by the Holy Spirit; he is thereby enabled to answer this call, and to embrace the grace offered and conveyed in it, and that by no less power than that which raised up Christ from the dead.”⁴

Three things follow. First, the change itself, not merely the occasion for it, is God’s act: he renews the will and determines it to what is good before the sinner answers the call, rather than presenting an offer the will accepts or refuses from an unrenewed state. Second, the confession explicitly excludes the causal role synergism assigns to the human will: the call proceeds “not from anything at all foreseen in man, nor from any power or agency in the creature.” Third, the confession still affirms genuine human agency: the sinner is “made willing” and comes “most freely,” so the monergist claim is not that the will is bypassed or coerced, only that its willingness is itself the effect of grace rather than an independent contribution to it. This is the substance of the contrast the rest of this article traces out.

Biblical Basis

Synergist theology reads several texts as teaching that grace can be resisted and that the human response contributes something grace alone does not supply.

The Remonstrants themselves anchored the claim that grace is resistible in Stephen’s rebuke to the Sanhedrin: “You stiff-necked people… you always resist the Holy Spirit” (Acts 7:51). Their fourth article on grace, as Charles Hodge records it, held that the Spirit’s operation “in the first conversion is indifferent and resistible, such that by it a man may be converted or not converted,” and cited this verse directly as its scriptural ground.⁵

Two further texts are read as expressions of a universal divine will to save that is genuinely capable of being frustrated: Paul’s statement that God “desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4), and Peter’s, that the Lord is “patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Pet. 3:9). On the synergist reading, “all” and “any” mean every individual without exception, so that God’s expressed will and the actual outcome can diverge whenever a person refuses the grace held out to them.

Revelation 3:20, Christ’s word to Laodicea, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him,” is likewise read as picturing grace as an offer that waits on the hearer’s own choice to open the door, rather than one that opens it unilaterally.

Historical Development

Arminius and the Remonstrance. Jacob Arminius, a Reformed pastor and later professor at Leiden trained under Beza at Geneva, came to dispute the Reformed doctrines of predestination, the extent of the atonement, and the nature of grace and free will.⁶ After his death in 1609, his followers organized their objections into the Five Articles of the Remonstrance of 1610. Hodge summarizes the break: “Arminius introduced a new system of doctrine in the Reformed churches of Holland, which was formally condemned by the Synod of Dort which sat from November 1618 to May 1619. Against the decisions of that Synod the advocates of the new doctrine presented a Remonstrance.”⁷ The Synod “unanimously condemned the doctrines of the Arminians, and in their Articles confirmed the common Calvinistic faith of the Reformed churches.”⁸ The condemned proposition on grace held that its “operation in the first conversion is indifferent and resistible, such that by it a man may be converted or not converted; nor does his conversion follow unless he determines himself to it by a free assent, and is willing to be converted.”⁹

Wesleyan Arminianism. John Wesley’s version modifies the original Remonstrant position. Rather than locating a surviving natural ability to cooperate with grace in fallen human nature itself, which Wesleyans regarded as Semi-Pelagian, Wesley grounded any capacity to respond to the gospel in a universal prevenient grace, given to every person on account of Christ’s redemption rather than left over from unfallen nature: “No man living is without some preventing grace, and every degree of grace is a degree of life,” and “there is a measure of free will supernaturally restored to every man, together with that supernatural light which enlightens every man that cometh into the world.”¹⁰ On this view, every infant “comes into the world free from condemnation on the ground of the righteousness of Christ and with a seed of divine grace, or a principle of a new life implanted in his heart.”¹¹ Once that grace is given, conversion still turns on the individual’s free choice to improve it and persevere.

Rome. Catholic theology likewise teaches a doctrine of prevenient grace, but locates it differently. Rome holds that “the freedom of the will, though weakened by sin, is not lost,” and that prevenient grace confers only the capacity to believe, not the act of believing itself; it is “granted to all adults within hearing of the gospel, but it lies in their power to accept or reject it.”¹² The Second Council of Orange taught that “after grace has been received through baptism, all the baptized with the help and cooperation of Christ can and ought to fulfill what pertains to the salvation of the soul, if they will labor faithfully,” and the Council of Trent likewise “declared that humans can consent to prevenient grace and cooperate with it but also reject it.”¹²

Eastern Orthodoxy. Orthodox theology describes the relationship between divine grace and human freedom in the process of theosis as synergeia, a cooperation in which grace does not override the freedom it works with; the human person must actively and freely assent to and participate in the grace offered rather than being unilaterally regenerated by it.

Objections and Responses

Objection: 2 Peter 3:9 and 1 Timothy 2:4 state that God wills the salvation of every person, so that resistance to grace is possible. The confessional response is that “all” in both texts need not mean every individual without exception. John Gill reads 2 Peter 3:9 in context: Peter is writing “to them that have obtained like precious faith with us” (2 Pet. 1:1), so “not willing that any should perish” is God’s will concerning the elect addressed, “not… of every individual of mankind.”¹³ Petrus van Mastricht makes the same move on both verses together: “the apostle does not say that God wills all altogether to be saved and none of them to perish, but only all believers… Nor is it said in 1 Timothy 2:4 that [God wills] every single human being” without qualification.¹⁴ On this reading, the texts describe the scope of God’s saving will as including every kind of person, not its extending, resistibly, to every particular person. This is the ground on which effectual calling and monergism treat God’s effectual call, once given, as certainly efficacious rather than merely offered.

Objection: Acts 7:51 shows that the Holy Spirit’s work can be resisted. The confessional response distinguishes the Spirit’s common operations, which the unregenerate resist constantly (the very point Stephen is making against his hearers), from the effectual call of the elect, which the confession describes as accomplishing what it sets out to do: “renewing their wills, and by his almighty power determining them to that which is good.”³ Acts 7:51 describes the ordinary condition of the unregenerate heart toward common grace, not a case of someone whom God is effectually calling successfully refusing him; see monergism for the confessional case that the call which actually saves cannot fail to do so.

Objection: if grace cannot be resisted, human beings are not free agents but coerced instruments. The confession denies the premise that freedom requires an uncaused or self-originating choice. Paragraph 1 of chapter 10 states that the elect “come most freely, being made willing by his grace” — freedom, on this account, consists in willing according to one’s own desires, not in being undetermined by any prior cause, and grace changes what a person wants rather than acting on the will from outside it or against its own inclination. The fuller philosophical case for this compatibilist account of freedom, and its contrast with the libertarian freedom synergism requires, belongs to free will and is not repeated here.

Related Doctrines

References

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 10, “Creator of Heaven and Earth.” ↩
A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 19, “Original Sin,” q. 25. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 10, “Of Effectual Calling,” para. 1, text as reproduced by The 1689 Confession. ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 10, para. 2. ↩
Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 185-186. ↩
Jared Heath Moore, A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), chap. 3, 114-115. ↩
Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 311. ↩
A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 6, “Comparison of Systems.” ↩
Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:679-680. ↩
Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:327-328. ↩
Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:326-328. ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 17, “The Order of Salvation.” ↩ ↩²
John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity (1769), book 2, chap. 2. ↩
Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. on “Will and Affections.” ↩