When God sovereignly and monergistically regenerates a person, He puts His Spirit into that person, giving them new life directly from His Life. He unites that person to Himself as He comes to indwell their heart, becoming the Life of their life. This is the doctrine of our union with Christ looked at from the perspective of God’s energies.
Yet, as God’s divine and holy energies work within and through the natural energies of the Elect, as the very Life of the Elect, they do not thereby become a second principle that gets added, as it were, alongside the natural energies. In other words, as God enlivens the otherwise dead human spirit with His Spirit, His Spirit remains the energy source for the new life of the believer. God is not merely giving “a shot in the arm,” nor is He applying “divine paddles” to restart the dead heart only to then leave it to run again as if on its own. God is thus the single energy, i.e. mon-energistic, source of the new and ongoing life of the Christian.
In this way the process of sanctification is still monergistic, although because the human spirit is made alive by God’s Holy Spirit it can now be said truthfully to cooperate with God. For when God gives new life to the soul, that soul is now enlivened to will and cooperate with God’s will. But this cooperation does not posit that man adds to the sanctification that is, and is in, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is Himself our righteousness and sanctification:
“But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption” (1 Corinthians 1:30 KJV).
Therefore it is not merely that Christ gives us these things, but that He Himself is these things. In giving Himself to us we receive all these as a consequence. How? By His energies, for His energies communicate His Person, not merely His attributes. God is His essence and His energies, where His energies are Him in His ability to relate dynamically with His creatures, i.e. His ability to Personally commune with man while remaining utterly transcendent in His essential Being.
As such, sanctification conceived as a process (having already received entire sanctification in receiving Christ) is the holy energy of God working in and through the Elect progressively. It is thus not “their” holiness, but God’s. And it is not synergistic in the sense that cooperation with God’s energies adds to what God has already perfectly and exhaustively supplied to faith. If one were to insist on using the term “synergism,” then, it would have to be conceived as passive synergism, which is here functionally equivalent to cooperative monergism.
From the perspective of passive synergism, it is passive because working with God or co-laboring with God (1 Corinthians 3:9) is to yield to His will and operation, not to add one’s own will and operation to what is already perfect in Christ. As the Apostle Paul indicates: “For we are labourers (συνεργός) together with God: ye are God's husbandry, ye are God's building.” (1 Corinthians 3:9 KJV)
In other words, Paul is not saying that he is a “co-husband” with God, or a “co-architect.” Rather, whether having planted or watered, he states, “So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase” (1 Corinthians 3:7 KJV).
Thus we rather yield to His husbandry and His design, to His indwelling Spirit’s operation within us. God supplies the life, the operation, the will, the energy.
Recall, this is not a discussion of monergistic regeneration, but monergistic sanctification. And so, similarly, from the perspective of cooperative monergism, it is cooperative because man’s will is truly enlivened and choosing, but in an active yielding to God’s singular power. Man is not enlivened by God to assert his will, but to trust and obey, to be one through whom the Holy Spirit produces His own fruit. Man’s very yielding for sanctification is made possible by God’s energy, for His grace is His Personal presence and power, so for man it is truly both monergistic and something with which he is willingly, yieldingly cooperative.
To conclude, the foregoing describes how sanctification functions monergistically. It is modeled by Christ in Gethsemane when He prayed: “not what I will, but what thou wilt” (Mark 14:36 KJV). The sanctified will is one that chooses to yield to God’s will, and so sanctification is the unfolding of God’s holy energy in and through the person and their personality, and not the product of self-will, self-development, or self-improvement. It is this holy monergy that allows the life in Christ to be one of Sabbath rest.
-Rev. Joshua Schooping
