A Sanctifying Union with Christ: Sanctification and Cooperative Monergy

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

The Essence/Energies Distinction

The Essence/Energies distinction is “a means of explaining how God’s being is unknowable,” on the one hand, and yet, on the other, that truly “God does communicate Himself” (George Maloney, A Theology of Uncreated Energies, p. 60). It is the means by which God causes man to genuinely participate in His divine Life, His uncreated energies, given that God is also utterly transcendent and unknowable in His essence. In other words, it answers the questions: What do I receive when I am united with Christ and said to participate in the Divine Nature (2 Peter 1:4)? Do I participate in some one (or other) Attribute(s) of God, or do I more properly have communion with God in His very Person? How can God truly indwell the heart and remain God?

If this distinction is not made, then participation in the divine nature risks collapsing into man’s actually becoming/disappearing into God. The distinction thus, on the one hand, preserves union with Christ God while, on the other hand, guaranteeing that we retain our personal creaturehood, that our unique personhood is preserved in our union with Him. In short, it is the guard against monism.

The Essence/Energies distinction, it ought to be added, is not merely a rational deduction from abstract philosophical principles or categories, but in its essence is derived directly from the witness of Scripture (and confirmed in the experience of God’s children). In other words, it is a datum, a fact revealed in and gleaned from the Word of God, an item of Special Revelation. For example, as King David sings of God’s transcendence:

“O LORD my God, thou art very great; thou art clothed with honour and majesty. Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment: who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain.” (Psalm 104:1-2 KJV)

And yet as Christ speaks of our union with the transcendent God:

“That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us ... I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one.” (John 17:21, 23 KJV)

And as the Apostle Paul writes of God’s transcendence:

“Who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto; whom no man hath seen, nor can see: to whom be honour and power everlasting. Amen.” (1 Timothy 6:16 KJV)

And yet as he writes of our union with the transcendent God:

“For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.” (Romans 8:15 KJV)

“Who hath also sealed us, and given the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts.” (2 Corinthians 1:22 KJV)

“And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father.” (Galatians 4:6 KJV)

In conclusion, the Essence/Energies distinction is a theological framework for understanding how God is both transcendent and immanent, how He is unknowable and yet capable of indwelling man Personally. It also explains how God’s union with man in Christ doesn’t destroy human creaturehood, but instead preserves it, raising it to the divine platform in communion (unto theosis) all the while preserving one’s unique, created personhood in an eternal relation to God’s Triune Personhood.

-Rev. Joshua Schooping