Presbyterion - Volume 19, Issue 3

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Can a Nature/Grace Dualism Be Born Again?

Douglas Wilson

A few years ago I read Harold Bloom's The American Religion with great interest. He makes many points which I thought quite compelling, the main one being that the American approach to religious faith is fundamentally gnostic. He, being a gnostic himself (p. 30), thinks this is all to the good, while I, not being a gnostic, am not cool with it. At the same time, since he is a gnostic, he does us all a valuable service by identifying his fellow gnostics—the same kind of service that was performed by the former Soviet Union when they opened up all their old KGB files, proving that Joe McCarthy was in the main correct—and according to Bloom his fellow gnostics are everywhere. They are found in Mormonism, the Southern Baptist Convention, Adventists, and Pentecostals. This is far more than just a glib assertion—he has a lot of evidence to support him.

On what might appear to be an unrelated topic, I recently finished Peter Leithart's very fine book on baptism, The Baptized Body, and while I was reading it, the penny dropped, and I figured out one of the sticking points in my discussions with Jim Jordan over the necessity of regeneration (covered somewhat in the following pages). This is a classic illustration of how a set of paradigmatic assumptions, like a good outboard motor, can drive the boat even though nobody can see the prop going.

Leithart said this: "For Baptist practice, redemption—inclusion in the new humanity that is the church—adds a second layer of `religious life' to the `natural life' of creation. This is necessarily the case, since children begin their `natural' life of physical and socio-cultural growth before coming to faith. This dualism of nature/culture and religion means that Christ is not in a full sense the `New Adam' who inaugurates a race that will fulfill Adam's calling to dominion" (p. 130).

On the next page, he wrote, "By positing a distinction between natural life and natural teleology over and against supernatural life and supernatural teleology, and by suggesting that natural life (which includes cultural and political life) had its own integrity that needs only to be `completed' by the supernatural addition of grace, scholastic theology wrote the preamble to nature and culture's `declaration of independence' from God" (p. 131).

Now stay with me, because this is where it gets fun. As an historic evangelical I insist on the absolute necessity of the new birth. And so I do. But what do Americans hear when they hear such words? What do American Christians hear? The new birth is a supernatural act, but what kind of supernatural act is it? There is a kind of "born againism" which is gnostic, which Bloom celebrates, and which Jim Jordan is leaning against. There is another kind (I am convinced) which is not at all gnostic, and does not need anybody to lean against it.

If you assume that in the supernatural act of regeneration God comes down and implants a grace node in your heart, then this is a form of gnosticism, and it helps perpetuate that pestilent nature/grace dualism. But if you hold that the act of regeneration is supernatural, and that the results are entirely "natural," then this is not gnostic.

For example, Jesus exercised miraculous power when He transformed the water into wine. The act was one of supernatural power, but the wine that resulted was natural wine, and the water He started with was natural water. If the master of the feast had been a trained sommelier, he would have been able to tell by taste what vineyard that wine came from. He would have been technically wrong, of course, because it actually came from the well in the town square, but you can't have everything. The gnostic would want the miracle to start out with water, and wind up with ambrosia, the supernatural elixir of the gods. In the biblical faith, the act is the miracle. In gnosticism, the result is the miracle.

So regeneration is an act of God's kindness and power, in which He changes me from one kind of human being (with Adam for a father) to another kind of human being (with the last Adam for a father). Before, during and after the process, I am a human being. In that respect, nothing changes. But with regard to who my father is (and regeneration always assumes generation), everything changes. In respect to how it is done, it is a miraculous intervention of God's grace.

I am not born again because something alien to the nature of humanity was implanted in me. The nature/grace dualism creates the temptation to think that way, and, at the end of the day, we are fighting off gnosticism. Rather, I am regenerate because I was miraculously transferred from a deteriorating way of being human to another restored way of being human. It is natural water to natural wine, supernaturally done. It is not natural water to supernatural ambrosia, supernaturally done.