His conception of the relation between the will and power of God on the one hand, and man’s freedom on the other, appears to be this:—All men, without exception, are through Christ called to salvation; predestination means no more than God’s original design, conceived prior to the Fall, of bringing all men to salvation. So, after the Fall, His redemptive plan or purpose embraces all men; but, on the other hand, it constrains no one. According to His absolute will all men are to be saved; but the accomplishment of His purpose is limited by the freedom of choice which He has Himself bestowed on man, whereby man may either accept the proffered favour and be eternally blessed, or reject it and be eternally condemned. God’s election of those who are called is not compulsory, but persuasive;[688] hence, many of those who have been called perish through their rejection of grace: they, and not God, are the authors of their own condemnation. God knows beforehand what each man will be, good or bad; but He does not constrain him to be one or the other.[689] The illustration of the potter in Romans ix. 20 must not be pressed too closely; St. Paul’s object simply is to enforce the duty of unconditional obedience. A vessel of wrath is one who obdurately resists God’s grace; he was never intended by God to be a vessel of wrath. “The vessels of mercy are said to have been prepared afore by God unto glory,” but the vessels of wrath to be fitted (not by God—He is not mentioned—but by sin) unto destruction.[690] So again, he acutely observes that, in the account of the final judgment (St. Matt. xxv.), the destiny of the good only is referred to God. “Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you;” but, “Depart, ye cursed” (not “of my Father”), “into everlasting fire, prepared” (not for you, but) “for the devil and his angels.”
On St. John vi. 44, he remarks, it is perfectly true that only they who are drawn and taught by the Father can come to Christ; but away with the paltry pretence that those who are not thus drawn and taught are emancipated from blame; for this very thing, the being led and instructed, depends on their own moral choice. Two factors, therefore, Divine grace which presents, and human will which appropriates, are co-efficients in the work of man’s salvation; God’s love and man’s faith must work hand in hand. God provides opportunities, encourages by promises, arouses by calls; and the moment these are responded to, the moment man begins to will and to do what is right, he is abundantly assisted by grace. But Chrysostom recognises nothing approaching the doctrine of final perseverance. St. Paul might have relapsed, Judas might have been saved (De Laud. Ap. Pauli, Hom. ii. 4). In his commentary on Phil. ii. 12-13, “It is God which worketh in us both to will and to do of his good pleasure,” the spontaneity of man’s will is carefully maintained. It may be said, if God works the will in us, why does the apostle exhort us to work? for if God wrought the wish, it is vain to speak of obedience; the whole work is God’s from the beginning. No! Chrysostom says, what St. Paul means is, that if your will works, God will augment your will, and quicken it into activity and zeal. Hast thou given alms? you are the more prompted to give; hast thou abstained from giving? negligence will increase upon you. The histories of Abraham, Job, Elijah, St. Paul, and other saints, are frequently cited to prove his central principle, that God in the moral and spiritual sense helps those only who help themselves. “When He, who knows the secrets of our hearts, sees us eagerly prepare for the contest of virtue, He instantly supplies us with His assistance, lightening our labours, and strengthening the weakness of our nature. In the Olympian contests the trainer stands by as a spectator merely, awaiting the issue, and unable to contribute anything to the efforts of the contender; whereas our Master accompanies us, extends His hand to us, all but subdues our antagonist, arranges everything to enable us to prevail, that He may place the amaranthine wreath upon our brows.”[691] God does not anticipate (φθάνει) man’s own volitions (βουλήσεις), but when these are once bent in the right direction, God’s grace powerfully promotes them; and without this divine co-operation holiness is unattainable.[692] But as, according to Chrysostom’s conceptions, the first movement towards good moral practice comes from the man himself, he often speaks of a man’s salvation depending on his own moral choice. He is not, therefore, in harmony with the mind of our Church as expressed in the Article, that “we have no power to do good works, pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God preventing us, that we may have a good will;” but his language thoroughly concurs with the subsequent clause, “and working with us when we have that good will.” In the technical language of theology, he recognises assisting, but not prevenient, grace.
It has been well remarked by Mr. Alexander Knox (“Remains,” vol. iii. 79), that “the advocates for efficient grace have been too generally antiperfectionists, and the perfectionists, on the other hand, too little aware that we are not sufficient so much as to think anything as of ourselves, but that it is God which worketh in us both to will and to do of His good pleasure.” The perfect conception of the true Christian standard of character could only be found, he thought, in a union of the systems of St. Chrysostom and St. Augustine. It must not be imagined, however, that Chrysostom regarded Divine grace as merely accessory or subsidiary to man’s own will and purpose. He fails not to represent it as indispensable to every human soul, however powerfully inclined of itself to good. The human will, weakened and depraved by evil, is not for a moment to rank as co-ordinate in its action with the work of the Holy Spirit: the real efficient force in the work of sanctification is the Holy Spirit. The beginnings, indeed (ἀρχαί), are our own, and we must contribute what we can, small and cheap though it be, because, unless we do our part, we shall not obtain the Divine assistance; but though the initiatory step is ours, the accomplishment of the work is altogether God’s, and, since the major part is His, we commonly say that the whole is His.[693]
He invariably speaks of the Old Dispensation as a period when Divine grace was given in less measure than under the Gospel, because then sin had not been blotted out, nor death vanquished. The achievements of holy men like Abraham and Job in this period were therefore deserving of peculiar praise, and their faults, on the other hand, were entitled to more indulgent judgment, because they laboured under disadvantages. When the Lamb which taketh away the sins of the world had been slain, and the reconciliation between man and God had been effected, then spiritual gifts of a higher order were imparted as a sign and a pledge that the old hostility had ceased.[694]
Turning now to theology, strictly so called, to the being and nature of the Godhead, we find comparatively little said by Chrysostom, except incidentally, on a subject more congenial to the theologian and student than to the earnest, practical preacher. In opposition to the rationalistic doctrine of the Arians, who affected to comprehend the Divine Nature, he strenuously maintained, as we have seen,[695] its inscrutability, and denounced any curious investigation of it as at once foolish and profane. God has condescended to appear to us in a form which is intelligible, and it is presumption to attempt to penetrate beyond the limits which He has placed to a knowledge of Himself. Chrysostom takes the dogma of the one substance (ὁμοουσία), established at Nice, as the basis of his position against the Arians, and seeks to prove it, not by speculative argument, after the manner of the Alexandrian school, but by reference to Holy Scripture. He uses the word “substance” (οὐσία) to designate the essential nature and “person” (ὑπόστασις), the personality of the Godhead, and points out that words which relate to the οὐσία, as Lord and God, are applied to all the Persons; whereas the other terms—Father, Son, Holy Spirit—indicating distinction of personality, are each applied to one Person only in the Godhead. Yet the Persons are not related to the substance as parts to the whole: God the Son is to God the Father as a beam of the sun, inseparable from Him, identical with Him in substance, yet retaining His own personality.[696] He is equally careful to guard the divinity of Christ against the rationalising school of Paul of Samosata, and the distinctness of His personality as against the Sabellians. St. Paul, he observes, does not dwell too much upon the abasement of Christ, lest Paul of Samosata should take advantage; neither does he dwell exclusively upon the exaltation, lest Sabellius should spring upon him.[697]
The equal divinity and distinct personality of the Holy Ghost are no less clearly and forcibly demonstrated by a collection and comparison of passages. St. Paul, for instance, in 1 Cor. xii. 6, speaks of God as “working all in all;” in verse 11 of the same chapter, he uses the same language of the Holy Spirit. Into any metaphysical, abstract discussion of the nature of the Godhead Chrysostom does not enter. He simply endeavours to guard the faith of the Church by a careful exposition of Holy Scripture, on which that faith was based, and by an exposure of the one-sided, or perverted, interpretations on which the current forms of heresy depended.
The union of the two natures in the person of our blessed Lord was, as is well known, a subject of constant speculation and of prolific error in the first five centuries. Here, again, the good sense of Chrysostom, united to his careful study of Holy Scripture, enabled him to hold the balance between two divergent methods—one which attended too exclusively to the humanitarian point of view, the other which brought out the divinity, but at the expense of the manhood. He earnestly maintains the veritable assumption of humanity by the Word. Our nature could not have been elevated to the divine if the Saviour had not really partaken of it; neither could He have brought help to our race if He had appeared in the unveiled glory of His Godhead, for sun and moon, earth and sea, and even man himself, would have perished at the brightness of His presence. Therefore He veiled his Godhead in flesh, and came not as the Lord in outward semblance, but in lowliness and abasement.[698] And this very condescension enhanced His dignity and extended His dominion: before the Incarnation He was adored by angels only, but afterwards by the whole race of redeemed man.[699] He assumed our nature, even in its liability to death, but not as contaminated by sin.[700] There were in Him three elements—body and soul making up the human nature, and the Logos or Word making up the divine. These two natures were united but not fused. “We, indeed, are body and soul, but He is God and soul and body; remaining what He was, He took that which He was not, and having become flesh, He remained God, being the Word. The one He became He assumed; the other He was. Let us not then confound, neither let us divide; one God, one Christ the Son of God; and when I say one, I speak of union, not fusion” (ἕνωσιν λέγω οὐ σύγχυσιν).[701] Jesus Christ was subject to death, susceptible of pain and all those emotions and sensations which belong to the human body, otherwise His would not have been a real body, but the weakness pertaining to human nature was entirely overruled by the constant operation of the Logos. If He is said to have been lowered or exalted, this was only as man, since the Godhead was incapable of either, being absolutely perfect. When the Holy Ghost is said to have descended upon Him at His baptism, this must be considered to refer to His human nature only; the manhood, not the Godhead, is anointed. Or when we read that He walked not in Judæa, because the Jews sought to kill Him, and then, just afterwards, that He passed through the midst of His enemies unscathed, we have a direct manifestation, in close correspondence, of the Godhead and the manhood.[702]
In speaking of the redemptive work of our blessed Lord, Chrysostom’s language is too rapturously eloquent to be very precise. There are in him several traces of the idea which began with Irenæus, and was developed by Origen, that the devil through the Fall acquired an actual right over man, and that a kind of pious fraud was practised upon him to deprive him of this right through the Incarnation and death of Jesus. By the noiseless, unostentatious manner in which our Saviour assumed humanity, veiling His Godhead under it, He, as it were, stole unawares upon the devil, who was not fully conscious of the majesty and might of his adversary. The devil assaulted Christ as if Christ had been merely man, and he was disappointed in his expectation. He was vanquished by his own weapons, his tyranny was destroyed by means of those very things which were his strength; the curse of sin and of death were his most trusted pieces: Christ submitted Himself to be bruised by them, and yet crushed them by His submission.[703]
On the other hand, we find also in Chrysostom the customary conception of a debt discharged, a ransom paid, a sacrifice offered once for all. “Adam sinned and died; Christ sinned not and yet died. Wherefore? that he who sinned and died might be able, through Him who died but sinned not, to throw off the grasp of death. This is what takes place also in money transactions. Often some one who is a debtor, not being able to pay, is detained in bonds; another, who owes nothing but is able to lay down the sum, pays it and releases the responsible person. Thus has it been in the case of man. Man was the debtor, was detained by the devil, and could not pay; Christ owed nothing, nor was He holden by the devil, but He was able to pay the debt. He came and He paid down death on behalf of him who was detained in bondage.[704]
From this point of view the person to whom the debt is due and is discharged is the devil; from another, the satisfaction is regarded as due to God, owing to the violation of man’s obedience, and is paid to Him through the sacrifice of a sinless life. “It was right that all men should fulfil the righteousness of God; but, since no one did this, Christ came and completely fulfilled it.”[705] He was Himself both the sacrificer and the victim; the cross being the altar. He suffered outside the city that the prophecy, “He was numbered with the transgressors,” might be fulfilled, and also that the universality of the sacrifice might be proclaimed.[706] Chrysostom is not careful to distinguish between the alienation of man from God, and of God from man through the Fall. He represents the hostility as in some sort existing on both sides. Christ did the work of a mediator by interposing Himself between the two parties, and reconciling each to the other. The references to such a fundamental verity are of course numerous, often full of beauty of expression and tenderness of feeling, and glowing earnestness. What he specially delights to dwell upon, as might be expected from his warm, affectionate disposition, is the exceeding love of Christ to man, and the hearty return which gratitude for such a benefit ought to draw forth from us. Like St. Paul, he often will break forth, in the midst of some argument or practical address, into a burst of rapturous and adoring praise. “What reward shall I give unto the Lord for all the benefits which He hath done unto me? Who shall express the noble acts of the Lord, or show forth all His praise? He abased Himself that He might exalt thee; He died to make thee immortal; He became a curse that thou mightest obtain a blessing.... When the world lay in darkness, the light of the Cross was held up like a torch shining in a dark place, and the light at the top of it was the Sun of Righteousness Himself.”[707]