Can We Do Anything Good?

There is no zero-sum game between God's goodness and ours

Photo by Hunter Haley on Unsplash

It’s Lent, and many of us are thinking more than usual about our sanctification. I have been thinking in particular about a problem that arises in many Christian communities whose theological starting point is the all-encompassing and devastating impact of sin. You know, the churches where they make up for not celebrating Lent by living it year-round. Sin is devastating and we should certainly not downplay it, but there is a danger of imagining that sin has removed all our agency, leaving us with nothing but powerlessness. Rather than seeing sanctification as something that we actively participate in, it becomes nothing more than “realizing how much we need Jesus.”

If humans have no ability to act freely, if there is no goodness left in us whatsoever, if we are only evil and dead in our sins, then sanctification can only be the gradual deepening of our awareness of our own sin and need for Jesus. This is often explained with that classic illustration of a gap between us and God, with a cross bridging the gap. As we grow and mature, the gap actually grows larger because we become more aware of our sinfulness. As the gap widens, so does the cross: our awareness of sin drives our felt need for grace, and this is how we can “get more of Jesus” throughout our lives.

As for me, I will see Your face in righteousness; I shall be satisfied when I awake in Your likeness. —Psalm 17:15

We should absolutely grow more aware of our own sin and need for Jesus. But a greater awareness of both sin and God’s grace, while good and necessary, doesn’t actually lead to real change. We should also be growing in virtue, the power of doing good. We should be bearing more spiritual fruit in our 40s than we did in our 20s. The Psalmist links growing like God in righteousness to the ability to see God. Jesus said that it is those who are pure of heart that see God. (Matthew 5:8) We cannot see God when our hearts and minds are dark. The mistake is thinking that recognizing the darkness within us has anything to do with removing the darkness, except that it shows us where to begin.

I have heard many people speak as if it is somehow a threat to God’s sovereignty and grace to think we could do anything good, ever. (Except repenting, of course.) But there is no conflict between our doing good and God’s sovereign grace. in fact, it is a category error to imagine that this is even possible.

The thinking goes, that if I take responsibility for doing something good, then I am “taking credit” away from God. We can’t meaningfully act or do good, because then God would not be fully sovereign. But this way of thinking puts God and ourselves on the same plane of being, as if God and creation “share space” that somehow contains them both. In reality, there is no zero-sum game relationship between God’s being and our being, or between God’s agency and goodness and ours.

God is both fully transcendent and fully immanent. He is so far removed and other from us that we can’t even imagine what he’s like, except by comparing him to creatures. But he is also so close and intimately present with us that the breath in our bodies is distant by comparison. When we absolutize “God in us” at the expense of God’s transcendence, the result is pantheism, the belief that there is no difference between God and the world. When we absolutize “God above us” at the expense of his immanence, the result is either Gnosticism (God so removed from creation that matter is evil) or what Pryzwara termed “theopanism”: the belief that there is only God, and human agency or freedom is just an illusion. Theopanists want to give God all the credit for our good actions, but in so doing, squeeze out human agency and goodness altogether.

Traditionally, the relationship between God’s activity and goodness and ours was understood to be a relationship of participation. We meaningfully act and choose with our wills, but everything we do “borrows” causality, action, and goodness from God, who is the source of all. God still gets all the glory, but we can still meaningfully say that we did a good thing, that we grew in virtue. We can say with the Psalmist, “I was blameless before him, and I kept myself from my guilt.” (Psalm 18:25)

When our whole walk with the Lord is reduced down to “becoming more aware of my sin,” our spiritual life is eviscerated and rendered sterile. In fact, I would propose that this is actually a form of acedia. Acedia is a blindness or an indifference to the good. It might seem pious to attribute everything we do to God’s action, but this is actually a willful blindness to the goodness of human agency, an agency which God gave us in order to serve him. Becoming aware of your sin is good, the way becoming aware of a target is good. But seeing the target accomplishes nothing if you don’t practice hitting the target. And that is the process of sanctification.

As Gregory of Nyssa said, “Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.” (Life of Moses)