Synergism

The Story

Synergism takes its name from the Greek “synergos,” a co-worker — the same word Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 3:9 when he calls himself and Apollos “God’s fellow workers.” As a soteriological label it names the conviction that salvation is neither a human achievement nor a purely unilateral act of God, but a cooperation: grace goes first and does the heavy lifting, yet the human being must genuinely respond, and that response is not coerced. The opposite position, monergism, holds that God alone is the agent of conversion and that even the responding faith is a gift effectually given.

Something like synergism was the default assumption of the early Greek-speaking church, which spoke easily of human cooperation with grace and resisted any framing that made salvation a divine override of the will. The great rupture came with Augustine’s late writings against Pelagius, where the priority and necessity of grace were pressed so hard that the will’s role shrank almost to vanishing. The Western church spent the next century arguing about how far to follow him. The Second Council of Orange in 529 settled on a careful middle: it insisted, against the so-called Semi-Pelagians, that even the first stirring of faith is the work of prevenient grace — but it stopped short of Augustine’s harder predestinarianism and left room for the will, once moved, to consent.

The word “synergism” itself became a fighting term during the Reformation. After Luther’s death, Philipp Melanchthon and his follower John Pfeffinger argued that in conversion the human will must contribute “its share, however small,” a position the strict “Gnesio-Lutherans” attacked as a betrayal of Luther’s monergism. The resulting Synergistic Controversy (roughly 1555 to 1560) was eventually resolved against Melanchthon: the Formula of Concord (1577), later gathered into the Book of Concord (1580), affirmed that the unregenerate will is purely passive in conversion. Reformed theology, following Calvin and ultimately the Synod of Dort, drew the line even harder.

Yet synergism remained the majority report of global Christianity. The Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox churches, the Wesleyan and Methodist traditions, and most Pentecostals all teach some version of grace-enabled cooperation. What looks to a Calvinist like a dangerous concession to human pride looks to an Orthodox or a Wesleyan like the plain meaning of every biblical command to repent, believe, and endure.

Who Draws the Line

No ecumenical council ever condemned “synergism” by name, and this is part of why the term is so contested: each side accuses the other of heresy using definitions the other side rejects. The strongest formal line is drawn from the monergist direction. The Formula of Concord (1577), the confessional standard of Lutheran orthodoxy, explicitly rejects the synergist position that the human will “concurs” with the Holy Spirit in conversion, teaching instead that in conversion a person is “purely passive.” Reformed confessions such as the Canons of Dort (1619) likewise condemn the idea that regeneration depends on a cooperating human will.

From the opposite direction, the Council of Trent drew its line against monergism. Its sixth session (1547), Canon 4, declares: “If any one saith, that man’s free will moved and excited by God, by assenting to God exciting and calling, nowise co-operates towards disposing and preparing itself for obtaining the grace of justification… but that, as something inanimate, it does nothing whatever and is merely passive; let him be anathema.” In other words, the Catholic Church anathematizes the very passivity that the Lutheran and Reformed confessions affirm. The Eastern Orthodox tradition has no comparable conciliar decree but treats synergy as simply the grammar of salvation, rooted in figures like John Cassian and Maximus the Confessor.

So the line is mutual and unresolved. To a Reformed theologian, synergism shades into the Semi-Pelagianism condemned at Orange in 529; to a Catholic or Orthodox theologian, monergism collapses the moral life into fatalism and makes God the author of the reprobate’s ruin. Each tradition is heterodox by the other’s confession.

Why You Might Accidentally Believe This

If you have ever urged someone to “make a decision for Christ,” or felt the weight of your own choice at a moment of repentance, you have leaned synergist. The entire vocabulary of evangelism — invitation, response, accepting, surrendering — presupposes that something real hinges on the hearer’s answer. It is hard to plead with people to choose what you also believe they cannot choose, and most Christians simply live inside that pleading without noticing the theological commitment underneath it.

The intuition also rises from ordinary moral experience. We praise and blame, we feel guilt and resolve, we sense that our prayers and efforts matter. A faith in which conversion happens to you, regardless of any movement on your part, can feel like it dissolves the very self that is supposed to be saved. Synergism is the natural theology of anyone who takes their own agency seriously and cannot quite believe that God would save them without, in some real sense, asking.

The Strongest Case For This View

The case begins with the texts that seem to hold both truths at once. Philippians 2:12-13 is the classic: “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” The command and the enabling sit in a single breath — Paul does not say God works instead of you, but that God works so that you will work. Synergists read this as the whole pattern of the New Testament in miniature: grace is the ground and energy of the human act, not its replacement.

Then there is the sheer volume of imperatives. The Gospel is preached as something to be received: “repent and be baptized” (Acts 2:38), “if you confess with your mouth… and believe in your heart, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9). Jesus laments over Jerusalem, “How often would I have gathered your children together… and you were not willing!” (Matthew 23:37) — a longing that seems to presuppose a will that could have answered and didn’t. Revelation 3:20 pictures Christ knocking and waiting: “if anyone hears my voice and opens the door.” To the synergist, the entire rhetorical posture of Scripture — warning, pleading, promising, conditioning — only makes sense if the hearer can genuinely respond.

The Eastern tradition adds a deeper note: salvation is not a verdict imposed but a relationship entered, and love that is compelled is not love. On this reading, God’s refusal to override the will is not a limit on grace but its very character. Wesley sharpened the point with the doctrine of prevenient grace: the ability to respond is itself a gift, restored to fallen humanity universally, so that the human “yes” takes nothing away from grace — it is grace’s own effect.

The Strongest Case Against

The monergist objection is that synergism, however carefully stated, ends by making the decisive difference in salvation a human one. If grace is offered to all and only some accept, then the thing that distinguishes the saved from the lost is not grace — which both received — but the acceptance, which the saved supplied. Augustine pressed exactly this against the Semi-Pelagians, and Paul seems to press it himself: “So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy” (Romans 9:16). The Reformed reading of John 6:44 (“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him”) and Ephesians 2:8-9 (“by grace you have been saved through faith… it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast”) insists that even faith is given, lest salvation become a ground for boasting.

There is also the worry about the bound will. Scripture describes the unregenerate as “dead in trespasses” (Ephesians 2:1) and unable to submit to God (Romans 8:7). A corpse does not cooperate; it must be made alive. From here the monergist argues that synergism underestimates the depth of human ruin — that what feels like free cooperation is in fact the will already liberated and moved by sovereign grace, claiming credit for a motion it did not originate.

Finally there is the pastoral charge that synergism breeds anxiety. If my salvation hinges partly on the quality or persistence of my response, assurance becomes precarious — I am always one failure of cooperation away from losing it. Monergists claim that only an entirely gracious salvation can ground real peace, because it does not finally rest on me at all.

What the New Testament Actually Says

The honest difficulty is that the New Testament contains both streams and never systematizes them. Alongside the “God does it all” texts — John 6:44, Romans 9:16, Philippians 1:6 (“he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion”) — stand the relentless conditionals and commands: “believe,” “repent,” “endure to the end,” “do not harden your hearts.” Philippians 2:12-13 places the two side by side without explaining the seam. Paul can say in one place that God grants repentance (2 Timothy 2:25) and in another command it as a human act. The texts do not resolve the relation between divine initiative and human response; they assert both and move on.

This is why the debate has lasted seventeen centuries without a settled outcome: it is genuinely underdetermined by the data. Synergism reads the imperatives as load-bearing and fits the sovereignty texts around them; monergism reads the sovereignty texts as load-bearing and treats the imperatives as the appointed means by which grace works. Each can account for the other’s verses, and neither can produce a knockdown text the other cannot absorb. The “synergoi” language of 1 Corinthians 3:9 is suggestive but addresses missionary labor, not the mechanics of conversion, and so settles nothing on its own.

What the New Testament will not let either side do is collapse the tension. It refuses to say salvation is your achievement, and it refuses to let you be a passive object. Whether that double refusal points to a genuine cooperation or to a single divine act that produces the human response from within is the question Scripture leaves open — and the question the church has answered, irreconcilably, in both directions.

Further Reading

• Roger E. Olson, “Arminian Theology: Myths and Realities” (2006) — a sympathetic defense of grace-enabled synergism.
• Michael Horton, “For Calvinism” (2011) and Roger E. Olson, “Against Calvinism” (2011) — a paired monergist/synergist exchange.
• John Cassian, “Conferences” (early 5th century), esp. Conference 13 — the patristic source often labeled “Semi-Pelagian” by its critics.
• The Formula of Concord (1577) and the Canons of the Council of Trent, Session 6 (1547) — two confessional standards drawing the line from opposite directions.
• Thomas C. Oden, “John Wesley’s Scriptural Christianity” (1994) — on prevenient grace and Wesleyan synergism.
• The Second Council of Orange (529), in Norman P. Tanner, ed., “Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils” or in J. N. D. Kelly, “Early Christian Doctrines” (1978) — on the grace-and-will settlement behind the whole dispute.