Orthodox and Catholic Voices — Another Christian Option¶

The casebook is a Protestant argument, but it is not a Protestant-versus-Catholic one. Two other communions have been making this case for centuries, and their witnesses are useful precisely because they do not share the casebook's other commitments.

Who they are¶

The Synod of Jerusalem met in 1672 under Dositheus II, Patriarch of Jerusalem, and its decrees — often called the Confession of Dositheus — were written explicitly against Calvinism. The Orthodox tradition it represents speaks of synergia (the cooperation of grace and the human will), theosis (deification as the goal of salvation), and a refusal to treat God's hidden purpose as a settled system of double predestination. On the Roman Catholic side the relevant material is the Council of Trent's teaching on justification and assurance, the de auxiliis controversy between Dominicans and Jesuits (1597–1607), the later condemnation of Jansenism, and popular apologists such as Dave Armstrong, who argues against Calvinism on assurance and perseverance.

Their best arguments¶

1. The Synod of Jerusalem rejected the decree¶

The 1672 decrees deny an absolute decree of reprobation, affirm that God's predestination is conditioned on foreseen faith and perseverance, and insist that grace is genuinely resistible. Whatever one thinks of the synod's authority, it is a datum: a major Christian body, in the same century as Dort and Westminster, examined the Reformed doctrine and rejected it in explicit terms. The claim that the Reformed reading is the obvious one for any Bible-believing church is therefore false as history. See The early church on free will.

2. Synergia and theosis are a different account of grace¶

Orthodox theology does not begin with a legal verdict and then ask how it is applied. It begins with union with God: grace is God's own life given to us, and salvation is participation in it. On that account, the question "is grace irresistible?" is malformed, because grace is not a force that overcomes a will but a life that invites a person into communion. The casebook need not adopt the whole metaphysics to see the value of the point: much of the Calvinist/Arminian argument assumes a forensic framework in which grace is a quantity to be applied, and the East offers a reminder that this is a choice, not a given.

3. Rome's own debates show the West was never settled¶

Trent anathematized the view that the justified must believe themselves certainly among the predestinate, and warned against presuming to know one's election — a direct challenge to the practical payoff of the Reformed doctrine of assurance. The de auxiliis controversy then showed that even within Rome the relation of grace and freedom was unresolved: the Dominicans' physical predetermination and the Jesuits' scientia media and congruism were rival systems, and the papacy declined to settle the question. Later, Rome condemned Jansenism, which was the strictest Augustinian reading of grace — evidence that the Western church's own magisterium would not accept the most consistent form of the Augustinian synthesis.

One representative work¶

For the East, the decrees of the Synod of Jerusalem (1672). For Rome, Trent's decree on justification (Session VI) and the de auxiliis material. Armstrong's popular books are a way in for lay readers, not a scholarly source.

Their distinctive contribution¶

They widen the frame. The casebook's central historical claim is that the Reformed doctrine is a particular Western development; the existence of a ancient, non-Augustinian, non-Calvinist theology with its own account of grace is the strongest form of that claim. The Orthodox also supply a theological alternative to the "grace as irresistible force" model that does not collapse into Pelagianism.

Where the case is weakest¶

The witnesses are selective, and the casebook must say so. The Synod of Jerusalem was a polemical document in a contested context, and Orthodox theology has its own difficulties — including a sometimes imprecise doctrine of predestination and a rejection of imputation that the casebook's Protestant readers will not accept. Trent's critique of assurance depends on a doctrine of merit and a magisterium this project does not hold, so citing Trent is ad hoc unless the point is only historical. The de auxiliis debates were about the mechanics of grace, not about the casebook's conclusion. And "the East never had Augustine" proves only that the East never had Augustine. Use these voices as corroboration and as a caution against equating "Christian" with "Reformed"; do not turn the casebook into a Catholic or Orthodox apologetic.

What to borrow¶

The historical datum, the synergia/theosis alternative as a way of reframing the question, Trent on assurance, and the reminder that the Western tradition contains more than one synthesis. Keep the tone descriptive.