Conversion

The Texts

Hannah's canticle in 1 Samuel 2 is not a personal testimony about one woman's answered prayer. It is a theology of divine sovereignty compressed into a few verses, and the Apology of the Augsburg Confession treats it as exactly that. The Apology cites verse 6 directly, "The Lord kills and makes alive," and declares that by one of these, contrition is signified, and by the other, faith is signified. The killing is God's strange work: the Law driving the sinner into the knowledge of his own death. The making alive is His proper work: the Gospel that raises what the Law has slain. Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration II, takes this binary and constructs a doctrine. If God alone kills and makes alive, the human will contributes nothing to either operation.

Psalm 30 confirms the same testimony from the opposite direction. The psalmist does not describe a recovery in which his own resilience played a part. "O Lord my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me." He brought down to Sheol; He raised up. The movement from mourning to dancing, from sackcloth to gladness, is entirely God's act. Hannah sings the same truth from the banks of her own Sheol: the barren woman bears seven children, and the one who trusts in his own strength is shattered. Both texts arrive at the same border the Formula of Concord will defend with precision: the boundary between God's work and the human response that follows from it, but never precedes it.

Key Terms

Worse Than a Stone

The Formula of Concord does not merely say that the unregenerate will is weak or impaired. It declares that before conversion a man cannot understand, believe, accept, will, begin, or cooperate in his conversion either wholly, or half, or in any, even the least or most inconsiderable part. Luther's description of the unregenerate will as a pillar of salt, a log, a stone, and a lifeless statue is cited approvingly. The language is meant to close every door through which a residual human contribution might enter.

Yet the Formula adds a distinction that sharpens the image further. The unregenerate man is in a worse condition than a block of wood or a stone, not a better one. A stone does not actively resist the hand that moves it. The natural man is at absolute enmity against God and fiercely, actively resists the Holy Ghost until God unilaterally converts him. The comparison to inanimate objects is not meant to flatter the will into passivity; it is meant to show that the will's problem is not merely absence of motion but active opposition. Psalm 30's psalmist did not help God bring him up from Sheol; he was brought.

The Rejection of Synergism

The historical occasion for Solid Declaration II was the Synergistic Controversy, in which Philip Melanchthon and Victorinus Strigel taught that man is not entirely spiritually dead but only, as they put it, badly wounded and half dead. Melanchthon introduced the formula of three concurring causes in conversion: the Word of God, the Holy Spirit, and the human will assenting to and not resisting the Word. The Formula's response is total. Before conversion there are only two efficient causes: the Holy Spirit and the Word of God. The unregenerate will is the subjectum convertendum, the thing to be converted, not a cause of its own conversion.

The Formula's description of the unregenerate will as pure passive before conversion means it does nothing but suffer God to work in it, as a potter works clay. This is not a description of the will's dignified reception of grace; it is a description of its utter inability to initiate, sustain, or assist its own transformation. Hannah's canticle does not say that the barren woman half-opened her womb and God supplied the rest. The Lord opens the womb and closes it, kills and makes alive, as He alone sees fit.

God's Way of Working

If the will is purely passive in conversion, the natural question is how God moves a rational creature without treating him the way He moves a stone. The Formula answers with the modus agendi, God's specific way of working with rational beings. He uses the external means of grace: the preaching and hearing of the Word. Even the unregenerate man retains enough civil freedom of the will to go to church and hear a sermon. Through that outward hearing, the Holy Spirit breaks the heart, works the terrors of contrition, and then kindles the spark of faith that receives the forgiveness of sins.

The Formula's formulation is precise: "God, through the drawing of the Holy Ghost, makes out of stubborn and unwilling men willing ones." He does not wait for willingness; He produces it. Once regenerated, the renewed will is no longer idle, and the converted man cooperates in all the works of the Holy Ghost. The Formula explicitly refuses, however, the analogy of two horses pulling a wagon together, which would imply equal partnership. The regenerate will cooperates entirely through the new powers given by the Spirit, and only so long as God rules, guides, and leads him. If God were to withdraw His hand, the believer could not persevere in obedience for a single moment.

The Payoff

Psalm 30's dancing and Hannah's seven children are not the products of human resilience finally rewarded by a gracious God. They are the products of the same sovereign act that raised Jesus Christ from the dead, the only One in whom God's killing and making alive reached its final and decisive form. The Formula of Concord defends the passivity of the human will in conversion not to diminish the believer but to protect the Gospel: the one who was dead in trespasses and raised to faith by the Holy Spirit through the Word may know with absolute certainty that his conversion rests on God's unilateral act, and that the God who made him willing once will not abandon him to the native powers of his flesh.