The Oldest Argument in Christianity Might Be Why We Stopped at Healing

In Episode 2 of What Does It Mean to Be Well? I name two reasons the church sometimes slows past healing. The first is capacity. The second is a theological tension between human effort and divine grace that deserves more than a passing mention. The video introduces it. This blog actually engages it. Watch the episode first, then come back here.

There is a question that has been dividing serious Christians for roughly 1,600 years, and it comes up whenever someone asks whether pursuing flourishing is faithful or self-focused.

The question is this: how much of the good life is something we pursue, and how much of it is something God produces in us?

It sounds like a modern wellness debate. It is not. It is one of the oldest arguments in the history of Christian thought, and understanding why it has never been fully resolved helps explain something important about why the church tends to be better at helping people survive than helping them thrive.

Where the Tension Starts

Augustine of Hippo, writing in the early fifth century, was responding to a British monk named Pelagius who argued that human beings have the natural capacity to choose God and pursue holiness without divine intervention. According to Pelagius, the Will is free. The effort is ours to make.

Augustine disagreed, forcefully and at length. Human will is not free, he argued. It is bound by sin. Without the prior movement of divine grace, no one chooses God, pursues holiness, or grows in virtue. Grace is not a reward for effort. It is the precondition for any effort worth making.

The Council of Carthage in 418 sided with Augustine. Pelagianism was declared heresy. And the question was settled, officially, theologically, institutionally, in favor of grace.

Except it was not really settled. Because the practical question remained: if grace precedes and enables everything, what exactly are we supposed to do? What is the role of human effort, practice, formation, and intention in a life oriented toward God?

The question was settled theologically in 418. The pastoral implications have been negotiated ever since.

The Reformation Made It Sharper

Martin Luther, twelve centuries after Augustine, sharpened the tension rather than resolving it. Justification is by faith alone, through grace alone. Human works contribute nothing to the standing before God that matters most. Sola fide. Sola gratia.

Luther was not wrong. But the pastoral question got sharper: if works contribute nothing to justification, what exactly is the relationship between grace and the ongoing life of formation? Between being declared righteous and becoming righteous? Between justification and sanctification?

The Reformed tradition developed robust answers. The Wesleyan tradition developed different ones. The Catholic tradition never fully abandoned the cooperation of human will with divine grace. And the evangelical Protestant tradition inherited a complicated mixture of all of them, usually without being fully aware of which thread it was pulling on at any given moment.

The result is a kind of theological background hum that I think many of us feel but can’t name precisely. Something like: God does the transforming, so be careful about making it sound like something we produce through effort. But also: we need to show up, practice, engage, pursue. But also: be careful about making it sound like performance. But also: growth requires intention.

And around it goes.

Unnamed tension tends to produce cautious silence rather than clear direction.

Why This Matters for Flourishing Specifically

Here is where the ancient debate lands in the present moment.

Crisis care does not trigger the effort-grace tension in the same way that flourishing does. When someone is suffering, the instinct is to move toward them. Hold space. Pray. Bring food. Sit with grief. None of that feels like human effort producing a spiritual result. It feels like love responding to need, which is theologically unambiguous.

But flourishing is different. The question of how to intentionally cultivate whole-person wellbeing in Christ sounds, to an ear shaped by the effort-grace tension, uncomfortably close to Pelagianism. It sounds like humans engineering their own transformation. It sounds like the wrong kind of striving.

So the instinct is to get cautious. To say let God do it. To say wait on the Lord. To say be careful about making this a program. And none of that is wrong exactly. But it can quietly function as a reason not to engage the question of flourishing with the same intentionality that crisis care receives.

I have felt that pull myself. There is something that feels safer about waiting than about pursuing, when you are not entirely sure where the line is between faithful effort and Pelagian self-reliance.

Where the Conversation Needs to Go

The resolution to the effort-grace tension is not to choose a side. It is to hold both things with more precision than the binary usually allows.

Grace is prior. Always. God initiates, enables, and sustains. Nothing in Christian formation happens apart from the movement of the Holy Spirit. That is not negotiable, and it is not the question.

The question is what faithful human response to that grace looks like in practice. And the answer the Christian tradition has always given, when it is being careful, is that the response is real, embodied, and involves the whole person. It involves attention and intention and practice. It involves knowing where you are and moving toward where God is calling you.

That is not Pelagianism. That is discipleship.

The Greatest Commandment is not a passive posture. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength. That is a command in the active voice. It requires something of us. And it is precisely because grace has enabled us to respond that the response is possible at all.

Pursuing flourishing intentionally is not self-help dressed up in theological language. It is faithfulness to a command that was always asking something of us.

What I am building with the Greatest Commandment Model is a framework for that response. Not a program for producing transformation. Only God produces transformation. But a way of knowing where you actually are across the dimensions of whole-person wellbeing, so that intention and effort are pointed in the right direction.

The church was never meant to stop at healing. It was built to make disciples. And discipleship has always included the intentional, whole-person pursuit of the life Jesus described.

The oldest argument in Christianity is not a reason to stop. It is an invitation to go further, with more precision than we have managed so far.

Watch Episode 2 at the link above.

Join the Greatest Commandment Assessment waitlist at luke1028.com.

Jen Collier is the co-founder of The Luke 10:28 Project and a researcher and practitioner at the intersection of positive psychology, Christian psychology, and applied coaching psychology. She holds an NBC-HWC certification and an MSc in Applied Positive Psychology and Coaching Psychology from the University of East London.