According to some Protestants, the receiver of God’s initial, justifying grace is passive in doing so. For instance, in the Joint Declaration on Justification, it is said that:

According to Lutheran teaching, human beings are incapable of cooperating in their salvation, because as sinners they actively oppose God and his saving action. (Section 4, Paragraph 20)

However, according to some of these same Protestants, man is capable of rejecting God’s grace, contra the teaching of irresistible grace. As a friend of mine has said, man is active in his damnation and passive in his salvation. Or, as the Joint Declaration puts it:

Lutherans do not deny that a person can reject the working of grace. When they emphasize that a person can only receive (mere passive) justification, they mean thereby to exclude any possibility of contributing to one's own justification… (Section 4, Paragraph 20)

However, this seems to pose a dilemma that leads these kinds of Protestants to either need to accept irresistible grace, or accept synergism.

The dilemma is this: Does man choose passivity?

Because it seems that if the Protestant say man does choose passivity, they either contradict the very meaning of being a passive recipient of God’s grace, or they must be a synergist (read: in agreement with the Council of Trent), because man is choosing God’s grace.

If they say that man does not choose passivity, then they must believe in irresistible grace, because man’s passivity is the result of God’s choice. Man is incapable of rejecting God’s grace because passivity is not something he chooses.

How could a Protestant who accepts monergism but rejects irresistible grace escape this dilemma?