Pelagianism Vs. Augustinianism in Church History

Edited by John Hendryx

Preface

Augustine's Doctrine of the Bondage of the Will

Contrasting Augustine and the Council of Orange (529 AD) with The Council of Trent (1563)

A.A. Hodge - Pelagianism, Semi-Pelagianism & Augustinianism

B. B. Warfield - Augustine & the Pelagian Controversy

Arthur C. Custance - The Leven of Synergism

The Original Debate: Historic Documentson Grace Alone

Augustine - A Treatise On Grace and Free Will

Augustine - A Treatise On Nature and Grace, Against Pelagius

Augustine - A Treatiuse On Rebuke and Grace

Augustine - A Treatise On the Grace of Christ and Original Sin

Augustine - A Treatise On the Predestination of the Saints

Augustine - A Treatise On the Gift of Perseverance

Augustine - A Work On the Proceedings of Pelagius

Jerome - Against the Pelagians (Book 1)

Jerome - Against the Pelagians (Book 2)

Jerome - Against the Pelagians (Book 3)

Canons of the Council of Orange - 529

Reforming the Church

Luther -Key Quotes from On the Bondage of the Will - 1525

Calvin - The Necessity of Reforming the Church - 1543
Calvin - A Treatise of the Eternal Predestination of God - 1552
Calvin - The Fall and Revolt of Adam - Calvin - Inst 2.1 - 1559
Calvin - Man Has Now Been Deprived of Freedom of Choice -Inst 2.2 - 1559
Calvin - Only Damnable Things Come Forth from Man - Inst 2.3 - 1559
Calvin - How God Works in Men's Hearts - Inst 2.4 - 1559
Calvin - Refutation of the Objections in Defense of Free Will - Inst 2.5 - 1559
Calvin - Fallen Man Ought to Seek Redemption in Christ - Inst 2.6 - 1559

CONFESSIONS AND CREEDS COMING OUT OF THE REFORMATION

The Belgic Confession of Faith - 1561
The Heidelberg Catechism - 1563
The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion
The Wesminster Confession of Faith - 1647

Calvinist / Arminianism Controversy

Five Arminians Articles of Remonstrance - Arminain 1610

Canons of Dort - 1618

Universal Atonement by John L. Girardeau

Arminian Theory of Redemption by R.L. Dabney

Of Free Will in the Fallen State by Christopher Ness

The Arminian Idol of Free Will by John Owen

Appendices

Quotes on Effectual Grace by St. Augustine

Controversy Between Whitefield and Wesley - 1740

Free Grace: A Sermon by John Wesley (Classic Arminian)

Augustine by Arthur C. Custance, Ph.D

From Augustine to the Reformation by Arthur C. Custance, Ph.D

Preface

B. B. Warfield once declared that there are "fundamentally only two doctrines of salvation: that salvation is from God, and that salvation is from ourselves. The former is the doctrine of common Christianity; the latter is the doctrine of universal heathenism." This statement frames the never-ending battle between Augustinians and Pelagians through church history over the extent that the grace of Christ saves us. Augustine taught that because human beings are born in original sin and are utterly impotent to redeem themselves, that salvation must, not in part, but wholly be from God. In other words, since man's will is in bondage to sin, only God's grace in Christ, which he most freely bestows on whom He will, means that God alone deserves the glory for salvation. Pelagius, on the other hand, rejected original sin by asserting that Adam was merely a bad example and we could help ourselves through a moral improvement scheme. According to Pelagius salvation comes about through choosing to become a Christ-follower, that is, by following Christ's moral example, rather than Adams'. On the other hand, Augustine taught the biblical doctrine that salvation is a free gift of mercy to those whom God joins to Christ, clothing them in his righteousness and making them alive by His grace.

Again, B. B. Warfield said, "Augustine [was one of the early founders] of Roman Catholicism and the author of that doctrine of grace which it has been the constantly pursued effort of Roman Catholicism to neutralize, and which in very fact either must be neutralized by, or will neutralize, Roman Catholicism. Two children were struggling in the womb of his mind. There can be no doubt which was the child of his heart. His doctrine of the Church he had received whole from his predecessors, and he gave it merely the precision and vitality which insured its persistence. His doctrine of grace was all his own: it represented the very core of his being . . . it was inevitable, had time been allowed, that his inherited doctrine of the Church, too, with all its implications, would have gone down before it, and Augustine would have bequeathed to the Church, not "problems," but a thoroughly worked out system of evangelical religion. . . . The problem which Augustine bequeathed to the Church for solution, the Church required a thousand years to solve. But even so, it is Augustine who gave us the Reformation. For the Reformation, inwardly considered, was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine's doctrine of grace over Augustine's doctrine of the Church. (Warfield, Calvin and Augustine, 321-22)

The Bible is our authority in all matters of our faith. But investigating how the church interpreted the Bible through its history gives us a great deal of understanding of who we are now. Pointing out the various strains of Christianity, that is, which ones have remains faithful to Scripture and which have deviated, may help us to see more clearly where we may have gone astray.

"For by grace you have been saved through faith, which is a gift from God, so that no man can boast." - Eph 2:8-9

"...no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father." - John 6:65

"Grace does not destroy the will but rather restores it." - Augustine

"Let God give what He commands, and command what He will." - Augustine

Augustine's Doctrine of the Bondage of the Will

Augustine argued that there are four states, which are derived from the Scripture, that correspond to the four states of man in relation to sin: (a) able to sin, able not to sin (posse peccare, posse non peccare); (b) not able not to sin (non posse non peccare); (c) able not to sin (posse non peccare); and (d) unable to sin (non posse peccare). The first state corresponds to the state of man in innocency, before the Fall; the second the state of the natural man after the Fall; the third the state of the regenerate man; and the fourth the glorified man.
Augustine's description of the person after the fall "not able not to sin (non posse non peccare)" is what it means for humanity to have lost the liberty of the will. Fallen man's will is free from coercion yes, but not free from necessity... ie. he sins of necessity due to a corruption of nature.
With this in mind we better understand the following statements of Augustine:
"Without the Spirit man's will is not free, since it has been laid under by shackling and conquering desires." - Augustine, Letters cxlv 2 (MPL 33. 593; tr FC 20. 163f.)
"When the will was conquered by the vice into which it had fallen, human nature began to lose its freedom." - Augustine, On Man's Perfection in Righteousness iv 9 (MLP 44. 296; tr. NPNF V. 161)
"Through freedom man came to be in sin, but the corruption which followed as punishment turned freedom into necessity." - Augustine On Man's Perfection In Righteousness
"Man, using free will badly, has lost both himself and his will"
"The free will has been so enslaved that is can have no power for righteousness."
"What God's grace has not freed will not be free."
"Nature is commong to all, but not grace."
"The justice of God is not fulfilled when the law so commands, and man acts as if by his own strength; but when the Spirit helps, and man's will, not free, but freed by God, obeys."
"Man when he was created received great powers of free will, but lost them by sinning."
"We know that God's grace is not given to all men. To those to whom it is given it is given neither according to the merits of works, nor according to the merits of the will, but by free grace. To those to whom it is not given we know that it is because of God's righteous judgment that it is not given."
Augustine - On Rebuke and Grace
"How have you come? By believing. Fear lest while you are claiming for yourself that you have found the just way, you perish from the just way. I have come, you say, of my own free choice; I have come of my own will. Why are you puffed up? Do you wish to know that this also has been given you? Hear Him calling, 'No one comes to me unless my Father draws him' [John 6:44 p.]." - Augustine, Sermons xxvi. 3, 12, 4, 7 (MPL 28.172, 177, 172f., 174)
"Why then, do miserable men either dare to boast of free will before they have been freed, or of their powers, if they have already been freed? And they do not heed the fact that in the term 'free will" freedom seems to be implied. 'Now where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.' [II Cor 3:17]. If therefore, they are slaves of sin, why do they boast of free will? For a man becomes the slave of him who has overcome him. Now if they have been freed, why do they boast as if it had come about through their own effort? Of are they so free as not to wish to be slaves of him who says: 'Without me you can do nothing'" [John 15:5]
"...the human will does not obtain grace by freedom, but obtains freedom by grace; when the feeling of delight has been imparted through. the same grace, the human will is formed to endure; it is strengthened with unconquerable fortitude; controlled by grace, it never will perish, but, if grace forsake it, it will straightway fall; by the Lord's free mercy it is converted to good, and once converted it perseveres in good; the direction of the human will toward good, and after direction its continuation in good, depend solely upon God's will, not upon any merit of man. Thus there is left to man such free will, if we please so to call it, as he elsewhere describes: that except through grace the will can neither be converted to God nor abide in God; and whatever it can do it is able to do only through grace. "

AUGUSTIN CONFESSES THAT HE HAD FORMERLY BEEN IN ERROR CONCERNING THE GRACE OF GOD.
Augustin explains that at some point he changed his view from synergism to divine monergism in salvation. He argues that due to our fallen state, we are not only partly dependent upon Christ for our conversion but totally dependent upon Christ.

"It was not thus that pious and humble teacher thought--I speak of the most blessed Cyprian--when he said "that we must boast in nothing, since nothing is our own." And in order to show the, he appealed to the apostle as a witness, where he said, "For what hast thou that thou hast not received ?And if thou hast received it, why boastest thou as if thou hadst not received it?"And it was chiefly by this testimony that I myself also was convinced when I was in a similar error, thinking that faith whereby we believe on God is not God's gift, but that it is in us from ourselves, and that by it we obtain the gifts of God, whereby we may live temperately and righteously and piously in this world. For I did not think that faith was preceded by God's grace, so that by its means would be given to us what we might profitably ask, except that we could not believe if the proclamation of the truth did not precede; but that we should consent when the gospel was preached to us I thought was our own doing, and came to us from ourselves. And this my error is sufficiently indicated in some small works of mine written before my episcopate. Among these is that which you have mentioned in your letters wherein is an exposition of certain propositions from the Epistle to the Romans. Eventually, when I was retracting all my small works, and was committing that retractation to writing, of which task I had already completed two books before I had taken up your more lengthy letters,--when in the first volume I had reached the retractation of this book, I then spoke thus:--"Also discussing, I say, 'what God could have chosen in him who was as yet unborn, whom He said that the elder should serve; and what in the same elder, equally as yet unborn, He could have rejected; concerning whom, on this account, the prophetic testimony is recorded, although declared long subsequently, "Jacob have I loved, and Esau have I hated,"' I carried out my reasoning to the point of saying: ' God did not therefore choose the works of any one in foreknowledge of what He Himself would give them, but he chose the faith, in the foreknowledge that He would choose that very person whom He foreknew would believe on Him,--to whom He would give the Holy Spirit, so that by doing good works he might obtain eternal life also.' I had not yet very carefully sought, nor had I as yet found, what is the nature of the election of grace, of which the apostle says, ' A remnant are saved according to the election of grace.' Which assuredly is not grace if any merits precede it; lest what is now given, not according to grace, but according to debt, be rather paid to merits than freely given. And what I next subjoined: ' For the same apostle says, "The same God which worketh all in all;" but it was never said, God believeth all in all ;' and then added, ' Therefore what we believe is our own, but what good thing we do is of Him who giveth the Holy Spirit to them that believe: ' I certainly could not have said, had I already known that faith itself also is found among those gifts of God which are given by the same Spirit. Both, therefore, are ours on account of the choice of the will, and yet both are given by the spirit of faith and love, For faith is not alone but as it is written, ' Love with faith, from God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ.' And what I said a little after, ' For it is ours to believe and to will, but it is His to give to those who believe and will, the power of doing good works through the Holy Spirit, by whom love is shed abroad in our hearts,'--is true indeed; but by the same rule both are also God's, because God prepares the will; and both are ours too, because they are only brought about with our good wills. And thus what I subsequently said also: ' Because we are not able to Will unless we are called; and when, after our calling, we would will, our willing is not sufficiently nor our running, unless God gives strength to us that run, and leads us whither He calls us;' and thereupon added: ' It is plain, therefore, that it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy, that we do good works'--this is absolutely most true. But I discovered little concerning the calling itself, which is according to God's purpose; for not such is the calling of all that are called, but only of the elect. Therefore what I said a little afterwards: ' For as in those whom God elects it is not works but faith that begins the merit so as to do good works by the gift of God, so in those whom He condemns, unbelief and impiety begin the merit of punishment, so that even by way of punishment itself they do evil works'--I spoke most truly. But that even the merit itself of faith was God's gift, I neither thought of inquiring into, nor did I say. And in another place I say: 'For whom He has mercy upon, He makes to do good works, and whom He hardeneth He leaves to do evil works; but that mercy is bestowed upon the preceding merit of faith, and that hardening is applied to preceding iniquity.' And this indeed is true; but it should further have been asked, whether even the merit of faith does not come from God's mercy,--that is, whether that mercy is manifested in man only because he is a believer, or whether it is also manifested that he may be a believer? For we read in the apostles words: ' I obtained mercy to be a believer.' He does not say, ' Because I was a believer.' Therefore although it is given to the believer, yet it has been given also that he may be a believer. Therefore also, in another place in the same book I most truly said: ' Because, if it is of God's mercy, and not of works, that we are even called that we may believe and it is granted to us who believe to do good works, that mercy must not be grudged to the heathen;'--although I there discoursed less carefully about that calling which is given according to God's purpose." - Augustine, A TREATISE ON THE PREDESTINATION OF THE SAINTS chapter 7 [III.]
Man's original capacities included both the power not to sin and the power to sin ( posse non peccare et posse peccare ). In Adam's original sin, man lost the posse non peccare (the power not to sin) and retained the posse peccare (the power to sin)--which he continues to exercise. In the fulfillment of grace, man will have the posse peccare taken away and receive the highest of all, the power not to be able to sin, non posse peccare . Cf. On Correction and Grace XXXIII.

Pelagianism Vs. Augustinianism in Church History