In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will—to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.
Ephesians 1:4–6
As we saw with Augustine, those aspects of Christian theology that have the most immediate existential impact are often grasped intuitively before we learn to articulate them in the more precise categories of Christian discourse. I knew that I was a sinner and needed a Savior who was God himself long before I was able to express what that meant in a finely tooled doctrine of original sin or had read the Creed of Nicaea. I had a vision of the glory of the Christ who is God and man before I knew the terms expressed by the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Theology cannot be reduced to our experience or to religious psychology—the fundamental error of liberalism—but we cannot deny that for most people our experience of grace precedes a full and rigorous understanding of grace.
In the Confessions, we saw how Augustine offers us the first great postbiblical first-person narrative of God’s grace in the life of the soul. It’s not a work of biblical exegesis or systematic theology but a personal testimony, suffused with Bible verses and theological reflections. As with all attempts at autobiography, there is some systematizing at work as he seeks to find or impose an order on his story to give it a narrative with some theological coherence. But it is no systematic theology. It is a prayer. It is a confession of sin and personal faith, constructed to bring glory to God and instruction to those who read it or hear it read. Augustine is tracing the work of God in his life and in terms of his sin and God’s grace.
The late fourth century was not a time of easy access to books. Levels of literacy were rather low, and for a book to have a wide impact it needed to be read out loud, publicly performed in front of others. And that’s what happened with Augustine’s story. Today we might go to the cinema or to the theater, but in Augustine’s day the theologically engaged went to a public reading.
At one of these events in the early years of the fifth century, there was a member of the audience named Pelagius, a Welsh monk. His exposure to the Confessions was a momentous occasion that triggered a bitter theological controversy. Augustine himself gives an account of this famous incident in chapter 53 of a later work, On the Gift of Perseverance:
And which of my smaller works has been able to be more generally and more agreeably known than the books of my Confessions? And although I published them before the Pelagian heresy had come into existence, certainly in them I said to my God, and said it frequently, “Give what Thou commandest, and command what Thou willest.” Which words of mine, Pelagius at Rome, when they were mentioned in his presence by a certain brother and fellow-bishop of mine, could not bear; and contradicting somewhat too excitedly, nearly came to a quarrel with him who had mentioned them. But what, indeed, does God primarily and chiefly command, but that we believe on Him? And this, therefore, He Himself gives, if it is well said to Him, “Give what Thou commandest.” And, moreover, in those same books, in respect of what I have related concerning my conversion, when God converted me to that faith which, with a most miserable and raging talkativeness, I was destroying, do you not remember that it was so narrated how I showed that I was granted to the faithful and daily tears of my mother, that I should not perish? Where certainly I declared that God by His grace converted to the true faith the wills of men, which were not only averse to it, but even adverse to it.1
This was the encounter that started what we now know as the Pelagian controversy, a controversy that is fundamental to all future discussions of grace. This conflict forced Augustine to offer deeper exegetical and systematic foundations for the intuitive understandings of grace he had put forth in the Confessions. In doing so, he clarified what was really at stake, laying down the basic framework for later medieval, Reformation, and post-Reformation arguments on this issue. Perhaps not until the work of Karl Barth was a true attempt made to overthrow the Augustinian structure of the discussion, and even Barth is largely reacting against—and thus still dependent on—the classic Augustinian heritage.
The Context of the Controversy
If grace represents a response by God to the plight of sinful humanity, how one understands grace lies at the heart of what one understands the Christian life to be. If one believes that humanity’s problem is simply ignorance of how to live, then we can assume that grace is education to alleviate such ignorance. We might identify grace with a book of rules or a manual of ethics that God specially reveals to cut through innate human ignorance.
Grace also relates to the authenticity of Christianity, whether it is real and genuine. If our human problem is simply moral ignorance, and grace is moral revelation, the Christian life would consist of men and women being obedient in their own strength to the revealed moral code. God shows us what to do, and we find the will to do it. Under such a system, Augustine’s claim that God should command what he will is not a problem. God has every right to demand that we live moral lives. But it is the second clause—that he should give what he commands—that proves problematic. Why? Because this statement seems to place both the responsibility for revealing true morality and for the individual’s obedient response squarely on the shoulders of God himself. We should not be surprised that many people felt that a theology like this was nothing but an excuse for moral laxity. That was how Pelagius understood it. To him, Augustine was providing a rationale for moral mediocrity.
We forget that this was not a minor squabble but a ferocious debate. To grasp this, we need to understand something of the nature of the fifth-century world. For the first two centuries of its existence, the Christian church had been marginally connected to Roman society. Christians were mocked and derided by the intelligentsia and subject to sporadic local persecutions. By the middle of the third century, however, Christianity was growing into a significant force, and a number of empire-wide persecutions occurred at the hands of emperors worried that it would lead to sedition and undermine the established order.
Culturally, the church responded by setting forth the idea of the martyr, the one who suffers for his faith, as an aspirational ideal. The ancient world often placed a high value on asceticism. This did not mean that many aspired to be ascetics but that those who lived an ascetic life were often seen as special, wise, or elite. The lives of philosophers such as Pythagoras or Diogenes would emphasize this aspect of their biography as a way of pointing to their integrity. In such a world, Christianity’s early emphasis on physical suffering and even death for the faith would have spoken eloquently even to pagans who did not share the faith.
Then, suddenly, all of this changed for Christianity. At the start of the fourth century, Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and set in motion a century of struggle for ideological control of the empire. The old gods of paganism battled, and slowly lost ground, to the God of the Christians. The most obvious result of this change was that Christianity became, for want of a better term, a whole lot easier. Indeed, part of the attraction of Christianity for the empire was the number of adherents it had and the administrative structure it possessed. As the empire Christianized, Christianity no longer was the difficult or dangerous option. It was now the easy and at times advantageous one.
Times of massive cultural change for Christianity always raise the question of what a true Christian looks like. In America in the twenty-first century, we see the church rapidly changing to a marginal role within society. Issues of Christian identity and behavior in this new world dominate many of the headlines in the Christian press. But it was the opposite experience in the fourth century. Christianity had been on the sidelines and was now respectable. Yet the challenges to identity were just as fierce. How could a movement whose aspirational ideal was suffering and martyrdom continue now that Christianity was rapidly moving from the political and cultural margins at the start of the fourth century toward being the official religion of the empire by its end?
One option was monasticism. The fourth century saw the rapid rise of the monastic movement, inspired by the lives of ascetics such as Anthony and visionaries such as Pachomius. The monastic ideal of self-denial and physical and mental asceticism made Christianity a valiant and difficult calling, even as the world around monasticism came to accept the church and led to a softening of the faith.
It was in this context that the clash between Pelagius and Augustine erupted. It was more than a pedantic debate between two theologians; rather, it represented a clash between two views of what it means to be a Christian and to live a Christian life. At the heart of the debate were fundamentally different conceptions of grace. To put it simply: Was the Christian life primarily one of vigorous, disciplined, ascetic effort? Or was it, to use deliberately provocative terminology, one of moral mediocrity, in which constant failure might be excused?2
The Course of the Controversy
The issues at stake in the debate—sin, grace, predestination—are perennials of Christian controversy. So it’s no surprise that the battle between them has rumbled on down through the ages with those who have tended toward one side or the other continuing to battle for the soul of the church. For now, we’ll focus on the ancient controversy itself as seen through the life of Augustine.
The earliest years of debate were from 411 to 418 CE, and they exhibit a certain amount of chaos. In 411, a synod in Carthage condemned Pelagius’s colleague, Caelestius, yet in 415 the Synod of Diospolis exonerated Pelagius from accusations of false teaching. Then, two years later, the situation became even more confusing. In January, the then-bishop of Rome, Innocent I, condemned both Pelagius and Caelestius. Nine months later, his successor, Zosimus, rehabilitated them. Then, in May 418, a council in Carthage condemned both men, and this time Zosimus switched sides, confirming the condemnations. What is clear in all of this is that the church had not fully reflected on the notion of grace and was being forced to some quick conclusions. All of this threatened to cause serious division.
After 418 Augustine was more engaged and went head-to-head with Julian of Eclanum, the most brilliant of the early Pelagian thinkers. In this phase of the debate, the key issues discussed were the goodness of marriage, the nature of life before the fall, the origin of the soul, and the nature and transmission of original sin, as well as the matter of predestination. Augustine, by this point, had elaborated on his intuitive theology in the Confessions, developing it into a complex of doctrines.
Human Freedom: The Key Issue
The key issue in the debate between Augustine and the Pelagians was freedom. For Pelagius, if Christianity was to be a religion of merit, it was necessary that human beings after the fall be free in the sense that they were ultimately responsible for their own actions. He saw the Christian life as one in which Christ was a great example, and Christianity largely involved following him as a paradigm for life. The grace of God had a threefold reference. First, it was the forgiveness of past sins.3 Second, it was the endowment of human freedom, the ability of human beings to recognize and obey God if they wished.4 Third, it was the revelation of what that activity should look like.5 This included the sacred Scriptures given to us as law. The Pauline notion of Adam and Christ as the archetypes of all humanity meant that they were not representative heads for all humanity, but rather bad and good examples of what human beings should do.6
The theology underlying Augustine’s prayer that God should “command what you will, and give what you command!” rests on a very different view of human freedom. For Augustine, the human problem was the lack of freedom since Adam’s fall. Augustine agreed that Adam was created with free will, though this will was not quite the same as how we think of free will today. Today free will typically connotes the ability to choose between alternatives a or b without interference (i.e., libertarian freedom).7 I might choose to visit Philadelphia this Saturday, or I might choose to stay at home. The decision is mine, uncoerced by any external force.
If we move this question of freedom into the context of moral action, we can perhaps see Pelagius’s concern. For him, human beings could freely choose to follow God on the basis of what he had revealed of himself. By implication, this meant that they could also freely choose not to do so. Augustine, however, takes a different approach. For him, human freedom before the fall (like that of the angels) had an intrinsic, moral quality. Not only did Adam have a free and upright will, Adam also possessed as a gift from God the ability not to sin. Unfallen human freedom was only properly exercised when Adam clung in love to God, as a creature should. The freedom of the human will can only be properly considered when it is set in the context for which human beings were designed—our unfallen state.
According to Augustine, grace now makes the fallen will free again by instilling in it a love of righteousness:
For neither is the law fulfilled except by free will; but by the law is the knowledge of sin, by faith the acquisition of grace against sin, by grace the healing of the soul from the disease of sin, by the health of the soul freedom of will, by free will the love of righteousness, by love of righteousness the accomplishment of the law.8
This notion of freedom sounds strange to those raised in a culture in which we embrace a more libertarian concept of freedom. We think of freedom in terms of our own autonomy, but Augustine pushes back, saying that the will is truly free when it chooses to love God. As soon as Adam failed to do that and chose another ultimate love, his will was less free.
When thinking of Augustinian freedom, we should set aside libertarian notions and think first of all in terms of how a thing is designed. For example, a fish that uses its physical capabilities to beach itself on the shore will die. As a creature, a fish is not truly free when it does this. By acting in a way contrary to its design, it destroys itself. In Augustine’s theology Adam’s decision to disobey God is something he is able to do and for which he is responsible. But it is an act that destroys his freedom, not one that demonstrates or enhances it.
Once fallen, Adam’s will (and those of his descendants) remained free in the ordinary sense that he was able to choose how to act. But this freedom was now limited, oriented away from God and toward self, toward seeing the satisfying of oneself and one’s needs as the purpose of life. Adam acts freely in that he is not subject to external coercion, but now he always acts sinfully. His will always tends toward love of self rather than love of God and is enslaved to sin. Like a fish flopping on the beach, every action he chooses only leads to his inevitable death.
Original Sin
The Pelagian controversy sharpened Augustine’s thinking on original sin, and though some of the nuanced points are contested in Augustine scholarship, there is agreement on certain basics. Augustine believed that corporate human nature after Adam’s fall inherited ignorance concerning what is good. He saw that human desire and love was now directed toward the self rather than toward God (concupiscence). He saw all human beings as guilty and condemned in Adam. And he spent a great deal of his theology thinking about death. These themes dominate our fallen human existence, and in his reading of Romans 5:12, Augustine, more than anyone since Paul, saw Adam as existentially and morally pivotal for all subsequent humanity.9
Augustine held to a twofold transmission of our ignorance, inward desire (concupiscence) and death. One is the physiological aspect because all human beings are descended bodily from Adam and thus have a seminal solidarity with him. This grounds the juridical fact that all his descendants are condemned by his sin. There is also a psychological unity whereby the disorder that is Adam’s concupiscence is shared by his descendants too. Augustine believed that this concupiscence was probably passed on by sexual procreation, although procreation itself is not sinful, for it would still have been the means of replicating the human race had Adam not fallen. However, after the fall, he believed, it was irremediably scarred by sin.
The nature of the transmission of original sin has been debated by theologians for years. Reformed theologians argue on the basis of Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 for a federal, or covenantal, understanding of Adam that does not emphasize the physical aspects of the transmission of original sin. Adam represents humanity as, say, the president of the United States represents all Americans in the decisions he makes in his office as head of state and commander in chief. This is arguably a better way of understanding Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 than that proposed by Augustine.
Yet we should give Augustine credit. He makes clear that our human problem is not a matter of following a bad example. In Pelagian theology, human beings sin in Adam by following his bad example, and the relation between my sin and that of the first man is that he loved himself rather than God, and I subsequently follow his example by choosing to do the same. The problem is primarily external.
Augustine’s great insight, intuitive in the Confessions and explicit in the anti-Pelagian writings, is that sin is far more radical. It is something that is inherent in human beings after the fall. To have sinned in Adam is not simply to have followed a poor example. It is to be subject to a fundamental change in the human relationship to God and to self. It involves a corruption of human nature that came about directly as a result of Adam disobeying God. I love myself rather than God, am ignorant of the good, and I will die because of the actions of Adam long ago in the garden of Eden, confirmed here and now by my own twisted psychology and inability to love God as I should.
Grace as Transformative
Against this background Augustine works out his understanding of grace. Grace is always the counterpoint to the problem of sin, and how one understands the latter is decisive for one’s thinking on the former. For a Pelagian, sin is primarily something external, so grace is primarily external (e.g., the example of Christ, the law). Our problem is moral ignorance, not innate moral depravity.
For Augustine, sin is deeply embedded in human nature, so grace must go all the way down. Human beings have a problem: they need to love God but cannot do so in their own power, and this problem must be resolved in two ways. Human nature must be both healed and restored, and that healing and restoration must originate outside ourselves, for men and women are trapped in a death spiral of self-love. The human predicament demands grace both as the content and as the overall framework of salvation. We might describe these—content and framework respectively—as the active work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer, and the predestination to grace of the believer.
As to the first, Augustine agrees with the Pelagians that the giving of the law is important, for it shows human beings their peril and the reality of their condition. But knowing the law is not enough. Because of the internal, existential problem of human sin, Augustine argued that the internal work of the Holy Spirit is also vital. It is the Spirit who writes the law on the heart of the sinner, something for which Augustine sees obvious biblical justification in Jeremiah 31:33.10 Augustine draws this out dramatically in his work On the Spirit and the Letter when he compares the Israelites gathered at Sinai to the disciples gathered together at Pentecost:
Now, amidst this admirable correspondence, there is at least this very considerable diversity in the cases, in that the people in the earlier instance were deterred by a horrible dread from approaching the place where the law was given; whereas in the other case the Holy Ghost came upon them who were gathered together in expectation of His promised gift. There it was on tables of stone that the finger of God operated; here it was on the hearts of men. There the law was given outwardly, so that the unrighteous might be terrified; here it was given inwardly, so that they might be justified.11
Here the Spirit transforms both the sinner and the law by internalizing the latter. “Command what you will, and give what you command!” That intuitive cry in the Confessions now finds its theological expression in Augustine’s understanding of God’s grace, here focused on the work of the Holy Spirit in writing the law on the hearts of sinners.12 It is this work of the Spirit that makes the external law able to address the most fundamental problem of humanity, the internal and psychological consequences of sin. The Spirit works subjectively in the life of Christians to renovate them and to bring them back to the path of true freedom.
But why is it that some people are beneficiaries of this supernatural work of the Spirit, while others are not? There is clearly a discriminating factor at work in the way in which this grace is distributed, and this brings us to the topic of predestination.
Predestination
Augustine had done some written reflection on grace and predestination prior to the Pelagian controversy. In 396/97 he wrote a work, To Simplicianus, in which he prioritized grace over free will. The collapse of free will caused by Adam’s fall meant that human beings could no longer turn to God in their own strength. Salvation was only possible at God’s initiative. In the course of this discussion, Augustine cites Romans 9 and argues that God’s choice of Jacob over Esau was not based on foreseen merits but on his own autonomous decision, the reasons for which defied human comprehension (i.e., unconditional election).13
Augustine’s understanding of the human predicament was that through Adam we are now all bound in sin, incapable of loving God as we should, and doomed to perish in our mortal bodies. This meant that under the polemical pressure of the Pelagian controversy he had to also clarify the second dimension of grace: the overall eternal framework. As a result, he came slowly but surely to articulate an understanding of predestination that continues to dominate much of our Christian discussion of salvation today. Augustine’s interpretation of Paul’s thinking in Romans has been foundational to all subsequent Western discussions of grace.
Augustine uses a number of arguments to establish his case. In On Grace and Free Will, he points out that believers pray for the conversion of unbelievers, which implies that God is able to graciously give it to them.14 He reinforces the gift nature of grace by indicating that grace is not preceded by good works but by evil ones, which flow from the wickedness of the human heart. If the apportioning of grace were based on human merit, then nobody would receive it.15
Even more explicit are the statements he makes in A Treatise on Rebuke and Grace. He writes:
Whosoever, then, are made to differ from that original condemnation by such bounty of divine grace, there is no doubt but that for such it is provided that they should hear the gospel, and when they hear they believe, and in the faith which worketh by love they persevere unto the end; and if, perchance, they deviate from the way, when they are rebuked they are amended; and some of them, although they may not be rebuked by men, return into the path which they had left; and some who have received grace in any age whatever are withdrawn from the perils of this life by swiftness of death. For He worketh all these things in them who made them vessels of mercy, who also elected them in His Son before the foundation of the world by the election of grace: “And if by grace, then is it no more of works, otherwise grace is no more grace.” For they were not so called as not to be elected, in respect of which it is said, “For many are called but few are elected”; but because they were called according to the purpose, they are of a certainty also elected by the election, as it is said, of grace, not of any precedent merits of theirs, because to them grace is all merit.16
Here he is wrestling with the standard criticism made against the anti-Pelagian notion of grace, namely that it makes human action (here, pastoral disciplinary action) useless. Augustine disagrees, arguing that God uses means, but the divine decision to elect someone is what guarantees the success of those means. As he goes on to argue in the very next chapter, none of the predestined can perish.
In fact, Augustine often noted that the success of preaching depends on God’s grace and thus ultimately on predestination. What later Protestantism called a means of grace, the preaching of the word, is only a means of grace because God has willed to attach his saving action to it. Only because God has decided to be gracious to someone does the proclamation of the word then work faith within them and build them up in that same faith.17
As a side note, I believe this teaching is of great practical relevance to all pastors. If you preach regularly (or listen to preaching regularly), you should find this to be a very reassuring doctrine. If I believed that the power of my sermons to change human hearts, to bring unbelievers to Christ, and believers to maturity in Christ, rested on my eloquence or my learning or my powers of persuasion or my own moral perfections, I would be driven to despair. If congregants thought that the power of the word to transform them depended on the ability of the preacher, or on his own moral qualities, they would also despair. The preacher and the congregants need to know that God is overwhelmingly powerful and will do what he will do. This is theology that inspires confidence in ministers and in congregations.
Romans 9, particularly the section on Jacob and Esau, plays a key role in Augustine’s discussions (as in all Christian attempts to wrestle with predestination). In On Predestination, Augustine cites the Romans 9 passage to acknowledge his own previous error, an error he says he held prior to becoming a bishop and from which he was cured in part by a saying of Cyprian, that “we must boast in nothing, since nothing is our own.”18 Back then, he mistakenly believed the election of Jacob was based on God’s foreknowledge of his future faith (i.e., conditional election). He thought that faith preceded grace, which built on the prior acceptance of God by the individual. He ascribes this view to a lack of thought and theological carelessness, for he had not yet realized that faith itself was one of the gifts that God sovereignly gives to his people.19
This early view of Augustine is not unusual and still quite common today. The idea that we make the key decision and God assists us in bringing that decision to a fruitful end is perennially popular. Positively, it seems to preserve both human responsibility and divine grace. Yet it fails to recognize, as Augustine saw, that faith itself is a work of God’s grace. This was a key point that Luther pressed in a dramatic form in his clash with Erasmus in 1525, as we shall see again in chapter five.
In another work, Against Two Letters of the Pelagians, Augustine refers to the example of Isaac’s sons three times. First, he argues that the case of Jacob and Esau is instructive because Paul refuses to solve the issue of God’s discrimination between them according to human criteria. Augustine leaves the matter unresolved, pushing it back into the unsearchable wisdom of God, which human beings should not presume to question.20 This is a helpful point to remember because discussion of predestination can tend to be highly speculative at times. We are curious about such things, and, when faced with a doctrine that presses very hard against our innate notions of godlikeness, we speculate. What Augustine sees is that the Pauline approach to predestination resolves the problem doxologically but not theologically. There are myriad questions that crowd into our minds when we read Romans 9. And Paul pointedly does not answer these questions. Indeed, they cannot be answered in a direct fashion because he is speaking of a mystery that lies deep in the mind of God himself and is only very partially revealed to us, his creatures. Instead, Paul drives his readers back to the praise of God, precisely because the rationale for election is unfathomable and unsearchable. A retreat to mystery in theological discussion can sometimes be an excuse to avoid hard thinking on a matter, but when Augustine does so in his reflections on Romans 9, he is merely following where Paul’s argument leads. Perhaps we should do the same. God’s grace, his loving and mysterious response to our rebellion, should inspire praise and worship first and foremost.
The second reference to Esau and Jacob happens as Augustine highlights an inconsistency in Pelagian thinking. Augustine points out that if Pelagians wish to argue that Esau was condemned on the basis of foreknown sin, then what do we say of twins when one dies in infancy and the other reaches adulthood?21 For Augustine, this scenario begs an explanation. Since the Pelagians deny original sin, the death of the infant cannot be a consequence of his own sin. Yet it is surely profoundly unjust to condemn someone on the basis of sins that they have not yet committed. Critics of Augustine’s view of predestination might say that his approach is unfair by human standards, but in this instance it is the Pelagian position that is vulnerable. The only conclusion can be that God wills to discriminate between the two based solely on his own autonomous decision in eternity.22
A Pelagian might respond that the dead infant, not having sinned and not being condemned by original sin, is translated straight to paradise. But such an argument merely transfers the problems elsewhere. If all dead infants go to heaven, is it then in any meaningful sense just to let one live, so that she might lose her salvation and bring judgment on herself by later sins? Would infant death not be much better, guaranteeing a place in heaven? And what of death anyway? If it is a penalty for sin, why does an innocent infant suffer it?23
Pastorally, of course, infant deaths are among some of the most difficult problems a minister has to handle. But Augustine is not looking at this question from a pastoral perspective. He is simply using it to highlight the problems associated with a Pelagian view.
Augustine’s third reference to Jacob and Esau occurs in a passage where he is emphasizing that the grace of God working in the lives of believers is rooted in the prior, gracious decision of God.24 This goes to the heart of Augustine’s concern, since his interest in the topic is driven by his desire to ensure that salvation is by grace—that free, unmerited favor of God. Many of the more speculative questions that came to be associated with later strands of anti-Pelagian tradition are absent from his writings or only present in a very embryonic form.
Predestination and Preaching
Augustine scholar Peter Sanlon notes that the doctrine of predestination was rarely preached by Augustine, and when he did mention it he generally avoided elaborating on it. Instead, he stressed the need to prove one’s election through offering hospitality.25 This is consonant with Augustine’s observations about the preaching of Cyprian and Ambrose, where he notes that they used the doctrine to underscore the gratuity of grace alongside the need to take the imperatives of grace seriously.26
Preaching on predestination remains difficult today, of course. The challenge is doing justice to the biblical teaching while avoiding excessive speculation and addressing pastoral problems such as a lack of assurance or unwarranted presumption. Augustine’s basic point is that predestination undergirds the sovereignty of God’s grace and places all of our works in the context of that prior decision. Paul’s own teaching consistently grounds the imperatives of the Christian life, what we must do, in the indicatives of God’s revelation, what he has done and still does on our behalf. It takes a robust understanding of God’s grace grounded in predestination to do justice to this basic structure, and when we come to the time of the Reformation, we see that the Reformers take this doctrine a step further in their application, using it to undergird the believer’s assurance of faith.
Grace after Augustine
Augustine outlived Pelagius, but he died in 430 while the conflict with Pelagius’s most brilliant successor, Julian of Eclanum, was still raging on. Still, the range and power of Augustine’s intellect and literary output ensured that he was the victor in their battle. The doctrinal war continued, of course. A key moment after Augustine’s death came at the Second Council of Orange (529). Fourteen bishops met, with Caesarius, bishop of Arles, presiding, and approved a series of statements affirming the teaching of Augustine and another father, Prosper of Aquitaine, over against resurgent semi-Pelagianism.27 The council issued twenty-five canons that upheld the doctrines of original sin and the priority of God’s grace, and while the canons do not develop an elaborate understanding of predestination and did not affirm irresistible grace, the basic thrust of the council’s position on grace is clear from canon 6:
If anyone says that mercy is divinely conferred upon us when, without God’s grace, we believe, will, desire, strive, labor, pray, keep watch, endeavor, request, seek, knock, but does not confess that it is through the infusion and inspiration of the Holy Spirit that we believe, will, or are able to do all these things as is required; or if anyone subordinates the help of grace to humility or human obedience and does not admit that it is the very gift of grace that makes us obedient and humble, one contradicts the apostle, who says: What have you that you did not receive? [1 Cor 4:7]; and also: By the grace of God I am what I am [1 Cor 15:10].28
This statement from the council is entirely consistent with Augustine’s position and should have set a clear boundary for medieval reflection on grace within a broadly Augustinian framework. The conclusions of the council, however, do not appear to have played any significant part in later medieval discussion.
In fact, Augustine’s legacy on the doctrines of grace was rather mixed. Medieval Catholicism continued to exhibit great diversity on the matter of grace, embracing both Augustinian and what could be called “semi-Pelagian” positions. In part this was the result of the way in which Augustine’s works were transmitted. In an era when the lack of printing technology made book production a complicated and expensive matter, few people had access to complete texts. More common were the florilegia and books of sentences, which were composed of thematically ordered quotations. The most famous of these, Peter Lombard’s Four Books of Sentences, was produced in the twelfth century and became the dominant theological textbook in the West. The problem was that quotations are statements taken out of their original textual context and prone to ambiguity in meaning. So while Augustine’s thought remained a standard source for medieval thinking, the meaning of what he had written and argued was frequently lost. No medieval theologian—even those we would regard as semi-Pelagian in bent—would have considered themselves to be deviant from Augustine on the issue of grace. They simply did not grasp what Augustine had written and taught on that subject.
By the ninth century a controversy had exploded over the subject of predestination that in many ways repeated the controversies of the fifth century. This time, Augustine was being cited on both sides of the issue. Theologian Gottschalk of Orbais advocated a strong and clear doctrine of double predestination, the belief that God both chooses the elect and rejects the rest. While this doctrine is arguably present in Augustine at certain points, it was never a matter of great emphasis for him. In Gottschalk and his appropriation of Augustine it became a key doctrine. Gottschalk’s views were condemned as heretical at the Council of Mainz in 848, and he was shortly thereafter imprisoned until his death, around 868.29
One of the theologians commissioned to refute Gottschalk was Irishman John Scotus Eriugena. Eriugena advocated a view of predestination that held that God has a universal will to save all and that human beings damn themselves by their own actions. Human beings were created rational and free and remain so even after the fall. During the course of his work On Predestination, he cites Augustine but fails to capture the essentials of Augustine’s thought.30
I mention the Gottschalk-Eriugena debate to illustrate some of the confusion that persisted over the teaching of Augustine throughout the early Middle Ages. These are, of course, deep waters and complicated historical and doctrinal matters, but we should not assume that Augustine’s thought in its purest form had become the default position of the church. Nor should we suppose that the advocates and interpreters of Augustine were always faithful to his position. Some Protestants, including Luther himself, believed the medieval church to be a monochrome bastion of semi-Pelagianism. But this simply is not true. There have always been advocates of a Pauline-Augustinian notion of grace, even in the Middle Ages.
Conclusion
During the time of the Reformation, there were many reasons why Protestants wanted to claim Augustine. B. B. Warfield summed it well when he wrote, “The Reformation, inwardly considered, was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the Church.”31 And there is a practical lesson here for evangelical Protestants today as well. We must remember that our faith is rooted in history and has roots beyond the year 1517. While we may be familiar with the struggles between Wesley and Whitefield or, in our own day, between Calvinists and Arminians, we should not see these as isolated incidents but as the latest in an ongoing debate that has occurred throughout the centuries. We need to appreciate the central role of Augustine in all of this, and particularly his anti-Pelagian writings.
We may wonder: Where was the church before the Reformation? Certainly, the Reformers themselves wrestled with this question. If God works in and through the church in history, then what authority or genealogy can the Reformers claim for their churches? One popular answer at the time of the Reformation (and since) is that the trail of blood establishes our ancestry. The true church has always been persecuted, and we should look for the long line of martyrs throughout history to find how God has brought us to the present.
Such an approach has its attractions, and it proved popular at the time of the Reformation, as evidenced by John Foxe’s massive account of the history of martyrdom, Acts and Monuments.32 But it also has its fatal drawbacks in that it ignores the importance of teaching and doctrine as a fundamental mark of the true church. Merely dying for one’s faith does not necessarily mean that one’s faith was historic Christianity.
Perhaps a better way of tracing our roots and establishing our historic credentials is not the trail of blood, but the trail of grace. Grace, after all, is the characteristic of God’s dealings with his people throughout the ages. And the Lord has provided the church with many theologians across the generations who have safeguarded the fundamentals of God’s grace. They have emphasized that grace is sovereign, transformative, an act of God’s own mercy and pleasure, and powerful enough to deal with the moral and existential morass that is human life in this fallen world.
At the head of that trail in the postapostolic church stands Augustine. He teased out the implications of Scripture on the matter and set forth the issues in a way that laid down the lines of future debate. Protestants need have no shame in seeing their own cry of “grace alone!” resonating with that of the great fifth-century bishop of Hippo Regius. His thinking may have been obscured by some or misunderstood by others, but there is a faithful line of those who defended his view of grace through the Middle Ages, providing a foundation for the Reformation.
Before we move on to the Reformation, we’ll stop to consider one of the great theologians of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas, a theologian whose views on grace were as great and important as Augustine’s.
1. A Treatise on the Gift of Perseverance, in Saint Augustin: Anti-Pelagian Writings, ed. P. Schaff (New York: Christian Literature, 1887), 54; hereafter APW.
2. This is not to say that Augustine himself wished to excuse mediocrity or adopt a casual attitude to sin in the life of the Christian. But it is to say that this was certainly Pelagius’s concern with Augustine’s thought; and Augustine himself clearly develops a theology that places the accent decisively on the gracious action of God rather than on the moral effort of the believer.
3. Augustine quotes Pelagius to this effect in his work On Nature and Grace 18.20 (APW, 127).
4. Theodore DeBruyn, ed., Pelagius’s Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 65.
5. Ibid., 81.
6. Ibid., 92–95.
7. Also called “freedom of contrary choice,” or, more critically, “freedom of indifference.”
8. On the Spirit and the Letter 52 (APW, 106).
9. A brief but helpful outline of the background of Augustine’s and Pelagius’s different approaches to Romans can be found in DeBruyn, Pelagius’s Commentary, 10–24.
10. On the Spirit and the Letter 19.33 (APW, 97).
11. On the Spirit and the Letter 17.29 (APW, 95).
12. Augustine offers a wonderful summary of this in On the Spirit and the Letter 19.32: “Let no Christian then stray from this faith, which alone is the Christian one; nor let any one, when he has been made to feel ashamed to say that we become righteous through our own selves, without the grace of God working this in us,—because he sees, when such an allegation is made, how unable pious believers are to endure it,—resort to any subterfuge on this point, by affirming that the reason why we cannot become righteous without the operation of God’s grace is this, that He gave the law, He instituted its teaching, He commanded its precepts of good. For there is no doubt that, without His assisting grace, the law is ‘the letter which killeth’; but when the life-giving spirit is present, the law causes that to be loved as written within, which it once caused to be feared as written without.”
13. Ad Simplicianum 1.2.17; 1.2.8; 1.2.16.
14. On Grace and Free Will 29 (APW, 455–56).
15. On Grace and Free Will 30 (APW, 456).
16. A Treatise on Rebuke and Grace 13 (APW, 476–77).
17. On the Predestination of the Saints 7.12 (APW, 504); 8.14 (APW, 505); On the Gift of Perseverance 14.34 (APW, 538); 17.42 (APW, 542).
18. On the Predestination of the Saints 3.7 (APW, 500).
19. “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” (On Predestination 3.7 [APW, 500]).
20. Against Two Letters 2.7.15 (APW, 398).
21. Augustine seems to have had a fascination with twins as helpful to theological argument. In the Confessions he uses them to refute the claims of astrology, as he here does to refute the claims of the Pelagians.
22. Against Two Letters 2.7.16 (APW, 399).
23. Later Pelagians would come to deny that physical death was a result of sin, thus circumventing this particular objection but raising insurmountable problems relative to the Bible’s teaching on the matter.
24. Against Two Letters 2.10.22 (APW, 401).
25. Peter T. Sanlon, Augustine’s Theology of Preaching (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014), 17–18.
26. On the Gift of Perseverance 19.48 (APW, 545).
27. It is worth giving some broad definitions of some standard terms that are used in distinguishing classic views of divine grace. “Pelagianism” refers to an understanding of grace in which there is only one mover of salvation, and it is the human. “Semi-Pelagianism” refers to an understanding of grace in which there are two movers, God and humans, and humans have the decisive role. Grace is neither prevenient nor irresistible. “Semi-Augustinianism” refers to an understanding of grace in which there are two movers, God and humans, and God moves first. Grace is prevenient but not irresistible. “Augustinianism” refers to an understanding of grace in which there is one mover, and that is God. Human beings are passive toward grace, which is both prevenient and irresistible.
28. Heinrich Denzinger et al., Enchiridion symbolorum definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, 43rd ed. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012), paragraph 376 (p. 136).
29. For an introduction to this debate and the relevant texts from Gottschalk, see Victor Genke and Francis Gumerlock, eds., Gottschalk and a Medieval Predestination Controversy (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2010).
30. On Eriugena, see Deirdre Carabine, John Scottus Eriugena (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
31. Warfield, Studies in Tertullian and Augustine, 130.
32. Foxe’s work, first published in 1563 and often revised and reprinted since, was the most influential martyrology of the sixteenth century and indeed one of the most important books in the formation of English Protestant culture until the end of the nineteenth century.