Grace for the Blamed and Burdened: Augustine’s Response to Pelagius on Sin, Freedom, and Human Nature

I. Councils of Carthage (419) and Orange (529)

In the first four centuries of its existence, the church hammered out a firm theology of the Trinity, the person of Christ, and the person of the Holy Spirit; and its attention turned from the nature of God to the relationship between God and humanity. The main questions that confronted it in the fifth through seventh centuries revolved around grace, free will, and the sinfulness of humankind. Although it was now the nature of humanity rather than the nature of God that was the center of church councils, the decisions reached at Carthage and Orange were no less important to the development of Christianity than those at Nicaea and Chalcedon.

While the knowledge of a good and loving God throws a light on how far short humankind can fall, Christian doctrine is complicated by the teaching on Adam’s fall from grace. Orthodox Christian doctrine has always been that each human bears responsibility for his or her own sinfulness. The question is How much responsibility? If sin came into the world through Adam and infected everyone else without their consent, can individuals really be held accountable for sins they commit?

Secular views of humankind sometimes blame the evil in the world on oppressive institutions, bad genetics or upbringing, or psychological disorders. Although these explanations are certainly valid, they can be abused to avoid taking real responsibility for one’s actions. The challenge for orthodox Christianity is to agree with these secular views that there is an evil influence beyond our control that has skewed our ability to do good, but to maintain that we bear some responsibility even given this influence, and that there is a great deal that we do that cannot be blamed on anyone but ourselves. Worse, there is a great deal that we do with good intentions that ends up only causing harm.

In the debates at Carthage and Orange, theologians attempted to strike a balance between human responsibility for sin (and human ability to do good) and the doctrine that we live in a fallen world. The debate began with a British monk named Pelagius, who thought he had found a real answer to those who blame evil on our environment rather than ourselves. He advocated a worldview in which humans had full freedom and full responsibility for their actions. If God is just, Pelagius believed, he will punish or reward humans only for the choices that they can freely make, and so he created a world that lets each person choose good and bad however they please. On the other side, a North African bishop named Augustine promoted a view in which humans are born into the bondage of Adam’s sin. People are destined to sin more and more unless God intervenes, in which case they are gradually freed to do good by the power of God’s Spirit. At Carthage, the council ruled that Augustine’s idea was truer to both Scripture and to the human experience than that of Pelagius, even though it was much less palatable. Later, Orange reaffirmed Augustine’s teaching against the Semi-Pelagians, those who didn’t go as far as Pelagius but still held a more optimistic view of human nature.

II. Pelagius

Early in the fifth century, a controversy boiled over in the Western church about the origin of sin, the freedom of the will, and the nature of God’s grace. Christians in the first four centuries held two beliefs concerning human nature:

1. Humanity is fallen and requires divine help for salvation.
2. Humans have a will and are responsible for their sin.

Just like the apparent paradox of the doctrine of the Trinity—God is one but exists in three persons—the two ideas were difficult to reconcile. The conflict came to a head with the clash of two popular teachers: Pelagius and Augustine.

Pelagius was a heretic of a different sort. He was Trinitarian and held to the divinity and humanity of Christ. This gave him the benefit of the doubt with many Christians at the time, but what landed him in trouble was his understanding of the Fall of humanity. Understanding Pelagius’s historical context is helpful here.

Pelagius was a British monk who was deeply devoted to living a moral life. He was born around AD 350 in Britain. The details of his life are shrouded in mystery, but historians know he became a monk and eventually moved to Rome to teach the Bible. He had a mild personality, and there was no controversy surrounding his early life. However, upon seeing the lax moral discipline in Rome, he developed a reputation for being a spiritual director who urged people to reform their behavior and live lives as upstanding, moral citizens. It must be understood that Constantine had not only Christianized the Roman Empire in the fourth century but also brought about the “secularization” of the Christian church.¹

When he came to Italy to be a teacher, he was shocked to see how lax the Italian Christians often were. One of their more infamous offenses was a tendency among Italian noblemen to take multiple mistresses in addition to their wives or to buy slave girls to keep as mistresses, and this was apparently true of both pagans and Christians.² Several lived comfortable lives in the midst of great wealth, while the society around them was often desperately poor. The clergy was taking little action to confront these Christians, either allowing them to continue in open sin after baptism without any rebuke or permitting them to remain in a sort of halfway state as “catechumens” (unbaptized Christians—they could participate in church but not the Eucharist).³ To Pelagius, the situation clearly violated Christ’s teachings. In one of his letters, he wrote, “Do you consider him a Christian who oppresses the wretched, who burdens the poor, who covets others’ property, who makes several poor so that he may make himself rich, who rejoices in unjust gains … and a man of this kind has the audacity to go to church!”⁴ Unless a person denied himself and imitated Christ, Pelagius warned, he had no business calling himself a Christian.

Before Christendom, as it came to be known, Christians were being persecuted or ignored. It was a serious choice to become one. After Christians gained considerable power in the Roman Empire, it became politically expedient to be a Christian. Nominal Christians increased in number as a result.⁵

To counter the dangerous moral laxity that he observed, Pelagius developed an ascetic form of Christianity with an optimistic theology of human nature. He pleaded for a sense of urgency about moral reformation and a pursuit of “real” Christianity. As historian Peter Brown notes, Pelagius lived in a world where Christians occupied more positions of power than they ever had before.⁶ Out of his discussions with these sophisticated men, Pelagius formed the basis of his theology in his Expositions of the Letters of St. Paul.

Before 410, Pelagius had to flee Rome to avoid the invasion of the Arian Gothic leader Alaric.⁷ He then moved to North Africa where he met intense opposition before migrating to Palestine. In 418 he was banished from Jerusalem, after which he vanished from the historical record. His teaching was condemned by the Council of Ephesus in 431.

III. Pelagius’s Teaching

Partly from his observations in Italy as well as from his own strictly disciplined life, Pelagius developed a doctrine of sin and salvation that hinged on good works. According to him, sin cannot stem from a preexisting condition, because it would mean that God had created sin as part of human nature: “To say that man cannot be without sin is like saying that a man cannot live without food or drink or sleep or other such things without which our human state cannot exist.”⁸ Instead, Pelagius taught, sin comes from bad habits that people willingly form. As humans continue to sin, their wills become weaker and bad deeds more frequent, but if they will commit themselves to do good, they can reverse these trends.

The starting point of Pelagius’s moralistic theology was his insistence that God would never command anything that is impossible for humans to carry out. Pelagius emphasized humans’ unconditional free will and moral responsibility. Specifically, Pelagius took issue with Augustine’s prayer in his Confessions: “I have no hope at all but in your great mercy. Command what you will: give what you command.”⁹ He felt that this kind of talk encouraged laziness rather than piety and that laziness is not a safe state of mind when it comes to sin.

Pelagius saw Augustine’s prayer as turning humans into puppets determined by God’s action. Indeed, he thought that God’s commanding a person to do something that he lacked the ability to do would be useless: “To call a person to something he considers impossible does him no good.”¹⁰ If God called humans to live moral lives, Pelagius thought, it should be within their own power to carry out God’s commands.

In his Letter to Demetrias, Pelagius laments that Christians do not consider it an honor to be ruled by God’s precepts in his word. He writes, “In fact, we act like lazy and insolent servants, talking back to our Lord in a contemptuous and slovenly way: ‘That is too hard, too difficult! We cannot do that! We are only human; our flesh is weak!’ What insane stupidity! What impious arrogance! We accuse the Lord of all knowledge of being doubly ignorant. We assert that he does not understand what he made and does not realize what he commands … The just one did not choose to command the impossible; nor did the loving one plan to condemn a person for what he could not avoid.”¹¹

Notice Pelagius believed that God commands only according to our abilities. In Matthew 5:48, Jesus commands, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Pelagius interpreted this to mean that perfection must be within our reach. Since perfection is achievable, it should therefore be obligatory.

It is important to understand that Pelagius’s motivation was good. He saw one form of God’s divine sovereignty as eliminating human responsibility. To modern ears, Pelagius’s ideas might seem self-righteous, a way of setting yourself up to be holier than those around you. Pelagius himself, however, wrote from pastoral concern. He thought that the idea of original sin inherited from Adam—that humans are guilty and corrupted by an evil influence—led Christians to be apathetic about their own sins. “Anyone who hears that it is not possible for him to be without sin … will never do penance appropriate to his misdeeds but will believe that God will lightly remit what rightly he ought not even to impute.”¹² (In plain English—if Christians are always going to be sinful and God is just going to forgive sins, what’s the motivation to even try to change? Pelagius is suggesting that original sin removes the sense of evil from sin.) Pelagius worried that if the church embraced the idea of original sin, it would inadvertently give Christians an excuse for tolerating their own sins and that God would judge them harshly on the day of judgment.

Moreover, Pelagius intended to avoid the error of the Manichaeans, who posited a dualism between immaterial good and material evil (and since Augustine had been a Manichaean before his conversion to Christianity, Pelagius was doubly suspicious of his emphasis on the evil of human nature). In the Manichaean view of humanity, to be human (even before Adam’s fall from grace) is to be inherently evil, and the highest good is achieved in the soul’s separation from the evil body. Pelagius, however, saw human nature as something good created by God.

It is the result of the Fall upon humanity (original sin), however, that Pelagius ignores, causing his theology to fall into error. First, Pelagius argued that there is no such thing as original sin. In no way were humans after Adam guilty of or implicated in his first sin. Adam’s sin in no way makes humans guilty or corrupt. Instead, “over the years [our own sin] gradually corrupts us, building an addiction and then holding us bound with what seems like the force of nature itself.”¹³ Humans by nature have a clean slate—a state of neutrality—according to Pelagius, and it is only through voluntary sin through the exercise of an unhampered human free will that humans are made wicked. Potentially, then, one could live a sinless life and merit heaven, for there is nothing intrinsically sinful about humans even after Adam and Eve’s sin. Pelagius didn’t consider humans to be intrinsically damnable after the fall.

In short, Pelagius rejected the doctrines of original sin, substitutionary atonement (the idea that Christ’s death in our place is a supernatural intervention to save us), and justification by faith (the idea that believing and trusting in Christ is the way to salvation). This had major implications for Pelagius’s theology of the freedom of the will, the origin of sin, and the nature of grace.

A. Pelagius on the Freedom of the Will

Early-church scholar J. N. D. Kelly observes that “the keystone of [Pelagius’s] whole system is the idea of unconditional free will and responsibility.”¹⁴ Humans are given the unique privilege of carrying out God’s will by their own choice. Pelagius identifies three elements in conduct: ability, will, and act. The first one comes from God while the latter two are strictly humanity’s. This means that God has given us all the tools we need to do good, but it is up to us to want to do good and to carry it out. Hence, people are responsible for their own sins and cannot blame any outside influences (addiction, abuse, duress, or most especially original sin). As seen in Pelagius’s quote above, if we say we are incapable, we impugn God’s creative ability. God made humans to be good.

B. Pelagius on the Origin of Sin

Most Christian theologians would reply, “Yes, but what about the fall?” Pelagius would reply that it had nothing to do with our sins. Yes, Adam was a bad example for his descendants, but his sins affected only himself. Pelagius rejected as absurd and unjust the doctrine Augustine termed “original sin.” Why should a person be punished for another person’s sins? The human duty to self-improvement could not be abandoned. People are born sinless, just like Adam. We sin not because we are born sinners but because we make a deliberate choice to do so. Sin exists only in the act. Pelagius taught that many Old Testament heroes were able to remain sinless, and since it had been done before, we are therefore without excuse.

C. Pelagius on the Nature of Grace

So what about grace? Pelagius did not discard grace entirely, but he did not understand it to mean dependance on God for salvation. When Pelagius spoke of grace, he meant the natural ability that God had given humanity to control their affairs rather than a supernatural intervention. God has given us the grace to obey him. Pelagius also spoke in terms of instruction. It is by grace that we have the word of God. The role of God in this scheme is threefold: God gives each person free will, the ability to see for themselves what is right and wrong, and revelation through Scripture to guide them.¹⁵ Christ is the ultimate form of grace, the perfect divine guide that God has given humanity to demonstrate the right way. So the grace of God through Jesus Christ is his perfect example of obedience. In the end, however, the only thing that matters is whether one has fully eradicated evil from oneself.

According to Augustine, Pelagius’s disciple Caelestius summarized Pelagianism succinctly with this list:

• Adam was created mortal, and he would have died whether he sinned or not.
• Adam’s sin injured himself alone, not the human race.
• The law, as well as the gospel, leads to the kingdom.
• There were men without sin before Christ’s coming.
• Newborn infants are in the same condition as Adam before the fall.
• It is not through the death or the fall of Adam that the human race dies, nor through the resurrection of Christ that the whole human race rises again.¹⁶

IV. Augustine’s Response

On the other side of the debate was Augustine, a prominent North African bishop who had already weathered many controversies. Only a few years before the Council of Carthage, Augustine had dealt with a splinter group known as the Donatists, who preached that the church should consist only of those who live perfectly holy lives. In many ways, the Donatists prepared Augustine for the new challenge of Pelagius. Against the Donatists, Augustine had argued that the church does not consist of perfect people (not that he believed there is such a thing) but consists simply of those who have been baptized into the church. He compared the church to the parable of the tares and the wheat in the gospel: “What swelling of arrogance it is, what forgetfulness of humility and gentleness, that any one should dare or believe that he can do what the Lord did not grant even to the apostles—to think that he can distinguish the tares from the wheat.”¹⁷ Having dealt with the Donatist disappointment of how the institution of the church looks in real life, Augustine now turned to Pelagius’s disappointment with how sinners look in real life.

Pelagius’s teachings prompted a storm of anti-Pelagian literature, especially from the North African bishop Augustine, who opposed Pelagianism in many of his major works, such as On the Spirit and the Letter (412), On Nature and Grace (415), On the Grace of Christ and on Original Sin (418), On Grace and Free Will (427), and On the Predestination of the Saints (429).¹⁸ Toward the end of his life, Augustine kept the sovereignty of God, human depravity, and humanity’s need of grace at the center of his theology.

Augustine worked out his theology of humanity long before the Pelagian controversy. The amount of writings against Pelagius’s view on the freedom of the will, origin of sin, and nature of grace showed how seriously Augustine considered Pelagius’s errors to be.

A. Augustine on the Freedom of the Will

Augustine affirmed that humans were created with free will, teaching that only Adam and Eve had real freedom. This freedom was not in the fact that they had an inability to sin but rather because they had the ability not to sin. Pelagius said that humans started out in a neutral state but easily fell prey to bad habits. As the person commits more and more wrongs, he is less and less able to reform his life. Augustine said that after the Fall, humans were preconditioned to commit wrong because Adam and Eve had sinned and that all humans were guilty of that sin. The direction toward evil and away from God was already set. They are “not able not to sin.” Hence, God must intervene and turn humans back toward him.

If Pelagius had solved the problem of sin and human responsibility by arguing that humans are perfectly capable of doing whatever they want, Augustine solved it by saying that humans deliberately act against the good ideals that they don’t know and are selfish, greedy, lustful, stubborn, and proud. In his words, people are non posse non peccare, “not able not to sin,” because even the good things that we do are not out of love for God but for some lesser purpose. In Augustine’s scheme, grace is not a divine nudge but a power that frees people to love God for who he really is. It is this God-empowered love that destroys the rule of sin and bestows the ability to choose to sin or to choose not to sin (posse non peccare—“able not to sin”). However, until this grace is given, people cannot choose goodness. Though we might be in the grip of an evil power that we do not understand, we are still responsible for spending our time and energy on the things that we do wrong. Furthermore, he held that all of humankind had committed sin when Adam had—the act of disobedience had been committed together, in a mystical way.¹⁹ As such, there were no innocent victims who had been wronged by a third party—everyone had crippled themselves.

Unlike Pelagius, who thought that hardened sinners are least likely to be able to return to God, Augustine believed that God sometimes chooses hardened sinners over the good, pious people in order to better show his grace.

Augustine firmly believed in original sin. In his view, humans begin life in the grip of a power that they cannot shake, which will draw them deeper and deeper into destruction unless God himself rescues them. Just as Pelagius’s dogmas reflected his own life of self-discipline and hard work, Augustine was influenced by a youth that was wasted in increasingly selfish pursuits. From his point of view, his desires had propelled him into sin, but he had not reformed his life by increasing his desire to do good. In his spiritual autobiography, Confessions, he took the words of Paul in Romans 7 as his watchword: “Even though a person may be delighted with God’s law as far as his inmost self is concerned, how is he to deal with that other law in his bodily members [which delivers] him as prisoner to the law of sin dominant in his body. Who will free him from this death-laden body, if not your grace, given through Jesus Christ our Lord?”²⁰ By these words, Augustine demonstrated how helpless he had been in his former life, and how much he owed to the mercy of God.

Humans are restored after the mediation of divine grace in Jesus Christ through the work of the Holy Spirit—and only by the mediation of divine grace, for the will is bent in on itself and unable to choose to do good—and receive once again, by God’s grace, the ability not to sin. Augustine writes, “This freedom of will is not therefore removed because it is assisted; it is assisted just because it is not removed. For he that says to God ‘be thou my helper’ confesses that he wills to fulfill what He has commanded, but that he asks the aid of Him who commanded that he may have power to fulfill it.”²¹ The range of freedom one enjoys is narrowed the deeper one is in sin and broadened the deeper one is in Christ.

B. Augustine on the Origin of Sin

The problem is original sin. If Adam had not sinned, he would not have died.²² But he did, so the consequences were severe. Augustine taught that the Fall affected all of Adam’s descendants with sin. Now every part of humankind is corrupted by sin, darkening the human mind and hardening the human heart. Furthermore, all human beings are born guilty of Adam’s sin. In other words, people are not sinners because we sin; we sin because we are born sinners. Sin is like a hereditary disease passed down from one generation to the next. Augustine called humans a “lump of sin” incapable of saving themselves.²³ He “was happy to regard the church as a hospital where fallen humanity could recover and grow gradually in holiness through grace.”²⁴

Augustine believed in both the corruption and guilt inherited from Adam—what later theology would describe as original sin’s double effect: corruption and guilt.

Augustine taught that human nature was radically corrupted by Adam’s sin. This means that all humans are born with a disordered will and an inclination toward sin—they are non posse non peccare (not able not to sin). This is the damage passed on to all humanity.

But Augustine went further: He also insisted that all people are guilty before God because of Adam’s sin. In his reading of Romans 5:12, he understood that humanity was not only wounded by Adam’s fall but also implicated in it legally—we are born not only sick but condemned: “In Adam, all die; and all are made liable to condemnation, not only because of imitation, but because of participation in his guilt.”²⁵

He explicitly argued against the Pelagian claim that infants are born innocent and sin only by imitation. For Augustine, even infants need baptism to be cleansed from the guilt of original sin—not just its effects: “The whole mass of humanity was condemned in its root; and if the deserved punishment were rendered to all, it would justly drag all to eternal death.”²⁶

Augustine believed that we inherit both the corruption of nature (moral/spiritual brokenness) and guilt (legal condemnation) from Adam. This view was affirmed at the Council of Carthage (418) and later shaped Western Christian doctrine, especially in the theology of the Reformers.

C. Augustine on the Nature of Grace

In On the Grace of Christ, Augustine charges Pelagius with ignoring Philippians 2:12–13, which urges Christians to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling even though God is actually at work in them.²⁷ Augustine says, “Thus [Paul] did not say, ‘God works in you to be able,’ as though they had willing and working of themselves and had no need of God’s help for these two. Instead he said, ‘It is God who works in you both to will and to accomplish.’”²⁸ Put differently, “It is clear that [Pelagius] located this capacity [to will and to work] in nature itself” rather than in divine grace.²⁹ Or further, “The grace Pelagius acknowledges is God’s showing and revealing what we ought to do, not giving and helping us to do it.”³⁰

To Augustine, grace is the only way to salvation. In On Nature and Grace, Augustine argued that if it were possible for a person to live a perfectly righteous life and be saved without faith in Christ, as Pelagius alleged, then Christ “died in vain” (Gal. 2:21).³¹

Albert Outler beautifully summarizes Augustine’s view of grace: “Grace, for Augustine, is God’s freedom to act without any external necessity whatsoever—to act in love beyond human understanding or control; to act in creation, judgment, and redemption; to give his Son freely as Mediator and Redeemer; to endue the Church with the indwelling power and guidance of the Holy Spirit; to shape the destinies of all creation and the ends of the two human societies, the ‘city of earth’ and the ‘city of God.’ Grace is God’s unmerited love and favor.”³² Augustine is famous for his play on the Latin words gratis (free) and gratiae (grace): “This grace, however, of Christ, without which neither infants nor adults can be saved, is not rendered for any merits, but is given gratis, on account of which it is also called grace.”³³

V. The Council of Carthage (418)

Pelagius and Augustine might never have clashed if the Roman Empire had remained intact. As it was, however, the empire was crumbling, and in 410 Rome itself was sacked by Alaric, king of the Visigoths. The Gothic incursions sent Roman nobles fleeing to fortress towns on the coast and forced Pelagius and his followers across the sea into North Africa. There, a disciple of Pelagius named Caelestius began spreading Pelagian ideas, and it was not long before a synod of African bishops was assembled to deal with the two conflicting visions of God’s grace and human free will. The Council of Carthage was assembled early in May 418 and came down heavily on the side of Augustine.

Among the eight canons that the council passed, there are three ideas that pose significant challenges to Pelagius. Two of these are about original sin and free will. First, the council stated that infants require baptism because baptism is not only a symbol but actually washes away sin.³⁴ This was a practical way of recognizing Augustine’s position that humankind is born into sin rather than working itself into sin.

Second, the council decreed that a sinless life was impossible. Over and against the idea that Pelagius and Caelestius had proposed, that the biblical writers called themselves sinners out of humility rather than any real sin, the council reaffirmed the statement in 1 John 1:8: “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.” It was an important recognition that our sins go deeper than we ourselves ever realize. By taking this position, the council was refuting the idea that we are in complete control of what is good or bad in us and, consequently, the idea that we can perfect ourselves.

Finally, the council took a stand on the power of God’s grace. Pelagius had said that the phrase “God’s grace” means that God has given people a natural ability to overcome their sins. The council took a much stronger view of the power of grace and of its role in the relationship between God and humankind: In short, the council stated that grace is primarily related to bringing God and man closer together, “so that we may know what to seek, what we ought to avoid, and also that we should love to do so.”³⁵ Grace is not simply a tool that people can use to conform to certain behaviors but also a description of how God changes people from the inside as well as the outside by helping them love him rather than sin. The council argued that God’s grace is something he gives, not something that we choose at our convenience, and that it overpowers the stranglehold sin has on our lives: “Without the grace of God, we can do no good thing.”³⁶ Since the council had also said that God remains distant from the world because of our sins, the presence of grace shows the believer in a very tangible way that God has forgiven us and voluntarily united himself with us again.

The council proceeded without much political excitement compared with the councils at Ephesus or Nicaea. The only exception is the actions of Pope Zosimus, who was impressed by the piety of Pelagius and Caelestius and who strongly urged the African synod to recognize the orthodoxy of the Pelagian party.³⁷ The Africans politely but firmly refused—they had had several unpleasant dealings with Roman officials and considered themselves competent to decide such a matter in their own province.³⁸ After a few months, Zosimus conceded the point.

Partly because it was not ecumenical, however, the council remained open to question. Its decision was not accepted as authoritative in the East, and several Christian theologians felt free to question its rulings. In particular, the council’s deep pessimism about human freedom alarmed thinkers who thought that the Africans had gone to extremes in rejecting Pelagianism and that a more moderate position would serve the same purpose without devolving into fatalism. Thus, a second council was called more than a century later at Orange to resolve some of the more controversial issues at Carthage in a way that would be more binding.

The decision at Carthage left much of the Western Christian world torn. On the one hand, most theologians opposed Pelagius, and they were glad that the council thoroughly defeated his ideas. On the other, there was a growing fear that the council had been influenced by Manichaeanism, a sizeable religion that proposed that humankind is trapped in an utterly evil material world and that the only escape is through the spiritual realm. In comparison with this trapped, fatalistic view, the church had traditionally been optimistic about the ability of humans to choose their own fate. The fact that Augustine had once been a Manichaean and that his ideas were central to the council made the suspicion of Manichaean influence a plausible one. Consequently, theologians such as John Cassian argued that while the intent of the Council of Carthage was good, it left no room for human decision-making, or at least decision-making that had any real meaning. The church in their eyes had become just as fatalistic as the Manichaeans.

Those who questioned Carthage thought (1) that the idea that fallen humans are unable to freely choose good in their unredeemed state is self-evidently false, and (2) that the fatalism implied by the council’s ideas about predestination is repugnant and contrary to the teaching of Scripture. Perhaps the most famous of the theologians who called Carthage into question was John Cassian, who argued that human freedom is not in conflict with God’s grace and that God’s predestination is based on his foreseeing who will freely (by grace) come to faith in Christ. For instance, Cassian cited the story of Zacchaeus from the Gospels.³⁹ In the story, Zacchaeus is a universally despised tax collector who was desperate to catch a glimpse of Jesus. Since he was a short man, he was forced to climb a tree and wait until Jesus passed by. John Cassian argued that God did not cause Zacchaeus to climb the tree—he decided of his own accord to do so, and Jesus rewarded his initial step of faith. Zacchaeus made a decision of his own free will, and God responded to that decision—two separate beings treating each other with dignity, rather than one using the other as a puppet.

Unfortunately, in the seventeenth century these “dissenters” from the decision at Carthage were labeled Semi-Pelagians, which links them much closer to the Pelagian heresy than they actually were. Indeed, calling these theologians Semi-Pelagians is much akin to calling those who lived in post–World War II Germany Semi-Nazis, strictly on the basis of their historical location. Regarding the fate of this “Semi-Pelagianism,” church historian J. N. D. Kelly notes, “It suffered, inevitably, but unjustly, from a suspected bias to Pelagianism, but what chiefly sealed its fate was the powerful and increasing influence of Augustine in the West.”⁴⁰

VI. The Council of Orange (529)

A second council was called in 529 at Orange in southern Gaul (modern-day France) to deal with these questions. It decided once more in favor of Augustine (who was now deceased). In fact, Augustine’s influence was so prevalent that many of Orange’s rulings used his language word for word.

Twenty-five canons were passed that ruled out the arguments of those who questioned Carthage. They frequently accused the opponents of the council of having been unknowingly influenced by Pelagius, perhaps as a counterpoint to the accusations that the Council of Carthage had been unknowingly influenced by the Manichaeans. However, while it might be thought that the council was simply called to reaffirm Augustine’s teaching, some of the canons acknowledge that free will is a mystery, and in fact Augustine’s doctrine of predestination to hell was ruled as heretical.⁴¹ For instance, the council affirmed that free will is restored by baptism (Conclusion) and that Christians have a duty to pray and to persevere in good works (Canon 10). But it was adamant that the will has to be freed by God first before someone can choose to love him: “The love with which we love God … is wholly a gift of God to love God. He who loves, even though he is not loved, allowed himself to be loved. We are loved, even when we displease him, so that we might have means to please him” (Canon 25).⁴²

VII. Relevance

The theology of Augustine won against Pelagianism only formally at the Council of Carthage (418). Pelagianism refused to die and has continued to live on in various forms throughout church history. As theologian Robert Reymond opines, human beings are born “with Pelagian hearts,”⁴³ meaning all people are prone to attempt salvation through natural means from within ourselves rather than through the supernatural means of relying on God’s grace. Ask most people, “Why would you go to heaven?” and if the person believes in heaven, a safe bet is that the answer will be, “Because I’ve tried my best to be a good person.” One arrives at this common answer because of a combination of three basic Pelagian concepts:

• Freedom is defined as independence from God’s sovereignty.
• Original sin is rejected; we are all born good. Sin is only in the act of the will.
• Grace as unmerited favor from God is rejected, ignored, or unknown.

The combination of these three results in personal morality as the basis for salvation. But this must be rejected, as it is clear from Scripture that “there is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God” (Rom. 3:10–11). This is because of original sin, as Paul writes, for “just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned” (Rom. 5:12).

Christ came to set us free from the bondage of sin, from which we are unable to break free on our own (John 8:34–36). Paul said that we are free from righteousness, but that leads to death (Rom. 6:20–23). We are called to freedom (Gal. 5:1, 13), and true freedom is not being left to do what we please but acting in the way that God has always intended for us (Rom. 6:18). We either serve sin or we serve God.

The good news is that we are not left to our own devices to choose righteousness, but we are changed and empowered by God’s grace to love and obey God more and more. That is one of the roles of our Helper the Holy Spirit (John 14:16–17). One day those redeemed in Christ will enjoy ultimate freedom, when sin will no longer be an option.

Understanding Pelagius’s error and Augustine’s contribution to the doctrine of sin is monumentally important today. Ignoring, as Pelagius did, the consequences the fall of Adam has on every human can lead to diminishing the multifaceted work of Christ. Jesus not only bore our sins on the cross but lived a perfect life in obedience to the Father through the power of the Holy Spirit—the life that Adam failed to live—in order to restore fallen humans through union with him. But God not only saves humans by grace; he also sustains them by grace. As Augustine put it, “God set the strong one free and permitted him to do what he chose; he guards the weak so that by his gift the saints unfailingly choose the good and unfailing refuse to abandon it.”⁴⁴ Without understanding the magnitude of sin and the plight of humanity, the gracious work of Jesus for us and our salvation seems superfluous, at best. 1 Peter 1:18–19 says, “For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.” It is for this reason that the work of Augustine in upholding the truth of Scripture in the fifth century is relevant for the church today.

Despite the fact that Pelagianism was never widespread, the ideas of Pelagius are compelling and deserve a carefully thought-out response. You might say that Pelagianism is wrong in its denials but challenging in its assertions; in many ways, it seems to answer certain questions about Christianity much more satisfactorily than the rulings at Carthage. For instance, there is no problem about whether God is fair, or of salvation outside of the church, or of the way that leads to heaven. Good people do good things and are rewarded; bad people do bad things and are punished. Any bad person can become a good person if they will only pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Like most heresies, however, Pelagianism provides easy and attractive answers at great cost. Though Pelagius’s God may seem more fair, he is certainly much less intimate. The wonder of salvation for Augustine was that God loved him when he was deeply in sin. Rather than waiting until Augustine had gotten his act together and freed himself from sin, God broke into Augustine’s life on his own timing and with a scandalous disregard for whether Augustine was a good person.

In Augustine’s arguments against Pelagius, the God-humanward movement is emphasized as opposed to the cruelty of emphasizing the human-Godward movement. This is especially relevant when it comes to suffering or recovery from abuse.

Examples of this God-humanward movement are found in the opening lines of morning and evening prayer.

Morning Prayer: “O Lord, open thou our lips. And our mouth shall show forth thy praise.”⁴⁵

Evening Prayer: “O God, make speed to save us. O Lord, make haste to help us.”⁴⁶

Compare this to how some theologians who engage trauma studies seem to emphasize the human-Godward movement as they celebrate process theology, open theism, panentheism, or Schleiermacher’s theology and then criticize classical theology.

Clearly, distorted God-centered theologies have been used to justify rather than encounter suffering: “Classical theology and reform liturgy justifies rather than encounters suffering. Before suffering can speak or cry out, it has been steamrolled by an aggressive theology of sin and guilt.”⁴⁷

This is cruel. But equally as cruel is the anthropocentric and Pelagian theologies that leave survivors blamed and burdened.

The message survivors hear often is self-heal, self-love, and self-help. Survivors of trauma are frequently told some version of the following, which are all from trauma theologians: “One can will one’s well-being”⁴⁸ or “If you are willing to work hard and find good support, you can not only heal but thrive.”⁴⁹ Regarding healing, two survivor advocates write: “There’s nothing as wonderful as starting to heal, waking up in the morning and knowing that nobody can hurt you if you don’t let them.”⁵⁰ The message is that healing begins with and is maintained primarily by the survivor. One trauma theologian writes: “When a moral loss is involved, it must be that violator and violated are co-responsible for the resulting harms.”⁵¹ This is theological victim blaming at its worst.

This sentiment is reflected in the famous quote, “No one can disgrace us but ourselves.”⁵²

This is all the opposite of what John Barclay writes about the concept of gift in Paul’s theology. Paul is famous for speaking of Christ with the language of gift (2 Cor. 9:15, Gal. 1:14): “The conditions for the gift are anything but positive. This is not the giving of covenants to the worthy … No fitting features can be traced in the recipient of God’s love, not even in their hidden potential.”

Pelagianism offers those who suffer horrible news. The experience of many survivors is that people offer them platitudes, suspicious questions, surface empathy, and shallow theology. But those who experience trauma simply may not have the wherewithal to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.”

Hurting people need something from the outside to stop the downward spiral, to give them a place to rest, to support and carry them, and to give them strength for recovery.

Fortunately, God’s mercy, grace, power, and love flood in at the point when hope to heal oneself is lost. Survivors need to be told that however deeply despair and violence can go, God’s great love goes deeper.

What is needed is not simply a list of exhortations or self-help platitudes and advice. J. Gresham Machen: “What I need first of all is not exhortation, but a gospel, not directions for saving myself but knowledge of how God has saved me. Have you any good news? That is the question that I ask of you. I know your exhortations will not help me. But if anything has been done to save me, will you not tell me the facts?”

God does not command “Heal thyself!” but declares “You will be healed!” Jeremiah 17:14 promises: “Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved, for you are my praise.”

VIII. Conclusion

The question of original sin, which seems far removed from everyday life, becomes much more real when applied to those who are trapped in sin. Their fate hung in the balance at the Council of Carthage—whether they would be told to simply get their act together or told that they were loved first in spite of themselves, and that because of God’s love they would be given the ability to conquer sin. At the same time, Pelagius’s critiques about leading a holy life and not using grace as an excuse to sin should ring strongly in a consumer culture that often takes it for granted that God should be conforming to its preferences. David Wells, a Protestant cultural critic, once wrote, “Pagans were deathly afraid of the gods and goddesses … By contrast, we feel that the sacred will be pleased to have us, will spread out the welcome mat, so to speak, and will be grateful for our attention.”⁵³ For all the faults in his theory, Pelagius reminds us that we should not take advantage of God’s mercy.

As for the case of those who questioned Carthage, the ruling at Orange is more ambiguous. Some today question how firmly we should hold the rulings at Orange and Carthage at all. They were not ecumenical councils of the church; that is, they were not universally affirmed by the Eastern and Western branches of the church. In addition, some argue that the councils were so concerned with Pelagianism that they ruled out legitimate understandings of the grace of God and human salvation. Today, we can broadly consider both sides at Orange as orthodox, since there are several threads that unite both those who sided with Augustine and those who wanted to avoid the heresy of Pelagius without sacrificing legitimate expressions of human freedom. Most important, both sides absolutely affirmed “that humanity’s present condition does not correspond to God’s ultimate purpose and original intention in its creation.”⁵⁴ Moreover, they agreed that humans are responsible for their condition and that God is ultimately responsible for reversing the curse and restoring that which has been broken. Put differently, both sides affirm the crucial doctrine that salvation is by grace alone; nothing that humans can do could warrant their acceptance before a holy God.