3. Pelagius

There is some repetition of material already posted here, but I have posted the full text of the Necessary Heresies series given at St Ebbe's for the benefit of those who came (largely). I crave your indulgence!

1. Confronting the barbarians
We live in a time when we may well think that the barbarians are at the gates. What we know as ‘civilization’ - that in which we have so much faith for our comfort and security – cannot conceal its true barbarity. Just this week we have commemorated the 200th anniversary of the passing of the act against slavery, with much self-congratulation all round. However, there was also in this a reminder of the crucial role that slavery played in the economy of the empire; and that the Church of England itself was a supporter of slavery and even an owner of slavery. It was ‘decent’ people who promoted such ‘indecency’; the most civilized people who profited from barbarity. But we shouldn’t imagine that we have entered a stage of superior moral enlightenment. In the name of protecting its own prosperity the society in which we live continues to butcher the unborn and call it a medical procedure justified by certain so-called ‘rights’; and continues to hold in its possession weapons of such appalling potential that it beggars the imagination. The populace of Britain is enslaved by lust, greed, gluttony and drunkenness, vanity, despair and violence to an unprecedented degree in its history, with a decline in subscription to every value except the value of personal freedom of choice. If we imagine that we can look upon the regime of a savage like Robert Mugabe with some degree of superiority, we ought to remember that in our own societies civilized behaviour is only a thin skin stretched over our hearts of darkness. As Joseph Conrad’s Marlowe said, sitting on a boat on the Thames: ‘this too has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ I had a friend, a 22 year old woman, who was in New Orleans at the time of Hurricane Katrina. The Hurricane itself was not the most frightening thing. She made her way with several other tourists to the Superdome, where they were to spend several days in fear of their lives in a crowd of almost 25,000 people crammed into the building. Armed gangs roamed around menacing and abusing them. They were afraid to go to the toilets because people had been raped and even killed there. This utterly chaotic and primitive scene occurred in the most advanced society on earth.
The rise of such appalling inhumanity demands a response from any right-thinking person, surely. More than ever before, there is a need for a new moral core, a morality that is convincing to the modern person in its liberality but severe enough to curb the kind of lawlessness we observe. The church itself is need of this moral renewal, too: it exhibits moral confusion and pettiness. When its leaders can make themselves understood, it turns out they aren’t saying anything at all. It has been lax with child-abusers and sexual deviants in its midst; and its clergy are a byword for laziness and ineffectiveness up and down the country. It hasn’t addressed the greed and the moral narrowness of its own membership. Isn’t moral renewal demanded by such circumstances? Isn’t a fresh seriousness about civilized behaviour called for more than ever?

2. The moral seriousness of Pelagius
Pelagius was a British theologian who took morality - and the moral responsibility of human beings - seriously. And he lived through a time in which a great civilisation was decaying around him. He would have been witness to tremendous and brutal evils in his time, living as he did around the sack of Rome in the early 5th Century. His teaching was not that human beings are naturally good - that doctrine would have had no purchase at all amongst those who had seen limbs hacked off and heard the screams of the rape victims. Rather, he held that man and woman were free to choose the right or the wrong. There was no escape behind the veil of determinism, or pleading helplessness as if that was some reassurance. Each of us could and should and would be held fully accountable for our actions. We ought to hear the full impact of God's address to his people 'Be holy, as I am holy', or as Jesus said: ‘You must therefore be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect’. This means what it says. Jesus would not have said it if was not a moral possibility. Moral pessimissim is insulting to the creator of human beings, who created not puppets or beasts, but persons. Life and death is set before human beings and we are bid by our maker to choose life, aren’t we (Dt 30:19)? What’s more, this is a New Testament perspective as well: takes James’s epistle for example, where faith and obedience are in close conjunction with one another.

For Pelagius, there are three features in action - posse, velle and esse (power, will, realisation). Posse comes only from God, but the other two belong to us. When we choose to do the right, in order words, we can count on power from God to aid us. Not that Pelagius felt he was negating the sovereignty of God by such a teaching; far from it - man's free will occurs only within the sphere of God's permission and generosity, and ought to be used to the ends that God commands.

There are two futher points that Pelagius taught: First, the human will has no bias in favour of evil, not having inherited the spoiled will of Adam. After all, how can we be blamed for another's sin? That makes no moral sense. Adam set in train a custom or a habit of sin, but not a physical geneaology of sin.

Secondly, Pelagius also denies that man has a bias towards the good. Grace is provided as a grace of knowledge: through the law and the example of Christ, God provides us with all we need to know about what to do.

So, it is possible to say with the Rich Young Ruler, 'all these I have kept since childhood'. In fact, the Bible contains many examples of righteous lives. Now, this is not a trivial business for Pelagius: the merit on offer only comes through strenuous effort and application. He is well aware of the high destiny to which human beings have been called and to which they ought to aspire. No doubt he was also aware of Christians who saw grace as either a short-cut to righteousness or who felt that predestination as Augustine and others taught it was a counsel of despair. Here rather was a call to quit moaning and get on with living righteously. Here was a call to be as magnificent as human life can be. It was quite a heroic vision of the human person. And what’s more, at the time Pelagianism took hold, it did not look particularly unorthodox. Pelagius soon gathered a large following across the Roman Empire, from Britain his homeland to Sicily, Greece and even North Africa, particularly amongst the wealthy and educated.

3. The appeal of Pelagianism
What makes Pelagianism so attractive?
It isn’t too hard to see what makes Pelagianism attractive. Firstly, like most heresies, it could appeal to Biblical sources. The commands of the law and of Jesus were surely commands that could be carried out and ought to be taken seriously.

Secondly, it was the remarkable lives of holiness that Christians had lived in the first years of the Christianity that had been perhaps the most remarkable testimony to the truth of their cause. Pelagianism was a call to return to this source of strength in the face of social chaos.

Thirdly, Pelagianism is a theology that treats us like individuals and like adults. It demands that we put aside childish excuses, and take responsibility each for our own actions. It requires of us discipline and hard work; it calls us to virtue. It turns us to do the good: perhaps, too, it sees most theological talk as foolish speculation and puts before us a concrete path of action and improvement. It tells us that ‘God helps those who help themselves’: whole tax systems have been built on this kind of principle! Being treated like an adult is rather appealing I find, especially when churches are so good at babying us.

Fourthly, it offers a vision of progress in the Christian life. It dangles a reward in front of us, as we freely choose to do the good and discipline our wills to pursue it and ask for God’s aid in it, Pelagianism declares we can leave behind foolish ways and become more and more Christlike, so that in fact, full imitation of Christ may be achieved by certain individuals.
Fifthly, it is positive about humankind in a way that honours the creator’s stamp on us. Human beings have a high destiny indeed serving so majestic a God and seeking to imitate him.

4. Augustine and Original Sin
The Pelagian movement however ran headlong into the most formidible defender of orthodoxy bar Athanasius the church has ever seen: Augustine of Hippo. Already Augustine had taught explicitly that human beings were born into a state sin derived from and inherited from the first couple. When a Pelagian disciple Celestius arrived North Africa, Augustine, who could not resist a controversy, gathered his ammunition.

His first rejoinder to the Pelagian teaching was to agree with this at least: the human being as he or she is made by the Creator is a glorious creature. Augustine paints a remarkable picture of the glories of Adam and Eve physically, morally, spiritually. Adam was in a state of justification, illumination and beatitude (JND KELLY). He was possessed of a true freedom- the freedom not to sin, being endowed with a good will and an inclination to do the right thing.

However, secondly, as the Bible tells it, Adam fell. The fault was entirely with him: there was no way in which God could be blamed for his lapse. His will, free to not sin, had the possibility of choosing in error. This first sin, however, was not merely Adam’s affair: because in that sin a great fall occurred than in any of the myriad sins that followed it. Romas 5:12 in particular is his text here: Romans 5:12 Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned-…

Third – original sin comes from our participation in Adam’s choice – and thus our co-responsibility for it. We have a tragic solidarity with our first parents in sin.

Fourth, the result of Adam’s sin is that human nature is terribly scarred and deformed. The image of God remains in us, but it is as a cracked mirror. But in every aspect, human beings are now enslaved to sin and destined for death. We are ignorant, lustful and dying. We have lost above all that the use of that free will that Adam enjoyed not to sin. We cannot now avoid sin: sin hangs around even our good, as a bad smell. He would say we still have a free will, but now only use it as a matter of fact to do wrong.

Fifth, if the effects of sin loom large in Augustine’s teaching, it is because the power of grace is overwhelms it (See Romans 5!) His pessimism about human nature gives him no confidence that Pelagius is anything but a deceiver, encouraging in men and women pride to think they can free themselves from the mire. Without God’s help we cannot, says Augustine, overcome the temptations of this life. And grace cannot be merely a matter of external aids, such as the teaching of Jesus how to live a godly life. Augustine was able to see that Pelagianism has a shrunken view of the cross as God’s free gift; and no view of the Holy Spirit as likewise the free gift of God himself to give us, not a kick in the rear, or a great example, but a whole new birth. If we were dead in our sins, then how moreso are we now alive to God in Jesus Christ by his Holy Spirit, and truly freed for doing the works of God.
Augustine and sex… hmm.
- the distortion of the Augustinian position into defeatism or cheap grace.
Finally called heresy at 431 at Ephesus.

5. Contemporary Pelagianism
Pelagianism is very much alive and well: and it takes both secular and religious forms. Partly it is alive and well because the need for moral teaching and guidance has never been more pressing. We have forms of deterministic thinking that need repudiating: that we are determined by our genes for example, or that society is to blame, or our parents. It may be tempting to want to preach Pelagianism in the teeth of that kind of moral laziness. But we need to remember that what people need more than anything is not better moral training: they need a powerful gospel of forgiveness and new life; a gospel of sheer grace, in other words.

Here three types of pelagianism :
1) self-help Pelagianism. I love the self-help section of the book shop… don’t you? I really do love to hear that I have amazing potential, if only I could release it. Unleash The Power Within is what I want to hear: take hold of your full humanity in every aspect. Be a remarkable human being. Unfortunately, there is also a market for Christianised self-help manuals, that are little better. They are targeted at our feelings of spiritual inadequacy, which we pretty much all have. They tell us: the truly uninhibited walk with Jesus could be yours if only you take action now! Within evangelicalism, the Holiness movement was and is especially guilty of this – enticing Christians away from grace and encouraging a deadly spiritual pride.

2) existentialist pelagianism: less religious is the pelagianism of existentialism, which says basically, the world is meaningless and chaotic: and the best we can do is take responsibility for it. Trying to explain things is actually to make things worse. So, Camus’ The Plague: it is the man who just does what is humane and stops trying to make sense of it all who is the hero.
Of course: in reality, it is the believers who actually make the difference, not the existentialists. Camus trades in a false dichotomy.

3) The Pelagianism of the moral gospel: The reduction of the Christian gospel to values, or a set of political rights to be protected… this was always the risk with defending Christian morality in the public square – you encourage a Pelagian view of Christianity, as if somehow you could have values without worship, and moral activity without spiritual transformation.