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Augustine and Medieval Theology

Transcript - CH511 Augustine and Medieval Theology © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 17 of 24CH511

Augustine’s Anti-Pelagian Works, Part 2

Augustine and Medieval Theology

Blessings! How are you doing? It’s good to be with you again. Today we’re going to pick up and conclude our discussions on Augustine’s anti-Pelagian works and, at the same time, provide an introduction to his masterpiece On the Trinity, but let’s begin with contemplation and prayer. In this case today we’ll pray a prayer from Augustine’s work On the Trinity, at the conclusion. Augustine has written this great work, it’s taken him twenty years, as we’ll find out, and in many ways it’s an apologetic work. He comes to the end, and his mind is tired, and he says, “In the final analysis, prayer is better than any argument.” And with that, let me ask you to pray along with me, and I’ll pray Augustine’s prayer that he pens at the end of his great work.

Father, I’ve sought You and have desired to see with my understanding what I believed, and I’ve argued and labored much. O Lord, the One God, God the Trinity, whatever I’ve said in these books that is of Thine, may they acknowledge who are Thine. If anything of my own, may it be pardoned both by You and by those who belong to You.

And, Father, that’s our prayer, that our ministry would be such that it would be seen to be true and genuine, and that the wellspring of our thoughts would come out of Your absolute truth, and that we’d not misrepresent because of our lack of preparation or misunderstandings who You are, Your claims on the world, and our understanding of You—that it’d be rooted and grounded in a historical truth that’s based on proper exposition of Scripture. Father, we do desire to know You and to know You properly, and, along with Augustine, we pray this prayer, in Jesus’ name. Amen.

You’ll recall that last time we talked, we were talking about the anti-Pelagian works of Augustine, and we gave you a brief overview of the Pelagian controversy and later development of semi-Pelagianism. We’ve talked about some of the principal characters. We have thought about Augustine’s role in this

Scott T. Carroll, PhD Experience: Professor of Ancient History,

Cornerstone University



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controversy, about how it took up a major amount of his energy; and in some ways it reflected, as well, that the church, though at the Council of Orange, dealt with semi-Pelagianism, ideas in it would remain alive and well in the church of the Middle Ages.

In some ways, the question of the Reformation was opening up again this question of Pelagianism at the end of Martin Luther’s life, when he was talking about his works that he had written. He said, “Let them all perish, except for my work with the Holy Scriptures,” which consumed the bulk of his ministry, his translation from the early 1520s through his death in 1546. And he said, “that my commentary on Galatians would survive and, as well, my tract on The Bondage of the Will,” written against Erasmus. Both The Bondage of the Will and the question that lies at the heart for Luther in his commentary on Galatians is the question of whether works can produce righteousness apart from God’s grace.

This is an important question in the Reformation. In fact, though they were bitter opponents—that is, Martin Luther and Erasmus—Luther would say, “I would give Erasmus credit for this: that he understands the real issue of reform and that is the question of how one understands the will.” Erasmus wrote a tract called The Freedom of the Will, which precipitated Luther’s outstanding response, The Bondage of the Will.

We’ve thought a little bit about this, and it’s interesting as it is on the heels of our consideration of the anti-Donatist works, that in many ways the church in the Middle Ages is working out an ecclesiology along the lines of Augustine’s anti-Donatist works and yet is working out a soteriology that has not fully appreciated the arguments in Augustine’s anti-Pelagian works. We’ve tried to be objective, though, in realizing while I embrace the theology of the Reformation, the soteriological conclusions, at the same time would say that it’s probably high time that the church reconsiders some ecclesiological issues that are rooted in the early church—particularly because of abuse in Protestantism today and the desire that people have to be fulfilled in a sense of tradition that’s rooted and grounded in orthodoxy. There’s a great need for that, as we’ll see when we contemplate his work On the Trinity.

Having said that, let’s try to bring some summary to Augustine’s work and response against the Pelagians. You’ll recall that we last left off with his discussion of infant baptism. The Pelagians placed their finger on infant baptism and said, “After all, you



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know, even those who call themselves orthodox in the Church of Rome practice a kind of a work whereby this emerged.” And is it biblical or not? is the thrust of their argument. Augustine will use infant baptism in order to argue for our original sin and all humans drinking deep of the cup of Adam.

The whole concept of how individuals share in Adam’s sin and guilt is an interesting one that the church had to deal with. And these are questions that are far beyond, oftentimes, the pew of the Protestant church. In what way do we participate in Adam’s fall? We’d recall from the last class that some in the Protestant church had this idea that the unpardonable sin is, in fact, rejection of Jesus Christ and that there is kind of an age where there is no accountability, and dealing with the pain of infant death, with the atrocities of abortion, with the whole pain of those who die without the intellectual capacity of reason to understand the claims of the gospel and have an operative faith. It’s caused some to develop a theology of compassion that compensates for this obvious human misery. Without even getting into the historical terms of those questions, and people have given much payer and thought about these troubles, the church today seems as if it doesn’t fully understand this concept of original sin.

Particularly for those who do not practice the ordinance of infant baptism or a kind of a sacramentalism, their concept of sin and guilt in some ways is separate from the first Adam. Similarly, their concept of righteousness is separate from the second Adam. And so imputation is lost in the church of the postmodern age.

Augustine will strike at the heart of this in his response, and he will deal with the question of infant baptism, and we saw his argument where he insisted on and showed that it reflects the need of infants for grace. Augustine looks at the underlying issues, though, as he moves away from infant baptism; and he sees at the core that there’s a misunderstanding at two levels with someone who was a follower of Pelagius. First, there was a misunderstanding of the nature of the grace of God in Christ; and second, there was a need for a better understanding of how one gets right standing before God, that is, this insistence on man’s ability of the will to achieve moral excellence is something that he would reject. So the role of the will had to be analyzed, as the nature of the grace of God in Christ, and we saw right at the end that these things were interwoven. It’s difficult to discuss the one without the other, in fact, and they’re both interrelated.



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For Pelagius, Augustine would say the Pelagians must be resisted with the utmost vigor, who suppose that the mere power of the human will in itself, without God’s help, can either perfect righteousness or advance toward it in an even tenor. When they begin to be hard pressed about their presumption in asserting that this result can be reached without divine assistance, they check themselves. They allege that such attainments are not possible without God’s help, seeing that God created man with free choice of his will and gave him His commandments, and so forth.

You’ll recall that they would say that the grace is in that creation, and that God has shown His grace by giving a will to human beings.

Then Augustine, though, would argue back that the free grace of God in Christ is in direct relation to impotence, to the inability of the will, not to is capacity; and so that’s where grace comes in, that the will is dysfunctional on its own and therefore in need of grace. We shall see this question more easily, says Augustine, if we first examine with some care what our own power means. There are then two faculties: the exercise of the will and the exercise of power. Not everyone who has the will has therefore the power also, nor has everyone who possesses the power got the will and immediate control. For, as we sometimes will what we cannot do, so also we sometimes can do what we do not will. And so Augustine strikes at the heart of it, and he says that this is essentially the problem that we face. The problem is that the person, apart from divine assistance from God in Christ, is unable to do that which is pleasing before God; and therefore the will needs grace in order to function properly, as designed by God.

We will see that he goes back to creation. He goes back to the creation of Adam, and he looks at the second Adam, Jesus Christ, as he analyzes what it means to have will and power and ability. For Augustine the best example of man’s inability was in sexual areas; and, for Augustine, we’ve reflected on his own immoralities and his quest to try to control his sexual passions. And so it’s interesting that he will raise this up as a universal human experience to proof text what he’s trying to say here about will and capacity to do that which is right.

Augustine, in his works, will then open up a whole critique of the nature of the will and the nature of grace; and, in doing so, he will look carefully at what Pelagius says and then will argue back in terms of what, in fact, Augustine believes Scripture says. For Pelagius, the nature of the will is to choose, and God’s grace



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enables that function. For Augustine, the real exercise of the will is not its capacity to choose but to fulfill, and that this can be done only with the grace of God in Christ. Not by nature, Augustine says, is grace denied; but rather, by grace nature is repaired. So that which we were given originally has been broken, and it’s only by God’s grace that it can function properly. People who die outside of Christ, die outside of Christ willingly, because their will works the wrong way. Apart from God’s grace, their will will not work in the proper direction, is the idea. So, for Augustine, the crux of the matter is that there’s a close relationship. For the will to work right, it must have God’s grace in order for it to function.

They will both argue back and forth in terms of defining these different issues and their nature. For instance, Augustine quotes Pelagius as affirming “whatever is bound by natural necessity is deprived of all freedom of will and deliberate choice.” Some of you may have heard that argument or posed that argument yourself. We may perceive that to hear and to smell and to see is our own, while the capacity to hear and to smell and to see is not our own but lies in the natural necessity. The actual capability of not sinning lies not so much in the power of man’s will as in the necessity of his nature. Whatever is placed in the necessity of nature undoubtedly appertains to the author of that nature, that is, God. How then can that be regarded as done without the grace of God, which is shown to belong in a special manner to God Himself? So, again, Pelagius says, “Our natural proclivities cause us to sin or not sin, and those proclivities or dispositions are given by God, and therefore God is the source of victory, and therefore this is grace.”

Augustine, in response to this, will say that grace is the gift in Christ to empower the will to do what on its own it will not do. And he turns that argument and says, “Either I do not understand what he means, or he does not himself, as to his remarks. Concerning our sense of smell, does he not display no little carelessness when he says that it’s not in our own power to be able or to be unable to smell; but that it’s in our own power to smell or not to smell.” This might seem pedantic to you, but the question rises and falls on the illustrations and definitions, which Augustine, as a trained rhetorician with his powers of logic, will follow through.

But let us suppose someone could to us with our hands firmly tied but yet without any injury to our organs of smell. Among some bad and noxious smells, in such a case we altogether lose the power, however our strong may be



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our wish not to smell; because every time we’re obliged to draw a breath, we also inhale the smell which we disliked. Man’s nature, indeed, was created at first faultless and without any sin, but the flaw which darkens and weakens all those natural goods, it is not contracted from its flawless Creator.

This gets back to his idea and his arguments with the Manicheans that God is not responsible for evil and for sin, but from that original sin which it committed of its own free will. This is my own editorial remark here that the argument will rise and fall, in some ways, on Adam himself—that Adam living in a perfect environment, perfect intellect, free from care, never experiencing sin, and therefore rebelling; how can we with all that works against us choose to do better?

This grace, however, of Christ, Augustine would say, without which neither infants nor adults can be saved—interesting—is not bestowed for any merits but is given freely on account of which it is called grace. So this lies at the heart of Augustine’s argument, and he sees grace as absolutely necessary in order for the will to work. He will go in and look more carefully at this whole question of nature, and he’ll turn in some ways from arguing about Adam, and he’ll look at Jesus Christ Himself and the incarnation, and in Adam will see all condemned, as opposed to Pelagius, who’ll say that Adam’s sin injured only Adam. And in Christ a kind of fulfillment of the incarnation and the power of will and the imputation of righteousness, and these themes will be themes that are powerful and important in the Reformation, as will be obvious to you.

So this lies at the heart of the debate between the two, and the focal point is the whole question of will, the question of grace, the question of God’s original intent in creation, the question of humankind’s abilities to please God, the question of the atonement. Augustine will see that at the essence of all this, the whole question of redemption in Christ, that redemption in Christ is necessary because of the inability of the will to produce a pleasing behavior before God.

And so these themes will be important themes. Augustine will finally conclude that these things are essentially comprehended by a perspective of faith. It’s faith that understands God’s grace. It’s faith that helps one to see that God is the Author of good and yet can hold human beings responsible for evil. It’s faith



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that helps one understand that before God we stand guilty of our own accord, of our own free will, and yet stand justified, by choice, assisted by grace. He would say that it’s faith that helps us to understand that the grace in Christ is absolutely superior to our works performed on our own and that we have marvelous advantages over Adam himself because of the grace that God has given us and the empowerment to not just will, but to fulfill, as he had said earlier. Augustine says,

At that time, therefore, God had given to man a good will” [and that’s an interesting term, “a good will,” as opposed to a bad will?] because in that will He had made him, since He had made him upright. He had given help without which he could not continue therein if he would, but that he should will, he left in his free choice. He could, therefore, perseveringly hold fast the good which he would, but that he willed not to continue is absolutely the fault of him whose merit it would’ve been if he had willed to continue.

Let me interject here that it is outside the realm of reason and historical reality to argue “what if.” What if Adam would not have sinned? and so forth. He did. That’s a historical reality, and it’s ended at that. The rest is philosophical fantasy and not theology rooted in historical reality. And so, to wit, Augustine goes on:

Such a fullness of blessing that by it he might have the fullest certainty of always abiding in it. Now, however, to those to whom such assistance is wanting, it is the penalty of sin; but to those to whom it is given, it is given of grace, not of debt; because by this grace of God there is caused in us, in the reception of good and in the persevering hold of it, not only to be able to do what we will, but even to will to do what we are able, so to fulfill God’s desires in the law. But this was not the case in the first man, for the one of these things was in him, but the other was not; that is, the power of grace to fulfill. For he was not without the grace to receive good, because he had not yet lost it, but he was without the aid of grace to continue in it. And he had received the ability, if he would, but he had not the will to exercise the ability. For if he had possessed it, he would have persevered, for he could persevere if he would; for what shall be more free than free will, when it shall not be able to serve sin? But now the good deserving has been lost by sin in those who are delivered. That has become the gift of grace, which would’ve been the reward of deserving,



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on which account we must consider with diligence and attention in what respect those two things differ from one another. To be able not to sin, and not to be able to sin; to be able not to die, and not to be able to die; to be able not to forsake good, and not to be able to forsake good – for the first man was able not to sin, was able not to die, was able not to forsake good. Therefore the first liberty of the will was to be able not to sin. The last was much greater—not to be able to sin.

And it’s a very interesting distinction. The first immortality was to be able not to die, the last was much greater—not to be able to die. The first was the power of perseverance, to be able not to forsake good. The last was the felicity of perseverance, not to be able to forsake good. And so, consequently, he sees in grace and the will the fulfillment of God’s righteous intentions in humankind.

So this is the mystery of grace, and so if I draw these things to conclusion for you, you can see that in defining the will, in going back and looking at the nature of humankind created in Adam—if you look at the necessity of the grace of God in Christ in His redemptive work, and the necessity of faith, that these become important issues, not only to the medieval church but also to the church of the Reformation.

The anti-Pelagian works are of extraordinary significance, and these lengthier readings give us some context, though, and will help you understand as you divine you way through the works that have been assigned to you and as you contemplate these important works in Augustine’s life and as they relate to the life of the church. I think, as well, not only to the life of the medieval and the Reformation church, but the life of the church today, because, essentially, these are still areas that are debated about all the time. And we have such a marvelous resource that’s been given to the Bride of Christ in the person of Augustine, as he’s dealt with the very same issues, on a pastoral level, as you and I may daily as well.

Let’s make transition and turn to another very important work. Think about this: Augustine busy with his pastoral duties, doing all that he’s doing, and writing these great works. What I’d like to do is look very briefly, giving you an overview of a phenomenal work, and that is Augustine’s work On the Trinity, one of the most profound overviews and syntheses of the Trinity in the West, at least, if not in the entire church age. Now is it with fault? It



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certainly is, but Augustine would argue it’s because of our inability of language and the intellect to really grasp these things.

If there’s misunderstanding in the church today, as it relates to the will and grace, there certainly is as it relates to the nature of the Godhead. So, very briefly, what we’ll do is give a glancing look at kind of a historical introduction; and then we will think briefly about the necessity of the Trinity. And in our next time together we will give an overview of the nature of the work On the Trinity, but let’s take a step back and look briefly at kind of a historical overview.

The earliest issues that the church dealt with were issues defining the Godhead, and there were certain councils that culminated with definitions that were important. Over the course of the late first, second, third centuries, into the early fourth century, the primary focus was on the Logos, the person of Jesus Christ, His incarnation, His relationship to the Father; and it was finally defined in the Athanasian Creed pronounced at Nicea.

This would be an important benchmark, with the development of early Christology, as well as steps toward a refined Trinitarian theology; but that was defined by a council in Constantinople in 381 that gave a full-fledged definition to the Trinity. Certainly in the East, driven by great theologians from Cappadocia and the Greek East, as they confronted Arianism, and they thought about not only the relationship between Christ and the Father but also the Spirit and the deity of the Spirit, and how the Three interrelate.

In their classic definition, there was in Greek a distinction made between the ousia and the hypostasis. The ousia was the essence of God, the unity of God. The hypostasis was the modes of being of God. The West would call these the persons, but this hypostasis was translated into Latin substantia, but “substance” didn’t get at modes of being, and there was a language problem. For someone like Augustine, remember that he didn’t work in Greek, and so he didn’t have the advantages of realizing the subtle definitions that had developed in the East. But instead his only exposure to those were through the works of Hilary of Poitiers, a Latin father who was conversant with the Greek theology and was a cornerstone for defining the Trinity in the West. But this great work of Augustine’s would also lay a foundation piece that the entire medieval church would build on. And one would stand and marvel that he was able to come to the conclusions and subtle definitions that he was able to come to apart from exposure to many of these Eastern church



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fathers, or only through translation or hearsay.

That kind of gives you a little bit of the historical perspective, so Augustine is living in the wake of decisions in 381, and so he is able to stand on the shoulders of great decisions. Augustine as a rhetorician will confess the inability of language and our natural reason to fully comprehend God. A very popular book that you’re certainly aware of is Knowing God [J. I. Packer (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993)]. There is a place where we cannot know God. There’s a place where language fails at defining Him for us adequately. Augustine would say that our language is shaped by our experience and our experiences in the physical realm, and God is yet eternally Spirit, and so language and metaphor fail.

Let me bring this to a practical place. We experience this in the church. I listen to people try to explain the Trinity. People every day, as Jehovah’s Witnesses come to their door and accuse Christians of tri-theism, of a kind of polytheism, and Christian men and women try to give analogies of the Trinity and fall into a classic historical trap, that these analogies fall short. If they were gently directed to Augustine’s arguments, one would find analogies that in some way help us to understand the Trinity, but he would realize two things.

First, that they are inadequate, essentially, because God is altogether transcendent, in language and experiences unable to quantify Him in such a way that it’s palatably understood by the mind of reason.

Second is this whole inability of language to get at these definitions. So these are two areas that Augustine would realize he shatters some of the common misbeliefs about Trinity, the whole analogy that z’Trinity’s like water. It’s steam, it can be fluid, and it can be ice; but can it be all three at once?” A scientist tells me it can, but, you see, Augustine will look for arguments that are of usefulness to the church. Yet, as he tries to work through this, he realizes that some of these things must be held in mystery. I think that’s something that Protestants aren’t good at. We want to—maybe on the heels of German theological developments, maybe scientism—we want to quantify and define everything; but there are some things where we should confess that we don’t know, yet we confess to believe. We know by experience, and yet we can’t quantify. It’s something held in mystery, and there is nothing wrong with doing that.



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The church is on the verge, though, and it has been throughout church history, of tumbling into heretical thinking. Our prayers of parishioners stumble into heretical thinking about God, and if you listen—not critically but to hear how people’s theology is worked out in their prayer life—you’ll see that at one moment they’re praying to the Father, and the next moment they’re thanking Him for dying on the cross—a kind of modalism that was in the church.

You see, there are two extremes with trying to define the Godhead. The one extreme says that it holds unswervingly to a kind of Unitarianism—a unity of the Godhead in one. This is such that when one tries to deal with Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, either Christ is absolutely subordinated to the Father and inferior to Him, and the Spirit is seen as some kind of emanation, a force—which would be an Arianism, or the Jehovah’s Witnesses today, let’s say. Or, on the other hand, a kind of Unitarianism of the Godhead, where each of the three what Trinitarians would call persons are seen as merely modes of expression that relate to God’s relation to His creation through ages. And so God the Father is Creator, and God the Father becomes known as God the Son as Savior, and reigns eternally in His church today as God the Spirit. And so it’s a kind of patripassianism that was contended with in the early church, that the Father died on the cross.

These things have been dealt with historically, and yet we fall into them. And some of it is based on bad translations of Scripture. The classic prophecy in Isaiah of Emmanuel and that He is “everlasting Father” has led some Pentecostal groups into a kind of confession of the fatherhood of Christ, when, in fact, the proper translation of that passage, as you may be aware, is that He’s Father of eternity, the Alpha and the Omega, the Creator of the universe.

So one extreme is this kind of idea of unity, at the exclusion of persons or the melding of them; the other extreme is a kind of tri-theism, that they are individual at the expense of unity. I know people who will insist on Christ as Creator, to the exclusion of the work of the Father and the Spirit. This is dangerous. God is ubiquitous. He is everywhere present. “Even if I make my bed in hell, God is there,” and one should be careful to hold in tension while the major Actor that’s placed forth in Scripture is—in creation, for instance—the Logos, the Word Himself, Jesus Christ. At the same time, the work is co-opted together with the Father and the Spirit, as each work in union together.


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Now, so what? Why do we study the Trinity? Why is it important? is a kind of second point. First it gives us a metaphysical groundwork for our experience of who God is as Father, as Savior, and as Sanctifier. Second, it helps us to understand God as distinct from His creation. God is Spirit, and yet God is three in one, and it helps us to understand God better. Third, it helps us to detect and understand God’s relationship to the physical world and to human experience. Finally, and this is what’s important with Augustine’s work, as we’ll see next time, it helps us understand ourselves better if, in fact, we’re made like the image of God. With that to think about, I bid you farewell and God’s blessings until we meet again.

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