John MacArthur's right-hand man, Phil Johnson, is clueless concerning "Pelagianism." Phil knows nothing about Pelagius. The verbal diarrhea he spews is merely hearsay and gossip, and he ignorantly regurgitates and parrots it without doing his homework to see if it is true in the least. [Just as Phil's blind followers will do with me.] He teaches as "fact" something that never actually existed, as you are about to witness. You see, Phil is lazy. He believes things simply because he was told to believe them. He has never done a lick of research to weigh the various interpretations on any issue to see if they legitimately square with the Scriptures. There are over 40,000 Christian denominations, each with their own set of "scholars" or "experts." They cannot all be right, but they can certainly all be wrong. Phil believes what he believes because of blind tradition. He believes what he believes because of how he was raised and what he was taught. He has never approached the beliefs he has embraced in the manner which the Bereans approached Scripture. The guy follows two bankrupt systems of theology simultaneously: Dispensationalism and Calvinism. 'Nuff said!
After reading this entire post, do you think Phil has the humility to acknowledge his error and to admit he was wrong? I am willing to bet not. With his ego, pride, and hubris, because he is unable to argue the main point and can never provide a reasonable refutation or intelligent counter-argument, Phil will simply turn around and attack me by utilization of denial, deflection, IMAX-level projection, censorship, "cancelling," manipulation, smearing, gaslighting, jamming, framing, ad hominem, name calling, character assassination, attempted intimidation, and the use of fallacious arguments that have no basis in reality, the way he has always done with any of his opponents. He is a narcissistic bully. The dumb sheep who follow him and hang on his every word will do likewise because they do not possess an ounce of ability to critically think for themselves. If some clown like Johnson tells them to hate someone, inventing reasons the way Augustine did with Pelagius, they will hate that person without ever knowing them or attempting to know them and without ever weighing the matter for themselves. "I heard this or was told this, therefore is must be true." As Augustine brought Pelagius into disrepute, I have no doubt that Phil will attempt to do the same with me, because he is of his father the devil: a liar! I have no doubt that at least one person to several people (including Phil himself) will write me to express their godless hatred because they behave more like the Devil than they do the Saviour. They have a Christ-less "Christianity"! They are a cult.
Augustine leveled fourteen accusations against Pelagius, of which only half of one is true. In other words, 96% of what Augustine accused Pelagius of simply was not true. Let us take a look, shall we. Here are the fourteen tenets Augustine leveled against Pelagius, and the evidence for or against:
[Note: the information provided for all fourteen tenets has been taken from the well-researched and well-documented book The Myth of Pelagianism, a book that Phil Johnson will no doubt be too cowardly to purchase and read in order to educate his glaring ignorance. You know what the Bible says about pride, Phil...]
1.) Augustine claimed Pelagius taught: 'Adam was created mortal so that he was going to die, whether he sinned or not.'
In On Virginity, Pelagius referred explicitly to the fact that Adam died as a result of sin. In a discussion of how failure to obey God's positive as well as his negative injunctions would incur punishment, Pelagius wrote:
For I do not want you to flatter yourself on the grounds that there are some things that you have not done, since it is written: Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it [Jas. 2:10]. Adam sinned once, and died: do you suppose that you can live, when you are frequently committing the very same act which killed another, though he had perpetrated it only once? Or do you suppose that he had committed a great crime, because of which he was deservedly condemned to undergo a more severe punishment? Let us see then what it was he did: he ate of the fruit of the tree contrary to the commandment given to him. What then? Did God punish a man with death because of the fruit from a tree? No, not because of fruit from a tree but because of his rejection of a commandment.
Pelagius then repeated the idea that Adam's sin caused his death. After a list of divine commandments, he concluded that if his addressee did not observe them all, then God would reject him:
If you reject him in any respect, if he spared Adam, God will spare you also. Indeed there would have been greater reason for him to spare Adam, who was still ignorant and inexperienced, and did not have the example of anyone who had previously sinned, and died for his sin, to deter him.
In On the Divine Law, Pelagius wrote that Adam was punished for his sin:
Thus Adam, after enjoying familiarity and conversation with God, easily believed the devil when the devil seduced him, and as a result, overcome by desire for one apple, lost Paradise; and because he presumed to possess one good thing through transgression, he lost many good things at the same time ... I ask you, after so many proofs and so many deaths, whence grows in us this feeling of immunity from punishment for our sin?
2.) Augustine claimed Pelagius taught: 'The sin of Adam harmed him alone and not the whole human race.'
Pelagius wrote that Adam's transgression damaged all his descendants:
So I want you to know in full what I believe that you already know in part, that our Lord, the word of God, came down from heaven for this reason, so that through his assumption of our human nature, the human race, which was lying prostrate since the time of Adam, might be raised up in Christ; and the new man rewarded for his obedience with a salvation as great as the destruction that befell the old man through disobedience.
Pelagius taught that Adam's sin established for his descendants an example and habit of sin so strong that it almost seemed part of human nature. In this way it indeed harmed all his descendants. This was why it was important to remind people that inclination to sin was not, in fact, innate. By contrast, Augustine taught that Adam's sin damaged human nature, and all humans inherited 'original sin' (peccatum originale) from Adam, transmitted through the procreative act.
3.) Augustine claimed Pelagius taught: 'The law leads to heaven in the same way as the Gospel.'
Pelagius was clear that the Gospel led to salvation much more than the law, since after Christ's coming mankind were 'under grace' (sub gratia). He argued that if men were able to lead holy and righteous lives before Christ's advent, then it had to be possible for men to do so after Christ's coming:
How much more must we believe that we are able to do this after the light of his coming, we who have been renewed through the grace of Christ and reborn as better men; we who have been purified and cleansed by his blood, roused by his example to pursue more perfect righteousness, we ought to be better than those who lived before the time of the law, better even than those who lived under the law, as the apostle says: Sin will have no dominion over you. For you are not under the law but under grace [Rom. 6:14].
Pelagius also made this clear in On the Divine Law:
Because the present time of grace is different, in which the fullness of perfection has arrived; the time of the law was different, the time of the prophets was not the same as now, as the Lord says: You have heard that it was said to the men of old [Matt. 5:21], that they should not kill, but I give you more perfect commandments, which the reader will find set forth in order in their appointed place in the Gospel. For from the time when the son of God became the son of man, from the time when the old leaven of the Jewish tradition was made the new scattering, from the time when the lamb is eaten not metaphorically but in truth, from the time when according to the apostle: The old things have passed away and all things are made new [2 Cor. 5:17], from the time when it was commanded to set aside the image of earthly man and take up the form of the heavenly man, since that time, having died with him, we live, and by his power we have risen again in Christ alongside him.
Pelagius paired the teachings of the law with the Gospels suggesting both of them were required in order to achieve righteousness (iustitia). He also asserted: 'Indeed anything that goes against the Gospel of Christ is unrighteous'. Furthermore, it was axiomatic in Pelagius' writings that imitation of Christ saved Christians, and this made them dependent on the teachings of the Gospels.
4.) Augustine claimed Pelagius taught: 'Newborn infants are in the same state as Adam before his transgression.'
The idea that newborn infants were in the same state as Adam before his sin is not asserted in Pelagius' surviving writings. The only evidence that Pelagius taught that infants did not require baptism comes from the accusations of his opponents. They read into his assertion of the goodness of human nature the entailment that infants were in the same state as Adam before his transgression. They then drew from this the further entailment that Pelagius taught infants did not require baptism, on the grounds that the idea that infants lacked sin deprived the sacrament of infant baptism of any purpose.
Pelagius' response to this accusation when it was put to him at a synod was to deny that he had made the statement and to anathematise it. In his Statement of Faith, composed as part of his defence for his third trial, he asserted that baptism was necessary and should use the same wording for infants as for adults. This perhaps looks like a response to this hostile entailment being read into his defence of the goodness of human nature. This tenet therefore reveals the degree to which a bogus set of statements were attributed to Pelagius and made synonymous with his name. Both tenets 4 and 6 in Augustine's list of the constituent theses of 'Pelagianism' refer to this one issue, and this doctrine has been attributed by many scholars to Pelagius and taken as a defining tenet of 'Pelagianism', which shows how far understanding of Pelagius' teaching has been determined by his opponents' account of it. The fact that in his surviving writings Pelagius only mentioned infants in his Statement of Faith after he had been accused of heresy for denying the need for infant baptism suggests that he was responding to a criticism of his teaching. This was an example of how the polemical context determined the nature of the debate, which proceeded through accusation and counter-accusation. Pelagius stressed the importance of baptism as a sacrament of cleansing from sin and second birth. It was a hostile entailment read into his writings to suggest that this might make more sense for an adult than for an infant, and once again a doctrine that Pelagius did not assert was attributed to his writings.
Caelestius was a Christian from a noble family who was linked to Pelagius by Pelagius' opponents through their description of Caelestius as Pelagius' 'pupil' (discipulus). He was tried for heresy three years before Pelagius, at an ecclesiastical council held in Carthage in North Africa, on charges similar to those later levelled against Pelagius. According to the account of some of the proceedings of the council, included by Augustine in his On the Grace of Christ and on Original Sin, Caelestius appears to have raised the issue of infants as a way to attack the notion of original sin, by drawing out a consequence of the doctrine which might offend peoples' sense of justice and thus turn them against the idea (because it entailed that God condemned infants to hell). While Augustine could see malign intent in babies, others found the idea of evil in infants at best counterintuitive and at worst a damaging idea. Caelestius' move was then countered by adducing an entailment from the assertion of the goodness of human nature, that if infants lacked sin then infant baptism would have no purpose, since there would be no sins to remit; and this was then turned into the accusation that Pelagius denied infant baptism.
However, Pelagius asserted the good of human nature because he believed that in order to encourage Christians to moral behaviour he had to convince them that it was within their capacity and depended only on their choosing it. Thus he offered his critique of the idea of original sin through a positive presentation of his own perspective and not through attacking the position of his opponents. Brynley Rees pointed out that in the surviving fragments of the writings of Julian of Aeclanum, a Christian who wrote texts opposing aspects of the triune [original sin, prevenient grace, and predestination as preordainment] after Pelagius' condemnation, there is a justification of infant baptism that does not depend on the existence of original sin. As things stand, there is no way of knowing what Pelagius' understanding was of the reasons for infant baptism. What is clear is that he did not deny the need for it, and that tenets 4 and 6 were entailments read into his writings with hostile intent, that are possible, but not necessary, entailments of Pelagius' assertion of the goodness of human nature.
5.) Augustine claimed Pelagius taught: 'The whole human race does not die through the death or transgression of Adam, and the whole human race does not rise through the resurrection of Christ.'
Pelagius wrote that the example of sin that Adam established caused mankind to die spiritually, and Christ raised mankind from this destruction. He also wrote that Christians were saved through the cleansing of Christ's passion: 'God our Lord and Saviour, when he thought fit to take manhood upon himself for the sake of the salvation of the human race'.
6.) Augustine claimed Pelagius taught: 'Even if they are not baptized, infants possess eternal life.'
As discussed with regard to tenet 4, the issue of unbaptised infants possessing eternal life is not dealt with in Pelagius' surviving writings. He drew a distinction between eternal life and the kingdom of heaven in so far as he wrote that there were many mansions in heaven, and that different levels of goodness would receive different levels of reward in the afterlife. This was expressed in his letters when he wrote about the vocation to virginity, and it appears to have been intended as a means to differentiate the special reward given those who dedicated themselves as virgins. It would perhaps have afforded room somewhere for unbaptised infants, but in his surviving writings Pelagius did not mention infants until he was accused of teaching something he had not written, which forced him to deny having written it, and to anathematise hostile entailments read into material he had not written—namely, alleged quotations from the writings of Caelestius.
7.) Augustine claimed Pelagius taught: 'If wealthy person who have been baptized do not renounce all their possessions, they have no merit, even if they seem to do something good, and they will not possess the kingdom of heaven.'
There is no evidence that Pelagius taught that wealth was an impediment to achieving salvation. The reverse seems to be the case. When he wrote a letter of advice to the young Roman patrician girl Demetrias about how to live a life dedicated to following Christ's injunctions, at no point did he advise her to distribute her fortune to the poor, nor did he establish poverty as a future goal, nor did he denigrate her wealth. When Pelagius wrote a letter of advice to Celantia, a Roman matron, he did not tell her to give away her wealth. Nowhere in his surviving writings did Pelagius advise anyone that they should give away their property. With regard to the ability of the rich to enter heaven, he did not suggest either to Celantia or to Demetrias that they should in any way diminish their wealth as he set out for them how they should live in order to reach heaven. He was explicit in his letter to Demetria that everyone in every station in life was called to righteousness and could thereby attain eternal life: 'In the matter of righteousness we all of us owe one obligation: virgin, widow, married woman, a person in the highest station in life, the middle station, or the lowest rank, all are commanded equally to fulfil the commands.' Pelagius told Demetrias that she could expect to enter the kingdom of heaven if she maintained her virtuous behaviour, and, since his advice was explicitly predicated on her living within her ancestral household, he was clearly not suggesting that she had to embrace poverty in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. Access to every area in the kingdom of heaven would be determined by how closely a person had imitated Christ, but nowhere did Pelagius suggest that poverty was part of that imitation.
What Pelagius did do was seek to downgrade the social status of wealth. He sought to elevate spiritual riches above material wealth by asserting that they had a more real value because they determined attainment of and status within the kingdom of heaven. In his letters of advice he redefined nobility as spiritual and unrelated to nobility of birth. In his rejection of earthly social status, Pelagius condemned the social order in strong words: 'It was not the equality of nature that was responsible for worldly nobility but the ambition of greed.' This is the only sentence in Pelagius' surviving writings reminiscent of the anonymous tract On Riches (De diuitiis) in the Caspari Corpus, which took a dim view of wealth. In his comment, however, Pelagius cast a critical eye on secular nobility, not wealth per se. Pelagius wrote this comment in a letter to the unknown addressee of On Virginity, clearly not a girl of patrician stock.
If other Christian writers, animated by enthusiasm for ascetic values, extended critique of worldly status to include criticism of wealth per se, that does not imply that Pelagius did so. Once again, the tenet listed by Augustine cannot be found in Pelagius' surviving writings.
8.) Augustine claimed Pelagius taught: 'God's grace and help is not given for individual actions, but consists in free will and the law and teaching.'
As already noted, in Christian literature the word 'grace' could be used to refer to any gift from God. It is useful here to set out some of the different aspects of God's grace to which reference is made in Christian texts from this period. At least seven possible aspects of God's grace were referred to. First, there was the grace of creation, which included man's endowment with free will.; the extent of this free will was at issue, whether it was free will to evil only, or 'dual' or 'effective' free will—that is, to virtue as well as to sin. Second, the grace of God's teaching was regularly referred to, which included all Scripture and Christ's examples. Since they were gifts from God, all of these things could be described as God's grace. Third, there was the grace of Christ's passion which washed away the sins of mankind. This gift was made available to man in a fourth aspect of grace, the grace of the sacrament of baptism, as demonstrated by Pelagius' use of the term 'grace' to refer to baptism in On Virginity. Fifth, there was the grace of salvation. Sixth, the word 'grace' was used to describe the individual gift given by God, such as that of healing, eloquence or wisdom. Seventh, there was prevenient grace, which consisted of the Holy Spirit pouring into a person to cause them to love virtue and to choose it.
The implicit assumption within tenet 8, however, was that there was only one correct interpretation of the word 'grace', which was an absolute form of prevenient grace; and further, that all Christians had to subscribe to this interpretation of grace and the absolute prevenience of God's grace in causing all their good actions. Augustine's view of grace was that it was always a free gift; if grace was given in return for anything at all then it simply was not grace, which was by his definition always gratuitous. Augustine derived this interpretation of gratia from the Latin word gratis, meaning free, on the basis of biblical citations that made this connection. This interpretation of the word gratia diverged from everyday Roman secular usage in which gratia commonly meant favour, with an implication of mutual reciprocity. It diverged also from the meaning of gratia in texts associated with Roman law. Jill Harries documented how in legal usage gratia was a 'morally ambivalent concept' which had negative connotations in which 'favour' meant favouritism or improper influence, and referred to a type of injustice.
Examination of Pelagius' writings shows that he referred to other aspects of God's grace besides free will, the law and teaching. For example, he referred to Christ's passion wiping away mankind's sins as grace and to the help of God's grace, and he was clear that grace was something that Christians received over and above instruction and example: 'What can Christians do, whose nature has been renewed in a better condition by Christ, and who are assisted by the aid of divine grace as well?' Pelagius also referred to the 'help of the Holy Spirit' (auxilium Sancti Spiritus).
In a passage in Pelagius' On Free Will (De libero arbitrio) quoted by Augustine, Pelagius wrote of God's daily help, but Augustine refused to accept the statement and read into it an account of grace that did not describe the action of the Holy Spirit causing goodness but a grace that merely made goodness more easily achieved:
'But although we have free will within us that is so strong,' he says, 'and so steadfast for avoiding sin, which the creator implanted in human nature universally, again on account of his inestimable kindness we are defended daily by his own help'. What need is there of this help, if free will is so strong, so steadfast for avoiding sin? But even here he wants the help to be understood as for this purpose, that the thing may be done more easily through grace, which, even if less easily, he nevertheless thinks may be done without grace.
It is noteworthy that Pelagius here offered a compromise with Augustine's stress on the constant need for God's grace by specifically referring to 'daily help' (auxilium cotidianum).
Three patrician Romans who were living as ascetics in Palestine—Melania the Younger, her mother Albina and her husband Pinianus—wrote to Augustine in AD 418 apparently to try to persuade him to have the charges against Pelagius dropped. In his reply to them, Augustine referred to their report of a visit they had made to Pelagius, when Pelagius had repeated his assertion of the need for daily help and made the further concession that God's grace was needed for every action:
You wrote to me that you had conferred with Pelagius, so that he condemned in writing whatever was said against him, and so that he said in your hearing: 'I anathematise anyone who thinks or says that the grace of God by which Christ came into this world in order to save sinners [1 Tim. 1:15] is not necessary, not only at every hour and every moment, but also for every action of ours, and those who try to do away with this doctrine deserve eternal punishment.'
The context of the meeting of Melania, Pinianus and Albina with Pelagius must have been the spring or summer of AD 418, after Pelagius had sent his written defence to Pope Innocent, which contained his Statement of Faith. In this statement, Pelagius still maintained, at the last hour in the face of excommunication, the irreducible minimum which he did not feel able to disavow—namely, the existence of human free will—but he chose compromise by adding a rider noting the constant need for God's help: 'We confess free will in such a way that we say that we always have need of God's help'. These three pieces of evidence—the quotation from his On Free Will, the testimony of Melania, Pinianus and Albina, and Pelagius' assertion in his Statement of Faith—suggest that Pelagius was not uncompromisingly opposed to the doctrine that there was an aspect of God's grace that was required every day to help man to be virtuous. However, he felt the need also to confess free will alongside grace. This tenet therefore seems to be another case of a thesis being read into Pelagius' teaching which cannot be found in his writings, and which instead runs counter to the surviving textual evidence. Augustine's objection was that 'the grace of God by which Christ came into this world in order to save sinners [1 Tim. 1:15]' was not explicitly prevenient grace. Tenet 8 implicitly asserted Augustine's interpretation was the only correct understanding of God's grace and its operation. It is nevertheless clear that what Pelagius was accused of publicly was not the real reason for his indictment, which was his assertion of the goodness of human nature and effective free will. The list of tenets could simply have contained these two principles. It did not do so because that would have made visible the true process at work in the accusation of heresy made against Pelagius.
Support for the idea that Pelagius sought compromise, and characterised the relationship between God's grace and man as one of co-operation, comes in his On the Divine Law. In this letter he directly addressed two points of doctrine involved in the controversy. In both cases his approach was cautious and inclined towards moderation. First, he discussed the criticism that stress on free will 'made grace ungrateful' (in the sense that God's grace would receive no thanks, gratiam faciat ingratam). Pelagius accurately identified the point Augustine was making in his criticism of him—namely, that it was necessary for man to remain grateful to God and to acknowledge God's gifts. Pelagius sought to answer this criticism directly:
But someone will say: 'If everything is expected to come from our own efforts, then grace performs nothing'. I do not want anyone rashly and under the title of ignorance to make grace ungrateful, lest he should turn his faith into a stumbling-block and the cause of his salvation should be made into an occasion for his destruction. If reasoning about this thing is pursued with moderation, only then will it be an aid to life, reasoning which would perhaps have hurled him to his death through presumption. But grace indeed dismisses sins for free, but with the consent and the will of the believer.
In this passage, Pelagius presented a model of co-operation. Grace here seems to encompass Christ's redemption of man's sins through his passion, which was another facet of God's grace (not mentioned in tenet 8), over and above aspects of grace such as man's created nature, the law, and Christ's teaching. Pelagius' characterisation of the process of achieving virtue identified two agents: God's grace and human will. The suggestion that Pelagius denied that God's grace was given for individual actions was something read into Pelagius' writings with hostile intent. Not mentioning something does not equate to denying it. The burden of the surviving evidence therefore suggests that Pelagius sought compromise as long as God's justice, founded on human responsibility, was maintained.
The second point of doctrine in the controversy that Pelagius addressed in On the Divine Law was predestination. Without using the word 'predestination' (praedestinatio), he raised the problem that if interpreted as preordainment it might preclude the universality of God's salvific will, an objection that many ecclesiastics in southern Gaul later held to be crucial:
This first I want to ask you and to hear your answer, whoever you are that proposes this argument: if the choice is made by God himself, who also makes the calling, why did he want to call more when he was going to choose only a few out of the many? Surely out of the two called you want that one to hold his place whom God has appointed by his choice, and conversely the other to fall whom God does not protect by the power of his choice. But if this is how things are, on this account neither good nor bad actions belong to us, and the result will be that neither fault will be punished nor good needs praised .... Secondly, if you consider to be saints only the few whom you say have been chosen, you say that those who have been called are reprobate; how then does the same apostle Paul summon those called to be saints at the start of his letters, as he does at the beginning of his book to the Romans, saying: To all God's beloved in Rome, called to be saints [Rom. 1:7]? If Christ died for a few, it is just that a few keep his commandments. But if all of us who believe receive the sacrament of his passion in baptism without discrimination, if all of us equally renounce the devil and the world, if to all of us who do not live rightly the punishment of hell is promised, then we ought all of us with the same diligence both to avoid what has been forbidden, and to fulfil his commandments.
In this passage, Pelagius raised questions in a direct and reasoned manner, and avoided attacking his opponents. The passage suggests that there were two motivations behind his defence of free will: first, the desire to maintain the transparency of God's justice; second, the desire to maintain the message of God's universal salvific will. These could both be characterised as objections to exegetical interpretations of the Pauline Epistles that made prevenient grace absolute and omnipotent, and therefore interpreted predestination as preordainment rather than foreknowledge. Despite these concerns, Pelagius' writings show that he acknowledge the need for God's grace, even for individual actions; that he explicitly characterised one aspect of grace as the 'help of the Holy Spirit'; and that he proposed a synergistic model of the relationship between God's grace and human will.
9.) Augustine claimed Pelagius taught: 'God's grace is given in accord with our merits, and for this reason grace itself is located in the human will, whether one becomes worthy of it or unworthy.'
This tenet comes closest to being something that Pelagius taught, since the first part of it—that God's grace was given in accord with merit—was something that Pelagius asserted: '[James] shows how we ought to resist the devil, if we are indeed servants of God, and by doing his will we may merit divine grace and may resist more easily the evil spirit with the help of the Holy Spirit.' The additional statement attributed to him by his opponents—namely, that grace was therefore located in the will—was not something that Pelagius wrote, nor is it a necessary entailment of the idea that some aspects of grace might be merited.
In fact Pelagius frequently referred to several aspects of grace. Of the many possible referents of the word 'grace', the issue of Augustine was that Pelagius' references to it might not refer to Augustine's interpretation of the word, which for him was the most important aspect of grace. Prevenient grace was inextricably bound to its twin, predestination interpreted as preordainment. Augustine described prevenient grace and predestination as two stages in one process. Both were causally tied to original sin because sin made human nature so weak that it was unable to choose virtue unaided, and on every occasion it required prevenient grace to cause it to choose virtuous action. Thus these three doctrines formed a mutually dependent triune. So closely bound together were they that although it is possible to separate out two questions at issue—namely, whether human virtue was caused by man's effective free will or by prevenient grace or by some combination of the two, and whether human nature was innately capable of goodness or inherently inclined toward sin as a result of damage done to it by Adam's transgression—they could also reasonably be described as one question, at base. Augustine referred to there being one fundamental point of disagreement: 'The whole dispute with these people turns on this point: that we should not, through a perverse defense of nature, make the grace of God which lies in Jesus Christ our Lord, of no effect.'
That Pelagius asserted that the human will worked alongside the action of the Holy Spirit is also shown by a passage in On Virginity, in which Pelagius told his addressee that the Holy Spirit chose those who possessed merit:
While the whole multitude of believers receives similar gifts of grace and all rejoice in the same blessings of the sacraments, those to whom you belong have something peculiar to themselves over and above what the rest possess; they are chosen by the Holy Spirit out of the holy and spotless flock of the Church as holier and purer offerings on account of the merits of their will.
At issue is not whether Pelagius referred to a direct causal relationship between human merit and the reward of the grace of salvation; he certainly did. At issue is the fact that this had been a presumption within Christianity for centuries (as will be detailed in Chapters 3 and 4) until a change occurred. After much study of the Pauline Epistles in the Latin West in the last decades of the 4th century, and scrutiny of their references to predestination, to God's grace and to God's control of man as a potter controls clay, the issue became which way the trigger worked—whether the action of the Holy Spirit triggered human goodness which earned merit, or whether human free decisions created merit which triggered the action of the Holy Spirit to work in the virtuous individual. The first half of tenet 9 does refer to something that Pelagius genuinely taught, although the suggestion that he invented either the idea of a causal relationship between human effort and God's reward of grace, or the idea of man's effective free will, is false. It is also false to suggest that Pelagius did not argue for co-operation between the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and the human will.
The second half of the tenet, 'and for this reason grace itself is located in the human will, whether one becomes worthy or unworthy', attributed to Pelagius the further idea that there was never any other sort of grace than that which was a consequence of the unaided action of the human will. The attribution of this view to him was unwarranted since, as has been seen, Pelagius certainly referred to many aspects of God's agency through his grace, and he did not deny prevenient grace. In his statement to Melania the Younger, Pinianus, and Albina, Pelagius acknowledged the role of grace in every human action every day, and Augustine objected that it was unclear which type of grace Pelagius meant when he made this assertion. Augustine then attributed to Pelagius' writings a doctrine that was not in them and which Pelagius rejected, in this case a denial of God's grace. As much as Augustine was certain that Pelagius had not meant prevenient grace, it is impossible to know that Pelagius excluded the grace of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit prior to virtuous action. Furthermore, Augustine insisted that Pelagius had to acknowledge the absolutist account of prevenient grace that Augustine proposed, in which prevenient grace was always the sole cause of virtue. While Pelagius did not acknowledge in writing the role of prevenient grace in the way that Augustine wanted him to do, his discussion of the issue in On the Divine Law points to a compromise model of co-operation between the Holy Spirit and man. In this regard it is noteworthy that Pelagius drew attention to the interpretative nature of discussion of Scripture, prefacing his readings with such comments as: 'I think that this should be understood to this effect'. This suggests that he acknowledged that what he wrote was simply one possible way to explain a passage, and sought to avoid dogmatic interpretation of Scripture.
10.) Augustine claimed Pelagius taught: 'Only those people can be called children of God who have become entirely without sin.'
Pelagius stated that all Christians were reborn as children of God through baptism:
We are all made equal by the grace of the divine water, and there can be no distinction amongst those who have been created by a second birth, through which the rich man as much as the poor man, the free man as much as the slave, the noble as much as the man of low birth, is made a son of God.
He reminded Demetrias that she was a daughter of God. He also explained that the phrase 'children of God' was used in Scripture in order to instil in Christians a sense of their own worth and the value of Christ's teaching. He did not limit this to a subset of Christians. He did not suggest that Demetrias was without sin; he stressed the opposite: 'As long as we are in this body we should never believe that we have attained perfection.' Pelagius told the anonymous addressee of On Virginity that she should remember that she was a daughter of God and act appropriately as befitted her high status. He did not tell her that she should act well in order to gain the status of child of God, but so as to make visible a status she already possessed: 'Present yourself in such a way that your heavenly birth may be visible in your person and your divine nobility clearly shine out.' Pelagius addressed her as a daughter of God but presupposed that she was not perfect when he advised her to keep improving in her imitation of Christ: 'Reckon as wasted all the time in which you have failed to notice an improvement in yourself.'
11.) Augustine claimed Pelagius taught: 'Forgetfulness and ignorance are not sinful, because they do not come about willingly, but necessarily.'
The suggestion that forgetfulness and ignorance were not sinful is not found in Pelagius' surviving writings.
12.) Augustine claimed Pelagius taught: 'A choice is not free if it needs the help of God, since everyone has their own will either to do something or not to do it.'
Pelagius did not write that the help of God made the will unfree. He acknowledged continuously the need for God's help, such as when he paired free will and God's help in his Statement of Faith. In On the Divine Law he also twice explicitly asserted the co-operation of divine grace and the human will, expressed in the word 'consent' (consensus): 'We comprehend that our calling has a standing according to the honour of the one who calls us, yet also that it rests upon the consent of our will'. Pelagius also acknowledged the help of God's grace in the passage from his On Free Will, already cited in relation to tenet 8. In these passages already examined, Pelagius asserted man's need for God's help and man's co-operation with God, and he raised the concern that predestination interpreted as preordainment, as opposed to God's help, might limit human responsibility and God's universal salvific will.
The exact content of the term 'help' (auxilium) was at issue. Augustine used the words 'to help' and 'to co-operate' freely in an indeterminate manner. He argued that Pelagius located God's help in nature and free will or in the law and teaching: 'So that plainly when God helps man so that he turns from wrong and does good [1 Pet. 3:11], he is believed to help by revealing and showing us what should be done; not by co-operating with us and breathing love into us so that we do what we know must be done.' Yet elsewhere Augustine characterised the help of grace differently: as a force that caused good action by driving a person rather than co-operating with them or helping them: 'For those who are children of God are governed and driven by this Spirit [Rom. 8:14], not by their own will.'
Thus the statement that Pelagius did not acknowledge God's help was untrue. It was the nature and role of God's help that was at issue because it equated to the nature and role of grace itself. Nor did Pelagius teach that God's help rendered man unfree. This was an argument about the meaning of the word 'grace' and the extent of God's control of man. It was perhaps also a conflict over authority, as represented in the authority to interpret Scripture, and whether authority lay with the episcopacy alone or with lay preachers and monks also. This possibility is suggested by Augustine's comment: 'A new heresy has now been introduced, not by bishops or priests or by any clerics, but by certain supposed monks'.
13.) Augustine claimed Pelagius taught: 'Our victory is not the result of God's help, but of free will.'
As already noted, Pelagius explicitly wrote that God helped man, and stated that Christ was the cause of man's victory over death. In another passage from his On Free Will quoted by Augustine, Pelagius described human virtue as the result of co-operation between man and God:
'For God helps us', he says, 'through his revelation and teaching, when he opens the eyes of our heart; when he discloses to us what is to come so that we are not absorbed with the present; when he exposes the snares of the devil; when he enlightens us with the gift of his heavenly grace, which comes in many forms and cannot be explained in words.'
14.) Augustine claimed Pelagius taught: 'From Peter's statement: "We are sharers in the divine nature" [2 Peter 1:41], it follows that the soul can be as sinless as God.'
In Pelagius' surviving writings there is no statement that man's soul could be as sinless as God. This thesis was an inference read into his positive account of man as created in God's image and his advice to his addressees to pursue perfect righteousness. It seems unlikely that Pelagius wrote that a person could achieve sinlessness in one of his works that do not survive, such as his On Nature or his On Free Will, because if he had done, Augustine would have quoted that passage. In On the Divine Law, Pelagius acknowledged that few people observed God's commandments. In his Letter to Demetrias Pelagius explicitly denied perfectibility. He argued at length that the key to Christian virtue was constant striving to make progress and that any other approach led to slipping backwards, citing Philippians 3:13-14: Brethren, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God. Pelagius advised Demetrias to consider that she was starting afresh every day, because if she ever stood still she would lose what she had achieved up to that point.
So there you have it. The fourteen tenets were a fabrication, a distraction, a smear, which was necessary to obscure the real process being affected: the installation of a different anthropology and soteriology into Christian doctrine. Not only does Phil Johnson know nothing about Pelagius, but he also knows nothing about Augustine. In truth, Augustine was the real heretic! Observe:
- Augustine taught that there is an irreconcilable conflict between salvation based on grace and salvation conditioned on works or obedience. This stems from the False Dilemma fallacy, stating that it is either one or the other. It is not! These passages obliterate that heretical teaching once and for all: Matt. 25:31-46; John 5:28-29; 2 Cor. 5:10; 1 Pet. 1:17; Rev. 22:12, 14; cf. Matt. 16:27; Rom. 2:5-8; 11:19-22; 1 Cor. 6:9-11; 10:1-12; Gal. 6:7-9; Eph. 5:3-8; Jude 1:3-5; et al.
- Augustine radically altered the doctrine originally taught by the Church, becoming the most influential teacher of all time. The list of doctrines and practices Augustine either initiated or gave his authority to is impressively long:
- Mary was born and lived her entire life without actual sin.
- All unbaptized infants are eternally damned.
- Sex within marriage is an inherently debased act.
- Taught the doctrine of "holy war." (see Violence: To Commit or Not to Commit)
- There is no forgiveness of sins outside the Catholic church.
- Some of the practices and teachings of the apostles no longer apply to Christians because they lived in a different era.
- There is a purgatorial fire.
- The dead can benefit from the sacrifice of the Eucharist.
- It is proper for a "Christian" state to persecute heretics.
- Augustine is the father of Western theology. Modern Westerners can usually follow Augustine's logic; but they cannot follow the logic of the pre-Nicene Christians.
- Augustine never mastered Greek, which is likely why he departed from early Christianity in so many areas—more than any other teacher of his time.
- Because Pelagius taught a no-nonsense message of repentance and holiness, Augustine responded with these teachings that went to the opposite extreme of Pelagius' disciple Celestius:
- Man is totally depraved; he cannot believe or have faith in God.
- Man can believe or have faith in God only if by grace they are given the faith or belief. Man has no free will.
- God arbitrarily chooses whom to give faith to and who to condemn.
- Before creation, God arbitrarily predestined who would be saved or condemned.
- The elect cannot lose their salvation; the damned cannot be saved.
- No one can know if they are of the elect. Some people God has given the gift of believing have not been given the gift of perseverance and will be lost.
- Salvation is totally of grace. Faith, obedience, perseverance are gifts from God.
- Augustine obliterated the original early Christian teachings of free will and man's involvement in salvation.
- Nicene theologians took the lead in the veneration of Mary. Augustine gave his support to the false teaching that Mary was a perpetual virgin and lived a sinless life. He even called those who disagreed "heretics." They also taught Mary was bodily assumed into Heaven and ruled as Queen of Heaven. Not one whit of protest came from the lips of the Nicene theologians.
- Augustine gutted the Sermon on the Mount, explaining away Jesus' teachings. The teachings had become meaningless. Nicene theologians exalted Jesus but did not hesitate to contradict His words. Christianity had become corrupted. Catholicism was born.
- Augustine believed that the purpose of marriage is procreation, and that lust during sex—even among married Christians—was wrong.
- Augustine believed that the use of contraception to prevent children was perverting the purpose of marriage, "committing adultery within marriage" and "turning the bed-chamber into a brothel."
- Augustine believed that if you are going to teach Scripture, you must have a knowledge of the natural world, mathematics, music, science, history, the liberal arts, and a mastery of dialectics (the science of disputation).
- Augustine believed that sacramental baptism produces regeneration and is necessary for the forgiveness of sins.
- Augustine believed it was permissible to use force against heretics.
- Augustine believed that the Lord's Supper (the Eucharist) was necessary for salvation.
- Augustine held to a dualistic view of the world, which was heavily influenced by non-Christian philosophy.
- Augustine believed that a person can fall from grace and lose their salvation.
- Augustine believed that Mary (mother of Jesus) was a perpetual virgin.
- Augustine believed in praying for the dead.
- Augustine believed infants were subject to eternal death unless baptized (baptismal regeneration).
- Genuine followers of Jesus do not leave the sick and elderly to die. They do not force others to sell their children in exchange for dog meat. And they do not retaliate against their oppressors and slaughter and plunder them.
By the way, if the teaching of man's free will was considered "Pelagian," then the entire first three centuries of Christian believers must have been "Pelagian", and long before Pelagius ever existed. I could provide every single quote they wrote on man's free will, but that would be overkill on an already deathblow to the myth of "Pelagianism."
If Phil knew anything of the early Christians of the first three centuries, he would know that the things Pelagius taught were a reflection of those teachings, whereas Augustine was presenting entirely new things and/or things that had been previously rejected as heresy by the early Christians. For example: in the days of the early Christians, there was a religious group who strongly disputed the Congregation's ("Church's") stance on salvation and works. This religious group taught:
- that man is totally depraved,
- that we are saved solely by grace,
- that works play no role in our salvation, and
- that we cannot forfeit our salvation once we obtain it.
This religious group was labeled as heretics by the early Christians. You might be thinking, "This group of 'heretics' were the real Christians while these 'orthodox' Christians were really heretics." However, such a conclusion is impossible. Who was this religious group, you ask?
The Gnostics!
If you think the Gnostics were "true Christians," observe what the apostle John said about them: "Many deceivers have gone out into the world who do not confess Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist" (2 John 7). If our Evangelical doctrine of salvation is true, we are faced with the uncomfortable reality that this doctrine was first taught by "deceivers and antichrists" before it was taught by Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and others.
Ponder that point promptly.
Scholars have noted that "Calvinism" (a.k.a. "TULIP" or "The Doctrines of Grace") has risen up in popularity four times over the past 500 years. Every single time, it always dies back down. Why do you suppose that is? Well, either God ordained it to be such, or else the system just does not hold any water theologically and/or logically. When Christians actually hold Scripture as their authority rather than what some preacher has told them to believe (or what is dictated in their creeds, confessions, catechisms, constitutions, statements of faith, or systems of theology—all examples of proof text methodology, eisegesis and Scripture twisting), they inevitably come to a conclusion that is opposed to these beliefs.
To all you dumb sheep who basically worship John MacArthur and Phil Johnson, because you are really MacArthurites and Johnsonites than you are Christians, for your thoughts and studies are most of all directed to the works of these men—and you have neglected the teaching of Jesus, bring on your hatred and your false accusations against me. We both know you are unable to argue the main point and will never provide a reasonable refutation or intelligent counter-argument, but have to rely on denial, deflection, IMAX-level projection, censorship, "cancelling," manipulation, smearing, gaslighting, jamming, framing, ad hominem, name calling, character assassination, attempted intimidation, and the use of fallacious arguments that have no basis in reality. Maybe you should take the time to learn what it means to be an actual Christian. Jesus commands you to "Love one another, just as I have loved you," to "Love your neighbour as yourself," and to "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you." When are you going to do so?
If you need more evidence that Grace Community Church is a cult, look no further than Abuse at Grace Community Church. Like the Pharisees made false accusations against Jesus, I know for a fact that Phil Johnson and his Johnsonites will attempt to make false accusations against me. Bring it on, cowards! You cannot refute me, so you have to attack me. I have listened to Johnson for years, so I am well acquainted with how he deals with his opponents: like a coward. You can hate me all you want, Phil, and level whatever false accusations you want against me. I will still love you and pray for you.