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Greeneyes,

Are you aware of the great controversy that happend around 380 to 400 AD...with AUGUSTINE and a British monk whose name was PELAGIUS ?

Pelagius was teaching theology in Rome..when he read AUGUSTINE...he had a tizzy fit..because Augustine taught about human sinfulness, and the need for Divine Grace...Pelagius objected because he thought that what Augustine was saying was an unacceptable novelty.

It is thought that Pelagianism was bound to arise, because the Church had not defined the concept of sin very well.

Everyone agreed that people everywhere were sinners, and in need of Divine Grace. the point of controversy began when people began to argue about what sin WAS, and WHERE it had come from.

The Bible says that when God created the world, it was good. The Son of God had become a man and lived a sinless life in a material body, which would not have been possible if matter were inherently sinful. (this is a Gnostic view, not Christian.)

Finally and not least, the promise of salvation included the resurrection of the body, which would have been inconceivable if the body was beyond redemption. Evil was therefore not something that God had created, but what was it?

Satan appeared to Adam and Eve and tempted them into following him in his rebellion even though they knew that what they were doing was wrong. Their sin was not an inescapable part of their created nature but was an act of disobedience to the revealed will of God. On this, Augustine and Pelagius were agreed, but it was not clear what the consequences of Adam’s disobedience were for the rest of humanity. Does everyone sin by their own free choice, as Adam and Eve did, or do we inherit an innate sinfulness that cuts us off from God, whether we commit actual sins or not? To put it another way, is a newborn baby a sinner in need of salvation even if he has not done anything wrong? In an era when infant mortality rates were high, this was a pressing question for many Christians, who found it impossible to believe that God would condemn a baby to hell merely because of what Adam and Eve had done.

The dispute between Augustine and Pelagius was not about the origin of sin but about the effect of Adam’s disobedience on his posterity. Augustine maintained that all human beings have inherited the broken relationship with God caused by the disobedience of our first parents. We are not free to choose our inheritance and must accept what we have been given.

Pelagius, on the other hand, believed that sin is an act of the will and that, like Adam and Eve, every human being is free to choose whether he will sin. Pelagius admitted that in practice everyone does choose to sin, and so his position was that human beings are sinners, but there is an important difference of principle that shows us just how incompatible the two views are.

Pelagius believed that every human being is granted free will in the same way that Adam and Eve were. He insisted that sinlessness must therefore be theoretically possible, because if it were not, human beings could not be held responsible for their freely chosen sinful actions. Furthermore, Pelagius argued, God would not have commanded people to act righteously if He knew that they were incapable of doing so, because God does not ask us to do the impossible. In his view, the law of Moses would have no meaning if it could not be kept, even if nobody actually did so. Pelagius believed that Jesus was the exception that proved the rule. He had kept the law perfectly and was therefore sinless. The fact that He achieved this shows that it is possible, and it makes those who fail to live up to the standard guilty of their sin. To Pelagius and those who thought like him, this seemed fair—people are rightly held responsible for their own failings but not for those of others, including the disobedience of Adam and Eve.

Reluctance to accept the transmission of sin from one generation to another was compounded by the question of guilt. Some people accepted that the weakness of the flesh was such that every human being would fall into sin sooner or later, but they could not agree that we are individually responsible for that weakness and therefore guilty in the sight of God. Pelagians believed that responsibility and guilt are meaningful only in the context of actual sins committed. They had no concept of innate sinfulness as distinct from sinful acts and therefore rejected the idea of “original sin.”

Augustine himself wrestled with these questions in his early days as a Christian, and it was only slowly that he came to understand sinfulness as something distinct from sinful acts voluntarily committed by people who were exercising their free will. Augustine did not deny that human beings have the freedom to choose between good and evil, but following the teaching of Paul in Romans 7, he came to see that even if we choose what is good, we are incapable of doing it. We may not want to sin, but we have no alternative because our will is in bondage to the power of evil.

Like Augustine, Pelagius believed in the need for divine grace, but he interpreted this differently. Where Augustine believed that God’s grace is needed to deliver us from a spiritual condition that we can do nothing about, Pelagius thought of it as the power given to us so that we can choose what is good. In his view, God helps us achieve spiritual perfection by enlightening our souls in baptism and by giving us the Holy Spirit to guide us along the way to perfection.

Pelagius did not believe that the sinlessness of Christ is easily obtainable by anyone who desires it. He knew that the lure of temptation is too great to resist other than by the grace of God. The gulf that separated Augustine from Pelagius was hard for many people to appreciate because by stressing the need for divine grace to help us overcome our weakness, Pelagius appeared to give God the credit for human salvation.

Augustine retorted that although human nature retains the goodness of its creation, human beings are cut off from God, with the result that everything good in our created nature is perverted and abused. Sinfulness is a universal spiritual condition, not a voluntary choice that can be mitigated or reversed, so that every human being, including the newly born infant, stands in the same broken relationship with God. In Augustine’s view, no amount of moral training can deliver a person from his inherited sinfulness. That can only be achieved by spiritual death and resurrection to a new life, which is not ours but Christ’s. The role of the Holy Spirit is not to enlighten our minds and strengthen our wills to follow Christ but to impart His new life to us by coming to dwell in our hearts and uniting us to Him. Our “righteousness” is not ours at all—it is the righteousness of Christ at work in us.

Augustine maintained and developed his opposition to Pelagianism until his death in AD 430, but by then most of the church had been won over to his views. Pelagius and his followers were condemned several times, but that is not the whole story, because the beliefs that lie behind Pelagianism are more than the heresy of one man and his followers. The desire to find some good in fallen humanity and to exempt small children (in particular) from the consequences of original sin remains very strong, as does the feeling that punishment should be meted out only to those who commit actual sins. The idea that there is a universal human sinfulness for which we are all responsible is hard for many people to accept, even if they are officially committed to Augustinian principles. As a result, Pelagian beliefs are still common today, even though Pelagius himself has largely been forgotten.

Much of the above article was written and published in TABLETALK by Dr. Gerald Bray who is a research professor for Beeson Divinity School.

The reason I’ve included extensive parts of this article.. was to demonstrate that Pelagius taught that new borns are as a clean slate. they are neither born evil or good. Indeed.. that is what Pelagius taught.. BUT “Pelagianism was opposed by Augustine, bishop of Hippo in Africa, who asserted that human beings cannot attain righteousness by their own efforts and are totally dependent upon the grace of God. Condemned by two councils of African bishops in 416 and again at Carthage in 418, Pelagius was finally excommunicated in 418; Pelagius’s later fate is unknown.” (Quote from the Encyclopedia Brittanica)

I apoloiise for this lengthy reply to the assertion that you’ve made regarding children, being NOT born evil or good. This assertion is Pelagian, condemned by 2 Church councils as heretical.

Let’s VOTE tomorrow! TRUMP 2020!~

Again, thank you for your kind attention.