Part I: Historical Survey
(354430), Bishop of Hippo Regius in Roman North Africa,
was undoubtedly the greatest of the Latin Fathers. He is called
a Latin Father partly because he spoke and wrote in Latin, and
partly to distinguish him from the Greek Fathers who wrote in
Greek. Many of the latter were influential chiefly in the Eastern
half of the Christian world which later became the Greek Orthodox
Church, whose religious capital was Constantinople. Augustine's
influence was chiefly in the Western world.
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Augustine was born of middle-class
parents at Tagaste in North Africa, but he seems to have been
financially assisted as a young man when he had perhaps proved
himself to be what today would be called "scholarship material."
His father, Patricius, remained for most of his life a pagan,
but was converted shortly before his death in 372 when Augustine
was just eighteen years of age.
In so far as the specific subject
matter of this volume is concerned, Augustine's enormous literary
output is of less immediate interest than his autobiography in
which he detailed the circumstances that finally led to his conversion.
It is in this autobiography, his Confessions, that we
see the background of the long struggle he had with his own unruly
nature, and how he became increasingly aware of both the fundamental
depravity of the human heart and the futility of appealling to
the unsaved to turn themselves towards the Saviour.
Augustine begins his Confessions
with the famous and often quoted (or misquoted) words, "Thou
hast formed us for Thyself and our hearts are restless till they
find their rest in Thee" (I.i.l). He then proceeds to give
the reader some idea of his life before he became a Christian.
He began very early to be a troublemaker, perhaps when he was
only eight or nine years old, and his experience thereafter was
what Hogarth would have painted under the title The Progress
of a Rake. He was not converted until 386 A.D. at the age
So he continues:
now call to mind my past foulness and the carnal corruptions
of my soul, not because I love them but that I may love Thee,
O my God. For love of thy love I do it, recalling in the very
bitterness of my remembrance my most vicious ways that Thou mayest
grow sweet to me Thou sweetness without deception! And
recollecting myself out of that my dissipation in which I was
torn to pieces, while, being turned away from Thee, I lost myself
among many vanities. For I even longed in my youth formerly to
be satisfied with worldly things, and I dared to grow wild again
with various and shadowy loves; my form consumed away and I became
corrupt in Thine eyes, pleasing myself and eager to be pleasing
in the eyes of men. (II.i.l)*
as a child he sought the thrills of crime on a petty scale of
theft for the fun of it, making mischief for people simply for
the pleasure of seeing their distress. He describes it thus:
I had a desire to commit robbery
and did so, compelled neither by hunger nor poverty but through
a dislike of doing the right things, and a certain lustiness
of iniquity. For I pilfered that of which I had already sufficient,
and much better. Nor did I desire to enjoy what I pilfered but
only the theft and the misdeed itself. (II.iv.9)
Inevitably he tired
of these adolescent delinquencies, having now reached the age
at which the opposite sex became an object of interest. And so
he went to Carthage, perhaps the most wanton city of the time
"where a cauldron of unholy loves bubbled up all around
me" (III.i.1). Into this cauldron he plunged with energetic
abandon, and he recounts the steady degeneration of his soul
which took place: "Woe, woe, by what steps was I dragged
down to the depths of hell" (III.vii.11).
Meanwhile his mother, Monica, a most
devout and godly Christian woman, watched his slow degradation
with agonizing concern. Augustine was now in his early twenties
and was quite aware of his mother's distress. "My mother,
thy faithful one, wept to Thee on my behalf more than mothers
are wont to bewail the physical deaths of their children"
is remarkably typical of many modern young people who have a
similar measure of economic independence. It seems clear that
as a young adolescent he became involved with a gang of potential
troublemakers who sought escape from the boredom of life by being
destructive just for the fun of it. But in due time this palled,
and as he grew into manhood he sought more sophisticated forms
of escape. And so he went to Carthage, "the big city."
But this, too, in time began to sicken him so that like many
in similar circumstances today, he turned hopefully to philosophy
and in a sense "attached" himself to the founder of
Manichaeism, the equivalent of the modern guru. He describes
this change in lifestyle. "During the space of nine years,
then, from my nineteenth to my twenty-eighth year we went
on seduced and seducing, deceived and deceiving, in
* Augustine, Confessions:
all quotes are from Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of
the Christian Church, edited by Philip Schaff, Buffalo, Christian
Literature Co., 1886, vol.1
divers lusts; outwardly
practicing a lifestyle which they call 'liberal'" (IV.i.1).
In disgust at the emptiness of this life, therefore, he turned
to a pagan philosophy which saw the universe as being divided
into two eternal kingdoms, the kingdom of good and the kingdom
of evil, neither of which could ever wholly conquer the other.
Man might seek by the proper exercise of will to live increasingly
in the one or the other but the strife was unending and there
was no guarantee of complete victory either here or hereafter.
And so Augustine struggled on,
gradually establishing a reputation as a teacher of rhetoric,
while at the same time becoming increasingly disillusioned with
Manichaeism. He found no peace, no meaning, no sense of purpose:
only a growing sense of disease of spirit and dissatisfaction
of mind. He was disturbed also by his own inability to temper
his unruly will. To be good attracted him, but he could not find
within himself the resources to achieve goodness. And so he went
to Rome because he learned that students there lived under more
restrictive influences bringing some measure of control to their
disordered lives. He recounts the circumstances of this decision
as evidence, when seen in retrospect, of the overruling providence
of God in his life.
It was not my desire to go to
Rome because greater advantages and honours were guaranteed me
by the friends who persuaded me to do this but my principal and
almost my sole motive was that I had been informed that youths
there studied more quietly and were kept under the control of
more rigid discipline (V.viii.14).
is a reflection of a struggle which seems to have gone on in
his life for many years. The unruliness of his will, indeed the
unruliness of every man's unredeemed will, was to be a key point
of emphasis in his subsequent theology and profoundly influenced
Luther's thinking a thousand years later. In spite of the fact
that his personal problem appeared to him at the time to be the
basic reason for his deciding to cross the Mediterranean to Rome,
he later saw this as just one more instance of divine supervision
in his life (V.viii.15).
Evidently his stay in Rome did
not fulfill his expectations for he was soon attracted to Milan,
accepting an invitation from that city to teach rhetoric. He
notes that his travelling expenses were paid by the city fathers
(V.xiii.23). Here he discovered the saintly Ambrose, Bishop of
Milan; and to his mother's enormous relief, this godly minister
came to have a tremendous influence on his life. With refreshing
frankness he tells why he was first attracted to Ambrose. It
was the Bishop's eloquence! And here we have a beautiful example
of how the talents of a godly man (for surely eloquence is a
talent) can be used in God's service in ways that are unexpected.
In words which are equally as eloquent as the Bishop's, Augustine
describes what gradually happened.
although I took no trouble to learn what he spake but
only to hear how he spake (for that vain concern
alone remained to me, despairing of finding any way for man to
approach Thee), yet along with the words which I prized there
came into my mind also the things about which I was careless;
for I could not separate them. And whilst I opened my heart to
admit "how skillfully he spake," there also entered
with it, but gradually, "how truly he spake"! (V.xiv.24).
I resolved therefore to become
a catechumen in the catholic church, which my parents had commended
to me, until something more positive should manifest itself to
me whither I might steer my course. . . . (V.xiv.25) After
that, O Lord, little by little Thou didst persuade me, drawing
and calming my heart with a most gentle and merciful hand (Vl.v.7).
was slow at first. As Augustine wrote:
And I, puzzling over and reviewing
these things, marvelled most at the length of time that had lapsed
from my nineteenth year when I began to be inflamed with the
desire for wisdom, resolving when I found her to forsake all
the empty hopes and deceiving insanities of vain desire. Behold
I was now getting on to my thirtieth year, still stuck in the
same mire and eager for the enjoyment of things present which
fly away and destroy me (Vl.xi.18).
was aware of the continuing pursuit of Him whom Francis Thompson
so aptly named the "Hound of Heaven." This conviction
strangely strengthened as the misery in his own soul deepened.
In his growing despair he found himself nevertheless unexpectedly
filled with praise for God!
Unto Thee be praise, unto Thee
be glory. O Thou fountain of mercy! While I became more wretched,
Thou became more near. Thy right hand was ever ready to pluck
me out of the mire and to cleanse me: yet I was ignorant of it
By inward stings didst Thou disturb
me that I should be dissatisfied, until Thou wert made sure to
my inward sight. And by the secret hand of thy remedy was my
swelling lessened, and the disordered and darkened eyesight of
my mind was made whole from day to day by the sharp anointing
of healthful sorrows (Vll.viii.12).
And I enquired what iniquity really
was. And I discovered it not to be a substance [as Manichaean
philosophy had viewed it] but a perversion of the will
bent aside from Thee, O God. . . . And I marvelled that I now
loved Thee and not just a fantasy instead of Thee. (Vl.xv.22.
23). [emphasis mine]
we find a clear recognition of where the real problem of human
wickedness lies. Pelagius (c. 390 A.D.) had taken the view that
the wickedness of man was really something foreign to his nature,
taught him through example and precept by his own corrupt society.
The right appeal to his best nature would bring improvement and
under the proper circumstances man had the power to correct his
faults and achieve his own salvation.
In due course, Augustine, out of the depths of his
own experience, was to become such an opponent of this hopeful
humanism that Pelagius' teaching would subsequently be condemned
by the Church of Rome. Salvation by self-effort was declared
to be an impossibility for fallen man. Because of his own experience
in Italy, Augustine very early came to the conclusion that the
Church of Rome was the sole instrument or vehicle of the grace
of God in bringing salvation to the individual. There was no
salvation outside of its orthodoxy. Augustine, in fact, by the
cogency of his arguments, the eloquence of his writing and speaking,
and the profundity of his own personal experience while searching
for the truth, had a tremendous influence upon the Church of
Rome's theology in this respect; and by many Protestant scholars
he is considered to have been the founder of Roman Catholicism
in its basic expression.
In the end, Augustine's main emphasis
came to be not on the exclusive character of the Church of Rome
as a vehicle of God's grace but on the total incapacity of man
to turn himself about and contribute in any way to the effecting
of his own salvation. As he wrote later:
And I sought a way of
acquiring strength sufficient to enjoy Thee; but I found it not
until I embraced that "mediator between God and man, the
man Christ Jesus," "who is over all, God blessed forever,"
calling unto me and saying, "I am the way, the truth and
the life" (VII.xviii.24).
And so Augustine
came home at last to his God. And his heart was overwhelmed by
O my God, let me with gratitude
remember and confess unto Thee thy mercies bestowed upon me.
Let my bones be steeped in thy love and let them say, Who is
like unto Thee, O Lord! "Thou hast loosed my bonds; I will
offer unto Thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving." And how
Thou hast loosed them will I declare; and all who worship Thee
when they hear these things shall say: "Blessed be the Lord
in heaven and in earth, great and wonderful is his name"
Yet the struggle
with his unruly will continued, as it did for Paul (Romans 7),
and as it does in all of us. Witness how he cried out in some
Whence is this monstrous thing?
And why is it? The mind commands the body and it obeys forthwith;
the mind commands itself and is resisted. The mind commands the
hand to be moved, and such readiness is there that the command
is scarce to be distinguished from the obedience. . . The
mind commands the mind to command the will, and yet though it
be itself, it obeyeth not. Whence this monstrous thing? It commands
itself to will and would not give the command unless it willed,
yet is not done that which it commandeth. But it willeth not
entirely; therefore it commandeth not entirely (VIII.ix.21).
protest is eloquent, and his analogy is striking. He was perhaps
the first after Paul to realize the Total Depravity of man.
Man unredeemed is spiritually incapable
of truly willing the smallest step towards God unless he is enabled
to do so through the office of the Holy Spirit. We may suppose
that men do seek the Lord on their own initiative because we
see them apparently doing it. We may suppose we ourselves did
it because we were aware of a desire within ourselves. The very
act of willing leads us to believe that we are willing of our
own accord. We do not stop to ask, Why did I will to seek the
Lord? Why did I, but not my neighbour, will to seek the Lord?
Was it something in myself which distinguished me from my neighbour,
and indeed from the multitude around me? And here is the crux
of the matter, for if it was I who initiated this movement in
my soul, then could I not be said to be a better man than my
neighbour? Would I not be indeed in a position to boast, both
here and hereafter?
But there is no reason to suppose
that there are levels of spiritual deadness. We are all dead
in trespasses and sins, and death is the great leveller. In this
unregenerate state we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.
A corpse does not cry out for help. "The dead know not anything"
(Ecclesiastes 9:5). The sad truth is that even after we have
been born again, we carry part of this death with us until we
slough it off in the grave. Thus even after being born again,
we still have two wills to contend with. This was Augustine's
experience and it generated and coloured his whole understanding
of the truth of the Gospel of grace. Indeed, it was out of this
experience that he really recovered for the Christian Church
the doctrine of the Sovereignty of God in the salvation of man.
For man being spiritually dead could not possibly initiate out
of his own inner being the seeds of spiritual life nor, having
been redeemed, generate out of the old life that which is pleasing
to God. Augustine's past continued to press heavily on his soul
and agonizingly thwarted his aspirations after holiness, until
he reached a crisis.
I flung myself down, how
I do not know, under a certain fig tree, giving free course to
my tears. I was saying these things and weeping in the most bitter
contrition of my heart when, behold, I heard a voice as of a
boy or a girl, I know not which, coming from a neighbouring house,
chanting and oft repeating, "Take up and read, take up and
read". . . . I grasped [the New Testament manuscript
in his hands], opened, and in silence read that paragraph on
which my eyes first fell "Not in rioting and drunkenness,
not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying;
but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for
the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof" (Romans 13:13, 14).
No further would I read, nor did I need; for instantly, as the
sentence ended by a light. as it were, of security infused
into my heart, all the gloom of doubt vanished away (Vlll.xii.28,
he went in at once to his mother to tell her what happened: "We
make it known to her she rejoiceth! We relate how it came
to pass: she
pg.6 of 16
leapeth for joy [She
was then nearly sixty years old] and triumpheth and blesseth
Thee who art 'able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that
we ask or think'." (Vlll.xii.30).
So was this great warrior consecrated
to the Lord's service.
Francis Thompson's beautiful poem
"The Hound of Heaven" seems almost as though it were
written to describe Augustine's experience. It opens with these
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes, I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet
"All things betray thee, who betrayest Me."
of this poem was published in 1926 with perceptive comments on
the text by Michael A. Kelly. I found his remarks on line 114
of the poem particularly interesting. The line is a short one.
It reads, "I am defenseless utterly." At this moment
in the poem Francis Thompson, after a long chase through the
years, was now in the position of being nearly overtaken by God.
Upon this Kelly comments as follows:
This is a terrible revelation
to some souls (for we are all Pelagians at heart and would wish
to be able to work out our salvation without God's grace)
the fact that with all their striving they get no closer to God,
for they hit wide of the mark all the time by not preparing for
and awaiting God's coming to them. What we can and must do is
to co-operate with God's grace.
This is a noteworthy
comment, for while Kelly is suggesting that Pelagianism is an
error, he simply substitutes Arminianism instead. Pelagius said,
"If a man sets his mind to it he can save his own soul without
God's help." Arminius said, "Not so. He must have God's
help. He must co-operate with God since he alone cannot save
himself." Augustine, in complete contrast to both these
positions, held that man is so totally corrupted in his being
that he cannot contribute anything whatever. He is
spiritually dead and
entirely incapable of co-operating with God in any way. Augustine's
own experience had taught him that he could not assist God
in any way, and his own experience had also taught him that he
could not refuse God in any way either. In his comment,
Michael Kelly reflects the view so widely held today, that while
man is not able to save himself, he can at least prepare himself
to receive the salvation God offers by opening his own heart
or at the very least by not resisting the overtures of the Holy
Spirit. Modern man's experience, as he licks the wounds of the
last two great wars, probably does not encourage too many Pelagians.
But the great majority of men still prefer to believe that they
have enough autonomy left to be in a position to refuse or to
accept the offer of God's salvation just as they have a mind
Augustine died in 430 A.D. at the
age of seventy-six. He never left his beloved North Africa for
any substantial length of time. His life must have been exceedingly
busy, for in addition to his duties as a bishop, his pen was
constantly at work. Through his writings, his influence on the
development of theology for centuries to come has been enormous.
It is sometimes said that in the period of forty-four years between
his conversion and his death he produced over a thousand treatises
on every aspect of Christian doctrine. As a reflection of the
influence of these writings, it may be noted that a bibliography
listing works on Augustine published between 1950 and 1960 numbered
in excess of five thousand titles.
We have already noted that Augustine's
initial emphasis upon the unique role played by the Church of
Rome in his conversion strongly influenced him to think of it
as the only vehicle of God's mercy. This was seized upon by that
institution as the basis for an exclusiveness which, there is
little doubt, Augustine in his later years would have abhorred.
Augustine's subsequent emphasis upon the Total Depravity of man
and the corruption of his will was to play a very significant
role in the formulation of the teachings of the Reformers. It
thus came about that out of the voluminous works of a single
individual there emerged finally two strongly opposed schools
of theology, the Roman Catholic and the Protestant. Perhaps in
a manner of speaking the second would not have emerged with clarity
without the first, and we may therefore praise God for the whole
of Augustine's ministry of writing, despite its sometimes contradictory
nature. At any rate, Augustine stands as a major link between
Paul and Calvin.
From Paul to Augustine the major
emphasis theologically had been on the nature and Person of Christ
as God-made-man, and experientially, on repentance and faith
as the basis of salvation, and on good works (such as almsgiving,
prayers, and submission to certain sacraments of the Church such
as baptism) as proof of the reality of conversion. Increasingly
there had developed a kind of tacit agreement that conversion
resulted from a
co-operation of wills,
the human and the divine. By threat or argument or appeal men
were persuaded to respond. Long before Arminius left his personal
impress upon the Church of God, Arminianism had swept the early
Christian world. Men are by nature Arminian. It is easy
to believe that man has a say in his salvation, a contribution
to make, a frame of mind for which he is personally responsible
and without which God is powerless. Pelagius drops easily into
a ministry to the elite in society who seem likely to be most
amenable, since good breeding is easily mistaken for an improved
nature. In such a theological environment it is obvious that
Paul's insistence upon Predestination and Election will be toned
down until it means no more than that God can foresee who will
by nature be responsive and who will not. There are clearly some
who don't respond and some who do. The difference is not in the
sovereignty of Election but in the responsiveness of the individual.
Some men seem to have a form of natural goodness which makes
them more susceptible to persuasion, more amenable to reason,
more sensitive to the overtures of God, more aware of personal
need. Predestination in this view is simply based on foreknowledge.
The decision to believe rests ultimately with the individual.
Man elects for God, not God for man.
There is no doubt that in spite
of this erroneous view of how God's grace is made effectual,
the grace of God in saving some guaranteed the continuance of
the Body of Christ as a vital living reality through these early
centuries, even as it continues today. It is therefore no hindrance
to the work of God that those whose lives are effectively renewed
do not at all understand the circumstances of this renewal or
the theology which underlies it. It is not necessary to a vital
Christian experience to comprehend, or even be aware of, the
mysteries of divine Election and Predestination. Christian piety
is possible without theology provided there is a true conversion;
and alternatively, a sound theology is no guarantee of Christian
piety. Wesley almost certainly saved England from a "French
Revolution," though he embraced the Arminian heresy and
left to his followers a legacy of piety without theology.
There is a warfare going on, an
unending struggle between falsehood and truth regarding the nature
of man and his destiny. This falsehood, which encourages man
to believe he has powers of self-redemption (powers which experience
nevertheless demonstrates he does not have), is prosecuted forcefully
by means of propaganda in printed form that is cogent and reasonable
and effectively produced. It is everywhere, in our romance novels,
in our idealistic film themes, in our reconstructions of history,
in our philosophy of education, and even, alas, in many of our
churches. What is needed to combat this steady stream of propaganda
is not merely piety and the ambiguous testimony of individual
experience, but an equally reasoned and powerfully convincing
presentation of the truth. In short, we need a recovery of sound
doctrine rather than emphasis on emotional experience.
has largely decided the fate of Methodism already. Thousands
of church buildings which once housed active and devout Methodist
congregations all over North America now stand entirely deserted
or have been taken over by congregations whose mission is almost
wholly social betterment on a worldly level and whose "theology"
is nothing more than a humanism parading as Christian endeavour.
A substantial part of the so-called Christian community is either
Pelagian or Arminian. That which gives to the individual equal
power with God is either humanism, or it is a distortion of the
Gospel. And such a distortion, being untrue, is really no Gospel
at all. It is no Gospel to an utterly defeated human being to
tell him that if he will co-operate with God in the right way
God will save him.
did was to preserve the Church of Christ in the West from losing
sight of the truth of man's hopelessness and helplessness before
God. He awakened God's people to the creeping disease of Christian
humanism which was evident even then from the successes of Pelagius
in Rome and from the growing "Arminianism" which was
reflected in the writings of Chrysostom and Jerome and many other
Christian theologians by the end of the fourth century A.D. If
man did not have it within his power to save himself (as Pelagius
claimed he did), neither did he have it within his power to embrace
the salvation of God made possible through faith in the finished
work of Jesus Christ. Both erroneous views credited man with
a kind of freedom of will that he does not have.
Man, Augustine argued, has freedom
only in one direction. He is free when he sins. As a sinner,
man can achieve a curious integrity when he makes no attempt
to hide his sin. An Anglican Bishop said recently, "Modern
young people are so delightfully wicked!" And Augustine
spoke of the unabashed wickedness of pagan man as exhibited in
his "splendid vices." Years before this, the Roman
writer Scaevola is reputed to have said, "A totally evil
man has an irresistible charm and excites the envy and admiration
of those who dare not display their own true selves so completely.
Total evil has a kind of virtue of its own, an honesty."
This kind of freedom is like that of the free fall of the man
who jumps from his plane and delays opening his parachute. There
are virtually no experienced restraints. The anticipated enjoyment
of such an activity is like those who "promise themselves
liberty" (2 Peter 2:19), yet are really wholly in bondage
to gravity. They become momentarily "free among the dead,"
as the Psalmist put it poetically (Psalm 88:5).
What Augustine had learned by experience
was that the human will is corrupted at the source. When unregenerate
man struggles against the evil propensities of his nature, he
does so by exercising his will the dynamic force which
lies at the root of those evil propensities. The very exercise
of his will in this struggle has the effect only of making it
found such a struggle
spiritually self-defeating because it served in the end only
to reinforce at the core of his being the source of the sinfulness
he so much hated. The man who of his own will determine to overcome
evil is defeating his own purposes by strengthening the very
will that is the seat of his evil desires. The power for evil
is self-reinforced, and thus self-reformation becomes a wholly
self-defeating exercise. It is a vicious circle.
Quoting 2 Peter 2:19, Augustine
expressed this idea by saying, "Of whom a man is overcome,
of the same he is brought into bondage." The man who overcomes
himself becomes in bondage to himself. And this self is sinful.
It was one of the defects of Puritanism that by laying emphasis
upon outward acts and concentrating energies on suppressing this
or that particular fault, the man who overcomes is credited with
having overcome sin itself. What he may suppress are only the
symptoms, not the disease. But like the man who uses aspirin
freely, there comes such ready and long-lasting relief that he
is in danger of forgetting the disease itself and ignoring it
until it is his undoing.
Or alternatively, a man can surrender
to the disease and learn to accept it willingly; he can even
learn to enjoy it. So sin also has its pleasures. As Augustine
What kind of liberty,
I ask, can the bondslave possess except when it delights him
to serve sin? For he only is free in his bondage who does with
pleasure the will of his master. Accordingly, he who is the servant
of sin is free to sin. Hence he will not be free to do right
until, being freed from sin, he shall begin to be the servant
of righteousness. . . . "If the Son shall make you free,
ye shall be free indeed" [John 8 360. And before this freedom
is wrought in a man, when he is not yet free to what is right,
how can he talk of the freedom of his will? (1)
Well, he can
of course, but he can speak of freedom only in one direction.
He acts freely when he does evil because that is natural to his
will. It is a uni-directional freedom, the kind of freedom that
the man enjoys in "free fall." Not until a man tries
to reverse his course does he suddenly become aware of his bondage.
Augustine became intensely aware of his bondage as soon as he
tried to break out of it and govern his own unruly spirit.
Augustine argued rightly that man
as created was truly free, free to sin or not to sin.
Man in Adam lost this kind of freedom of will by an act of disobedience
which was a demonstration of how free he had originally been.
Augustine had a striking analogy: "A man who kills himself
must, of course, be alive when he kills himself, but after he
has killed himself he ceases to live and cannot restore himself
to life." (2)
But by the same token he will not even want to restore
himself to life. So, again, he is "free among
1. Enchiridion. XXX: from Nicene
and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Buffalo,
Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887, vol.III, translated
by J. F. Shaw, p.247.
the dead." It is
a kind of freedom. What is true of physical life is paralleled
by what happens in man's spiritual life. Sometimes it is objected
that a man can always refuse a gift. He has this much freedom
at least. But there is one gift which he cannot refuse: and that
is the gift of life. He will not be offered it because
he is dead. It can only be conferred upon him and it is
not within his power to refuse it.
The intensity of Augustine's nature,
and the seriousness of his search for holiness and for fellowship
with God, set him pondering why that which he so earnestly desired
was not at all within his grasp as a pagan, and still often eluded
him even when he had been so wonderfully converted. Daily he
wrote down his thoughts and it became the consuming passion of
his life to understand why the human will is so corrupted by
nature and so powerless for good.
Augustine saw man as not merely
misguided in his search, or defective in his understanding, or
blurred in his vision of the truth, or sick in the moral fibre
of his being. He saw man as hopelessly lost, blind and dead.
Man cannot respond to God's love merely by being told about it,
any more than a corpse of a loved one can respond to the appeals
of the bereaved. Man needs resurrecting first: to be made alive
in order that he may love God, not to love God in order that
he may be made alive. The initiative must always be with God.
Nor can he hinder the grace of God. The dead cannot refuse resurrection
any more than the dead can ask for it. Divine Election and Sovereign
Grace, not human inclination, are what account for man's salvation.
Yet it is human inclination that accounts for man's lost condition.
The intending suicide acts according to his own will;
but should he succeed he is certainly totally unable to undo
what he has done, and even unable to wish it undone.
The question of the bondage of
the human will as it sets itself against the will of God was
the crucial issue in Augustine's thinking, and his works upon
the subject constitute the basis of Luther's Bondage of the
Will and of Calvin's absolute assurance that salvation is
entirely the work of God. Augustine's thinking along these lines
was undoubtedly largely stimulated by his conversations with
Ambrose. Ambrose had said, in fact, "If you are an unbeliever
(when you die), Christ did not die for you." (3) Nothing could be clearer
than this. The Election of God is sovereign. No man elected to
salvation could possibly die or be killed unsaved. If he died
unsaved, he was not one of the elect. There was no thwarting
of the purposes of God in this.
Towards the end of his life, Augustine
went back over his works and sought to remove some of the potential
contradictions that arose as a consequence of his developing
understanding. He published his thoughts under
3. Ambrose: quoted in Jerome Zanchius, Absolute
Predestination, Grand Rapids, Sovereign Grace Publishers,
1971, p. 20.
the title Retractions,
by which he meant not "withdrawals" but "redrawals"
or "re-views." But he did correct a few earlier statements.
Thus he wrote in one place: "I could never have asserted
that God in choosing men to live had any respect to their faith
had I duly considered that faith itself is His own gift."
(4) This agreed
entirely with an observation he had made regarding John 15:16:
"Since Christ says, 'Ye have not chosen Me,' I would fain
ask whether it be scriptural to say we must have faith before
we are elected. and not rather that we are elected in order to
our having faith." He returned to this theme again and again.
Common faith is the possession of all men: faith in the word
of a friend, in the laws of nature, in the witness of one's own
senses (what one hears and sees as being real). But saving
faith is entirely a work of God and beyond man's natural
ability. "God has from the beginning elected you to salvation,
through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the
truth" (2 Thessalonians 2:13). Election is first:
faith with respect to the truth of God comes as a consequence.
So "as many as were ordained to eternal life, believed"
(Acts 13:48) and no others. This was the theme about which Augustine
structured his thinking during the last half of his writing ministry.
As he put it:
Whatsoever persons are
through the riches of divine grace exempted from the original
sentence of condemnation are undoubtedly brought to hear the
Gospel, and when hearing they are caused to believe it, and are
made likewise to endure to the end in the faith which works by
love. And should they at any time go astray, they are recovered
and set right again. (5)
Here are Election
and eternal security. Later he adds: "All these things are
wrought in them by that God who made them vessels of mercy and
who, by the election of his grace, chose them in his Son before
the world began." And here then is Predestination. As Augustine
put it elsewhere: "The grace of God does not find men
fit to be elected, but makes them so. . . . The
nature of the divine goodness is not only to open to those who
knock but also to cause them to knock and ask." (6) Thus John wrote, "We
love Him, because He first loved us" (1 John 4:19).
The crucial issue is this. Some
men respond and some do not. Why do some and not all men respond
to so manifest a good as the eternal salvation of their own souls?
Because they are different! In what way? In some way that makes
them better judges of what is good? Or just a kind of natural
disposition less hostile to the things of God? Are not all such
distinguishing marks, if they really exist, but evidences that
all men are not equal before God, that it is not out
of the same lump that some are made vessels of
4. Ibid., p.62.
5. On Rebuke and Grace, XIII.
6. Augustine: quoted in Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine
of Predestination, Philadephia, Presbyterian & Reformed
Publishing Co., 1975 printing , p.102.
honour while others
are made vessels of dishonour? But we know these things are not
true. It is "of the same lump" that both kinds of vessels
are made (Romans 9:21). There are not any differences between
men (1 Corinthians 4:7) as there are no differences in the responsiveness
of the bodies of the dead. Their response is wholly predictable:
it is nil. The spiritually dead are all alike: dead and unresponsive
unless first quickened by the Spirit of God. The Psalmist cried:
"Quicken us and we will call upon thy name. Turn us again,
O Lord God of hosts . . . and we shall be saved" (Psalm
80:18b, 19). It has to be God's initiative, not man's; for "the
dead know not anything" (Ecclesiastes 9.5).
Augustine did not believe that
man could or did will to be saved. But rather he believed that
God graciously converted his will. He was "made willing"
by God's grace. Man is an entirely passive participant in this
work of God. Just as we may change a man's mind by demonstration
of a truth without destroying the mind's power of independent
thought, so God can change a man's will by gracious intervention
without destroying the will's power of independent expression.
Demonstration is to the mind what persuasion is to the will.
Neither is destroyed by the change which may be brought about
in each case. Augustine gladly admitted that man is capable of
exercising saving faith, for clearly the converted man is doing
just this. The capacity for exercising this kind of faith is
present in man but is dormant until it is awakened by the Holy
Spirit and given a direction and a content and a character which
were formerly entirely foreign to it. To the unregenerate soul,
the things which we as the Lord's children believe are simply
"unbelievable." There is no way unaided man can change
the character of his faith for himself. Saving faith is a gift.
Man has "power" to exercise saving faith but there
is no power but comes from God (Romans 13:1). (7)
This empowering of God is
not, however, applied to a creature who has not the requisite
capacity for receiving and exercising it. In the elect, saving
faith acts upon what Luther refers to as a "passive aptitude"
in man. It is a passive aptitude but it is an aptitude
implanted in human nature by the Creator which distinguishes
all men from all other creatures, angelic or animal. It makes
man unique in that he is a potentially redeemable creature. Man
does have the power to exercise will. It is only that his will
is corrupted in such a way that it is by nature in opposition
to the will of God. Because we are conscious of volition, we
suppose our volition is free. What we discover by experience
is that our freedom of will is uni-directional. We are truly
free only when we sin, for we are then acting according to our
nature, a fact which accounts for the pleasures of sin (Hebrews
11:25). It comes as a surprise to many people, when they make
Originally Augustine had allowed
that man has some freedom of choice
7. Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter,
in the matter of his
salvation. In his work On the Predestination of the Saints
(III.7) he had written: "The grace of God consists merely
in this, that God in the preaching of the truth reveals his Will;
but to assent to this Gospel when it is preached is our own work
[my emphasis] and lies within our own power." But in his
Apology (XVlll.vii.8) he says: "I have erred when I said
it lies within our power to believe and to will." Pelagius
had held the maxim, "It is mine to be willing to believe;
it is the part of God's grace to assist." In this manner
the Gospel of Jesus Christ had been corrupted almost unrecognizably.
But such was the enormous influence of Augustine's pen that the
Church of Rome was convinced of the propriety of his rejection
of Pelagianism and they officially condemned it by the Synod
of Orange in 529 A.D. By contrast, the same Church slowly rejected
his doctrine of the Total Depravity of man. With this rejection
went also the eclipse of the truth of Predestination and Election.
Growing emphasis was placed upon formal membership in the Church
of Rome, assent to its dogmas, and participation in its sacraments
and its ritual. The works of Augustine were seldom studied or
even read by Luther's time, except among a few persecuted fragments
of the Body of Christ such as the Waldensians.
truth of the Sovereignty of Grace and the total incapacity of
man had been recovered by Augustine and explored in a way entirely
new. It was he who had crystallized the theology of Predestination
and Election which are the corollary of man's total incapacity
and helplessness and God's sovereign grace. The Reformation was
essentially a revival of Augustinianism, as Augustinianism was
a recovery of Pauline theology; and Paul's theology was a clear
enunciation of the Gospel as applied to man's need.
I cannot do better to set this
in historical perspective than to quote from a great theologian
of the recent past, Benjamin B. Warfield. In his book Calvin
and Augustine, he wrote: (8)
The great contribution
which Augustine has made to the world's life and thought is embodied
in the theology of grace, which he has presented with remarkable
clearness and force, vitally in his Confessions and as
a thesis in his anti-Pelagian treatises. . . .
A new Christian piety dates from
him in which, in place of the alternations of hope and fear which
vex the lives of those who, in whatever degree, hang their hopes
on their own merits, a mood of assured trust in the mercy of
a gracious God is substituted as the spring of Christian life.
And a new theology corresponding to this new type of piety dates
from him; a theology which, recalling man from all dependence
on his own powers or merits, casts him decisively on the grace
of God alone for his salvation. Of course, this doctrine was
not new in the sense that it was Augustine's invention; it was
the doctrine of Paul, for example, before it was the doctrine
of Augustine, and was only recovered for the Church by Augustine,
though in that age, dominated in all its thinking by the dregs
of Stoic rationalism, it came with all the force of a new discovery.
. . .
8. Warfield, Bejamin C., Calvin and Augustine,
edited by Samuel Craig, Philadelphia, Presbyterian & Reformed
Publishing Co., 1971, p.320323.
Copyright © 1988 Evelyn White. All rights
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required ten years before the revived Paulinism attained even
a fully consistent positive enunciation (first in the work De.diversis
quaestionibus ad Simplicianum, A.D. 396); and, though the
leaven worked steadily thereafter more and more deeply and quietly
into his thought, death intervened before all the elements of
his thinking were completely leavened. . . .
His doctrine of the Church he had
received whole from his predecessor, and he gave it merely the
precision and vitality which insured its persistence. His doctrine
of grace was all his own: it represented the very core of his
being; and his whole progress in Christian thinking consists
in the growing completeness with which its fundamental principles
applied themselves in his mind to every department of life and
thought. . . .
It is Augustine who gave us the
Reformation. For the Reformation, inwardly considered, was just
the ultimate triumph of Augustine's doctrine of grace over Augustine's
doctrine of the Church. This doctrine of grace came from Augustine's
hands in its positive outline completely formulated: sinful man
depends for his recovery to good and to God entirely on the free
grace of God; this grace is therefore indispensable, prevenient,
irresistible, indefectible; and being thus the free grace of
God, must have lain in all the details of its conference and
working, in the intention of God from all eternity. . . .
If the necessity of prevenient
grace was thereafter [after the second Council of Orange, 529]
the established doctrine of the Church, the irresistibility of
this prevenient grace was put under the ban and there remained
no place for a complete "Augustinianism" within the
Church, as Gottschalk and Jansen were fully to discover. Therefore,
when the great revival of religion which we call the Reformation
came, seeing that it was on its theological side a revival of
"Augustinianism," as all great revivals of religion
must be (for Augustinianism is but the thetical expression of
religion in its purity), there was nothing for it but the rending
of the Church.