At 11:06 PM 3/14/2006, Debbie Mann wrote:
>"... I find so many people who have lost *their* faith due to not
>finding the perfection they sought. ~ Debbie Mann (765) 477-1776
@ When people pursue the religion of natural man, *the faith* they
lose has nothing to do with God. (If it did - they wouldn't have lost it).
It's not arguable - boiled down to their essence, there are only two
religions ---ie: there are only two faiths.
[1] Man trusts (has been given the gift of faith) God --- or
[2] Man trusts (has faith in his own abilities) himself.
Those who deny that faith is the gift of God are Pelagians. Even the
Council of Trent (condemning the reformers) anathematized such a
denial as Pelagianism.
Those who think that people are basically good, are the same people
who think that they can perfect themselves and society by the
decisions they make. (Evolving into perfection over time). Of course
to be "perfect" is to be God. An impossible goal. There is only ONE God.
I'm sure most on this forum are familiar with the term,
"pelagianism", and know its meaning. They can stop reading here.
Those who maybe have heard the term, but haven't really looked into
it (and are interested in knowing more), the item below will help get
you started:
Pelagianism: The Religion of Natural Man by Michael S. Horton
http://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/articles/onsite/pelagiannatural.html
[huge snip]
Pelagianism in Church History
Every dark age in church history was due to the creeping influence of
the human-centered gospel of "pulling oneself up by the bootstraps."
Whenever God is seen as the sole author and finisher of salvation,
there is health and vitality;. To the degree that human beings are
seen as agents of their own salvation, the church loses its power,
since the Gospel is "the power of God unto salvation for everyone who
believes" (Rom 1:16).
Throughout the period that is popularly known as the "dark ages,"
Pelagianism was never officially endorsed, but it was certainly
common and perhaps even the most popular and widespread tendency
among the masses. That should come as no surprise, since thinking
good of our nature and of possibilities for its improvement is the
tendency of our sinful condition. We are all Pelagians by nature.
There were debates, for instance, in the eighth century, but these
did not end well for those who defended a strict Augustinian point of view.
Since Pelagianism had been condemned by councils, no one dared defend
a view as "Pelagian," but Semi-Pelagianism was acceptable, since the
canons of the Council of Orange, which condemned Semi-Pelagianism,
had been lost and were not recovered until after the closing of the
Council of Trent in the sixteenth century.
On the eve of the Reformation, there were fresh debates over free
will and grace. Reformers benefited from something of a renaissance
of Augustinianism. In the fourteenth century, two Oxford lecturers,
Robert Holcot and Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Bradwardine, became
leading antagonists in this battle. Two centuries before the
Reformation, Bradwardine wrote The Case of God Against the New
Pelagians, but, "Holcot and a host of later interpreters found
Bradwardine's defense of the 'case of God' was at the expense of the
dignity of man." 3 If that sounds familiar, it should, since the
truth and its corresponding objections never change.
The archbishop's own story gives us some insight to the place of this debate:
Idle and a fool in God's wisdom, I was misled by an unorthodox error
at the time when I was pursuing philosophical studies. Sometimes I
went to listen to the theologians discussing this matter [of grace
and free will], and the school of Pelagius seemed to me nearest the
truth. In the philosophical faculty I seldom heard a reference to
grace, except for some ambiguous remarks.
What I heard day in and day out was that we are masters of our own
free acts, that ours is the choice to act well or badly, to have
virtues or sins and much more along this line." Therefore, "Every
time I listened to the Epistle reading in church and heard how Paul
magnified grace and belittled free will-as is the case in Romans 9,
'It is obviously not a question of human will and effort, but of
divine mercy,' and its many parallels-grace displeased me, ungrateful
as I was." But later, things changed:
"However, even before I transferred to the faculty of theology, the
text mentioned came to me as a beam of grace and, captured by a
vision of the truth, it seemed I saw from afar how the grace of God
precedes all good works with a temporal priority, God as Savior
through predestination, and natural precedence. That is why I express
my gratitude to Him who has given me this grace as a free gift."
Bradwardine begins his treatise, "The Pelagians now oppose our whole
presentation of predestination and reprobation, attempting either to
eliminate them completely or, at least, to show that they are
dependent on personal merits." 4
These are important references, since many think of the emphasis of
Luther in The Bondage of the Will and of Calvin in his many writings
on the subject as extreme, when in actual fact, they were in the
mainstream of Augustinian revival. In fact, Luther's mentor, Johann
von Staupitz, was himself a defender of Augustinian orthodoxy against
the new tide of Pelagianism, and contributed his own treatise, On
Man's Eternal Predestination.
"God has covenanted to save the elect. Not only is Christ sent as a
substitute for the believer's sins, he also makes certain that this
redemption is applied. This happens at the moment when the sinner's
eyes are opened again by the grace of God, so that he is able to know
the true God by faith. Then his heart is set afire so that God
becomes pleasing to him. Both of these are nothing but grace, and
flow from the merits of Christ
Our works do not, nor can they, bring us to this state, since man's
nature is not capable of knowing or wanting or doing good. For this
barren man God is sheer fear."
But for the believer, "the Christian is just through the
righteousness of Christ," and Staupitz even goes so far as to say,
that this suffering of Christ "is sufficient for all, though it was
not for all, but for many that his blood was poured out." 5 This was
not an extreme statement, as it is often considered today, but was
the most common way of talking about the atonement's effect:
sufficient for everyone, efficient for the elect alone.
To be sure, these precursors of the Reformation were not yet
articulating a clear doctrine of justification by the imputation of
Christ's righteousness, but the official position of the Roman
Catholic Church even before the Reformation was that grace is
necessary for even the will to believe and live the Christian life.
This is not far enough for evangelicals, but to fall short of this
affirmation is to lose touch with even the "catholic" witness shared
at least on paper by Protestants and Roman Catholics.
What About Today?
Ever since the Enlightenment, the Protestant churches have been
influenced by successive waves of rationalism and moralism that have
made the Pelagian heresy attractive.
It is fascinating, if frustrating, to read the great architects of
modern liberalism as they triumphantly announce their project. They
sound as if it were a new theological enterprise to say that human
nature is basically good, history is marked by progress, that social
and moral improvement will create happiness, peace, and justice.
Really, it is merely a revival of that age-old religion of human nature.
The rationalistic phase of liberalism saw religion not as a plan of
salvation, but as a method of morality.
The older views concerning human sinfulness and dependence on divine
mercy were thought by modern theologians to stand in the way of the
Enlightenment project of building a new world, a tower reaching to
heaven, just as Pelagius viewed Augustinian teaching as impeding his
project of moral reform.
Instead of defining Christianity in terms of an announcement of God's
saving work in Jesus Christ, Schleiermacher and the liberal
theologians redefined it as a "feeling."
Ironically, the Arminian revivals shared with the Enlightenment a
confidence in human ability. This Pelagian spirit pervaded the
frontier revivals as much as the New England academy. Although poets
such as William Henley might put it in more sophisticated language
("I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul"), evangelicals
out on the frontier began adapting this triumph of Pelagianism to the
wider culture.
Heavily influenced by the New Haven theology and the Second Great
Awakening, Charles Finney was nearly the nineteenth-century
reincarnation of Pelagius.
Finney denied original sin. "Moral depravity is sin itself, and not
the cause of sin," 6 and he explicitly rejects original sin in his
criticism of the Westminster Confession, 7 referring to the notion of
a sinful nature as "anti-scriptural and nonsensical dogma." 8
According to Finney, we are all born morally neutral, capable either
of choosing good or evil. Finney argues throughout by employing the
same arguments as the German rationalists, and yet because he was
such a successful revivalist and "soul-winner," evangelicals call him
their own. Finney held that our choices make us either good or
sinful. Here Finney stands closer to the Pharisees than to Christ,
who declared that the tree produced the fruit rather than vice versa.
Finney's denial of the substitutionary atonement follows this denial
of original sin. After all, according to Pelagius, if Adam can be
said to be our agent of condemnation for no other reason than that we
follow his poor example, then Christ is said to be our agent of
redemption because we follow his good example.
This is precisely what Finney argues: "Example is the highest moral
influence that can be exerted. If the benevolence manifested in the
atonement does not subdue the selfishness of sinners, their case is
hopeless." 9 But how can there be a "benevolence manifested in the
atonement" if the atonement does not atone? For those of us who need
an atonement that not only subdues our selfishness, but covers the
penalty for our selfishness, Finney's "gospel," like Pelagius's, is
hardly good news.
According to Finney, Christ could not have fulfilled the obedience we
owed to God, since it would not be rational that one man could atone
for the sins of anyone besides himself. Furthermore, "If he obeyed
the law as our substitute, then why should our own return to personal
obedience be insisted upon as the sine qua non of our salvation?"10
One wonders if Finney was actually borrowing directly from Pelagius'
writings. Many assume "that the atonement was a literal payment of a
debt, which we have seen does not consist with the nature of the
atonement. It is objected that, if the atonement was not the payment
of the debt of sinners, but general in its nature, as we have
maintained, it secures the salvation of no one. It is true, that the
atonement, of itself, does not secure the salvation of any one." 11
Furthermore, Finney denies that regeneration depends on the
supernatural gift of God. It is not a change produced from the outside.
"If it were, sinners could not be required to effect it. No such
change is needed, as the sinner has all the faculties and natural
attributes requisite to render perfect obedience to God." 12
Therefore, "...regeneration consists in the sinner changing his
ultimate choice, intention, preference." Those who insist that
sinners depend on the mercy of God proclaim "the most abominable and
ruinous of all falsehoods. It is to mock [the sinner's] intelligence!"13
Of the doctrine of justification, Finney declared it to be "another
gospel," since "for sinners to be forensically pronounced just, is
impossible and absurd. As has already been said, there can be no
justification in a legal or forensic sense, but upon the ground of
universal, perfect, and uninterrupted obedience to law...The doctrine
of an imputed righteousness, or that Christ's obedience to the law
was accounted as our obedience, is founded on a most false and
nonsensical assumption" and "representing the atonement as the ground
of the sinner's justification has been a sad occasion of stumbling to many." 14
From Finney and the Arminian revivalists, evangelicalism inherited
as great a debt to Pelagianism as modern liberalism received from the
Enlightenment version directly.
When evangelists appeal to the unbeliever as though it was his choice
that determines his destiny, they are not only operating on Arminian
assumptions, but Pelagian assumptions that are rejected even by the
official position of the Roman Catholic Church as a denial of grace.
Whenever it is maintained that an unbeliever is capable by nature of
choosing God, or that men and women are capable of not sinning or of
reaching a state of moral perfection, that's Pelagianism.
Finney even preached a sermon titled, "Sinners Bound To Change Their
Own Hearts."
When preachers attack those who insist that the human problem is
sinfulness and the wickedness of the human heart-that's Pelagianism.
When one hears the argument, whether from the Enlightenment (Kant's
"ought implies can"), or from Wesley, Finney, or modern teachers,
that "God would never have commanded the impossible," 15 they are
echoing the very words of Pelagius.
Those who deny that faith is the gift of God are not merely Arminians
or Semi-Pelagians, but Pelagians. Even the Council of Trent
(condemning the reformers) anathematized such a denial as Pelagianism.
When evangelicals and fundamentalists assume that infants are pure
until they reach an "age of accountability," or that sin is something
outside-in the world or in the sinful environment or in sinful
company that corrupts the individual-they are practicing Pelagians.
That which in contemporary evangelicalism is often considered
"Calvinism" is really "Augustinianism," which embraces orthodox Roman
Catholics and Lutherans as well. And that which in our circles today
is often considered "Arminianism" is really Pelagianism.
The fact that recent polls indicate that 77% of the evangelicals
today believe that human beings are basically good and 84% of these
conservative Protestants believe that in salvation "God helps those
who help themselves" demonstrates incontrovertibly that contemporary
Christianity is in a serious crisis.
No longer can conservative, "Bible-believing" evangelicals smugly
hurl insults at mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics for
doctrinal treason. It is evangelicals today, every bit as much as
anyone else, who have embraced the assumptions of the Pelagian heresy.
It is this heresy that lies at the bottom of much of popular
psychology (human nature, basically good, is warped by its
environment), political crusades (we are going to bring about
salvation and revival through this campaign), and evangelism and
church growth (seeing conversion as a natural process, just like
changing from one brand of soap to another, and seeing the evangelist
or entrepreneurial pastor as the one who actually adds to the church
those to be saved).
At its root, the Reformation was an attack on Pelagianism and its
rising influence, as it choked out the life of Christ in the world.
It asserted that "salvation is of the LORD" (Jon 2:9), and that "it
therefore does not depend on the decision or effort of man, but on
the mercy of God" (Rom 9:16). If that message is recovered, and
Pelagianism is once more confronted with the Word of God, the glory
of God will again fill the earth.
[snip] Clink link to continue ..
~ Janice
Received on Wed Mar 15 09:56:48 2006
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