Re: What Bible? (Bart Ehrman and Elaine Pagels)

I've not been following all of these postings closely, so maybe I've missed
something. But a question, Debbie: what do you mean by "the Pelagian
issue"?

Do you mean by it the popular but incorrect view that Pelagius (or immediate
followers like Julian of Eclanum) taught that human beings may reach
perfection (or salvation) by their own efforts? If so, that was never the
view of Pelagius. While Pelagian literature is sparse, and much of our
picture of him is based on the criticisms of his opponents (especially
Augustine and Jerome) and to some degree distorted or misinterpreted, there
is enough of his own writings to get some picture on his views on grace and
free will.

Pelagius taught that human free will is one of the gracious gifts of God, so
whenever we exercise our free will, we should give glory to God for it.
Also (and his teachings are based his commentary on Paul's letters), he saw
as grace: (1) the God-given endowment of free will; (2) the Mosaic Law (as
did Paul), (3) the forgiveness of sins through the redeeming death of
Christ; (4) justification through faith alone (sola fide) in Christ, (5) the
Way that one can follow through the potent and enabling example and
teachings of Christ. For Pelagius, salvation is a gift of God, apart from
any merit on our part. He argued simply that human beings are capable of
acting without sin (doing a good act using their free will), not really much
more than that. He rejected any notion of sin as a "substance," which is
how he understood Augustine's definition, because that was no different from
Manichaean teaching, in his view. On that point, Pelagius was catholic. He
also rejected the notion of grace as a power "infused" in human beings
(outside of free will).

The notion that one can achieve salvation or perfection by one's own efforts
has been labeled "Pelagian," but that label does little justice to Pelagius.
His notion of perfection, as much as one is able to grasp it, seems to be
more in line with the Greek theologians and desert fathers & mothers, who
understood perfection as a process that one embarks on in the Christian
life.

Karl Marx was once at a young communist meeting, and after listening to the
group describe what they thought was his concept of community, he blurted
out, "I am not a Marxist!" I think were Pelagius to listen to things
attributed to him as "Pelagian," he might exclaim, "I am not a Pelagian!"

Bob Schneider

----- Original Message -----
From: "Debbie Mann" <deborahjmann@insightbb.com>
To: "Asa" <asa@lists.calvin.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, March 15, 2006 10:37 AM
Subject: RE: What Bible? (Bart Ehrman and Elaine Pagels)

>I agree with much of what you said, but I feel there are two issues.
>
> One issue is the Pelagian issue.
>
> The other is disillusionment. When one is taught that the Bible is perfect
> and infallible and literally true in every way for years, and when those
> who
> don't believe it are condemned. Aut then logical thought combined with
> science show that that just is not so, then disillusionment can cause
> faith
> to crumble.
>
> My mother told me to always let my children see that I am not perfect. She
> said otherwise, when they hit their teens and sought my imperfections,
> they
> would think that I was a fraud and a liar and would be alienated for
> years.
> I have had teachers who graded from average, rather than grading from
> perfection. A 90 was not flawed by ten, it excelled by 20. When we use
> perfection as our standard of judgement, we cannot help but be
> disappointed.
> What is perfection? What is the standard of excellence? The one defined by
> certain groups is certainly not useful - but rather poisonous. We should
> not
> judge things by how far they are below a lofty and imaginary rule, instead
> we should view them from how far above our starting point they are. Many
> of
> the Psalms do that, proclaiming how amazing God is above the writer's
> capabilities.
>
> Debbie Mann
> (765) 477-1776
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Janice Matchett [mailto:janmatch@earthlink.net]
> Sent: Wednesday, March 15, 2006 9:56 AM
> To: Debbie Mann; Asa
> Subject: RE: What Bible? (Bart Ehrman and Elaine Pagels)
>
>
> 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 12:19:47 2006