In continuing the tradition of outsourcing quality theological reflection to my betters, allow me to link to this weighty post from Christopher on justification, sanctification and the various kinds of legalisms and antinomianisms that afflict the left and right.
The way I’ve learned to think about faith and works was that we are saved – i.e. restored to a right relationship with God – sheely by grace on account of Christ received through faith. This is the Reformation view shared by Lutherans, Calvinists, and many Anglicans.
But there’s a divergence about what role sanctification, or growth in the Christian life, means. Lutherans tend to say (at least when they’re being good Lutherans) that being continually rooted and re-rooted in faith will “naturally” produce good works (cf. Luther’s Freedom of a Christian). However, Luther, being the realist that he was, also recognized that our sinful impulses aren’t going to disappear until the consummation of all things, so in the interim we have the law to act as a check on them. I think this is properly described as the “civil” or first use of the law, not the much controverted third use.
Calvinists, by contrast, tend to have a more positive view of the law as a guide to Christian living and see sanctification as on ongoing process of being empowered by grace to obey God’s law. Naturally as a Lutheran I think the danger here is legalism and instrospectiveness; Calvinists would no doubt say that Lutheranism courts antinomianism.
An interesting third view, suggested as a distinctively Anglican one, is offered by Louis Weil in an essay called “The Gospel in Anglicanism,” found in an anthology The Study of Anglicanism, edited by Stephen Sykes and John Booty (1st ed.). Weil contends that Anglicanism, as it’s expressed in the prayer book and Articles of Religion, agrees with the Reformers on justification, but has a more sacramental understanding of sanctification:
While clearly within the Reformation tradition in its understanding of justification, Anglicanism distanced itself from both Calvin and Luther in ways which have been presented here. It is particularly with regard to the role of the sacraments as instruments of grace that Anglicanism maintained its own middle way: as Hooker wrote, ‘Sacraments serve as the instruments of God.’ They are thus God’s actions toward mankind, occasions in which through participation in the outward forms, men and women are involved in an active response to the grace of God. (p. 71)
In Weil’s view, the Anglican ethos sees sacramental and liturgical worship as the means by which God’s sanctifying grace is communicated to us. Through worship we participate in the mysteries of the faith and are linked to God’s purposes for the world. It is the primary means by which we are incorporated into the Body of Christ. Sanctification, then, has its roots in this incorporation; it is a key part of acquiring the “mind of Christ” from which good works flow. If good works are the fruit of faith, perhaps we can see this as “watering the plant.” This is one of the aspects of Anglicanism that I came to appreciate and cherish during last year’s sojourn among the Anglo-Catholics in Boston.
In theory Lutherans (I can’t speak for our Calvinist/Reformed brethren) ought to have a similar sacramental piety. After all, Lutheranism was the “conservative” branch of the Reformation that maintained much of the Catholic practice that the more radical elements of the Reformation rejected outright. However, my sense among ELCA Lutherans at any rate is that this sense of participating sacramentally in the reality of the paschal mystery is not very common.
My heart’s with the Lutherans in insisting that we can never merit our relationship with God. Our righteousness is always a gift that comes from outside (extra nos) and there’s nothing we can or need do to add to it. However, I also like the Anglican emphasis on being incorporated into Christ through participation in sacramental worship. Or, to put it more simply, learning to love Jesus by spending time with him. It seems to me that this offers the promise of helping to give a shape to the Christian life that sometimes seems to be lacking in Lutheranism, but without reducing it to sheer moralism.
A great new track from PE’s 20th anniversary album(!) How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul???
(Talk about a presumptuous title!)
In this post I touched briefly on the question of why God creates the universe in the first place. Keith Ward, following Hegel, suggests that in creating God is able to realize a kind of love and relationship, one with creatures capable of not responding to God, that would otherwise be impossible, and that this constitutes a great good.
It may be that there is no more impious or fruitlessly speculative question than asking why God created the world. Still, the Christian tradition has certainly grappled with it, and it’s intimately bound up with questions about the divine nature, the purpose of our existence, and our ultimate redemption, so maybe some reflection isn’t entirely out of order.
My impression is that the tradition has, in thinking about creation, tried to hold together two ideas that are, or at least appear to be, in some kind of tension. The first is the idea of creation ex nihilo and its corollary of creation as the free act of God. Unlike some of its pagan competitors, biblical religion has held from early on that God brings the world into being out of nothing, that is, there is no preexistent material or chaos that limits God’s creative will. And God is not constrained by any external force or reality to create; creation is an utterly free act of God.
The second idea that stands, I think, in some tension with creation ex nihilo and the freedom of God is the notion that God’s nature is love and that creation is in some sense an expression of the divine nature. Love, it can be said, longs to share itself and the creation of something other than God for God to share the divine self with seems “natural” or “fitting” if not necessary.
In this view it shouldn’t be said that God creates because God “lacks” something, but because it is of the divine nature to share itself. A popular image has been that of a fountain of being that almost can’t help but overflow, bringing other contingent beings into existence. The worry here, however, is that this looks like a kind of neoplatonic doctrine of “emanation” in which creation is a kind of divine effulgence rather than the result of a free purposive choice.
So, we have what looks like a paradox of sorts: we want to say both that creation is a free choice of God and that it is an expression of the divine nature which is love. Whether or not this is an irresolvable paradox will depend, among other things, on how we understand divine freedom. Do we think of freedom as the ability to choose A or B such that God could have just as easily chosen not to create? Or is freedom better thought of as the ability to express one’s nature without being in any way constrained by external forces or realities?
It should be noted here that we run into a similar paradox with the idea of grace. Grace is God’s unmerited favor and freely bestowed on us without our doing anything to earn or deserve it. And yet, graciousness isn’t, we think, just an accidental property of God as though God could’ve just as easily chosen not to be gracious. God’s freedom doesn’t mean the freedom to not be good, loving, and holy, or at least that’s what I think most Christians would want to say if they thought about it.
Interestingly, the contemporary Lutheran theologian Oswald Bayer explicitly makes the connection between God’s graciousness in justifying sinners and God’s graciousness in creation.
He writes:
The world was not called into being because of any this-worldly necessity, but out of pure freedom and goodness. Creation out of nothing means that all that is exists out of pure goodness; it is unmerited: “All this is done out of pure, fatherly, and divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness of mine at all!” (Bayer, “Justification as the Basis and Boundary of Theology,” Lutheran Quarterly, Fall 2001, p. 277; the quote is from Luther’s commentary on the first article of the creed in his catechism)
So, God’s freedom in creation means at least that God isn’t constrained by anything outside of God, but at the same time creation is an expression of God’s grace and goodness. Creation and redemption aren’t two different stories, but part of the same story of God’s self-communication to that which is not God.
Another tradition that saw God’s purposes in creation and redemption closely aligned is the so-called Franciscan tradition (because of its association with Franciscan thinkers like Duns Scotus and Bonaventure). In this view, the Incarnation, the manifestation and communication of the divine nature, becomes itself the purpose of creation. In other words, the Incarnation isn’t simply God’s afterthought or Plan B for dealing with human sin; there would’ve been an Incarnation even in an unfallen world. And creation is a kind of theatre for God’s self-manifestation. You might say that Jesus doesn’t exist for us, but we, and everything else, exist for him!
This tradition draws on John’s logos Christology as well as the cosmic Christ imagery from Colossians in viewing the creation itself as a visible reflection of the divine Word, which is both the reflection of the Father and the archetype for the created world. Created being, in its multitude of forms, refracts the light of the logos in an unlimited variety of ways:
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. (Col. 1:15-17)
What this suggests, of course, is that the Incarnation isn’t some kind of deus ex machina inserted late in the story to salvage a plot gone badly awry, but the underlying theme of the entire story from the very beginning. Christ is the image of the Father, and creation is, in a manner of speaking, the image of Christ.
But if (part of) God’s purpose in creating is to share the divine self with creation, with what is not God, then it’s fitting that it be shared in the manner most fitting to the particular kind of creature. The medievals had the principle that there must be a certain affinity between the knower and the object of knowledge in order for true knowledge to take place. In light of that an Incarnation would seem to be the ideal way for personal beings like ourselves to know God, i.e. a fully personal mode of knowledge. A line of reasoning similar to this led thinkers in this tradition to suppose that God would’ve become Incarnate to share himself with his creatures even had sin never entered the world.
But as we know all too well there is sin in the world, so the Incarnation necessarily takes a redemptive form in our world. In a fallen world, the communication of divine love has a cruciform shape. But the divine nature that takes human form in the Incarnation is the same divine nature that is reflected (if imperfectly) in the rest of creation.
I think one of the helpful aspects of seeing creation as an expression or reflection of the divine nature is that it helps us to see non-human creation as something possessing value in its own right. Our perspective on creation has made it increasingly difficult for us to see the entire cosmos as existing for the sake of human beings alone, as a mere backdrop to the human drama of fall and redemption.* In his book Pascal’s Fire: Scientific Faith and Religious Understanding, Ward writes:
[A]nyone who believes in a creator God can affirm that the cosmos is created so that God can enjoy its beauty. After all, theists believe that the cosmos is a product of the divine mind, so its creation can be compared to the work of a supreme artist, enjoyable and worthwhile for its own sake, without any reference to possible finite persons at all. The universe could still have a point, and that point would be its expression of the power and wisdom of the creator, and God’s enjoyment both of the process of creating and of the created universe itself. This is part of the traditional view — the Hebrew Bible depicts the divine Wisdom as ‘rejoicing in his [God’s] inhabited world, and delighting in the human race’ (Proverbs 8:30). And if Wisdom delights in the human race, it surely also delights in the beauty of the stars. If there is a God, the universe has a point, as the creative expression of the master creator, and the object of divine delight. (pp. 15-16)
Needless to say, I would add that God delights in his other non-human living creatures and that these creatures don’t exist solely to fulfill human needs and wants. Seeing all created being as an expression of the divine Logos should move us toward a more theocentric perspective and a less anthropocentric one.
And yet it remains the case that we believe that God became human, and that the Incarnation represents something like the pinnacle of creation, that in Jesus the divine finds expression in way that is different in kind from the way it is expressed elsewhere. Or to put it another way, that the story finds its climax in this event even if the theme has been present all along.
But holding that all of creation is or can be an expression of the divine nature and glory doesn’t commit us to the view that all parts of creation are of equal value. Personal life does seem to have qualities and capabilities that make it more valuable in some respects. And our tradition has consistently taught that God is personal (or tri-personal), or at least that personal language is the least misleading language we can use about God. Which would seem to imply that, within creation, God could only find adequate expression as a person and could only adequately relate to his personal creatures in this way.
So where, if anywhere, have we gotten to? We started by asking if we could shed any light on why God creates. Does God need to create in some sense, in order to determine the divine identity, say, or to enrich the divine experience? Following the tradition I ruled out the possibility that God is constrained to create by anything external to the divine nature, but I suggested that maybe there is something “natural” or “fitting” in the fact that God, in the fecundity of the divine being, creates a world both as an expression of the divine being and as something to which God can communicate divine love. In this perspective, the Incarnation can be seen as the climax or focal point of the divine self-communication rather than a late add-on to the divine plan or a contingency measure (allowing, of course, that the form the Incarnation takes is partly determined by the exigency of human sin). God wills to share the divine being with creation and will go to whatever lengths necessary to do so, even, as we see in our own case, to the point of death on a cross.
Obviously this is all fairly speculative, open to revision, and to be taken with more than a grain of salt. 😉
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*It’s worth mentioning, however, that there are those who maintain that, given the constraints of very fundamental aspects of the laws governing the physical world, a universe roughly the size and age of our own would be necessary for the emergence of intelligent life on even one planet. Even if that’s right, though, it in no way rule out God choosing the rest of the cosmos for its own sake since God, presumably, can be quite parsimonious in choosing means to realize his ends.
I’m traveling for work, currently staying at a resort in Florida for a company meeting. There’s a reason people don’t vacation in Florida in August it turns out. Though it may actually be more pleasant here than it was in DC when I left…
Anyhoo, my flight was delayed for three hours, which gave me time to make it through a big chunk of Keith Ward’s Re-Thinking Christianity. This has been billed as a sequel of sorts to Pascal’s Fire, and the themes will be familiar to anyone who’s read much of Ward’s other work.
Ward is an anomaly in some ways. He’s liberal in certain respects, wanting to subject Christianity to critical scrutiny (the book jacket has blurbs from Hans Kung and John Shelby Spong), but he’s also a staunch defender of theological realism and natural theology against the attacks both of its atheistic despisers like Richard Dawkins and non-realist religious thinkers like Don Cupitt. Ward also affirms the Resurrection, the possibility of miracles, and the doctrines of the Incarnation and Trinity, though sometimes in ways that might make those of a more traditionalist bent somewhat uneasy.
The main thrust of Re-Thinking Christianity is to argue for a more pluralist and generous Christian theology in part by appealing to the history of, well, rethinking Christian beliefs. This process of rethinking, Ward argues, didn’t begin with the modern period, or the Enlightenment, or the Reformation, but goes back to the very beginning of Christianity. If a certain theological revisionism is part of the warp and woof of Christian theology, then further development can’t be ruled out a priori.
Ward contends that this process is discernible in the New Testament itself, where we see a variety of theological perspectives existing side-by-side and can trace some evidence of development. For instance, it seems that at least some early Christians expected an imminent parousia followed by the restoration of Israel with Jesus and the Apostles ruling an earthly kingdom. In time this Jewish messianic gospel came to be eclipsed by John’s logos theology and Paul’s drama of death-and-resurrection. Even Paul himself seems to have moved from an early belief that the Lord would return soon to a longer time horizon for his eschatology.
Ward’s aim isn’t to debunk later developments by pointing out their divergence from some early pristine Jewish gospel. Quite the opposite in some ways. He sees the process of re-thinking as drawing out the implications of the Christian response to God as disclosed in Jesus when this conviction is set in different contexts.
Unlike some 19th and 20th century liberal theologians (and some more recent neo-orthodox ones), Ward isn’t interested in purging the “simple message of Jesus” from alleged Hellenistic accretions. In his discussion of the early centuries of the Church during which the great ecumenical creeds were hammered out he affirms the value of using the tools and concepts of Greek philosophy to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the universal divine wisdom, as the logos theology of some of the early Fathers did. This was both a salutary response to the intellectual and cultural context in which they found themselves and a creative use of ideas that would’ve been foreign to Jesus and the Apostles to deepen their apprehension of the divine mystery.
Ward also points out that recognizing the process of rethinking that has gone on over the centuries makes it more difficult to ascribe a sacrosanct status to particular expressions of the faith. For instance, medieval conceptualizations of the Atonement or purgatory can rightly be seen as innovations that have to be judged on their merits rather than simply accepted as “the traditional view.” Old innovations aren’t necessarily more correct than more recent ones.
The Reformation, Ward thinks, elevated the principles of pluralism and re-thinking even if in some cases it was against the intentions of the Reformers themselves. Replacing the Pope with the Bible as the supreme religious authority may not in theory demand a proliferation of interpretations of the Christian faith, but this is what happened as a consequence of the inability of all parties to agree on the correct interpretation of the Bible. But rather than lament this fact, he sees it as a step toward recognizing that the things of God will always yield divergent interpretations and thinks that Christians should accept this as a fact of life rather than insisting on the absolute correctness of their interpretation (or that of their church, sect, pastor, favorite theologian, etc.).
If the Reformation yielded at lest a de facto more pluralistic Christianity, the Enlightenment and succeeding centurie pushed this principle even further. The critical approach to the Bible and church history, the revolution in the understanding of the natural world, and radical changes in social affairs all helped to undermine the certainties of Christendom. The appeal to authority and tradition largely ceased to carry the weight that it had even for many of the Reformers. The new knowledge yielded by science and critical historical investigation haven’t yet, Ward thinks, been fully assimilated into Christianity. They call for re-thinking many of the traditional expressions and conceptualizations of things like original sin, the Incarnation and Atonement, and the nature and destiny of the cosmos.
On the whole Ward thinks that this can be an enrichment of Christian thought and faith. For instance, a cosmos as vast and intricate as the one revealed to us by modern astronomy and physics, perhaps populated with many species of intelligent life, can give us a greatly expanded vision of God’s power and providence as well as a richer and more diverse vision of God’s kingdom.
Ward examines one particular tradition that has tried to assimilate the findings of science and critical history into Christian faith, the German liberal tradition associated with Harnack, Ritsschl, and Troeltsch. While Ward admires the way in which they tried to focus on the ethical core of Christianity, their distrust of metaphysics, de-Judaized Jesus, and radical skepticism about the reliability of the Gospels leave us with a seriously impoverished faith. He argues that the principles undergirding such skepticism beg major metaphysical questions and that it’s possible to affirm Jesus as the Incarnation of God in history even while accepting the principles of historical criticism and the findings of modern science. Neither history nor science commit us to the kind of metaphysical reductionism that is often passed off in their names.
Ultimately what Ward thinks we should take away from this history of re-thinking Christianity is not that it’s impossible or unreasonable to affirm traditional Christian beliefs such as the Resurrection or divinity of Jesus. It’s that we can no longer take for granted that the way in which we formulate those truths is final and adequate to reality. Ward doesn’t put it this way, but you might call this an “eschatological reservation” about all our theological claims. Since in this world we see through a glass darkly all of our ideas about God and attempts to describe the divine reality will fall short. Consequently, we should maintain a sense of humility about our beliefs, especially those that lie away from the center of core Christian commitments or are the result of fine philosophical distinctions and abstract argument (he uses the example of the arguments over the nature of the Trinity).
If there’s one place where I might quibble it’s that Ward doesn’t seem to have a very strong sense of the consensus of the Church as at least having a significant presumption in its favor. Granted that re-thinking has always occurred, doesn’t the burden of proof lie on the innovator? It’s hard to say exactly what this burden consists in or what kinds of considerations merit overturning a settled conviction, but it seems to me that if we affirm that the Spirit guides the Church, then we will be inclined to think that she has gotten at least many of the important things rigit over the long haul. I’m not sure Ward would deny this, but he does say things that seem to suggest that more traditional beliefs don’t enjoy special privileges here, whereas I’d want to say that beliefs which have stood the test of time shouldn’t be lightly cast aside.
What Ward seems to me to be defending is in many ways a kind of old-fashioned Anglican latitudinarianism. This was the view that required agreement on essentials but allowed diversity on inessentials, with “essentials” being defined rather narrowly. Thus debates about the precise nature of the Trinity, free will and predestination, and other thorny theological issues, disputes over which had led to bloodshed, could be left as matters over which people of good will could disagree. In our time we might add debates about various ethical issues which threaten to split the churches. Clearly the challenge is walking the line between latitudinarianism and indifferentism, but that might be something worth doing in a time when dogmatism seems nearly as prevalent as ever.
In a follow-up post I’ll talk a little about the balance of the book where Ward discusses re-thinking Christianity in the thought of Hegel and Schleiermacher, Christianity in a global context, and the relationship between liberalism of the kind he’s been defending and liberation.
I couldn’t help but notice that blog-friend Graham at Leaving Muenster is sporting an ad for the “Family Values” tour on his site!
Now, I could be going out on a limb here, but I’m going to bet that Graham is probably not a fan of Korn, Evanescence, Atreyu, Hellyeah, or Trivium.
Gotta be careful what you write about there, Graham! One minute you’re critiquing the Religious Right’s distorted view of what constitutes “family values,” the next you’re shilling for Korn!
By the way, Hellyeah is the new project of former Pantera drummer Vinnie Paul.
Here’s a video of Vinnie buying $1000 worth of Jagermeister – it doesn’t get much more metal than that, friends (n.b. some bad language):
Here’s Trivium, “Entrance of the Conflagration”:
In Part I of his The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society (see previous post), Murray Jardine traces the trajectory of modern liberalism from its beginnings with Locke and Hobbes to the present. His argument is that liberalism embodies the contradictions of the technological society in that it recognizes humanity’s capacity to alter its physical and social environment but lacks a moral framework for limiting and directing that capacity. This is intimately related to liberalism’s quest for a “neutral” public sphere that prescinds from making judgments about the relative worth and value of different types of human life.
Early modern liberalism, or “classical” liberalism, Jardine argues, combined a new sense of individual freedom to be secured by limited government and the free market with the remnants of a natural law ethic. This ethic encouraged thrift, rationality, and productivity – the classic Protestant work ethic. It was believed that a society of productive rational individuals trained in the habits of this ethic were necessary to build up wealth and create a peaceful and harmonious society. Far from being “neutral” about the good life, this early modern version of liberalism reflected in many ways the outlook of the rising merchant and manufacturing class. This version of liberalism was dominant up through the 19th century.
The next stage of liberalism is “reform” liberalism, or what we would identifiy as New Deal/Great Society liberalism. Liberals in this era no longer saw overweening government as the only, or chief, threat to individual freedom, but saw concentrations of corporate power along with economic deprivation and inequality as social ills that could only be remedied by using government to check the workings of the market. While giving rise to needed reforms, this version of liberalism expressed the outlook of a managerial or technocratic elite which saw social problems as tasks to be tackled by accredited experts working in the massive institutional beauracracies that dominated the middle part of the 20th century (big business, big government, big labor, etc.).
Finally, with the economic stagnation that appeared to face western nations at the end of the 1970s we see the rise of what Jardine calls “neoclassical” liberalism, or what I would call “libertarianism lite.” This differs from reform liberalism in wanting to set the market free as an engine of wealth creation, but also differs from classical liberalism in rejecting the old bourgeois ethic in favor of a more thoroughgoing subjectivism about values. Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek were both subjectivists about value and denied that government could legitimately judge between the prefrences expressed by individuals or that the distribution of rewards in the market was a matter of justice. Essentially this is the “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” consensus that is more or less shared in varying degrees by the elites in both our parties.
In Jardine’s view, neoclassical liberalism shows the ultimate failure of liberalism in providing any kind of check on or direction for human creative capacities. As an objective moral order has receded, the market has taken over more areas of life to the point where the model of freely contracting individuals becomes normative for practically everything, including marriage, family, and community. The removal of restraints on the market has resulted in a culture of work and competitiveness that leaves little time or energy for pursuits outside the sphere of commerce.
The result is a consumer economy and a consumer culture characterized by the ethos of expressive or aesthetic individualism. The purpose of life becomes one of self-expression through consumption, cultivating a particular “lifestyle.” This is true for “high” culture as for “low.” Jardine points out that critiques of American “consumerism” often contrast it with the supposedly superior lifestyle enjoyed in Europe, but he points out that what we have there is just a different form of consumerism:
North American and western European socieities are in fact both consumer cultures; the patterns of consumption just differ slightly. North Americans tend to consume things: their homes are cluttered with electronic gadgets, and their garages are filled with gas-guzzling SUVs. Western Europeans, on the other hand, tend to consume experiences: they spend their money on expensive food and elaborate vacations. European consumerism may be, in some sense, slightly more sophisticated, but it is nevertheless consumerism. (p. 124)
The deepest problem with the consumer culture of late liberalism and the “postindustrial” economy is that it is unsustainable. The ruthless competitiveness of the market and the exhausting demands of the culture of work, combined with self-expressive individualism create social anomie and atomism. This in turn is a breeding ground for tyranny because atomized individuals are more easily controlled by governments (see, e.g. Robert Nisbet’s The Quest for Community) and a threat to the sheer physical perpetuation of society, since having children makes less sense in a consumerist society. Children threaten to become, at best, another consumer product. Add to this the possible ecological consequences of an ever-expanding consumer economy, and you have something that can’t, in Jardine’s view, go on.
The deep paradox of liberalism, then, is that, while it recognizes human creative potential, it both underestimates and and doesn’t know how to direct it. It underestimates in that it can’t see an alternative to the ever-expanding consumer economy as a way of meeting human needs. And its moral subjectivism disallows any judgment of value about the ends to which that creative capacity is put. The result is an ultimately unsustainable consumer culture.
In the next part Jardine goes on to articulate how Christianity can provide an alternative moral framework that holds out the hope of a better approach to human creativity.
In a comment to this post bs asks:
Having followed the blog and its comments for a while, I’ve noticed that Pelagianism is taken (by Lee and commenters) to be a dirty word. Embarassingly, I didn’t know what it was and googled it. While I can’t say that I necessarily agree with Pelagius, I admit that his theory, at least superficially, does not strike me as all that bad. Has rigorous analysis revealed it to be half-baked?
This is a good question in part because I think a lot of modern Christians do accept views (not without good reason) that are similar to those embraced by Pelagius. However, there are other components of Pelagianism (and its cousin, semi-Pelagianism) that continue to be rejected by mainstream Chrstianity. It would be presumptuous of me to try and cover the entire Pelagian controversy in a blog post even if I had the ability, but I’ll talk a little bit about why I think modern Christians might be attracted to some of Pelagius’s views, but also why I don’t think they have the implications that Pelagius himself seemed to think.
Pelagianism
First of all, a caveat: my understanding of the “historical Pelagius” is highly imperfect and it’s probably misleading to talk about “Pelagianism” as though it were a timeless set of doctines. Still, it’s probably fair to speak of Pelagianism as a tendency within Christianity, one that comes to the fore whenever we are tempted to emphasize human potential at the expense of divine grace. Consequently, “liberal” Christians have often been accused of being closet Pelagians, as have some conservative evangelicals, though hardly anyone that I’m aware of actually claims the label.
Pelagius was a British theologian of the fifth century whose views were condemned for (to simplify greatly) two reasons: he denied original sin as understood by the church at the time and he denied the need for divine grace to attain salvation. He’s probably known to us now chiefly on account of Augustine’s polemic against Pelagian views on these matters, over against which Augustine developed his own views which obviously have been highly influential in Western Christianity.
Original sin
It’s in Pelagius’s denial of Original Sin, at least in its Western-Augustinian form, that I think many modern Christians are likely to be sympathetic to his views. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, Pelagianism denies that 1. Death entered the world as a result of Adam’s sin. 2. That Adam’s sin (and accompanying guilt) was passed down to succeeding generations in a quasi-biological fashion. 3. That newborn children are in a state of sin, both in being prone to sin and in being actually guilty on account of Adam’s sin. 4. That the entire human race dies “in Adam” or as a result of his sin.
What’s striking here is that I think it’s fair to say that many present-day Christians would want to deny, or at least significantly modify, these tenets of the traditional formulation of Original Sin too. Given the perspective of evolution and the questionableness of interpreting the Genesis story in a literal fashion, we no longer think that death entered the world only as a result of human sin, or that guilt and sin can be transmitted biologically, or that newborn children are guilty of sin, or that we die only because Adam sinned. Death seems to be part of the warp and woof of creation, a necessary condition for the ongoing development of life, at least under present conditions. Likewise, we have trouble making sense of gulit as something that can be passed down physically from parents to child. And it seems morally questionable, to say the least, to suggest that newborn infants are guilty of sin and deserving of (possibly everlasting) punishment, or even the “mild limbo” of some traditional theology.
Divine Grace
The second part of Pelagius’s condemned views seem to flow from his views on original sin. If Adam’s role is primarily one of setting a bad example for us, but our faculties remain uncorrupted, it seems, in principle, that we should be capable of attaining blessedness and moral perfection under our own steam. This is where Pelagius really runs up against orthodoxy since, if we’re capable of being good on our own, what need is there for a Savior? Jesus is then reduced to an example of the virtuous life which we are fully capable of imitating.
Leaving aside the question of original sin for a minute, I think it’s worth pointing out that this purely exemplarist view of Christ simply doesn’t fit with the experience of Christians throughout the ages. We get this at least as early as Paul’s lament that “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Rom. 7.15). This idea that evil is a power within us over which we don’t have complete control, and from which we need to be delivered, is part and parcel of the Christian experience of Jesus as Savior. Jesus is the one who breaks the power that sin has over us. Pelagius, by contrast, takes the view of Stoicism – that by the sheer power of our will we are capable of doing right.
So orthodoxy was right, it seems to me, in seeing Pelagianism as a heresy that strikes at the heart of the gospel. Still, given the difficulties with the traditional doctrine of original sin, aren’t we forced back into a kind of Pelagianism? I don’t think so, because I don’t think Pelagius’ conclusions about divine grace follow from his account of sin. Or, to put it another way, I think we can give at least a partial account of sin that doesn’t fall afoul of the problems with the traditional Augustinian view, but which also gives us a more realistic picture of human life and its need for grace than that offered by Pelagius.
A revised view of Original Sin
In light of our knowledge of evolutionary biology, a lot of Christians have felt a need to revise the Augustinian account of original sin. One such account that I’ve discussed before has been offered by Keith Ward. Ward accepts that death existed long before human beings came on the secne, but he still thinks we can talk about a historical “fall” of sorts. What he means by this is that there was a point at which human beings chose self-interest over the obligations of morality and what he calls a “tacit” knowledge of God. Thus our primal sense of unity with the ground of our being was ruptured.
This primal choice reinforces our preexisting tendencies toward lust and aggression which are legacies of our evolutionary development. Severing our fellowship with the divine renders us impotent to choose the good in the face of these competing drives. Thus the result is a “spiritual death.” And this tendency is propagated and reinforced through the social environment created by this rejection of God. So, human beings aren’t born, in Ward’s view, with original sin strictly speaking, but they are born into a world where it is virtually impossible to consistently choose the good due to the combined factors of our innate tendencies and the social and cultural environment that has been corrupted by the choices of our ancestors.
Though he rejects Original Sin understood as a hereditary transmission of guilt or an innate corruption, Ward parts ways from Pelagianism in holding that the compounded sin of humanity has put each one of us in a situation where we can neither consistently choose the good nor repair the ruptured relationship with God. This is why divine grace is needed: to restore us to fellowship with God and heal our distorted tendencies toward self-centeredness.
God’s restoration of fellowship and healing presence are mediated, Ward says, by the Incarnation. In Jesus “God acts to show the life that is required of us, to establish a community in which such a life can be begun, to show that the human goal of divine-human fellowship is possible, and to draw people into such fellowship” (Ward, Religion and Human Nature, p. 223). This goes beyond Pelagian exemplarism in that our restoration to fellowship with God relies entirely on God’s gracious initiative, and the healing of our disposition to sin is a gift of the Spirit. There is no suggestion that human beings, under their own power, can restore what was lost through the fall.
This is just one possible revisionist account of original sin, and I’m not saying it’s correct in all its particulars. But it does offer a view that takes seriously our need for grace even while questioning the traditional way that the doctrine of original sin has been framed.
The God of Grace: The Heart of the Gospel
The reason that so many Christians find Pelagianism to be wrong, then, may not be necessarily because it rejects a particular account of Original Sin, but that it seems to eliminate the need for divine grace, which is the very heart of the Christian message. Christianity is all about a God who helps those who can’t help themselves. Indeed, setting ourselves up as independent of God’s help is pretty much the definition of sin in traditional Christianity. So, my contention is that what we may find attractive about Pelagius’s rejection of a hard Augustinian view of original sin doesn’t entail the optimistic conclusions he drew about human beings’ capacities for self-perfection. We can still affirm with the tradition that we’re in need of God’s grace to be delivered from our condition.
Hope that helps somewhat. Of course, I could’ve completely missed the point of the question.
A Thinking Reed 