Pelagius:

Are we really that bad?

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How bad are human beings? It would have to be admitted that the obvious answer is ‘well, pretty bad’.

But anyone who is a parent knows that a key tactic in helping children to behave is to expect better of them. Somehow, they will rise to meet the standard expected of them.

Aren’t human beings as a whole like this? If we simply say ‘It’s no good: they’re simply evil and always will be’ won’t we get what we expect? Doesn’t it make sense to say to people, ‘not only is doing good something you ought to do; it is also something you can do’?

This very debate was circulating it amongst Christians some 1500 years ago.

Pelagius was a British theologian who took morality - and the moral responsibility of human beings - seriously. And he lived through a time in which a great civilization was decaying around him. He would have been witness to tremendous and brutal evils in his time, living as he did around the sack of Rome in the early 5^th Century.

His teaching was not that human beings are naturally good - that doctrine would have had no purchase at all amongst those who had seen limbs hacked off and heard the screams of the rape victims. Rather, he held that man and woman were free to choose the right or the wrong. Each of us could and should and would be held fully accountable for our actions. We ought to hear the full impact of God's address to his people 'Be holy, as I am holy', or as Jesus said: ‘You must therefore be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect’.

For Pelagius: this means what it says. Surely Jesus would not have said it if was not a moral possibility. He would not have given us a task we could not accomplish, difficult though it may be. Moral pessimism is insulting to the creator of human beings, who created not puppets or beasts, but persons.

This is how Pelagius described it. Think about what happens when you do anything. There are three aspects to it: your ability, or power to do the act; your intention to do it; and the actual moment when you put your power and your intention together and realize the action. As Pelagius thought of it, the power that we have to act comes from God. But our intentions and the realization of our actions belong to us. When we choose to do the right, in order words, we can count on power from God to aid us. But it is we who choose it. The first step is ours.

It isn’t too hard to see what made and still makes Pelagianism attractive. First, like most decent heresies, it could appeal to Biblical sources. The commands of the law and of Jesus were surely commands that could be carried out and ought to be taken seriously.

Second, it was the remarkable lives of holiness that Christians had lived in the first years of the Christianity that had been perhaps the most remarkable testimony to the truth of their cause. Pelagianism was a call to return to this source of strength in the face of social chaos.

Third, Pelagianism is a theology that seems to treat us like individuals and like adults. It demands that we put aside childish excuses, and take responsibility each for our own actions. It requires of us discipline and hard work; it calls us to virtue.

Fourth, it is positive about humankind in a way that seems to honour the creator’s stamp on us. Human beings have a high destiny indeed serving so majestic a God and seeking to imitate him.

But the Pelagian movement ran headlong into arguably the stoutest defender of biblical orthodoxy the church has ever seen: Augustine of Hippo.

His first reply to the Pelagian teaching was to agree with this at least: the human being as made by the Creator is a glorious creature, possessed of a true freedom - the freedom not to sin, being endowed with a good will and an inclination to do the right thing.

However: Adam fell. The fault was entirely with him: there was no way in which God could be blamed for his lapse. His will, free to not sin, had the possibility of choosing in error. This first sin was not merely Adam’s affair: because in that sin a great fall occurred than in any of the myriad sins that followed it. Romans 5:12 in particular is his text here.

The result of Adam’s sin is that human nature is terribly scarred and deformed. In every aspect, human beings are now enslaved to sin and destined for death. We are ignorant, lustful and dying. We have lost above all that the use of that free will that Adam enjoyed not to sin. We cannot now avoid sin: sin hangs around even our good, as a bad smell over a corpse. We may still have a free will, but now only use it as a matter of fact to do wrong.

This is simply the killer blow against Pelagianism: the very fact of human behaviour, throughout history and across cultures. We who live in the wake of the horrors of the terrible 20^th century ought to know this more than anyone in history. As critic George Steiner once said: “We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.” Pelagius’ teaching fails simply on account of the fact that human beings, even when they know the right thing to do, cannot actually do it.

But if the effects of sin loom large in Augustine’s teaching, it is because the power of grace is overwhelming. His pessimism about human nature gives him no confidence that Pelagius is anything but a deceiver, encouraging in men and women pride to think they can free themselves from the mire. Without God’s help we cannot, says Augustine, overcome the temptations of this life. And grace cannot be merely a matter of external aids, such as the teaching of Jesus about the godly life. Augustine was able to see that Pelagius had a shrunken view of the cross as God’s free gift; and no view of the Holy Spirit as likewise the free gift of God himself to give us, not a kick in the rear, or a great example, but a whole new birth.

If we were once dead in our sins, then how are we now alive to God in Jesus Christ by his Holy Spirit, and truly freed for doing the works of God? Surely it can only be by the mercy and grace of God!

Pelagianism is very much alive and well: and it takes both secular and religious forms. Partly it is alive and well because the need for moral teaching and guidance has never been more pressing. We have forms of deterministic thinking that need repudiating: that we are determined by our genes, for example, or that society is to blame, or our parents. It may be tempting to want to preach Pelagianism in the teeth of that kind of moral laziness. But we need to remember that what people need more than anything is not better moral training: they need a powerful gospel of forgiveness and new life; a gospel of sheer grace, in other words.

Here are three types of Pelagianism to beware of:

1) self-help Pelagianism. Unleash The Power Within is what I want to hear: take hold of your full humanity in every aspect. Be a remarkable human being. Unfortunately, there is also a market for Christianised self-help manuals that are little better. They are targeted at our feelings of spiritual inadequacy, which we pretty much all have. They tell us: the truly uninhibited walk with Jesus could be yours if only you take action now! Within evangelicalism, the Holiness movement was and is especially guilty of this – enticing Christians away from grace and encouraging a deadly spiritual pride.

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2) existentialist pelagianism Less religious is the Pelagianism of existentialism, which says basically, the world is meaningless and chaotic: and the best we can do is take responsibility for it. Trying to explain things actually makes things worse. So, in Albert Camus’ novel The Plague, it is the man who just does what is humane and stops trying to make sense of it all who is the hero. Of course, in reality, it is the believers who actually make the difference, not the existentialists.

3) The Pelagianism of the moral gospel: The reduction of the Christian gospel to values, or a set of political rights to be protected… this is always the risk with defending Christian morality in the public square – you encourage a Pelagian view of Christianity, as if somehow you could have values without worship, and moral activity without spiritual transformation.