It is not of him that willeth, nor of him thal runneth, but of God that hath mercy.—Rom. 9: 10.
There are fundamentally only two doctrines of salvation’: that salvation is from God, and that salvation is from ourselves. The former is the doctrine of common Christianity; the latter is the doctrine of universal heathenism. The principle of heathenism,” remarks Dr. Herman Bavinck,” “is, negatively, the denial of the true God, and of the gift of his grace; and, positively, the notion that salvation can be secured by man’s own power and wisdom. Come, let us build us a city, and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven, and let us make us a name.’ Gen. 11: 4. Whether the works through which heathenism seeks the way of salvation bear a more ritual or a more ethical character, whether they are of a more positive or of a more negative nature, in any case man remains his own saviour; all religions except the Christian are autosoteric… And philosophy has made no advance upon this: even Kant and Schopenhauer, who, with their eye on the inborn sinfulness of man recognize the necessity of a regeneration, come in the end to an appeal to the will, the wisdom, and the power of man.”
It was quite apposite, therefore, when Jerome pronounced Pelagianism, the first organized system of self-salvation taught in the Church, the “heresy of Pythagoras and Zeno.”” It was in effect the crystallization in Christian forms of the widely diffused Stoic ethics, by which the thought of men had been governed through the whole preceding history of the Church.” Around the central principle of the plenary ability of the human will, held with complete confidence and proclaimed, not in the weak negative form that obligation is limited by ability, but in the exultant positive form that ability is fully competent to all obligation, Pelagius, no mean systematizer, built up a complete autosoteric system.” On the one side this system was protected by the denial of any “fall” suffered by mankind in its first head, and accordingly of any entail of evil, whether of sin or mere weakness, derived from its past history. Every man is born in the same condition in which Adam was created; and every man continues throughout life in the same condition in which he is born. By his fall Adam at most has set us a bad example, which, however, we need not follow unless we choose; and our own past sins, while, of course, we may be called to account for them and must endure righteous punishment on their account, cannot in any way abridge or contract our inherent power of doing what is right. “I say,” declared Pelagius ‘“that man is able to be without sin, and that he is able to keep the commandments of God.” And this ability remains intact after not only Adam’s sin but any and every sin of our own. It is, says Julian of Eclanum, ‘“just as complete after sins as it was before sins.”” At any moment he chooses, therefore, any man can cease all sinning and from that instant onward be and continue perfect. On the other hand, this round assertion of entire ability to fulfill every righteousness is protected by the denial of all “grace,” in the sense of inward help from God. As such help from God is not needed, neither is it given; every man in the most absolute sense works out his own salvation: whether with fear and trembling or not, will depend solely on his particular temperament. To be sure the term “grace” is too deeply imbedded in the Scriptural representations to be altogether discarded. The Pelagians therefore continued to employ it, but they explained it after a fashion which voided it of its Scriptural pregnancy. By “grace” they meant the fundamental endowment of man with his inalienable freedom of will, and along with that, the inducements which God has brought to bear on him to use his freedom for good.
The Pelagian scheme therefore embraces the following points. God has endowed man with an inalienable freedom of will, by virtue of which he is fully able to do all that can be required of him. To this great gift God has added the gifts of the law and the gospel to illuminate the way of righteousness and to persuade man to walk in it; and even the gift of Christ to supply an expiation for past sins for all who will do righteousness, and especially to set a good example. Those who, under these inducements and in the power of their ineradicable freedom, turn from their sins and do righteousness, will be accepted by the righteous God and rewarded according to their deeds.
This was the first purely autosoteric scheme published in the Church, and it is thoroughly typical of all that has succeeded it from that day to this.
In the providence of God the publication of this autosoteric scheme was met immediately by an equally clear and consistently worked-out assertion of the doctrine of “grace,” so that the great conflict between grace and free will was fought out for the Church once for all in those opening years of the fifth century. The champion of grace in this controversy was Augustine, whose entire system revolved around the assertion of grace as the sole source of all good in man as truly and as completely as did that of Pelagius around the assertion of the plenary ability of the unaided will to work all righteousness. The reach of Augustine’s assertion is fairly revealed by the demands of the Council of Carthage of A. D. 417-418, which refused to be satisfied by anything less than an unequivocal acknowledgement that “we are aided by the grace of God, through Christ, not only to know but also to do what is right, in each single act, so that without grace we are unable to have, think, speak, or do anything pertaining to piety.” The opposition between the two systems was thus absolute. In the one, everything was attributed to man; in the other, everything was ascribed to God. In them, two religions, the only two possible religions at bottom, met in mortal combat: the religion of faith and the religion of works; the hb religion which despairs of self and casts all its hope on God the Saviour, and the religion which puts complete trust in self; or since religion is in its very nature utter dependence on God, religion in the purity of its conception and a mere quasi-religious moralism. The battle was sharp, but the issue was happily not doubtful. In the triumph of Augustinianism it was once for all settled that Christianity was to remain a religion, and a religion for sinful men, needing salvation, and not rot down into a mere ethical system, fitted only for the righteous who need no salvation.