Dr Michael Horton on Pelagianism

Dr Michael Horton is one of my favourite Calvinists. He brings the Bible and Church history to life time after time.

Horton is the J. Gresham Machen professor of apologetics and systematic theology at Westminster Seminary California (Escondido, California), host of the White Horse Inn, national radio broadcast, and editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation magazine. He is author of many books, including The Gospel-Driven Life, Christless Christianity, People and Place, Putting Amazing Back Into Grace, The Christian Faith, and For Calvinism.

What follows is an article he wrote for Modern Reformation in 1995 called ‘Pelagianism’.  This post concludes my series on Pelagianism and Semi-Pelagianism, both of which are heresies.  Although I’ve explored these heresies over the past week, Horton adds new insights — both historical and current.

His article is well worth reading, particularly in light of today’s evangelicalism and popular thought. Excerpts follow, emphases mine.

Cicero observed of his own civilization that people thank the gods for their material prosperity, but never for their virtue, for this is their own doing. Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield considered Pelagianism “the rehabilitation of that heathen view of the world,” and concluded with characteristic clarity, “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.” (1)

But Warfield’s sharp criticisms are consistent with the witness of the church ever since Pelagius and his disciples championed the heresy. St. Jerome, the fourth century Latin father, called it “the heresy of Pythagoras and Zeno,” as in general paganism rested on the fundamental conviction that human beings have it within their power to save themselves …

Last week, I explored the history of Pelagianism and how it played out in the life of the Church throughout the centuries.

However, Horton has more on how Pelagius countered Augustine and dug himself deeper into heresy.  Original sin — something which many modern Christians have difficulty accepting — comes into the picture:

Augustine taught that human beings, because they are born in original sin, are incapable of saving themselves. Apart from God’s grace, it is impossible for a person to obey or even to seek God. Representing the entire race, Adam sinned against God. This resulted in the total corruption of every human being since, so that our very wills are in bondage to our sinful condition. Only God’s grace, which he bestows freely as he pleases upon his elect, is credited with the salvation of human beings.

In sharp contrast, Pelagius was driven by moral concerns and his theology was calculated to provide the most fuel for moral and social improvement. Augustine’s emphasis on human helplessness and divine grace would surely paralyze the pursuit of moral improvement, since people could sin with impunity, fatalistically concluding, “I couldn’t help it; I’m a sinner.” So Pelagius countered by rejecting original sin. According to Pelagius, Adam was merely a bad example, not the father of our sinful condition-we are sinners because we sin-rather than vice versa. Consequently, of course, the Second Adam, Jesus Christ, was a good example. Salvation is a matter chiefly of following Christ instead of Adam, rather than being transferred from the condemnation and corruption of Adam’s race and placed “in Christ,” clothed in his righteousness and made alive by his gracious gift. What men and women need is moral direction, not a new birth; therefore, Pelagius saw salvation in purely naturalistic terms-the progress of human nature from sinful behavior to holy behavior, by following the example of Christ.

Women following Oprah Winfrey’s Lifeclass have adopted a Pelagian point of view.  They would say that Christ presents mores and teachings for us to follow.  Outside of that, He does not redeem us — we can take care of that ourselves.

Horton lists the six tenets of Pelagianism which caused the Church to declare it a heresy.  These are worth examining carefully.  I have highlighted the ones most commonly believed today:

(1) Adam was created mortal and would have died whether he had sinned or not; (2) the sin of Adam injured himself alone, not the whole human race; (3) newborn children are in the same state in which Adam was before his fall; (4) neither by the death and sin of Adam does the whole human race die, nor will it rise because of the resurrection of Christ; (5) the law as well as the gospel offers entrance to the Kingdom of Heaven; and (6) even before the coming of Christ, there were men wholly without sin. (2) Further, Pelagius and his followers denied unconditional predestination.

After the Church councils repeatedly declared Pelagianism a heresy, Semi-Pelagianism began spreading. It

maintains that grace is necessary, but that the will is free by nature to choose whether to cooperate with the grace offered.

The Church — via the Council of Orange in 529 — condemned Semi-Pelagianism, including

those who thought that salvation could be conferred by the saying of a prayer, affirming instead (with abundant biblical references) that God must awaken the sinner and grant the gift of faith before a person can even seek God.

Therefore, the altar call prayer which some evangelical churches routinely employ could well be heretical depending on how it is used and presented.

Horton sums up why the Church considers Pelagianism and Semi-Pelagianism heresies:

Anything that falls short of acknowledging original sin, the bondage of the will, and the need for grace to even accept the gift of eternal life, much less to pursue righteousness …

Some people in the Bible were Pelagians.  Horton cites several examples:

– Cain murdered Abel because Cain sought to offer God his own sacrifice. The writer to the Hebrews tells us that Abel offered his sacrifice in anticipation of the final sacrifice, the Lamb of God, and did so by faith rather than by works (Heb. 11). However, Cain sought to be justified by his own works. When God accepted Abel instead, Cain became jealous. His hatred for Abel was probably due in part to his own hatred of God for refusing to accept his righteousness …

– At the Tower of Babel, the attitude expressed is clearly Pelagian: “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves. ” In fact, they were certain that such a united human project could ensure that nothing would be impossible for them (Gen 11:4-6). But God came down, just as they were building upward toward the heavens. “So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city” (v.8). This is the pattern: God provides the sacrifice, and judges those who offer their own sacrifices to appease God. God comes down to dwell with us, we do not climb up to him; God finds us, we do not find him.

– Jonah learned the hard way that God saves whomever he wants to save. Just as soon as he declared, “Salvation comes from the LORD,” we read: “And the Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land” (Jon 2:9-10).

– The Pharisees believed that God had given them his grace by giving them the law, and if they merely followed the law and the traditions of the elders, they would remain in God’s favor. But Jesus said that they were unbelievers who needed to be regenerated, not good people who needed to be guided. “No man can even come to me unless my Father who sent me draws him” (Jn 6:44), for we must be born again, “not of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God” (Jn 1:13). “Apart from me you can do nothing. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit-fruit that will last” (Jn 15:5, 16).

– [T]he Judaizing heresy that troubled the apostles was larger than the issue of Pelagianism, but self-righteousness and self-salvation lay at the bottom of it. As such, the Council of Jerusalem, recorded in Acts 15, was the first church council to actually condemn this heresy in the New Testament era.

Horton explains how Semi-Pelagianism gained popularity in the Church between the sixth and sixteenth centuries.  It may explain why St Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) had what some Protestants see as a Semi-Pelagian slant in his books:

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.

Furthermore, two hundred years before the Reformation and the Council of Trent, Pelagianism was still hotly debated. In England, the then-Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Bradwardine wrote of his own journey out of heretical thinking:

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)

If it was true then, it is still true today.  And it can be difficult to avoid getting caught up in it!  We’ll come to that in a moment.

Just before the Reformation began, an Augustinian revival was underway.  Martin Luther’s mentor Johann von Staupitz wrote On Man’s Eternal Predestination, which said in part:

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.

Staupitz, Horton points out, also believed in limited atonement. Staupitz wrote that the Crucifixion:

is sufficient for all, though it was not for all, but for many that his blood was poured out.

As we saw the other day, the Age of Enlightenment spread Pelagian ideas on a secular level which then crept back into the Church. Horton explains:

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 …

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.

Along came Charles Finney, who did much to further this heresy in the 19th century. His twisted theology and enthusiasm (not a good thing theologically) live on today in many Evangelical circles.

Finney denied original sin … 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 ...

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.”

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…

Arminian revivalists preaching at the same time as Finney also furthered Pelagianism. Horton tells us:

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.

Pelagianism is insidious — not only in the religious realm but in the secular world. The messages we receive about not smoking, not drinking, not overeating and not taking exercise play into what in Wesleyanism is called the ‘perfection’ or ‘holiness’ doctrine.  If only, if only, if only … we could achieve perfection, then we would have a utopia, or as one of Oprah’s Lifeclass students put it — borrowing the words of Eckhart Tolle — ‘a New Earth’.  No!

Horton says:

that which in our circles today is often considered “Arminianism” is really Pelagianism.

As to our inherent ‘goodness’ as human beings, today’s Evangelicals seem to line right up with Oprah’s Lifeclass students:

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).

Pelagianism and Semi-Pelagianism are highly dangerous and, possibly, highly contagious, heresies. Pray for God’s grace that we may avoid them and discern them when we see them.  May He also grant us His grace to be able to point them out to our fellow Christians.

End of series