The Reformed Perspective

So I'm going to talk about Augustine today and Calvin. I suppose I should say that refer to that Spanish proverb that is surely Augustinian and Calvinist. But it says that every person is, as God made him a whore, only a little worse. In any case, I am the better for my association at Columbia Seminary and grateful to the institution. One of the problems when you get older is that institutions change. And the continuity of institutions, really not in the buildings, but in the persons. And I believe the only two professors at Columbia Seminary who taught me, who are still here, Dr. Richards and Dr. Cartlidge. I did have a note from Dr. Robinson about a month ago saying that he would not be here, but that he would be praying for this particular week at Columbia Seminary.

In any case, let me say as sincerely as I can that it is a real joy to be back here at an institution to which I feel indebted And with you as colleagues in the Presbyterian Church, I have always been a Presbyterian. The distinction between ARP and Presbyterian in the U.S. is quite as critical as racial distinctions in some Southern communities. Albert Brown once sat in the Presbyterian Outlook that I was a product of ARP Church, which made it almost impossible for me to go home again, but I feel greatly indebted to my association with ARPs, and I certainly am a better person for having grown up in the U.S. than I would have been if I had grown up most anywhere else. I'm glad to be with so many of you whom I know in other situations and other places.

How Theology Is Taught in the Congregation

The invitation specified that these lectures should seek to answer the question, how can theology be taught in the local congregation, and it further specified that the answer should at least point to specific methods and procedures, that it should be as concrete as possible, and this is surely a valid request. What the teaching of theology is, the invitation was surely aware, is never simple, nor is Is it a matter of technique, of procedures and methods? There may be some new and easy way of teaching theology, but I do not know what it is. And I have continually asked those who say there are such new and easy ways to tell me what they are, but I have not yet received an answer. theology, it seems to me, takes place in the local church as good, responsible, self-conscious theology informs the life of the congregation and those practices that we have traditionally called the means of grace.

This shaping of a congregation's life by theological concern happens best when it is not planned or programmed, but when it flows spontaneously and naturally out of the theologically informed lives of church leaders, in particular ministers. When theology has been assimilated into the persons, into the thought processes of church people, it enriches the total life and form of the congregation. In a quite fundamental sense. The teaching of theology and a congregation cannot be programmed, contrived, or arranged, and certainly it never takes place by a committee or bureaucratic decree. It happens when the church happens, when the situation is right, when certain theological ingredients are present in the life of the congregation. Now a procedure in these lectures will be, first of all, to identify four theological ingredients in the congregational situation that provide the context in which theology can be assimilated, learned, and taught.

Four Classical Theological Documents

And as a basis for our reflection, we shall take at our starting point four classical theological documents that relate theology to the congregation and to the pastry. Augustine's on nature and grace, Calvin's Institutes, Karl Barth's church dogmatics with section reconciliation, and Reinhold Niebuhr's nature and destiny of man. There are two reasons for approaching the teaching ministry on the basis of these four theological documents and doctrines. First, they illustrate how theology actually informs and shapes the life of a congregation, and theology is taught by the way in which theology is actually embodied in the life and practice of a congregation. And secondly, these four particular documents or doctrines, when embodied in the life of a congregation, provide the context in which the teaching of Christian doctrine can actually take place.

So first, the teaching of theology in the church begins with an awareness of the holy, a sense of the numinous. The Church is not a club, not a therapy group, not an educational institution, not an agency for social change. The Church is a people of God who live in the awareness of the mystery that encompasses human existence and who believe that that mystery has been transmuted into meaning in Jesus Christ. And no one has ever said this better than John Calvin did in the institutes of the Christian religion. And no one has ever put more emphatically the life and work of the church, teaching and pastoral care in this particular perspective of the holy. The perspective is apparent in Calvin's very understanding of theology. The theme that holds Calvin's theology together is a dialectical relationship of God and man, God's relationship to man and man's relationship to God.

As he put it in those remarkable opening words of the Institutes, nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts, the knowledge of God and of ourselves, but while joined by many bonds which one precedes and brings forth the other is not easy to discern. He then goes on to say it is certain that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he is first looked upon God's face. In theology, everything has to do with God and with the relationship of man to him. The same theme also runs through Calvin's understanding of the Christian life. The Christian life is the fact that every human being has every moment to do with the living God. As Calvin put it now, the great thing is this. We are consecrated and dedicated to God in order that we may hereafter think and speak and meditate and do nothing except to his glory, for a sacred thing may not be applied to profane uses without marked injury to him.

We are not our own, that not our reason nor our will therefore sway our plans and deeds. We are not our own, let us therefore not set it as our goal to seek what is expedient to us. We are not our own insofar as we can, let us therefore forget ourselves, and all that is ours. Conversely, we are gods. Let us therefore live for him and die for him. We are gods, let his wisdom and will therefore rule all our actions. We are gods that all the parts of our life accordingly strive toward him as our only lawful go. Let this therefore be the first step, that a man depart from himself in order that he may apply the whole force of his ability to the service of God. I call service not only what lies in obedience to God's word, but what turns the mind of man empty of its own carnal sense, only to the bidding of God's Spirit.

Now a third illustration of this pervasive theme in Calvin's thought is his doctrine of the church. The church differs radically from every human organization in that it is constituted by the acts of God through his word and his spirit. Martin Luther and John Calvin knew of the clarity that shaped their lives, that only one thing is really necessary for the existence of the church, the word of God in preaching in sacrament. Everything else is expendable. Have a desire while other aspects of the church's life may be in the formula that has become a cliche, but that was and may still be the deepest understanding of the reality of the church. Wherever we see the word of God purely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to Christ's institution, there it is not to be doubted a church of God exists.

Now Calvin said the same thing about the church and its doctrine of predestination and in his doctrine of justification. The church is not, first of all, a human organization, but the creation of God brought into being by the divine activity, by the word, and by the Spirit. The Church is to be sure secondarily a human activity, a human activity that corresponds to God's work by His word and Spirit, namely faith and love. Now, someone may protest that the Church depends upon many other activities, pastoral visitation, church suppers, building programs, budgets, and financial campaigns, many other human activities, some of which take place in all human communities. But in the church, these are all ancillary to that which is the essence of the church's life, the action of God through his word and spirit, and the responding human actions of faith and love.

These three illustrations drawn from Calvin's understanding of the nature of theology, of the Christian life, and of the Church all mean that in the Church we have to do with the living God, creator of heaven and earth. The Church is not a school, not a therapy center, not a social action agency. It is a community of faith standing in the presence of the Holy Other. In the Church, and in all of its activities, there must always be the sense of the numinous, the all-filled mystery that once frightening and fascinating, but in whose presence we stand in all in devotion. The teaching of theology in the Church begins with this awareness and this sensitivity. Karl Barth has made this point about the holiness of the Church with typical clarity and vigor.

Holy means set apart, and all this with a final definiteness decisively, unalterably, because it is God who does it. The term indicates the contradistinction of the Christian community to the surrounding world and, in particular, to other gatherings and societies which exist in the world. The Church is not a natural society after the manner of nations, nor is it based on social contracts and agreements of temporary and permanent understandings and arrangements. It is not a society of necessity and compulsion like the State, nor is it a free society for particular purpose like an order or a club or an economic or cultural union. It has its own basis and its own goal. It cannot therefore understand itself in the light of the basis of other societies or follow their goals.

The Holy Spirit and the Church

Without this awareness of the holy, or to put it another way, without the presence and gifts of the Holy Spirit, the whole character of the Church and teaching in the Church are changed. Teaching in the Church must always be in the context of the Holy, which only the Holy Spirit can give. And here, Bart puts it with remarkable directness and clarity. Without this gift of the Holy Spirit, Bart declares, even the most holy work is profane. The Church's preaching is simply a kind of explanation and instruction or enthusiastic protestation. Its baptism in large supper are religious rites like others. Its theology a kind of philosophy. Its mission a species of propaganda. They all may have their interests and importance and practical value from other standpoints intellectual, moral, psychological, sociological, but they cannot be holy without the work of the living Lord of the community.

No institutions within which its activity is done, no goodwill on the part of men who act, no old or new techniques which are used, can make them holy or prevent them again from becoming secular. The community is entirely in the hands of its lord, and that means that it is thrown back on his having mercy upon and making its unholy activity holy and acknowledging it as such. Well, that paragraph from Bart is precisely what I wish to say in the first half of this particular lecture. Now this awareness of the holy is no human achievement. Certainly it cannot be programmed or contrived or commanded. It always comes, as does the church, as a gift. There is something trite in saying this, and all of us know on the top of our minds that the church is God's gift, and that in the church we have to do with the living God, and all of us can say the formula.

The Pastor as Catalyst of the Holy

The problem is, knowing it existentially, knowing it in our viscera, as it were, the problem is having it happen in the congregation. The church as an organization, the preaching service as an exercise of human skill can can all happen by human ingenuity and human planning, but the church in its reality always comes as a gift. There are some things that we can do, and it is more likely to happen if we do them. But finally, the church is always a gift of God. But Calvin was convinced that the pastor is on the human level the catalyst of this experience and of this awareness of the holy. The holy must not be construed certainly in moralistic terms and most emphatically not in terms of obedience to certain rules and laws. All ministers, as Calvin Shulin, are creatures limited by time and space and more than that they are sinners, yet in his lofty doctrine of the ministry he believed that ministers by their persons, by the manner in which they carry out their responsibilities, war and war are a means by which congregations know that they have to do in the life of the church, not with another human endeavor, but with the Lord God, creator of heaven and earth.

For this reason Calvin could speak of ministers as the mouth of God. Now, ministers in our time are acutely aware of the danger of being the mouth of God, representatives of God, and this is surely it for the good. Yet it is disconcerting that in a time when we do not like to think of ourselves as catalysts of a sense of the holy, we have no similar hesitancy in accepting other signs of privilege such as titles, jewelry, robes, and the perquisites of an affluent society. When I finished Columbia Theological Seminary, it took some courage to preach in a robe. Now it takes some courage to preach in a business suit. The serious teaching of theology in the local congregation only begins when there is an awareness of the presence of the holy, an awareness that in the church And one has to do with the Lord God, creator of heaven and earth.

And apart from this awareness, the Church may do many useful things for human well-being, and the Church may make the human plight on this planet more bearable, but it cannot teach theology or embody theology in its life and practice or experience the personal serenity or the sense of destiny that Christian faith distills from the raw stuff of life. Now, let us come a step further, and let us note that the teaching of theology takes place in the Catholicity, in the context of the Catholicity of the Church. of the wide reference, including doctrine itself. But here our concern is with catholicity in reference to the human situation, the human condition, and with catholicity as it relates to the holiness of the Church. And the classical document that will serve as our point of reference will be Augustine's treatise on grace and nature.

Pelagius and the Augustinian Controversy

The Pelagian-Augustinian controversy was next to the Arian debate, the most serious dispute in the history of the Church. It had to do with human nature and with the human will, with sin and with grace, and yet it was also a controversy quite fundamentally about the nature of the Christian life and about the nature of the Church, and for this reason it is important to us. Pelagius, according to the little that we know about him, was a great hulk of a man native of Britain who arrived in Rome about 384 and remained there until 409, one of those critical transition periods in human history. His physical size was impressive, his personality was also impressive. He found the place in sophisticated theological circles, and among the nobility he was a friend of Rufinus, came under the influence of theology of Origen from the east.

He had arrived in Rome at an opportune time when another way of life was breaking up and a new way of life was it yet powerless to be born. There was little personal discipline, a little sense of destiny, the realm of Virgil's Aeneid, of Romanitas, a society ordered by reason and justice that once inspired the messianic poetry of Virgil was gone, and the church was not much better. Good pagans with their mediocrity or their moral sensitivity came into the church, either sensitive or mediocre, and in this situation there was inside and outside the church, a widespread striving, as Peter Brown has put it, to create an aristocratic elite. Sensitive, concerned people outside and inside the church wanted to define themselves over against the chaos, the confusion, the undisciplined life that was all about them.

Low groups of the elite began to appear, each striving to rise above their neighbors. An imperial edict about this time would very significantly condemn some of these groups for wanting to be better than everybody else. As the edict puts it, they consider that it is a sure sign of being low-born and commonplace to think the same as everybody else. And a token of exceptional expertise to undermine what is unanimously agreed. So Peter Brown, Augustine's biographer, concludes, behind the councils of perfection of a pelagius, we can sense the high demands of a sense of nobility, especially the responsibility that nobility breeds a sense of the high demand of the iron discipline of a patrician household. Well, Pelagius was a very impressive person and his message was challenging, even inspiring in a decaying society.

The Message of Pelagius

There are three important elements in that message for us. First of all, the Christian life is Pelagius understood it was relatively simple. There are good people and there are bad people. The good people know the will of God and they do it. The bad people sin out of perversity, out of contempt for God, they sin out of set purpose, and out of willfulness. Pelagius knew the power of habit, the power of example, and yet habit did not reach deeply into one's life and its power could be broken by discipline by will. Pelagius also knew the need for grace, the grace of forgiveness, the grace of the law, the grace of creation. But with it all, life was very simple. There are the good people and there are the bad people. Americans, it has been said, are born religions.

This is true of morally sensitive people in and out of the church, especially those we generally call Christians. The good life, even the Christian life, is simple. The options are clear and simple choices between good and evil. Grace is available in certain aids, especially in the knowledge of what is good in the law. The human person and the human will may have been damaged by parents, may have been damaged by society, but the wounds are not very deep. They are the good people and the bad people, and the difference is in human choice and in the social context of life. And secondly, Pelagius wanted a church without spot or wrinkle. As Peter Brown has put it, Pelagius thought of the church as a small elite group in a pagan-indicating world.

The Church was an elite community which had achieved a clear understanding of what it was in contrast to the mediocrity of society in general. The Church was composed of superior people who stood in judgment upon society. Pelagius wanted not only the perfect individual but also the perfect group, and he imposed perfection not only upon individuals but also upon the church. And thirdly, Pelagius wanted to reform society. He and his followers were outspoken critics of Roman society. Under his influence, apparently a very great influence, rich young nobility gave up their wealth and renounced their self-seeking. The Pelagians, for example, were committed to the redistribution of wealth. They could not have chosen a more critical issue. Perhaps nowhere is the heart of Pelagianism and the optimism of Pelagianism more clearly revealed than in the conviction of some of the Pelagian groups.

That accumulated wealth was just another bad habit that could be shrugged off by Christians on baptism. Now this vision of the Christian life and of a society transformed by the human will, by human discipline, is very compelling. Here is a triumph of the human spirit over passion, weakness, temptation over every obstacle. Here is the superiority of the human person over the heritage of the past, over fate, over the corruptions of the social order. The Pelagians were determined to triumph over the disordered and undisciplined society of which they were a part. They would maintain a different life from the conventional, mediocre lives of their neighbors. Now, there's something very Christian in Pelagius's concern, and certainly every Calvinist should know this.

Like Calvin, Pelagius wanted every Christian to be a monk. The councils of perfection rest upon us all. Unlike Calvin, he believed a sinless life was a simple possibility. exalted in the grace of God in creation and in the power of the human will. And whenever this vision of the possibilities of human existence is lost, and whenever this zeal to be perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect dies, the Christian community will be the loser. But the latest challenge, Augustine's fundamental understanding of the nature of the Christian faith and especially of the church and the Christian life. Pelagius Augustine thought obscured the difference between the church and a community of pagans, of good pagans. Augustine thought of the church as an end for convalescence, not as a aristocratic elite, and certainly not as an elite core for social reform.

Augustine's Case for Grace

Augustine knew, as well as any theologian in the history of the Church, the significance of the human will. The human person, organized and directed, indeed he defined a person chiefly in terms of the will. A person is not what he or she eats, not even what he or she thinks. A person is as a person loves. The two cities were founded by two loves. And yet Augustine also knew that there are many things in life beyond the power of the human will. And therefore he rejoiced in making a case for grace, and the Church has rightly recognized the case that he made in calling him the Doctor of Grace. As Augustine put it, no subject gives me greater pleasure, for what ought to be more attractive to us sick men than grace, grace by which we are healed, for us lazy men than grace, grace by which we are stirred up, for us men longing to act than grace by which we are helped.

Now Augustine's case for grace is very difficult to make. It was very difficult for Augustine to make it, and it's very difficult for us in our time to make it. The ordinary Christian saw in Pelagius only a sincere believer who wanted Christians to take their faith very seriously. If you do not believe this, I ask you to try an experiment. Preach three types of sermons and evaluate both the difficulty in writing those sermons and the responses to those sermons. Most congregations respond enthusiastically to a sermon that exhausts the moral activity, especially if the activity does not touch sensitive concerns. They also respond enthusiastically to sermons that deal with religious aspects of life, prayer, trust in God, the mystery of existence.

They respond least well, and certainly sermons are most difficult when we attempt to preach the gospel, when we attempt to preach the grace of God, when we attempt to put together in a way that is meaningful and relevant and that makes sense out of human experience. God's grace is mercy that forgives us, and God's grace is power that renews us, heals us, and makes us whole again. The simple fact is that Pelagius in his day and the Pelagians in our day have popular Christianity on their side, and moreover, Pelagius could and did appeal to the great theological traditions of the East, and it also exalted inhuman freedom and in the capacity for communion with God. In a very real sense, it was Augustine and the provincial church of North Africa against the world and against the sophisticated theological and cultural world.

Original Sin and the Complexity of Sin

Now, Augustine based his case on the complexity of the human situation, which he believed that Pelagius had grossly oversimplified. Augustine was always respectful of Pelagius. He believed that Pelagius had a zeal for righteousness, but as he went on to say, not according to knowledge, not according to the knowledge of the human situation of Augustine, of an Augustine who is the greatest of all Christian psychologists. Augustine's case included original sin. Indeed, original sin was an important factor in Augustine's case. new that no baby is ever born now into a situation of innocency. The sin of Adam and all of Adam's descendants infects the life of a newborn child at birth. Now original sin has always been an offensive idea, and in his last day Reinhold Niebuhr confessed that he had probably made a a strategic mistake in trying to fling the concept of original sin in the face of modern people.

And Shirley Augustine sometimes clumsily related it too much to sex, to conception, and treated it as though it were an infection in the bloodstream or a defect in the genes. But Shirley, a few articles of Christian faith are so empirically verifiable as original sin, the sin which predates our being a center, the sin which informs the very structure and fabric of social existence, the sin that penetrates our lives in those mysterious ways in which one person penetrates another person's life before our first conscious act. Augustine knew that our situation is not simply that we are sinners, but that we are born into a situation where sin is already present. And he knew also that the corruption of human existence is not superficial. It is not a recent habit that can be easily extended.

It reaches into the depths of the human person, even beyond conscious awareness. He also knew that the corruption was so pervasive in society that the only options open on public issues involve one in evil as when one loyalty has to be denied for the sake of another loyalty. Augustine knew, and this is the point that I wish to make now. Augustine knew that sin is not simply a matter of perversity, of contempt for God. In a very remarkable sentence, in one of the most remarkable sentences in our theology in the essay of Nature and Grace, Augustine puts the human situation remarkably well. Many sins, he said, are committed through pride, but not all happen proudly. They happen so often by ignorance, by human weakness. Many are committed by men weeping and groaning in their distress.

And he knew that we frequently conquer one's sin only to fall victim to another. He once wrote a rich letter, I have, he says, have often observed this fact of human behavior that certain people, when sexuality is repressed, avarice seems to grow in its place. Peter Brown, Augustine's biographer, comments that the Pelagians, in all their shrill denunciations of the ways of the world, never said anything as shrewd as that. In some, Augustine knew that the Christian life is never simple. The good are never as good as they think they are, and the bad are never as bad as as they're thought to be. The good is not a simple possibility. Augustine liked to think of sin as concupiscence, but he meant by it not sensuality, but self-centeredness. And he knew that it infects our best deeds as well as our worst.

As Reinhold Niebuhr put it for contemporary Pelagians, our causes are never as righteous and our participation in them never as devoid self-entries as we think they are. T.S. Eliot has some very remarkable lines that come to mean something to you when you get into your fifties. It goes from four quartets and it goes like this. Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age to set a crown upon your lifetime's effort. First, the cold friction of expiring sense without enchantment, offering no promise, but bitter tastelessness of shallow fruit as body and soul began to fall asunder. Second, the conscious impotence of rage at human folly, and the laceration of laughter at what ceases to amuse. And last, and this is the point of this quotation, and last, the rending pain, a reenactment of all that you have done and been, the shame of motives late revealed, and the awareness of things ill done, and done to others harm, which once you took for exercise of virtue.

The Church as Hospital for Convalescence

No one ever put it better than that, I think. And yet how profoundly analytical and true that is in the perspective of age, that which once we took for exercise of virtue, is seen as flawed and done to others harm. Augustine knew this, and Pelagius did not. Augustine knew that the Pelagian controversy had to do with the nature of the church. For Pelagius, the church is an aristocratic elite, a community of moral heroes. The church was a disciplined army of the Lord in conquest of the world, the flesh and the devil. Augustine preferred to think of the church as an end for convalescence. He acknowledged, as I have said, that the Pelagians had a zeal for God but not according to knowledge. The Pelagians thought human beings needed illumination and help.

Augustine thought they needed healing. The sinner needs a true confession of weakness, not a false sense of capacity. The sinner is not healed quickly, but must look forward to prolonged, precarious convalescence in the end of the church, in the end of the church. As Augustine put it, in his track on nature and grace, our present inquiry is about where went he was able to descend therefrom, who, moreover, is still in the process of cure, the process of being healed, even though he is already in the end. God does not therefore enjoy an impossibilities, but in his injunctions he counsels you both to do what you can for yourself and to ask his aid in what you cannot do. Now Augustine had faced this same question and his controversy with the Donatists.

They too wanted a church without spot or wrinkle, though they concentrated their demand upon the priesthood. It's interesting how the early church dealt with this problem of holiness. They said the church had to be holy, and if it wasn't holy, it wasn't the church. They first tried to say the church is holiness, and therefore its existence depended upon the holiness of its members, and they wanted to limit forgiveness. Finally had to put forgiveness in the Apostles' Creed as an article of faith that was being denied. They wanted to limit forgiveness after baptism, and that's the reason people began to postpone baptism, so we could take care of all those sins. If you could time it just right, that was a very convenient thing to do. And they wanted to say there are certain sins that can't be forgiven at all.

Murder and adultery and apostasy. But they finally had to give up on that. You can't really have a church if it's gonna depend on human holiness, and then they wanted to limit it to the ministers. Well, that also was a precarious read. And finally, it was Augustine, you know, who came to say that the holiness of the church is not primarily the holiness of its members, not primarily the holiness of its priesthood. The holiness of the church is the activity of God that heals, that makes people holy. The Pelagians and the Donatists were attempting to maintain holiness, but to maintain holiness at the expense of the Catholicity of the church. And Augustine was attempting to hold together the catholicity of the church and the holiness of the church.

The Pelagians defined this holiness too much in moralistic terms, the Donatists in sacramental as well as moralistic terms, but Augustine who had a concern for morals and for sacraments knew that the holiness of the church in here is not in the holiness of its members nor in the holiness of its priest, but in the holiness of God, in the action of God through his word and spirit by which sinners are healed and made whole again. Well, Augustine has been called rightly the doctor of grace who celebrated grace, and by grace he did not mean simply a good creation, not simply the law, not simply forgiveness, but the forgiving and healing action of God. As Albert Outler has put it, grace is God's freedom to act without any external necessity whatsoever, to act in love beyond human understanding or control, to act in creation, judgment and redemption, to give his Son freely as mediator and redeemer, to endue the church with the indwelling power and guidance of the Holy Spirit, to shape the destinies of all creation and the end of the two human societies.

Grace is God's unmerited love and favor, prevenient and a current. It touches man's inmost heart and will. It guides and impels a pilgrimage of those called to be faithful. It draws and raises a soul to repentance, praise and faith. It transforms the human will so that it's capable of doing good. It relives man's religious anxiety by forgiveness and the gift of hope. It established the ground of Christian humility by abolishing the ground of human pride. God's grace became incarnate in Jesus Christ, and it remains eminent in the Holy Spirit in the Church. God's grace, God's personal impingement upon our lives, and those myriad ways in which he encounters us in and outside the Church. It has never been easy to hold together the holiness and the catholicity of the Church.

Choosing Augustine over Pelagius

Neither has it been easy to hold together God's grace as mercy which forgives our sin with God's grace as power that renews and sanctifies us. We have always found it difficult to really believe that God is gracious, a stanza that our hymn books omit from Faber's hymn, there is a wideness in God's mercy that puts it very well. But we make his love too narrow by false limits of our own, and we magnify his strictures with a zeal he will not own. Well, Pelagius was, by the standards of American church life, a wonderful Christian man, even if some of his critics said he was overweight and too prideful. He was a challenging figure, dealing with the relevant critical issues of Roman society. And Augustine, in comparison, was really not with it. He was a stodgy churchman of a provincial North African province, and his battle with Pelagius was, in a real sense, against the world, a provincial churchman against the sophisticated leadership of the church.

He believed in such things as original sin and the necessity of infant baptism, and his hopes for this life were relatively modest. He wrote a very great book, some would say the greatest of all Christian books, the city of God, to say that the meaning of life is to be found in no human achievement however great, and that the security of life is to be found in no human achievement however remarkable but only in God. The temptation for us is always to choose Pelagius over Augustine, but if you're looking for a pastor, no matter how Pelagian you may be, you better choose an Augustine who knew how complex human existence is. And there is a a radical difference between the kind of teaching that is done in the church by the Pelagians and that is done in the church by the Augustinians. In the long term, common sense wisdom of the church, Pelagius has been accounted as a heretic and Augustine as a doctor of grace, and we ought to learn from that in the teaching and the life of the church today.