Category Archives: Pelagianism

The Original Sin of Sex in Augustine, Ambrose, and Lombard

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It is no secret, for those whom it is no secret, that Augustine believed that original sin was a genetic material stuff that was propagated in and among the human mass through the lust of sexual intercourse. Indeed, some of this, no doubt, was developed in the context of his Manichean background; but also, Augustine believed that the passions themselves were ultimately representative of the very base of sin, or what he identified as concupiscence (self-love). He wasn’t the only one who believed this, there were many others, following, like Ambrose, and later Peter Lombard, who affirmed the same in regard to the relationship between post-fall sexual relationships and the propagation of original sin sired in that act. Here is Lombard in his Sentences giving his own view on this, followed by prooftexts from both Ambrose and Augustine.

Chapter 4 (209)

HE SHOWS THE CAUSE OF THE CORRUPTION OF THE FLESH, FROM WHICH SIN OCCURS IN THE SOUL. For the flesh became corrupt in Adam through sin. Before sin, a man and a woman could join together without the incentive of lust and the burning of concupiscence, and there was a marriage bed without stain; but after sin, there cannot be carnal joining without lustful concupiscence, which is always a flaw, and even a fault, unless it is excused by the goods of marriage. And so it is in concupiscence and lust that the flesh is conceived which is to be formed into the body of the offspring. And so the flesh itself, which is conceived in vicious concupiscence, is polluted and corrupted. From contact with such flesh, the soul, as it is infused, derives the stain by which it is polluted and becomes guilty, that is, the vice of concupiscence, which is original sin.

  1. THAT BECAUSE OF THE CORRUPTION OF THE FLESH, WHICH IS THE CAUSE OF SIN, SIN IS SAID TO BE IN THE FLESH. And that is why sin is said to be in the flesh. And so the flesh which is sown in the concupiscence of lust has neither guilt nor the action of guilt, but its cause. Therefore, in that which is sown, there is corruption; in that which is born by concupiscence, there is vice.
  2. Hence Ambrose, on the words of the Apostle, says as follows: “How does sin live in the flesh, since it is not a substance, but a privation of the good? In this way: the body of the first man was corrupted through sin, and that corruption remains in the body through the nature of the offense, preserving the force of the divine sentence promulgated against Adam, by association with whom the soul is stained by sin. And so it is because the cause of the deed remains that sin is said to live in the flesh.” This is the law of the flesh.—The same: “Sin does not live in the spirit, but in the flesh, because the cause of sin is from the flesh, not from the soul; because the flesh is, from its origin, of the flesh of sin, and through its transmission all flesh becomes [flesh] of sin.” But the soul is not transmitted and so it does not have the cause of sin in it.
  3. Augustine too, in a sermon On the Words of the Apostle, shows that the soul contracts sin from the flesh; he says: “The vice of concupiscence is what the soul contracted, but from the flesh. For human nature was not first established with vice by God’s work, but it was wounded by vice coming from the choice of the will of the first humans,” so that there is not good in the flesh, but vice, by which the soul is corrupted.[1]

A truly unbiblical development and accretion, but one that Augustine, and those following, felt needed to be pressed in order to keep the heretical teachings of Pelagius, and the Pelagians at bay. This is what happens when an imbalance is presented into the mix of theological development, particularly as that obtains in the heat of polemical relationships. Not to mention, by time the Augustinian and Pelagius disputation occurred, theological matters had also become a deeply political aggression.

Clearly, from Scripture, the Apostle encourages sexual intercourse (not to mention the epistle to the Hebrews) as a duty, and yet a pleasure, to be had in the marriage bond between a man and a woman.

Now concerning the things about which you wrote, it is good for a man not to touch a woman. 2 But because of immoralities, each man is to have his own wife, and each woman is to have her own husband. 3 The husband must fulfill his duty to his wife, and likewise also the wife to her husband. 4 The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; and likewise also the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. 5 Stop depriving one another, except by agreement for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer, and come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. 6 But this I say by way of concession, not of command. 7 Yet I wish that all men were even as I myself am. However, each man has his own gift from God, one in this manner, and another in that.[2]

Not simply as an act for reproduction, as Augustine would press. But indeed, as an act of undefiled and pure intimacy; i.e., the two become one in the ‘flesh’ in the communal bond of the love of the Holy Spirit. Latterly, Bernard of Clairvaux, Martin Luther, Puritans like Richard Sibbes et al. would pick up on what came to be called ‘Marriage Mysticism,’ in regard to the relationship between Christ and His Bride, the Church. In other words, the intimacy envisaged by the act of sexual penetration in the bonds of holy matrimony were so (and are so) sanctified, that it could be the symbol of the intimacy that Christ and His Bride have within the bond of God’s Holy Life as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (whose life itself is known to be perichoretic and interpenetrative in a Subject-in-Being fellowshipping relationship) (see Eph. 5:18ff). All of this to underscore that sex within marriage coram Deo is a peak event in the human experience in regard to attesting to the very triune life of God itself; inclusive of God’s life with us (Immanuel) and in us in Christ.

Augustine, Ambrose, Lombard et al. couldn’t get everything right.

[1] Peter Lombard, The Sentences: Book 2 On Creation: Distinction XXXI, trans. by Giulio Silano (Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2012), 154–55.

[2] I Corinthians 7:1–7, NASB95.

Reading the Prodigal Son Story as an Illustration of a Familial Rather than Legal Relationship

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Here at Athanasian Reformed we often talk about soteriology; indeed, as a nexus interlinked with a whole host of other theological loci, within a theological taxis (order). I was once again reminded by someone on X/Twitter that not everyone thinks these matters through the inner-theological reality present within the warp and woof of Holy Scripture; they simply skim the outer-textual-top and think they have somehow penetrated the marrow therein. But as is the case, the biblical marrow is only gotten at when the reader understands the Bible’s res (reality): i.e., Jesus Christ. When Scripture is “exegeted” through a Ramist place logic, logico-deductive schemata (as TF Torrance refers to Ramism), the purported exegete ends up with a text that thinks in abstraction, and out of a disordered order vis-à-vis its triune givenness as that has been provided for by God’s Self-exegesis/interpretation of Himself in Jesus Christ (cf. I John 1:18). As TF Torrance rightly notes (paraphrase): the context of the text of Holy Scripture is Jesus Christ. Since this is the case (without elaborating on what that entails), to read Scripture from within a center in yourself, as law-based, Augustinian based readings tend to do, is to disregard the clear Dominical teaching that Jesus Himself is God’s center for us; and it is within this relational/dialogical center wherein Scripture comes to have contextual-canonical referent and meaning.

Here is the post, on X/Twitter that reminded me of how important it is to have a properly formed, genuinely Christian biblical hermeneutic:

Romans 4:5 the verse abused by unemployed salvationists who think it means u can be ungodly have faith & never have works & be saved satan loves fooling ppl who want to cling to their flesh bcuz they can’t discern scripture talking about how the old covenant law can’t save [sic]

This Xr’s handle is @ osasisHERESY (i.e., once saved always saved is heresy). I’m simply snagging this guy’s assertion, about salvation, because it serves exemplary for how many many people think salvation (at least as that gets expressed online, and even in the literature). As my original tag, as I retweeted his post noted: “Doesn’t understand God’s Grace. He has separated the Person of grace from the works of grace, and placed the works of grace on us rather than Christ. Historically this is known as moralistic Pelagianism.” This poster’s thinking is really a subset of a larger soteriological frame that Latin (Western) Christianity has inherited, at pervasive levels; whether that be Catholic or Protestant iterations.

What I want to do with the rest of this post is use Luke 15, and the famous Dominical teaching, therein, on the prodigal son. I want to offer two different frames, and show how those frames, as the interpretive lenses, respectively, bear on an exegetical conclusion relative to the topic at hand. That is: “when someone is genuinely born again of an imperishable seed, is it possible to then lose this imperishable seed (as our poster on X asserts is the case)?” Depending on what the frame is, that is used to read the prodigal son story, will lead to variant theological-exegetical conclusions. As will become evident, what I am doing with Luke 15 ends up being something like a theological thought experiment; with the intention of illustrating how a broader understanding of soteriological theory is working within the canonical text of Holy Scripture. That is to say, I am not attempting to maximally prove from our passage that a so-called ‘once-saved-always-saved’ frame is indeed the frame present within a reading of Luke 15. Instead, more minimally, I am using the prodigal son narrative to suggestively illustrate what a law-based reading of salvation looks like juxtaposed with what I will call a familial (which could also be called filial or marital, by way of other biblical analogies/realities). The Christologically conditioned hermeneutic I am attempting to illustrate, through engagement with Luke 15, comes from a depth dimensional or deeper engagement with the context of the text of Holy Scripture, as that is provided for by the Christ. That is the aim of my post: to suggestively illustrate, at a theological level, that if the so-called prodigal son was in a work-release program set by his judge (father), then a so-called once-saved-always-saved frame (which our X poster calls “hyper grace”) would indeed, end up being sorely deficient and errant. But if the frame is understood, even as the immediate context provides for, as a familial relationship, as a father-son relationship seemingly gone awry, then the way we read this will end up illustrating how salvation, in the Bible, should be understood, indeed, as a familial relationship wherein the relationship can never be lost (it is biological, of a supranatural level, as it were—i.e., based on the shed blood of Immanuel’s veins; we as his adopted brothers and sisters).

 

The Text: Luke 15.11–32, The Prodigal Son

11 And He said, “A man had two sons. 12 The younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the estate that falls to me.’ So he divided his wealth between them. 13 And not many days later, the younger son gathered everything together and went on a journey into a distant country, and there he squandered his estate with loose living. 14 Now when he had spent everything, a severe famine occurred in that country, and he began to be impoverished. 15 So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. 16 And he would have gladly filled his stomach with the pods that the swine were eating, and no one was giving anything to him. 17 But when he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired men have more than enough bread, but I am dying here with hunger! 18 I will get up and go to my father, and will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in your sight; 19 I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me as one of your hired men.”’ 20 So he got up and came to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion for him, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. 21 And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ 22 But the father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet; 23 and bring the fattened calf, kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; 24 for this son of mine was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found.’ And they began to celebrate.

25 “Now his older son was in the field, and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. 26 And he summoned one of the servants and began inquiring what these things could be. 27 And he said to him, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has received him back safe and sound.’ 28 But he became angry and was not willing to go in; and his father came out and began pleading with him. 29 But he answered and said to his father, ‘Look! For so many years I have been serving you and I have never neglected a command of yours; and yet you have never given me a young goat, so that I might celebrate with my friends; 30 but when this son of yours came, who has devoured your wealth with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him.’ 31 And he said to him, ‘Son, you have always been with me, and all that is mine is yours. 32 But we had to celebrate and rejoice, for this brother of yours was dead and has begun to live, and was lost and has been found.’”

 

Law-Frame Reading

Let’s think our passage through a Law-Frame rather than a Familial-Frame. The Law-Frame is the frame our Xr is using to arrive at the conclusion that someone can “lose their salvation.” The Law-Frame reading of Luke 15 would set the father-son relationship up as a judge-subject-criminal relationship. The son-subject in this frame would have run away from the legal jurisdiction of his judge, and from there engage in further perverse and potentially even criminal (law-breaking) behavior. As the son-subject ran out of resources, he would attempt to go back to his judge-father seeking mercy from the court; seeking permission back into the welfare system that he had available to him prior to his criminal fleeing. But since the judge isn’t the subject’s father, there is no necessary (biological-familial) relationship present; as such a merciful, even gracious relationship is not present, leaving the subject at the court’s mercy. But the court has no latitude available to it, even it if wanted to merciful, and allow the subject back into the kingdom. The subject, because of disobedience (to stay within the boundary of the judge’s jurisdiction, the kingdom), must prove by his obedience, by his performance, that he is a trustworthy client of the kingdom; bearing fruits showing himself worthy of the conditions set forth by the kingdom and its judge, in order to be provisionally let back into the kingdom. As the subject-son came back from the far country he would have to forever meet the conditions of the kingdom, set-out by the judge, in order to stay in the kingdom; otherwise, he would be cast out of the kingdom, forever, and this based on his lack of obedience and performance before the judge and the suitors he represents in the kingdom. The whole relationship is contingent not on the judge, but on the subject’s-son’s ability and desire to keep the codes of the kingdom. Outwith that type of obedience there is no legal place for the subject to be a son of the kingdom.

Familial-Frame Reading/Judge judged

This frame requires less development, since it is the immediate frame and context of our passage in Luke 15. The father-son relationship is the frame. The son has all the resources of the father available by pure virtue of him being his father’s son. He doesn’t have to perform for them, there is no obedience required of him, he simply has these resources (to one degree or another) available to him as one who was born into his father’s family. This is most clearly evidenced by the fact that when the son chooses to rebel, and be disobedient and “squanderous” with his father’s resources (and freedoms), that the son, no matter what kingdom he is apparently living in, remains the father’s son. When the son realizes what a fool he’s been he simply goes back to his father, seeking his father’s mercy. But remember, the whole time, the whole season, he remained the father’s son; not because of who the son had chosen to become, outside the normal expectations of the family, but based on the seed of the father that remained in the son, no matter how the son performed or “dis-performed.” When the son came back to the father, the father welcomed him back as if a son from the dead. All that mattered to the father was that his son was alive, and had come home from his disobedience. None of this was based on legal conditions being met, but instead on the fact that the son was simply the son of the father by birth. Within that relationship there was nothing thicker than the blood that bonded the son and the father together, not even the son’s disobedience.

How much more then is the blood thicker than any of our disobediences that might attempt to dis-bond us from our heavenly Father? The Son’s blood, is indeed of the imperishable seed, from the indestructible life of the triune life for the world in Jesus Christ. Within God’s covenant of grace, He is first and foremost our Father; indeed, on analogy, as He was and is the Father of Israel; indeed, and Jesus ultimately being the consummate Israel of God. We are so thoroughly entwined in the life of God, at the point of His conception for us in Christ, that the idea of being dis-bonded from him, based on some sort of extra-legal apparatus simply is the possible impossibility. This goes so far to even think that the legal apparatus was enforced, as in our first scenario, and the Son enters even into that relationship, who in fact is the Judge, and becomes the Judge judged for us (as Barth so rightly emphasizes).

Conclusion

As I noted in the beginning of this little post, the appeal to Luke 15 is only a minimalistic exercise. That is to say, I recognize that in fact the actual context of Luke 15 is Jesus referring to the expansiveness of His salvation offer over against the narrowness that the Pharisees and religious leaders of his day were offering. But in an attempt to suggestively illustrate how the Prodigal Son story would have looked much different, if framed from a nomist (law-based) reading of Scripture, I have taken the liberty of reframing it in a way that showed how the story itself would have no legs, no texture within the fabric of the Second Temple Judaic period that Jesus inhabited. So, there was something much deeper than law-keeping, that went beyond the cultic practices that the Pharisees et al. had absolutized and relativized to their Jewry. God’s relationship to the Jew and Gentile alike, according to Jesus, was and is based on the “God who first loved us, that we might love Him.” And because He knew we couldn’t love Him, in and of ourselves, or ever, He forged a way for us by “becoming us that we might become Him” by the grace of adoption; He feigned not to leave us as orphans, but instead, to make us His dearly beloved sons and daughters through the vicarious humanity, and big brother love of Jesus.

My hope is that readers, even antagonistic ones, might see how the frame we read Scripture through is all important. My money is on reading Scripture through its triune reality, given for us in the face of Jesus Christ. In His reality, there is space for disobedience; this, of course, is not the ideal, but it is the reality as we continuously remain simul justus et peccator (simultaneously justified and sinner) in this in-between not yet time.

A final note: to think of salvation as once saved always saved versus not once saved always saved, per se, or vice versa, is to think the frame of salvation from completely non-biblical errant theological premises. Salvation is God for us in Jesus Christ. God is elect for us in the humanity of Jesus Christ. God is the salvation that fills the gap that we never could between us and Him. God is Father of the Son / Son of the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit, and it is this life, this inner reality of the covenant between God and humanity, in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, wherein life eternal is wrought and won for all. We say Yes, as an echo of God’s Yes and Amen for us, who is the Christ. When we are found in Him, we are born again of an imperishable seed, that will endure as long as the Word of God. Indeed, the Word of God is Jesus Christ, and when we come into His life, as He first came into ours, it is in this combine of life that a person becomes “eternally secure” within the Father’s big hand. Within the Father’s hand it may superficially appear that they/we are falling or have fallen, but that is only the space between the Father’s upper and lower hand; they/we haven’t nor cannot escape His hands; not because of who we are for Him, but because of who He is for us: as Father of the Son / Son of the Father.

Clearly, there are people in the world who profess Christ, but have never become “possessors” (to use an old phrase); that is, who have never become ‘spiritually’ united to Christ. But de jure, when someone genuinely has come into spiritual union with the living God through Christ, there is in fact space for disobedience. This is not the aim, or the ideal, but it is in fact the reality. Any other Gospel other than this is a No-Gospel, based on a Pelagian type of performance and continuity of law-keeping; indeed, all the days of the “performer’s” life. If someone proclaims a Gospel to you that makes the Gospel contingent on you and your performance of the Gospel, then they are proclaiming to you another Gospel; may they be anathema.

Pelagian Creation and the Regnum Christi

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Pelagian Creation is a neologism I just thought of as I was reflecting on the piece we will be reading along with from Barth’s Church Dogmatics. I have written, over the last few months, on the locus of Pelagianism with reference to a particularly popular soteriological movement online. But I don’t want to get swamped down by that focus too much in this post, since functional Pelagianism is a pervasive phenomenon that is present throughout a variety of theological and philosophical frameworks today. I think what Barth is onto undercuts Pelagianism, in all of its forms, even if in this particular pericope from him, it is indirect. In other words, he doesn’t mention Pelagianism here, but if we internalize what he writes, and if we have any notion of Pelgianism operative in our wandering theological thoughts and acts, this should correct that; repentance should be forthcoming; and a freshness of life just around the corner.  

The following is taken from Barth’s CD II/2, which of course is the infamous section where he reformulates a doctrine of Reformed double predestination; more pointedly a doctrine of election. That is the context of this passage, which you will see momentarily. Hopefully what you will grasp is just how central a proper doctrine of election is to a proper Protology and doctrine of creation. It is fitting that with how we start theologically will shape how we end, and all things in-between. Often times people simply start midstream, say with soteriology, without first attending to ‘first things,’ as Barth does here. What I wonder is if the reader will see, as I have, how what Barth is communicating might defeat Pelagianisms and other forms of Pure Nature. He writes: 

Again, if the doctrine of election is treated as something secondary and supplementary along the lines of the three possibilities mentioned, this means that it may well appear as if we could deal at least with creation and sin without any previous consideration of this decisive word, this mystery of the doctrine of reconciliation. But in this case creation takes on the character of a presupposition relatively independent of reconciliation and redemption. It becomes self-sufficient. It has its own reality and must be considered in and for itself. But this makes it appear as if the universe and man might well have been created and sustained without any inner necessity of the continuation and completion of the divine work in reconciliation and redemption. They may, then, be considered directly, apart from the divine election and decision, apart from the kingdom of Christ. But in this case there arises the concept of a realm whose existence allows us at least to question the infinity and divinity of this kingdom, opposing to it the parallel kingdom of nature. But this means that sin, the mishap which takes place in this separate kingdom of nature, acquires the character of an unforeseen incident which suddenly transforms the good creation of God into something problematical, breaking and shattering it in such a way that only a few traces of the original remain and what virtually amounts to a different world is brought into being. On this view God Himself appears in a sense to be halted and baffled by sin, being pressed back into a kind of special “world of God.” From this it might easily appear as if reconciliation is the corresponding escape from this dilemma, a mysterious wrestling with what is almost a rival God, a reaction against a different power, something not at all in keeping with the unity and omnipotence of God. In the whole of the divine work, however, it is really a question of only a single act of divine rule. This act is, of course, differentiated and flexible within itself. But it is not arrested or broken. It fulfils itself step by step, and at each step it is irresistible. We can and should recognise that in his unbroken grace and truth the one and omnipotent God is the One in whom there is neither error nor mistake, neither weakness nor compromise, but who in and through everything lets His own goodwill be done. We can and should recognise that the regnum Christi is not one kingdom with others, for in that case it might well be merely hypothetical. On the contrary, it is the kingdom of all kingdoms. We can and should recognise the fact that however we regard man, as creature, sinner or Christian, we must always regard him and understand him as one who is sustained by the hand of God. Neither in the height of creation nor in the depth of sin is he outside the sphere of the divine decision. And if we see in this decision the divine election, this means that he is not outside the sphere of the election of grace. At no time and in no way is he neutral in the face of the resolve and determination which are proper to the will of God in virtue of the decision made between Father and Son from all eternity. For this reason we must see the election at the beginning of all the ways of God, and treat of the doctrine accordingly. We believe that in so doing we shall not be disloyal to the intention which activated Calvin especially as he drew up those different outlines. We shall rather be taking up and realising this very same intention.1 

For Barth, and I’d suggest for us, the way we approach all things theologically ought to be theological. In other words, we shouldn’t engage in Ramist locus methodology and read and think things theological from logically-deductive schemata; but instead, we ought to allow the whole of God’s organic and triune life to pressure us into thinking things wholistically from who God is as revealed in Christ. This is what we get in the above passage from Barth. He is attempting to show how central God’s inner life and free choice to be for and with us is to the creational matter. Without Christ as telos and protos for all of creation all we are left with is an abstractly hot-mess wherein ‘we’ are left to construct a bridge (metaphysic) between God and humanity wherein God’s life in a God-world relation becomes predicated by our choice to construct said metaphysic—that is methodological Pelagianism.  

Pelagianism, in a theological sense, is the idea that nature has a functional non-contingent independence of its own. That nature has the capacity to be for God or against Him of its own self-determined freewill. To think creation in general, and humanity as a subset and yet pinnacle of creation, in particular, in terms that are outside of God’s primal decision to be for creation, for us (pro nobis) is to operate outside of the confessional norms required by a proper theology of the Word. As Christians, in name even, we are such because we are in Christ by the Spirit; just as Christ was in the womb of Mary by the Spirit. He is the pre-conditioning reality of all that was, is, and ever will be. To think otherwise is to think heretically in quite proper ways.  

1. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/2 §32-33: Study Edition (New York, New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 95-6.