Pelagianism and the gospel

At our youth commission training day, I threw out a few terms that I only briefly explained. I thought it would be good to give you more background and detail.

Here it is...

Pelagius was a heretic in the church back around roughly 400 AD. He believed that every person is responsible for their own life. Adam gave us a bad example and Christ gave us a good example, but neither affected us. We choose freely and are judged by our own choices. The impact Pelagius left on the church, besides being noted in history as having been declared a heretic by the Council of Carthage, is that today we use the term “pelagian” to describe the view that we save ourselves. We can see some of this idea when people talk about free will (and mean that we totally control whether or not we get to heaven) or describe Jesus as a great moral example.

Semi-pelagian then is the perspective that we save ourselves with God’s help, or that it is somehow a shared process. This view might suggest that free will means that Jesus’ death on the cross made it possible for me to choose him and decide to be a Christian. Semi-pelagianism is the view of the Roman Catholic Church because they teach that salvation is by grace and man’s good works. This view means that we contribute something to our salvation... namely being good enough to be saved. They do not teach that we are already good enough but through confession and penitence, we work towards salvation.

This contrasts with the quote we put before you.

"The gospel of submission, commitment, decision, and victorious living is not good news about what God has achieved but a demand to save ourselves with God’s help. Besides the fact that Scripture never refers to the gospel as having a personal relationship with Jesus nor defines faith as a decision to ask Jesus to come into our heart, this concept of salvation fails to realize that everyone has a personal relationship with God already: either as a condemned criminal standing before a righteous judge or as a justified coheir with Christ and adopted child of the Father."
— Michael Horton

We looked at Col 2:6-15 and asked the question... “What part did you contribute?” The answer is nothing, nada, zero, zip! God did it all. This is salvation by grace because grace is unmerited favor. In other words, it is good stuff we get - that we do not in any way deserve.

We did not have time to look at Phil 2:12-13 On that passage, I wanted to point out that our will power is God’s workmanship. Most of the time we notice the idea of working out our salvation but we don’t notice the phrase after it which tells us that it is God’s work not ours. We have to learn to live as people who have been saved already by God’s grace. Which leads us back to the phrase that Thomas Cranmer believed...

“What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.” ~ Thomas Cranmer

I don’t recall if I explained fully who Thomas Cranmer was. He was the first Archbishop of Canterbury after the Church of England left the Roman Catholic Church. He wrote our first book of common prayer in 1549 and revised it in 1552 to make it more clearly unlike the Roman Mass. Our BCP comes from his work. However, our BCP has been significantly influenced by Roman Catholic theology and it really is very different from Cranmer’s final work. That is a different topic though.

We talked about the fact that if we want to get rid of sin in our lives, we need to focus our attention on Jesus and put our hearts on him. The more we love God, the more our behavior will change to reflect that. This is good news! Not that we keep making commitments or rededicating our lives but that we seek to fall in love with Jesus every day. This is also humbling news because we recognize that the sin in other people’s lives and the sin in our society is the result of people not knowing the love of God. It’s not that they are bad people and we are not. We are all sinners in need of a savior.

So to sum up things... salvation is totally God’s work. We merely receive the gift through faith, which is a gift in itself. Where does that leave free will then? Simple... free will is generally true of our choices apart from the matter of salvation. Meaning, I choose who I marry, where I got to college, what kind of car I will buy, where I will live, etc etc. Of course we seek God’s direction on all that stuff, but the bottom line is that we can make these choices. We ought to make these based on where we sense that God is pointing us. If we did not have this sort of free will, we would be merely puppets on strings. If you don’t understand that metaphor, sorry.

So, does that shed some more light on things we discussed way back in January?