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I intend to spend a little time at the outset of these discussions of common grace on a brief survey of the history of this doctrine. While surely it would be of little profit to enter into this history in detail, some important matters are to be learned from a study of the subject as it has been discussed in the history of the church of Christ. The old adage is true: “He who will not learn from history’s mistakes is doomed to repeat them.”
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The fact of the matter is that the whole subject of common grace was not on the agenda of the church prior to the Reformation of the 16th century. The term “common grace” was not used and the idea of common grace as it is maintained today in so many circles was strange to the thinking of theologians. This was true of common grace as God’s universal attitude of kindness towards all men, but it was also true of the term “well-meant gospel offer.”
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Nevertheless, similar ideas as those found on the lips of present defenders of common grace were expressed very early. And it is well to take a brief look at some of them. I intend to write in this installment a bit about the ancient church father Augustine. He and Athanasius, the great defender of Christ’s divinity at the Council of Nicea, are my own favorite church fathers from the time of the close of the New Testament canon to the supremacy of papal rule in Europe and the medieval church.
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Augustine lived in the last part of the 4th century and the first part of the 5th century. He died in 430 A.D., the same day the barbarians were storming the gates of the city of Hippo where he was bishop. He was born from a Christian mother and a pagan father, and in his early years he himself was a wicked man. He continued a dissolute life until he was, under the power of the grace of God, converted from his sinful ways and brought to faith in Christ. Augustine’s early life and conversion, however, were used by God to underscore, in his own experience, the truth that grace is sovereign, irresistible and the sole power of salvation – much like Luther’s monastery experiences and his search for God. Augustine knew from his own experience that he was helpless to break the shackles of sin that had bound him. Augustine became, what the Roman Catholic Church later called him: Doctor of Grace. With supreme irony, Rome gave him the honorable title of “Doctor of Grace,” while rejecting his doctri
nes of grace..
(Left: Augustine)
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Augustine knew that sovereign grace alone could and did save him from the slavery of his lusts. God, whose ways are always wise, used these experiences to prepare Augustine for his calling to defend the sovereign grace of God.
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Augustine was an extremely brilliant man and, prior to his conversion, dabbled in all the philosophies current during his lifetime. But when God brought him out of his unbelief, God set his thinking on theology rather than on vain philosophy. While he was unable to shake completely free from his philosophical meanderings for some years after his conversion, Augustine was compelled to be devoted more deeply to the study of the truths of Scripture by the rise in Italy of a horrible theology known as Pelagianism. And when the church condemned blatant Pelagianism, a modification of Pelagianism arose, especially in southern France, which Augustine also fought bitterly. It became known as Semi-pelagianism.
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It was in his wars against these heresies that Augustine developed his own views on sovereign grace. Knowing that he himself was a sinner saved only by the power of grace, he saw also that these truths were the clear teachings of the Word of God. And he spent the remainder of his life defending them. Augustine, in his writings against Pelagianism and Semi-Pelagianism, taught the doctrines that we today call the five points of Calvinism. He taught sovereign, double predestination, the total depravity of the natural man, an atonement that was limited to the elect, a work of God’s grace that man could not resist, and a perseverance of the saints throughout their life. It is really no wonder that Calvin quoted Augustine’s writings more than the writings of any other church father of the first four centuries.
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Pelagius was a superficial thinker, but, as so often happens in the church, a very congenial man and one well-liked. He taught that Adam was created neither good nor bad, with a sort of morally neutral nature, but with the potential for doing both. When Adam chose to disobey God and brought about the fall into sin, Adam experienced no serious and important consequences of the fall, but remained capable of choosing for the good or for the bad. Nor did the fall have any consequences for his posterity. Sin itself, a matter of bad choices, was only a bad habit, like smoking. The longer one committed a sin, the more habitual it became. But, by force of the will, one could break the habit, repent of the sin, and make this fundamental alteration in his life. In other words, man was saved by his own efforts to overcome habits of sin he had probably learned from other people.
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It stands to reason that such a blatant distortion of Biblical doctrine could not be tolerated in the church, and Pelagius was condemned. But a modified form took its place. This modification became known as Semi-pelagianism. Those who promoted this view claimed that the fall resulted in a certain depravity of man’s nature, but this depravity was more a matter of a grave and potentially deadly sickness than an actual spiritual death. And so, while grace was certainly necessary, the help and assistance of grace could only be acquired through man’s own desire to attain salvation. He was sick, but no doctor would come to heal him unless he summoned the divine doctor to his bedside.
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Thus, salvation was possible for all men. This led inevitably to another position to which these Semi-pelagians held: the idea of a universal atonement rooted in God’s desire to save all men. And here is where, while not speaking in terms of a well-meant gospel offer, the Semi-pelagians taught something almost identical to today’s “well-meant offer of the gospel” rooted in God’s love for men.
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I am going to give a few quotes from Augustine’s writings to demonstrate his commitment to a repudiation of this underlying error of the well-meant gospel offer. Although as I said, Augustine taught clearly all the doctrines of grace, I cannot offer in this forum quotes from Augustine’s writings to prove these points. But I offer two pertinent quotes to demonstrate Augustine’s position on the idea of a gracious gospel offer.
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In defense of total depravity, Augustine argued that the will was a slave to sin and not free. “So, when man by his own free will sinned, then sin being victorious over him, the freedom of his will was lost” (Enchiridion, 30).[i] “And hence he will not be free to do right, until, being freed from sin, he shall begin to be the servant of righteousness” (Enchiridion, 30).
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Not surprisingly, the Semi-pelagians quoted the same Scriptures as are quoted today in support of the well-meant gospel offer. I Timothy 2:4 is one such text: “Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.” Augustine wrote: “. . . but that we are to understand by ‘all men’ the human race in all its varieties of rank and circumstances, -- kings, subjects; noble, plebian, high, low, learned, and unlearned, the sound in body, the feeble, the clever, the dull, the foolish, the rich, the poor, and those of middling circumstances; males, females, infants, boys, youths; young, middle-aged, and old men; of every tongue, of every fashion, of all arts, of all professions, with all the innumerable differences of will and conscience, and whatever else there is that makes a distinction among men. . . We are not compelled to believe that the omnipotent God has willed anything to be done which was not done: for setting aside all ambiguities, if ‘He hath done all that He pleased in heaven and in earth,’ as the Psalmists sings of Him, He certainly did not will to do anything that He hath not done“ (Enchiridon, 103). This interpretation is the same as Calvin gives to this passage.
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Matthew 23:37 is another text to which appeal is made by defenders of the well-meant gospel, and reads: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, but ye would not!” Augustine, in his answer to those who appealed to this text, said: “But even though she (Jerusalem) was unwilling, He gathered together as many of her children as He wished: for He does not will some things and do them, and will others and do them not, but He hath done all that He pleased in heaven and on earth” (Enchiridion, 97).
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Passages such as these could be multiplied, as well as countless passages in support of the other doctrines of grace. Augustine wanted no part of any universal intent or desire of God to save all men. Nor would Augustine speak of two wills in God, one will to save all and another will to save only His people. He was opposed to the doctrine. An early form of the well-meant offer was rejected.
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There were also those among the Semi-pelagians who appealed to the wonderful deeds of the pagans, including the marvelous systems of philosophy developed by the Greeks, especially Plato and Aristotle, as proof of man’s natural ability to do good. In fact, in my own Greek courses in college my Greek professor did not cease to extol the works of Plato; they were, he said, works that brought Plato to the next to the top rung of the ladder to heaven, and he bemoaned the fact that Plato did not climb that last rung. Augustine dismissed these works of the philosophers as being good in the sight of God (even though he had been ensnared by philosophy in his pre-conversion days). Rather disdainfully, he dismissed them as “splendid vices.”
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Greetings and blessings to all,
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Prof Hanko
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[i] All the quotes I give are from Augustine’s writings as found in Schaff, Philip, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1-8 [Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 1980-1986]. From henceforth I will give only the work quoted.