Lecture 7: Original Sin: Augustinianism and Arminianism

The lecture, section by section

1. The map for the evening

   The plan: finish original sin, then begin free will, which next week will be handled philosophically, because free will is a question philosophers have wrestled with for ages and their work sheds real light on the biblical debate. The Pelagian review first: no original sin at all, only bad example passed down since Adam; every person born neutral, scales balanced, sinners because we sin. Against that stands the view now on the floor.

2. The Augustinian definition

   Augustinianism: man is inherently corrupt; the fall brought condemnation and guilt upon all men; the disposition of the will is totally corrupted and inclined toward evil. Man has free will, but that will is governed by the sinful nature, so that the order reverses Pelagius exactly: man sins because he is a sinner. This is the doctrine often named total depravity: not that every person is as bad as possible, but that the will itself is enslaved, unable to choose the good. In the scales picture the teachers keep drawing, nothing is broken in the mechanism of choosing; the scales are simply weighted, so that you freely choose what you want, and what you want is evil.

3. Why all die: the argument from Romans 5

   The first Augustinian argument: all people die. Paul reasons in Romans 5 that death reigned from Adam to Moses even over those who did not sin as Adam did, in the face of a direct command, for in that stretch no such commands existed to violate. Yet they died like Adam. Death’s universal reign proves a universal connection: all of us inherited Adam’s corruption and stand implicated in his sin.

4. Sinners from birth

   The second argument: Scripture teaches a corrupt nature from birth. Jeremiah 17 calls the heart more deceitful than all else and desperately sick. In John 3, no one sees the kingdom without being born again, and if new birth means a restored relationship with God, then the requirement that everyone be born again means everyone is born separated. Ephesians 2 says we were by nature children of wrath, and Romans 5:19 states the reversal of Pelagius in a single line: through one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners. People are not sinners because they sin; they were made sinners in the one man’s disobedience.

5. The coin that always lands the same way

   The third argument is the one the teachers dramatize. If the will’s disposition is unaffected and every person has equal opportunity for good and evil, why has every person without exception chosen evil? Dyke flips his coin: imagine it landing the same side up billions of times running. The odds are good, but there has never been a winner. And the equality is an illusion twice over: even granting a neutral will, no one is born into a neutral environment; only Adam had the garden. We are not really like Adam, so what Pelagius needs he cannot have. Romans 3 declares that all have sinned and fall short, and Genesis 6 that every intent of the thoughts of man’s heart was only evil continually. Something in man must explain that.

6. No condemnation without representation

   The fourth argument, imputed guilt, is where the teachers slow down and refuse to let the class off easily. To be held guilty for another’s act violates everything in our way of life; no one here would accept it in a courtroom. And they observe how culture shapes the struggle: a nation founded on no taxation without representation instinctively demands no condemnation without representation, while Christians elsewhere in the world receive the doctrine with far less resistance. Augustine himself felt the difficulty, which is why he taught realism, sometimes called seminalism: we were really in Adam, all humanity present in him seminally, so that his act was in a true sense ours. Federalism, the covenant-headship account, would wait for the Reformation era. The teachers’ point is pastoral before it is polemical: everyone has a problem with this doctrine, and those who claim otherwise are not dealing with it. Imagine evangelizing with it: you need a Savior because Adam sinned and God holds you guilty. You would be laughed at before finishing the sentence. It is an offense, and pretending otherwise helps no one.

7. Truth before palatability

   Here the course’s method is restated. The palatability of a doctrine does not determine its veracity. Feelings belong on the stage of truth, but never above Scripture, or Scripture ends up interpreted by feelings rather than the reverse. Dyke widens the lens with the history of philosophy: most philosophers have judged man basically good, with dissenters like Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan argues man is evil enough to need a sovereign over him. A culture convinced of human goodness corrects wrongdoing by education and rehabilitation, the program of behaviorism from B. F. Skinner: change the environment, fix the man. And a church breathing that air struggles to preach a Savior, for a Savior from what, our goodness? Pelagius is not a fourth-century problem; he is the modern default.

8. Infant baptism and the sin no one confesses

   The early church’s struggle with original sin left institutional marks. Infant baptism arose to deal with exactly this problem: babies dying with original sin not yet removed, which is why in Catholic practice the baptism of an infant becomes urgent when its life is threatened, and why baptism addresses original sin while confession and the sacraments address the sins that follow. Then Dyke springs the question on the class: how many of you have ever confessed Adam’s sin? We confess our personal sins readily. But the sinner’s prayer, rightly heard, confesses something deeper than a list of deeds: that we are sinners by nature. And 1 John 1 keeps confession ongoing for the sins that follow, with the class’s own careful distinction preserved: fellowship can be strained where salvation is never lost.

9. Romans 5, the hinge of everything

   Now the passage itself, read at length: sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and death spread to all; through one transgression came condemnation for all people, and through the disobedience of the one the many were made sinners, as through the obedience of the one many will be made righteous, and where sin increased, grace multiplied all the more. Patton is blunt about its standing: this is the only passage in the Bible that speaks directly of imputed sin, and if Romans 5 were not in the Bible, we would not be having this discussion. Verse 18’s condemnation through one transgression carries imputed sin; verse 19’s made sinners carries inherited corruption. And the tell, he notes, is what interpreters do with it: those who deny imputation spend pages upon pages laboring to make this one passage fit. Everyone has difficulty with Romans 5, except the Augustinian.

10. The Reformation’s Augustinian roots

    The story now runs forward a thousand years. The church affirmed Augustine and condemned Pelagianism, and semi-Pelagianism with it, at the Council of Orange in 529. But across the centuries a works system sat uneasily beside total depravity, and practice drifted toward balanced scales even while Augustine remained the confession. Luther’s charge to Rome was therefore not innovation but recall: you have left your own roots. Salvation by faith alone rests on the Augustinian premise that man cannot choose God, so grace alone must do everything: not synergism, God and man working together, but monergism, God working alone. The Reformation is built on the Augustinian doctrine of the fall.

11. Arminius and prevenient grace

    Then Jacob Arminius, after the reformers had revived Augustinianism, rebelled against it while insisting on keeping faith alone. His teaching, stated carefully: man is inherently corrupt, truly inheriting a sinful disposition; the fall brought condemnation on none but Adam; Adam’s sin is imputed to a person only when that person sins personally, showing agreement with Adam, imputation mediated through our own choice rather than immediate; and God gives all men prevenient grace, correcting the corrupted disposition so that every person stands, for the choosing, as Adam stood in the garden. The teachers make it vivid: as the gospel is preached, grace levels the scales, and each hearer gets a garden moment, choosing the fruit or refusing it, so that anyone who chooses God does so only by grace freely given. And they underline the concession inside the system: even Arminius would not say we are born neutral. No one inside orthodoxy says that; Pelagianism alone does, condemned from the beginning and creeping back in every generation, including, the teachers admit of themselves, in the daily illusion that today I simply chose good.

12. Dort, the verdict, and the cards on the table

    The Arminian defense is given fairly in four steps: Pelagius is right that guilt for another’s sin offends justice and that command presupposes ability, ability freedom; Augustine is right that universal sin and corruption demand explanation; the only harmony is a God who confers sufficient grace on all, counteracting the corruption and enabling cooperation with him in regeneration; and imputation is mediate, falling when we sin in Adam’s likeness. The church’s verdict came at the Synod of Dort in 1618 and 1619, where Arminianism was condemned and the five points of Calvinism were framed, though the teachers add the honest footnote that Dort was no ecumenical council: the board was Calvinist and the Arminians were condemned before they arrived to defend themselves. These traditions still divide Protestantism, with Wesley carrying the Arminian line and Rome standing nearer to it than to Augustine. Then the teachers show their cards. Prevenient grace, the driving force of the whole system, is, in their searching, found nowhere in Scripture; Patton has tried to build its case himself and cannot, and suspects it exists to make the doctrine palatable. He holds the Augustinian position, with a speculation of his own, begun from Aquinas’s reflections on the angels in the assigned paper, that he promises to unfold later. Against the fear that Augustinianism makes robots, Tozer’s ship is offered: passengers roam the deck freely while the ship’s destination is fixed, freedom within sovereignty. Sovereign grace differs from prevenient grace exactly here: it does not neutralize the scales and wait; it makes the dead alive, and faith follows as the first response of a restored relationship, itself God’s gift, so that all of it, start to finish, is God. And the closing comfort reframes the offense: God could justly have walked away when Adam turned, leaving the race to the fate its head had chosen. He stayed in, redeeming out of a fallen world people who had no claim on him. Next week, Jonathan Edwards makes everyone define free will before arguing about it, and, the teachers warn, the popular notion will not survive the definition.

1. The teachers say everyone has a problem with imputed guilt, and those who deny it are not dealing with it. Name your problem with it honestly. Then weigh their reframe: God could justly have walked away when Adam turned. Does grace change the accounting for you?

2. Where do you catch yourself living as a functional Pelagian, treating each day’s obedience as a neutral coin flip you happened to win? What would it change to credit every good in you to grace?

3. Dyke asks whether our evangelism and our sinner’s prayer confess only deeds or also nature. When you came to Christ, what were you actually confessing, and how would you now explain to a friend the difference between being forgiven for sins and being made alive?