Pelagianism
Pelagianism is the view that human beings, even after the Fall, retain full moral ability to obey God’s law and earn eternal life without the Holy Spirit’s supernatural aid. It denies that Adam’s sin corrupted human nature or was imputed to his descendants, holding instead that each person is born as innocent as Adam was created and sins only by individual choice. It takes its name from Pelagius, a British monk whose teaching in Rome in the early fifth century provoked Augustine’s sustained response and was condemned as heresy by councils at Carthage (418) and Ephesus (431).
Historical Origin
Pelagius, a British monk of “culture, ability, and exemplary character,” according to Charles Hodge, introduced his teaching in Rome in the early fifth century, together with his associates Coelestius, a teacher and jurist, and Julian, an Italian bishop.1 Augustine, bishop of Hippo, became Pelagius’s chief opponent, developing much of his own mature doctrine of grace and original sin in direct response to Pelagius’s teaching.
Pelagius’s teaching was condemned at a council in Carthage in 412. He was formally exonerated at the Synods of Jerusalem and Diospolis in 415, largely by concealing his actual views, but condemned again by sixty bishops at Carthage in 416.2 Zosimus, bishop of Rome, initially sided with the Pelagians and censured the African bishops’ judgment, but reversed himself and joined the condemnation once it was confirmed by a general council of two hundred bishops at Carthage in 418.2 The Eastern church added its own condemnation at the Council of Ephesus in 431.2
Core Tenets
Hodge summarizes the aphorism on which the whole system rested:
“The radical principle of the Pelagian theory is, that ability limits obligation. ‘If I ought, I can,’ is the aphorism on which the whole system rests.”1
Several distinctive claims followed from this principle. Human free will is “plenary power, at all times and at every moment, of choosing between good and evil,” not merely the ability to act on one’s own existing character.3 Sin, therefore, consists only in the deliberate choice of evil, never in an inherited condition, and there can be no such thing as original sin: each person is born, in Pelagius’s own words as Hodge reports them, “sine virtute…sine vitio,” without virtue and equally without vice, in the same state in which Adam was created.3
Adam’s own sin, on this view, injured only himself. It “exerted the influence of a bad example” on his descendants and nothing more, since Adam was in no sense the covenant representative of his race, and each person stands their own probation.4 Because human nature remains unimpaired by the Fall, some individuals can live entirely without sin, and salvation is possible even without the gospel, since the moral law given to all people offers the same path to eternal life the gospel does, only “rendered more easy.”4 Pelagius did not deny grace outright, but redefined it: “by grace…he understood everything which we derive from the goodness of God,” including the natural faculties of reason and free will themselves, rather than the supernatural, regenerating work of the Holy Spirit.2 Consistent with denying that infants inherit Adam’s guilt, Pelagius held that baptism does not remit sin in their case, but only consecrates them to God.2
Confessional and Biblical Response
Scripture traces both the guilt and the corruption of sin to Adam as the covenant head of his race, not merely its bad example: “sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned” (Rom. 5:12), and “by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners” (Rom. 5:19). David confesses that his own corruption predates any choice he could have made: “in sin did my mother conceive me” (Ps. 51:5).
The Second London Baptist Confession states the doctrine of Adam’s headship directly, against the Pelagian claim that his sin injured only himself:
“They being the root, and by God’s appointment, standing in the room and stead of all mankind, the guilt of the sin was imputed, and corrupted nature conveyed, to all their posterity descending from them by ordinary generation, being now conceived in sin, and by nature children of wrath, the servants of sin, the subjects of death, and all other miseries, spiritual, temporal, and eternal, unless the Lord Jesus set them free.”5
The same chapter states plainly that this inherited corruption, not mere imitation of a bad example, is what produces actual sin: “From this original corruption, whereby we are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil, do proceed all actual transgressions.”5
Related Doctrines
- Original sin
- Imputation of Adam’s sin
- Total depravity
- Augustinianism
- Semi-Pelagianism
- Council of Ephesus
Further Reading
External Links
- The Pelagian Captivity of the Church, by R. C. Sproul
- Pelagianism: the religion of natural man, by Michael Horton