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Regeneration is solely the work of God's grace in your soul by the divine initiative. And your being rescued from the kingdom of darkness and from the state of the flesh is by God's grace and by God's grace alone.
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You heard the Gospel and your friend heard the Gospel. Why did you become a believer and your friend did not? This is the Saturday edition of Renewing youg Mind. I'm glad you're with us today. We're in a series by RC Sproul and we're considering the five SOLAs of the Reformation. And today he considers sola gratia grace alone.
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We're going to continue with our series of study on the five SOLAs of the Protestant Reformation. And closely related to the doctrine of sola fide is the doctrine of sola gratia, which means literally by grace alone. Now, in the Middle Ages, in the Roman Catholic Church, of course, the leading theologian was St. Thomas Aquinas. And the Church since that time has referred to Thomas as the Angelic Doctor, the Doctor Angelicus, the Doctor of the angels. They have another nickname for the great St. Augustine, who ministered at the end of the fourth century and into the beginning of the fifth century. And Augustine's nickname is Dr. Gratia. That is, he's known as the Doctor of Grace in Church history because he is the one who first formulated this idea of, of sola gratia. And so we look back to Augustine and the controversies in which he was involved to get a source of understanding of this idea of sola gratia. Let's look first at the historical provocation that led to this phrase in the teaching of Augustine. And it came about in the so called Pelagian controversy that took place roughly around the turn of the century, from the fourth to the fifth centuries. And it began when Pelagian Plagius was a British monk who came to Rome to visit Rome and heard of the reputation of the great Augustine. But when he came to Rome, he was appalled by the behavioral patterns and the licentiousness of members of the Church and those who were professing Christ. They seemed to be living godless lives. And so in a very real sense, Pelagius wanted to be a reformer of the morals of the Christian Church of his day. And he was disturbed by a famous prayer that had been written by St. Augustine, where in that prayer Augustine said this. O God, grant what thou dost command and command what thou dost desire. Now, the second part of the prayer, that God would command from his creatures whatever it was pleasing for God to command. Plagiaris certainly agreed that God had the right to impose obligations on the creatures that he has formed in his own image. He believed that God was morally sovereign in that he is the lawgiver, not we. We're not the ones who create the law of God. No problem with that part of the prayer. It was the first part of the prayer that distressed him so greatly, in which Augustine said, o Lord, grant what thou dost command. Pelagius was puzzled by that. He said, why would you ask God to grant you? A grant is a gift, after all, why would you ask God to grant you whatever he commands that indicates that God is commanding that you do something that without this grant, without this gift, you cannot do? Well, this is exactly what Augustine was saying. Augustine was saying that God gave his law to man in creation and man was created to mirror and reflect the character of God. God is holy. And we were created with a mandate to be holy, a mandate to be righteous, a mandate to be perfect. But Augustine says in the Fall, man was ruined as he fell into a corrupt status by which it was no longer possible for that human to obey all of the commands of God, that man was no longer morally able or morally powerful enough to live a perfect life. And so that the only way we could become righteous would be through God's help, through God's gift of grace. So it's one thing to consider man in creation, it's another thing to consider man in his fallen condition. In his created original situation, man could be righteous. According to Augustine, after the Fall, because of original sin, man could no longer obey the law of God. Now again, remember that the doctrine of original sin does not refer specifically to to the first sin, the original one, you know, the first one that got everybody in trouble. Now, what original sin defines or describes in theology is the result of that first sin, the result being the fallen corruption that was the subsequent judgment of God upon the first sin. So that after Adam's sin, after Adam and Eve fell, then their future descendants are born in sin, born with this human nature that is corrupt by birth and is no longer able to achieve righteousness. That's why Augustine said, since the Fall, for us to do anything right requires the grace of God. Now this is where Pelagius objected. He said that the sin of Adam affected only Adam. There was no transfer to his progeny of the consequences of this sin. We only sin not because we're born sinners, but we only sin when we imitate what Adam did, that we are those who ape our original Father. When we sin. But Adam's sin did not do anything to change the constituent nature of humanity. We are born today in the same condition as Adam was when he was first created, so that we have the same abilities, the same powers that Adam had when God first made him. Pelagius went on to say that we as human beings still have the power to live perfect lives without grace. Now, it's not that he was opposed to grace. He said, not only can we theoretically live perfect lives without the grace of God, but there are people, in fact, many people, who achieve that and who actually live righteous lives. Now it's made more difficult because so many people have echoed and imitated Adam by copying being copycat sinners, as it were, that we now live in a society, an environment, where there's so much sin that that makes it hard for the person who still has the constituent nature of the original Adam to make it through life without sinning, because there are these negative pressures all around him. But still the ability is there, the moral ability to perfection remains in the soul and the heart of human beings since Adam. Now, he went on to say that grace helps. He wasn't opposed to grace. His concept was this, that grace facilitates living a righteous life. And of course, the word facilitate means to make easier. But grace, Pelagius insisted, is not necessary for a person to be righteous. So that was the issue that provoked so much of Augustine's insightful teaching on the fall of man and on the doctrine of election or of predestination. Now, as a result of this conflict, the Church of that time roundly and soundly condemned Pelagius as a heretic and completely rejected Pelagian theology, not only in the 5th century, but again in the first three canons of the Council of Trent. In the 16th century, the Church reaffirmed its judgment against Pelagianism. And in fact, in the 5th century, the church ruled in favor of St. Augustine vis a vis Pelagius. And the principal idea of Augustine can be summarized with these words, moral inability, namely, that the fall was so radical and so corrupt sin so invaded our humanity that we are born in a state that the Bible describes in terms of being in a state of spiritual death or in bondage to sin, and saying that we are morally impotent to do the things of God. Augustine said, there can be an outward conformity to the law of God from unconverted people and unregenerate people, what Calvin would later call civic righteousness or civic virtue. There are still parents that have a natural love for their children. And so on. But there is no inclination or desire of the human heart for the things of God because the heart of fallen humanity is now a heart of stone and in that heart it only has wicked desires continually. And Augustine said even after conversion that our best works, even with the assistance of Divine grace, are splendid vices because sin is so damaging that it attaches itself to us even after conversion until we are glorified by God in heaven. And so Augustine is saying, without God's doing the work, we are powerless to do spiritual good. Now that was the issue. Then there emerged after this initial dispute a so called middle ground position by a man by the name of John Cassianus, whose anglicized name is John Cassian. And Cassian was disturbed about some elements of Augustine's teaching and, and though he rejected pure Pelagianism, gave a modified view which since that time has come to be described as quote, Semi Pelagianism and that means partial Pelagianism. And let me just give you a brief recapitulation of the seven main points of Cassian's Semi Pelagian position as he originally articulated. And I deal with that again in the book Willing to Believe. As I mentioned in the first lecture, the first point of Cassian and his supporters was that Augustine's views are new and represent a departure from the teaching of the Church Fathers, especially Tertullian, Ambrose and Jerome. Cassian himself was a student of Chrysostom and he believed that Augustine was taking the Church in a new direction. Second, Augustine's teaching on predestination as it related to sola gracia cripples the force of preaching, of reproof and moral energy and plunges men into despair and introduces a fatal necessity. And so what the fundamental point was this, that Cassianus believed that God's grace is necessary for salvation. It's not just something that helps, but it's absolutely essential for salvation. And Semi Pelagianism then and now believes that there really was a fall in Adam, there really was a change in the constituent nature of human beings after the sin of Adam and Eve, and that this fall did very serious damage to the moral capacity and moral power of fallen human beings. Semi Pelagianism acknowledges that we are born sinners and that we have an inherent corruption, that the will, the soul and the heart are severely weakened by sin. However, it is not so serious that man is left in a state of complete moral inability with respect to the things of God. Let me go back to this summary of Cassian, though God's grace is necessary for salvation and assists the human will in doing good. It is man, not God, who must, in the final analysis, will that which is good. Grace is given in order that he who has begun to will may be assisted, not to give the power to have faith itself. In other words, what they are saying historically is that the initial conversion of man and the coming to Christ is a synergistic work. It is a cooperative venture between God's grace and man's will. If God gives us no grace, we could hear the preaching of the Gospel every day and never come to faith. Because we could not exercise faith without God's help. And the help that God gives us to exercise grace and to come to Christ for our salvation is a necessary aid for that to happen. But that grace that assists people to come to to Christ and to embrace him in faith is resistible. So God, the Holy Spirit, in His grace, helps woos, illumines, attends the preaching of the Gospel to stoop to our weakness. Because we are severely weakened by the fall. But in the fall there remains, as I've said in other contexts, a little island of righteousness, unaffected by the fall, where still there is this power left in the will that can be stirred by the fallen person. While there is yet unconverted and unregenerated, there is still the power in the will to either accept the offer and the assistance of grace or. Or to reject it. The choice is ours again. We couldn't be saved without grace because we're so weak. But we're not so weak that God actually has to create faith in us for us to come. He offers his assistance. If we accept it, we are saved. If we don't, we are lost. And of course, it's up to us to make the choice. That's why so much of evangelism in semi Pelagian camps focuses attention on the human decision. This is decisional conversion. The way you become a Christian is you make a decision to follow Christ. Now, obviously, both sides of this controversy believe that people are called upon to make decisions and to make choices. Every day I'm confronted with a myriad opportunities of possible choices that I can choose to do this or to do that, to go one way or to go another way. And the church is always called to make that decision, to follow Christ, to choose the things of God. But here we're talking about the initial point of conversion. Where we are transformed from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of life, where we are raised from spiritual death to spiritual life. There we want to know how the will is involved. And what the reformers Calvin and Luther taught following Augustine was that in the Fall, the power of making choices freely was not lost, that human beings are created with certain faculties by God. We are given a mind with which to think. We are given a heart with which to have affections, and we are given a will by which to make choices. That is, we are volitional creatures, creatures who are held responsible for our decisions that we make and the choices that we make that are of a moral sort. So Calvin, Luther, Augustine, Edwards all believed that in the Fall, the will of man was not destroyed, that man is still a volitional creature, that he still makes choices. The problem is that will is imprisoned by sin, and so that the choices we make are made according to our sinful impulses, our sinful desires. You think of a person who is a drug addict or an alcoholic or something like that, and they say, I try to stop using heroin, but I can't. He's still free in the sense that nobody is forcing him to do what he does. Nobody outside of himself is forcing him to sin. He sins because he chooses to sin, and he chooses freely in the sense that no one is coercing him. But freedom is a fairly magnificent word to apply to somebody who's bound to their vices, who's incarcerated by their moral condition. Now again, the language that the Bible uses to describe what we're like in the flesh is that we are dead in sin, biologically alive, spiritually dead. Now, the semi plagian position says man is sick. He's very, very sick, desperately sick, can't possibly survive without the help of God. But he's not spiritually dead. He still has this ability, this pulse that exists in him that when confronted with the assistance of God's grace, can reach out and say yes rather than. But he can also say no. And some people exercise their will while they're still unconverted to say yes. Then when they say yes with faith, then they are reborn. What Augustine was saying, what Calvin was saying, what Luther was saying, what Edwards was saying, what classical Reformed theology says is the Fall is so great that it leaves us in a state of moral inability still make choices, but we will never choose the things of God because they are contrary to the flesh. Jesus says to his audience in John 6, no man can come to me unless it is given to him by the Father. And Jesus doesn't say, no man can come to him unless God helps him. He says, no man can come to him unless God in Fact gives it to him. I talk to my Arminian friends all the time about this and say, look, let me ask you a question. Why is it that you're a believer, maybe members of your own family or friends that you have are not believers when you've both heard the gospel? And they said, well, because I responded to the Gospel and the other person didn't. I said, okay. You said yes to the aid of God's grace. God gave the same offer to your neighbor. And your neighbor said no. I want to know this. Why did you say yes? And your neighbor said, no? Oh, because I'm free. I said, I understand that, but why in your freedom were you inclined to say yes to grace? And your neighbor said, no. Is it because you're more righteous than that person is? Now, what would anyone Arminians say? Of course not. I don't believe that I'm in there because I'm righteous. I say, why not? What your friend did was the wrong thing. It's a sinful thing to say no to an offer of divine grace for salvation. Wouldn't you agree? And they said, well, yeah. And I said, and the right thing is to say yes. I said, yes. In the final analysis, the reason why you're saved and that person isn't is because you did the right thing and they did the wrong thing. And if you really think that that's the reason you're saved, the danger you're in is in actually trusting in what you have done rather than somebody else. How far away is that from Rome? If you really believe that it's what you did that made the difference. Sola Grazia says salvation is monergistic at the beginning. Regeneration is solely the work of God's grace in your soul. Now, after he makes that change in your heart, after he changes the disposition of your soul, you come, you believe you work for your entire Christian life in cooperation with sanctifying grace. And the rest of the Christian life is synergistic, but the beginning is by the divine initiative. And you're being rescued from the kingdom of darkness and from the state of the flesh is by God's grace and by God's grace alone. That's the doctrine of Sola Gracia according to the Reformation.
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And we are thankful for that amazing grace. We're glad you're with us for this edition of Renewing youg mind. That was R.C. sproul from his series God Alone. Dr. Sproul goes deep on each of the five SOLAs, helping us understand the good news of the Gospel and what key truths were at the heart of the Protestant reformation. Request this 10 part series when you give a donation in support of Renewing your mind@renewingyourmind.org before midnight tonight. And to thank you for your support, we'll send you the series on dvd. We'll also unlock the messages and study guide for you in the free Ligonier app and send you a Renewing your Mind notebook. So respond now@renewingyourmind.org before this offer ends in only a few hours. Well, how does God declare an unjust person? Just don't miss next Saturday's episode here on Renewing youg Mind.
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Sam.