Semi-Pelagianism

Who takes the first step?

The name means ‘half-Pelagian’, for it left the first step to us. Unlike Pelagianism, this teaching did not claim that people can keep God's commands without grace. It accepted that Adam's fall has wounded human nature and that no one is saved without God's help. The difference is one of order. A sinner, on this view, can at least begin to want God, to ask and to turn; grace then meets that good beginning, strengthens it and brings it to completion.

Those who held it took seriously the many calls in Scripture to turn and seek: "Return to Me, declares the LORD of Hosts, and I will return to you" (Zechariah 1:3). Why invite people who cannot respond at all? The church came to answer that Scripture traces even the beginning to God. Paul is confident that "He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion" (Philippians 1:6), and he asks, "What do you have that you did not receive?" (1 Corinthians 4:7). Jesus himself said:

No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day.

John 6:44

Augustine, commenting on this verse, puts it plainly: "no one can say, I believed, and therefore He called me: rather the preventing mercy of God called him, that he might believe" Augustine. ‘Preventing’ has its old sense: going before.

Gaul, Augustine and the Council of Orange

The view spread in the late 420s, in Augustine's last years, among the monks of Marseille and of the island monastery of Lérins in southern Gaul. Its best-known voice was John Cassian (c. 360–435), who had brought the wisdom of the Egyptian desert monks to the West. They admired Augustine's stand against Pelagius but feared that his later teaching on predestination, and on a grace that goes before everything, would make exhortation and moral effort pointless. Cassian taught that sometimes God draws the unwilling, and sometimes he waits for the first stirrings of a good will in us and then helps it.

When Prosper of Aquitaine and others reported these views, Augustine answered in On the Predestination of the Saints (c. 428–429) that even the beginning of faith is God's gift Augustine, On the Predestination of the Saints. The debate outlived him: Faustus, once abbot of Lérins and later bishop of Riez, defended the view in the later fifth century. In 529 a council at Orange, led by Caesarius of Arles, confessed that the beginning of faith and the very desire to believe come by grace; that grace is not given because we ask, but itself makes us ask; and that no one is predestined to evil Council of Orange. It was a regional synod, but Pope Boniface II confirmed it in 531. The name ‘Semi-Pelagian’ came much later, in the late sixteenth century.

How the label is used

The Catholic Church holds to Orange. The Council of Trent (1547) taught that the justification of adults begins with God's prevenient grace, and that no one can believe or repent as they ought without the Spirit's prompting and help Council of Trent, Decree on Justification. The Orthodox churches took no part in this Western debate. They speak of salvation as synergy, the cooperation of divine grace and human freedom, while confessing that no one is saved without grace, and they do not accept the Western label for their teaching. Chrysostom wrote on John 6:44 that Christ's words "do not destroy our free agency, but only show that we need Divine assistance" Chrysostom.

After the Reformation the word often became a weapon. The Lutheran Formula of Concord (1577) rejected by name the Semi-Pelagian error that we can begin our own conversion by our own powers. Some Reformed critics have charged Arminianism with being Semi-Pelagian at heart; Arminians and Wesleyans reject the charge. Arminius ascribed to grace the beginning, the continuance and the completion of every good Arminius, Declaration of Sentiments, and Wesley taught that prevenient grace, given to all, goes before every good desire and enables the will to respond. So Calvinists and Arminians do not divide over whether grace comes first, but over whether it can be resisted; both confess with Orange that even the beginning of faith is grace. The background is told in the lesson Augustine, doctor of grace; see also What is grace?