I have been teaching through the book of Ephesians recently. It has been a rich and satisfying study. One of the primary things I have discovered in researching and writing on Ephesians 2 is the role that Augustine (354-430) played in undermining orthodox Christian theology concerning the place of free will. He did this by mixing Gnostic determinism with his Christian theology. The result has been devastating as will be shown in this series of posts.
In Ephesians 2 Paul takes back up the subject of what Yahweh has done for us in Christ that he began earlier in this letter, and the result of Jesus’ willing sacrifice for us on Calvary. In returning to the subject of believers, Paul starts at the beginning in verse 1. He says rightly, that “you were dead in your trespasses and sins.” The KJV reads, “And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins;” “hath he quickened” is in italics to indicate those words are not found in the majority text from which the KJV translators worked and were added to the text by the translators. Unfortunately, this addition has created a problem for us today.
For those persuaded by a Reformed Theology, verse 1, even without the clear addition of hath he quickened, is proof enough that God must act upon a man or woman in order for them to believe. For those persuaded by an Arminian Theology, believing that God must act in order for anyone to believe violates several texts of Scripture and belief in free will. Here is how one author sums up the contrasts between Calvinism and Arminianism.
Regeneration is the act of God by which a spiritually dead person becomes spiritually alive. Regeneration is the “born again” experience mentioned in John 3:3. The question is when regeneration occurs. Is regeneration a result of salvation or does regeneration result in salvation?
At first glance, this issue might seem to be inconsequential. But it is actually one of the key disagreements in the Calvinism vs. Arminianism debate. For a Calvinist, if God does not first regenerate people before they trust in Christ as Savior, that faith is something people produced on their own, making salvation dependent on them instead of on God. For an Arminian, if God must regenerate people in order for them to believe, there is no genuine free will, and the call to believe is pointless.
For the Calvinist, Ephesians 2:1 is key: “And you were dead in your trespasses and sins.” Without Christ, people are spiritually dead. Dead people cannot do anything. A spiritually dead person can no more do anything to remedy that situation than a physically dead person can climb out of a grave. Therefore, God must regenerate people, making them spiritually alive, before they can trust in Christ as Savior (John 3:8).
For the Arminian, all of the biblical calls to believe in Christ as Savior are key (e.g., John 3:16; Acts 16:31). If people are unable to believe without God first regenerating them, the biblical calls to believe are pointless. God does not command people to do what they are incapable of doing. Calling people to believe in Christ when they are incapable of doing so on their own, and then judging them for their lack of faith, would be unfair and unjust. Further, if God must regenerate people in order for them to have faith, essentially “installing” faith in people, God would essentially be forcing people into salvation.
The question still remains, however, must God regenerate people, i.e., save them, before they can believe? Is it possible that God could enable people to believe without regenerating them? Could God draw people, unblind their eyes, soften their hearts, and open their minds, making it possible for them to believe, without actually regenerating them? For the Arminian, the answer is yes, and this “spiritual awakening” is known as prevenient grace.
Again, for the Calvinist, Ephesians 2:1 is the deciding factor. It is impossible to draw, unblind, soften, or open the minds of dead people. God must make people alive, regenerate them, before they can believe. Arminians believe that Calvinists are taking the analogy between physically dead people and spiritually dead people too far. They claim that being spiritually dead only means that people cannot come to Christ on their own and that being spiritually dead is not 100 percent analogous to being a corpse.[1]
This idea that we are a corpse spiritually is an important foundation within Calvinism. Most Christians agree that all people are spiritually dead before they are born again by faith in Jesus. The real question is to what degree are we dead? Dr. David Anderson provides an enlightening response to the Calvinistic idea that all people are a spiritual corpse. He says,
I listened to a debate between James White and Dave Hunt on Calvinism. During the first twenty-two minutes of the debate White made reference to this verse (My note – Ephesians 2:1) at least four times. What he was trying to establish as the foundation for his Calvinistic point of view is that spiritually speaking every man or woman is a spiritual corpse before regeneration – dead. Once the word corpse is on the table, the logic flows from there.
Can a corpse eat? No. Can a corpse talk? No. Can a corpse breathe? No. Can a corpse think? No. Can a corpse believe? No. This is a primary recruiting tool used by Five-Point Calvinists. If a man or woman is a spiritual corpse, and if a spiritual corpse is completely incapable of eating, speaking, breathing, thinking, or believing, then one is completely incapable of believing before regeneration.
Sounds quite logical, and it is. But the problems are twofold: first of all is the misuse of the word “dead,” and second is the fact that we already concede that on his own a person cannot believe. Let’s look at the misuse of the word “dead.”
White is using “dead” here in the sense of “inactive” like a dead church or youth group. This completely overlooks the word “in” …Chapter one begins with the spiritual blessings we have “in Christ” in heavenly places. But chapter two begins with our Position before we were baptized by the Holy Spirit into Christ. We were dead in sin. This kind of death is not talking about a spiritual corpse but rather a spiritual separation…
It is easy to show that the human spirit of an unbeliever is quite active and functional even though it is separated from God. In Genesis 41:8 we are told that Pharoah’s spirit was troubled within him. In 1 Kings 21:5 we are told that Ahab’s spirit was sullen. In 1 Chronicles 5:26 it says God stirred up the spirit of Tiglath-Pileser. In 2 Chronicles 36:22 God stirred up the spirit of Cyrus the Persian to free the Jews. In Daniel 2 it says Nebuchadnezzar’s spirit was troubled and anxious and in 5:20 it was hardened with pride. Surely, we would argue that none of these mentioned was a believer. But their spirits were not corpses. They were quite active. They were separated from God, but they were capable of a number of activities.
Zechariah 12:1 says the Lord forms the spirit of man within him. To what purpose? To be a corpse? No, the spirit of the unbeliever has many functions as we have seen. I would even argue that our conscience is a function of our human spirit, and this is precisely where the Holy Spirit convicts the unbelievers of sin, righteousness, and judgment.
In 1 Corinthians 2:11 we read, “For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him?” The context calls for a non-Christian in this verse, but the spirit within him knows the man. If this man’s spirit is dead like a corpse and cannot breathe, eat, think, or believe, how is it that this spirit in the unbeliever can “know” the things of the man?
…To conclude, “dead in trespasses and sins” is a statement of spiritual separation (death) from God, the spiritual state of an unbeliever. It does not mean dead like an inactive volcano. It means separated from God but alive and kicking.[2]
This highlights the importance of understanding where our doctrine originates. Our understanding and subsequent beliefs are influenced by what we have read and by what we have been taught. Do we take the time to ask questions not just about the text but of those who teach? In my opinion, the best place to start to understand what the Bible teaches is with the text itself and then by reading the early church fathers. Do we know what the disciples of the disciples taught? There are resources available to us for our study and many of them are free. Philip Schaff’s History of the Church is one such resource that provides a history of what the disciples of the disciples believed and taught.[3]
I am laboring this point for this reason – some believers will point to Ephesians 2:1 and see in that verse the doctrine of original sin which renders all people incapable of response to the Gospel without divine intervention. I will be examining this doctrine extensively in subsequent posts before moving into the text because it is a lynchpin of sorts concerning other doctrines. Readers will see how this doctrine affects other doctrines. The doctrine of original sin as most Christians understand it today is a Calvinist construct derived from Augustine. The doctrine of original sin as it is taught today is consistent with Calvinism’s Total Depravity. The meaning is that mankind has no ability to choose God. Mankind is a dead corpse and corpses don’t do anything. As we will see that teaching is not what the early church believed or taught.
Nearly all Calvinists point to Augustine as the originator of this doctrine. Sadly, these same Calvinists will not attempt to understand where Augustine derived his understanding of human nature. As Dr. Ken Wilson makes clear:
The 500-year-old theology of John Calvin was directly derived from Augustine who strayed from the foundation of traditional Patristic theology over 1,000 years prior to Calvin. We need to explore the foundation on which Augustine laid his novel Christian theology. This will expose the fact that Augustinian Calvinism’s impressively logical edifice has been built upon an unstable foundation of pagan syncretism (mixing pagan and Christian ideas).[4]
The fact of the matter is that Augustine was a Manichean Gnostic for at least 10 years before his conversion to Christ. He was a trained rhetorician and practiced three highly deterministic philosophies – Stoicism, which taught everything was dependent on fate and therefore beyond any influence of human choice; Neoplatonism, which was entirely deterministic, and Manichaeism. The latter was the form of Gnosticism which taught among other things that:
…the physical body was evil, and the spirit was good, so that even the birth of a child was sin. Persons were unilaterally pre-determined before birth by the good god (who did not create physical matter) to be either elect or damned independently of human choice – Divine Unilateral Pre-determinism of Individuals’ Eternal Destinies (DUPIED).[5]
Some might say that this means nothing. Generally, I would agree. People are delivered from pagan backgrounds all the time. However, in Augustine’s case, it can be demonstrated that he did incorporate many of his Gnostic beliefs into his later beliefs and passed them off as accurate Christian theistic and biblical exegesis. For example, after his conversion in 386 AD, Augustine moved away from his Gnostic roots and began to teach against the very deterministic philosophies he previously championed. He accepted as biblical that God uses foreknowledge and not determinism. In other words, historic Christian teaching advanced the belief in man’s free will and Augustine once taught this truth, rejecting the Gnostic interpretation of Ephesians 2:3 that all people are doomed at birth because they are “children of wrath.”
In reference to John 1:12 which says, “But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name”, Augustine wrote, “Scripture teaches that God himself placed this in our power when it says, He gave them the power to become sons of God.”[6] Again, this is the truth of human free will. This seems to be reiterated in John 5:25 where Jesus says, “Truly, truly I say to you, an hour is coming and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the son of God, and those who hear will live.” Spiritual dead people can hear the Gospel call to believe.
It was Augustine who introduced five concepts from Manichean Gnosticism into Christianity. Those five are: (1) Total inability or what Calvinists today call total depravity. This is the Calvinist interpretation of Ephesians 2:1. All humans are corpses with no ability to do anything unless God changes that condition. This is not what the original disciples believed, nor was it what the early church fathers (the disciples of the disciples) believed and taught. (2) Damnable sin at birth for all, which includes infants. This is why Romans Catholics and Reformed people continue to baptize infants today. The disciples did not teach this nor did the church fathers. (3) Unconditional election. Augustine rejected God’s choice by foreknowledge and returned to the Gnostic teaching of determinism. God saves whoever He wants to and leaves everyone else to a pre-determined fate of hell. This belief is necessitated by the Gnostic doctrine of total inability. If people are truly corpses at birth, then only God can make them alive. (4) Irresistible grace. Augustine began to teach that God determined by His will who would be saved and who would not and manipulated circumstances in the lives of both groups to accomplish His determination.
All of these new interpretations impacted Augustine’s view of the atonement. The early church taught that God loved the whole world and Christ died for the whole world. Mankind has the responsibility because of free will to choose to love God by trusting in Jesus for everlasting life. Augustine believed and taught this as well.
However, Augustine struggled to understand 1 Timothy 2:4 which says that God “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” This verse is stating clearly that man has free will and God desires that he exercise that free will in faith. But Augustine’s Gnosticism completely took over his thinking. When he could not fathom how what God desired would not necessarily come to pass, he changed his thinking on the atonement to mean that only certain people are covered by the blood of Jesus – the elect, and all others perish being unable to receive the atonement by God’s choice to reject them. This led to the belief in the Calvinistic doctrine of limited atonement. In summary, Calvinism’s TULIP doctrines of grace came directly from Augustinian Gnosticism.
Each of these beliefs were brought into Christianity by Augustine as he attempted to justify baptizing infants. He could not do it within the framework of Christian theism, for all church fathers rejected the idea that infants needed to be baptized, so Augustine resorted to pagan heresies, admitting that he could only advocate his new beliefs by rejecting human free will, the only orthodox Christian view of the disciples and the early church fathers.
To summarize what the early church fathers and even Augustine himself taught until 412 A.D., Dr. Ken Wilson states:
The early Augustine’s traditional theology (My note – what orthodox Christianity taught at the time) pervasively asserts that humans can respond to God without divine assistance. “But miserable friends could be masters of this world if they were willing to be sons of God, for God has given them the power to become His sons” (On True Religion, 65). Contrary to the Manichaean misinterpretation of Ephesians 2:3 (“were by nature children of wrath” meaning at birth), Augustine denounced alienation from God by nature, “Remember what the apostle said, ‘In our lifestyle (behavior) we are alienated from God,’” and, “Augustine said: ‘I say it is not sin, if it be not sinned by one’s own will; hence also there is [a] reward, because of our own will we do right’” (Against Fortunatus the Manichaean, 21). Augustine clarifies that his free will statements concern current persons, not merely Adam’s original nature.[7]
To be continued
Dr. Mike Spaulding
[1] Author unknown, Does regeneration come before faith? https://www.gotquestions.org/regeneration-before-faith.html
[2] David R. Anderson, “The Nature of Death – Ephesians 2:1”, in A Defense of Free Grace Theology: With Respect to Saving Faith, Perseverance, and Assurance, (The Woodlands, TX: Grace Theology Press, 2017), pp. 567-569.
[3] Available here – https://ccel.org/s/schaff/history/About.htm
[4] Kern Wilson, “A Theological and Historical Investigation,” in A Defense of Free Grace Theology, p. 34.
[5] Wilson, pp. 34-35.
[6] Wilson, p. 38.
[7] Ken Wilson, The Foundation of Augustinian Calvinism, (Regula Fidei Press, 2019), p. 38.