I tuned into Radio Four on Saturday evening, expecting to hear The Moral Maze crew arguing about some hot topic of the day, and was in for a surprise, in ways pleasant and in ways unpleasant. The series has ended for the next few months, and in its stead stood a programme entitled
The Great Debates. This week’s programme, as I quickly learned, was about the debate between St. Augustine of Hippo and the itinerant British monk, Pelagius.
As students of church history will remember, Augustine won the day, convincing a church council that human beings are by nature incapable of saving themselves, requiring an act of God and God alone; that we are born with sin and guilt due to the sin of our federal head, Adam; and that God chooses those whom he will save as an act of his free and sovereign will, not due to any righteousness on our part, but purely out of grace.
Pelagius was condemned by the church council as a heretic and banished. For the record, I side firmly with Augustine.
The format is that of a classic debate, with two individuals on both sides who face each other off with argument and rhetoric.
Ignoring the substance of the arguments, the debate itself was a little weak. The chair seemed somewhat ineffectual, only realising that he’d allowed the debaters to lose the main point about five minutes before the end. Clearly, this is a failing (in a sense) of live radio, as the debate can hardly be re-run because one or both sides had written their script badly, as well as a failing of the chair. That said, I hope that the series producer was able to have a word with Allan Little, the chair, regarding the need to, ah, “dash them with a rod of iron”, should the need arise.
Unfortunately, both sides seemed to epitomise odium theologicum, seeming to have exchanged arguments of substance and truth for a slanging match based on accusations of misrepresentation and insults. I doubt this is how theologians run their debates normally, and it doesn’t seem terribly edifying.
On a related point, the debate seemed to focus a lot on whether the theological idea was fruitful for explaining human behaviour, whether the historical figures were interested in keeping people out of the church or broadening its appeal, whether the figures had led lives which were (by our standards) virtuous or pretty awful, and so on. Some time was spent well, discussing the implications of both viewpoints, but the concept of an objective standard by which both ideas could be judged seemed to have been abandoned in favour of pure pragmatism: does it work? However, this is starting to impinge upon the substance of the debate, and it is to this that I next turn.
Firstly, at least one person, somewhere in the chain, had misunderstood the nature of the debate between Pelagius and Augustine. Both sides in the programme were arguing about original (or inherited) sin, which, while an important facet of the debate between the two, was not the chief focus. The chief focus was the doctrine known as total depravity: chiefly, that sinful human beings cannot save themselves, but require an act of God to do it for them. Since both sides never mentioned this during the entire programme, I can only assume that they had been wrongly instructed. However, in a sense, that doesn’t matter. Both sides were at least debating the same thing; it’s just that they misunderstood the nature of the historical debate.
Secondly, there was a significant lack of Bible in the programme. That the two protagonists wouldn’t have quoted Scripture as much as a modern evangelical theologian would is not surprising: neither Augustine nor Pelagius were twenty-first century evangelicals, after all. However, I counted three quotations of the Bible in the programme, and only two of those were cited as such. The second speaker for Augustine quite impressively managed to pass off her only Biblical reference (“as in Adam, even so in Christ”) as “a traditional belief in the early church”. Well, yes, but no! It was depressing to see the Pelagians produce two Scripture references in favour of their position, while the Augustinians seemed to think that they had no such need.
Finally, the Augustinian side completely flopped in terms of what should have been a chief aim of their argument. The Pelagians, in discussing the implications of their view, were more than happy to apply Pelagius’ teaching personally to the audience: “Pelagius taught that we are all fundamentally good. Isn’t that nice?” (I summarise for brevity.) Well, false gospels are nice.
The Augustinians, by contrast, had a perfect opportunity to give a very quick presentation of the true gospel on national radio, to a live audience, and explained in terms of the implications of Augustine’s view. “Yes, Augustine teaches that we all have a fundamental problem, which is inherited sin and guilt, but he teaches that we can all have a fundamental hope, which is that God has dealt with that problem. When Jesus Christ died, he dealt with sin for all who will believe on him, and that’s the message which Augustine taught, as relevant today as sixteen hundred years ago.”
On balance, the Pelagians came off better than the Augustinians in this debate, mainly due to the Augustinians’ ineptitude and enjoyment of insult. Thank God the debaters today weren’t the ones running the debates all those centuries ago!
Footnote
One of the Pelagians, Richard Worsley (whose name shall ever stick in the throat, er, memory) almost deserves a whole essay. He is a Church of England vicar and practising psychotherapist. His (sole) argument in favour of Pelagianism was that, as a professional psychotherapist, he noted that psychotherapy and Pelagianism started from the same basic assumptions and, since psychotherapy as an empirical science works, Pelagianism must be true. Proof by psychotherapy: “That’s a novel argument. We haven't tried that on them before.” (Yes, Minister, The Challenge)
And of course, this heresy is specifically condemned in the Ninth of the Articles of the Church of England. Pelagianism as a system of thought also denies the Tenth, Eleventh and Thirteenth Articles of the Church of England. So this chap has signed up to a set of Articles in which he doesn’t fully believe. Remind me: why am I always surprised when I find Anglican vicars who don’t believe the Thirty-Nine Articles?
As a humorous footnote, Microsoft Word seems to be appalled at my spelling of Pelagianism, for which it suggests Plagiarism. Suggestions for an inner meaning of this are welcome!
