Heavenly Pilgrim said:
Let’s start with one of the first remarks you made. You said, “When one conflates 'grace' as an attribute of one's 'inherent human nature' as Pelagius did we cease to understand the Fall as a fall nor understand the necessity of Redemption as redemption.”
HP: Tell me how this is so.
All of your threads are winding in on themselves. Frankly, they cannot be discussed in a vacuum and each needs to reference the other.
"The Christian doctrine of sin in its classical form," Reinhold Niebuhr has written, "offends both rationalists and moralists by maintaining the seemingly absurd position that man sins inevitably and by a fateful necessity but that he is nevertheless to be held responsible for actions which are prompted by an ineluctable fate." Only seldom in Christian history have the spokesmen for the Christian tradition been confronted with equal force by those who denied that sin was inevitable and by those who denied that man was responsible. Martin Luther, for example, one of the most eloquent interpreters of the inevitability of sin, did not face opponents whose fatalism would have made a mockery both of moral responsibility and of salvation; and therefore he was able to ignore the potentially fatalistic implications of his own one-sided formulations. Most of the doctrinal development in the first four centures, like Luther, faced only one option; but in this instance it was the deterministic alternative that constituted the major opposition, with the result that Christian anthropology, as formulated in the course of the ante-Nicene and immediately post-Nicene debates, leaned noticeably to one side of the dilemma, namely, the side of free will and responsibility rather than the side of inevitability and original sin. Why was this so?
Augustine's own answer was to note that
"before this heresy [Pelagiansim] arose, they did not have the necessity to deal with this question, so difficult of solution. They would undoubtedly have done so if they had been compelled to respond to such men." That is, both the attacks upon Christianity from without and the distortions of it from within had tended in the same direction, the deterministic explanation of the human predicament, with the result that the defenders of the faith were obliged to define man's responsibility for his condition much more carefully than they did the inevitability of the condition itself. One horn of the dilemma of Christian anthropology, that of resonsibility, seemed to be the one demanded by the polemical situation. Yet in the long one to which the interpretation of Christian doctrine was obliged to give its primary attention. To explain this development, we must look at the athropological implications of the history we have traced so far.
Both responsibility and inevitability had been prominent in the classical understanding of man. In the Homeric poems "destiny" was a power which the Olympian gods could not dominate; but at the same time it is true to say that
"chthonian powers are not so much absent from the Odyssey as they are subdued or brought into his service by the hero's extraordinary feats of will and intelligence," so that neither the presence of destiny nor that of the gods vitiated the importance of human virtue. There was not in Homer any systematic formula for the relation between destiny and the gods, a relation which was bequeathed as a problem to later Greek thinkers. With the loss of confidence in the gods of Olympus, fortune or fate became increasingly prominent, and men "tended more and more to resign themselves to fate." Aeschylus sought to balance the three forces... the tyranny of fate, the power of the gods, and the responsibility of man... concluding the Oresteia trilogy with the words:
"There shall be peace forever between these people / of Pallas and their guests. Zeus the all-seeing / met with Destiny to confirm it." And Plato, although he seemed in the
Timaeus to elevate necessity to the status of an overriding force and in the
Laws quoted the tradition that even God could not oppose necessity, attempted to maintain some similar balance between divine governance, "luck", "timing", and "skill".
The Romans, too, were impressed with the power of destiny. Ovid represented Jupiter as acknowledging to the other gods that both he and they were ruled by the fates. But in the period of the empire this consciousness of fate grew even more dominant, as the Stoic doctrine of necessity coincided with the incursion of the Choldean astrologers. "Reason compels us to admit," Circero asserted, "that all things take place by fate...namely, the order and series of causes." Stoicism identifies fate with divine will, but in the process had to surrender the freedom of human will. According to Pliny, the goddess Fortune was being invoked everywhere, even though there were those who, with Juvenal, insisted that it was human beings who had made Fortune a goddess. In the popular mind, not Stoic theories of necessity, but the predetermination of the stars undercut human freedom and responsibility. "Fate has decreed as a law for each person the unalterable consequences of his horoscope," said a pagan contemporary of the Christian apologists. And even the emperor Tiberius stopped paying homage to the gods because everything was already written in the stars.
In the conflict of Christian theology with classicism it was chiefly this sense of fate and necessity that impressed itself upon the interpreters of the gospel as the alternative to their mesage, rather than, for example, the Socratic teaching that with proper knowledge and adequate motivation a man could, by the exercise of his free will, overcome the tendency of his appetites toward sin. With very few exceptions the apologists for the gospel against Greek and Roman thought made resonsibility rather than inevitability the burden of their message.
The definition of "human" was a part of the presupposition of christological doctrine, and that in at least three ways: the understanding of the human condition and its need for salvation; the definition of the human nature of Christ; and the picture of a human race redeemed and transformed by his coming. The two principle options in the doctrine of the incarnation contained, each in its own distinctive manner, elements that served to preclude a full investigation of the inevitability of sin. The proponents of the hypostatic union could certainly never be accused of taking the human predicament lightly. As the anthropology of Athanasius demonstrated in vivid detail, these theologians set the coming of the Logos into flesh against the somber background of the human condition of sin, corruption, and death. By turning away from God in disobedience, men "became the cause of their own corruption in death." This stat, moreover, was deteriorating progressively, and men had become "insatiable in sinning." Not satisfied with the first sin, men "again fulled themselves with other evils, progressing still further in shamefulness and outdoing themselves in impiety." Nether sun nor moon nor stars had fallen away from God; only man was vile. Viewed against this background, the incarnation of the Logos was seen as the only means of rescue for fallen mankind.
