The Calvinism of Luther

I want to introduce our next speaker. Now, this is the bio that I was sent. So that's all

I can say. All right. Keith Foskey was born the peasant son of a sharecropper named

Festus in Jerkwater, Georgia before he hit fame and fortune in the big city. His theological education was earned on the mean streets of Dallas as he would challenge

DTS students to fisticuffs outside the student quad. He spends his days now working on his life debt to James White by making hilarious videos.

Now, hold on there. We're going to give you a real one. But Keith Foskey is a pastor, a humorist.

He's the host of Your Calvinist with Keith Foskey. He has a Doctor of Ministry degree from Jacksonville Baptist Theological Seminary.

He and his wife, Jennifer, have six children. And honestly, you might know him as a very funny guy, but I have never met anyone who can take big, deep theological subjects and he morphs them and turns them into digestible morsels for laymen like me to understand.

I'm happy to call him my friend. It's Keith Foskey, guys. Give him a hand. If you have your copy of God's Word, I want to invite you to turn to Ephesians Chapter 2 and hold your place at verse 1.

Getting a little bit of feedback up here. Before we read,

I want to offer a few words of thanks. I want to thank the conference organizers, particularly

Jeffrey and Hatz, for and Brayden, I'm sorry. Not only am

I honored to speak alongside of them, but I have come to call them friends. Met them last year at the conference and I'm very blessed to get to have gotten to know them.

I want to thank the Lord for opening doors of ministry, especially in this last year, much of which came through humor.

I said, you know, the bow tie has done a lot of things, opened a lot of doors through funny videos and things like that, but I'm not clowning around today.

There may be a little humor, but it won't be a joke. And I do want to explain the title of today's message before we read.

The title is The Calvinism of Luther. Well, last year when we did the

Shadows to Substance conference, I wasn't a speaker last year. I was just doing my podcast, but I was talking to Jeffrey during one of the breaks and he mentioned that they were going to do a

Calvinism conference this year. And he just said, what would you talk about if you wanted to come and speak?

And I said, well, I want to talk about the Calvinism of Luther. And his eyes sort of lit up and, oh, well, that sounds interesting.

But I want to say off the bat that the title itself is a clickbait title.

If you don't know what that is, you're probably not into YouTube and all that stuff like me. But you put things out there just to get people's attention.

And right before we started, I always post picture of my notes. I have these very colorful, kind of odd looking sermon notes.

And I post pictures of them online. And the title by itself has already got a lot of people interested.

Because their first thing, Luther wasn't a Calvinist. I know. But you clicked.

That was the purpose. The entire title is anachronistic. Because when we talk about Luther, we're talking about someone who was born in 1483.

And Calvin was not born until 1509. And I got to thinking about that in a sort of just comparative way.

I was born in 1980. My daughter was born in 2011. Sorry, 2012.

My wife's going to not be happy about that. But my daughter and I are about the same difference in age as Luther was to Calvin.

And so to talk about the Calvinism of Luther is anachronistic. But what

I want to show today, and what I hope to convince you all of, is that they shared an anthropology, which in many ways was influenced by their spiritual ancestor,

Augustine. Now, Andrew has already talked about that some earlier today. And I'm going to seek to simply expand on some of what he has already said.

But understand this. My goal today is not necessarily to convince you of Calvinism.

There'll be other men who come and do a wonderful job. But my goal is simply to convince you that there was a unity of anthropology among our

Reformed ancestors that was actually shared by the church prior to the

Reformation, and that we have a historic anthropology of the nature of man and his fallen condition that we can look to and say, this is what the church has taught about this subject.

And therefore, we can have confidence in what we believe as not just simply being some wild -eyed view from a 16th century

French expositor, but rather we are holding to the anthropology of the church, which has been held now low these many centuries.

So with that being said, I invite you to open your Bibles again. Well, I'm not in church. My church stands to read the word.

If you'd like to stand, you're welcome. But I'm going to read chapter 2, verses 1 to 3.

And this is reading from the English Standard Version. And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.

Our Father and our God, we come to You in Jesus' name. And we ask now that even now

You would give us Your Holy Spirit to understand what we are about to hear.

For we know that apart from the Spirit, we can do nothing apart from the Spirit. We can know nothing. And apart from the

Spirit, we will not be able to understand or apply what we learn. Lord, we are completely dependent upon You.

I thank You for my brothers who have already preached, for Brother Claude and for his passion, for Brother Andrew and his professorial presentation.

And I pray now, Lord, that I would seek to simply dig a little deeper into the history of this important subject.

I pray that You would keep me from error as I preach Your word. And I pray that Your people would be edified.

And Lord, if there be even one here who has not yet named the name of Christ, who has not yet bowed the knee to the

Savior, that You would do that work that only You can do and bring them the gift of regeneration, which leads to life.

We pray this in Christ's name. Amen. One person who

I did forget to give thanks to, as I was thanking Paps and Braden and Jeffrey, I want to thank

Dr. White, who is here with us. Dr. White has been very helpful over the years in being an instructor and friend to me.

And I'm very grateful for the times that I have gotten to spend with him, even the awkward times where I've sat and watched him eat.

So if you don't know that story, I'll be happy to tell you later.

So I want to share with you some dates that are important. I've already given you one, and that was 1483.

If you're familiar with the old tune about Columbus in 1492,

Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Well, about a decade before that, Martin Luther was born in 1483.

And then in 1505, as he was returning home from university, he was caught in a storm.

And in that storm, as many of you probably know who are somewhat familiar with Luther's life, as he was caught in that storm, he thought he was going to die.

And so in the moment where he thought his life was going to come to an end, he found himself afraid.

And so he called out, not to God or to Jesus, but rather to St. Anne. And he said,

St. Anne, if you save me, I will become a monk.

Much to the chagrin of his father, who had paid for him to go to university and get an education.

Well, it was a few years later, he did become a monk. And in 1517, he published what became known as the 95

Theses. Every year at our church, we celebrate October 31, 1517.

We celebrate it as Reformation Day, not because that's really when the Reformation began.

But it's a moment in time that we can look to and be thankful for. It's a moment of time that we can say, here's a watershed moment in the history of our faith.

And we can be thankful for what happened there. And just remind you, in 1517, when

Luther published the 95 Theses, he was 34 years old.

Calvin was eight. A few years later, in 1521, came the

Imperial Diet of Worms, which my children love to call the

Diet of Worms. And that is where Luther gave his speech.

And different scholars have presented it in different ways. Sometimes it's the very bold speech, here

I stand. And some say he was more reserved.

Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen. And I would imagine that may be fairly accurate, understanding that it was only, as Andrew mentioned earlier, only a century before that Jan Hus at the

Council of Constance was condemned for some of the very things that Luther had taught, and was not given the safe passage that he was promised, but rather was taken out and was burned.

Luther, knowing what could happen and potentially would happen, still stood for truth.

And Luther said a lot of things that I disagree with. In much of his theology, I would repudiate.

But on the core issues of the faith, I believe we stand together. And I will say this,

Luther is my hero, not because he was perfect, but because he took a stand for the word of God.

Certainly, many other dates could be mentioned in the life of Luther. But I want to share with you just one more.

And that is December of 1525. It was in December of that year that Luther published his response to the writings of a man named

Desiderius Erasmus. Erasmus had written a work on the freedom of the will, de libero arbitrio, which means of free will.

Luther responded with de servo arbitrio, on the bondage of the will.

This would become, to Luther, such an important work that later in his life, when he was talking, or rather, excuse me, writing a letter to Wolfgang Capito, he said he saw no other of his writings other than the bondage of the will and the catechism that was worthy to continue to be published.

This is amazing, considering the voluminous amount that Luther wrote.

It's estimated that he published new writings every few weeks. I had the opportunity to interview, on my show, a group of Lutheran pastors just a few weeks ago, and one of them from the

UK said, it's estimated that at one point in Luther's life, he was publishing every two weeks, which is just an amazing amount of writing, especially when you consider the fact that he did not have a

MacBook, but he was rather writing with a quill pen and ink.

And I wanna say this, because of Luther's prolific writing, it is sometimes hard to nail down exactly what his position is on certain issues, because when speaking of an issue in one area, he may speak on it in another area and sound like he's contradicting himself.

I don't know if you've ever had that problem where you'll say something in one context and say something in another context and someone might think you're contradicting yourself, well, imagine if you wrote all the time and you were constantly publishing things.

Therefore, some of what I say today about Luther, I know for certain someone's going to say, well, you misrepresented

Luther. Well, I want you to know, from the very bottom of my heart,

I have no intention of misrepresenting Luther at all. I would hope that if he were sitting in the audience, although he would be very confused,

I would hope that he would at least be able to say that what

I have said is right in regard to what he believed. So why was the bondage of the will, this work that Luther wrote, so important to him?

Well, it was important because he understood what it meant in regard to theological accuracy.

A right understanding of God is essential to theology. Earlier we had

Brother Claude come and talk to us about that very thing.

We need to have a right understanding of God. We all need to have our Isaiah moment where we recognize that God is holy, holy, holy, and I am not, not, not.

And so a right theology begins with a right understanding of God, but it also includes a right understanding of man.

And Luther believed that to err in regard to the issue of human free will was dangerous to the soul.

He said this, he said, "'A man cannot be thoroughly humbled "'till he knows that his salvation lies altogether "'beyond and out of his own strength, "'counsels, desires, wills, and works, "'till he depends absolutely upon the counsel, "'the will, and the work of another, "'and that other is

God.'" One cannot read the works of Luther without coming to the conclusion that he was convinced of a monergistic view of salvation.

Monergism simply means that there is one who works. In salvation, we do not have a synergistic view where two or more work together to accomplish a particular task, but we have a monergistic view where God alone is doing the work, even as it were the work of giving us a gift of faith.

Now, having said all that, it is important to understand that Luther did not hold to all of Calvin's views.

And modern Lutheranism will be very quick to tell you that.

As I said, I love Luther and I love Lutherans. I know that sounds kind of a strange thing to say, but I sometimes think they don't like us.

I make jokes about that with Hans Feeney, who's the guy from Lutheran Satire.

He is a wonderful brother in the Lord, but I tease, I say, we like you guys, but y 'all don't like us.

So what I wanna do on their behalf, if I could take just a moment in the message, is

I would like to simply address the issue that separates modern

Lutherans from Calvinists and where the issue really lies before we get to the heart of Luther's theology.

I wanna, on their behalf, say, well, this is what they would say is the dividing line between us.

And they would say that the reason why they reject

Calvinism is because of double predestination. However, when describing it, and I have listened to several of them describe it, when describing it, it seems as if they are defining double predestination as something called equal ultimacy, which means that God does the same positive act in election that he does in reprobation, that God expresses the same amount of power in damning someone that he does in saving someone.

That's equal ultimacy. And by the way, that is not what Calvinists should believe.

And by the way, having just said that, I paused because some of you may believe that.

And I'm simply going to say that there is a debate in Calvinistic circles as to the method by which

God brings about reprobation. But I am convinced that reprobation is an act of passing over or predation, not an act of creating evil in the heart, because the evil is already there.

But it's important to recognize that while Luther and Calvin shared a monergistic view, the resultant systems which arose from each man's theology do have distinctions, especially in light of the fact that both of the men's systems were then carried on by their followers, and their followers had different ideas.

Of course, Calvin was succeeded by Theodore Beza and Luther by Melanchthon, and both of them put their own thoughts into the systems.

But if you were to ask a Lutheran, and this is actually, I'm going to quote now from the pastor of Holy Cross Lutheran Church.

He has his own YouTube page. He does an Ask the Pastor series on his

YouTube page, and this is what he says in regard to the difference between Calvinism and Lutheranism in regard to election.

He says this, and by the way, I asked Hans if this was right, and he said yes.

So if it's wrong, y 'all get on to Hans and not me. I hope it's okay that I told y 'all that.

No, I got with him beforehand. I said, hey, I'm going to say this. Is this right? Does this rightly reflect what you believe?

And he said yes. God elects men to salvation in view of Christ's merits, which are only received by faith.

God didn't elect anyone by an absolute decree, but he only elected people in view of Christ and his merits, and Christ is only apprehended by faith.

We don't add faith as a cause of election. We add it because it's simply part of the order

God has established. No one is considered in Christ, in the scriptures, unless by faith. This does not answer the question of why some and not others because faith is a work of God in man's heart, not of man.

All this does is simply acknowledge that the scripture teaches and defends against the Calvinism, or the

Calvinian absolute decree. Now that was a long sentence, so let me see if I can help you make sense.

They don't like the word decree. They don't. They don't like the idea of double predestination, but they have to admit that faith is a gift, and they have to admit that the faith that is a gift comes from God, and that it's not wrought in the hearts of men because they share the anthropology that Calvin shared.

They recognize man's deadness and sin, his inability to do anything good toward God, and yet at the same time, they know that not all men have faith, and so they have to leave it there and simply say, we're not gonna go any further.

God has elected, he has predestined, but he has not predestined anyone to hell, and therefore in my, and this is gonna sound a little unfair,

I love them to death, but in my estimation, they wanna have their cake and eat it too, and that's the meanest thing

I'm gonna say all day, is I think they wanna have their cake and eat it too. They wanna be able to say God elects, but not to hell.

God doesn't choose who's going to hell, he just chooses who's going to heaven. Well, that's having your cake and eating it too.

And sometimes we're accused of the other side. We're accused of being overly logical, and oftentimes they will appeal to mystery.

Well, these things are left to the mystery of God, and that's their language, not mine, that's the language that they use, and therefore this is where the challenge comes in.

But again, my only point in all of this is to simply say that both of us are starting at the same point, and that's man has an absolute inability to do any of this on his own.

Even modern Lutherans will say, man cannot come to faith apart from a work of the

Spirit of God in his heart, where the Spirit gives him that faith. You see, that's the key.

That's what brings this together. That's the unifying anthropological understanding.

So again, even in affirming against the Calvinistic view of predestination, they still affirm that faith is a work of God, not something that is brought about by man.

And this is where Luther and Calvin's anthropology converge in the bondage of man in sin, and the inability of man to believe apart from God's grace.

Now with that being said, I want to now share what three things

I believe are most consistent between Calvin and Luther in regard to this teaching.

So if you're taking notes, or you want to write something down, this might be the point where you would pull out your pen, because I'm going to give you three thoughts to consider.

These are the consistencies in anthropology that we find between Luther and Calvin.

I'll give you the three if you want to write them down, and then we'll go through each one of them. Number one, they both affirmed emphatically the doctrine of original sin.

Number two, they both rejected absolutely the concept of free will.

And number three, they both affirmed salvation, sola gratia, which is the

Latin for by grace alone. Now with those three ideas,

I want to now lead you through a few thoughts that they have written. And I'm going to read from Calvin's Institutes, I'm going to read from the

Bondage of the Will, and also I'm going to read a short portion of a book because what's interesting is

Luther and Erasmus had his, Luther had his debate with Erasmus over the freedom of the will.

Well, Calvin also had a writing which was a debate against a man named Albert Piccius.

And Albert Piccius had written on this subject, and Calvin wrote against him. And so it's interesting, as we heard

Andrew talk about earlier, how often this subject comes up, and every generation has their debaters.

You have Pelagius and Augustine, you have Luther and you have Erasmus, you have Calvin and Pigius, and then later

Arminius, and you have White and Flowers. Every generation has their, has their debaters.

So let's look first at original sin. When you say the word original sin in a church today, you might get looked at with some confusion because not everyone even understands what you mean.

Oftentimes when you say original sin, people think you're talking simply about the sin of Adam in his original state.

But that is not the doctrine of original sin, that is simply Adam's sin. The doctrine of original sin is that Adam's sin has brought a corruption to all of his posterity.

All of his posterity refers to all of his descendants. And by the way, that includes all of you.

You are all born of Adam. In fact, in a couple of weeks,

I'm going to be doing another debate. I'm going to be debating a young man named Redeem Zumer, if you all know who that is, on the subject of evolution because he's a

Christian who believes in evolution. And so we're going to have a debate on that subject. And I believe one of the major issues, and I'm sure he's gonna hear this so he'll be able to at least prepare himself.

I believe one of the major issues is that in evolution, if you join hands with your ancestor and he joins hands with his ancestor and he joins hands with his ancestor, eventually someone is going to be holding hands with someone who's not human, if evolution is true.

At some point, there's going to be a step back in the chain where you go from human to non -human.

Well, beloved, that is not biblical anthropology. Biblical anthropology is that man is a special creation of God created in his image.

And that man in his fall represented all of humankind in what we call the federal headship of Adam, where he was the representative head of all mankind.

And in the same way where we have a federal government, where if our federal government decides to go to war, guess what?

We all go to war. If our federal government decides to do something, we all do it because they represent us.

And when Adam sinned against God, he sinned in a federal sense.

He sinned as our representative. And now his sin has affected us all.

That is the doctrine of original sin. And even further is how much it has affected.

It has affected us to the point that we now are morally unable to do good toward God apart from a work of grace.

By the way, this is something interesting among Lutherans. If you ask Lutherans about free will, they will say we have free will beneath us, but not above us.

They will say we are free in those things that are choices. Like I was free to go to lunch today or go to the food truck or whatever.

I have freedom in those things that are beneath us. But when it comes to the things that are above us, I am bound.

I don't have freedom in that. Why? Because I have a moral inability which comes from what?

It comes from the fall. And I have inherited that inability.

All right, so that's the doctrine of original sin. There's more to it, but for time's sake, I'm hoping most of you understand it at least.

And if you have questions, I'd be happy to talk with you later. So is it right to say that Luther affirmed original sin?

Absolutely. In the bondage of the will, he said this. He said, seeing that we are all under sin and damnation through the one offense of the one man,

Adam, how can we attempt anything which is not sin and which is not damnable?

So he addresses right there. We are in Adam and in Adam fallen.

And in Calvin's Institutes, he says this. He says, we thus see that the impurity of parents is transmitted to their children so that all without exception are originally depraved.

The commencement of this depravity will not be found until we ascend to the first parent of all as the fountainhead.

We must therefore hold it for certain that in regard to human nature, Adam was not merely a progenitor, but as it were a root in that according by his corruption, the whole human race was deservedly vitiated.

And that word vitiated means spoiled or impaired. Calvin writes a little longer, but you hear what he's saying.

Through the one sin of Adam, all of humankind was spoiled or impaired.

So did both of them affirm original sin? Absolutely. Absolutely. And because of this, they both rejected absolute free will or what might be referred to as libertarian free will.

And I'll seek in a moment to give an understanding of that. Because if you read the bondage of the will,

I mean, the very title itself proves Luther did not believe in a free will, the title of the book.

But I do wanna read a quote. He said this, he says, his original sin does not allow free will to do anything except sin and be damned.

Hear that again. His original sin does not allow free will to do anything, but sin and be damned.

Now again, you may not agree with that. You may not be a Calvinist today, and I may not be convincing you of that truth, but I hope that I'm showing you that's what

Luther believed. Again, that's my purpose today, is to say this is the anthropology of Luther and it was the same anthropology of Calvin.

Because when Calvin wrote against Pigius, and I'm not sure I'm saying that correctly, Albert's, it's

P -I -G -H -I -U -S, and there's not a Google translator alive that could give me a right answer as to how it's supposed to sound.

So I'm just going with Pigius. But Pigius, I want you to hear what he said.

Because there's a possibility some of you never even heard of him. But I want you to hear the arguments he made against free will, and I want you to think about some of the arguments maybe you've heard against Calvin, or I'm sorry, he was arguing against Calvinism, he was arguing against sovereign election, and he was arguing for free will.

Listen to what he says. He says that if we do not have free will, it contradicts common sense, it destroys all morality and discipline, it turns men into animals and monsters, it makes

God the author of sin, it perverts his justice into cruelty and his wisdom into folly.

Sounds like a Soteriology 101 post. And hey, Layton will be here in a little while.

I ain't trying to be ugly. But that sounds exactly what they're saying. By the way, did y 'all know he was coming? Yeah, Layton Flyers will be here, he's coming to support the guy who's debating

Dr. White. Be nice. What's that?

Why, well, yeah. Calvin responded to Pigias' work much more eloquently than Luther responded to Erasmus.

Again, I like Luther because Luther liked to really have colorful language.

And I like that, I like the fact that he didn't mince words, he said it like it was. But Calvin was the scholar's scholar.

And on this subject, he wrote this. And I excuse the use of Latin.

You will understand the words, but I just, for a moment, I'm not gonna read it all in Latin, but there'll be

Latin portions. In regard to this, Calvin said, "'Man has arbitrium spontaneum, "'so that he willingly and by choice does evil, "'without compulsion from without, "'and therefore he incurs guilt.

"'But owing to native depravity, "'his will is so graven to sin "'that it always chooses evil, "'hence spontaneity and enslavement may exist together.

"'The voluntous is spontaneity, but not libera, "'it is not coacta, yet serva.'"

Translated, the will is self -directed, but it's not free. It can do what it pleases, but the problem is what it pleases to do is sin.

So if someone asks you, do you believe in free will, you can say no. Well, I mean, you can say whatever you want.

I will say no, but I will say this, I believe man makes choices, and they are legitimate choices, but that they are choices that are bound by a will which is in bondage to sin.

That was Calvin's point. Yes, yes, certainly man is self -directed.

The problem with that is the self part. Yes, you're self -directed, but yourself is bad.

The will does what it wants, but until it is liberated by the spirit of God, it will not want the things of God.

Isn't that very similar to what I just said about Lutherans today who say we can do, we are free to things below us, but we are not free in things that are above us.

See, there is more commonality between Calvin and Luther maybe than we'd like to admit. Yes, they differed on the table.

Yes, they differed in many other areas, but on the issue of anthropology, on the issue of the nature of man in sin, there was much agreement.

So both affirmed original sin. Both rejected absolute or libertarian free will.

And finally, both affirmed salvation by grace alone.

Luther and most modern Lutherans affirm sola gratia.

Calvin affirmed, interestingly enough, Calvin affirmed what he would call prevenient grace.

The problem is later the remonstrants who were the followers of Arminius that Andrew told us about, they would take a different use of the word prevenient grace.

For the Arminian, oh, and by the way, here's something interesting. Classical Arminianism holds the same view of the will of man as Calvin and Luther because they all believe the will is bound until God sets it free.

The only one who didn't believe the will was really bound is you have to go into Pelagianism.

We're gonna talk about that in a moment, but for now, let me simply say this. Arminians believe in the bondage of the will in the sense that they believe that God has to do something.

The difference is they believe God has done that for everyone and he has preveniently graced everyone, or as I think

Dr. White was the one who said, peanut butter, like he smears it on everything. Maybe, is that, yes? Like it just sort of goes on everybody and grace sort of goes everywhere and doesn't save anyone, but rather makes men savable.

That's not what Calvin meant by prevenient grace. Calvin's view of prevenient grace was much more in line with what we would talk about as effectual grace, that the grace comes and affects the heart.

The grace comes and changes the soul. Calvin said this, conversion is the work of God alone.

Now, could that be the sixth sola? No, it's not necessary because it's already in there. Because if you affirm salvation, sola gratia, you are affirming that conversion is by God alone.

As you're affirming that it has to be by grace. It cannot be a cooperative thing, it is by grace alone.

Therefore, if you affirm the five solas in their intention, not in some odd reinterpretation, but if you affirm the five solas in their intention, you will affirm a monergistic regeneration.

Calvin said this, he said the will is prepared by the Lord. The will is prepared by the

Lord. So this is the issue.

We have these two men, these ancestors in the faith, Luther and Calvin, a generation apart, they came to some different conclusions about various things, but on this issue, they were in agreement.

They were consistent. And why? Why were Luther and Calvin consistent?

One is because they had a common scriptural commitment. They were both committed to scripture.

Both were masters of the languages. The heart that beat within them was the heart of sola scriptura.

They both applied similar hermeneutics and therefore came to similar conclusions.

Even though they debated a little bit about what is means. Lord's table, this is my body.

Everybody? Okay, all right. A little bit of debate there. Sorry, that was inside baseball, sorry.

They had a common scriptural commitment, but they also had a common theological heritage. And I wanna say this, our opponents in this debate today will often look to what

I'm about to say as the problem, but I look to it not as the problem, but as a positive thing.

Because I am willing to say that yes, Luther and Calvin had a tremendous theological influence from one who came a thousand years before them.

And his name was Augustus. I'm sorry, Augustine. Yes, Augustine did influence

Calvin and Luther. If you read their writings, you can come to no other conclusion. And the problem with that for some is that they will argue that Augustine himself introduced many theological novums, many new theologies into the church.

And they will say that no one before him believed in original sin. No one before him believed in the fallen nature of man to the point where he was unable to do these things.

I was appreciative of what Andrew said earlier about the fact that the first three or 400 years of the church were more invested in the debate over Christology than anthropology.

That does not mean that they didn't discuss it or talk about it, but certainly the major councils within the early church and the writings of the early church did deal a lot with the person and work of Jesus Christ.

And it was those issues with Pelagius that brought about the systematization of Augustine's theology.

But again, if we look historically, history has sided, the church has sided with Augustine.

Not out of fear, not out of having been coerced, or not out of having been fooled, but because in the vast majority of instances when this subject has arose, they have found his arguments to be most consistent with scripture.

So why do we look to Augustine? Because Augustine was looking to Paul and making the very same arguments that he was making.

In fact, it was after Augustine and Pelagius, by the way,

Pelagius was condemned as a heretic, but his teaching didn't go away.

As Andrew mentioned earlier, it moved into more of what was known as a semi -Pelagianism. And then what

B .B. Warfield would call a semi -semi -Pelagianism, in his book, by the way, if you want the reference to that, it's the book

The Plan of Salvation by B .B. Warfield. But there was a council that took place.

This council took place in France in A .D. 529. So it was after the death of both

Augustine and Pelagius. And the council was known as the Council of Orange.

It was actually the second council of Orange. And they established 25 canons of teaching.

Now, this was not an ecumenical council. This was not a council that we would look to like the Council of Nicaea or Chalcedon or any of those.

This was a more local council, but yet at the same time, they knew there was an important issue with which to deal.

And the issue was, how do we understand the nature of man? How do we understand our anthropology?

And understand, this is 1 ,000 years before Luther wrote

The Bondage of the Will. There are 25 canons.

I don't have time to read them all to you, and I'm sure you wouldn't want me to if I did. But I do want to read to you one of them, the first one.

And by the way, I don't agree with everything that the Council of Orange decided. So if you come to me later and say, oh, well, they said this about baptism or this about this.

Yes, I'm not saying it was perfect. But what I am showing here is a consistent anthropology through history, right?

That's my point. And I want you to hear what was written in 529.

"'If anyone denies that it is the whole man, "'that is both body and soul, "'that was changed for the worse "'through the offense of Adam's sin, "'but believes that the freedom of the soul "'remains unimpaired and that only the body "'is subject to corruption, "'he is deceived by the error of Pelagius "'and contradicts the scripture.'"

So again, why? Did Calvin and Luther agree?

Was it because they had been unfortunately influenced by the bad teaching of Augustine?

Or was it because this teaching is what the scripture teaches and the people of God have recognized it down through the ages?

My argument is simple. I believe that history bears out what we believe about the nature of man.

Does it raise questions? Absolutely. Do we have to wrestle with tensions about freedom and responsibility?

Absolutely. But when we begin to give these things up, when we begin to say, well, maybe these things don't matter, we open ourselves up to so many other dangerous things, so many other dangerous heresies.

And so we should, with Calvin and with Luther and with Augustine, affirm what the

Bible teaches, that you were dead in your trespasses and sins, which you once walked in.

And you are, by nature, children of wrath.

But God, who is rich in mercy, with the great love with which he loved us, by grace you have been saved, through faith.

And that is not your doing, but it is the gift of God.

Not a result of works, lest any man should boast, for we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, that he prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.

Beloved, this is a biblical anthropology proclaimed by our ancestors, and one that I believe should be held by us all.

Let us pray. Father, I thank you for your word, and pray even now, Lord, that we will see that the teachings of our ancestors have great value even to today, and the battles that were fought before and continue to be fought now,

Lord, are battles over foundational issues. And Lord, often we are accused of having an unbalanced fascination with your sovereignty, and yet,

Lord, we would say there are those with an unbalanced fascination with freedom of the will. Lord, help us, instead of both of those, to have a right view of you, and a right view of God, or a right view of man.

And Lord, forgive us where we err, and bring us in accord with the truth. We pray in Jesus' name, amen.