Pelagius got it right about our first two parents, but got it wrong about the rest of the human race, his descendants, because he overlooked the curse of sin.
Adam and Eve were created naturally without virtue or vice until they sinned against God’s prohibition. This was a state of innocence. They chose the short term benefits of deadly knowledge rather than the long term benefits of eternal life. In so doing they lost access to the Tree of Life.
The innocence of Adam was short lived indeed. Though he was created in innocence this was not possible in the generations of descendants that populated the earth afterwards. The curse of sin upon man, the climate and the earth changed everything.
The first man was created with a living soul, but the rest of the race only had an active body and the breath of life, called the spirit within him. His soul was dead in sins and trespasses. The whole human race was blighted with darkness and death. Though this constantly affirmed in the Old and New Testaments most people in the churches can no longer accept this fact of God’s Word.
Pelagius, the Church of Rome, Erasmus and Arminius (Jacob Hermandson) mistakenly thought and taught that Adam’s innocence was righteousness. It was not! When Eve first sinned, then Adam, it was not a fall from righteousness. The popular doctrine of ‘The Fall’ is not found in Genesis because he possessed no righteousness from which to fall. The term ‘Fall of Adam’ is by the Church of Rome and mistakenly perpetuated afterwards by Christendom, especially after the Age of Enlightenment.
If holy water of a Roman priest could have restored the innocence of Adam to the believer (and it cannot), it would still not restore original righteousness to the believer, because it is a myth, rejected by the whole of biblical counsel of Scripture. Augustine was not the only scholar that stood by the opinion of the Bible: Luther, Calvin and many other godly scholars through time did so, including C H Spurgeon of London in the 19th century.
Following the lead of Pelagius and Erasmus, the first Baptists took a left hand turn against the Reformation’s ‘faith by grace’ by eclipsing it with their militant compulsion of adults to take a second baptism. Yet this was a negation of the Reformation and its biblical message of the ‘bondage of the will’. The message of water became a distraction from the Reformation message of ’faith alone, by grace alone, by the Scriptures alone.’
Human volition, or the will, with conscience suddenly survived the curse of sin and was even able to access faith through mental understanding and verbal affirmation. Synteresis, or the universal spark of a godward conscience came from medieval Rome and had its roots in Greek philosophy.
The Quakers also agreed with the Baptists and Jacob Arminius that this was so, but they erred from the truth in a major way. Yet this fallacy abounds today across the globe throughout Christendom. Augustine, Luther, and Calvin have been rejected for the easy religion of freewill faith which is now supposed to access grace. It never has and it never will be a means of accessing the divine.
Freewill faith is natural faith and supposedly activated by man’s will. The words of the apostles refute this idea. It is in direct opposition to the Bible’s doctrine. It is merely a humanistic deviation, so well espoused in the 18th century Age of Enlightenment and by the lapsed Jonathan Edwards, who also turned to philosophy to reject original sin and universal inherent decay of man’s body, soul and spirit. This includes mind, motives and morals of a blighted conscience according to the words of Jesus, St. Paul, St. John and James.
It took only seven years after Martin Luther before deviant new churches began to reject the Reformation’s of sola fide, via sola gratia, via sola scriptura, . By faith alone through grace alone through Scripture alone is the path of access to participating in the divine nature of Christ. Paul and John affirmed that these do not come through water-wine-wafer or the will of freewill faith by man. The pathway cannot be trod naturally, regardless of the disciple’s best of motives, moral rectitude, religious zeal of verbal affirmations.
Today’s revivalists and fellow travellers go even further since the advent of the 19th century Father of American Psychology, not only can freewill access faith, but any freewill act of the unbeliever in a godward direction is faith, no matter how small and insignificant it seems.
This is the folly of believing in the myth of original righteousness, and, secondly the folly of denying original sin’s catastrophic outcome. In short this is the easy-religion that now pervades Christendom’s churches.
There is no original righteousness, despite the Church of Rome’s claim to holy water becoming the water of rebirth to the christened baby who is made originally righteous.
There is no godward propensity and man is not interested in even seeking God, let alone understanding his message to humanity. His devious heart, however, will become religious when its suits his ulterior self-interested motives. Otherwise, the universal propensity to worship some unseen being kicks in one way or another. Thus the birth of a panoply of Christian and non-Christian religions within both the civilized and uncivilized world. From Eve in the Garden onwards, the hunger for the paranormal and the divine has been an innate self-justifying gravitational pull.
When in the 19th century this was acceptably immersed into the new religions and sects of Christendom it gave rise to all sorts of cults which continued being born in the early years of the 20th century. They can be easily discerned by the true saint: stage performed; sensationalist; and excessively loud. They are often guided by personality cult shepherds swaggering with unique knowledge no one else possesses. They alone are privy to special revelation of which others are unaware, confident gurus with the ‘gift of the gab’; unctuous; self-promoting with bibliolatrous over veneration of their select verses of Scripture to justify their new extra-biblical doctrines of error.
They focus on emotion, titillating the curious and the gullible with grandiose exaggeration and graphic entertaining asides to keep the congregation’s attention. The degree of ecstatic physical responses becomes important as each tries to outdo a contemporary in another assembly. Conversions are made easily and quickly by use of various verbal and musical cadences to soothe the unsuspecting adherent in the pews. Emotional expression soon comes to be synonymous with faith itself. Coaching counselors school and tutor would be converts into easy-religion to be followed by induction in water to seal the deal. Easy trips to heaven are up for grabs at the drop of a hat. One may change one’s destination from hell to heaven on a whim and never look back, always reassured that the matter is irrevocably final and cannot be changed by man or devil.
In the final analysis, freewill righteousness by natural understanding and mere verbal affirmation after being tutored is as false as the original righteousness of Adam. In the former and the latter neither are possessors. That is why the Second Adam had to come and give the gift of enlightening grace to the first eleven disciples before they could understand or believe in the Christ that had died and had risen from the dead to meet them on that first day.
BIBLE READING.
10 As it is written, There is no one righteous; no, not one. 11 There is no one who understands. There is no one who seeks after God. (Romans 3.10-11)
Now the natural man doesn’t receive the things of God’s Spirit, for they are foolishness to him, and he can’t know them, because they are spiritually discerned. (1 Corinthians 2:14).
1 “Come, everyone who thirsts, to the waters! Come, he who has no money, buy, and eat!
Yes, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. 6 Seek God while he may be found. Call on him while he is near. 7 Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts. Let him return to God, and he will have mercy on him; and to our God, for he will freely pardon. (Isaiah 55:1; 6-7).
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SPECIAL NOTE:
Read again Isaiah 55:1 and see the paradox in the futility of self-effort and self-will to gain the unattainable. It cannot be bought or purchased. It is priceless and invaluable a treasure yet there is no price attached, so it cannot be purchased. This is not an open invitation to all and sundry to come and get easy-religion or a quick ticket to heaven. Only those who thirst should even bother coming. Only those who are seekers can possibly find this unspeakable treasure, though the price was paid in full at Calvary.
Nevertheless, the great paradox is:- “There is no one who seeks after God.” (Romans 3.10-11). Is this antinomy? Is this a contradiction? No, certainly not! Both Testaments of Scripture tell the story of grace and without the touch of grace men will not be arrested in their tracks enough to hunger or thirst after God.
Without grace a man will not want to subject himself to hearing and learning of God the Father. Without grace the no man will forsake his way, and his unrighteous thoughts. Without grace sorrow and regret cannot be turned into the godly sorrow of repentance. Without grace there will be no final enlightening by the risen Christ to understand and to be born a second time as the eleven disciples experienced after the resurrection with one hundred and nine others in the forty days of his visitations and appearances.
THE DOWNGRADE OF GOSPEL