Augustine and Pelagius
Let’s look more closely at the ideas behind this great debate. Pelagius argued that human beings possess unconditional free will as well as moral responsibility. If human beings do not, then it would be unjust for God to demand obedience and hold people accountable for not obeying. He wrote, Evil is not born within us, and we are procreated without fault. In other words, we are good at birth.
Augustine’s mature thinking on sin and salvation can be found in On the Spirit and the Letter (412). After the fall of Adam into sin, man became a slave to sin. But he was not created this way. Adam was created good. He was posse non peccare (“able not to sin”) before the fall. Augustine stressed the original goodness of God’s creation and the freedom of Adam and Eve to respond obediently to God. Yet this ability to respond obediently should not be thought of as a power inherent within human beings. Even in the Garden, Adam and Eve depended upon God’s grace and his fatherly favor for their lives and happiness. God’s grace, then, is the precondition for true freedom. Freedom is neither autonomy nor independence from God. Quite the contrary, it is a clinging unto God.
According to Augustine, Adam’s original integrity consisted in his ability to respond to God obediently from an unencumbered will. Through sinning Adam and Eve lost their original freedom and moral integrity. They now became non posse non peccare (“not able not to sin”).
The second consequence of the fall was death. Originally Adam had been posse non mori (“not able to die”). As fallen he is non posse non mori (“not able not to die”). The Adamic rebellion came from a misuse of creaturely freedom, a spirit of autonomous freedom in which Adam and Eve sought to follow their own desires rather than God’s. Pushing themselves away from the source of their true freedom and life, they came under the perverse and perverting powers of sin and death.
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