Adolf von Harnack
Published: 2013-09
Total Pages: 142
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1899 edition. Excerpt: ... independent of human agency. Augustine subordinated the notions of the Church and Sacraments to the spiritual doctrine of God, Christ, the gospel, faith and love, as far as that was at all possible about A.D. 400. 3. The Pelagian Controversy. The Doctrine of Grace and Sin. Augustine's doctrine of grace and sin was constructed independently of the Pelagian controversy. It was substantially complete when he entered the conflict; but he was by no means clear as to its application in separate questions in the year of his conversion. At the time of his fight with Manichaeism (see the Tres libri de libero arbitrio) he had rather emphasised, following the tradition of the Church teachers, the independence of human freedom, and had spoken of original sin merely as inherited evil. It was his clerical office, a renewed study of Romans, and the criticism of his spiritual development, as instituted in the Confessions, that first led him to the Neoplatonic Christian conviction that all good, and therefore faith, came from God, and that man was only good and free in dependence on God. Thus he gained a point of view which he confessed at the close of his life he had not always possessed, and which he opposed to the earlier, erroneous conceptions 1 that friends and enemies frequently reminded him of. It can be said that his doctrine of grace, in so far as it was a doctrine of God, was complete as early as A.D. 387; but it was not, in its application to Bible history, or to the problem of conversion and sanctification (in the Church), before the beginning of the fifth century. It can also be shown that he was at all times slightly influenced by the popular Catholic view, and this all the more as he was not capable of drawing the whole consequences of his...