Rather than appearing in its pure and simple form, Pelagianism has been far more prevalent in church history when it has been mixed in with a bit of grace.
Cornelis Venema, of Mid-America Reformed Seminary, in his recent book dealing with the New Perspective, argues that E. P. Sanders portrayal of Second-Temple Judaism has strong affinities with semi-Pelagianism:
The glaring weakness of Sanders' case...is that he does not consider whether 'covenantal nomism' could accommodate a form of religious teaching that regards salvation and acceptance with God as being based on grace plus good works.
Covenantal nomism is a sufficiently elastic pattern for the religion of Second-Temple Judaism that it could express a kind of a semi-Pelagian view of the relation between God and his people.
That Second-Temple Judaism was not full-blown Pelagianism is not surprising. In the course of history, Pelagianism is a 'rare bird' in the aviary of Jewish and Christian theology. Few have argued that salvation does not require the initiative of God's grace but is simply based on human moral achievement.
Where Pelagianism has appeared, therefore, it has commonly been condemned by the major branches of the Christian church. Semi-Pelagian views, however, are quite often found in the history of Christian theology. Though these views may speak of God's gracious initiative in salvation, they also insist that human salvation does not end with a good beginning.
According to semi-Pelagianism, those who find favour and acceptance with God are those who freely co-operate with his grace and complement it by a life of good works that merits further grace and final salvation.Cornelis Venema, The Gospel of Free Acceptance in Christ: An assessment of the Reformation and the New Perspective on Paul, p. 156-7
Recently I have been reading through Listening to the Beliefs of the Emerging Churches. Doug Pagitt has a very curious explanation for the tension between Augustine and Pelagius. In his estimation Pelagius' Celtic spirituality, the product of a Druidic northern culture, was always going to clash with Augustine's Greco-Roman view of God. Now aside of the fact that their respective theologies are explained solely in cultural terms (and I think quite inaccurately by Pagitt) and not in terms of their differing exegesis Scripture, Pagitt has got the wrong culture in mind. Jerome said at the time that Pelagianism was the heresy of "Pythagoras and Zeno." Dean Milman, noted that "the greater part" of Pelagius' letter to Demetrius "might have been written by an ancient academic." Pelagianism seems to him to be "a rehabilitation of the general heathen view of the world."
And it ought to be pointed out that explaining orthodoxy and heresy in such a way that culture accounts for both is itself the product of an unorthodox presupposition.
Here is Bavinck on Pelagius:
"According to Pelagius, the image of God consisted solely in free personality, not in positive holiness, immortality, and so on. Adam's trespass, according to him, did not deprive humans of the image of God and in fact had no adverse consequences whatsoever. There is no such thing as original sin. Adam's trespass negatively affected his descendants only in that it left them a bad example, which, followed by others, made sin a power among humankind...Sin, accordingly, is propagated not by generation but by imitation. Humans, whose souls were created pure by God, are still today born in the same state as Adam was before the fall...Human beings are still completely free and can of themselves know and do the good: they have no need of grace. It is indeed possible for them to abstain from all sins, and a few have in fact attained this ideal.In voicing these ideas, Pelagius did little more than take over the views that had been promulgated long before by Greek and Roman philosophers and had found acceptance in popular philosophy."Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics vol. 3: Sin and Salvation in Christ, (Baker: 2006), p. 86
Rather than appearing in its pure and simple form, Pelagianism has been far more prevalent in church history when it has been mixed in with a bit of grace.
