There are variations of Christian perspectives on aspects of the Bible, Creation, End Times, Gifts of the Holy Spirit, and, of course, Salvation. Can a person lose their salvation? What is the evidence of salvation? What is the gospel, and who is it for?
This last one, what is the gospel (good news for whom), who is it for (who can be saved by the gospel), what is the gospel for (offer salvation to all or to extend the call to God’s elect), and what are missions for (to offer all the opportunity to believe unto salvation or to gather God’s elect from the four corners of the earth).
The difference is between what is known as Calvinism and what I call Extensivism. Extensivism’s work of grace, which is available to every person, is non-determinative in outcome and provides so that everyone may choose to believe or reject God’s salvation while still in their sins. This work of grace enables man to make spiritually restorative decisions, which ability was lost in the fall.[1]
Simply stated:
Calvinism believes that God has chosen to save some people and not save other people; therefore, only those he desires to save, the elect, can be saved, and they will be saved because God determines that they will be saved. God has provided everything needed for them to be saved and has determined they will be saved. The rest of humanity is the non-elect; not only will they not be saved, but they cannot be saved; they cannot will to believe. God has withheld everything needed for salvation from them because it pleases him to damn them to hell without ever having an actual opportunity to believe and be saved. Everything in Calvinism is micro-determined.
Extensivism believes that God chose to make salvation available and accessible to everyone because he genuinely desires that everyone believe in the gospel, and by doing so, they will be saved. God has provided everything needed so that everyone can and should believe and be saved. The elect does not refer to some abstract group but rather is used to speak of Christ, who is the elect one, and those who believe in him are in him and are, therefore, the elect—Christians. God created so that some things are determined by Him and, therefore, unaffected by human or natural activity. Whereas some things, by God’s design, result from humans exercising their God-given free will.
When we consider biblical passages, we glean which theological perspective is true by seeing which is most reflective of Scripture. In this article, I want to consider historically which perspective is the most characteristic of early Christianity as a whole.
Does the perspective that everything is determined and God predetermined to save only a small group (the elect) and deny salvation to the rest of humanity, his creation (the non-elect), reflect the teachings of the early church, or does the Extensivist perspective in which only some things are determined and others (by God’s grace and design) are the result of free will including whether a person is saved or not, and that God truly desires every person to be saved and every person can and should believe unto salvation.
Sometimes, the disciples become more zealous than their leader, as John the Baptist’s disciples did in John 3:27–36. Many Calvinists do the same. Consequently, we must ask, what was Augustine’s Protestant orthodoxy, background, and beliefs? Church history is often referred to in the context of Late Augustine or the Reformation forward by Calvinists. Those who do this forget the history of the early church and other such vast movements of God, like the Anabaptist and Baptist movements and Methodists. Calvinists often speak of church history as beginning with the late Augustine or the Reformation; both are incomplete.
Historically, the early church rejected what is now known as Augustinian and Calvinism’s deterministic view of God and his salvation plan. The following makes this clear.
For the first 350 years of the church, the church fathers, leaders, and Christians rejected everything like Augustine’s later adopted determinism, which even early Augustine himself rejected. He was a great proponent of free will and argued against the Manicheans, but later, he adopted determinism, which was later adopted by, most notably, John Calvin. Calvinists have done such an outstanding job in advocating Augustinianism and Calvinism in their writings that many, especially many Calvinists, think Augustine’s view was present from the beginning. So, I want to not focus on the theology of it all but on the historicity of the two main views.
Ken Wilson, a pediatric surgeon, earned a PhD at Oxford. He wrote his doctoral thesis (we call dissertation) on Augustine’s evolution from free will to micro-determinism. It is entitled Augustine’s Conversion from Traditional Free Choice to Non-free Free Will. It is summarized in his simpler book, The Foundation of Augustinian Calvinism. However, if challenged, the challenger must use Wilson’s dissertation (not his summarized version), and he has been open to debating James White and others on the truth of his thesis.
Wilson read all of Augustine’s writings in the original language and chronological order, just as Augustine directed. Wilson also studied all the relevant church fathers and the contemporary religions and philosophies (Stoicism, Manicheism, Neoplatonism) in the original languages that may have influenced Augustine. For 10 years, Augustine was a Manichean. When he became a Christian, he, like the entire church, argued against Manichean determinism. Augustine remained a stoic his entire life, which like Manicheanism, is deterministic.
Augustine said, “For whoever reads my works in the order in which they were written will perhaps discover out [sic] how I have made progress over the course of my writing.”[2] Referring to his doctoral thesis, Wilson said, “For that project, I read all of Augustine’s extant works, letters, and sermons chronologically and compared them with the various religious and philosophical beliefs on fate and free will from 2000 BCE to 400 CE, including the earlier Christian authors (early church fathers).”[3]
Wilson demonstrates how the early church fathers believed in free will and rejected salvation by predeterminism, and this group included the early Augustine. Wilson said, “Early Christian authors unanimously taught relational divine eternal predetermination. God elected persons to salvation based upon foreknowledge of their faith (predestination) . . . Of the eighty-four pre-Augustinian authors, studied from 95–430 CE, over fifty addressed this topic. All of these early Christian authors championed traditional free choice and relational predestination against pagan and heretical Divine Unilateral Predetermination of Individuals’ Eternal Destinies.”[4] Wilson summarizes, “No Christian author from 95 CE until Augustine in 412 CE could be identified who taught anything other than traditional free choice.”[5]
Loraine Boettner is a Calvinist theologian and historian. He writes, “The earlier church fathers….taught that salvation was through Christ; yet they assumed that man had full power to accept or reject the gospel. Some of their writings contain passages in which the sovereignty of God is recognized; yet alongside those are others which teach the absolute freedom of the human will.”[6]
Boettner correctly assesses the ubiquity of “absolute freedom of the human will” in early church writings and God’s sovereignty. Calvinistic theology and writings err in their view that these are mutually exclusive.
Cults taught unilateral determinism, like Augustinian/Calvinism, Gnostics, stoics, and Manicheans (Augustine was a Manichean for 10 years and remained committed to Stoicism his entire life).
Thus, for the first three hundred and fifty years after Christ, there were no determinists (like the late Augustine or Calvin and his followers) among these leaders. Let that sink in for a moment. Those of us who reject Calvinism’s determinism are portrayed as out of step with history, but the truth is, we are only out of step with their selective history. Therefore, the early church believed in free will and not determinism for everything, including those who could be saved.
When Augustine became a determinist Christian, he argued against a man named Pelagius. In Calvinism, Augustine was correct, and Pelagius was wrong and a heretic. Many Calvinists fondly and repeatedly classify people like me who believe God offers accessible salvation to everyone and truly desires that all individuals believe in Christ and be saved as Pelagians or semi-Pelagians.
Ali Bonner contends that “Pelagianism is a Myth” created for polemical reasons. Pelagianism, as a movement, is a fiction according to Ali Bonner, a graduate of Cambridge, Associate Professor in Celtic History of the Medieval Period, Fellow of Queens’ College at Cambridge, expertise “Pelagius and the manuscript transmission of his writing.”[7] Her book is The Myth of Pelagianism.
She did not begin with a theological drive to study Augustine and Pelagianism but researched, studied, and wrote about the British history of that time period to better understand it. However, Augustine and the Pelagian controversy loomed so large that she had to study them to understand that period of British history.
I do not know if she is a Christian; having studied her book, I am not aware of her taking sides on who is theologically correct. As I remember, she said she did not know who was right regarding what the Bible teaches. However, she concluded that the idea of Pelagianism as a movement led by Pelagius and that Pelagius taught all the things attributed to him is a myth. Her conclusions are based on extant manuscripts of Pelagius’s writings.
What Pelagius believed was the common, ordinary belief of the time, and Augustine even admitted Pelagius did not teach what he was accused of. Bonner says, “Pelagius did not suggest anything that was not already in wide circulation in Christian discourse.”[8]
Bonner writes, “Augustine listed fourteen tenets which he presented as constituting ‘Pelagianism.”’[9] Bonner says, “Only one part of these fourteen tenets is attested in the surviving writings of Pelagius.”[10] She then takes you through the surviving writings of Pelagius regarding the fourteen points. I have read all of them. You can read them and what Pelagius actually said about each in chapter one.[11]
Bonner writes, concerning these points, “The bishops said that Pelagius rejected and condemned as opposed to the truth . . . Pelagius replied [they] were not in his books nor had he ever said such things, and he anathematized those who thought such things not as heretics, but as fools.”[12] Therefore, we have in Pelagius’s own words that he rejected these ideas and never wrote otherwise.
Augustine said of the 14 points, “It may be doubtful or unclear whether Pelagius or Caelestius [disciple of Pelagius] or both of them or neither of them or others either with them or in their name, held or still hold such propositions. It has nonetheless been made quite clear by this court that these things were condemned and that Pelagius would have been condemned at the same time if he had not himself condemned them”[13] emphasis added. But, as Augustine admits, Pelagius did condemn the teachings and, therefore, was not commendable for believing them; that is Augustine’s clearly stated opinion.
What Pelagius did hold to was “the goodness of human nature and effective free will.”[14] Both of these were the accepted teachings of the church fathers and the church, including Augustine, for the first 350 years of the church. There were common disagreements about nuances, but these two beliefs were the accepted beliefs of the early church.
Pelagius did believe the human will works alongside or cooperates with the action of the Holy Spirit.[15] Contrary to the charges against him, he did not believe man could be saved on his own or that man did not have to depend on God’s grace and the Holy Spirit.
“Pelagius frequently referred to several aspects of grace.” Bonner wrote, “The issue for Augustine was that Pelagius’ references to it might not refer to Augustine’s interpretation of the word, which for him was the most important aspect of grace. Prevenient grace was inextricably bound to its twin, predestination, interpreted as preordainment. Augustine described prevenient grace and predestination as two stages in one process. Both were causally tied to original sin because original sin made human nature so weak that it was unable to choose virtue unaided, and on every occasion, it required prevenient grace to cause it to choose virtuous action.”[16]
The early church spoke and used the term “grace” so that there were at least seven possible aspects of using grace. Bonner writes, “In Christian literature the word ‘grace’ could be used to refer to any gift from God.”[17] Remember, important to this discussion is to understand that words must be read in their literary, time, and language context.
She lists seven usages of the term grace, of which number one is “There was the grace of creation, which included man’s endowment with free will; the extent of this free will was at issue, whether it was free will to evil only, or ‘dual’ or ‘effective’ free will—that is, to virtue as well as to sin.”[18] Additionally, Pelagius did not believe in human sinlessness or that it was humanly attainable, although many repeat this error.
So, we can at least see from this one usage that Pelagius believed that the possession, use, and action of free will are by grace; this is contrary to the standard charges of our day by Calvinists. Consequently, while stated differently than found in late Augustine, Pelagius did make evident that he believed that virtue, believing in Christ by an act of the will, was because of grace.
What Augustine did not like was that Pelagius did not say it as he did. That is the same today, with many Calvinists only accepting our belief in grace salvation if we define it as they do, which would make us Calvinists, something we reject and that is out of step with the early church. We Extensivists believe everything is by grace, even possessing the good gift of libertarian free will, meaning that some things will be different based on our choices. We also believe God constituted humans and his salvation plan so that it can be accepted by anyone by believing and rejected by not believing.
Well, here we are today. Is moral freedom the God-given grace ability to choose to do good or evil (the early church, early Augustine), or is it only the ability to choose evil without predetermined prevenient grace given to some (late Augustine, Calvin, and his supporters)? That was the issue and still is. Much of Calvinism’s support is derived from virtually omitting the early church’s history, using only selective history, and relying on unnecessarily narrow definitions and interpretations artificially imposed upon many biblical texts. They also rely on the obstacles (sin, being in darkness, Satan, fallen world) to man being able to choose to believe in salvation freely or not being so formidable that man cannot choose to believe. While I recognize that the obstacles to the exercise of free will in salvation are redoubtable, I recognize that all of them, in their mightiest form and most robust moment, are no challenge to the grace of God. And God has overcome every obstacle by his grace enablements clearly laid out in Scripture.
Bonner says, “If Augustine had simply stated the two issues in dispute, he would have risked failing in this project to install as orthodoxy the interlinked doctrines of original sin, prevenient grace, and predestination interpreted as preordainment.”[19] Bonner refers to these inseparable ideas in Augustinian determinism as the “triune.”
Bonner gives the reason the following doctrines are referred to as the triune. She writes, “Because the doctrines of original sin, an absolutist account of prevenient grace, and predestination interpreted as preordainment were so closely linked, they will on occasion be referred to hereafter as ‘the triune.’”[20] When the rhetoric is dispelled we are left with the reality that there were only two actually disputed issues. They were “the goodness of human nature and effective free will.”[21] Since these were common, widely held Christian beliefs, if Augustine had not added the 13.5 other charges against Pelagius (that even Augustine admitted on two occasions that Pelagius did not believe), Augustine’s attempt to introduce a new orthodoxy would have faced potential failure.
In her conclusion, referring to the triune mentioned,[22] Bonner says that change “represented not just a different brand of Christianity but a different conception of man and God.”[23] This is also where we are today. At the end of soteriological discussions and interpretations according to Calvinism and Extensivism, we are continuously led to the question of who is God?
If these problems were not enough, Augustine’s influence on Catholicism and his belief in the sacraments should also be considered. Catholic apologist Dave Armstrong writes, “documents from Augustine’s writings [confirm] that he believed in the seven sacraments of Rome.”[24]
[1] Specifically, Extensivism believes man was created in the image of God with otherwise choice and God’s salvation plan is comprehensive, involving an all-inclusive unconditional offer of salvation and eternal security of the believer; reception of which is conditioned upon grace-enabled faith rather than an exclusive plan involving a limited actual offer of salvation to only the unconditionally elected, or any plan that, in any way, conditions salvation upon merely a humanly-generated faith.
Extensivism may have some things in common with Calvinism, Arminianism, or Molinism, but does not rely upon any of them. Similarities do not equal sameness. Extensivism seeks only to present a comprehensive, consistent system of soteriology that is reflective of the warp and woof of Scripture, which may have shared beliefs with other systems of soteriology, but Extensivism neither relies upon nor seeks to be consistent with them.
Generally, I use Extensivism as a positive term in place of non-Calvinism.
[2] Sourced as Retract., Prol. 3 in Ken Wilson’s The Foundation of Augustinian-Calvinism, (Regula Fidei Press, 2019), 3.
[3] Ken Wilson, The Foundation of Augustinian-Calvinism, (Regula Fidei Press, 2019), III.
[4] Ken Wilson, The Foundation of Augustinian-Calvinism, (Regula Fidei Press, 2019), 19–20. Wilson goes on to say, “Some persons triumphantly cite ancient Christian authors claiming they believe Augustine’s deterministic interpretations of scripture, but without reading the entire context or without understanding the way in which words were being used. I am not aware of any Patristics (early church fathers) scholar who would or could make a claim that even one Christian author prior to Augustine taught Divine Unilateral Predetermination of Individuals’ Eternal Destines (DUPIED, i.e., non-relational determinism unrelated to foreknowledge of human choices.)” 20.
[5] Kenneth M. Wilson, Augustine’s Conversion from Traditional Free Choice to “Non–free Free Will” A Comprehensive Methodology (Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2018) 307.
[6] Loraine Boettner, Calvinism in History, Chapter One, “Before The Reformation,” accessed September 4, 2019, http://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/sdg/boettner/boettner_calvinism.html#chapter1.
[7] University of Cambridge, Dr. Ali Bonner, accessed December 3, 2024, https://www.asnc.cam.ac.uk/people/Ali.Bonner/.
[8] Ali Bonner, The Myth of Pelagianism (Oxford: Published For The British Academy By The Oxford University Press, 2018), 27.
[9] Bonner, The Myth, 2.
[10] Bonner, The Myth, 3.
[11] Bonner, “The Caricature of Pelagius’ Teaching and its Disjunction from the Reality of Texts Written by Pelagius,” in The Myth, 1–28.
[12] Bonner, The Myth, 2.
[13] Bonner, The Myth, 23.
[14] Bonner, The Myth, 25.
[15] Bonner, The Myth, 17.
[16] Bonner, The Myth, 16.
[17] Bonner, The Myth, 10.
[18] Bonner, The Myth, 10.
[19] Bonner, The Myth, 26.
[20] Bonner, The Myth, xii.
[21] Bonner, The Myth, 25.
[22] Bonner’s conclusions can be found in Bonner, The Myth, 302-7.
[23] Bonner, The Myth, 305.
[24] Dave Armstrong, “Did St. Augustine Accept All Seven Sacraments?” National Catholic Register, November 15, 2017, accessed April 14, 2022, https://www.ncregister.com/blog/did-st-augustine-accept-all-seven-sacraments. See also “The Catholic Augustine and His Novel Doctrine of Determinism” on my blog, https://ronniewrogers.com/2023/03/the-catholic-augustine-and-his-novel-doctrine-of-determinism/.
