The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

In the Second Book of Augustine on Perseverance (chap. ii.), he
says: "There are three points on which the Church Catholic mainly
opposes the Pelagians.
7. "One of these doctrines with which she opposes them is, that the
grace of God is not given because of our merits.
8. "The second is, that whatever may be the righteousness of a an,,
no one lives in this corruptible body without sins of some kind.
9. "The third is, that man contracts liability by the sin of the first man,
and would come under the fetter of condemnation were not the
accountability which is contracted by generation dissolved by
regeneration."
10. In the same book he attributes to the Pelagians the doctrine that
"Adam's sin injured no one but himself."
The following statements, drawn from other reliable sources, will
further illustrate the characteristics of Pelagianism:
1. Pelagius originally asserted that man without grace can perform all
the commands of God. Under the pressure of the urgency of his brethren
he subsequently admitted that some aid of Divine grace is desirable, but
only that we might more EASILY do God's commands.
2. That concupiscence or desire, which is in man by nature, is good,
and that the whole nature of man, even after the fall, remains entire and
incorrupt, so that even in spiritual things he could do good, and fulfil the
will of God.
3. That sin is contracted entirely by example and imitation, not at all
by propagation.
II. The Anabaptists.
The confessors, in the Antithesis, may have had reference, moreover,
to the Anabaptists, who maintained:
1. "That sin was so taken away by the death of Christ that infants,
under the New Testament, are born without sin, and are innocent, the
servitude of death alone excepted;
2. "And, therefore, deny that infants are to be baptized, since they are
born subject to no sin."
III. Zwingli
It is not a matter of perfect agreement among the writers on our
Confession, whether Zwingli is alluded to in the Antithesis. Our old
standard writers are almost unanimous in believing that he was, at least,
one of