Transcript

Alright, welcome back to part two of our all-Augustine night.

Oh, I just broke my one piece of long chalk.

In the second hour, we're going to talk about Augustine and the Pelagian controversy.

We're going to be getting into a little bit more of Augustine's theology here.

Now, remember, as I said earlier, that before Augustine, most everyone assumed that humans have free will.

especially in the East, but also in the West.

You see it in Justin Martyr, Theophilus, Clement of Alexandria, in all the apologists, and then in the theologians as well.

Free will is assumed.

But, now here comes Augustine, and remember his background.

We talked about his increasingly pessimistic anthropology, especially with regard to social pressure, human habit, etc. On top of all that, remember that his mentor is Ambrose of Milan.

Ambrose of Milan is anti-Aryan, so Augustine is anti-Aryan.

But what is Aryanism but an optimistic anthropology?

Aryanism assumes Arianism has this optimistic anthropology.

To be anti-Arian is to reject that and to take a pessimistic anthropology.

Augustine's experience with pears and women led to this very pessimistic anthropology, this pessimism about human nature and about the perfectibility of the human and about the freedom of the human will.

The problem for Augustine is this.

Sin is not simply behavior.

Sin is a disease.

With which all humans are infected.

And the symptom of the disease is the loss of free will.

Humans are enslaved to our compulsions, and we are really only free to sin.

We persevere, if we persevere, only because of God's grace.

Therefore, if we are to be saved, it must be all by God's doing.

And so Augustine wrote in his confession, speaking to God, he said, Grant what you command, command what you will.

In other words, tell me what to do, Lord, and I'll do it as long as you give me the power to do it.

Now, along comes Pelagius.

Pelagius is a British monk who came to Rome.

And in fact, Pelagius was coming to Rome just about the time that Augustine was leaving Rome to go to Milan.

They never really met there.

But when Augustine went back to North Africa, Pelagius was still in Rome.

And there he read Augustine where Augustine says, grant what you command, command what you will.

This would be in about the year 405. Now, Pelagius read that and immediately disagreed with it, in the sense that he thought it undermined moral responsibility and taught a kind of cheap grace.

As if Augustine was saying, you know, I'll do whatever you want me to do, Lord, as long as you give me the power to do it, as though that sort of implies But if I don't do it, it must mean you didn't give me the power to do it.

Therefore, if I don't do your will, it's really your fault, God.

That's kind of how Phileas just read this.

So you can sort of extrapolate from that almost a freedom from all moral responsibility.

This evil is on God somehow.

And so Pelagius thought that Augustine's idea of election sounded too much like the fatalism of the manichees.

Almost like Augustine's idea of predestination sounded too much like astrology.

Like, well, you know, stars have determined your fate and it is what it is.

And so for Pelagius to say these things runs the risk of letting people off the hook.

And having people throw up their hands and say, well, why be good then?

Why even try to be good if we can't? And Pelagius himself believed in the very real possibility of human perfection.

And he would later write this.

This is Pelagius.

He said, since perfection is possible, it is obligatory.

In other words, since it's possible to be perfect, God expects you to be perfect.

Now remember, Pelagius is a monk, and the lifestyle of the monk is asceticism.

It's based on personal discipline.

But if it's all on God, and we don't have the ability Why strive for personal discipline?

Why even attempt to have an aesthetic lifestyle?

And it seems to question the monastic vocation, as if it can't be done.

Now, to be fair, Augustine was a monk too, but Augustine had a very different outlook on humanity and took a different tack.

So Pelagius really Paul took this and ran with it to the point of completely rejecting the concept of original sin.

Pelagius said that all humans are born sinless.

You're born with a clean slate and sin is completely voluntary.

If you sin, it's because you chose to.

Your actions, based on your own free will choices, will determine your eternal destiny.

So if you're to be saved, it'll be because you chose not to sin, at least more often than you chose to sin.

And so when Pelagius rejects original sin, this is taken by his opponents as saying there's no need for instant baptism.

because, think about it, if there's no original sin, then what does infant baptism wash away?

In fact, Pelagius was accused of saying that we don't need infant baptism and we don't need God's grace because we can choose to do the right thing on our own, of our own free will.

So Pelagius rejected The concept of original sin.

And this, obviously, is going to get him into trouble.

Augustine actually...

Do you have a question?

That's an excellent question.

And I knew we would get around to that at some point.

Was Pelagius influenced by Arianism?

It's hard to say.

I mean, I can't point to a direct influence.

But I can say this, there are affinities.

I purposely didn't try to make a three column chart and put Pelagianism as somehow the next phase of the evolution of Arianism.

I didn't want to go that route because it's not that clear.

But there are affinities in terms of the optimistic anthropology, and the belief in perfectibility, and we know that Pelagianism will catch on in some of the same areas that were open to Arianism in the West.

You said that before that Arianism would spread across the Hagan and the northern frontier, so I thought maybe in some way it might have reached the island.

Yeah, although we cannot say Pelagius is an Arian because there are other aspects of Arianism that he wouldn't accept, but there are definitely affinities here.

So if you want to see a connection, that's okay.

What does Pelagius do with Psalm 51 and 5? You know, I'm not sure, that's a good question, but I'm not sure if we have, we don't have much from his own pen, and I don't think we have anything where he deals with that, where he deals with that passage specifically, so I'm not sure.

All right, so Augustine actually starts writing anti-Pelagian documents before he's ever read anything by Pelagius, right?

He's only heard, and he, And he's reacting also against another writer named Cilesius, who was actually an influence on Pelagius.

Cilesius also had denied original sin and had denied the need for infant baptism.

And so basically the idea here is if there's no original sin, Babies, when they're born, are in the same state as Adam and Eve before the fall.

There's no sin to be cleansed of.

This actually led Caelestius to question the role of the cross in the atonement, to go that far.

Pelagius is kind of based on that.

And Augustine's earliest anti-Pelagian writings are really against what he's heard from Caelestius.

But at any rate, eventually Augustine read Pelagius' Commentary on Romans.

Now the Commentary on Romans was written in 413, and that's the one where he says, since perfection is possible, it is obligatory.

And Augustine responded with a document called On the Spirit and the Letter.

And here it's interesting because in that Augustine actually admits, he's conscious of the fact, that he is using Paul's arguments against the Judaizers against Pelagius.

So there again is your affinity with Arianism, right?

Because Paul is speaking out against the earliest version of adoptionism, if we can say that.

And Augustine finds those same arguments helpful against the Pelagians.

And so the Pelagians in this document are called the opponents How does the fall, if they will admit to a fall, then fit into this idea of sinness?

Is the fall the self-awareness that will lead to sin because of human nature?

For Pelagius and Pelagians, the fall is an example of the misuse of human free will.

The fall brings evil into the world, but sin is not transmitted Down through the generations for them.

It's a different view of anthropology again.

So every baby is born with a clean slate.

And then, if you sin, you are following in the footsteps of Adam, but it's not that Adam's sin is held against you, just your own.

So that's kind of how they would look at it.

Now, early on, Augustine seems to want to say that humans have some kind of free will.

He seems reluctant in his early writings to completely abandon the idea of free will.

He says it's theoretically possible for a person to be perfect, but no one ever has.

If it were ever to happen, it would be possible only because it would happen by the power of God.

So even here he's saying that it would be an act of God.

But he's admitting that since the human will is created by God, it must have the potential for good.

God doesn't create evil, so God can't create or wouldn't create an evil human will.

So because the human will is created by God, it must be good initially.

So here's where he says the human has the ability to choose what is good, but not the ability to do it.

And so he, Augustine sort of makes this distinction between willing or wanting to do the good, but not being able to actually do it.

So to will something is in our power, in the sense of to want it or to wish it, but to actually do it is not in our power That requires God's power.

He says no one can be confident, meaning like have self-control, except God give him the gift.

So if you have self-control, if you exercise discipline, it's only because God gave you the ability to do it.

So here's the difference between what Pelagius is saying and what Augustine is saying.

Pelagius is saying humans have free will from birth, from the start.

Augustine is saying, humans are born with a will that is broken, it's fallen.

And it is God's grace that grants freedom.

So, for Augustine, the human will is born broken, grace must fix it, if we're ever to do the right thing, if we're ever to do the good.

So grace, for Augustine, It is a power.

It's a force.

It's the power to do the right thing that God grants to a person.

It's empowerment.

In fact, the Holy Spirit is associated with the power of God's grace.

The Holy Spirit is given to the believer to move him or her to love God, to reorient him or her toward God, and to empower him or her to act on that love.

But without that power, It cannot be done.

So any righteousness is ultimately a work of God.

So for Augustine, grace sanctifies, grace justifies making good works possible.

In fact, justification and sanctification are synonymous for Augustine, or at least they're concurrent.

Because remember that this is a journey, it's a process.

So even conversion is not an arrival, but it's the beginning of the journey.

So that sanctification and justification are this journey or this process.

And it is a process that will not be complete in this life because we will not become perfect in this life.

So without grace, the human will is only free to sin.

It is grace that frees the will.

Again, notice the difference.

For Pelagius, you're born with free will.

For Augustine, you're born with a will in bondage, and grace must free your will, if we're ever going to do anything good.

So grace is God acting on the human spirit, the rational soul, in order that it may believe and do what is right.

For Augustine, believing seems to be synonymous with accepting that grace.

And so one believes and receives grace.

And even the act of accepting the grace, which would seem like an act of free will, even that is an act of God.

It is even God who gives the elect the ability to accept grace.

So the will is only free to believe by the persuasion of God.

Now, I know that begs the question, why then do some believe and others do not?

If, in fact, believing itself is something that God has to give you the power to do.

Well, Augustine says, it's a mystery.

It's a mystery why some believe and others do not, but it has something to do with God's election.

And for Augustine, foreknowledge, predestination, election, these are all basically the same thing.

And Augustine will acknowledge that God wants everyone to be saved, but he says that God does not call everyone to be saved, so not all are among the elect.

You can imagine the Pelagians are going to say, hey, Augustine, how about that Bible passage that says God does not wish for any to perish, right?

So he's got an answer for that.

And the answer, again, separates the wanting from the doing.

God wants everyone to be saved.

The Bible tells us that.

But not all are saved in the end because God does not call everyone to be saved.

Not all are among the elect.

So it's really the elect who are the ones who are given the grace to believe and then act on that belief.

So Pelagius and Augustine go back and forth writing documents, arguing against each other, until Pelagius is summoned to a synod in the eastern city of, I always have to look at the spelling of this twice, Diospolis.

The synod of Theophilus, which is actually the town of Lyda, the year is 415. Now imagine, here's a westerner, Pelagius, summoned to an eastern council.

He's in the east, but there's a language barrier because his accusers are speaking Greek.

He is accused of teaching that a person could be saved without God's grace.

But his accusers didn't actually show up, and so he was able to deny the charge, and perhaps with the aid of the language barrier, he was acquitted.

But Augustine realized that The whole story had not been told at the Synod because Pelagius had not been clear about what he meant by grace.

In other words, Pelagius is defining grace differently than Augustine would.

For Pelagius, grace is the things God gives you so you can make the right choices.

In other words, the law, the Ten Commandments, the example and teaching of Christ.

That's everything you need to make the right choices.

God has given you grace, now make the right choice.

You have all the information you need.

And so see, grace is reduced to information.

It's passive.

But for Augustine, grace is active.

It's not just information, it's a power.

It's God's empowering love given to us by the Holy Spirit.

It's a medicine that heals our human nature.

We're born with a sick, fallen human will and human nature, and grace is a medicine that heals us or that fixes it.

And so grace is active, it's a power.

For Pelagius, grace is only external to us.

You know, here I am trying to make the right choices, but I have information.

I've got the Ten Commandments and the teachings of Jesus.

For Augustine, though, grace is not only external to us, but it's internal, too.

It works on you from the inside, working to restore the image of God in you.

And so, notice the very different understandings of grace here.

Religious grace is information.

It's external only, and it's passive.

Whereas the human will is active, or religious.

But for Augustine, grace is active, and the human will is passive.

Makes sense?

So, two very different ways of looking at grace.

Alright, well, yeah, question there?

He was charged with what, though?

He was charged with teaching that a person could be saved without God's grace.

And so, thank you for making me say that again, because let's say that again now that we've defined the two different ways of looking at grace.

Because Pelagius is charged with having taught that a person could be saved without grace.

And Pelagius says, no, I never said that.

I think a person absolutely needs God's grace.

But he's defining grace in this very passive, sort of external only information sense.

He's not defining grace the way Augustine would.

And Augustine wants to say, wait a minute, we need more than just information, we need grace as that empowering love from God, the medicine for the soul.

So anyway, Pelagius is off the hook.

It's a synod of Diospolis in 415, but in 416 local synods were held in North Africa, which condemned him.

And of course it was easy to get the North Africans to go against Pelagius because not only does Pelagius have affinities with Arianism, but it has affinities with Donatism as well.

And so it looks kind of like Donatism.

Augustine wrote a document called On the Proceedings of Pelagius in 417, and sort of spelled out the reasons why Pelagius should be condemned as a heretic.

And of course he was condemned in North Africa, but the North African synods were local synods, and they really only tied the Synod of Diaspolis, which acquitted him, they didn't override it or trump it.

And so we have more documents back and forth.

Pelagius wrote on the freedom of the will and Augustine wrote on the grace of Christ.

And in these cases where we have these back and forths of war of words with each one writing documents, Usually, the Pelagian document is no longer extant, but fragments of it are preserved in Augustine's response to it.

So, you know, Augustine will say, well, Pelagius says this, and I'm going to say this, and so we kind of know what Pelagius said by reading Augustine's response.

But, you know, as always, you can sort of take that with a grain of salt.

So, at this point, an appeal was made to the Bishop of Rome.

And so now, again, they're looking to the Bishop of Rome to solve the problem.

At this time, the Bishop of Rome was Innocent I. Innocent I excommunicated all Pelagians, lest they should recant their Pelagianism.

But then Innocent died, and the next pope was kind of undecided, didn't know what to do about it.

So the Emperor steps in.

This is the same Emperor we saw earlier who issued an edict against the Donatists.

This is the Western Emperor Honorius, and this is in 418 now.

The Emperor steps in and banishes all Pelagians from Rome.

Pelagius himself was declared a heretic at a council in Carthage in 418 and died in 420. Now, Pelagius died, but the baton was picked up by a guy named Julian, Julian of Meclanum was a follower of Pelagius, another Pelagian, sort of led the followers of Pelagius.

He wrote a document against Augustine, Augustine wrote a document against Julian, back and forth.

Like Pelagius, Julian was accusing Augustine of being too influenced by the Manichees, influenced by his youth, and accusing Augustine of being unable to see sexuality as anything other than dirty and sinful.

The question is, how does sin become attributed to the person?

If you're Pelagius and his followers, you are responsible for the sin you commit.

But if you're Augustine, You're also responsible for original sin, and that comes through sexuality.

You said Julian, he accused Augustine of what now?

He accused Augustine of being too influenced by his youth to be able to see sexuality as anything other than sinful.

Remember, Augustine's own history includes his own disappointment with himself over his inability to exercise self-control over his sexuality.

Eventually, when he moved to North Africa, he was able to live as a celibate person, but it was an all-or-nothing proposition for him.

Bottom line is this, though.

Julian is basically saying the same thing that Pelagius had before him, and that is that if there is no free will, Then there is no moral responsibility, and there is no need to even try to be good.

If you're saying that the human will is not free, then you are ultimately relieving every human of responsibility for his or her actions.

Because every person can simply say, well, I guess doing the right thing is not my charism.

It's not something I've been given the power to do by God.

But at this point, it was pretty much a done deal.

Pelagius and Julian were condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431. Now, we haven't talked about the Council of Ephesus yet.

We will next week.

But the Council of Ephesus is the third ecumenical council.

It was held in the year 431 in the city of Ephesus.

And because it was believed that they taught that infants did not need baptism, they were condemned as heretics.

Now, you'll notice that there are some unused squares on the board here.

So we need to talk about two intermediate positions that are both, I think, attempts at finding a middle way between Augustine's all grace and Pelagius' all will.

Because remember, for Augustine, grace is active, but the human will is passive.

And for Pelagius, there's no room on that side, but for Pelagius and his followers, it's the opposite.

It's the human will that's active, but grace is passive.

Grace is reduced to just all the information you need to know to make the right choices, right?

So what we have here are a couple of intermediate conditions that, as I said, I think are an attempt at finding a middle way.

And I'm gonna start with, let's see here, I'm gonna start with John Cassian, who represents a position that we call the semi-Pelagian position.

And ultimately what that means is he's not quite as Pelagian as Pelagians.

Now, John Cassian's dates are 360 to 435. And I'll tell you right now, he is not considered a heretic.

In fact, John Cassian was asked to write an important document on the Incarnation by the Bishop of Rome, and he wrote some other things that are considered orthodox.

So, he's not considered a heretic, but he doesn't quite get it, almost not quite.

Basically, Cassian was also a monk.

He spent some time in a monastery in Bethlehem, spent some time in Egypt learning from the desert monks and brought that kind of monasticism back to Gaul and started monasteries there.

Cassian understood Augustine's The definition of grace.

He agreed with Augustine that a person needs grace, that grace is a power that people need.

Yet he disagreed with Augustine on the idea of grace being irresistible.

In other words, he believed that we have the free will to reject God's grace.

That's how we explain why some people are ultimately saved and others are not.

It's because God's grace comes to all, but some people reject it.

So for him, grace is resistible.

Is that an I-B-L-E or an A-B-L-E? I can never remember that.

It doesn't matter.

You can resist it.

And in fact, what he said is that The grace of God and the human will cooperate in the relationship between the person and God.

So, grace and will cooperate, but he left open the possibility that the human will can take the initiative in the relationship with God.

The human will might move first, even without God's grace.

And this is why his way of looking at it will be rejected.

The human will might move first, which then basically means that it is God's grace cooperating with the human will.

It sort of makes the human will primary.

So you see what's happening here.

A little bit too much free will for the mainstream church here.

Again, he's not a heretic, though.

This is not the position that will come to be accepted.

Now, you might have seen this coming, especially if you got the handout from me, but this position is what we call the semi-Augustinian position.

Not quite as Augustinian as Augustine, but a little bit more Augustinian than the semi-Pelagians or the Pelagians.

This position is characterized, I guess, by a bishop, Caesarius of Arles.

He's bishop of that same town where the synod of Arles was held, but his dates are 470 to 542. The semi-Augustinian position accepts everything that Augustine had to offer except the idea of predestination.

Grace is still irresistible in this understanding.

Grace is resistible.

You can resist grace.

And what we have here is a cooperation of grace and will.

Stop thinking it's a TV show.

So, you're saying to yourself, wait a minute, that looks exactly like the semi-Augustinian position, what's the difference?

The difference is this.

With the semi-Augustinian position, the human will cannot take the initiative.

Grace must always take the initiative.

And so, it's the human will cooperating with grace.

Grace must move first, or it's not going to happen.

In fact, if you want to think in terms of a prevenient grace, you'd be right on.

Grace must move first.

And of course, that's Augustine's understanding of grace as well.

But what makes it different from Augustine is that you can resist grace.

So grace might come to you and you might shun it, you might resist it.

But the idea here is that grace is offered to all and there is enough free will that allows us to accept it or reject it.

See, the problem with Augustine's concept of election is that it ultimately leads to a limited atonement.

And this is what I mean.

If you assume that election is what determines who is saved and who is not, that begs the question, well then, is the cross somehow ineffective for those who are not among the elect?

And the only answer to that question that doesn't leave the cross lagging is to say that, well, Jesus ultimately didn't die for those who are not the elect.

That's a limited atonement.

The atonement is limited only to the elect.

So if you start with this, with a true Augustinian election, you necessarily end up with a doctrine of limited atonement that says Jesus only died for the elect.

And so these guys don't want to say that.

They want to say, no, Christ died for all, grace is offered to all, but we have enough free will that allows us to either accept or reject grace.

So grace is resistible, but for the semi-Augustinian position, grace must move first.

And the human will may choose to cooperate with that grace.

Now, in the year 529, so 99 years after Augustine's death, in 529, the Council of Orange, spell it like the fruit and you'll get it right, the Council of Orange, or the color, in the year 529, now actually, just in the interest of full disclosure, Caesarius of Arles was the The Council of Orange accepted the semi-Augustinian position as the Orthodox Catholic position.

If you take this away and these guys are off the table, it does become the middle way between This is going to be Catholic Orthodoxy.

What that means is that the Church accepted the Augustinian view of the sacraments.

It accepted an Augustinian view of original sin.

It accepted the idea of grace as a power and the idea of prevenient grace.

But the Council rejected Augustine's doctrine of election or predestination, which naturally leads to a limited atonement.

So, we still have original sin, but we also still have a little bit of free will in there, too, because the will chooses to accept or reject God's grace.

So, whereas, you know, this extreme has really all All will, I mean the will is active and grace is passive.

And this extreme is really all grace.

Grace is active and the will is passive.

Both of these middle options have an idea of active will and active grace.

Both grace and will are active.

It's just a question of whether or not the human will can sort of take the initiative in the relationship between human and God.

And the conclusion is no, it cannot.

Grace must take the initiative.

And so, ultimately, the semi-Augustinian position that will be confirmed as the Catholic position for the West is everything that Augustine said except the predestination thing, except the limited atonement.

That stuff won't be picked up again until the Reformation with John Calvin.

And so what Calvin did with that is really picking up the parts of Augustine that the Catholic Church had rejected.

So, any questions so far on the Pelagian Controversy?

Alright, let me just say a few things by way of wrap-up.

Augustine himself had great influence in the West, and almost none in the East.

In the East, you had the Cappadocians, who had a lot of influence.

In the West, you had Augustine, and Augustine had, in the West, the same kind of influence that the Cappadocians had in the East, but neither one really had the same influence in the opposite side.

And in the East, the Eastern Church will continue to emphasize that classical optimism about the human nature, that humanity is perfectible, and that the human will is free, and the East will We'll always have this idea that there is a sanctification towards godliness, that perfectibility is somehow still possible.

And we see this in the idea of theosis, becoming godlike.

The West isn't going to have that.

The West is going to have, from Augustine on through into the Middle Ages, the West is going to have a more pessimistic outlook on human nature, emphasizing original sin and the human will as fallen and as needing grace as medicine.

And so we're going to see a very different way of looking at sin, original sin, free will, between the East and the West.

And this is going to be one of the things that's going to feed into the split between the East and West that's coming down the road.

But for the Western world, Augustus effectively ends what we call the classical period.

With its optimism about human nature and with its belief in free will.

So, in some ways I guess we can blame Augustine for that and his experience with pears and things.

So let's see if there are any questions.

The classical period of history in the West.

The classical world is characterized by Mormon optimism about human nature.

Yes, with humanism.

It comes back somewhat also in The medieval period during the time of scholasticism and when the scholastics bring philosophy back.

We'll get to that.

Yes?

Where did Pelagius come from?

He's from Britain originally and then he moved down to Rome.

Stayed in Rome until about 409 just before the sack of Rome and then he got out and then he went to the east.

But he's from Britain.

He was a priest?

He was a monk.

You know, I don't have a birth year, but he died in 420. I'm double checking, but yeah, he died in 420. Anything else?

Yes?

It was something you had said earlier.

The Catholics, they took the position on the website for the church to accept the views of sacraments, outstanding views of sacraments, and what else did you say?

And they accepted his view on original sin.

On original sin.

But they rejected the outstanding view Yes, it rejected his view, his doctrine of election, which is predestination.

You may hear talk about a single predestination versus a double predestination.

If people talk about that, what they're saying is that a single predestination would be that God would choose those who are to be saved, and a double predestination would be that God would choose those who are to be saved and those who are not to be saved.

I don't see the difference.

If you're going to choose those who are to be saved and leave the rest not saved, to me there's no such thing as a single election or a single predestination.

It's double or nothing is what it is.

Although Augustine doesn't talk about it like that, that comes back around in the Reformation.

So that's what the church rejected was this idea of election as predestination along with its limited atonement.

So there's no middle way like the Gnostic tab with the solish?

What happens to unbaptized babies who die before they get baptized?

I believe it was Pelagius who actually promoted the idea of limbo.

As a possible place in between heaven and hell where the unbaptized might go, Augustine wanted to talk about a milder form of damnation for the babies.

So yeah, in that sense, maybe there's some place in between, but the church would eventually accept some kind of idea of limbo that more recently has rejected it.

So that didn't take hold long-term, but yeah.

Yes?

You mentioned infant baptism a couple times tonight.

Could you refresh my memory?

Maybe I missed it, but kind of when that shift was made to infant baptism away from adult baptism?

I know that you said early on that adults were there to be baptized.

Well, there really isn't a theological shift.

The shift, in fact I would say there really isn't a shift.

In the first generation of the church, when there are mostly adults who are making a choice to be Christian, they're the ones who are getting baptized.

But even already in the New Testament, you see at least one example of a household baptism, right?

And so we assume that that's how it worked, that whole households were baptized and that Eventually, and again this is one of those things where you can't put a date on this because it would have happened at different times at different places, but eventually everyone's going to get around to baptizing infants.

As they're born into the church, as baptism becomes the Christian version of circumcision.

So that, you know, if your circumcision on the eighth day has entrance into the family of the covenant, with the church it's going to be a similar kind of thing.

And especially when you have, you know, in the West, a doctrine of original sin, Then it becomes imperative to baptize an infant.

I can't think of anyone who worries about that.

I wouldn't be able to pinpoint a time.

It seems to be there from the beginning.

The first generation of the adult Catholicism, more on the initiation stage, right?

The morality aspect of Christianity and also the sanctification of that person's soul, right?

You always have adult baptisms because you always have converts coming into the church from paganism or wherever.

You'll always have adult baptisms and you'll always have catechesis for adults.

Like Perpetua's class, they all get arrested together.

Is that what you're asking?

I'm trying to get away from seeing that as a transition at all.

You have to assume that infant baptism goes back as far as we can figure, yeah?

So if, going on the infant baptism, so after original sin, there's a imperative to baptize babies, that'll be in the West.

Yeah, right, because the doctrine of Original Sin doesn't take hold as much in the East.

But they still baptized in this, yeah, and that goes back again as far as we can tell.

We can't pinpoint a time when they didn't. Without baptism, you don't have access to the Holy Spirit and to grace.

So it would have been very early on when it was apparent that Jesus may not come back for these first generations of converts.

Yeah, certainly the conferral of the Holy Spirit would technically probably be part of the confirmation, but once you have Christianity legalized, Then there isn't even a reason for people with government jobs to postpone their baptism, so then, you know, even more so.

Yeah, but again, that's more probably in the context of the legalization of Christianity and The legalization of Christianity also affects ordination because once Christianity becomes legalized and then the official religion of the empire, ordination takes on more of a liturgical, sacramental, ceremonial aspect as well.

So there's a lot of things that sort of change at that point.

Alright, any other questions?

Okay.