Duran week 10 journal reading Augustine and the controversy against Pelagians

While I was reading the controversy against the Pelagians, I was thinking in a boxing fight, or wrestling, or UFC fight, where Augustine and Pelagius were the fighters. Serious, I could imagine the movie Rocky because both looks were very popular, famous theologians and every body knows them. As Harmless said, “the two men shared a wide network of aristocratic friends” (p. 378).  Both of them had different origin, Augustine belonged to the low class and Pelagius was part of the Aristocracy. Augustine was a clergy and Pelagius was a lay; in spited of all these, bot of them were contemporaries and very popular, both of them were excellent philosopher and theologians and both were against the Manichest, and Donatists. All the things around them look that both could be good friends and be the heroes of that time, but not. As two boxing fighters, they were growing separated and arrived to the moment when they had to fight between themselves and see who is the best! 

Also, while I was reading more deeply about Pelagius and his doctrine I began to compare him with the tele-preachers of this twenty first century or with Norman Vincent Peale the father of the positive thinking, because he was offering a gospel where the men could decide exactly all that they want, or the future is in their hands, or they have the capacity to live without sin, etc. etc. Putting aside the historical data of the controversy against the Pelagians, I want to go directly to the topic I chose about the controversies between Augustine against Pelagius. Harmless said that: “Augustine wrote a detailed commentary, On the Deeds of Pelagius (De gestis Pelagii) trying to excuse his Palestinian colleagues and to analyze what he perceived as Pelagius’s evasiveness and deceptions” (pp.379-380).  

Pelagius wrote his treatise On Nature and Augustine wrote his treatise On Nature and Grace, and there, Augustine describing the Pelagians theology, Augustine talked about the Pelagian teaching about the “sinlessness must exist, at least as a rethorical possibility” (p. 400). Clearly Augustine wrote: “It is impossible for a human being to be without sin” (p. 400). The second point about Pelagius here is: “given his moral rigorism, was outraged by those who blamed the sin of Adam for human sinfulness. He insisted that we do not inherit original sin; we imitate the original sinners” (p. 401). Augustine talking about the sin of Adam said: “ Our nature has been weakened and changed through sin” (p. 402) Augustine also expanded this point talking against the Adam descendants as weaker as him. The last point here was “Pelagius argued for the possibility of salvation beyond the borders (whether temporal or geographical) of Christianity” (p. 402). Augustine argued that God in his justice will judge them according to their facts, “by living rightly, even though it has not been tinged with any faith in the Passion and Resurrection of Christ” (p. 402).