WJEC/Eduqas RS for A2/Yr2: Religion and Ethics (DRAFT)

T4 Determinism and free will

God’s grace and atonement for the elect/ saints However, Augustine’s Doctrine of Original Sin is not without hope for humanity. Augustine argued that through God’s grace some people will receive salvation because God did not intend that all humanity remain in this desperate state of sin. God’s grace is defined as the love and mercy given to humanity by God because God desires humanity to have it, not because of anything humanity has done to deserve it. By God’s grace some people are set free from their secondary nature of concupiscence, enabling them to respond rightly to God. No person can do anything to deserve it. Only God knows why certain people are chosen and not others. Therefore, the choice which God makes to extend grace to human beings is totally within God’s sovereign discretion. Augustine called these chosen people ‘ the elect ’ (sometimes known as ‘the saints’). Those people not chosen were labelled by Augustine as ‘ reprobates ’. Augustine regarded these ‘reprobates’ as responsible for their sins and so are simply receiving God’s just wrath for their disobedience. For instance, in City of God Book V chapter 10: ‘Our wills are ours and it is our will that affects all that we do by willing and which could not have happened if we had not willed … the fact that God foreknew that a man would sin does not make a man sin; on the contrary, it cannot be doubted that it is the man himself who sins … a man does not sin unless he wills to sin; …’ John Hick in Evil and the God of Love suggests that in a few passages Augustine implies that God creates some with the express intention of damming them and others with the opposite intention of saving them: Hick himself concludes that on balance it seems that Augustine believed ‘that people fall freely and culpably and that out of the fallen race God saves some, leaving others to perish; although God knows from the beginning which he intends to save and which to abandon’. Augustine seems only too aware of the problematic nature of his doctrine but sees

Specification content Doctrine of Original Sin: God’s grace and atonement for the elect/saints

Key quotes …God leads some in mercy and repentance and others in just judgement does not lead. (Augustine) It is unthinkable that He [Jesus] should deliberately have shed his blood for hell-dwellers-to-be. (Augustine) Key terms God’s grace: the love and mercy given to humanity by God because God desires humanity to have it, not because of anything humanity has done to deserve it Reprobates: those people, untouched by God’s grace, left to be consumed by the defect of concupiscence The elect: those people chosen, by the grace of God, to be freed of concupiscence

DRAFT

the resolution in divine knowledge. He thought that the fallen human intellect was incapable of understanding the workings of divine salvation. To human beings it remained a mystery because Augustine thought that grace itself only leads to partial restoration of the intellect.

4.4 How do people become ‘elect’?

According to Augustine, Christ’s death was not to save all of humankind.

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