100. Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue, 9. (continued)
promised. Otherwise, the accomplishment of God's promises would not be in the power of God, but in that of human beings, and what was promised by the Lord would be rendered to Abraham by human beings themselves. This was not what Abraham believed, but rather "he believed, giving glory to God, that whatsoever He has promised, He is able also to perform" (Rom 4:20–21). He does not say "to foretell," he does not say "to foreknow"—because God can foretell and foreknow also what others do. But he says: "He is able also to perform." And thus the deeds are not those of another, but His own.101
Jesus as Predestination Incarnate
In his later years, Augustine began quietly wrestling with the same issue that was beginning to boil over in the Greek East and would come to a crisis in the clash between Nestorius and Cyril of Alexandria in 431, namely, what it means to speak of Christ as truly human. Augustine never devoted an entire treatise to Christology, but the ever-sogradual evolution of his thinking through the questions appears both in sermons and in passing remarks in various treatises. In the following passage, Augustine boldly speaks of Christ as the exemplar of predestined humanity. From On the Predestination of the Saints:
(15.30) There is another most illuminating example of predestination and grace, and that is the Savior Himself, "the mediator between God and human beings, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Tm 2:5). By what prior merits of His, whether of works or of faith, did the human nature which is in Him come to attain this status? Let there be an answer to my question: How did this human being merit that He be assumed by the Father's co-eternal Word, the only-begotten Son of God, into the unity of the one person? What good of His, of whatever kind, preceded this? What did He do beforehand, what did He believe, what did He ask for in order to arrive at this ineffable excellence? Did He not begin to be the only Son of God from the moment He himself began to be a human being by the Word creating and assuming Him? Did not that woman, full of grace, conceive the only Son of God? Was not the only Son of God born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, not by a desire of the flesh but by a unique gift of God? Was it to be feared that this human being as He grew older might sin through free will? Or for that reason was His will not free—or rather,
101. De praedestinatione sanctorum 10.19 (BA 24:522–24); trans. Mourant and Collinge, FOTC 86:241–42. On the reception of such views in North Africa, see J. Patout Burns, "The Atmosphere of Election: Augustinianism as Common Sense," Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994): 325–39.
Against the Pelagians 433 was it not so much freer because He was that much more unable to be a slave to sin? Certainly, human nature—that is, our nature—received uniquely in Him, without any prior merits of its own, all these uniquely admirable gifts and whatever other gifts may most truly be said to be proper to Him. . . .
(15.31) Therefore, in Him who is our Head, let there appear for us the very fountain of grace, from which He pours Himself out through all His members according to the measure of each one. For the grace that makes any human being a Christian from the time one begins to believe is the same grace by which that man from his beginning became the Christ. The Spirit by whom a Christian is reborn is the same Spirit who brings about in us the remission of sins and is also the Spirit who brought it about in Christ that He had no sin. These things God, beyond all doubt, foreknew that He would accomplish. This then is that predestination of the saints, which appeared most clearly in the Saint of saints. Who can deny this predestination, who rightly understands the words of the truth? For we learn that the very Lord of glory was predestined inasmuch as He who was Son of God became human. This is what the teacher of the gentiles proclaims in the beginning of his Epistles: "Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the Gospel of God, which He had promised before, by His prophets, in the holy Scriptures, concerning his Son, who was born of Him, according to the flesh from the seed of David, who was predestined to be the Son of God in power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead" (Rom 1:1–4).
Therefore, Jesus was predestined so that He who was to be the Son of David according to the flesh should nonetheless be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness, because He was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary. This is the assumption by God the Word of a human being that ineffably occurred so that He might truly and properly be called at the same time the Son of God and the Son of Man, Son of Man because of the man who was assumed, the Son of God because of the only-begotten God who assumed him. Otherwise, a quaternity, not a Trinity, would be believed in. Such an uplifting of human nature was predestined, an elevation so great, so lofty, and so sublime that our nature could not be raised higher, just as for us the divinity could not humble itself more profoundly than by taking on human nature with the infirmity of the flesh, even to death on a cross. Therefore, just as that One was predestined to be our Head, so we, being many, are predestined to be His members. Here let human merits, which perished through Adam, be silent, and let that grace of God reign which reigns through Jesus Christ our Lord, the only Son of God, and the one Lord. Anyone who can discover in our Head the merits that preceded his unique birth, let