F. Common Commitments: Augustinian Harmatology
II.
F. Common Commitments: Augustinian Harmatology
Newman and Vermigli both follow Augustine’s doctrine of sin. Along with the Bishop of Hippo, Newman underscores the initiative of divine grace, which is altogether necessary for salvation on account of our bondage to sin.893 To deny the reality of sin, or to rely upon one’s own righteousness, from Newman’s point of view, is the sin of pride, a vice that he routinely opposed in the liberalism of his day.894 For Newman, God’s legal pronouncement is “a real and gracious act on God’s part towards us sinners,” precisely because sinners are otherwise without hope.895
Peter Martyr shares Newman’s belief in the anthropological necessity of divinely initiated grace. On this point, Martyr refers to the transgression of Adam as described in Romans 5, where one observes “the cause of so great an evil.”896 Following from the first man’s disobedience, humanity is “lost and condemned,” which includes infants.897 Later in his Romans locus, Vermigli asserts this point rather explicitly: “The works of unregenerate men are sins.”898 In other words, people are incapable of producing works that are acceptable to God. Therefore, the basis of justification cannot possibly rest on human ability. This sober awareness of sin is what Frank James has labeled Vermigli’s “intensive Augustinianism.”899
Martyr vehemently opposes the notion that God extends a general grace to all people in such a way that it enables them to exercise justifying faith. He labels such a view “Pelagianism” and considers it to be an affront to Scripture.900 According to Vermigli, if redemptive grace is obtainable prior to the initial work of the Spirit that enlivens the soul, the justification that follows would be based upon human effort:901 “They [his Roman Catholic interlocutors] hold that there is a kind of general grace accessible to all and common even to the unregenerate, who are in a sense helped to merit justification and do works which please God. But in saying this, they fall into the heresy of Pelagius.”902
While the problem of human sin factors more significantly into Vermigli’s overall doctrine of justification, Newman may be credited with the rhetorical edge when he posits,
I observe, then, we become inwardly just or righteous in God’s sight, upon our regeneration, in the same essence in which we are utterly reprobate and abominable by nature, or (to use the strong language of the Homilies) as we are since Adam’s fall “corrupt and naught,” “without any spark of goodness in us,” “without any virtuous or godly motion,” “the image of the devil,” “firebrands of hell and bondslaves of the devil,” “having in ourselves no one part of our former purity and cleanness;” but being “altogether spotted and defiled,” and “nothing else but a lump of sin.”903
Newman and Vermigli maintain a sober and severe estimation of sin which recognizes the paucity of human righteousness in the unregenerate. Together they insist on the necessity of God’s enlivening grace, “regeneration” in Newman’s terms, which leads sinners to exercise justifying faith.