Ancient Christian Witness

Yes it is necessary that we accept the free Gift of Salvation.

In the work called "On the Spirit and the letter" Saint Augustine leaves a little bit of room for free will. Or human consent. Yes, this was in his middle years before he totally seemed to totally cave in to Plotinistic determinism. And so I tend to agree with Saint Augustin's early to mid writings while rejecting alot of his more deterministic later stuff.

But this is what he had to say:

On the Spirit and the Letter Chapter 57 (around the year 412 A.D.)
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1502.htm

Quote:
""it surely follows that it is God who both works in man the willing to believe, and in all things prevents us with His mercy. To yield our consent, indeed, to God's summons, or to withhold it, is (as I have said) the function of our own will. And this not only does not invalidate what is said, "For what do you have that you did not receive?" 1 Corinthians 4:7 but it really confirms it. For the soul cannot receive and possess these gifts, which are here referred to, except by yielding its consent."


The Christian East always embraced synergy, mostly as something simultaneous and so this issue was never an issue for the east, and it could never be an issue now for us either for our development in the area of Essence vs Energies makes such a conflict impossible and only strengthens our view of simultaneous synergy for God's Energies are present everywhere, to assume that our will or even existence can exist where God is not already Present is ludicrous and somewhat atheistic, agnostic or deistic.

In the christian west, Synergy was embraced by the western local council of Arles in 473 A.D.

The council condemned the hard Augustinian teachings of Lucidus/Lucian. In 529 A.D. at 2nd Orange the idea of synergy was embraced post Baptism or at the moment of water Baptism onward.

And so if you combine these two local western councils together, what you get is a synergy of pre and post water Baptism. Ever since Saint Augustine, the western church fought to embrace monergy, but they also didn't totally reject synergy, and so the west eventually became a mixture of semi-Augustinians to moderate Augustinians with individualistic hard Augustinians popping up once in a blue moon. But the official mainstream view seemed to be a semi-Augustinian one. This changed with the protestant Reformation, for they wanted to adopt a more hardcore Augustinian view.

Over all, in the christian west the semi-Augustinian view was one of....... gratia operans(monergy) eventually becoming gratia co-operans(synergy).

Why? Because they saw monergistic grace as healing the will so that after the first contact of grace, the will of man was made able to respond back.


What still divides Protestantism & Roman Catholicism Sola Fide


This snippet of the debate talks about the relationship between grace and free will in passing while talking about the issue of Justification and Sola Fide. I hope this helps!







ICXC NIKA