Define Our Task Pelagianism (OTP) as the doctrine that without grace it is possible that a person does all the actions and has the mental states that are directly sufficient, given God's promises, for entering into heavenly joy. The "directly" here is meant to rule out the interposition of further actions or mental states, but is meant to be compatible with the idea that God's gracious causality is still needed to move us into heaven after we have done the required actions or mental states--God is at least needed to reward our merit.
The "directly" is kind of messy, but is needed in an account of Pelagianism. For it is compatible with the denial of Pelagianism that God has specifically promised that Jones will be saved (e.g., God might have made this promise to Jones or to Jones' mother). Then Jones' blowing his nose is sufficient, given God's promises, for entering into heavenly joy, since the content of God's promises entails that Jones will be saved whether or not he blows his nose. But Jones' blowing his nose is not directly sufficient, since other actions and/or mental states are needed, e.g., faith. On the other hand, a doctrine that says that God's judgment is based on whether we have blown our noses--all those who had go to heaven and all others go to hell--would imply OTP given that we do not need God's grace to blow our noses. (We need divine creation, sustenance and cooperation to blow our noses, but grace goes beyond creation, sustenance and cooperation.)
I assume OTP is false.
Call a bunch of actions and mental states that are jointly directly sufficient for entering into heavenly joy given God's promises "salvific". Pelagians and non-Pelagians agree that there are salvific actions and mental states. Thus, all agree that faith, hope and love in mind and action would be sufficient for salvation given God's promises. Our Task Pelagians, however, hold that there is a salvific bunch of actions and mental states that could occur absent God's grace.
The less that a doctrine requires of salvific actions and mental states, the more likely it is that it implies OTP. First, note that a doctrine which made some set of purely external physical movements compatible with the laws of nature directly sufficient for salvation would very likely imply OTP, since any set of purely external physical movements compatible with the laws of nature might well be done without grace, simply on a whim, or might even occur purely randomly due to quantum processes, and hence absent God's grace.
Interestingly, it seems that it is hard to avoid OTP while being a materialist or even supervenientist given quantum randomness. For if supervenience holds, then there is some set of physical conditions which are sufficient for the occurrence of any physically possible bunch of actions and mental states, and hence also for the occurrence of salvific actions and mental states. But these physical counditions could occur, purely through quantum randomness, absent grace.
But even without supervenience, avoiding OTP takes hard work. Suppose for simplicity that it directly suffices for salvation that one trust Jesus, love God, believe in the Trinity and Incarnation, and be baptized (some will want to demand more, and some less, but I don't think this will significantly affect the argument). Well, imagine now Sarah who comes to believe that God exists, is perfect and a Trinity, and that Jesus is perfectly trustworthy, and who comes to believe all this completely apart from grace. This seems imaginable. For instance, Sarah might have come across a book that makes all of these assertions and might have naturally formed a belief--whether on good or on bad grounds--that the book is true. But why would it, then, be impossible for Sarah to love God and trust Jesus? After all, it does not seem to require grace to love imperfect beings, so why should it require grace to love a being one takes to be perfect? If anything, it should be easier. (It is surely possible to love Apollo without grace; so why not the one true God?) And it does not seem to require grace to trust imperfectly trustworthy people (in fact, folks often manage to trust quite untrustworthy people), and so why should it require grace to trust a person one takes to be perfectly trustworthy? And if Sarah can do all that without grace, surely she can also ask someone to baptize her, again without grace, simply because one acquires the belief--on good or bad grounds--that baptism would be beneficial.
It appears, thus, that Sarah is capable of doing a bundle of salvific actions without receiving any grace. But that, of course, can't be right.
So where has the argument gone wrong?
I see at least three possibilities:
1. Two central steps in the argument for OTP were based on the assumption: (*) if it doesn't take grace to love or trust x, and one takes y to be more lovable or trustworthy than x, then it doesn't take grace to love or trust y. This assumption holds of a perfectly rational agent. But we are not perfectly rational agents. It may be that original sin has twisted us in such a way that even though we can believe God to be more lovable than Apollo, we cannot love God without grace, while we can love Apollo without grace.
I am not sure I buy this response. Suppose that Sarah comes to believe that there is a unique non-angel who has at least the positive attributes of Apollo. Her belief is, let us suppose, true. The being is, of course, God, but Sarah does not know this. If Sarah can come to love Apollo absent grace, she should be able to come to love the unique non-angel who has at least the positive attributes of Apollo. Suppose that she then comes to believe that this being in fact is omniscient, omnipotent, all good, unique, and creator of all. It seems plausible that acquiring these additional beliefs will not have take away, even absent grace, Sarah's love for the unique non-angel who has at least the positive attributes of Apollo.
2. A different way to dispute (*) is to note that it can be harder to love a more lovable being. Love should be adequate to its object. Loving a more lovable being can demand more of us. Thus God is harder to love than Apollo. Love of Apollo does not, for instance, demand of the devotee that every part of her life be a prayer to Apollo. But love of God demands that we pray always. To love x constitutively requires that one acknowledge the demands that loving x would entail (it is possible to fail to meet these demands, but acknowledging them is a constitutive part of love).
This response is better, but I am not sure I am completely convinced. What I just said holds true of perfect love. It is perfect love that acknowledges and fulfills all these demands. But imperfect love may not just not fulfill all the demands but may not acknowledge them all. Moreover, it does not seem that perfect love of God is required for salvation--at least, I had better hope it's not required! Furthermore, it is only as one lives the Christian life that one learns what the demands of God's love are. It seems like it would be possible to enthusiastically embrace the demands without knowing exactly what they are. (This might not last long. But that doesn't matter: OTP does not require that one maintain a state eligible for salvation for very long--only long enough to die in such a state.)
3. But perhaps we should question the assumption that one can actually come to believe the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation without grace. It seems that if one could come to entertain these doctrines without grace, then one could come to believe them without grace, since if one entertains a proposition p that is not self-evidently false, it is arguably always possible, absent grace, that one come to think one has conclusive evidence for p (e.g., by testimony). If this is right, then to deny the possibility of believing in the Trinity and Incarnation without grace, one must deny the possibility of even entertaining these doctrines without grace. And if this is right then it follows that these doctrines are mysteries that transcend language in the sense that someone can be a competent and intelligent user of English or Latin or Greek, and can read a text expounding the doctrines (e.g., the Pseudo-Athanasian Creed) without understanding what the text says. I think there is much to be said for this way out of Pelagianism, but there may also be other solutions.
(OTP) as the doctrine that without grace it is possible that a person does all the actions and has the mental states that are directly sufficient, given God's promises, for entering into heavenly joy.
Alex,
Is the possibility above wide-scope as in (1), using 'M' for possibility?
1. M(For any one without grace, he does all the actions and has the mental states. . . for entering into heavenly joy)
Or are you worried about (2)?
2. For anyone without grace M(he does all the actions and has the mental states. . . for entering into heavenly joy).
For (1) to be false there must be some world in which the acts/mental states of a graceless person are sufficient for salvation. But for (2) to be true, there need only be a world in which the acts/mental state of a graced person are sufficient for salvation. That is, a world in which the person's grace at most overdetermines his salvation. Neither is obviously true.
But let me ask about an ambiguity in (1). When you say that the acts/ms of the person are sufficient for salvation, do you mean 'sufficient for' in the sense of (3) (where '[]' is broad logical necessity)?
3. [](Anyone having performed acts A and having had mental states M, is, by those very acts and states, saved).
If (3) is true, then there are worlds in which it is impossible that God preclude some persons from heaven, given their actions/ms. That would be difficult to show. But you might mean 'sufficient for' in the sense of (4) (where '[]->' is the subjunctive conditional).
4. (S performs acts A and has mental states M) []-> (S is saved those very acts and states).
In this case God would admit to heaven anyone who performed certains acts and had certain states, on the exclusive basis of those acts and states, though he could preclude them. If you mean 'sufficient for' in the sense of (4), then I think OTP is true. It is possible that God would admit certain ungraced persons into salvation on the exclusive basis of their actions/mental states. I mean this to be consistent with holding that it is not necessary that God admits those ungraced persons into salvation on the exclusive basis of those actions, etc.
Alex,
what about this response: There are no actions I can perform that play any positive causal role in my being saved. That is, no matter what I do, I can't get salvation through my own tasks. The only mental state causally sufficient for me to be saved is having the infused, theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity. These virtues, by their nature, are not acquirable, so I can't get them through my work (though I can lose them through sinning).
So, here's what's in the most minimal bundle of mental states and actions that is properly called "salvific" (in your sense here): having the infused, theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity. Since there is nothing I can do to acquire these theological, infused virtues, there is no salvific task I can perform.
Sarah, in your case, "holds that which is of faith otherwise than by faith" (As Aquinas puts it). Since she doesn't have the virtue of faith, which is an unacquirable free gift from God, and is a necessary part of any bundle of actions and mental states that is salvific, she isn't doing something salvific (in your sense). So long as the virtue of faith is something not acquirable (as Thomas has it), we needn't worry about OTP.
What do you think of that reply?
Mike:
Let P be the conjunction of all true propositions of the form "God promised that p". How about this rendering of OTP:
M(P & there is a person who without grace does some set S of actions and has some set T of mental states such that L(if P, then anyone who does S and has T is saved)).
Tim:
In principle, I think your answer is correct. But the question now is why it is that the infused virtues could not arise apart from gracious infusion. (If materialism is true and there is quantum indeterminacy, then they could. However, materialism is false.) What is it about these virtues that makes this impossible?
We want to avoid the following story: There are mental states, F, H and L, such that when these mental states caused by divine infusion, they are the theological virtues and are salvific, but they are not theological virtues or salvific when they are not caused by divine infusion. Indeed, your use of "by their nature" shows that you reject this story.
It is something intrinsic to the mental states F, H and L that makes them be faith, hope and love and makes them be incapable of arising in any way but through grace.
So now the question is: What is it about F, H and L that makes this be so? In my suggestion (3), I offered one solution: faith has a content that it would be impossible to entertain apart from divine help. We can extend this to hope and love: we hope in one who is a mystery and we love one who is a mystery.
But maybe instead we can say that L has a purity that would be impossible without divine help, H has a tenacity that only divine help can make possible, while F has a strength that requires divine help (we are committed to believing the Christian faith no matter what, and hence we are committed to seeing no argument of the form "if Christianity holds, then p" as a reductio, no matter how apparently absurd p and no matter how apparently plausible the conditional). But I am worried about this kind of internal characterization, not least because my sinful actions testify to my not having mental states with the described characteristics.
I have no argument that no account such as you propose will work. But right now I don't know how to make it work.
Thanks Alex. I see. That amounts to this, for arbitrary agent A,
1. ML(P & SA & TA --> SavedA).
Given S5, that's just,
2. L(P & SA & TA --> SavedA)
That's a very strong way to read the position. It entails that it is impossible for God not to grant salvation to anyone A, given that SA and TA and His promises. Is that what defenders of OTP are claiming? Why don't they claim instead that, as a matter of contingent fact, anyone A in @ such that SA and TA, will secure salvation in @? That seems like all they need to claim, and it is still highly controversial. Why defend a claim about every possible way God might grant salvation? That is, why defend the claim that there is no world in which God grants salvation only to the graced? It seems unnecessarily strong.
Mike,
Thanks for pressing me on the modal issues.
Well, God's promises are sure--it is metaphysically impossible for them to be broken. God's promises include the claim that those who have faith and show love (of the right sort) will receive eternal joy. Thus, necessarily, in any world in which God makes his promises, everybody who has faith and love is saved. OTP follows if it is possible without grace and in a world containing God's promises to have faith and love of the right sort. (I think it's not possible.)
That said, note that OTP is compatible with the claim that in the actual world everybody who is saved has received grace. (I expect Pelagius thought so, too.)
Alex,
A question: suppose one was a materialist who held that (i) some set of actions and states XYZ was sufficient for salvation; also that (ii) for those people who wind up performing XYZ, God has determined and caused this performance from the foundation of the world; and that (iii) this _is_ God's grace in their lives. (I think Calvinism would or could fall under this description.) Is that OTPism? I guess I'm not clear on what all is involved in "God's grace" on OTP.
Heath:
That's a great question. Yes, that is OTP. But is it Pelagian? I don't know.
It seems that a radical Calvinism that says that God has predestined all our actions (a more moderate Calvinism says that God predestined our ultimate destination) may erase the difference between Pelagianism and anti-Pelagianism. Which is an argument against the radical Calvinism.