Everyone likes preachers who give challenging sermons, and none have ever been more challenging than Pelagius. Somewhere around the turn of the fifth century, he arrived in Rome, lambasting immorality and issuing a clarion call for Christians to live in purity. All stirring stuff. However, when Augustine, the planet-brained bishop of Hippo, looked into what Pelagius was teaching, he realized that, for all his Christian language, Pelagius had fundamentally misunderstood the nature of God and the gospel. Pelagius was teaching that we had done wrong things—that was the problem—but that if ever we
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