Letter to Rufinus on Grace and Free Will

Contents

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1. 0Prosper writes to Rufinus to answer rumours against him and explain the question at issue.
2. 1The Pelagian error at root is that grace is given according to human merits; Pelagians now profess grace only in a diluted sense.
3. 2The Pelagians reduce grace to outward teaching and exhortation and so make it a reward of merit, which is no grace.
4. 3Pelagianism was condemned by East, Rome and Africa and refuted by Augustine, whom some in Gaul now secretly accuse of denying free choice and teaching fatalism.
5. 4The critics fear open debate against Augustine's writings; Prosper hopes God's grace will yet win them, though their virtues are misused when credited to nature or prior merit.
6. 5Against the critics' use of Matt 11:28, Prosper cites texts showing that free choice obeys God's call only when grace has created the will to believe.
7. 6Cornelius's piety before baptism was itself the work of grace; conversion to God is from God, not from us.
8. 7Man, dead and blind in Adam, receives life, light and righteousness freely from Christ; without faith there is no true righteousness.
9. 8God first loved and sought lost man; faith working through love is God's gift, and without love even great virtues profit nothing.
10. 9God makes the elect worthy; grace makes the wicked good and frees free choice rather than destroying it, and perseverance too is God's gift.
11. 10Peter's faith stood only through Christ's prayer; and the fixed number of the predestined cannot be denied, since nature and God's gifts did not save the nations of past ages.
12. 12There is no salvation apart from Christ; the free salvation of some baptized infants, while others die unbaptized, shows grace is not given by merit.
13. 13On 1 Tim 2:4: the different fates of baptized and unbaptized infants show salvation is not by merit; the reason is hidden in God, but none perish undeservedly and none is saved by merit.
14. 14Only those preordained to life believed; the Spirit kept the apostles from some regions; God changes hearts, and all the predestined in every nation will hear and believe.
15. 16We need not know the number of the elect, as the saints of old did not know of the Gentiles' calling; the good enter the kingdom by grace, the wicked are excluded by their own guilt.
16. 17Grace does not abolish free choice but converts and heals it; man is evil of himself and good through God, who gives the will, the deed and perseverance.
17. 18Prosper rejects the charge that Augustine teaches fate or two natures: all humanity is one mass fallen in Adam and restored only by grace; he urges Rufinus to read Augustine himself.