Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) turned the church's attention to the salvation of the church by the gift of grace around the turn of the fifth century of our era, when the doctrines of Pelagius started to have currency in the public teaching of some Western churchmen. Up to this time, the church was fully committed to the resolution of the Christological controversies that began in the early fourth century with the heresy of Arius. Augustine began with the fruit that came from the resolution of those controversies. He helped to settle the issues that arose when the question was asked, "What does it mean to the salvation of sinners that Christ is God and man in one indivisible person?" The second half of the question had been decisively answered by the Nicene orthodoxy of the church catholic. The first half of the question remained for Augustine and his era and in some ways still remains. We know who Jesus Christ is when we see what He does to save sinners like us. Luther's reformation of the sixteenth century cultivated the ground originally plowed by Augustine more than a millennium before, clarifying yet further the implications of Christ's grace for sinners.

Pelagius and his followers were committed to the unimpaired moral power of human nature as created good by a good God. Things were deceptively simple for the Pelagians. God had created humans. God gave the law. Those whom God created would have been created to keep the law. So those humans needed to get to work in keeping that law. Grace was fundamentally unnecessary where such high earthly gifts had been conferred by God upon His creation and His foremost creatures, human beings. This was the ultimate Nike theology: "Just do it!" long before athletic shoes were invented. When pressed about the need for grace to complete nature the Pelagians argued that it was gracious that God had conferred free will upon humans and given them the created gifts to make use of it. The Pelagians were adept spin-masters in that they were trying to co-opt the language of the Bible to cover their fundamentally pagan views about the moral powers of human nature and free will.

Their view called into question why God should become incarnate in Christ. If humans have the power to become right in God's sight by their obedience, then Christ's life, death, and resurrection are superfluous. The Pelagians anticipated the deists of the seventeenth century by making the divine economy of salvation in Christ unnecessary. The Pelagians have many adherents in the twenty-first century; as a quick scan of "TV Christianity" makes clear.