6. Henry Bettenson, ed., Documents of the Christian Church (New York: Oxford, 1963), 54.
Appendix 2
centuries of church history have repudiated the notion that salvation effects anything less than the complete transformation of a believer's character, behavior, and way of life.
For example, in the Didache, one of the earliest of all extrabiblical church writings, written perhaps as early as the end of the first century, we read: "Every prophet who teaches the truth but fails to practice what he preaches is a false prophet."3
From the words of Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch, writing near the beginning of the second century, we read, "What matters is not a momentary act of professing, but being persistently motivated by faith."4
Another of the earliest church writings, known as the Second Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, penned about AD 100, contains these words:
Let us not merely call Him Lord, for that will not save us. For He says, "Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will be saved, but he who does what is right." Th us, brothers, let us acknowledge him by our actions. . . . Th is world and the world to come are two enemies. Th is one means adultery, corruption, avarice, and deceit, while the other gives them up. We cannot, then, be friends of both. To get the one, we must give the other up.5
Augustine, writing in AD 412, described works of righ teous ness as an inevitable proof of the operation of the Holy Spirit in one's life:
We for our part assert that the human will is so divinely aided towards the doing of righ teous ness that, . . . besides the teaching which instructs him how he ought to live, he receives also the Holy Spirit, through which there arises in his heart a delight in and a love of that supreme and unchangeable Good which is God; and this arises now, while he walks by faith and not by sight. Th at by this earnest, as it were, of the free gift he may burn to cleave to his Maker, and be on fi re to approach to a share in that true light. . . . But to the end that we may feel this aff ection "the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts" not "through the free choice which springs from ourselves," but "through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us" (Rom. 4:5).6
After Augustine's death, his doctrine gave way to semi-Pelagianism, the teaching that the sinner's own will and efforts are the ultimate determining
3. Cyril C. Richardson, ed., Early Chris tian Fathers (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 177. 4. Ibid., 92. 5. Ibid., 194 – 95. 6. Henry Bettenson, ed., Documents of the Chris tian Church (New York: Oxford, 1963), 54.