CHAPTER 1

MORAL TRANSFORMATION THEORY

And do not be conformed to this world,

but be transformed

by the renewing of your mind,

that you may prove

what is that good and acceptable

and perfect will of God.

Letter to the Romans 12:2

Based on some recent studies, which have led to a profound reconsideration of the ancient Jewish cultural context, an ideal of moral transformation of man as a consequence of the life, preaching, death and resurrection of Jesus, seems to have been the predominant interpretation of salvation among the early Christian communities, who believed that Jesus' mission was aimed at producing a radical moral renewal in men and society following the coming of the Kingdom of God. This theory, which its authors have called “Moral Transformation”, has recently been elaborated and has the merit of reconsidering the perspective of how the ancient Christian communities, of Jewish tradition, could have understood the message of the Gospel, before the cultural contaminations with which we interpret it in modern times. Therefore, it is not a theory formulated by ancient theologians, as in the case of several theories that we will see later, but it is deduced from an in-depth documentary, historical, social and cultural analysis carried out by some contemporary scholars, on the basis of Christian texts of the first centuries.⁶

1.1. Moral Transformation theory

According to this theory, the death of Jesus and the subsequent resurrection were regarded, by the early Christian communities, primarily in terms of exemplary martyrdom (testimony) from which they drew inspiration, motivation and confidence. However, the saving work of Jesus was not limited to the event of his crucifixion but was manifested in all the words and teachings he preached and the example of life he gave. The cross was therefore the consequence of the revolutionary message Jesus brought, says one scholar: “The cross is merely a ramification of the moral life of Jesus. He is crucified as a martyr due to the radical nature of His moral example.”⁷

They saw Jesus as God’s appointed teacher, prophet, and leader, who died as a martyr in order to teach them a new way of life. Their paradigm of salvation centred upon this way of life taught by Jesus, and on following faithfully his example and teachings.⁸

The resurrection of Jesus was seen as the confirmation of the truth of what he preached and attested to God's acceptance of his doctrine; from this perspective, those who followed his teachings would also achieve the same resurrection and a positive final judgement. In this way, the martyr's death and the subsequent resurrection of Jesus served to instil courage, hope and confidence in the faithful to face persecution.

The exhortation to shun evil (sin) and practise good (righteousness) was predominant in this period, also in the wake of John the Baptist's earlier preaching; each person's final judgement would be determined in the light of the good or evil done in life. Emphasis was placed on the moral teachings and mutual love preached by Jesus, which constituted the new law, completing and replacing the previous Mosaic law, the Torah. The accent was no longer on the performance of ritual practices, questioned by Jesus himself, but on the need for a moral transformation of the individual who, by imitating Christ and following his teachings, committed himself with dedication to good works.

The early Christians believed that, at the final judgment, each person would be judged according to his or her life and works;⁹ a resurrection of life for those who had done good, a resurrection of condemnation for those who had done evil.¹⁰ The focus of the doctrine of salvation was not on the forgiveness of sins, for which, on the basis of what had already been stated in the Hebrew Bible, sincere repentance and return to God were sufficient conditions for forgiveness; rather, the focus was on the condition of the human heart, which was the foundation for a righteous life. Great emphasis was placed on the moral life, and the exhortation to live uprightly would cover a significant part of the New Testament, at the centre of which was placed the paradigm of love of neighbour.¹¹ It should also be remembered that the moral and theological recommendations, to which the first Christian communities could refer, came mainly from the writings of the Prophets and from the Wisdom books of the Bible, where there was a strong and recurrent invitation to do good and to help the oppressed in particular: “Learn to do good; Seek justice, Rebuke the oppressor; Defend the fatherless, Plead for the widow!”¹² “Defend the poor and fatherless; Do justice to the afflicted and needy.”¹³ What spread in this early period of Christianity could almost be said to be a social gospel strongly focused on helping the poor; as proof of this, when Paul and Barnabas went to Jerusalem to meet James, Peter and John, they received, besides the mandate to go to the foreigners, the only recommendation to remember, i.e., to do something, for the poor.¹⁴ The issue was so deeply felt that Paul worked continuously to raise funds for the poor brothers in Jerusalem,¹⁵ and those who joined the Church sold all their possessions and shared with those in need.¹⁶

God's grace, according to this theory, consists in having sent Jesus who, through his life and teachings, provided a moral example to motivate people to abandon the ways of sin and lead a righteous life based on love. Man was considered to be endowed with the ability to choose (free will) and there was no idea of original sin, a concept that was not formulated until the 4^th century by Augustine of Hippo.¹⁷ Therefore, the evil that afflicts man was considered to derive either from ignorance in knowing what is good or from a bad conscience in not practising it; thanks to the teachings and testimony of Jesus, men would therefore be touched to the core and exhorted to know what is good, to abandon evil ways and to convert to justice and love of neighbour. The death and subsequent resurrection of Christ would encourage the faithful to work unreservedly, even at the cost of their lives, to do good and to commit themselves to the community. It is an extended concept of salvation, not so much of the individual, as we are used to imagining in our individualistic society, but of the community, which was typical of the Jewish culture, where each person was called to work as a coordinated member of a single body, the Church.

In conclusion, salvation was seen as the conversion and repentance of the person towards a new moral dimension, a premise for a final positive judgement by God, which is obtained by doing good in imitation of the example given by Jesus, by remaining faithful to his cause and loyal to the community.

First, there is one spiritual and inexpressibly exalted God, who is Lord and Father of the world. Secondly, he requires a holy life. Thirdly, he will at last sit in judgement, and will reward the good with immortality and punish the wicked with death. The teaching concerning God, virtue, and eternal reward is traced trough the prophets and Christ; but the bringing about of a virtuous life (of righteousness) has been necessarily left by God to men themselves; for God has created man free, and virtue can only be acquired by man’s efforts. The prophets and Christ are therefore a source of righteousness in so far as they are teachers.¹⁸

It must be said, however, for the sake of completeness, that the vision of the early Church, hypothesised by this theory as integrally “exemplarist”, did not exclude the need for the action of the Holy Spirit in the process of man's transformation, and saw in the union with Christ the way to reach its full realisation, as we shall see later.

1.2. Pelagius and Augustine

An interpretation quite like the theory of Moral Transformation became widespread in the 4^th century, through the works of a monk named Pelagius,¹⁹ who advocated a return to the origins of Christianity by proposing an exemplarist model based on the life of Jesus. This model was strongly opposed by part of the Church and in particular by Augustine of Hippo, and led to his condemnation for heresy in 418 A.D. It is important to open a brief digression on the clash between these two eminent scholars, since it was an event that marked the course of Christian theology.

Specifically, Pelagius denied the existence of any original sin inherited from Adam and Eve, as instead assumed by Augustine, except in terms of the bad example they had passed on; humanity would be neither corrupt nor incapable of doing good, and even less guilty of anything by birth, it would only be badly educated and accustomed to vices:

For no other cause occasions for us the difficulty of doing good than the long custom of vices, which has infected us from childhood, and gradually, through many years, corrupted us, and thus holds us afterward bound and addicted to itself, so that it seems in some way to have the force of nature.²⁰

He believed that man does not need redemption and that he was created with the capacity and freedom to act righteously according to his own choices, albeit aided by the example of Christ:

In the person of Jesus Christ, the inner spiritual law is made fully manifest for us. His words explain the spiritual law, and his life and death exemplify it. Through him we are reborn as new men and women, because we can see clearly how we should live. We no longer need outer written laws, because in Christ we understand fully the inner spiritual law.²¹

Augustine, on the other hand, saw man as totally enslaved to sin and incapable of doing good, since, although still endowed with free will, he would find himself in “chains” and only able to fulfil sinful desires (which he identified with sexual concupiscence).²² Man would therefore be free, but free solely to do evil; only the grace of God can bring true liberation and confer the ability to do good, for there would be nothing good in man. Humanity, according to Augustine, if not redeemed, is a doomed mass (massa perditionis).

The key points of the dispute gave rise to two diametrically opposed visions, called Augustinianism and Pelagianism, which can be summarised as follows:

Augustinianism: only the grace of God can transform a man's heart from evil to good. It is grace that frees the free will and makes man capable of choosing the good. God's grace is granted only to those who are predestined and is irresistible. Salvation is God’s decision.

Pelagianism: grace is understood as help in terms of good education, moral example and exhortation from God. Rejection of any notion of an inner strengthening of the soul or the will of the individual by God, and denial of predestination. Salvation is a man’s choice.

Basically, Pelagius' preaching placed great emphasis on ethics, virtue and a strict way of following the example of Christ to achieve moral purity: “If I must, then I can.” On the contrary, for Augustine, only divine grace could give man the ability to overcome sinful desires and enable him to live in justice.

For the purposes of our study, in order to achieve a reconciliation between the two visions, we could assume that man is born with the capacity to do both good and evil (this is what we would expect to find among Christians and non-Christians) and that in this area of choice he often ends up, perhaps also conditioned by bad examples or a hostile environment, making wrong choices (and this is what we actually find and call evil). God's grace, in various ways and at different times of life, would be offered to all men,²³ although not always received, so that they, under the action of the Spirit of God, might be persuaded to turn away from evil and pursue good. But this is only a proposition for the moment, which we will try to explore further in the remainder of this book.

1.3. Criticism of the theory of Moral Transformation

The main criticisms levelled at the Moral Transformation theory concern in particular the idea of salvation achieved through human effort and the fact that it underestimates the weight of the moral corruption of humanity. According to the critics, the redemptive role of Jesus' death is denied, which in the theory of Moral Transformation would only assume the character of an exemplary testimony. This theory, if pushed towards the extreme meaning of Pelagianism, would make Jesus' death marginal to the salvation process, if not in terms of moral exhortation; man would be able to save himself, as he is perfectly free to choose goodness and justice. In that case, Jesus could only have preached his new ethical model and spared himself the martyrdom of the cross. The idea proposed by Pelagianism is the closest thing, in theological terms, to Greek Stoicism,²⁴ and although it has been discarded several times by official theology, it is quite widespread, especially in some pseudo-religious circles.

1.4. Conclusion

The so-called “exemplarist” theories, which claim that Jesus' life, death and resurrection constituted only the perfect moral example to be followed, have been repeatedly rejected throughout the history of theology, often harshly, and labelled as heretical. However, the theory of Moral Transformation has to be credited with highlighting the need for a radical change in man in following Jesus, and with pointing out that good works on behalf of the poor, the oppressed and all those in need are a natural part of a Christian's life; as the Apostle James said “Faith without works is dead.”²⁵ that is to say, a faith that does not produce good works is almost certainly inauthentic. We can therefore say that grace and works are not in antithesis with each other but proceed in parallel in the path of life and salvation of every Christian.

In the context of the debate on grace sparked off by Augustine and Pelagius in the 4^th century, which is still highly topical, the question arises as to what the role of the individual is in the sphere of salvation (free will? predestination?), what the scope of grace is (irresistible? irreversible?), and what the results generated by grace are. In the version dictated by moral rigorism, there is a real risk of lapsing into stoicism, in which Jesus would have no role, if not a marginal one, in the context of salvation. On the contrary, the Augustinian view, based on predestination and irresistible grace, would make human participation in the event of salvation completely superfluous and irrelevant, leading to fatalism²⁶ (typical of the culture of ancient Rome, which probably influenced Augustine) and laxity.

It is therefore necessary to find a synthesis between the two approaches, as was already attempted in the sixth century,²⁷ to reconcile the action of God's grace with a commitment of the faithful to renew and transform his or her own life. In fact, I consider unrealistic a path to salvation that is not initiated by divine grace and supported by the Holy Spirit in various forms and degrees, but equally unfounded is a complete lack of freedom of choice and individual responsibility of man in such a path.

This synthesis (synergism) was probably what the authors of the New Testament and the Fathers of the Church²⁸ tried to convey to us, but it was almost lost under the pressure of pagan philosophies and religions,²⁹ that steered towards one or the other of the two extreme visions (stoicism or fatalism).