“Therefore in Him who is our Head let there appear to be the very fountain of grace, whence, according to the measure of every man, He diffuses Himself through all His members. It is by that grace that every man from the beginning of his faith becomes a Christian, by which grace that one man from His beginning became Christ.”
-Augustine, On Predestination, XXXI
In context, Augustine is arguing against both Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism. Both camps assert the necessity of man’s willing consent to his own conversion, in the former case (Pelagianism) in entirety (that is, conversion is entirely man’s consent), and in the latter (semi-Pelagianism) in partiality (that is, conversion is partially God’s doing and partially man’s consent.) Up against both of these frameworks, the former which is, thankfully, fairly uncommon today, and the latter, which is almost ubiquitous among evangelicals, Catholics, and Orthodox today, Augustine aims to assert that salvation is all the work of God, raising the dead, granting faith to the faithless, and empowering, by grace, the obedience of the once disobedient.
Augustine bases his argument on such portions of Sacred Scripture as:
-“When you were dead...He raised you with Christ. By grace you have been saved…this is not your own doing, but is the gift of God, that no man should boast” (Eph. 2:5, 8-9).
-“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” (Jn. 6:44).
-“It has been granted you to believe in him…” (Phil. 1:29)
-“What do you have that you did not receive...Why boast as if you didn’t receive it?” (1 Cor. 4:7)
-“As many as were appointed to eternal life believed.” (Ac. 13:48)
But mostly in this quote, Augustine is drawing on Heb. 12:2, which calls Jesus the “Author and Perfector of our faith.” That is, He begins it (that is, faith) in us and He completes it (maturing it, perfecting it) in us.
This means that, just as God the Trinity is the fountain of life for all that exists, God the Son, the second Member of the Trinity, via His incarnation in the Person of Jesus Christ, is the fountain of grace for all of those who believe in and hope in Him.
Like God the Trinity not only begins but at every moment continually gives all people who live their being (eg. “In Him we live and move and have our being,” Ac. 17:28), so God the Son in Jesus Christ both begins and at every moment continually gives all of His people their salvation and eternal life. No one can say, “God offered to save me, and I accepted,” though countless believers throughout the centuries have tried to (and still do). They should instead say (and will say one day), “God offered to save me, and I accepted, because the Holy Spirit moved me to willingness to embrace the One who He taught me is eternal life.” Or they’ll simply say, “God saved me through the Lamb” (as in the heavenly songs of Revelation 4-5). Augustine is explaining how this salvation occurs.
But the reason Jesus can be our salvation in the first place is because the eternal Son became temporal man in the first place. Note the logic of Augustine’s last sentence in the quote: By Christ’s grace one becomes a Christian, which is the same grace that united the man Jesus with the the divine Son in the hypostatic union. In other words, God's grace brings us, men and women, to Himself, because God's grace, in the person of Jesus, brought a human nature to Himself, to give us a Savior who could truly be our fountain of life. Why am I a Christian, right now? Because the life of Jesus, the God-man Incarnate, is in me, as a spring of living water in a parched land. It is not parched anymore. Thus Jesus' promise, “I will give you living water” (Jn. 4:10).
And indeed, He has done so and continues to.
