It is common for many Protestants to quote Warfield, who (incorrectly) claimed that the Reformation was the victory of Augustine's theology of grace over his ecclesiology. However, when one reads it in full, even allowing for Warfield to be correct, it took one thousand years for the Church to be corrected on this issue(!) Here is the quote in full, beyond the common snippet one hears on podcasts and other media:
Augustine and Protestantism.—The
problem which Augustine bequeathed to the Church for solution, the Church required
a thousand years to solve. But even so, it is Augustine who gave us the Reformation.
For the Reformation, inwardly considered, was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine’s
doctrine of grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the Church. This doctrine of
grace came from Augustine’s hands in its positive outline completely formulated:
sinful man depends, for his recovery to good and to God, entirely on the free
grace of God; this grace is therefore indispensable, prevenient, irresistible,
indefectible; and, being thus the free grace of God, must have lain, in all the
details of its conference and working, in the intention of God from all
eternity. However clearly announced and
forcefully commended by him, it required making its way against great obstacles
in the Church. As over against the Pelasgians, the indispensableness of grace
was quickly established; as over against the Semi-Pelagians, its prevenience
was with almost equal rapidity made good. But there advance paused. If the
necessity of prevenient grace was thereafter (after the second Council of
Orange, 529) the established doctrine of the Church, the irresistibility of
this prevenient grace was put under the ban, and there remained no place for a
complete “Augustinianism” within the Church, as Gottschalk and Jansen were
fully to discover. Therefore, when the great revival of religion which we
call the Reformation came, seeing that it was, on its theological side, a
revival of “Augustinianism,” as all great revivals of religion must be (for “Augustinianism”
is but the thetical expression of religion in its purity), there was nothing
for it but the rending of the Church. And therefore also the greatest peril to
the Reformation was and remains the diffused anti-“Augustinianism” in the
world; and, by a curious combination of circumstances, this, its greatest
enemy, showed itself most dangerous in the hands of what we must otherwise look
upon as the chief ally of the Reformation—that is to say, Humanism. Humanism
was the ally of the Reformation in so far as it, too, worked for the
emancipation of the human spirit; and, wherever it was religious, it became the
seed-plot of the Reformation. But there was a strong anti-“Augustinian” party among
the Humanists, and from it emanated the gravest danger which threatened the
Reformation. Where this tone of thought was dominant the Reformation failed,
because religious depth was wanting. What Spain, for example, lacked, says R.
Saint-Hilaire justly, was not the freedom of thought, but the Gospel. In the
first stages of the Reformation movement in the North, this anti-“Augustinianism”
may be looked upon as summed up in Erasmus; and Erasmus, on this very ground,
held himself aloof from the Reformation movement, and that movement held itself
aloof from him. “I am at present reading our Erasmus,” wrote Luther six months
before he nailed his theses on the door of the Schloss-Kirche at Wittenberg, “But
my heart recoils more and more from him. . . . Those who ascribe something to
man’s freedom of will regard these things differently from those who know only
God’s free grace.” Do we realize how much we owe to Erasmus and his friends
that they remained Roman Catholics, and thus permitted the “Augustinianism” of
the Reformation to plant its seed and to bear its fruit? (Benjamin Breckinridge
Warfield, Calvin and Augustine, ed. Samuel G. Craig [Philadelphia:
The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1956], 322-23, emphasis in
bold added)
