For Augustine,
grace is efficacious because
Gods decree is efficacious and Gods decree is efficacious because
God is a sovereign, efficacious God who does whatsoever He wills. Grace is also particular.
God sovereignly decreed to reprobate some and choose others.
12 Contrary to the Semi-Pelagians,
Augustine taught that election and reprobation were not on the basis of foreseen faith or foreseen unbelief. The elect receive grace and the reprobate do not, and no other reason can be sought than the inscrutable will of God.
Augustine taught the election of the saints in Christ
as members of His body: "As, therefore, that one man [Christ] was predestined to be our Head, so we being many are predestinated to be His members."
13 Moreover, Augustine also taught reprobation:
[God] used the very will of the creature which was working in opposition to the Creators will as an instrument for carrying out His will, the supremely Good thus turning to good account even what is evil,
to the condemnation of those whom in His justice he has predestined to punishment.14
[The human] race we have distributed into two parts, the one consisting of those who live according to man, the other of those who live according to God. And these we also mystically call the two cities, or the two communities of men, of which the
one is predestined to reign eternally with God, and the other to suffer eternal punishment with the devil.
15
12 Augustine followed what is now called the infralapsarian scheme.
13 Augustine,
On the Predestination of the Saints xiv:31, trans. Peter Holmes and Robert Earnest Wallis, in
A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series, ed. Philip Schaff, vol. 5 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, repr. 1983), p. 513.
14 Augustine,
Enchiridion c, p. 269. In the two previous chapters, Augustine speaks of Gods hatredwhich he does not understand as "loving less"of Esau and His hardening of the lost (
Enchiridion xcviii-xcix, pp. 268-269). Thus Richard A. Muller wrongly denies that the
Enchiridion teaches reprobation ("Reformation, Augustinianism in," in
Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999], p. 706).
15 Augustine,
The City of God xv:1, p. 284; italics mine.