In 418A.D. a conference was held in Carthage of North Africa and Pelagius was condemned at the Council of Carthage, which was a territorial council rather than an ecumenical one. In the course of the controversy there were three different popes residing. This was a significant moment that strengthened the papacy when the Bishop of Rome stepped into a territorial council and placed his stamp of approval on Pelagius' condemnation.

Augustine wrote that mankind is a mass of sin. He was what theologians in the Church have called a true Pauline theologian, one Protestant theologian from Princeton even said that Augustine "gave us the Reformation of the 16^th century, because of his strong emphasis on the grace of God in salvation." He built his foundation on the Apostle Paul when he had written "there is none righteous, no not one…no one who seeks after God or does good…" from his letter to the Romans in the New Testament. The great commandment of God according to Christ was "To love the Lord thy God with all thy strength, mind, and heart, and love one another as yourself." Augustine believed that the most gross and heinous of sins was unbelief, not merely "To hate the Lord thy God with all thy strength, mind and heart, and to hate another even though you love yourself." He explains meaning that if man was sinful, and the great commandment was this, then to not keep this great commandment with the absence of good was the great evil of mankind, proving his inability to truly to do good and honor God. Augustine wrote that many see heinous sins and crimes as merely murder, adultery, and other outwardly visible sins, but that the greatest and most heinous of crimes is that which is not visible, namely unbelief or the dishonoring of God's commandments. It was not God's fault that man sinned against him, because man was tested in a perfect environment in the garden in perfect circumstances but with mutability, the ability to change: posse peccare the ability to sin if he chose to do so, his nature at this point in time being neutral. Man is now born with a condition which prevents him from fully obeying God (or the loss of libertas: moral liberty), thus doing the ultimate good and keeping the great commandment; therefore, only God by his grace can provide the ability to not sin. God provides this grace to a certain number of people within the Church as he did to Israel, a particular nation in the Old Testament (Deut. 7:7).

Augustine seems to establish that God does command what man cannot do. Augustine taught that because of this inborn nature and freewill to do only that which is evil and not godly, then man was by nature an object of wrath, as Paul had taught in the letter to Ephesians (Chapter 2), and in his letter to the Romans (Chapter 3 and 8). Christ came to "set the captives free" by living a perfect life in sinful man's stead, and dying, taking the wrath of God upon himself although innocent, and applying his righteousness to a particular people. Augustine wrote: "…man's good deserts are themselves the gift of God, so that when these obtain the recompense of eternal life, it is simply grace given for grace."

Augustine has been called the theologian of grace in history because of his writings in soteriology, and the establishing of an orthodox position on God's giving of grace to sinful man. He never denied man's freewill, he established it. He denied that according to the Apostle Paul and Christ's teaching, he was unable to be totally free in righteousness; thus, he had no ability to live perfectly righteous. Man was still free, but free to do only that which is evil. By the grace of God, in the infusion of love by the Holy Spirit (Rom. 5), the enslaved will chooses that which is pleasing to God, "not only in order that they may know, by the manifestation of that grace, what should be done, but moreover in order that, by its enabling, they may do with love what they know." According to Christ's teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, a tree is either good or evil at root. You know the tree by the fruit it bears, or to make this a human analogy: that which is born of flesh is flesh and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. Paul wrote that man is at enmity with God, fallen and under the wrath of God, children of the devil. Augustine concludes his arguments for his statement "Command what thou desirest; and give what thou commandest," by stressing that if Pelagius disagrees with him, he has to disagree with the teachings of Christ. Christ taught that "no man can come to him unless it is given by the father," "be perfect as my father in heaven is perfect," "The Spirit gives life, the flesh profits nothing…without me you can do nothing" (John 6; Matt.5).