Augustine: grace before faith, and a correction the tradition had to make

From Sovereign Grace and the Scope of Election: A Comparative Examination of Attainment Theology and Grace Theology, with Particular Attention to the Question of Whether God's Elect Are Found Among All Nations and Religions

The deep structure of this document is Augustinian. Against Pelagius, Augustine argued that grace precedes and produces every movement of the soul toward God, that election is unconditional, and that perseverance itself is a divine gift (On the Predestination of the Saints; On the Gift of Perseverance). His prayer in the Confessions, "Give what you command, and command what you will," is the whole soteriology of this study in one sentence. Yet honesty requires noting where Augustine must be corrected rather than followed: pressed by his sacramental theology, he concluded that infants dying unbaptized were lost, though punished most mildly. The later Reformed and Baptist tradition rejected that conclusion while keeping his doctrine of grace, and the ground on which it rejected it, namely that God's electing grace is not chained to an outward ordinance, is precisely the ground this document extends. The tradition corrected Augustine by Augustine.