Chapter 15: The Most Influential Christian of All Time. I don't speak lightly when I say that Augustine, the 4th-century bishop of Hippo, was the most influential Christian teacher of all time, at least as to Western Christianity. He has ultimately had more influence on the Western Church than even the apostles themselves, because the Western Church has read the apostles through his eyes. In fact, Augustine is almost universally recognized as the father of Western theology.
And it is not without reason that Augustine's influence on theology has been so tremendous. Before becoming a Christian, he had been a teacher of persuasive argumentation and writing. As a bishop, he made use of these skills. Nobody in the Western Church could successfully resist his argumentation. In his own lifetime, he became the theological authority in the West on practically every question of doctrine and morality. One noticeable attribute of Augustine is that he reasoned as a Westerner.
Many of the other early Christian writers didn't. Modern Westerners can usually follow Augustine's logic. The same can't always be said about the logic of some of the pre-Nicene Christian writers. Unfortunately for us, the New Testament wasn't written by Western minds, but by Hellenistic Eastern minds. Augustine himself had never mastered Greek. This is highly significant because Greek is the language of the New Testament and of the vast majority of the early Christian writers.
Perhaps that's why Augustine departed from early Christianity in so many areas, more than any other Christian teacher of his time. It's unfortunate that he had such a brilliant mind because, as a result of his genius, he took the entire Western Church with him. The list of doctrines and practices that Augustine either initiated or gave his authority to is impressively long. The following is only a partial list of what he taught.
For example, that Mary was born and lived her entire life without actual sin, that unbaptized infants are eternally damned, that sex within marriage is an inherently debased act, that war can be holy, that there will be no literal millennium, that there is no forgiveness of sins outside the Catholic Church, that some of the practices and teachings of the apostles no longer apply to Christians because the apostles lived in a different age, that there is a purgatorial fire, that the dead can benefit from the
sacrifice of the Eucharist or Mass, and that it is proper for a "christian state" to persecute heretics.
As to this last matter, Augustine wrote, "Let all be called to salvation. Let all be recalled from the path of destruction.
Those who may by the sermons of Catholic preachers, those who may by the edicts of Catholic princes, some because they obey the warnings of God, others because they obey the emperor's command." Still quoting from him, King Nebuchadnezzar, when converted by a miracle from God, enacted a righteous and praiseworthy law on behalf of the truth, that is, that everyone who should speak anything amiss against the true God, the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, should utterly perish along with his family.
If the true Church is the one that actually suffers persecution, not the one that inflicts it, as some say, let them ask the apostle what Church Sarah typified when she inflicted persecution on her handmaid. For the apostle declares that the free mother of us all, the heavenly Jerusalem, which is the true Church of God, was prefigured by that woman, Sarah, who cruelly treated her handmaid.
However, if we investigate the story further, we shall find that it was really the handmaid who persecuted Sarah by her haughtiness. Sarah merely imposed on her a proper discipline for her haughtiness. Again, I ask, if good and holy men never inflict persecution on anyone but only suffer it, whose words do they think those are in the Psalm where we read, "I have pursued my enemies and overtaken them. I did not turn again until they were consumed"?
So if we want to declare or recognize the truth, there is a persecution of unrighteousness, which the unholy inflict upon the Church of Christ, and there is a righteous persecution, which the Church of Christ inflicts upon the unholy. Moreover, the Church persecutes in the spirit of love. They in the spirit of wrath. What then is the function of brotherly love? Out of the fear of the short-lived fires of the furnace for a few, does it therefore abandon all to the eternal fires of hell?
Now, you're probably having no problem in seeing why Augustine is one of the principal fathers of the Roman Catholic Church. You may be surprised to know, however, that he is also the father of the Protestant Reformation. Our first subheading, Newton's Law of Theology. Sir Isaac Newton observed that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Sad to say, Newton's law seems to apply as much to theology as it does to physics.
For every heretic who moves away from true doctrine in one direction, there is nearly always an orthodox teacher who reacts to him by going to an equal and opposite extreme. Unfortunately, the "orthodox teacher" almost inevitably pulls the entire Church with him. The end result is that the heretic succeeds in adulterating the Church, but in an opposite way from what he intended. A classic example of this principle is found in the confrontation between Augustine and Pelagius, a monk from Britain.
By AD 400, the Church had largely become a cluster of people who met every Sunday and who could recite certain creeds and doctrinal formulations. For the most part, they had no genuine relationship with God. The Church was spiritually anemic. To counter this spiritual laxity, Pelagius traveled throughout the Church preaching a no-nonsense message of repentance and holiness. He stressed the individual's responsibility to God for sin.
One of his disciples, named Celestius, began teaching that humans could theoretically live completely sinless lives and thereby save themselves without the necessity of God's grace or the shed blood of Jesus Christ. His argumentation went something like this: We are all capable of obeying virtually any commandment of God for at least one day. For example, we can all avoid lying or coveting or stealing or taking God's name in vain for at least one day.
If we are capable of obeying such commands for one day, then it's in our power to do it for two days. And if we can obey that commandment for two days, we can obey it for a week, and so on. And ultimately, then the conclusion Celestius reached is that we are capable of obeying God's commandments every day throughout our entire lives. Therefore, we alone are responsible for our sins, and we can't blame our disobedience on Adam or on any inherited weakness of the flesh.
Well, although his argument might sound logical, it's actually fallacious. Because something can be done on a small, limited scale doesn't mean that the same thing can be repeated on an unlimited scale. For example, because a person can run three miles, it doesn't follow that he or she can run 300 miles. Or another illustration: I can type at a pace of 75 words a minute for three minutes without making a mistake. At least that's what I could do when I was in high school.
Under Celestius's reasoning, I should therefore be able to type at that speed for three days without making a mistake. But I can tell you, I simply can't do that. Nevertheless, the teachings of Pelagius and even those of his disciple, Celestius, weren't that far removed from those of the early Christians. As we've seen, they also believe that each person is responsible for his own sins and that we are capable of living obediently to God.
However, at the same time, they also recognize that we all stand in need of God's grace, both His saving grace and His empowering grace. Without grace, there can be no salvation. Well, in response to these teachings, which came to be known as Pelagianism, even though it appears that many of these things were not taught by Pelagius himself but only by his disciple, well, Augustine went to the opposite extreme and he developed the following set of doctrines. One, as a result of Adam's fall, man is totally depraved.
He is absolutely unable to do anything good or to save himself. In fact, he's even unable to believe or to have faith in God. Number two, therefore humans can believe in God or have faith in Him only if by grace He first gives them this faith or belief. Man has no free will to choose either to believe or not to believe. Three, God's decision to save one person and condemn another, to give faith to one person and withhold it from another, is totally arbitrary. There is nothing we can do to influence God's choice.
Number four, before the creation of the world, God arbitrarily predestined, not simply foreknew, but predestined who would be saved and who would be damned. And there's nothing we can do either in this life or the next to change these matters. Number five, the elect, those who were predestined for salvation, cannot possibly lose their salvation. Those predestined for damnation cannot possibly be saved. Number six, no one can know whether or not he or she is of the elect.
God gives many people the gift of faith so that they believe, are baptized, and walk in Jesus's commandments. However, some of them haven't been predestined for salvation and they ultimately won't persevere. The gift of perseverance is a separate gift from that of faith. We have no way of knowing who in the Church has been given the gift of perseverance. And finally, he said, number seven, salvation is totally a matter of grace.
Faith is a gift from God, obedience is a gift from God, perseverance is a gift from God. Well, Augustine managed to persuade most of the bishops of North Africa, and his views ended up prevailing. However, by overreacting to the errors of Pelagianism, Augustine obliterated the original early Christian teachings of free will and man's involvement in salvation. In their place was the cold, grim doctrine of absolute predestination.