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Augustine grappled with some big questions. Following on from my last post, what follows isn’t an attempt to defend Augustine, but to understand and explore his continuing relevance as I reflect on the small amount of his writings that I have been able to engage with recently…

Augustine’s theology of grace demands a different reading of what it means for the Christian to have freedom of action. There is a danger that, if we accept Augustine’s diagnosis of our weak human state, we become virtual puppets of God.¹ Just as the sinner has no option but to sin – does not have the ‘freedom’ of manoeuvre to avoid it – does the Christian therefore have no option but to be saved? According to Rist, Augustine would respond to such a charge by arguing that grace restores, rather than takes away, free will.² “Our delusion,” explains Rist, is that “to do ‘as we like’ is freedom.”³ However, even our free will must be restored so that it unconquerably desires the good. The function of grace, therefore, “is not to drag us, kicking and screaming, to salvation,”⁴ but rather to heal us so that we have the freedom to choose right. Augustine describes this in another way as God’s love breaking into our predicament with “sweet violence.”⁵ If Pelagius views freedom as the means by which humans attain their salvation, for Augustine “it is the issue, not the source, of salvation.”⁶ › Continue reading

It’s popular in many circles to knock and caricature Augustine’s ideas – I used to be in that camp despite having never actually read any of his writings for myself! What follows isn’t an attempt to defend Augustine, but to understand and explore his continuing relevance as I reflect on the small amount I have been able to engage with recently…

Augustine, even at the best of times, is a fairly morose character. He’s perhaps at his most sanguine when reflecting upon human nature, which is perhaps nowhere more shocking than in his condemnation of un-baptised babies. Seen positively, particularly in passages in the Confessions, Augustine likens man’s relation to God as like that of a baby to its mother’s breast – a relationship of intimacy and stark dependence as a result of helplessness. In bleaker passages, Augustine would concede that un-baptised infants would be punished eternally for their inherited sin “albeit ‘lightly.’” › Continue reading

Historical-criticism has been the dominant approach in biblical interpretation since the mid-nineteenth century until the 1970s. It has long been taken for granted as “the only scientifically respectable way to study the Bible,”¹ in the English speaking world at least, but “is now under a cloud.”² In contemporary biblical studies the number of approaches to interpretation are legion, and with so many of them seeking to consciously reject the historical-critical approach we must look carefully at the role it has played, and continues to play, asking whether it has not “been falsely demonised in the process.”³ This essay will evaluate key aspects of the philosophical, methodological and theological outcomes of historical-criticism and argue that it continues to provide invaluable interpretive tools when handled carefully and intelligently.
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The collection has been described as occupying a “central place in [Paul’s] work among gentile churches… [becoming] a defining emblem of his apostolate.”¹ It was certainly “one of Paul’s most ambitious hands-on projects,” looming large within the Corinthian and Roman letters, “both theologically and practically.”² The collection for the saints of Jerusalem does beg an important question: just what was it about the collection that meant that Paul was willing to sacrifice his very life to accomplish it? ³ Why did he devote such time and energy to the project? It is clear that meeting the concrete economic needs of the Christ-followers in Jerusalem must form part of our answer to this, but this essay shall demonstrate that we must not only ask what it means to say that economic factors were not foreign to Paul’s mission, but also go on to question specifically what it was about meeting these economic needs through the collection that meant Paul was prepared to devote years of his ministry to it.
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Reading ‘Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Roman Empire‘ by Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat has got me thinking once again about Paul and the Roman Empire. Others have reviewed this book and some of the issues it raises far more ably than I¹ so I thought I’d focus my thoughts in a different direction – based on an essay I wrote on Paul’s letter to the Philippians.

“But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Saviour from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.”
Philippians 3:20-21

I love Paul’s description of the Philippian Christians as ‘heavenly citizens… eagerly awaiting a Saviour’. › Continue reading