Posts tagged augustine
If the protest of the Reformation means anything, then surely there is a dichotomy, or at least a difference, between being Reformed and being a Roman Catholic. On that, I completely agree. However, I don’t think Rome owns Catholicity. Our “catholic” faith is the historic faith of the church, rooted in the Scriptures, received from the apostles, elucidated and articulated in the creeds and ecumenical councils, reformed in our confessions, with the conviction that the Spirit of God has guided the church through history. The Protestant Reformation is not a “paradigm shift,” the “emergence” of a “new faith.” Rather, we should see the Protestant Reformation as an Augustinian renewal movement within the church catholic.
God wants to make you god - not by nature, as in the case of the One he gave birth to, but by his gift and adoption. Just as Christ was made a sharer in your mortality through his humanity, so he makes you a sharer in his immortality by way of exaltation.
Augustine, Sermon 166.4
#controversialtheology
Initial enthusiasm is easy. Afterward, though, it is time to stand firm, even along the monotonous desert paths that we are called upon to traverse in this life - with the patience it takes to tread evenly, a patience in which the romanticism of the initial awakening subsides, so that only the deep, pure Yes of faith remains. This is the way to produce good wine. After the brilliant illuminations of the initial moment of his conversion, Augustine had a profound experience of this toilsome patience, and that is how he learned to love the Lord and to rejoice deeply at having found him.
Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth
It’s Augustine’s feast day today!
And as we talked and panted for it, we just touched the edge of it by the utmost leap of our hearts; then, sighing and unsatisfied, we left the first-fruits of our spirit captive there, and returned to the noise of articulate speech, where a word has beginning and end. How different from your Word, our Lord, who abides in himself, and grows not old, but renews all things.
To Be or Not To Be: An Interview with Paul Griffiths
Paul Griffiths is the Warren Professor of Catholic Theology at Duke Divinity School. The following interview is with Carole Baker:
As I mentioned earlier, I agree with Augustine’s belief that demons are fallen angels, but then we have to figure out what angels are. They’re creatures. They’re like us—they have intellectual capacities, free will, et cetera—but they don’t have bodies, or their bodies are very ethereal.
Augustine has this lovely little treatise calledOn the Divination of Demonswhere he addresses a question that few Christians think about now but it’s a great question: How is it that demons appear to be able to do things like tell the future or see things at a great distance? Does this mean that they’re sort of like God? Augustine answers that by saying, no, they just have ethereal bodies, which allow them to move about really fast. Thus, if they seem to know what’s happening in India right now, it’s because they were there a minute ago. The whole point is to puncture the pretentions of the demons. They’re just creatures who have some powers that we don’t have and that’s all.
So what can they do to us? Augustine suggests that they can show us things. They can show us idols, they can show us spectacles, they can offer us glamour, they can generically tempt us. But they cannot compel us. They can’t actually make us do anything. They are real forces in the world—they can be terrifying or seductive—but they’re not compelling, and that’s because they’re creatures like us.
I think that’s the right sort of line to take. Augustine was a great believer in them but also one who wanted to check the Christian tendency to say that humans are subject to them. We can never be subject to them, he thinks. We may enslave ourselves to them, but that’s something that we do, not something that they do to us. And the way to remove that slavery is simple. You just have to turn your gaze from them to God. The slavery is then gone. We may of course not know how to do that, but that’s what exorcism is. It’s a means to produce that result, the turning of the gaze of the possessed one toward something else—God.
I don’t think I posted this interview when it first came out, but it’s great.
Christian ethics is not about managing history, but about overaccepting the apparent givens of human life and turning them into gifts in the light of God’s grace.
These are scans of a copy of Origen’s Commentary on Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans that Augustine owned. The notes in the margins refer to the Pelagian controversy.
The amazing Hannah found the book, which is all scanned online, and sifted through hundreds of pages with me.
I’m glad everyone likes this so much! Here are some more screenshots I took:
I love the thought of Augustine doodling on the margins.
I would just like to remind people, before everyone gets carried away, that only one scholar has suggested that these are in fact Augustine’s own marginal notes. This is not a sure thing, so please don’t go around saying that it is.
Initial enthusiasm is easy. Afterward, though, it is time to stand firm, even along the monotonous desert paths that we are called upon to traverse in this life - with the patience it takes to tread evenly, a patience in which the romanticism of the initial awakening subsides, so that only the deep, pure Yes of faith remains. This is the way to produce good wine. After the brilliant illuminations of the initial moment of his conversion, Augustine had a profound experience of this toilsome patience, and that is how he learned to love the Lord and to rejoice deeply at having found him.
Even if I die, let me see thy face lest I die.
First, he [Augustine] believed that God is not an impersonal Reason dispersed through the world but a “person” who loves and can be loved in return. Second, to be human is to love; we can choose *what* to love but *whether* to love. Third, we live well when we love both God and neighbour, aligning ourselves with the God who loves. Fourth, we will flourish and be truly happy when we discover joy in loving the infinite God and neighbours in God.
Miroslav Volf, A Public Faith, p. 71.
(via hargaden)
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