36 - Augustine of Hippo Part 2

It's in the middle of August, well, actually early August, and half of everybody's gone, but we've got a lot of visitors with us.

We are in the middle of a series on church history, and we're trying to sneak as many of them in as we can before I basically disappear for the next two months.

I leave next Sunday afternoon, evening, for a brief stop in Birmingham, England, for a debate on the crucifixion.

Then I fly to Johannesburg, Durban, and then back through London, home a couple weeks, and then we're off to Germany for a couple weeks, so it's going to be a crazy time.

We're not going to be getting a lot of progress made, unfortunately, in the church history series, so we're going to try to sneak in as much as we can here.

Last week we began looking at the subject of Augustine.

This is just sort of where we have come in our studies. We're not really doing it topically.

We're sort of going chronologically, though it's impossible to do that in church history.

You have so many things happening at any one particular time, and if you just take a slice out of history and try to just look at, say, ten years of church history, you'd really be befuddled as to how people came to conclusions they came to and things like that.

There are just so many different currents that flow through history that it's really easy to misrepresent history because of that.

If people are not familiar with the context that gave form to things, and that's certainly the case with Augustine.

In Reformed circles you have a tremendously favorable general view of Augustine, but at the same time

I like to use Augustine as a really good example of a brilliant, brilliant mind, and yet an individual who was deeply influenced by the controversies of his own life.

If someone as smart as Augustine could end up with blind spots because of those things, the same thing happens to us as well.

Of course there are people, I remember good old Brother Dave Hunt, who's gone on to be with the

Lord. He used to go after Augustine big time and said he was the first Roman Catholic and things like that.

Augustine wouldn't have had a clue what in the world Dave was talking about at that point. But I did mention last week that after the

Apostle Paul, at least if you are a Christian in the West, you have probably been more influenced by Augustine's thought than almost anybody else.

You might say, what about Calvin and Luther and stuff? Well, yeah, but what was Luther? I'm doing a lot of reading on Luther right now because we're going to be speaking in Eisleben and Wittenberg and all these places in Germany next month.

I was looking at the collection of his letters. All the way past the period of his encounter at Worms with the

Diet of Worms, Charles V, so on and so forth, his letters were signed Martin Luther, Augustinian.

He was an Augustinian monk and it wasn't for quite some time after that until he stopped utilizing that terminology.

So he was deeply influenced. Anyone who's read the Institutes of the Christian Religion by Calvin recognized how deeply he was influenced.

And the Westminster Confession of Faith, the London Baptist Confession of Faith, Augustine is behind so much of all of that that we have been deeply influenced along those lines, whether we recognize it or not.

And so knowing something about him is important. We mentioned a little bit about the beginning of his time of ministry, the fact that he was elected to office unwillingly when the

Bishop of Hippo died. We talked a little bit about his conversion. But I would like to, in the midst of other things, keep in mind sort of a presentation that I frequently make on Augustine because I do think that it's helpful to us to understand, and this has helped

I think a lot of people understand why both sides in the Reformation, and of course we're coming up on Reformation Sunday, the 500th anniversary.

I'm sorry I'm not going to be here for that. I'm going to be speaking that weekend between Dallas and Houston.

I guess that's just all one big place now. But anyway, big anniversary.

It's not going to be one of those anniversaries where once you go past it's like, well, it's all over with, because it really just starts a whole series of really important Reformational dates.

You know, that's going to go way past my lifetime. You know, in 2021, we need to have

Diet of Worms Day. That sounds really great for most people today.

They don't know what a diet is, or the word has changed meaning, and worms sounds great.

I guess there might be some folks that would think that would be a good direction for us to go. Worms are much more sustainable than cows are,

I suppose. I can't imagine what that would taste like.

But anyway, there's all sorts of dates that we can be following over the next number of years and tying to Reformation issues, the coming conversion of Calvin, and the first publication of the

Institutes. And there's all sorts of things we could do if we would just put a little effort out to do it.

500 years ago this week, blah, blah, blah, took place. So we could probably do those things. But in looking especially at the subject of Augustine and his influence upon the

Reformation, I think it's very, very helpful to recognize the controversies that Augustine dealt with.

And we talked a little bit about the first one last week. I mentioned to you the scandal of Donatism.

And the Donatist controversy, not only did it have to do, and we've already talked about it in the past.

We've talked about the ex opera operato, ex opera operante stuff. We talked about the sacramentalism that was represented in this particular controversy.

But Augustine had to, this was an everyday issue that he had to deal with because of how scandalous it was that you were facing a divided

Christian church in North Africa. And Augustine did attempt reconciliation with the

Donatists. It's not like there wasn't any conversation or anything like that. He did attempt reconciliation, but failed in that attempt, especially because the

Donatists were based upon a very stringent perspective.

You guys don't have proper authority because of the apostasy back then. The hardliners really tended to be hardliners.

And time didn't tend to soften those stances, even now that you're well past the period of persecution.

You still were facing real hardline feelings. And what is important to recognize,

I gave you this quote before, but I think it's one of the most important quotes that we have. In his book,

Tertullian and Augustine, B .B. Warfield wrote the following.

He said, The Reformation inwardly considered was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine's doctrine of grace over Augustine's doctrine of the church.

Let me read that again. The Reformation inwardly considered was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine's doctrine of grace over Augustine's doctrine of the church.

So what this means is, at the time of the Reformation, both sides were quoting from Augustine. And you might say, well, he was the biggest name, and so one side was misrepresenting him and the other side wasn't.

Not really. Both sides could fairly quote Augustine against their opponents.

And why was that? Why could both sides quote Augustine? Well, because of the controversies that existed in Augustine's life.

The Roman Catholics could quote from Augustine in his antedonitist writings, the unity of the church, the nature of sacraments, things like that.

The Reformed could quote Augustine from his anti -Pelagian writings, the nature of salvation, grace.

So did Augustine contradict himself? Yeah. Why? Because of the controversies he faced in his life.

And if that's the case for him, then how much more so can it be the case for us as well?

What we also need to recognize, this is extremely important. At first,

Augustine resisted the idea of governmental infiltration, involvement in the

Donatist controversy. But eventually he succumbed and military force, the power of the state, was brought to bear against the

Donatists. And this is clearly, now remember,

Theodosius declares the Roman Empire to be a

Christian empire around 380. So this is right before Augustine's ministry.

And at first he's like, no, that wouldn't be proper. But eventually he is convinced that it's more of a scandal that there is a divided church than it's a scandal that force would be used in theological issues.

And could Augustine in 390 look far enough down the road to see what could possibly come from his actions?

No. No. I don't think you can hold people accountable for looking more than a brief stretch into the future in regards to what their actions might lead to.

You cannot possibly know how things are going to be changed 50 years from now so that what you do now may have totally unintended consequences 50 years from now.

Especially when you can't control all those other things that create the context of 50 years from this point in time, let alone 500 years or 1 ,000 years down the road.

However, looking backwards, we can surely, just as we looked at the

Council of Nicaea, and hmm, Constantine's there, hmm, the people that won't sign the creed are banished, hmm, who enforces that?

Well, the government does. Hmm. Okay. Well, what's the next logical step in that progression?

You can make the argument that if you trace everything back through history, there wouldn't have been a

Spanish Inquisition without Augustine's accepting state involvement in suppressing the

Donatists. Could Augustine have known about the Spanish Inquisition 1 ,000 years later?

Of course not. But that's how history works. These things are all related.

And when you ask, well, how did Augustine justify this utilization of external force in theological matters?

It's interesting. He utilized the parable where Jesus speaks of bringing the people in to the marriage feast by force, compel them to come in.

Compel them to come in becomes the foundation for the idea of the use of compulsion in matters of faith, and since it's being done by the state, now the state and the church are becoming intertwined in an extremely dangerous fashion.

Not in a way that could yet be seen in its full extent, but eventually when you watch the video we've watched a number of times here on New Year's Eve called

The Radicals. I think I've shown it like three times now over the past 20 years. So about every seven years or so we show

The Radicals. And you see the state persecuting peaceful people who simply want to baptize their own children upon profession of faith, not upon birth, and yet they're being persecuted and burned at the stake, not only as heretics against the church, but as traitors against the state.

How did it get to that? Well, Council of Nicaea, North Africa, Augustine, the

Donatists, little step by little step by little step over time. You combine that with the fall of the

Roman Empire in the west, the power vacuum that develops, the fact that people start looking to the church for leadership in these things, little step, little step, little step at a time.

And so that first controversy that takes place in Augustine's life, the

Donatist controversy, very important for many reasons, many reasons indeed. Then I mentioned to you the

Council of Carthage, which met in 397, and I just briefly mentioned to you the fact that Augustine, of course,

Augustine, you can probably find his influence in almost any theological argument that has been going on long enough in the history of the church, but Augustine had an extended dialogue and discourse with Jerome.

Now, when we talk about early church writers, or really we're in the transition now into the medieval period, it's not so much early church, it's not so much medieval, it's sort of right on the border right now.

But there are not any bigger names at this time period than Jerome and Augustine.

Certainly you've got some pretty big names. You've got, we're going to see the

Cappadocian fathers, Basil and Gregory and all these other types of people.

But Jerome and Augustine, you may recall at one point I mentioned to you that there were really only two early church writers who had full facility in both the biblical languages, both

Greek and Hebrew, and that was Origen and Jerome.

And the name Jerome should be familiar to, I think, any Christian, simply due to the fact that the translation that he was commissioned to produce toward the end of the 4th century into the very beginning of the 5th century is still the most important foreign language translation of the

Bible in Christian history, becomes known today as the

Latin Vulgate. And the Latin Vulgate, translated by Jerome, was the

Bible of the West from the 5th century through the Reformation.

Even the King James translators were more at home in the text of the

Vulgate than in any other text at all. Latin was the language of education and learning.

Speaking Latin was the language of advertising in the 17th century in England.

You pick up a newspaper and the advertisements are going to be in Latin. This is the language of education and literature and everything, which is why the first impetus to translate the

Bible into English was so resisted by many because it was considered such a vulgar tongue, such a low -level tongue.

It was the tongue of the uneducated farmhands, the people slopping the pigs.

You don't take God's holy word and put it into the language of farmhands. And so, even when you look at the

Reformers, they very frequently would write in two languages. Luther would write in German and in Latin.

Calvin, when you look at the Institutes, when you look at the various editions of the

Institutes, you have a Latin edition, then a French edition, then a Latin edition, then a French edition, because he was

French. Some people don't realize that. Oh no, he was French?

I can't believe it. I thought he was at least English. No, no, no, no. German maybe? No, no, no.

Portuguese something, not French. Yes, he was French. And so, that Latin language just remained massively, centrally important for a tremendous period of time, and Jerome is the one who translated that particular translation of the

Bible, and it created tremendous ripples when it was first done. Well, Augustine had an ongoing debate with Jerome.

Jerome had gone to Bethlehem. He had learned from the

Jews about the canon of Scripture that they themselves accepted.

And Jerome realized what Melito Sardis before him had realized, and what Origen and Rufinus and other people had all realized before him, and that is the

Jews had never accepted what we call the apocryphal books, or the deuterocanonical books, the books that were written during the intertestamental period, the

Maccabees and things like that. And so, the only reason he translated them into Latin was because the

Bishop of Rome, Damasus, told him to do so, but in his writings, he made it very clear that these are not canonical works.

Well, Augustine had some facility in Greek, but almost none in Hebrew.

And so, he was deeply influenced by the Greek Septuagint translation of the

Old Testament, as was, well, up until this period of time, the Old Testament text for the majority of the church was the

Greek Septuagint. There were very few Christians by this point. Well, almost none, except maybe in certain places in Palestine.

That could read Hebrew. And so, the Hebrew Old Testament was pretty much a closed book to the vast majority of Christians.

So, the Greek Septuagint was the only way that it was known. And Augustine labored under the misapprehension that the

Hebrew canon, that the canon that the Hebrew people themselves accepted the Old Testament, included what we call the

Apocrypha or the Deuterocanonical works. And so, he argued for them against Jerome, and of course, those who follow

Augustine would be influenced by his opinions. And the Council of Carthage, in 397, was just basically a rubber stamp party for Augustine's views.

I mean, by now, he's already, you know, he's very well known in North Africa. It's still going to be a few years before the city of God makes him known all around the world, but as far as North Africa is concerned, he's already been recognized as having tremendous theological insight.

And so, the Council of Carthage, in its Old Testament canon, includes the

Deuterocanonical books, primarily because of Augustine, even though he and Jerome were having this debate over that particular issue at this very time.

So, right around the same time as the fall of Rome, and remember, we say fall of Rome, that envisioned, you know, in many of our minds, we see flames and ruins, and when

Alaric the Visigoth sacked Rome, he basically came in, had a few beers at a pub, and left.

It really, you know, it didn't do anything major, as far as damage to the city was concerned.

It was just the idea that Rome had become so weak that it could not even defend itself against barbarians.

And that was the huge mental shock wave that went all across the crumbling

Roman Empire. Right around this time, we have a

British lay monk. He's going to die in 419, and his name is

Pelagius. Dies 419. And he was well -educated.

He, as so many people upon coming to Rome, was disturbed by the moral laxity of the people that he saw there.

It's interesting that this bothered Pelagius in the 5th century, and almost exactly 1 ,000 years later, 1510.

Well, it's 1 ,100 years. Same thing happens with an ironically

Augustinian monk by the name of Martin Luther, when he visits Rome. And the moral laxity that is seen there ends up having a major impact in his theological life as well.

But he was also reportedly disturbed by something Augustin had written that he had encountered.

And it went along the lines of, command what you will and give what you command.

So in other words, the idea that he found very reprehensible was that in some fashion,

God had to provide the supernatural ability for man to fulfill the commands which

God had given to him. For Pelagius, that was a scandal. For Pelagius, everybody has the ability to fulfill all of God's commands in and of themselves without any extension of supernatural grace from God.

So in other words, every man, and I realize we have some millennials amongst us, so every man and woman, or actually if we have millennials amongst us, we have to start down a row of about 48 different terms we have to use, but we don't do that.

So I'm using terms in their historically rational and understandable generic forms.

Every person, how's that, has inborn abilities.

Every person, when they're born, is a new Adam. There is no original sin. There is no sin nature.

Every person that is born is a new Adam. And the reason for the uniformity of sin is because of the example that we have from everybody else, not because of a necessity of nature.

So he denied that Adam's sin was relevant to anyone living today in the sense that we did not fall with Adam, nor did his sin injure any of us.

He taught that every person is a new Adam, fully capable of making the same choice that Adam made in the garden.

Adam's death did not cause the fall of man, and Christ's resurrection then does not result in the resurrection of humanity either.

The entrance to the kingdom is by either law or gospel, for both are simply examples to help us to improve ourselves.

Sinless perfection is possible, for no one is actually dead in sin. We sin because we see examples of sin all around us.

Obviously, this doctrine denies numerous clear biblical teachings, but most importantly, it denies the necessity of God's grace in salvation.

And so, long, long ago, back when I had lots of hair and big glasses like everybody did in the 80s,

I don't know why we did that, but anyway, when I was in seminary, my church history professor illustrated it like this, and I've been stealing his example ever since then.

And in Pelagianism, what you have is you have man down here, and he's in a pit, and what

Christ does is he comes along and he offers assistance in the form of example.

Example of love, example of upright living, it's all an example. And the man in the pit has the full capacity to walk over here and climb up the ladder of himself.

He's not sick, he's not dead, he doesn't have a broken leg, it's just all a matter of his will, and he can follow the examples given to him, both in the law and the gospel, to do what's right before God.

There is no necessity of any extension of divine grace.

Man has the capacity of basically pulling himself up by his own bootstraps. This is Pelagius' view.

Now in opposition to this, you have Augustine, and the man at the bottom of the pit is dead.

That's either a daisy or a tulip, depending on how you want to look at it growing out of his chest. He is dead.

And you can lower all the ladders down to him and shout all the encouragement you want down to him.

He's dead. And corpses do not respond well to encouragement or anything else.

And so what has to happen here is you have to have Christ come down and raise the individual to life by his own supernatural power and take him out of the pit.

So salvation is completely of grace, it's completely of God. Man is dead in sin, is a rebel against sin, is resistant to anything that God does until there is a spiritual resurrection that will bring him back to life, and so on and so forth.

So Augustine, he has divine election, predestination, whole nine yards.

One place where we would differ with Augustine is he does have the idea of temporary Christians. Some people, it's sort of difficult necessarily to argue, to nail all of this down, but because of the sacramental system, you had some people that were part of the church but really weren't a part of the church.

They really aren't a part of the elect. Only the elect persevere. So from his perspective, all of the elect,

God has a specific elect, they're the only ones who will be saved, and they will persevere in the faith. So this is his perspective.

Now, so this is the battle that you have going on toward the end of Augustine's life.

And so all his anti -plagian writings, his writings on grace, this is why the reformers can quote from him and utilize his materials and things like that, because on the nature of the gospel, there's tremendous consistency here.

But what happened is, Rome, by the days of the, well, Council of Trent, the

Counter -Reformation Council, anathematized Pelagius, and Pelagius had been anathematized long before this.

And that's why, you know, we all know this, I hope we all know this, but the issue at the

Reformation, and you all have heard me say this a thousand times before, but the issue of the Reformation was not the necessity of grace.

Rome clearly taught and teaches the absolute necessity of grace.

They condemned Pelagius. The issue at the Reformation was the sufficiency of grace, not the necessity of grace.

Because this may have been Augustine's perspective, but once he died, man, this is just so radical to people, it's all of God, and da -da -da -da -da, that it didn't take long for a middle perspective to develop.

Oh, he shouldn't be smiling. And that is, man is not really dead in sin.

It's really encouraging to turn around and see all my friends laughing at my overwhelming artistic capacity here.

Yeah, that looks really good, doesn't it? Monobrow, the whole nine yards. But he is sick.

Broken leg. You can put down the stuff for him, but he can't climb out by himself.

He has been damaged, sick in sin, just not able of himself.

So you have to have grace. Grace is absolutely necessary, but it's not enough.

So Christ can offer all this assistance, and you can have something, this is called semi -Pelagianism.

So sort of central to this is a concept called prevenient grace, where you have a kind of grace that sort of binds up the broken leg if the guy in the pit wants it to.

So the guy in the pit isn't a rebel. The guy in the pit isn't totally opposed to God.

The guy in the pit has free will. And if he chooses, then he can utilize, you toss down a splint, and you give him the directions on how to attach the splint so he can drag himself up out of the pit, basically.

So he needs help. He needs grace. Pelagius, oh, that's too much. But you can see grace neither necessary nor sufficient.

Grace necessary and sufficient. Grace necessary but not sufficient. Okay? So, I don't know, a hundred -ish years after Augustine, you have the

Council of Orange, and you start seeing in the Council of Orange a form of semi -Pelagianism.

And if you look at Rome's sacramental system to this day, you see that it is very much a semi -Pelagian system.

Prevenient grace. And, of course, John Wesley, a lot of prevenient grace concepts involved with his thinking as well.

And so, by the time of the

Reformation, the swing has been through here and it's over here someplace.

It's getting, Pelagius is rising from the dead in the minds of many people.

But still, there was always this, no, no, no, there has to be grace.

Grace is absolutely necessary. It's just how sufficient is it, how powerful is it. Yes, sir?

Jerome would not be nearly as strong on soteriology as Augustine was.

He was very much focused upon monastic life and things like that.

So, he'd be much more on what would eventually be called the semi -Pelagian camp than Augustine would be. Yeah, definitely.

Yes, sir? The middle stuff, the prevenient, all that stuff started in 500 maybe?

Well, you know, it's not like it starts in a certain year or something.

The point is that after Augustine and Pelagius have their rather clarifying debates at the beginning of the 5th century, and, of course, no one wants to debate

Augustine. Augustine's the most brilliant mind at the time. But after Augustine dies, there's not too many people that can defend his perspective against what

I would call the general trend of mankind. And the general trend of mankind is always toward semi -Pelagianism.

The idea of, yeah, I need God's help, but God can't do it without my help.

The synergistic type stuff. So, from that time to the

Reformation, did it kind of go backwards all the way for the next 600 years or so, or 800 years, all the way back?

Or did it go back and forth? No, semi -Pelagianism becomes the primary norm of the

Roman system. There were people who read

Augustine and tried to go back to a full Augustinian perspective. But they generally got themselves in big trouble.

One guy we'll look at later on is a fellow by the name of Gottschalk. G -o -t -t -s -chalk.

Gottschalk. And Gottschalk tries to sort of reintroduce

Augustine's thought, as we'll see later on, and gets himself into a bunch of trouble in the process.

So, you'll find people who, in their reading, would go, hey, this is the way it should be.

But, in general, mankind just chafes against this, but recognizes this is not how mankind is.

Man is fallen. And so this is the easy way, and it's sort of the default way even today.

Most of our Arminian brothers are semi -Pelagian in their understanding.

It's free will, prevenient grace, the whole nine yards. They put the door on it.

Right, right. Is grace sufficient or efficient?

Yeah, yeah, efficient. Well, normally the term sufficient would be used in saying that grace alone can save.

Efficient would be referring to the power that it has to actually accomplish what God intends it to accomplish. So, if we're talking about God's efficient grace in bringing about regeneration, then that grace has the power to actually raise the dead sinner to life.

If we're talking about God's grace being sufficient, it's sufficient without the addition of human merits or human actions and things like that.

So, that's how I would generally see where efficient and sufficient are distinguished from.

Well, obviously I'm Reformed, and if you're Reformed, Augustine is right.

Semi -Pelagianism opens the door to all of the works, salvations, systems of man, to the sacramental systems, to everything.

The issue at the Reformation was, is God's grace sufficient? Can God save in and of himself?

And the Reformers said yes. Augustine had said yes. Rome said no.

Because the sacramental system becomes, this is sort of the sacramental system, and you cannot have a meaningful sacramental system without the concept of the autonomous will of man.

Because man's will has to be the will that actuates it and makes the sacramental system work. Now, if some of you would like to draw the pits in a nicer way, or volunteer to do the artwork next time, rather than just snickering at me, okay, that's fine.

It'll probably be another 20, 25 years before we do the church history thing again. But there you go.

There's the situation with Augustine and Pelagius. Okay? All right, we're out of time.

Let's close our time with a word of prayer. Father, we do thank you for this opportunity to once again look into what you've done with your people over the years to recognize that what previous generations have struggled with, we struggle with as well today.

We desire to learn from their mistakes and their successes. And we thank you that you continue to build your church to this day.