August 5, 2019 Show with Dr. Michael A. G. Haykin on “Augustine: His Life & Legacy (& Why 21st Century Protestants Should Never Ignore Or Forget this 4th & 5th Century Bishop of Hippo, North Africa)”

Live from the historic parsonage of the 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,

Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours and we hope to hear from you the listener with your own questions and now here's your host

Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet

Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is

Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio wishing you all a happy Monday and today's date is the 5th of August 2019.

I'm so thrilled to have back as a returning guest today one of my favorite guests of all time

Dr. Michael A .G. Haken who is Professor of Church History and Biblical Spirituality and Director of the

Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

He's also a prolific writer and conference speaker. Today we are going to be discussing

Augustine, his life and legacy, and why 21st century Protestants should never ignore or forget this 4th and 5th century

Bishop of Hippo, North Africa. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, my friend

Dr. Michael A .G. Haken. It's great to be with you, thank you. And tell us something about, for our listeners who are discovering you for the first time, who are unfamiliar with the

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, tell us about that seminary and also about your post there.

Yes, it's the largest of the Southern Baptist schools. In fact, our

Master Divinity component, which is around over 2 ,000 students, is the largest group of MDiv students probably in the history of the

Church. Largest seminary at this point in the world, over 5 ,000 students.

Founded in the 1850s, 1859 to be exact, our PhD program was founded in 1892.

Underwent a conservative resurgence in the 1990s through the leadership of Dr.

R. Albert Mohler, who is still the current president, and it's a great privilege to serve under him and with him.

I teach Church History primarily, but I also do some work in Biblical Spirituality.

And I'm thrilled by the sort of students that we get and the privilege that I have of being there.

I often still pinch myself that, yeah, I'm actually teaching at Southern, yeah. Ha, ha, ha.

And of course, you also have a history with Toronto Baptist Seminary, where my dear friend, our mutual dear friend,

Dr. Tony Costa, serves as the Professor of Apologetics and Islam. Yes, I was there,

I was principal there for a number of years before I started full -time at Southern in 2006, and have still an ongoing involvement with Toronto Baptist Seminary.

Yes, and I just met recently for the first time in Franklin, Tennessee, the current principal,

Dr. Wellham, whose brother, Stephen Wellham, is one of your colleagues over at Southern.

That's right, yeah. So, very close to the Wellhams, and very thankful for their ministries.

Yeah, I had a wonderful time of lunch with them in addition to being with them at the conference, and I actually was the moderator of the question and answer session between the guest speakers in the audience, and both of the

Wellham brothers were on the panel of that Q &A, and I had a great time moderating that.

Excellent. One thing, if you could clarify to our listeners, what is biblical spirituality, where you are a, the subject over which you are a professor, one of the areas where you are a professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary?

Well, it's spirituality that is deeply shaped in accord with the Scriptures. Spirituality is a buzzword in our culture today.

It's a very positive -sounding word for many. People will say,

I'm religious, I'm spiritual, but not religious, etc., and so we wanted to make sure that when people saw that, they were understanding that we're talking about the spirituality that is grounded in the

Scriptures. Spirituality really deals, it actually is a Christian term, it was invented by Christians in the 4th century, and it deals with the work of the

Holy Spirit. And so we wanted to affirm that the interest that we have in spirituality is controlled and guided and grounded in the

Scriptures. Great. Well, if anybody wants to find out more about the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, the website is sbts .edu,

sbts .edu, and I just thought I'd let you know, perhaps after the show you might even want to let somebody at the

Southern Baptist Seminary know that the website is not working today, at least not in Pennsylvania, it's not in here in my studio, but perhaps it's just some kind of a glitch going on.

Yeah, hopefully it's just a glitch. But we also want to give you our email address here in the event that anybody wants to add a question to our discussion today with Dr.

Michael A .G. Haken on Augustine, His Life and Legacy, our email address is chrisarmson at gmail .com,

that's C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com,

and please give us your first name, at least your city and state and your country of residence, if you live outside the

USA, and already we have just a little comment from one of our listeners in Cork, Ireland, Mary in Cork, Ireland, says he goes to Munster Bible College too, he doesn't know me, is she referring to you or Dr.

Wellum, because I know Dr. Wellum goes there. Yeah, both of us, I was involved in the founding of Munster Bible College, and Dr.

Wellum has been over a number of times, he's regularly brought over to do systematic theology.

Great, well, Augustine is considered by many

Christians to be the greatest mind of Christendom outside of those who contributed to the canon of the scriptures, the inerrant

God -breathed words of God. The name

Augustine typically will conjure up reverence and awe in the minds and the lips and the writings of many.

There are a few exceptions, I understand that the Eastern Orthodox just very mildly tolerate

Augustine, and of course we have many of our fundamentalist friends who disassociate themselves completely with Augustine or any of the church fathers because they,

I think, wrongly broad brush these heroes of the faith with Romanism, and of course

I think that our Roman Catholic friends have invented an

Augustine of their own imagination that is far more Romanist than history would prove.

But if you could tell us something about the fascinating story of Augustine and his coming to faith in Christ involving his mother

Monica, and by the way, folks, today's program is somewhat of an amazing program to me because Dr.

Haken, who was originally going to discuss a different topic, asked me before the show, would you like to discuss

Augustine, his life and legacy, and I immediately started going through the archive thinking that we have discussed

Augustine many times, and it turns out in an entire history of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, going all the way back to 2005,

I have never had Augustine as the sole topic of a two -hour interview. He's definitely been included as a subject or a subtopic in other conversations on the air here, but he's never been the full subject, the center point of our discussions on this program, so I was quite amazed by that.

But I'm glad that you came up with that suggestion, Brother Haken.

But if you could tell us about how this pagan Augustine had come to faith in Christ, and I understand that he also was a very worldly, wicked, promiscuous man and so forth, so if you could tell us about him.

Yes, he was born in 354, and in fact we know the exact date of his birth, in November of 354, and would die in August of 430.

We know so much about Augustine because of his Confessions, which was published in the late 300s, around 400, in which he details his early life and how

God brought him to faith in Christ, a living faith in Christ. And we probably know more about Augustine than any other ancient figure in terms of biographical detail.

And born in what is now modern Algeria, a Roman town called

Tagast, T -H -A -G -A -S -T -E, now Souk Arras in southern

Algeria, about 150 miles from the Mediterranean. His father was a

Roman bureaucrat, a civil servant named Patricius. Patrick is the

English version of that, but nobody ever calls him Patrick, we always call him by his

Latin name, Patricius, who had married a Berber woman, a woman whose ancestry would be native to North Africa, whose name is

Monica, and probably best spelled with two N's, M -O -N -N -I -C -A, usually spelled with one

N, but she probably spelled it with two N's. She probably was illiterate, and the marriage was probably arranged.

She had become a Christian at an early age, he was not a believer until his deathbed, when

Augustine specified in 372 he made a professional faith. How real, we don't know at this point in time.

Augustine thought it was genuine. His father was frustrated by North Africa, Roman North Africa, Latin -speaking

North Africa, which is basically Algeria going west, so places like now Morocco, etc.,

was really a backwater of the Roman Empire. It was an important backwater, it provided things like olive oil, rows and rows of olive trees, but it was a backwater.

No Roman emperor had been there in North Africa since the early 200s. He gave

Augustine a sense of desire, gave him a desire to get out of North Africa, and the only way really out was to pursue a career, and for Augustine it became a career in rhetoric, and one of the dominant motifs or themes in Augustine's life is this passion for, ambition for fame and glory as a speaker and a teacher of speakers.

Rhetoric is the art of public speaking. Augustine details how at the age of 17 he leaves home, his father wanted him to attend university, higher education, and the only real opportunity for that was in Carthage.

Carthage was a very ancient city, it had once been an enemy of Rome, the

Romans had completely destroyed the city, leveled it in 146 BC, and then rebuilt it, and so Roman Carthage was quite different from the ancient city of Carthage.

The Roman ruins still exist, they're just really outside of Tunis, in Tunisia, and Augustine goes there to university at the age of 17, and in his biography or biographical account of his life, the confessions, he talks about how he came to Carthage burning, burning with lust, and like many in our society, the opportunity to get away from home led to deep -seated involvement in sexual immorality in his first year of university studies.

And then he reads a book at the age of 18 in 372, written by the

Roman orator Cicero, or Cicero as the Romans would have described, called him, and the book, we don't have the book today, but it was an emphasis on pursuing a life of wisdom, technically known as a protreptic, in which one is encouraged to pursue a certain lifestyle, and this was to pursue wisdom.

And it changes Augustine's life in one sense, it gives him a passion for truth.

And so he becomes a seeker after truth, and at the same time also, he meets a woman whom he never names, with whom he forms a liaison, which is basically, initially probably one in which he was using her as a sexual partner, but eventually it blossoms into love, and his heart will be deeply wounded when he has to give her up, as we'll see.

And I normally refer to their relationship as a common -law marriage. And they have a son,

Adiodatus, A -D -E -O -D -A -T -U -S, which means gift from God in Latin, which is interesting that they would name him such.

He's not interested in Christianity. Christianity for him is the religion of people who cannot think.

His mother is a Christian. His mother, as I said earlier, was illiterate probably, and for Augustine, he doesn't meet anybody in North Africa who is a

Christian, who in his mind is intellectually serious. Now, was he a religious man himself in a false religion, or was he just, as we would call today, an atheist?

No, no, atheism is virtually unknown in the world. I mean, there are some atheists, you know,

Lucretius, for example, but essentially everybody is religious to some degree or other.

And so he will actually get bound up with Manichaeanism, which is a cult, partly because his father runs out of money for his education and needs to resort to a patron named

Romanianus, who is a Manichaean. And Augustine gets involved in Manichaeanism, which was a false cult, stemming from an

Imani, a Persian, a self -professed Persian prophet who was executed in Persia around the 270s

AD, claimed to be the Holy Spirit. And it was a form of what we call

Gnosticism, in which there was a deriding of the material realm at the expense of the spiritual realm, and the

Manichaeans believed that there were bits of God broken off from God that had got lodged in certain people, the elect, who were, who discovered that they have

God within them. And it was a religion that focused on celibacy and vegetarianism.

They also believed, this is fascinating, they also believed that bits of God got broken off and lodged in cucumbers and melons.

I knew I loved those two foods for a reason. And so the more that you ate cucumbers and melons, the more spiritual you got.

And Augustine thought that the Christians were stupid, okay. You know, G .K.

Chesterton once said, if a man doesn't believe the truth, he'll believe anything. That is so true.

And so Augustine, who is brilliant intellectually, is wrapped up in this for about 10 years.

And he obviously is not a full member because he's living with this woman, and so he's not engaging in a life of celibacy, but he's wrapped up in this for about 10 years, and it only begins to, it's a hold only begins to break on him around 383.

By that time, he's moved to Rome, absolutely, you know, fed up with North Africa.

He's going to pursue a career at the heart of the Roman Empire. His pursuit there is nearly disastrous, nearly leads to his death because he gets ill, nearly dies in Rome.

And then he hears about a university post in Milan, which would be training the sons of Roman governors, who have to make speeches, obviously.

And he takes the position, a very wealthy position, because at one point, he's renting a home.

This is a home in which he's converted, which has a garden. Now, in the Roman world, if a house has a garden, if you own a house that has a garden, you are among the upper 2 % or 3 % of Roman aristocracy.

I mean, it's probably equivalent to renting an apartment overlooking Central Park in Manhattan.

Just very, very wealthy. And Augustine will give that up when he's converted. And in Milan, he meets for the first time a

Christian whom he can respect, and that is Ambrose of Milan. And it was tumultuous days for the church there.

Arianism, the denial of the deity of our Lord Jesus, was rampant. The emperor's mother was an

Arian. She was trying to seize the church. Ambrose's congregation on one occasion actually went out, knelt all around the church, refusing to allow imperial troops to take the church.

They had no weapon but their prayers. All this is going on when Augustine is in the city. Augustine's mother follows her son there, and she's right involved in the life of the church.

You get the impression from his mother, but his mother, that she's quite feisty as a

Christian woman. And Augustine starts to go back to church and hear the preaching of the gospel.

And what fascinates him initially was not the content, but the style.

Ambrose himself had been the son of a Roman governor, trained in the arts of rhetoric, a very capable public speaker.

And Augustine is attracted to the style, not the content. But slowly over the months of 383 to 384 to 386, he starts to hear the gospel that the only way of salvation was through God himself, the son, becoming man, dying for our sins.

And this is... it's as if he'd never heard this before. He'd heard this before from his mother, but he didn't have the ears to hear.

Now, at the same time, he's brought his common -law wife. Now, his mother, one of the things

I have not mentioned is that it was common practice for Roman males of Augustine's social class often to take a woman of a lower social class in their late teens, and then through their 20s while they were seeking to secure a position in life, they would use her really for sex.

And then abandoned her in their late 20s when they were established in their careers, and married somebody of their own social class.

And his mother, who is a godly woman, but nonetheless a sinner, makes a flaw of really a wrong move here.

She encourages, now that her son's going back to church, she doesn't perceive the relationship of her son with this unnamed woman as love, but perceives it along the usual lines of the social customs of the pagans, and she encourages her son to dump his wife, his common -law wife, and marry a younger woman.

Augustine's 32, and because you can get married as young as 14, he proposes to a woman who is 12, and it is accepted, and the marriage is set for two years hence, when she would be 14.

That's just shocking to us in some ways, the disparity in age. There is no such thing in this world as teenagers.

When you hit 12, your women are set to be married. Men start to work.

Unless you're in Augustine's position, and you have the finances to pursue further education.

Now, just to interrupt you for a second before our listeners just get totally sidetracked with that bit of news that might be shocking to them and just completely horrify them and so on,

I was told by an Orthodox Jewish friend that especially in a day and age where you're discussing, but even much more recently, perhaps as she was 100 years ago or so, even in the

Orthodox Jewish culture, just because you are considered married to someone, it might be an arranged marriage where the bride is not only in her teens but perhaps even younger, that doesn't mean that the marriage is consummated when the child is that young.

No. It's like a guarantee that that woman has been preserved or reserved for you.

Yes, exactly. Right. So, I didn't want people to think that Augustine was a pedophile or something like that.

Oh, no. No, no. So, this arrangement had been set up, and Augustine's mother kicks the woman out of the house, which tells you some idea of her feistiness and the significant role that she plays in Augustine's life.

But Augustine says in his confessions, she went back to Africa, he says, vowing never to be with another man, but he said,

I was too weak to follow that example, and I took another mistress. So his mother's plan completely backfires.

At one point he says, Lord, make me chaste, but not right now. I'm sure that prayer has been uttered by many people.

Oh, yeah. And he takes another woman into the household, and I think what it does for Augustine, it reveals to him how deep he is in bondage to sexual sins.

Because all along he's been thinking that his real problem in life is intellectual, that his problems with Christianity are intellectual.

His real problems, and I think this is true for 99 % of people, it's the issue of the affections and the will, not the mind.

I mean, I think there may well be a few people who genuinely have intellectual stumbling blocks, but the

Gospel comes to us with such overwhelming demand. We are no longer our own.

We are now yielded to Christ, or must be yielded to Him. He is our Lord and Master.

We are to love Him above all things. Those are things that the natural man just, he bolts at, and Augustine did too, but he cloaked his rejection of Christianity in intellectual problems.

And this experience with taking a second mistress reveals to him, this is the depth of his problem.

At the breaking point comes in 386, August of 386, he is at home, and he is visited by a

North African brother named Pontikianus. And Pontikianus comes on some business, he's a bureaucrat in the

Roman government, and he finds in Augustine's possession, he sees on a table, a copy of Paul's letters.

And he's amazed he gets to see that there. He thought Augustine had no interest in these things. He didn't know

Augustine that well. And he begins to share with Augustine stories about men who left everything behind to follow

Christ. And as he's sharing, Augustine realizes, I've been 12 years looking for truth.

14 years at this point, sorry. It was 372 when he read that little book by Cicero and set him on the quest for truth.

And he was no further ahead, no further ahead. And when Pontikianus leaves, Augustine breaks into tears, he goes into the garden, and in his own description throws himself down beneath a fig tree and begins to cry out to God.

And he describes the psychological battle of the flesh against the

Spirit in his confessions. It's just tremendous, the way he describes it.

And as he's weeping and crying out to God, he hears a voice of a child, and in the

Latin it's tolle lege, tolle, pick up, lege, read. And he stops crying and he thinks, that's odd, is that a game that children play?

And then he thinks, maybe it's God telling me to go back inside the house and pick up Paul's letters and read, which he does.

And the first passage he opens the copy of Paul's letters to is

Romans chapter 13, where it says, no longer in orgies and drunkenness, but put you on the

Lord Jesus Christ, make no provision for the flesh. And it's an ideal text.

Now this is not a pattern, Augustine doesn't see it as a pattern for normal guidance, but it is ideal for him.

And he says, I had no sooner read that text than the light of the gospel dawned in my heart.

I have no need to read further. And he would say, you, the Lord, converted me to yourself.

Amen. Now I have heard that story told in two different ways, maybe more, but one way that I have heard the story told, and perhaps you could either confirm or deny that this is the truth,

I have heard it told that he discovered it definitely was children playing and saying tolelege, but he took it as a providence of God.

And the other way I've heard it told, it's more of an agnostic telling of the story where we're not certain whether this was actually some kind of a revelation or voice he heard, or whether it was nearby children playing nearby.

So what do you know about that story as far as the answer to that question? Yeah, I think the way that Augustine relates it, it sounds like they were actual children playing and they were using this phrase in a game.

And I mean, some have argued it's kind of an auditory version of a vision that it actually wasn't there, it was

God speaking to them. Augustine doesn't say that at all. The whole impression you get from just, if you simply read the text, literally, you'd get the impression that Augustine actually heard children.

I think that's the way it should be taken. Not surprisingly, there's been a lot of ink spilled trying to figure out what game, if it is children, and they were playing this game, what game was it?

But there's a lot that we don't know about the ancient world, and nobody's come up with a satisfactory description of what that game might be.

But Augustine gives the impression it was literal children he heard. Okay, we have to go to our first break right now.

If anybody wants to ask Dr. Haken a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Please, as always, give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA, and only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. Don't go away.

We'll be right back with Dr. Michael A .G. Haken and our discussion on Augustine after these messages from our sponsors.

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p .m., 33 Bayshore Road, Deer Park, New York. Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen.

If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours with a little less than 90 minutes to go is Dr. Michael A .G.

Haken. He is a professor of church history and biblical spirituality and director of the

Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

We are discussing Augustine, or as some call him, Augustine, his life and legacy, and why 21st century

Protestants should never ignore or forget this 4th and 5th century bishop of Hippo, North Africa.

Our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com. C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

Please give us at least your first name, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA, and please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

That's chrisarnzen at gmail .com, chrisarnzen at gmail .com. We have a listener who also chimed in earlier with a statement earlier in the program.

We have Mary in Cork, Ireland, who asks, Good afternoon, Dr. Hagen and Chris.

I would be grateful if you could answer this question for me, please. In the Confessions of St.

Augustine, why did Augustine take so much time narrating the story of Marius Victorinus and his conversion and Christian witness after 363?

Shall you answer that first or I? I'm only kidding, I have no idea. I think

Marius is an example. Marius was, again, like Augustine, a very high -standing official in the

Roman Empire. He was a Roman senator, in fact, and when he became a Christian, he came to the church in Rome and asked, he had become a

Christian, but he said, I realize I need to be baptized as a believer, but could I do it privately? And the pastor that he spoke to said, absolutely no way, it's going to have to be a public event.

You're going to have to share your testimony, and then we'll baptize you as a believer. And he eventually came to the realization, yes, the commitment to Christ is not something you can hide under a bushel, as it were, and it has to be public and open.

And Augustine narrates that because in some ways he finds himself identifying with Marius, it would be nice if he could embrace

Christianity quietly, simply intellectually, academically, but Christianity demands a lot more than that.

So the story of Marius, I think, is narrated in his book, Eight of the Confessions, which talks about his conversion, his own conversion, and I think it's because he sees in Marius a man very similar to himself.

Well, thank you. Thank you, Mary in Cork, Ireland. Keep listening to our show and keep spreading the word about it in Cork, Ireland and beyond, and keep submitting those excellent questions.

Where we left off before the break was the pick up and read story, Tole Elege, which is the voices that Augustine heard that compelled him to pick up the

Bible and start reading it, and he states that it was likely children playing and reciting this, but he took it as a providential sign from God to pick up the

Bible and read in Romans. And so in Augustine's life at that time, he becomes a

Christian. How developed was his understanding? When did he start to believe in such things as a biblical concept of election?

And I know that he was a great hero to John Calvin many centuries later, perhaps over a thousand years later, a great hero to John Calvin because of this understanding.

And was it a commonly held view in his day? Yeah, Augustine's growth in grace is like that for many of us.

We don't begin with fully formed theological ideas that Scripture teaches.

We develop, we grow, and hopefully that growing is continuous. We're always growing in the grace and knowledge of God, not only grace but also knowledge, not only is our character being reshaped, but we're also growing in our understanding of divine things.

And Augustine is no different here. It's not really until the late 390s that his understanding of the sovereignty of God in election, in salvation, really comes to the fore in his thinking.

And the event that really kind of drives that home is a request that he gets from Ambrose around 396, 397, where Ambrose has been approached by a man named

Simplicianus, a member of the church in Milan, who actually would succeed Ambrose as bishop. And Simplicianus asks

Ambrose, what's the meaning of Romans 9, especially the statement,

Jacob I have loved, Esau I have hated? What on earth does that mean? Ambrose's response, and Ambrose probably is responding from a point of lack of knowledge, he says it's quite plain, just read the text.

Um, but it would appear that Ambrose made that comment, not because he thought it was plain, but because he himself didn't understand it.

And he didn't want to admit it. So Simplicianus finally,

Simplicianus kept pressing him and he said, why don't you write to Augustine and see what he thinks? And so he writes to Augustine in 397, and Augustine, 396,

Augustine, he doesn't understand, take the text either. And what he does is he goes back and re -reads

Romans. And in his own words, he said, I strove for free will to have the upper hand, but the sovereignty of your grace triumphs.

And so one of the results of that is his own book, the

Confessions. He writes the Confessions, and it's quite clear that one of the themes of the

Confessions is the sovereignty of God's grace. That God is at work in his life long before those events in Milan.

In fact, God's at work in his life all the way back from the beginning of time in one sense. He actually has a whole section on creation and memory and time.

And I think what he's doing there is he's trying to show that our salvation is grounded in the purposes of God that predate our birth and predate even the creation of humanity.

And so it's in response to a biblical question that Augustine works this out.

Now, he'll eventually get involved in the 400s from around 412, 413 to about the late 420s, not long before his death, in what we call the

Pelagian Controversy, where he is forced to enunciate this text after text from the scriptures.

But it's important to note that long before that, 20 years before that, or nearly 15 at least,

Augustine had already come to these positions from reading scripture. And he had enunciated this view in the

Confessions. In fact, it was the Confessions, Pelagius heard the Confessions read at a dinner party in 406 or thereabouts in Rome.

And he, at one point, just blew up and he said, I can't stand this text. And he said, stop reading it.

It was a passage where Augustine said, give what you command and command what you will.

And Pelagius apparently just blew up at the text and began to write against that idea.

Now, Augustine is not aware of that until probably the mid -teens, the 14s. So it's very interesting how

God uses the Confessions to bring to light this erroneous thinking. But the

Confessions are grounded in Augustine's reflection on the Book of Romans. Now, how close would

Augustine's understanding of election be to John Calvin, a thousand years later, who adopted

Augustine as a hero and believed he was accurately repeating what

Augustine had believed? That is now, amongst Calvinists, known as unconditional election.

Would that have been an identical or nearly identical understanding? Yes, it is.

The only area where Augustine is not as clear as the reformers, Luther and Calvin, is on justification.

But on the understanding of an unconditional election, he is absolutely the same as Calvin. And believe it or not,

I have met a Roman Catholic who was a traditionalist

Roman Catholic, you know, the Latin mass and all that. And he considered himself a truly

Augustinian Roman Catholic, and he believed in unconditional election. And he also, just as you said, however, disagreed with Calvin and the reformers on justification.

He was a sacramentalist, but he believed that the elect were brought to salvation through the sacraments.

But he did believe in unconditional election, or does. Augustine would not have been a sacramentalist. I mean, that's a later development.

But Augustine's problem with justification is grounded in language, because in Latin, the word for justify, to justify is justificare.

It's made of two words, justus, just or righteous, and facere, to make.

And so justificare is to make righteous. And Augustine, Augustine's Greek is never great.

He didn't, he will regret forever that he didn't listen to his teachers when he was a young boy trying to teach him

Greek. He really resisted learning Greek. And eventually, once he's become a

Christian, he realizes the importance of knowing Greek. But he never, he doesn't grasp the intricacies of the language.

And his understanding of justification, which is that it is to make righteous and not declare righteous.

And so that is an area of difference. And obviously, that'll be used by the Roman Church during the Middle Ages, where the sacraments are the ways in which

God makes us righteous. But for Luther and Calvin, when they read

Augustine on the sovereignty of grace and unconditional election, they read the way, they read a man whom they regarded as having the same view of the scriptural text that they were reading.

Amen. And you mentioned earlier Pelagius, from my understanding of Pelagius and his debate with Augustine, is that Pelagius believed that we are born with a clean slate, where there is no original sin inherited from Adam.

And of course, there is subsequent to that, there's no total depravity, the concept that would be more clearly articulated by the reformers a thousand years later.

But that grace even for salvation to occur is not necessary, that it is a helpful aid that nudges men, but it's not a requirement.

Now, am I accurate in my description of Pelagianism? Perfectly. Great, so that was one of the great crucial moments of Christendom, where Augustine and Pelagius are debating over this.

And isn't it ironic how you will have the majority of Rome still declaring

Augustine or Augustine as a hero and a saint, and decrying and opposing

Pelagius as a heretic, and yet it seems that they more resemble

Pelagius today and have for centuries, even though they would give lip service to grace and say it's necessary.

Am I going too far by saying they seem to resemble Pelagius' understanding more than Augustine's?

Yeah, it's difficult, because I think that there is a sense of the sinfulness, the inherent sinfulness of humanity among the

Roman Catholic thinkers, which would be at odds with Pelagius. But I think the reformers, when they confronted late medieval

Roman Catholicism, they were confronting what they saw as a semi -Pelagianism. That somehow, while man is a sinner, he still has resources to work out his salvation.

And so in the Roman Catholic thinking, those resources lie either in the mind, Alice, you know,

Thomas Aquinas, who thought that the fall impacted the entirety of human beings, but the mind, to some degree, was left untouched, or the sacraments.

The sacraments are the vehicles which can bring us to salvation.

Obviously, they would argue they're vehicles that grace uses, but the way in which they emphasize the sacraments was, to the reformers, it seemed to be a man -made religion.

And so they're not Pelagian. It's a semi -Pelagianism that the reformers are fighting.

Right. I didn't mean that they were dogmatically Pelagian. I meant that that seemed to resemble that, even though they would be more accurately described semi -Pelagian.

It just seems that way, as far as the emphasis on what men do in regard to their entrance into heaven.

What is the irony of lauding Augustine and yet not following him? Right, exactly.

Yeah. Let's see, before we go to the break, we have

John in Bangor, Maine, who has a question, and he asks, how far did

Augustine fall short when it came to an accurate understanding of the gospel, even though we should revere him in many ways as a hero?

I have heard that he was a forerunner of things such as the sacrifice of the mass and the belief in purgatory, although it was not full -blown at the time that he was some kind of a spoke in the wheel to usher in these doctrines.

Yeah, definitely not the mass. Augustine is thinking about the supper as much closer to the kind of symbolic view of Zwingli.

Really? Augustine does not believe that the bread and the wine are the actual very body and blood of Christ.

He sees them more as symbolic. He's definitely different there from somebody like Ambrose.

Ambrose would be much closer to what becomes the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation.

Augustine is not. On purgatory, if I recall correctly, that's not part of Augustine's eschatology at all.

In the city of God, there are two places people end up, heaven or hell.

It was said in the Middle Ages, the early Middle Ages, by a Spanish theologian named

Isidore Seville. If anybody says they've ever read all of Augustine, they're a liar. So I have not read all of Augustine.

I think I know him fairly well in a number of his key books, City of God, Confessions on the

Trinity, the Pelagian Controversy, but there's tons of Augustine I've not read.

And that's not a question I pursued in great detail. I think the critical area where Augustine does prepare for the medieval view is his understanding of infant baptism, which he argues vehemently.

The mass, no, but infant baptism, yes. He argues as a pastoral practice, we need to baptize babies lest they die and go to hell because of original sin.

So he obviously believed in baptismal regeneration. No. Oh, okay.

No, he believed that what baptism does, it, for a person who survives in adulthood, they must embrace the gospel.

But for a baby, if the baby dies, the baptism has cleansed them from the taint of original sin and opens the doorway to heaven.

Well, in fact, that is a more accurate description of most, or many at least, in the

Campbellite movement, the Restorationist movement. People wrongly accuse them of believing in baptismal regeneration when they actually believe in baptism for the remission of sins, which is a subtle difference, but I think it is a difference.

Yep, yep, yep, agreed. And we have to get to our midway break right now. If anybody wants to join us on the air, send in a question to chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com. And remember, this is our elongated break.

It's a longer than normal break because Grace Life Radio, 90 .1 FM in Lake City, Florida, requires of us this longer break in the middle because they have to air their own public service announcements and commercials since they are in Lake City, Florida.

And they air this program twice a day, in morning drive and then again in the evening in pre -recorded formats.

So while they are airing their commercials for Lake City, Florida, we're airing our global commercials.

And if you would please write down the information provided by our advertisers so that you can more frequently and successfully patronize them, because if we want our advertisers to remain our advertisers, they're likely going to need to see some results from their hard -earned money.

So the more you patronize them, the more likely they will remain our advertisers, which means we will more likely remain on the air for a longer period of time since we depend upon those advertising dollars.

So please patronize our advertisers as much as you can and further ensure that you will be able to do that successfully by writing down the information that they provide.

Also write down your questions for Dr. Michael A .G. Haken and send them to chrisarnson at gmail .com chrisarnson at gmail .com

Don't go away. God willing, we'll be right back after these messages from our sponsors with more of Dr.

Michael A .G. Haken. I'm Dr.

Tony Costa, Professor of Apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary. I'm thrilled to introduce to you a church where I've been invited to speak and have grown to love,

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I'm James White of Alpha Omega Ministries, and my friend Chris Arnzen and I are excited to be attending another

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Benny Hinn. Kosti has repented of the word -faith heresies of his youth and is now a Reformed Baptist pastor and cessationist in California.

Come join me and Chris Arnzen at G3 2020, January 16th through the 18th in Atlanta by registering at g3conference .com.

That's g3conference .com. See you there. When Iron Sharpens Iron Radio first launched in 2005, the publishers of the

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A beautiful little hardback by Evangelical Press. And by the way, Dr. Renahan will be my guest tomorrow on Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio speaking about the importance of the book of Psalms.

So make a note to listen tomorrow 4 to 6 p .m. Eastern to Dr. James M.

Renahan. But they are giving away his book. As I said, CVBBS is giving away his book

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you can get that for free with any purchase no matter how small. If you would like also the larger book that is my favorite of all biographies,

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The first you get with any purchase, the second you get only with a purchase of $50 or more.

And before we return to our discussion on Augustine, His Life and Legacy with my guest,

Dr. Michael A .G. Hagen, I just have a couple of upcoming announcements for events that are taking place that we hope you can attend.

The first is on September 7th, which is a Saturday at 6 .30 p .m. at the

Word of Truth Church in Farmingville, Long Island, New York. That is a debate on the theme,

Is the Office of Pope Biblical? The debaters include Pastor Bruce Bennett of the

Word of Truth Church in Farmingville, Long Island, New York and Roman Catholic apologist, Matthew Luke Broderick.

Matthew Luke Broderick is the Roman Catholic apologist defending the concept that the office of Pope is biblical.

Once again, that is Saturday, September 7th, 6 .30 p .m. at the Word of Truth Church in Farmingville, Long Island, New York.

If you'd like to attend that debate, call them for more information at 631 -806 -0614.

631 -806 -0614 or you can go to their website,

WOTChurch .com WOT, which stands for Word of Truth. Church .com

WOTChurch .com Then coming up in December, I am going to be heading off to my old stomping grounds in New York City to the

Foundations Conference, a conference hosted by sermonaudio .com

and what better time of year to go to Manhattan than in the heart of the Christmas season?

That's the best place I can think of to be during the Christmas season is New York City and the days are

Thursday and Friday, December 19th and 20th, which is surely during the Christmas season and they always have such a phenomenal lineup at the

Foundations Conference and this December is no exception. Those speakers include

Dr. Stephen J. Lawson, founder of One Passion Ministries, who's been a guest in this program and one of the most powerful preachers on the planet

Earth, as far as I'm concerned. Paul Washer, another one of the most powerful preachers on the planet

Earth. Rev. Jeff Thomas, who is also in that category. Rev. Armand Tomassian, who

I think is also in that category, although he is largely unknown to those outside of the

Free Presbyterian Church of North America, I think that Rev. Armand Tomassian is going to be a household name amongst

Reformed people over the next decade because he is absolutely extraordinary. For a man of his youth, he has abilities and gifts and power in his preaching far beyond his youth.

Richard Caldwell Jr. and Andrew Quigley, I have not heard them preach yet, but a sermon audio selected them.

I'm sure they must be magnificent. Go to thefoundationsconference .com to register if you are a man in ministry leadership.

They can only seat less than 200 people at this venue, so they have restricted the attendance to men in ministry leadership.

So that's thefoundationsconference .com, thefoundationsconference .com. And then in January, I'm packing up my bags again and heading down south this time to Atlanta, Georgia, or specifically

College Park, Georgia, to the Georgia International Convention Center for the 2020

G3 Conference. And the G3 stands for Gospel, Grace, and Glory.

This January, the theme is Worship Matters, and the speakers include Kosti Hinn, who is going to be my guest again on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio on Monday the 26th of this month,

August. So mark your calendars for that. Kosti Hinn is the nephew of notorious heretic and false teacher

Benny Hinn, and Kosti has renounced and repented of the word of faith heresy he was raised in.

And he has become a Reformed Baptist pastor and cessationist, currently pastoring in a new post that he is pastoring in in Arizona.

You're going to hear ads where James White identifies California as his place of residence and the place where he pastors, but he has just recently been called by his church to pick up the post as pastor in another work in Arizona.

So I would strongly urge you to hear Kosti Hinn if you are able to hear him speak anywhere in the country or the world where he may be speaking.

Daryl Bernard Harrison, who is a new member of the team of John MacArthur's Grace to You Ministries.

David Miller, who is a phenomenal old school preacher of the gospel. I love hearing him preach.

Derek Thomas, who is certainly not an unfamiliar name to most

Reformed Christians. My friend Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries, who

I've been blessed to call a very close friend since 1995. Jeremy Volo, former professional soccer player with the

San Antonio Scorpions, now a Reformed Baptist pastor. Dr. Joel Beeky, pastor,

I'm sorry, president of Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan, who I've also had as a friend since the 1990s.

Once again, we have Stephen J. Lawson and Paul Washer on the roster at this conference. We have Phil Johnson, the executive director of Grace to You Ministries, the ministry of John MacArthur.

Stephen J. Nichols, the president of Reformation Bible College, the college founded by R .C.

Sproul and Ligonier Ministries. My friend Todd Friel of Wretched TV and Wretched Radio. Dr.

Tom Askell, who is the executive director of Founders Ministries, the

Calvinistic ministry in the Southern Baptist Convention. Vodie Baucom, who is one of the most profound and powerful preachers alive today, and more.

And the latest name on the lineup is Dr. John MacArthur himself.

John MacArthur makes this whole conference worth your efforts to be there, as far as I'm concerned.

I've never been in the same building when Dr. MacArthur has preached, so I am very excited about this. This will be my first time being in the same building with him and I hope

I get the chance to meet him face to face and perhaps even get an interview out of him at my

Iron Sherpens Iron Exhibitors booth, which will be there at the G3 Conference once again, as it has been every year for the past several years.

If you want to join me at this conference, which is Thursday, January 16th through Saturday, January 18th, 2020 in College Park, Georgia, go to, sorry about that, go to g3conference .com,

g3conference .com. All the information will be there. I strongly urge you, if you have a business or a parachurch ministry or something else that you want to promote to the body of Christ, I would strongly urge you, in addition to registering to attend, that you register for your own exhibitors booth, just like I will be manning, because they are expecting, as they have every year, over 5 ,000 people in attendance.

And with John MacArthur added to the lineup, I think that they're gonna have over $6 ,000. That's just my educated guess.

I really believe they're gonna have over 6 ,000 people there now that Dr. MacArthur has been included. Go to g3conference .com,

g3conference .com. Last but not least, if you love Iron Trip and Zion Radio, you don't want us to disappear from the airwaves, you are thrilled to hear guests and topics that sometimes you don't hear anywhere else.

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Go to ironshipandzionradio .com, click support, then click, click to donate now. As I remind you every day, please never siphon money away from your regular giving to your local church where you are a member in order to give to Iron Trip and Zion Radio, and never put your family in financial jeopardy by giving to Iron Trip and Zion Radio.

Those two things are commands of God providing for your church and your home. Providing for my radio show is obviously not a command of God, but if you're financially blessed above and beyond your ability to obey those two commands, please give as frequently as you can and as generously as you can to Iron Trip and Zion Radio by going to ironshipandzionradio .com,

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Also, remember, if you are not a member of a Bible -believing church and you're not even prayerfully looking for one, you're living in rebellion against God.

Please rectify that situation. I may be able to help you because I have lists of biblically faithful churches all over the world.

I've already helped quite a number of listeners in the Iron Trip and Zion Radio audience find churches near them where they have joined and also where they are vacationing.

Also, I've found churches for the friends, family, and loved ones of listeners in different parts of the world.

So, please send me an email to chrisarnsen at gmail .com and put I need a church home or something like that in the subject line.

Also, if you want to advertise with us, we surely could use your advertising dollars as long as whatever it is you are promoting is compatible with what we believe, then we would love to help you launch an ad campaign because we really do need the advertising dollars.

Send me an email to chrisarnsen at gmail .com and put advertising in the subject line.

You don't have to believe exactly as I do, but you need to be promoting something that is at least compatible with what we believe.

That's chrisarnsen at gmail .com and put advertising in the subject line. And that is also the email address where you can send in a question to Dr.

Michael A .G. Hagen on Augustine, His Life and Legacy. That's chrisarnsen at gmail .com

chrisarnsen at gmail .com As always, please give us your first name, at least your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA. Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

I normally don't give the full names of listeners when I get questions from them, but I just got a question from a friend who is also a pastor.

And when somebody is pastoring a church that I think is very biblically sound and well worth your while visiting and even joining, if you don't have a church of your own,

I typically will let them have a moment of free advertising here. And this friend of mine, longtime friend of mine, is

Gary George, pastor of Sovereign Grace Chapel in Southbridge, Massachusetts.

He is personally from Leicester. I think I'm pronouncing that right, but I might not be. Leicester, Massachusetts.

And his question, Dr. Aiken, is how soon after Augustine's conversion was he baptized?

And did he understand it to be ex operi operato? Did he, did or does

Eastern Orthodoxy claim him as an esteemed early church father who they would endorse?

If so, why? If not, why not? Yeah, I kind of hinted at that in the beginning, that the Eastern Orthodox kind of barely tolerates him, right?

Yeah. Yeah, let me take the latter first and then go back to the other on his baptism.

So up until the 20th century, Augustine was not read widely by Eastern Orthodoxy.

They would not have regarded him in their pantheon of saints. And a good reason for that is

Augustine's teaching on the Trinity. In his book on the Trinity, he argues that the

Holy Spirit in his relationship with the father and the son is, he describes it as what we know as proceeds from the father and the son.

It's language that is designed to secure the differentiation of persons within the

Godhead. And in the standard confessional faith of the

Orthodox churches, which is the Nicene, Niceno -Constantinoplean Creed, we know it as the Nicene Creed simply, it simply says the

Holy Spirit proceeds from the father, not the father and the son. That is something that's introduced to the creed in the 800s.

It becomes the key theological reason for the separation of the Orthodoxy from Rome in 1054.

And Augustine is seen as basically providing the foundation of that. In that judgment, they're right.

Augustine definitely does lead in that direction. I think Augustine, this will be a subject for another discussion, the whole issue of the, how to talk about the

Trinity, the Trinity itself in internal relations. I think Augustine's right. I think he knows instinctively from the scriptures that the

Holy Spirit is the spirit of Christ. And in the Nicene Creed, the section on the

Holy Spirit, it doesn't spell that out exactly. And I think Augustine is right to recognize that the

Holy Spirit needs to be affirmed as the spirit of Christ. And he does so by saying the spirit proceeds from the father and the son.

Now, in the 20th century, a number of Orthodox theologians like George Florovsky, Jaroslav Pelikan, began to read

Augustine deeply, advocate for him, and so Augustine is now read by Orthodoxy, Orthodox scholars, but for the bulk of their history, he was basically beyond the pale.

Didn't Augustine also disagree with what, for centuries,

Eastern Orthodoxy would later believe? Didn't he disagree with them on original sin?

Doesn't Eastern Orthodoxy reject that? Yeah, I mean Eastern Orthodoxy is shaped, in many ways,

Eastern Orthodoxy, in its view of the human person, is shaped by the conflicts that took place in the 2nd century with Gnosticism.

Gnosticism was a deeply determinist heresy, and the Church Fathers like Irenaeus and Origen argued for the freedom of the will over against this determinism.

And that shapes Eastern Orthodoxy, the emphasis on the freedom of the will.

In Greek -speaking Christianity, that's a pretty strong given. In Latin -speaking

Christianity, of which Augustine is the key representative, but he's not the only figure, there had always been an emphasis on the sovereignty of grace.

You see it in Cyprian, in his letter to Donatus, you see it in Tertullian, you definitely see it in Hilary, or Poitiers, and Augustine is kind of the culmination of that.

And so that's another area of difference between Augustine and Orthodoxy. Yep. Between Augustine and Eastern Orthodoxy.

Because we would believe he's on the right side of Orthodoxy there. Now, to go back to the other question regarding his baptism,

Augustine is an heir to the early Christian understanding of baptism.

Baptism is part and particle of the whole process of conversion.

And for Augustine, conversion entails three things. One is the grace of the

Holy Spirit. Without the Spirit's work, we can do nothing. He's very clear on that. The second is the response of the human will.

We have to believe. And then thirdly, all of this is brought to the public gaze, as it were.

It's brought into the public by believers' baptism. The problem is that over the time, these things have been separated.

And Augustine precedes that, although he does anticipate that because of his emphasis on baptism for children, for infants.

And he participates in the destruction of the early Christian view that baptism is part and particle of the way in which we declare that we're

Christian. It's very interesting, up until Augustine's time and his defense of infant baptism, believers' baptism is the norm.

You look at all the 4th century figures like Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, all of them raised in Christian homes, none of them baptized until they were believers.

And it's only with Augustine you start to find a theological justification for infant baptism, given firm grounding.

Infant baptism had been practiced probably beginning in the late 100s. Augustine, Tertullian writes against it in about 190.

Isn't it that the first recorded reference to infant baptism was in opposition to it by Tertullian? Yep, I think so.

But it simply affirms it, but it's not a dominant thing until Augustine provides the theological foundation for it.

And even then, if there had not been the collapse of the Roman Empire with the massive illiteracy, biblical literacy that transpired as a result of it, one result of it, it's questionable whether or not it would have become the dominant mode of subject, the person who would be baptized in the

Middle Ages. I think there's good indication that if the Scriptures had continued to be read as they were read in the

Reformation, that there would have been voices arguing for believers' baptism.

Well, thank you very much, Pastor Gary George. And let me give our audience here a website for Sovereign Grace Chapel of Southbridge, Massachusetts.

It is SovereignGraceMA .org. SovereignGraceMA, the abbreviation for Massachusetts .org.

SovereignGraceMA .org. Thank you very much for contributing an excellent question, Pastor Gary. And please keep sending in questions for our guests here on Iron Trip and Zion Radio.

And we look forward to you returning as a guest as well, brother. God bless. Let's see.

We have CJ in Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York.

And he asks, can you speak a bit more on how both

Roman Catholics and fundamentalists wrongly view Augustine, how the

Roman Catholics have Romanized him and how the fundamentalist Baptists and others have unconsciously or consciously agreed with Rome for the first time in that they

Romanize Augustine as well, not because they adopt him as a hero or a church father, but because they despise him, even though they probably do not know what he taught.

Yeah, I mean, I've had I've had an encounter on both levels. I was raised Roman Catholic and Augustine was obviously revered within the context in which

I was raised. And then I've also met over the years, had a student at one point who would have been a fundamentalist.

And we were working through Augustine. I remember a paper that he gave in which he just ridiculed, well, not ridiculed it.

He basically rejected any Augustine as a helpful guide. And so I've encountered both of those perspectives.

And the fundamentalist view basically buys the argument that the Roman Catholics make. Augustine would have been uncomfortable in, or very uncomfortable in a

Roman Catholic setting in many ways. His view of authority, he doesn't buy the papacy the way that Rome develops it.

He certainly is not committed to the mass. The whole

Roman sacramental system as it develops in the Middle Ages. It's important to see it's a development.

It's not there in the beginning, obviously. It's not part and parcel of the early church's world.

There are seeds of it. Augustine's argument for infant baptism is a seed. But having said that,

Augustine would not fit into a medieval Roman Catholic structure. Thank you,

Steve. And it's ironic that the fundamentalists have basically bought that argument that the

Roman Catholics make that Augustine fits. And he doesn't.

I think there are two critical things for Roman Catholicism. One is the papacy. One is the mass. And the whole sacramental system.

And Augustine is dubious on both. And that is, you just listed the main pillars of Roman Catholicism.

Yeah, I mean, Augustine definitely rejects the idea of the papacy, because during the Pelagian controversy, Pelagius wrote to the

Bishop of Rome, and I think it was Zosimus, and Zosimus was about to recognize him as Orthodox.

And Augustine wrote when he heard this, and he said, look, if you do this, we will cut off, we'll cut you off as Orthodox totally, and the

North African bishops will have nothing to do with you. And you don't write to the

Pope that way. Thank you,

CJ, for the excellent question. This is interesting how our fundamentalist friends who claim to despise the

Church of Rome and especially its heretical teachings, how very often they unconsciously adopt understandings of certain things, or at least perpetuate beliefs of Rome that are more in contrast with the

Reformation. For instance, even though they would never say this verbally or in writing, they sided with Erasmus on the issue of the will when it came to Luther's debate with Erasmus on the bondage of the will.

They're actually siding unconsciously with Rome in that argument. And I say that, I don't mean to broad brush because there are

Calvinists who are fundamentalists, but I mean those fundamentalists who are anti -Calvinists are actually siding unconsciously with Rome on that issue, aren't they?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there are ironies. If we don't, you know, it's so important to know

Church history. And, you know, the sort of blue -ha -ha we saw a number of years ago, for example, this is outside the topic today, but, you know, with Bell, what was his first name?

He was a pastor in, well, Bell, a pastor in Grand Rapids.

And when he started to lose his faith and go off the deep end, the things he said, they were straight out of the late 19th century, early liberalism.

And I'm thinking, man, if people only read the past, they'd have some idea. We've been there before.

This is just a dead end. It's going nowhere. And it is vital for us to have some idea of Church history.

I'm going to have you respond to something when we return from our final break. Another question from Mary in Cork, Ireland.

She says, Augustine spent a lot of time talking about the sin of theft because it highlights the inherent sin nature in man.

Augustine stole for the sheer delight and pleasure of stealing before he was saved.

Regardless of whether it was tempting or not, it exposed his depraved nature. He loved theft for theft's sake and not for what he stole.

His theft was not because of necessity or want, but out of a strong impulse for iniquity and forbidden sin.

He says the pears were so beautiful to behold because God the Creator made them, but that was not the reason he lusted for them, as he had an abundance of better pears.

I only picked them that I might steal, for no sooner had I picked them that I threw them away and tasted nothing in them but my own sin, which

I relished and enjoyed. In any part of one of those pears past my lips, it was the sin that gave it flavor.

Could your guest comment more on this aspect of Augustine's writings? And if you could, pick up on that when we return.

If anybody else wants to join us, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com chrisarnson at gmail .com

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And as you probably recall, Dr. Haken, before the break, Mary from Cork, Ireland, had another question.

She wanted to know basically your comments about her description of Augustine taking a lot of time talking about the sin of theft because it highlights the inherent sin nature in man.

If you could comment on that at all. Yes, this incident is recorded by Augustine in book two of his confessions.

And what he's doing in that section is he's wanting to find something that demonstrates the heinousness of sin, the utter abhorrence that God has to sin.

And so he chooses this incident that took place when he was 16 moment thinking, well, why not a sexual sin?

Well, because he knows well enough that sexuality is designed by God and has its place within marriage and is a good thing in and of itself.

But the sin that he describes in book two, the theft of some pears demonstrates the heinousness of sin because Augustine emphasizes that when he stole these pears of some other use when he was about 16, he didn't do so because he was hungry or out of any sort of need.

He simply did so out of a delight in sin. And it was the delight in sin that thrilled his soul.

And that to me, that to Augustine is the heart and essence, the quintessence of sin, this delight that we have in disobedience to the law of God.

And for Augustine then, sin like godliness is ultimately rooted in our affections.

There must be a change in our affections for the new birth to take root. And likewise, the problem with the old nature and the problem with the unregenerate is they hate

God. They loathe him. They loathe his ways, his works, the true and living God. And conversion changes that.

The conversion changes that because it replaces those affections with deep -seated new affections that are basically the result of the indwelling of the spirit.

And so that incident to Augustine's mind so it captures the quintessence of sin, that sin is an absolute abhorrence to the law and person of God.

You know, that statement, that answer to Mary's question brought up to my memory.

I know this had nothing really to do with the experience of Augustine, but I think it goes hand in hand in a significant way.

When I have heard the testimonies of those most depraved serial killers and so on, such as Ted Bundy, when they are on death row, and in fact, this was from an interview that he had with Dr.

Dobson, I can remember. What started out as just basic pornography, which is in and of itself an abomination to God, he lost interest in it and it had to become more and more bizarre and violent and twisted in order for him to become aroused by it.

And it's as if sin in and of itself, just like the thieving of the pears, the pears that Augustine talked about had nothing to do with really the pears, it had to do with the excitement over stealing them.

And it seems that that would go hand in hand, even with these very grotesque testimonies of people who are like serial killers, like I just mentioned, who they have to be more and more depraved in order for them to enjoy their sin.

Mm -hmm, yeah. But before we run out of time, I would like you to really nail home with our listeners why especially those who are

Protestants should not ignore or forget the legacy of Augustine. Why is he such an important figure for us to grasp onto and learn from?

Well, in essence, all of us in the West are Augustinians. Augustine recaptured in his day at a very vital moment, namely the collapsing of Roman culture and that first framework for the

Church, the larger culture of the Greco -Roman society, he captured the heart of the

Gospel, that our salvation is grounded in the sovereign grace and mercy of the living God.

And the goal of life is to be, to see God face -to -face in our

Lord Jesus Christ with the saints in the City of God. And we haven't gotten into the

City of God. The City of God is such an important book for how to live in the context of a collapsing culture.

And Augustine, you know, emphasizes the Church as, the

Christians are on pilgrimage, this is not our home, we are heading for a city in which there is eternal beauty, truth, goodness, love, and it is all found in the

Lord Jesus. And wherever the

Church has flourished, there has been a revival or renewal of Augustinianism.

When I use that phrase, I mean in its best sense, in the sense in which Augustine was able to distill and capture the heart of the

Gospel. One thinks of the period of Anselm, Bernard of Clairvaux, one thinks of the

Reformers, one thinks of John Wycliffe, one thinks of the Puritans. I mean, John Owen, when he wanted to talk about in book three of his collected works that are published, and he talks about the work of the

Holy Spirit in conversion, and he wants to give an illustration, he goes back to Augustine's Confessions, the great revivals of the 18th century.

Wherever Augustinianism has flourished, there has been spiritual health. And we need to know this remarkable saint and theologian of the faith.

We won't agree with everything he wrote, but we see in him a man who loved the truth and sought to express it for the

Church in his day to keep her on track and to keep her vibrant in the midst of a collapsing, a world that was completely collapsing around them.

And there's so many ways, I think, in which Augustine can speak to us today, especially in that regard, the collapse of our culture.

You know, things in many ways, I can't conceive of Western culture with its complete death wish that many intellectuals have embraced over the last 25, 30 years, continuing for decades, if the

Lord tarries. But our hope is not bound up with the survival of the

West. Our hope is bound up with that Church that the Lord Jesus said, the gates of Hades shall not prevail against her.

Well, if you'd like to hang on the line after we go off the air, I would like to book you for another interview on Augustine's City of God, if you don't mind.

Oh, I'd love that. Oh, yeah. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Haken. I want to make sure our listeners remember that the website for the

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is sbts .edu, sbts .edu.

Do you have any other contact information that you care to share? That's great. Yeah, that would be perfect.

Great. And go to that website and also look up information. Keep checking on that website for a conference coming up in September on angels that I am going to try to attend myself.

Thank you for all of you for contributing your questions to Dr. Haken. And thank you all of you who listened, whether you asked questions or not.

I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater Savior than you are a sinner.