infinirest.blogg.se - From the depths of hell in silence

#FROM THE DEPTHS OF HELL IN SILENCE FULL#

How his training in rhetoric, his vociferousness, determination and almost pathological attention to minute detail drive him forward in an unbending trajectory towards his conclusions.

The extent to which assumptions from outside the Christian tradition are present and unexamined.

The degree to which Greek dualistic thought, as well as classical rhetoric, has formed Augustine’s method being fundamentally rationalistic and dualistic.

The influences of his personal background, specifically concerning his dominant mother and conspicuously absent father.

However, I would like focus on the penultimate book of his great work The City of God, Book XXI, subtitled “Eternal punishment of the damned, and the arguments which unbelief brings against it”.

#FROM THE DEPTHS OF HELL IN SILENCE FULL#

In that day true and full happiness shall be the lot of none but the good, while deserved and supreme misery shall be the portion of the wicked, and of them only. His view of judgment can be summed up in this statement: Ideas taken up at the height of Hellfire preaching by the likes of Jonathan Edwards some 1300 years later find their origin here. Book XX is an exhaustive examination of the theme of judgment, with the emphatic emphasis on its retributive nature. The City of God, Books XX and XXI concern these topics, and were completed in 426, four years before his death, and so represent his mature thought. In no way did Augustine “invent” the idea of Hell, this idea had been around in many cultures for centuries by the time that he wrote his most graphic, detailed arguments for a punitive judgment.

But what I want to focus on here is his profound influence on the Doctrine of Eternal Punishment. These include the Just War theory, the Trinity, and Original Sin. Many major themes of Christian thought can be traced to Augustine. Any disagreement with his writings is tantamount to heresy, and this applies equally to Catholic and Protestant traditions Even today he is widely quoted and revered, but more importantly, his theological approach has been deeply internalised so as to be seen as normal. In many ways, Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430) was the most influential post-Pauline theologian in Christendom.