Transcript

Hi folks, welcome back to History 1. This is highlights from Unit 7 and this is our last highlights video for the semester.

Now I'm going to begin with a little bit of myth busting.

We're talking about Saint Augustine today, among other things, and so The first myth I want to bust is the myth that Augustine is somehow responsible for the idea or concept or doctrine of original sin.

Don't blame St. Augustine for original sin.

If you want someone to blame for the doctrine of original sin, blame the Apostle Paul.

And as he says in Romans 5, this is Romans 5, 12 and then 17 through 19, he says, Just as through one person sin entered the world, and through sin death, and thus death came to all inasmuch as all sinned.

And then skipping a couple of verses here to verse 17. For if by the transgression of one person death came to reign through that one, how much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of justification come to reign in life through the one person Jesus Christ?

In conclusion, Just as through one transgression condemnation came upon all, so through one righteous act acquittal and life came to all.

For just as through the disobedience of one person the many were made sinners, so through the obedience of one the many will be made righteous.

And so that is the Apostle Paul on original sin and of course he is doing the typology thing.

where Adam is the first Adam, and Christ is the second Adam, and Christ fixes what Adam broke.

Okay, so you can't blame St. Augustine for the doctrine of original sin, but you can say that he turned it up to 11, that he really amped it up, and that if you want someone to blame for the doctrine of total depravity, that would be Augustine, because as I've argued, In his debate with the Pelagians he painted himself into a corner where he basically ended up by the end of his life with all five points of Calvinism or perhaps almost all and I've got colleagues who debate with me on this a little bit as to whether he actually had the doctrine of perseverance but he has everything else and he certainly has this idea of Total depravity.

And so there are ways in which St. Augustine went too far.

And we know that at the Council of Orange, some 99 years after his death, that council clarified the church's doctrines around the questions of free will and depravity and original sin and grace and the interplay between God's grace and human free will, etc. So the Council of Arange ends up at a place that we now call semi-Augustinian.

So we'll say a few more words about that in a couple of minutes.

The other myth I want to bust is that you can't blame Augustine for associating sex with sin.

The church was already teaching, by the time of Augustine, that sexuality, even within marriage, was somehow, on some level, inherently sinful.

And I think the guy you want to blame for that is Clement of Alexandria.

Remember that Clement of Alexandria, writing towards the end of the second century, was writing in response to Gnosticism.

And there were certain Gnostic sects who were saying that it's fine and desirable to live a very hedonistic lifestyle.

In other words, have all the sex you can, but whatever you do, don't procreate.

In other words, don't have children because in doing that you would be participating in creation, the creation of that Old Testament God, and you don't want to do that.

So the Gnostics are saying, have all the sex you can, but don't have children, and Clement of Alexandria comes at it the opposite and says that sex is only for procreation.

And there's a strain within the church that picks up on that.

So Augustine is not the originator of the idea that sex is somehow inherently sinful.

But Augustine was right about this.

He realized throughout his own experience that peace of mind and peace of spirit Requires some kind of peace in your body as well and for him to have peace for him is He needed to be celibate because he realized that sex was his kryptonite, that lust was his big temptation.

And he just came to the point where he knew that it had to be all or nothing.

And in order for him to have a relationship with God, he had to be celibate.

And the point there is that you and I, we all need to know what our kryptonite is and figure out how not to let that come between us and God.

Okay, so we're going to talk a little bit about St. Augustine or Augustine, if you will.

You can pronounce it either way.

It's fine with me.

We're going to talk a little bit about St. Augustine and the Pelagian controversy.

So while we're on the subject of original sin, I want to say a few words about that.

Just remember that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

The detail is all in the book, Reading the Church Fathers.

So you need to read the chapters in there.

Now, I want you to think of original sin in terms of the doctrine of consubstantiality, right?

We all know and we've talked about the fact that, you know, throughout the Aryan controversy, it was clarified that the father and son are consubstantial.

The son is consubstantial with the father.

Because his divine nature is the same divine substance as the Trinity.

So Father, Son, and Spirit are all consubstantial.

But we also know that Jesus Christ is consubstantial with us because we share a common human nature with him.

Well, you have to think about the fact that we are also consubstantial with Adam.

And so our consubstantiality with the first human, with Adam, and with his sin, that results in original sin.

So the way original sin comes to us is through our consubstantiality with the first humans.

And in fact, some of the church fathers would say that the reason why Sin permeates to all of humanity is because there was a moment in time when every single human on the planet sinned.

Of course, they're thinking of Adam and Eve, but you get the idea.

Our consubstantiality with Adam results in our original sin.

But of course, then Christ's consubstantiality with us results in our atonement.

And that's a little fancier way of saying what Paul was saying in Romans 5. Original sin did exist as a doctrine before Augustine, but in a balance with the reality of human free will.

And so before Augustine, There was a kind of middle way between original sin and human fallenness and a real freedom of the will, even though it may be seen as limited.

And I would argue that after the Council of Arange in 529, the church goes back to this kind of middle way, which, you know, to some people would say that the East Never really lost that, but the West kind of leaned into Augustine for a while, and then later in the Reformation, the Protestants will lean into Augustine as well, and of course that will lead to Calvinism.

But what the Church is after is this place of balance between too much optimism about human nature, which is Pelagianism, and too much pessimism about human nature, on the other hand, which is a kind of total depravity, which is really, you know, where the road that Augustine was on conceptually leads.

Now, to be fair, Augustine was reading Paul, and he saw in Paul that there are two kinds of will in the human, right?

There is the will that is wanting to do something And then there is the will that is actually doing it.

And, you know, even Paul points out, you know, there are times when I know what's right to do, but I don't actually do it.

I can't bring myself to do the right thing.

And so the human will is free to want to do the right thing, but sometimes not really free to do it, or at least it seems that way.

And so Augustine was picking up on that and in some ways trying to have his cake and eat it too, because especially in his earlier writings, He gives a kind of lip service to free will, but then he really sort of doubles down on the idea that human will is so limited by original sin that it's not really free anymore.

Okay, well when you're looking at the controversy, And you're looking at the different sort of factions that emerge, or at least the pigeonholes that we define in hindsight.

You definitely want to remember the chart on page 367 of the book.

And so there's that chart with four columns, and you have the column for Augustine where, you know, Our salvation is all on God.

It's all grace.

And you have the opposite extreme column, which is of course Pelagius and then Julian, where it's basically all on us.

It's all free will.

And then you have these two middle columns.

One, the semi-Pelagian approach, which is to say that there is a cooperation between the human will and grace, but the semi-Pelagians seem to want to hold out the possibility that human free will can take the initiative and that grace will cooperate with the human will.

And then finally, the semi-Augustinian conclusion, which is the position taken at the Council of Orange, and this becomes the official position of the Church, the semi-Augustinian position which again assumes a synergy between grace and human will, but grace must always move first.

The human will cannot take the initiative.

Grace moves first.

Grace invites, and the human will responds.

And this is synergy.

The human will cooperating with grace.

And I'm thinking here of, again, Paul in Philippians 2.12, working out our salvation with fear and trembling.

So we cooperate with grace.

And even Augustine admits, and this is from one of his sermons, even Augustine admits, he says, God created us without us, but does not save us without us.

And so even Augustine admits that there must be some cooperation of the human will with God's grace.

But ultimately, of course, he eventually lands on a kind of election that is essentially a double predestination and the church just can't go there with him.

Now, incidentally, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is an explanation of why Mary could be thought of as being without original sin.

She is the only human since the Fall, other than Jesus, with a totally free will.

And her fiat at the Annunciation was a free choice Just as Jesus' fiat in the Garden of Gethsemane.

So, as free as Jesus' will was to say in the Garden of Gethsemane, not my will be done, but yours, Mary's will was that free, absolutely free, to say yes to God's plan at the Annunciation.

And so, even though in the early church they didn't necessarily have the name Immaculate Conception, or they didn't call it that, they didn't have that phrase, The Church Fathers were in agreement that Mary was without sin, and the explanation for that is that by the Immaculate Conception, she was conceived without original sin, and so that her free will is actually totally free, unlike the rest of us.

Okay, now when you're looking at that chart on page 367 in the book, it's important to sort of look beyond the chart and see how that chart maps onto the medieval scholastics.

And so, for example, if you start with Pelagianism which is on the far right-hand column of the chart.

And by the way, don't read anything into what's on the right versus the left.

Those have nothing to do with any political or even sort of theological conservative versus liberal spectrum.

It has nothing to do with that.

So whether something is on the right or the left of the charts is not the point, so ignore that.

But the point is this.

If you start with Pelagianism, which is on one extreme, right, That very optimistic anthropology and the Christology that goes with it will lead you to a soteriology that's basically Aryan or some form of adoptionism.

And so that extreme optimism is always going to diminish the divinity of Christ because an extreme optimism about humans being able to save themselves through good works really It eliminates the necessity for salvation to be a divine rescue mission and therefore it will always end up with a Christology that diminishes the divinity of Christ and with a salvation that isn't really an atonement so much as following Jesus' example.

Now, if you start with the other extreme, the far left side column, which is Augustine, Augustinianism, well, from there you can go in two directions, and it depends how far you want to go towards that extreme.

If you go hard toward Augustine, you get Calvinism.

A little less hard and you get Luther.

But if you go kind of moderate Augustinianism, Well, you get Anselm of Canterbury, and you're going to read his document, Cur Deus Homo, Why the God-Man.

And by the way, it shouldn't be translated, Why God Became Man.

It should simply be translated, Why the God-Man.

In other words, why did the Savior, Jesus Christ, have to be a God-slash-human?

Why did he have to have That's Anselm's point, and it's an extremely important point.

And so Anselm's understanding of the atonement is best described as the satisfaction theory of atonement.

But it could also be called the debt payment theory, because he explains how the atonement is The payment of a debt, and this is expressed in more modern terms as, you know, Jesus Christ paid a debt he didn't owe because we owed a debt we couldn't pay.

Okay, so that's the satisfaction theory.

But the satisfaction theory of the atonement is misunderstood if it's understood to mean something about satisfying God's anger.

It's not about satisfying God's anger.

It's about satisfying a debt.

And it is very different from the later, what can be called the penal substitutionary theory of atonement that comes later with the Reformation.

That's more about God's anger, blood sacrifice, justice, all that stuff.

That's not where Anselm goes.

So pay attention when you read Anselm and look at how he describes the atonement.

It's described in terms of the payment of a debt.

Now, let's take a look at those two inner columns on the chart.

If you start with a semi-Pelagian anthropology, you're going to end up with something like Peter Abelard.

And if you're not careful, you know, leaning too hard into that can also lean can also lead to Arianism, much like Pelagianism does.

So the closer you are to Pelagianism, the more you're likely to end up with a kind of Arian or adoptionist, or perhaps in modern terms, Unitarian soteriology.

But if you start with that semi-Augustinianism, that balanced approach to an anthropology that takes into account both the freedom of the human will Also, it's limitation, the need for grace, the need for grace to take the initiative, but the very real expectation of a participation in grace.

If you start with that, well, then you're going to end up right where Thomas Aquinas ended up.

That is, you know, the necessity of Christ's two natures for our salvation, but also with a healthy recognition of the need for our participation So that's going to bring us to the topic of atonement, and it actually brings us full circle back to where we started this course, which is that Christ must have two natures in order for salvation to work.

Okay, so now I want to talk about the atonement.

And by the way, Atonement does not mean at-one-ment.

That is just a coincidence that only happens in English.

It does have to do with reconciliation with God, though.

Atonement assumes that we are estranged from God and ultimately what we as human beings need is reconciliation with God.

It does also have elements of sacrifice that go back to the original covenant in the Old Testament.

And so there is a sense in which Jesus Christ is the once and for all sacrifice, who replaces both the lamb of the Passover and the scapegoat of the Day of Atonement.

And so it has all of these elements built in.

And of course, as Anselm tells us, it also has the elements of the payment of a debt.

But at the end of the day, it is a grace.

It is an expression of God's love.

mercy, compassion, and forgiveness.

And really, all of those words are built into when we read in 1 John, when John simply says, God is love.

In other words, as if to say that one way to describe the very substance of divinity is love.

All of those other concepts are built into that.

Mercy, compassion, forgiveness, grace, All of that.

In fact, Saint Faustina famously said that the main divine attribute of the substance of divinity is mercy.

So there you have it.

Now, when we get to the theories of atonement, when we look at how salvation works, This is not a matter of orthodoxy versus heresy.

We're not saying some of these theories of atonement are orthodox and others are heretical.

There are maybe one or two that if If they were by themselves, if that's all you had, they would be inadequate.

But for the most part, you have to look at the theories of atonement like you're looking at different facets of a diamond.

It's a single diamond with different facets, you look at it from different angles, and so you see these different theories of atonement that way.

Maybe even theories is not the best word for them.

Maybe we want to say these are analogies for the atonement.

And just like any analogies, we've talked about this, Analogies are great, but they all fall short.

So you have to be able to know how the analogy works, how the analogy is like the atonement, but also how the analogy doesn't work and how it's not like the atonement.

And you have to be able to teach both sides of the analogy.

And so at any rate, we're not gonna go through all the theories of atonement right now.

They're all in the book.

So, you know, They're all in the chapter and when you write your essays, please do not feel like you have to list them all or define them all.

That's not the point.

But I do want you to remember this.

So here's the highlight of it all.

There are really two good analogies for sin.

And so the first one, the first analogy for sin is sin as slavery.

And this is absolutely biblical.

It's right out of Paul.

Augustine himself would remind us that because of two things, because of original sin and because of the power of habit, We are enslaved to sin and we are incapable of escaping that slavery on our own.

And so we need to be manumitted.

And if you don't know this word, manumission is the buying of a slave's freedom, right?

So we need to be manumitted.

We cannot escape this slavery on our own.

We cannot buy our own freedom.

In the Roman world, Back in the day, you could buy your own freedom if you were a slave.

But this is the kind of slavery where you can't get out of it yourself.

Someone else has to buy you out of it.

Our freedom from sin has to be bought.

And that's what Jesus Christ does.

He buys our freedom.

And so when you read in the New Testament about ransom, right?

There, when Paul uses the word that's translated in English as ransom, he's really talking about manumission.

It's not quite a hostage situation.

It is a slavery situation.

There's a certain sort of way in which the devil has legally acquired us because we've sold ourselves into that slavery, and so our freedom has to be bought.

So sin is like slavery, and salvation is Manumission.

So that's one analogy for sin.

The other analogy for sin is sin as debt.

Now debt is still also a form of bondage because we are in debt over our heads, right?

We owed God our obedience but we fell behind in the payments and our disobedience puts us in the red, so to speak, puts us in debt It puts us so far in debt that we could never get out of it on our own.

We can't pay the debt, but the debt has to be paid, and by rights it has to be paid by someone who is one of us, our kin, one of our people.

It has to be paid for us by someone who is one of us, right?

And so, again, sin is like debt, and salvation is the payment of the debt.

So think of sin in those two ways and then look at all the different analogies for atonement and how they are different ways to understand how Jesus Christ overcomes sin for us.

And so what we end up with then with Anselm of Canterbury and then Thomas Aquinas, the soteriology of the church is what I refer to as a kind of a tripod or it has these three legs and the first two relate to the two natures of Christ.

Again, expressing the fact that the two natures of Christ are both necessary for our salvation.

His human nature is necessary because one of the legs of the tripod of the atonement is human representation.

Again, if the debt is going to be paid, it's got to be paid by someone who is one of us, someone who can represent us in paying the debt.

And so Christ represents us because he's one of us.

His human nature is what satisfies the justice of the payment of the debt.

And so he is our champion.

He's the one who represents us and he's the one who pays the debt on our behalf.

So the first leg of the tripod is The second leg of the tripod is divine intervention.

And these are in no particular order, but it is Christ's divine nature that satisfies the need for divine intervention.

Because at the end of the day, salvation must be a divine rescue mission.

It cannot be something that we work toward or earn for ourselves.

It's gotta be God reaching out, reaching down to us And so Christ's divine nature satisfies the need for divine intervention, and it expresses the other side of the coin, which is God's mercy and love.

And when I say the other side of the coin, the two sides of the coin of God's character are justice and mercy, right?

God doesn't simply forgive the debt because that would be a mockery of justice and then God's justice would be brought to nothing.

On the other hand, God doesn't simply send us all to hell because then God's mercy would go unexpressed.

And so, in other words, the two sides of the coin, both sides must be expressed.

The one is justice, the other is mercy.

Christ's human nature And so the third leg of the tripod is individual participation.

This is the part we play in our own salvation.

This is our responsibility, and this is what allows for synergy, our own participation in our sanctification And so we've come full circle.

The third of our three laws says that Christology informs soteriology.

But really, it's bigger than that.

It's a kind of circle of ologies, as one of my former students used to say.

It's that anthropology, how we Understand the human person informs Christology because when we talk about what's missing in our lives or what's needed in terms of reconciliation with God, that informs how we understand the Savior and what it is about Him that fills in those gaps and meets those needs.

And then Christology informs soteriology because, again, whatever you believe about the Savior is going to inform what you believe about salvation or vice versa.

And soteriology informs ecclesiology because whatever you believe about salvation will also inform what you believe about the church and how salvation comes to believers through the church and especially through the sacraments.

And so I just want to end up today by saying a couple things about the church and about ecclesiology in light of Augustine's controversy with the Donatists.

Because when you look at that controversy, what you ultimately see is, among other things, a different way of understanding the church, a different ecclesiology.

The Donatists understood the church like it's Noah's Ark.

You know, let the few righteous in and then lock the door and everyone else is outside in the storm, right?

The church becomes a kind of, you know, gated community for the perfect people, right?

And so the Donatists, And by the way, you know, there are Christians like this today who want to see the church as a sort of enclave for holy people that needs to be protected from the unholy people, right?

The Donatists were trying to protect the church from the sinners, whereas Augustine, He took a very different understanding of the church.

And of course, his understanding of the church was the Roman ecclesiology and the ecclesiology that had been a part of the church and would be the church's understanding of itself.

And that is that the church is not so much like Noah's Ark.

It's more like a hospital.

It's the place that is open to all who want to be healed.

You don't need to protect a hospital from sick people.

And you don't need to protect the church from sinners.

The church is where the sinners should be.

And so for Augustine, the church is like a hospital.

The clergy are the doctors and the sacraments are the medicine.

And I think that's a much healthier and much more inclusive way of understanding the church.

And so that's where we'll end today.

Thanks for watching these highlight videos.

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