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The Failure of Augustinian Sacramentalist and Predestinarian trajectories

It is easy to perceive the two main modern manifestations of the Augustinian dilemma (major strains of post-Tridentine Catholicism and Calvinism) in utero.  Despite censure from the institutional Church through the Middle Ages, sacramental anti-realist position (usually, though not always connected with hard predestinarianism) manifested itself throughout the Middle Ages in the everything from the heresy of Berengar of Tours to the theology of the so-called proto-Reformers (Wycliffe, Hus, etc.).[1]

In giving a theological evaluation, it should be observed that the difficulty with both trajectories within the Augustinian tradition is that they destroy the biblical emphasis on the divine Word’s ability to enact salvation through the sacramental medium of human words.  For Augustine, the word is not a divine deed that contains within it the coming of the reality of which it speaks.  Rather, the word is a mere signifier that signifies things to be known more authentically through the experience of vision beyond them.  As a result, according to the first option outlined above the elect are predestined by invisible grace, which merely coincides with the means of grace- but is not literally present in them.  Therefore, the external medium of the word and sacraments do not enact salvation, they merely signify a salvation that God has already enacted in his eternal choice.  Conversely, following the second option, if grace is contained in the word and sacraments, but not enacted through them, it logically follows that the means of grace come to function as a signifier that signifies the possibility of grace to be actualized by free will.  It is not the Word of God that actualizes the redemption of the individual sinner, but free will accepting grace.

Ultimately, the competing sacramentalist and predestinarian trajectories fail to counteract the reality of sin as it is defined within the Augustinian tradition.  For Augustine, sin is self-incurvature (incurvate in se) and self-orientation.[2]  Grace must break this self-orientation and reorient the sinner toward God.  Nevertheless, if the means of grace do not actually contain grace and God invisibly elects believers, then it is up to the individual to discern the signs of the presence of God’s grace within him or herself.  In discerning God’s electing grace, they must necessarily return to their own self-focus and trust.  Conversely, if the means of grace do contain real grace that one is expected to grasp with his own free will, then one will again turn inward to discern whether one has appropriately utilized one’s free will to take hold of the offer of grace.  In either trajectory, the root of sin is ultimately not defeated, and the Augustinian tradition therefore fails to combat sin based on its own internal criterion.

[1] See the following: See Stephen Lahey, “The Sentences Commentary of Jan Hus,” A Companion to Jan Hus, ed. Ota Pavlicek and František Šmahel (Leiden: Brill), 147-9;  A.J. Macdonald, Berengar and the Reform of Sacramental Doctrine (London: Longmans, Green, 1930); Stephen Penn, “Wycliffe and the Sacraments,” in A Companion to John Wyclif, Late Medieval Theologian, ed. Ian Levy (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 241-93; John Adam Robson, Wyclif and the Oxford Schools: The Relation of the “Summa de Ente” to Scholastic Debates at Oxford in the Later Fourteenth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1961).

[2] Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013), 61.

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).

Image “i dont (want to) see it : incurvatus se” by Rachel Telian (2015)

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Human Agency in Relation to Verbal Inspiration

The doctrine of verbal inspiration should not be confused with a kind of mania that eliminates human agency.[1] When the Bible and the later Lutheran scholastics speak of verbal inspiration, they do not mean that God took over the minds of the prophets and apostles so that they ceased to function consciously as the men they were.

Nevertheless, it is very common to hear modern scholars and theologians attack the theologians of scholastic orthodoxy for essentially teaching such a doctrine. For example, Matthew Becker suggests that verbal inspiration and inerrancy erase human agency in the production of the Scriptures.[2] Becker claims Johann Gerhard taught that divine inspiration makes the inspired author like a flute played by God.[3] Such a claim lacks validity: Gerhard never uses such an analogy in his treatment of inspiration.

The manic concept of inspiration actually is present not in the Protestant scholastics but in the Ante-Nicene fathers. Indeed, one finds the flute analogy for divine inspiration in the second-century apologist Athenagoras.[4] As men of their time and cultural milieu, these theologians often borrowed this concept of inspiration from earlier Jewish and Hellenistic sources. Within the Palestinian Jewish tradition, the intertestamental Book of Jubilees (second century B.C.) speaks of Moses receiving the Torah as a whole on Mt. Sinai in the form of heavenly tablets.[5] This concept suggests an extraordinarily crude notion of inspiration as a kind of literal dictation.

Likewise, pagan Hellenistic culture possessed a concept of prophecy that was manic. Inspiration was understood as a state wherein the rationality and self-consciousness of the individual disappeared and was replaced by the divine agent, whatever form that might take.[6] Taking over this conception as part of their cultural assimilation, some Hellenistic Jews (notably Philo of Alexandria) came to think of Moses and the prophets as entering a kind of trance state brought on by the power of the Spirit.[7] Although Hellenistic Jews and the later Ante-Nicene fathers generally did not think the prophets and apostles had behaved in an irrational manner in the state of inspiration,[8] they nevertheless did speak of God taking over their minds.[9]

Although admittedly there are portions of the Bible where those prophesying enter into a trancelike state (1 Sm 10:10–12; 19:24), there is no evidence to suggest that such a state led to the production of the Scriptures themselves. Indeed, writings like the Psalms embody a genuinely human voice that prays, laments, repents, and praises God. At the same time the Psalms repeatedly are referred to by Jesus and the New Testament authors as divine prophecy and therefore the very voice of God (Mk 12:35–37; Jn 10:30–36; Acts 4:25–26; Heb 2:6–8, etc.).

[1] Franzmann, “New Testament View of Inspiration,” 746.

[2] Becker, Fundamental Theology, 305–6.

[3] Becker, Fundamental Theology, 305.

[4] See Leslie William Barnard, Athenagoras: A Study in Second Century Christian Apologetic (Paris: Beauchesne, 1972), 76.

[5] Leslie Baynes, The Heavenly Book Motif in Judeo-Christian Apocalypses 200 BCE–200 CE (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 110.

[6] See Christopher Forbes, Prophecy and Inspired Speech in Early Christianity and Its Hellenistic Environment (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995), 124–42.

[7] For example, Philo writes of prophecy: “No pronouncement of a prophet is ever his own; he is an interpreter prompted by another in all his utterances . . . when knowing not what he does he is filled with inspiration, as the reason withdraws and surrenders the citadel of his soul to a new visitor and tenant, the Divine Spirit which plays upon his vocal organism and dictates words which clearly express its prophetic message.” Philo, De specialibus legibus 4.49. Cited in Henri Blocher, “God and the Scripture Writers,” in The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures, ed. D. A. Carson (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2016), 503.

[8] Charles Hill, “‘The Truth above All Demonstration’: Scripture in the Patristic Period to Augustine,” in The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures, 81–83.

[9] Blocher, “God and the Scripture Writers,” 503–4; Preus, “View of the Bible,” 363.

From Jack D. Kilcrease, Holy Scripture, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics, Gifford A. Grobien, ed. (Fort Wayne, IN: The Luther Academy, 2020), 132-133.

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The Augustinian Dilemma: Predestination or Sacraments?

St. Augustine appears to pursue two distinct (and at times, seemingly contradictory) lines of reasoning regarding the sacraments and predestination.  On the one hand, Augustine asserts that the Church and its sacraments were absolute guarantees of the presence of God’s grace.  On the other hand, the Bishop of Hippo asserted against Pelagius that the grace of God is absolutely efficacious and irresistible.  Taken together this raises the problem: If God’s grace is irresistible and guaranteed by the means of grace, then why is everyone who encounters the means of grace not saved?  In part, Augustine’s answer was to emphasize that the grace of perseverance (gained particularly by prayer) is necessary to stay in a genuine fellowship with the Church and its perpetual offer of grace.  As a result, the role of the Church and its ministry seems then to be relativized by God’s hidden plan of election.  Hence, the question is raised as to whether in the end the external means of grace really provide a definitive guarantee of God’s favor and forgiveness.

The tension between what might be called the sacramentalist and predestinarian tendencies in Augustine’s thought establishes what we will call the “Augustinian Dilemma.”  As Jaroslav Pelikan observes:

“To interpret Augustine as a partisan of either scholastic or Protestant doctrine about grace and the means of grace would resolve the inconsistencies of his thought and language, but it would also resolve the paradox of grace.  The sovereignty of grace, with its inevitable corollary in the doctrine of predestination, could make the means of grace incidental to the achievement of the divine purpose. . . The mediation of grace, with its emphasis on the obligation to attend upon the services and sacraments of the church, could substitute a righteousness based on works of piety for a righteousness based on works of morality.  Each of these possibilities was present in the theology of Augustine, and each has manifested itself in the subsequent history of Augustianism.”[1]

Following a similar line of reasoning to Pelikan’s, it is easy to discern two distinctive trajectories in Augustine’s thought.  In one trajectory, one might argue that if grace is irresistible and the result of God’s predestinating act, the external means of grace become understood as only indirectly connected with the operation of God’s grace.  As a result, the means of grace possess little function other than to point beyond themselves to God’s eternal act of predestination and grace’s attending invisible enactment among the elect.  The means of grace in effect become symbols of what God has already done in eternity.  Many who encounter them are not converted because they are not real mediums of grace.  As we will see below and in future chapters, as a result of this line of reasoning many Western theologians have rejected sacramental realism in favor of sacramental symbolism and spiritualism. 

Following a second possible trajectory, if the sacraments do contain real grace (or, at minimum guarantee the presence of divine grace), then the fact that not all who encounter them are saved is explained by the argument that although sin has damaged free will, it remains operative to a certain extent.  Because human free will remains partially operative, people can decide whether or not to participate in the sacramental life of the Church.  To use an analogy: Although a patient who is ill cannot make themselves well by simply willing it, they can certainly agree to cooperate with the doctor and take medicine that will make them well.  In this perspective, grace is seen not so much as something that unilaterally makes salvation an actuality, but as a possibility to be accepted or rejected by free will.  Free will’s grasping onto the possibilities offered by the means of grace results in the actualization of salvation. 

The problem posed by the Augustinian Dilemma was felt in the Western Church immediately following the Bishop of Hippo’s death.  It must be recognized that although the consensus of the catholic Church was against Pelagius (who was condemned both in local African synods and in the canons of the ecumenical Council of Ephesus),[2] Augustine’s solution to the problem of sin and grace elicited considerable resistance.  Indeed, many attempted to modify Augustine’s position in the centuries following the Pelagian controversy. 

[1] Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, 1:306.

[2] B. R. Rees, ed., Pelagius: Life and Letters (Woodbridge, MA: Boydell Press, 1998), 4.

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).

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The Word Opens God to Abuse

In spite of this glorious fulfillment, God’s Word must always withstand opposition from His fallen creatures. Testing must precede validation. As in the life of Christ, humiliation always precedes glory, and trial always precedes vindication. Indeed, the reality of testing and opposition to God’s Word reveals the deep kenotic dimension to the act of revelation. Through His Word God not only reveals Himself, His will, and His purpose but is sacramentally present in it by the power of the Spirit (Mt 18:20; 28:20; Gal 3:2). God’s eternal Word, without losing its uncreated power and glory, kenotically makes itself available and tangible through the medium of finite human words. By making Himself known and tangible through His revelation in means, God opens Himself up to rejection, blasphemy, and abuse by His creatures.

Indeed, one suspects that this is the motivation behind Aquinas and Barth’s previously discussed theories of revelational analogy. If God makes Himself to be known in a merely analogical echo, then He does not fully open Himself up to the possibility of blasphemous abuse, misuse, or rejection of His Word. If God does not fully identify Himself with the means of grace, then He is saved from being rejected and abused when they are rejected and abused.

Aquinas and Barth’s revelational analogy is of course the logical corollary of their thoroughly Leonine view of the incarnation, wherein the communication idiomatum is little more than notional.[1] Nevertheless, as Luther notes, a God who does not communicate Himself fully to the flesh of Christ and suffer abuse is ultimately of no use to us.[2] And a God who has not communicated Himself fully to the external Word as both propositional truth and effective presence is of no use to His sinful creatures in need of “grace and truth” (Jn 1:14). If God is not fully present in His Word then He remains distant and hidden from His creatures, and they cannot grasp Him for the sake of their salvation. Just as the very Word of God made flesh submitted Himself to abuse and blasphemy on the cross and yet triumphed in the resurrection, in giving His external Word God submits Himself to abuse and opposition, and yet triumphs in either the creation of faith or the hardening of judgment.

[1] See my description in “Thomas Aquinas and Martin Chemnitz on the Hypostatic Union,” Lutheran Quarterly 27, no. 1 (2013): 1–32.

[2] Regarding Zwingli’s attempt to separate the two natures in Christ, Luther writes: “Beware, beware, I say, of this alloeosis, for it is the devil’s mask since it will finally construct a kind of Christ after whom I would not want to be a Christian, that is, a Christ who is and does no more in his passion and his life than any other ordinary saint. For if I believe that only the human nature suffered for me, then Christ would be a poor savior for me, in fact, he himself would need a Savior. In short, it is indescribable what the devil attempts with this alloeosis.” Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, 1528 (AE 37:209–10; WA 26:319).

From Jack D. Kilcrease, Holy Scripture, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics, Gifford A. Grobien, ed. (Fort Wayne, IN: The Luther Academy, 2020), 67.

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Augustine of Hippo on Sex

St. Augustine’s desire for all earthly things, especially sex, became a problem.  Although it is often said that Augustine’s negative preoccupation with sex was the result of his youthful indiscretions, but this misses the larger reality of his Christian-Platonic worldview.  Indeed, when examined closely, Augustine’s youthful sexual dalliances and his later relationship with his unnamed mistress appear trite by modern standards.  Augustine admits that he lived with his mistress for nearly a decade as a common-law wife to whom he was faithful while raising a son.[1] Moreover, although celibacy was certainly a prized ideal in the early Church, Christian clergy and bishops regularly married in late Antiquity.[2]  That all Christians did not share Augustine’s negative attitude to sex is clearly demonstrated by his late debate with Julian of Eclanum.[3] 

Hence, from a strictly Christian moral standpoint (1 Cor. 7:38) there was no particular reason why marriage and lawful sexual activity was not an option open to Augustine.  Nevertheless, Augustine choose celibacy and insisted on the problematic nature of all sexual desire.  In light of this, it would be more accurate to see Augustine’s negative attitude toward sex as being a result of his desire to be a Christian-Platonic philosopher who sought the eternal over the distraction of the temporal.[4]  In discussing the matter in his Soliloquies (written just before his baptism) Augustine comments that he is committed to giving up sex completely in order to purely pursue the life of the mind.[5]

Hence, within Augustine’s Christian-Platonic framework, much as in the cosmic hierarchy the baser and more material is to be hierarchically ordered to the greater and more spiritual, so to the human heart should be ordered to the eternal and spiritual, and not to enjoyment the temporal.[6]  Indeed, in the pre-lapsarian state, the baser desires did not interfere with the exercise of reason.  Adam and Eve would not have enjoyed or even desired sex, but instead would have engaged in the sex-act purely for the rational purposes of reproduction.[7]  The orderly nature of the cosmos- where the material was subordinate the spiritual- would have been reproduced in the human heart as a microcosm of the macrocosm.  Adam and his bride would have never burned with desire for one another but would have simply called their genitals to attention by an act of will, engaged in reproductive act without pleasure, and deactivated their genitals just as easily.[8] 

Augustine saw his own struggle to quiet his sexual desires and live a life unadulterated life of reason to be symptom of the Fall.  Sinful desire which interferes with reason (concupiscence) is a punishment for sin.[9]  Just creation is in revolt against the creator, so too the desires of the fallen person are at war with the rational and spiritual centers of the self: “In short, to say all in a word, what but disobedience was the punishment of disobedience in that sin? For what else is man’s misery but his own disobedience to himself, so that in consequence of his not being willing to do what he could do, he now wills to do what he cannot?”[10] 

Even without sin, created being is inherently unstable.[11]  Creation comes from nothingness and has a tendency of drifting back into nothingness.[12]  For this reason, humans and angels are in need of grace to prop them up even in their state of integrity.[13]  Only by receiving a special grace can humans and angels not drift back into nothingness through falling into sin.[14]  In Augustine’s thought- much as in later Roman Catholicism- although “grace” (gratia) certainly comes by God’s undeserved favor (i.e., the Pauline charis), it is primarily defined as God’s supernatural assistance and self-communication to his rational creatures in order that they might achieve higher and greater degrees of moral regeneration.[15] 

[1] Augustine, Confessions, 4.2; NPNFa, 1:68-9.

[2] William Philipps, Clerical Celibacy: The Heritage (London: Continuum, 2004), 81-96.

[3] Gerald Bonner, “Pelagianism and Augustine” in Doctrinal Diversity: Varieties of Early Christianity: A Collection of Scholarly Essays, ed. Everett Ferguson (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999), 203-4.

[4] Gary Willis, Augustine’s Confessions: A Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 59-62.

[5] Augustine, Soliloquies, 1.17; NPNFa, 7:543.

[6] Steven Schafer, Marriage, Sex, and Procreation: Contemporary Revisions to Augustine’s Theology of Marriage (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2019), 28-9.

[7] Augustine, City of God, 14.24; NPNFa, 2:280-1.

[8] Augustine, City of God, 14.24; NPNFa, 2:280-1.

[9] Timo Nisula, Augustine and the Functions of Concupiscence (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 258-9.

[10] Augustine, City of God, 14.15; NPNFa, 2:275.

[11] Augustine, City of God, 12.15; NPNFa, 2:235-6.

[12] Paul Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy: Creator and Creation in Early Christian Theology and Piety (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 298.

[13] Augustine, Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love, 106; NPNFa, 3:271.

[14] Augustine, City of God, 14.2; NPNFa, 2:282.

[15] Augustine, On the Grace of Christ, 1.15-16; NPNFa, 5:223-4.

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).