Creating Augustine

Creating Augustine
Author: Eric Leland Saak
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2012-06-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199646384

A major reinterpretation of Augustine's reception and influence in the later Middle Ages, this book proposes that the political and religious context of the early 14th century led members of the Order of Hermits of St. Augustine to create a new image of Augustine, with whom they identified as their founding father.

Retrieving Augustine's Doctrine of Creation

Retrieving Augustine's Doctrine of Creation
Author: Gavin Ortlund
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2020-07-14
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0830853251

How might premodern exegesis of Genesis inform Christian debates about creation today? Pastor and theologian Gavin Ortlund retrieves Augustine's reading of Genesis 1-3 and considers how his premodern understanding of creation can help Christians today, shedding light on matters such as evolution, animal death, and the historical Adam and Eve.

Creating Augustine

Creating Augustine
Author: Eric Leland Saak
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2012-06-21
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0191634360

The term 'Augustinianism' has been used by scholars for over a century to refer to trends in medieval philosophy, theology, and politics, which had a major effect on the transformations of European culture and society from the Middle Ages to the onset of modernity. Yet in each of these three disciplines 'Augustinianism' means something different, and the lack of clarity only increases when the debates over the relationship between a late medieval Augustinianism and Martin Luther are considered as well. Based on historical, philological, and iconographic analysis, this study adopts a hermeneutical approach drawn from philosophical hermeneutics, religious studies, and literary and sociological theory to argue for a historical, as distinct from a philosophical or theological referent for the term 'Augustinianism'. The interpretation of Augustine and of a late medieval Augustinianism can only be based historically on the newly created image of Augustine discerned in the writings of the Augustinian Hermits in the early fourteenth century. Recognising the diverse dimensions of this created image is requisite to a historical understanding of Augustine's late medieval reception and impact. Understanding Augustine as a 'created' saint has implications for a wider understanding of Augustine's influence stretching on beyond the later Middle Ages up until the present day.

"You Made Us for Yourself"

Author: Jared Ortiz
Publisher: Fortress Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2016-05-19
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1506406874

Augustine’s Confessions is probably the most commented upon text of early Christianity. Yet, there is a general consensus that this justly famous work is neither well composed nor structurally unified. “You Made Us for Yourself” aims to challenge this common notion by approaching the Confessions in light of what Augustine himself would have considered most fundamental: creation, understood in a broad sense. Creation, for Augustine, is an epiphany, a light that reveals who God is and who human beings are. It is not merely one doctrine or theme among others, but is the foundational context which illumines all doctrines and all themes. Moreover, creation, for Augustine, is dynamically ordered toward the church, toward the deified destiny the body of Christ both is and brings about. Thus, the Confessions itself can be understood as Augustine’s prayer of praise in thanksgiving for the unmerited gift of creation (and re-creation). It is his self-gift back to God—a kind of eucharistic offering intended to take up and bring about the same in his readers. Augustine’s rich understanding of creation, then, can account for the often despaired of meaning, structure, and unity of the Confessions.

The Many and the One

The Many and the One
Author: Yonghua Ge
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2021-05-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1793629110

How God relates to the world lies at the heart of the most intense debates in modern theology and philosophy. Movements of Nouvelle Théologie, process theology, radical orthodoxy, modern Trinitarian theology and postmodern theology (i.e. Jean-Luc Marion) all seek to reconsider God’s relation to the world as a corrective of what they perceive as problematic. Of particular significance is the recent revival of the theology of participation, as promoted by Radical Orthodoxy in UK and Hans Boersma in North America. Facing excessive secularism and fragmentation of the modern Western world, Radical Orthodoxy and Boersma resort to the pre-modern theology of participation as the way forward. Relying heavily on Platonism, however, their participatory theology, as critics pointed out, tends to compromise the intrinsic goodness of the creation. In this book, Ge proposes that a distinctively Christian theology of participation anchored in creatio ex nihilo, developed by Augustine and brought to the fore by Aquinas, provides a more promising solution which not only secures the unity of things in God but also the goodness of creaturely plurality. Since participation in its origin is a solution to the problem of the One and the Many, Ge employs Gunton’s framework of the one and the many in his discussion of Augustine and Aquinas’s theologies of participation. By reshaping their concepts of participation in the light of the doctrine of creation, Ge argues, these thinkers have profoundly transformed the metaphysics of participation, making it finally more suitable for describing the unique relationship between God’s unity and creaturely plurality. This Christian metaphysics of participation is not only an advance on Radical Orthodoxy and Boersma, but also superior to competing theories of reality such as pluralism and reductionist physicalism. The book will also bring out implications for modern science-religion dialogues, the core of which concerns how God relates to the world.

Augustine and the Environment

Augustine and the Environment
Author: John Doody
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2016-09-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1498541917

This volume brings into dialogue the ancient wisdom of Augustine of Hippo, a bishop of the early Christian Church of the fourth and fifth centuries, with contemporary theologians and ethicists on the topic of the environment and humanity’s place in and responsibility to it. The contributors vary widely in their estimation of how sustained and useful such a dialogue might be, from outright dismissal of the church father to extended speculation with him and in his spirit. Their conclusions impact our views of God and both human and non-human creation. Such engagement should influence any future discussion of how Christianity and environmentalism can interact or influence one another.

The Odyssey of Love

The Odyssey of Love
Author: Paul Krause
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2021-07-08
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1725297396

Tolle Lege, take up and read! These words from St. Augustine perfectly describe the human condition. Reading is the universal pilgrimage of the soul. In reading we journey to find ourselves and to save ourselves. The ultimate journey is reading the Great Books. In the Great Books we find the struggle of the human soul, its aspirations, desires, and failures. Through reading, we find faces and souls familiar to us even if they lived a thousand years ago. The unread life is not worth living, and in reading we may well discover what life is truly about and prepare ourselves for the pilgrimage of life.

On the Trinity

On the Trinity
Author: Saint Augustine of Hippo
Publisher: Aeterna Press
Total Pages: 630
Release:
Genre: Religion
ISBN:

The following dissertation concerning the Trinity, as the reader ought to be informed, has been written in order to guard against the sophistries of those who disdain to begin with faith, and are deceived by a crude and perverse love of reason. Now one class of such men endeavor to transfer to things incorporeal and spiritual the ideas they have formed, whether through experience of the bodily senses, or by natural human wit and diligent quickness, or by the aid of art, from things corporeal; so as to seek to measure and conceive of the former by the latter. Aeterna Press

The Literal Meaning of Genesis

The Literal Meaning of Genesis
Author: Saint Augustine (of Hippo)
Publisher: Ancient Christian Writers
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1982
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780809103263

A thorough and conscientious commentary on the first three chapters from the Book of Genesis, completed in 415. Augustine's purpose is to explain, to the best of his ability, what the author intended to say about what God did when he made heaven and earth. Contains Books 1-6. +

The Trinity and Creation in Augustine

The Trinity and Creation in Augustine
Author: Scott A. Dunham
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2008-08-07
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0791477940

The first English-language book on Augustine's Trinitarian doctrine of creation, The Trinity and Creation in Augustine explores Augustine's relevance for contemporary environmental issues. Modern, environmentally conscious thinkers often see Augustine's doctrines in a negative light, feeling they have been used to justify humankind's domination of nature. Considering Augustine's thought in his own time and in ours, Scott A. Dunham offers a more nuanced view. He begins with a consideration of the major themes that have characterized ecologically sensitive theologies and Augustine's place in those discussions. The primary examination considers how Augustine's doctrine of the Trinity informed his interpretation of the opening chapters of Genesis, especially his conceptions of divine creation, providence, and dominion. This analysis of Augustine's Trinitarian interpretation of Genesis stands in contrast to recent characterizations of classical conceptions of creation. The book concludes with a discussion of Augustine's relevance for modern theological thought by appraising Augustine's Trinitarian doctrine of creation in relation to ecological themes in theological ethics.