Browsing by Subject "Augustine"

The theologies of St. Augustine and John Howard Yoder are, if at all treated together, typically contrasted. This negative juxtaposition is in so small part due to the very different reputations of each theologian on the question of violence. This dissertation demonstrates that the standard contrast between the theopolitical visions of Yoder and Augustine is mistaken. An introduction portrays the cumulative work of the chapters as the unfolding of a question about the contemporary reception of Augustine and Yoder: Might John Howard Yoder's "pacifism of the messianic community" be received as a radical form of Augustinianism? The dissertation consists of four chapters, each dealing with some aspect of Yoder's or Augustine's thought which, under closer examination, reveals an interesting line of convergence with the thought of the other. The politics of historical interpretation, the challenge of interiority, the aims of historicism, and the nature of "the political" are taken up in succession. An affirmative answer to the overarching question is suggested, but the more important task is to render the question salient for contemporary theologians and ethicists.

For over a century, theologians, ethicists, and philosophers have debated the coherence and moral validity of Augustine’s account of self-love. What to make of statements like “Love the Lord, and in so doing learn how to love yourselves” (s. 90.6) and humanity’s ruin “was caused by love of self” (s. 96.2)? Does Augustine’s account of self-love contain an inner contradiction? And does loving oneself by loving God turn God into an instrument in the quest for self-love and happiness?

In this dissertation, I analyze Augustine’s account of self-love and its relevance for pastoral care and redefine the more than a century-old debate in three ways. First, employing Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, enriched by Augustine’s insights, I analyze the prejudgments scholars brought to this debate. I demonstrate that scholars who fault Augustine’s understanding of enjoyment (frui) with instrumentalization read Augustine with wrong assumptions. Aware of how modern utilitarianism’s emphasis on happiness could lead to the instrumentalization of people, critics like Hannah Arendt, Anders Nygren, and Oliver O’Donovan think Augustine’s usage of utilitas (“usefulness”) and uti (“use”) instrumentalizes God and neighbor. Through a detailed analysis of how uti and utilitas appear in ordinary Latin, ancient philosophy, Scripture, and Augustine’s writings, I show that Augustine uses forms of uti to describe the divine order. For Augustine, to use something is not to instrumentalize it but to love it as it should be loved: as an end in itself, situated within the higher end of loving God above all, from which every end receives its order, meaning, and purpose.

Second, situating Augustine’s account of self-love in its historical context—Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, the debate between Stoicism and the Old Academy about the good life, and Scripture—I refute that his interpretation of self-love is incoherent. Augustine’s understanding of self-love is grounded in the ancient ideal of therapy. In antiquity, therapy is about a new way of seeing and being in the world. Through his writings and preaching, Augustine seeks to move his readers from a competitive self-love that favors the self over others to a connective self-love that flourishes in loving relationships with God and neighbor.

Third, having established the nature and coherence of Augustine’s account of self-love, I go one step further by making explicit the implicit motivation for the entire debate: the relevance of Augustine’s interpretation of self-love for living a good life. I argue that Augustine’s nuanced understanding of self-love offers a good starting point for integrating self-care and self-denial for the common good. And in dialogue with feminist critiques of Augustine and Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, I also analyze where Augustine’s account of self-love needs to be corrected and expanded.

In this dissertation, I argue that the conceptual grammar of Augustine's thought provides a way of re-thinking the public/private distinction as it has been developed in modernity. The dissertation consists of two parts. The first part is a conceptual analysis and a genealogy of the distinction through focus on specific private characters produced in both antiquity and modernity. I focus on the characters of the "woman" and the "refugee." Conceptually, I argue that the public/private distinction can be seen both as an anthropological distinction and as a socio-political distinction: claims about the structure, nature, and history of selves have implications for how society ought to be organized, and claims about how society ought to be organized have implications about the structure, nature, and history of selves. I show how Christianity changed society by creating new character scripts and with them, new socio-political possibilities. The second part of the dissertation provides one Augustinian conceptual "grammar" that makes sense of the revolution Christianity effected possible, and it responds to problems raised by the genealogy in the first half by providing a close reading of Augustine's texts relating to God and creation, interiority, salvation and beatitude, and the Virgin Mary. I display the logic in Augustine's thought by which, in God, domestic and public come together, how God's relation to creation changes how to think about interiority, what that means for how Augustine understands salvation as a restoration of proper inwardness, and how the character of the Virgin Mary condenses the grammar as a sacrament of human salvation. I draw out the ways that Mary shows how Augustinian thought provides resources to think "beyond" the public/private distinction both as it was given to her in antiquity and how it has been received in modernity.

Throughout the life of the Church, certain habits have been cultivated to shape the identity of its community and deepen our communion with God. We see in the writings of the Desert Fathers that attentiveness is one habit that people of faith have taken care to cultivate to better connect with God. Contemporary of the Desert Fathers, Saint Augustine, also speaks to attentiveness and its relation to time. What both the Desert writers and Augustine understand is that our ability to connect with God depends on our ability to be attentive in the present moment.

This thesis will argue that an embodied, present attentiveness is foundational to a relationship with God; furthermore, given the patterns of attention developed around Wireless Mobile Devices (i.e. smartphones) and the strong pull on its users for their constant interaction, I argue that the practices created around these devices do in fact hinder one's ability to connect with God, despite their other potential for good. The thesis employs qualitative research in the form of literature reviews. First, drawing from the practices of the Desert Fathers and Augustine's understanding of the relationship between time, memory, and knowledge of God, I make a case for the discipline of embodied attentiveness to the present moment as foundational to our relationship with God. I then draw from current psychological, sociological and anthropological insights to model how the current technological landscape places particular pressures on an embodied present attentiveness, with specific focus on the Wireless Mobile Device (WMD), commonly known as the smartphone. Finally, I place in conversation the findings from these reviews; leading to an assessment on the patterns technology creates around attentiveness.

People are becoming increasingly aware and concerned that the Internet and Wireless Mobile Devices are not neutral mediums and consistent exposure (and use) of these mediums is affecting us. We will see in this thesis that not only are habits of communication shifting, but also we are literally being rewired as our neural pathways are firing into uncharted territory. While psychological, sociological, and philosophical assessments of communication technologies and the self are critical to understand various implications on attentiveness, the goal of this thesis is to articulate the practices that the use of Wireless Mobile Devices cultivates regarding attentiveness through a theological lens.

As we begin to understand the concerns of the Saints who have gone before us, combined with understanding the shifting landscape of technology as it pertains to attentiveness, we can imagine why it is that the Church ought to be concerned with the continued cultivation of the discipline of attentiveness. Rather than simply "sounding the alarm" that technology is detrimental to our spiritual formation, however, this thesis will attempt to help the Church have a more nuanced understanding of why social media inhibits our ability to be attentive, as it examines to what end (telos) our attention is being drawn. After developing a more robust understanding of why a present, embodied attentiveness is foundational to our relationship with God, we will be able to enter into conversations regarding social media that are nuanced beyond it having "positive" and "negative" effects.

This project rereads the political thought of Augustine of Hippo in the Black Lives Matter era. In the last two decades, scholars of religion and politics made a striking return to the constructive resources of the Augustinian tradition to theorize citizenship, virtue, and the place of religion in public life. However, these scholars have not sufficiently attended to Augustine’s embrace of the position of the Christian slaveholder in light of the fact that the contemporary situation to which they apply his thought is itself the afterlife of slavery. The ghosts of slaves and masters live on, haunting the ongoing social meanings of blackness and whiteness in American life. To confront a racialized world, the Augustinian tradition must reckon with its own entanglements with the afterlife of the white Christian master. This reckoning demands a constructive encounter, at once timely and long overdue, between Augustine’s politics and the resources of modern Black thought. Drawing from these two intellectual traditions, this constructive religious ethics dissertation develops a critical account of the problem of the Christian master, even as it presses toward an alternative construal of key concepts of ethical life—agency, virtues, temporality—against and beyond the framework of mastery.

This exercise in constructive Christian theology presents the relation between the testaments as a critical problematic for the figural reading of the Old Testament. The project consists of two parts, the first focusing on Augustine and Calvin, and the second primarily on the Epistle to the Hebrews.

The first part provides a typological comparison between Augustine and Calvin on the continuity and discontinuity of the testaments (chapters 1-2), the people of God across the testaments (chapter 3), and the purpose of Scripture in redemptive history (chapter 4). Augustine defines the unity of the testaments according to a sign-referent framework whereby the Old Testament signifies the New. Calvin, on the other hand, locates this unity in the one covenant, grounded in Christ across the testaments. Since Augustine thinks the grace of the New Testament was veiled before the time of Christ, he asserts the necessity of interpreting the Old Testament according to two levels of meaning: the literal and the spiritual. Since Calvin thinks both the Old and New Testaments reveal the knowledge of God, he restricts interpretation to the literal sense, though this sense can have multiple referents: Israel, Christ, the church, and the eschaton. Each figure struggles to account for Israel and the Old Testament saints. For Augustine, the saints belonged to the New Testament as they mediated the Old. Calvin alternately identifies Israel as the church during Old Testament times, and the Old Testament saints as redemptive-historical aberrations.

The second part draws upon this typological comparison to consider the Epistle to the Hebrews with reference to its depiction of redemptive history (chapter 5), its appropriation of the Psalms (chapter 6), and its overarching vision of Scripture (chapter 7). Hebrews locates the discontinuity between the testaments in the establishment of Christ as high priest, and the continuity in a common people and a common hope for an eternal inheritance. The author interprets the Psalms neither according to two levels of meaning, nor within an expansive literal sense, but as a living word of address whereby God speaks directly to his people. Old Testament locutions retain their illocutionary force, but adopt new valence in light of Christ. The authority of Scripture, then, rests not in some historically reconstructed sense, but in God's self-communicative act in the redemptive-historical present.

A Christian doctrine of happiness differs greatly from contemporary and pseudo-Christian conceptions of happiness, which are measured subjectively and by the accumulation of external goods. In order to develop a fresh account with objective standards, I critique, integrate and revise Aristotle and Augustine’s accounts of happiness. Additionally, I rely heavily on scriptures to present a telos of godlikeness that in turn informs a robust account of makarios. Throughout the thesis, the argument is made that happiness (eudaimonia) and blessedness (makarios) are equivalents. Despite the skepticism of liberal theologians, Christian happiness (makarios) is promised in the New Testament and achievable in this life. Fundamentally, makarios is relational, active, constant, and dependent.

For Augustine, Scripture resounds like a Bach cantata. At every moment, its allegories reverberate with many voices. In the Psalmist David’s voice we hear Christ’s, in whose voice we hear the Church’s, in whose voice we hear the saved or sinful soul. Voices—persons—agencies are in allegory distinct yet simultaneously entwined. I argue that such allegorical multivocality, in which voices, persons, and agencies are intermingled, affords a means to understand our shared agency and life with God. My dissertation explores this claim through two late medieval texts. In the anonymously authored fourteenth-century poem Pearl, the polysemy of memory reveals the polysemy of allegory and agency. Through recursive recollection the dreamer finds that his grief and despair are threaded through with God. Likewise Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Divine Love declares that even in deepest sin God is present. We have no autonomous, sin-stained selfhood, no self- and sin-defined meaning to our lives apart from an allegorical and Christological hermeneutic. Altogether our texts attest to our deep-grounded life in God. However dark our grief and despair, and however deep our sin, we are never God-bereft.

Abstract

This dissertation queries the ongoing significance and fruitfulness of Augustine of Hippo's insight that the Holy Spirit is the Love of God. Rather than turning to the standard text, his De Trinitate, this project examines closely the earlier Tractatus in Epistolam Joannis ad Pathos, a set of sermons on 1 John delivered mostly during the Octave of Easter.

The study of the Tractatus is offered in conjunction with a much later interlocutor, John Wesley. A close reading of Augustine's sermons of the Tractatus is synthesized with a close reading of Wesley's five extant sermons on texts from 1 John. The principal argument in this dissertation is that a synthesis of Augustine and John Wesley on the Holy Spirit produces a nuanced understanding of the Holy Spirit as the Love of God that enriches contemporary systematic theology. Furthermore, instead of either a purely archeological retrieval or genealogical study of these two theologians, this dissertation demonstrates the potential for enrichment by offering constructive proposals concerning the systematic coherence between a theology of divine desire and a theology of Christian initiation made possible by this Augustinian-Wesleyan approach to the Spirit.

The opening chapters, one through three, form an exegetical and synthesizing foundation, establishing the basic building blocks of the constructive proposals of chapter four, a theology of divine desire, and chapter five, a theology of Christian initiation. In the early chapters, the dissertation draws on the recent insights into systematic theology of Sarah Coakley and A.N. Williams in order to approach systematics in a way that brings coherence to a disparate set of homiletical texts. The conclusion of the dissertation is that Augustine's naming of the Holy Spirit, far from being an ancient relic best abandoned, resonates strongly with Wesley's own insights into the Spirit's person and work and that an Augustinian-Wesleyan pneumatology suggests possibilities for further cross-centuries examination of these two significant Christian preachers.

This dissertation is a theological exploration of liturgical prayer based on a congregational case study, one that focuses on the actual prayers of a specific worshiping community. The analysis of the prayers at The Summit Church, a congregation in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, leads to an initial conclusion: prayer times at these worship services were relatively short, focusing almost exclusively on matters related to the congregation’s mission and outreach efforts. People at Summit say that they pray a great deal, and they do—but not during corporate worship.

This dissertation interprets this seeming contradiction by drawing on two sources of cultural history. The first looks at the local history of Summit and its adoption of contemporary worship forms. The Summit Church is paradigmatic in its blending of two liturgical theologies and their sets of practices—one from the Pentecostal revival of the mid-twentieth century and the other from the Church Growth movement of about the same period. The convergence of these commitments can explain the reduction of prayer time in light of pragmatic considerations aimed at increasing service attendance.

The analysis of the congregation’s transcribed prayers reveals further connections among the prayer acts themselves and both sources of liturgical theology. The primary way God’s presence is sensed in worship is through the conversion of non-Christians, and so prayers are devoted almost exclusively to that end. The prayers themselves affirm the importance of the congregation’s commitment to mission—and its desire to increase the number of baptized Christians by proclaiming the gospel to those who have not yet accepted it—in decisions about how the church prays.

A second source of cultural history helps explain why Summit and other similar congregations have made such proclamations—and the corresponding propositional claims about God—the centerpiece of their liturgies. Catherine Pickstock’s historical reading of shifts in sacramental theology reveals that all liturgical acts, including prayer, have been altered by modern-era philosophical commitments. Specifically, Pickstock foregrounds a series of liturgical changes that have subordinated the role of the gathered body of Christ in the Western church’s imagination since the late Middle Ages. This change signals a loss of an ancient understanding of Christ’s body as comprising three mutually constitutive components: his incarnate historical body, the sacramental body, and the ecclesial body. Certain segments of Protestantism have prioritized claims about the historical body, and this has led to the kind of mission-focused liturgical praying seen at Summit.

The final section of the dissertation applies an Augustinian theology of the body to liturgical prayer. Saint Augustine’s theology of totus Christus, treated most thoroughly in his Expositions on the Psalms, offers corrections to a Western church that has lost a robust theology of the gathered body. Augustine suggests a different way of looking at the church’s role in prayer by working with the multiple interactions that the body of Christ has with its head and priest, i.e., Jesus Christ. The questions raised by looking at Summit Church thus open a way into a renewed imagination for liturgical prayers for all churches, not only Protestant, evangelical, or free church congregations. Adding an Augustinian liturgical theology to a missional emphasis like Summit’s—that is, teaching the church to pray for converts so that more voices will praise Christ and will be prayed through by Christ—is a way to enrich the prayers of the people of God.

The following work explores identity from overlapping vantage points; biblical/theological, historical and practical to establish a robust understanding of identity in our present time. This thesis explores the ontological elements of God and the meaning of “image bearer” through Scripture in Genesis 1-2; Psalm 8; an overview of Wisdom Literature in Job and Ecclesiastes; and the New Testament in Ephesians and Colossians. From a historical view, this thesis focuses on the work of St. Augustine and how humanity was “naturally created” in the imago Dei. Even those that are not Christ followers share in the imago Dei, as hidden as it may be, to be discovered and set free. Through this process, we see holiness (in contradistinction to morality) as foundational to our existence and reflective of God. Holiness is expressed through love in its proper order. For Augustine, our love of God conditions our love for all other things. This establishes an objective starting point, fundamental to all Christians, a proper understanding and embodiment of the Great Commandment. Finally, by practically applying a fresh understanding of one’s identity, humanity has an opportunity to thrive by acknowledging the positive implications of the embracing and embodiment of the imago Dei.The primary methodology of this thesis is through interpreting Scripture in light of the question, “what does it mean to be created in the imago Dei?” Using the work of the early Church Fathers such as Ambrose and Augustine give interpretive grounding to passages in both Old and New Testaments. Reading both primary and secondary sources on the imago Dei and its impact upon humankind and specifically the Church. Lastly, incorporating and integrating the work of modern psychology in understanding the modern person in light of the creative work of God in the beginning to our current day.

The following work explores identity from overlapping vantage points; biblical/theological, historical and practical to establish a robust understanding of identity in our present time. This thesis explores the ontological elements of God and the meaning of “image bearer” through Scripture in Genesis 1-2; Psalm 8; an overview of Wisdom Literature in Job and Ecclesiastes; and the New Testament in Ephesians and Colossians. From a historical view, this thesis focuses on the work of St. Augustine and how humanity was “naturally created” in the imago Dei. Even those that are not Christ followers share in the imago Dei, as hidden as it may be, to be discovered and set free. Through this process, we see holiness (in contradistinction to morality) as foundational to our existence and reflective of God. Holiness is expressed through love in its proper order. For Augustine, our love of God conditions our love for all other things. This establishes an objective starting point, fundamental to all Christians, a proper understanding and embodiment of the Great Commandment. Finally, by practically applying a fresh understanding of one’s identity, humanity has an opportunity to thrive by acknowledging the positive implications of the embracing and embodiment of the imago Dei.The primary methodology of this thesis is through interpreting Scripture in light of the question, “what does it mean to be created in the imago Dei?” Using the work of the early Church Fathers such as Ambrose and Augustine give interpretive grounding to passages in both Old and New Testaments. Reading both primary and secondary sources on the imago Dei and its impact upon humankind and specifically the Church. Lastly, incorporating and integrating the work of modern psychology in understanding the modern person in light of the creative work of God in the beginning to our current day.

This dissertation investigates the origins of death. It does so by drawing on Augustine of Hippo’s theology of creation, especially as expressed in his De Genesi ad litteram. It argues that recovering Augustine’s theory of the rationes seminales as presented in De Genesi ad litteram is a useful tool that allows contemporary theology to engage with modern cosmology and evolutionary biology without compromising on Catholic magisterial teaching regarding the connection between sin and death. The work consists of five chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion.

The first chapter is methodological. It explains how one might read the text of Genesis ad litteram in the sense Augustine uses the term. To do this, it draws on the resources of Ordinary Language Philosophy. Chapter two investigates Augustine’s use of the term ‘rationes seminales’ and provides a speculative account of what they are. Chapter three connects the speculations on the rationes seminales to the fall of the angels, examining scriptural and doctrinal evidences concerning the nature of the demons. Chapter four remains focused on the angelic fall, but from a literary perspective. It uses Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and Milton’s Paradise Lost to flesh out a theology of angels, their fall, and the effects this has on the created order. The last chapter examines how the effects of the angelic fall play out in time. It connects the speculations about the angelic fall to the human fall, showing how the doctrine of original sin as taught by the Catholic magisterium is compatible with discoveries in evolutionary biology and modern cosmology.

This dissertation investigates the origins of death. It does so by drawing on Augustine of Hippo’s theology of creation, especially as expressed in his De Genesi ad litteram. It argues that recovering Augustine’s theory of the rationes seminales as presented in De Genesi ad litteram is a useful tool that allows contemporary theology to engage with modern cosmology and evolutionary biology without compromising on Catholic magisterial teaching regarding the connection between sin and death. The work consists of five chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion.

The first chapter is methodological. It explains how one might read the text of Genesis ad litteram in the sense Augustine uses the term. To do this, it draws on the resources of Ordinary Language Philosophy. Chapter two investigates Augustine’s use of the term ‘rationes seminales’ and provides a speculative account of what they are. Chapter three connects the speculations on the rationes seminales to the fall of the angels, examining scriptural and doctrinal evidences concerning the nature of the demons. Chapter four remains focused on the angelic fall, but from a literary perspective. It uses Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and Milton’s Paradise Lost to flesh out a theology of angels, their fall, and the effects this has on the created order. The last chapter examines how the effects of the angelic fall play out in time. It connects the speculations about the angelic fall to the human fall, showing how the doctrine of original sin as taught by the Catholic magisterium is compatible with discoveries in evolutionary biology and modern cosmology.

This dissertation investigates the political grammars of truth-telling employed by two sets of early Christian authors, the Cappadocian Fathers (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa), who wrote in Greek, and Augustine of Hippo, who wrote in Latin. My aim is to describe the rules that these thinkers take to order relations implicated in the Christian’s acts of parrhêsia and confessio before other human persons and before the LORD. To this end, I employ methodology derived from ordinary language philosophy (OLP), which understands the meaning of a word to be constituted by its use within the form of life of a particular community.

In so doing, I argue against the conclusions of Michel Foucault on the politics of truth-telling in the early Christian tradition. Foucault depicts parrhêsia as an act of individual self-expression that belongs to an order of familiar, and fearless relations between the speaker and a God who holds no standards of judgment that the Christian does not always already meet. By contrast, he characterizes confessio as a form of cringing and self-doubting submission in fear that belongs to a hierarchical politics of discipline and punishment in which unnecessary distance is introduced to relations between the Christian and the LORD through the mediation of human authorities.

A far different picture emerges when we look at the grammars of parrhêsia and confessio as these terms were used by the Cappadocians and Augustine within their historical and cultural contexts – the forms of life of their linguistic communities – rather than interpreting them through the lens of our own post-Enlightenment languages and politics. The conceptual grammar of parrhêsia employed by both pagans and Christians required the speaker to calculate her ability to justify and demonstrate the acceptability of herself and her speech on criteria held by listeners, and to use non-verbal means of assuring that what she displayed and disclosed in speaking could meet these criteria. The grammar of confessio, as Augustine presents it, allows speech to serve as a medium through which the speaker can be made righteous and brought into right relationship with the LORD by dispositions of faith, humility, and ecstatic self-dispossession in the act of speaking.