F
fhansen
Guest
I’m not sure why you would even say this-maybe we just all like to claim Augustine for ourselves. We should expect Augustine to be consistent with Paul, however, whom Augustine paraphrases in De Trinitate, referring to 1 Cor 13 as I did earlier. Augustine was also consistent here with James in the 1st and 2nd chapters of his letter. The link between all three is the fact that justice for man is defined by love, not faith, faith being only a part of the equation.
This confusion, about God’s will for man, should serve to highlight the sheer fallacy of the doctrine of Sola Scriptura and the damage it’s done to the faith. The Church* understands* the gospel, from the vantage point of having lived and received it firsthand. And as Paul was battling legalism with the Judaizers, and Augustine later with Pelagius, they both rightly and necessarily emphasized the role of grace in becoming just in the eyes of God. Paul understood that faith is the means or doorway to a* life* of grace and the righteousness it produces. So did Augustine. Both of them knew that this new life meant communion with the Father, through whom all justice flows. Man cannot be righteous on his own, apart from God. But man certainly can be righteous; he wasn’t created to be a sinner after all. Again, man was made for communion with God; we’re broken, incomplete, lost without it. Adam shattered this relationship for humankind. So here, again, Augustine speaks to the true definition of righteousness or justice in “On Nature and Grace”:
"Inchoate love, therefore, is inchoate righteousness; . . . great love is great righteousness; perfect love is perfect righteousness."
It’s admittedly not hard to understand how a person reading the New Testament, on his own centuries after the events took place, with a great deal of the New Testament produced as it were by Paul, might walk away with some of the confused and rather shallow and simplistic views the Reformers arrived at regarding faith (faith alone), and, to a lesser degree perhaps, about the role of the will of man. But we have to dig deeper, into the wealth of knowledge that the CC has had from the beginning, and has cultivated and grown and pondered and clarified over the centuries. For Catholicism, there’s absolutely no conflict between Paul and James-it would never even come up as it did for Luther.
As for freewill, even if we at least agree that Adam fell freely, fallen man must also have a say in his rising again, in his salvation, because unless his will plays some part, however weak at first, God is reduced to a wicked and petty little god, because it means He would’ve predetermined from the beginning who’d end up in heaven and who in eternal torment with no actual culpability even possible on the part of the persons involved. The whole drama of the Fall of man, with all the history that followed of pain and suffering and tears and struggle has no meaning or purpose; God may as well have just stocked heaven with the elect and hell with the rest to begin with. But that’s not the way it is. Here, in this life, in this exile, we work out our salvation, with choices that have real meaning and real consequences.
We have to understand something of God’s overall plan behind all this. It was never to simply allow-or cause-man to Fall, and then save some of us undeserving wretches anyway at some future date with a sort of sterile legal transaction-end of story. God’s purpose is much grander, much more incredible. He loves man lavishly; he seeks to *serve *us. He knows who we can be, who He created us to be. And He created His world “in statu viae”, in a “state of journeying” to perfection. He’s been patiently molding and drawing that creation into a state of justice, not merely to restore the justice that Adam lost, but to ultimately produce even greater justice in us yet, as we come to participate in “owning” that justice, as we will it, and increasingly embrace and will it. It’s about being transformed, with our continuing cooperation-with our “yes”- into the image of God, the image of love where sin is naturally excluded- prior to entrance into heaven BTW, as Scripture insists must be the case. And there’s no limit to the amount of this justice that God can realize in us, because there’re no limits to love. In any event we’re called to participate in this perfecting, a journey that begins for us with Baptism where we receive a fresh start, becoming a “new creation”.
Man was made for much greater things than we can even imagine; man was made to be “divinized”. This is the consistent teaching of the Church, east and west, since the beginning. God wants more for us than we even know enough to want for ourselves-always has, ever since Eden.