G
GaryTaylor
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Augustine City of God page-380
Chapter 13
As soon as our first parents had transgressed the commandment divive grace forsook them, and they were confronted with their own wickedness, thus they took fig leaves which was possibly the first that came to hand in their troubled state of mind, and they covered their shame, for though their members remained the same they had shame now and they had none before. They experienced a new motion of the flesh, which had become disobedient to them, in strict retribution of their own disobedience to God. For the soul reveling in its own liberty, and scorning to serve God, was self deprived of the command it had formally maintained over the body. And because it willfully had deserted its superior Lord, it no longer held its own inferior servant, neither could its hold the flesh subject as it would always had been able to do had it remained subject to God. Then the flesh began to lust against the spirit in which strife we are born, deriving from the first transgression a seed of death and bearing in our members, and in our vitiated nature, the contest, or the victory over death.
Chapter 14
For God the author of nature, not vice, created man upright, being of his own will corrupted and justly condemned, begot condemned and corrupted children. For we all were in that one man, who fell into sin by the women who was made from him before the sin. For not yet was the particular form created and distributed to us, in which we as individuals were to live, but already the seminal nature was therefrom which we were to be propagated; and this being vitiated by sin, and bound by the chains of death, and justly condemned, man could not be born of man in any other state. And thus from the bad use of free will, there originated the whole train of evil, with its concatenation of miseries, convoys the human race from its deprived origin, as from a corrupt root. on to the destruction of the second death, which has no end, and those only being accepted are freed by the grace of God.
I think we are doing to much sola scripture reading of the Saints and Scripture. That’s why God left the Church so in our vitiated state as Augustine put it we might avoid further confusion, bad choices and scurrying for leaves wondering how you wound up with Eve.
Chapter 13
As soon as our first parents had transgressed the commandment divive grace forsook them, and they were confronted with their own wickedness, thus they took fig leaves which was possibly the first that came to hand in their troubled state of mind, and they covered their shame, for though their members remained the same they had shame now and they had none before. They experienced a new motion of the flesh, which had become disobedient to them, in strict retribution of their own disobedience to God. For the soul reveling in its own liberty, and scorning to serve God, was self deprived of the command it had formally maintained over the body. And because it willfully had deserted its superior Lord, it no longer held its own inferior servant, neither could its hold the flesh subject as it would always had been able to do had it remained subject to God. Then the flesh began to lust against the spirit in which strife we are born, deriving from the first transgression a seed of death and bearing in our members, and in our vitiated nature, the contest, or the victory over death.
Chapter 14
For God the author of nature, not vice, created man upright, being of his own will corrupted and justly condemned, begot condemned and corrupted children. For we all were in that one man, who fell into sin by the women who was made from him before the sin. For not yet was the particular form created and distributed to us, in which we as individuals were to live, but already the seminal nature was therefrom which we were to be propagated; and this being vitiated by sin, and bound by the chains of death, and justly condemned, man could not be born of man in any other state. And thus from the bad use of free will, there originated the whole train of evil, with its concatenation of miseries, convoys the human race from its deprived origin, as from a corrupt root. on to the destruction of the second death, which has no end, and those only being accepted are freed by the grace of God.
I think we are doing to much sola scripture reading of the Saints and Scripture. That’s why God left the Church so in our vitiated state as Augustine put it we might avoid further confusion, bad choices and scurrying for leaves wondering how you wound up with Eve.
Moral laws are essential conditions of personal development and fulfilment. We ignore them at our peril…