Psychoanalysis is the response now?
What is more interesting is the Roman Church...
Yes, this does seem to be the claim of the author. Restating it does not do much to help defend it though.
If all the applicable quotes are Augustine's erroneous eccentricities in some minor doctrines, then please at least defend this new claim. Or help explain the original claim. I'm interested in both.
* I thought copying and pasting everything I have access to would be a bit excessive.
His writings on the important doctrines of the faith; God, Jesus, Trinity, grace, faith and his defense against the various heresies of the day are of more importance than his politically expedient views of the church.
*LOL So, when you agree with him he is a theologian and when you don't he is a politician.
He was writing in an era of waning power of the corrupt Roman Empire and his defense of centralized authority was politically convenient.
* His sourcing of the Catholic Church's authority was anchored in his personal politically expedient thoughts rather that being sourced in Scripture and Tradition, as his own words prove. Well, yours is an iteresting idea. Prove it citing St. Augustine's words.
What is more interesting is the Roman Church, although accepting his doctrine of the church has distanced itself from his doctrine of the free grace of God; indispensable, prevenient, irresisible, indefectible; and thus founded in all its details in the intentions of God from all eternity.
*My very first post proves your assertion wrong.
*Are you sure?
Luther's works..Augustine has sometimes erred and is not to be trusted. Although good and holy, he was yet lacking in the true faith, as well as the other fathers...But when the door was opended for me in Paul, so that I understood what justification by faith is, it was all over with Augustine.
St. Augustine.... When you shall have been baptized, keep to a good life in the commandments of God so that you may preserve your baptism to the very end. I do not tell you that you will live here without sin, but they are venial sins which this life is never without. Baptism was instituted for all sins. For light sins, without which we cannot live, prayer was instituted. . . . But do not commit those sins on account of which you would have to be separated from the body of Christ. Perish the thought! For those whom you see doing penance have committed crimes, either adultery or some other enormities. That is why they are doing penance. If their sins were light, daily prayer would suffice to blot them out. . . . In the Church, therefore, there are three ways in which sins are forgiven: in baptisms, in prayer, and in the greater humility of penance
*And y'all think THAT is Faith alone?
Amen. Let's read some again...
Let us, then, understand the calling whereby they become elected,—not those who are elected because they have believed, but who are elected that they may believe. For the Lord Himself also sufficiently explains this calling when He says, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you.” For if they had been elected because they had believed, they themselves would certainly have first chosen Him by believing in Him, so that they should deserve to be elected. But He takes away this supposition altogether when He says, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you.” And yet they themselves, beyond a doubt, chose Him when they believed on Him. Whence it is not for any other reason that He says, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,” than because they did not choose Him that He should choose them, but He chose them that they might choose Him; because His mercy preceded them according to grace, not according to debt. Therefore He chose them out of the world while He was wearing flesh, but as those who were already chosen in Himself before the foundation of the world. This is the changeless truth concerning predestination and grace. For what is it that the apostle says, “As He hath chosen us in Himself before the foundation of the world”? And assuredly, if this were said because God foreknew that they would believe, not because He Himself would make them believers, the Son is speaking against such a foreknowledge as that when He says, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you;” when God should rather have foreknown this very thing, that they themselves would have chosen Him, so that they might deserve to be chosen by Him. Therefore they were elected before the foundation of the world with that predestination in which God foreknew what He Himself would do; but they were elected out of the world with that calling whereby God fulfilled that which He predestinated. For whom He predestinated, them He also called, with that calling, to wit, which is according to the purpose. Not others, therefore, but those whom He predestinated, them He also called; nor others, but those whom He so called, them He also justified; nor others, but those whom He predestinated, called, and justified, them He also glorified; assuredly to that end which has no end. Therefore God elected believers; but He chose them that they might be so, not because they were already so. The Apostle James says: “Has not God chosen the poor in this world, rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which God hath promised to them that love Him?” By choosing them, therefore; He makes them rich in faith, as He makes them heirs of the kingdom; because He is rightly said to choose that in them, in order to make which in them He chose them. I ask, who can hear the Lord saying, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,” and can dare to say that men believe in order to be elected, when they are rather elected to believe; lest against the judgment of truth they be found to have first chosen Christ to whom Christ says, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you”?
Perhaps if our RC FRiends actually read the major writings of Augustine rather than rely on unattributed snippets they'd see what Luther and Calvin and all the Reformers saw -- just how far the church of Rome has strayed from the Biblical truth of God.