Augustine, the Trinity, and the Church: A Reading of the Anti-Donatist Sermons by Adam Ployd (review)

Adam Ployd, a United Methodist deacon, teaches Church History and Historical Theology at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis. The book under review is his first monograph, a revised version of his dissertation written under the direction of Lewis Ayres and Anthony Briggman at Emory University. Though the influence of Ayres, as well as that of Michel René Barnes, is felt on nearly every page, both Ployd's source material and his thesis are unique. From the outset, he asks his readers to view Augustine not only as a "polemical or occasional theologian" but also (and primarily) as a preacher (1). Ployd is the first to treat the forty-one sermons Augustine preached between the winter of 406 and the summer of 407, drawn from the Enarrationes in Psalmos (119–33), Tractatis in Iohannis Evangelium (1–16), and Tractatus in Iohannis Epistulam (1–10), as a complete series, "a long discourse that Augustine conducts with his audience" (2). This discourse develops an understanding of the "church" (here, I follow Ployd's "intentionally vague" usage; see 4n6) that is intimately connected with Augustine's Trinitarian theology, and in particular, his "pro-Nicene" reading of Scripture. Ployd argues: "Augustine uses pro-Nicene principles and exegesis to construct his anti-Donatist vision of the church and in doing so he describes how the church shares in the life of the Trinity through the Son's giving of the Spirit to his own body" (3).

Ployd explores this thesis in four argumentatively compressed chapters, beginning with what he calls Augustine's "moral epistemology" in chapter 1. This term of art, deployed throughout the book, describes Augustine's insistence that knowledge and love are mutually informing, such that "we advance in knowledge of God through the reformation of our desire" (19). Ployd argues that, for Augustine, we maximally come to know and to love the God revealed in Jesus Christ as members of the church. Augustine's preaching is singularly directed toward the cultivation of this "moral epistemology," which Augustine theoretically explored with characteristic conceptual rigor in his De Trinitate, composed only a few years before the sermon series under consideration (beginning ca. 401–405). Ployd shows how Augustine's "intellectual" approach to Philippians 2:6–7 relates to his "moral" approach to Matthew 5:8. In order to interpret Scripture appropriately, the exegete must understand that the designation of Christ as appearing "in the form of a slave" does not negate his remaining "in the form of God." One becomes capable of closing the epistemological gap between the incarnate and the eternal Christ through moral purity cultivated in faith (see Matt 5:8). In turning to the sermon series, Ployd shows how the church becomes, for Augustine, both a vehicle of access to the faithful love that enables one "to bridge the epistemological gap" between the material and the spiritual (32) and an object for theological reflection that requires humility, "the primary disposition of the Christian life" (54).

In chapter 2, Ployd explores the Christological dimension of the church, and in particular, how Augustine construes our incorporation into the one grammatical subject of Christ in his homiletic exegesis. To this end, Ployd explores the nature of "prosopological exegesis as the best way to understand how Augustine speaks of our unity with Christ in these sermons" (57). Though persona occurs only once in the Enarrationes under consideration, Ployd rightly argues that "prosopology" is crucial for Augustine's Enarrationes as a whole and that Augustine's use of it elsewhere justifies his consideration of it as "the guiding motif" of the psalms of ascent (64). Here, Augustine consistently interprets the voice of the psalmist as the voice of Christ, and by extension, of the church: "Many Christians joined as one to each other by being united with and into the one Christ" (65–66). Incorporation in the church means becoming part of Christ's body, which...