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3 St. Augustine Pamela Bright St. Augustine (354–430) was born in Thagaste (present-day Souq Ahras, Algeria ), in the Roman province of Numidia, North Africa, of a non-Christian father, Patricius, and a Christian mother, Monica. Augustine became an adherent of Manichaeism in his teens, but gradually grew disillusioned by Manichee teaching . He left Carthage, where he had been teaching rhetoric, and sailed for Rome, where he was soon appointed rhetor at the imperial court in Milan. There he encountered translated works of Neo-Platonist philosophers and heard the sermons of Ambrose, the great bishop of Milan, who helped him to overcome his earlier prejudices against the Bible. This paved the way for his conversion in the fall of 386, and by the Easter of 387 Monica rejoiced to see her thirty-three-year-old son a “Catholic Christian” at last.After his return to Africa in 388 to begin a kind of monastic experiment in Christian communal living, Augustine was pressed to accept priestly ordination, in 391, by Bishop Valerian of the seaside town of Hippo. In 395, Augustine was consecrated bishop of Hippo, where he died in 430, during the siege of the town by the invading Vandals. He had spent close to forty years as “minister of word and sacrament” in the African church, but through his writings Augustine’s fame and influence had spread throughout the Latin-speaking Mediterranean world. Augustine’s spiritual and intellectual journey can be traced through his letters , sermons, and writings, which have formed a rich religious and cultural legacy for the Christian Church in the West and beyond, from antiquity to the present. This is evident in his writings against the Manichees, the schismatic Donatist church of Africa, and the Pelagians who attacked his theology of grace. It can also be traced in the hundreds of extant sermons and letters, as well as in his great work on the history of salvation, The City of God.Augustine’s contribution to the interpretation and reception of scripture has been immensely influential in the sixteen centuries since his death. Along with 39 Jerome, he became the biblical voice of the Latin West. His commentaries on the Psalms and the Gospels, and especially his reading of the Epistle to the Romans, have left their imprint on subsequent Christian thought. The three masterpieces of his early episcopacy, On Christian Doctrine, Confessions, and The Literal Interpretation of Genesis, witness to the range and the scope of his understanding of scriptures, as well as to his extraordinary self-application to the biblical texts as the source of life for the Christian Church. Anyone who has crossed the equator knows the disorientation of missing the familiar constellations of the night sky. Looking up and recognizing Polaris or the Southern Cross gives the needed assurance of “locating” oneself along the axes of a kind of interior compass. A similar sense of disorientation arises when one attempts to enter the thought-world of Augustine. It is a world so nuanced and so multidimensional that one needs a kind of spiritual compass to navigate it. This is especially so when one attempts to systematize elements of his thought—his ecclesiology, his christology, his pneumatology, his theology of grace, or his doctrine of scripture. In order not to be lost in abstractions or sidetracked by secondary issues, one needs to find the lodestar around which his thought circles. For Augustine the lodestar is Christ. Whether it is in the hurlyburly of the controversy with the Manichees,1 the Donatists,2 and the Pelagians ,3 or in the depth of his contemplation of the vast panorama of salvation history4 or the woundedness of the human condition,5 Christ is the lodestar of his discourse. Any discussion of his doctrine of scripture, its authority, its nature, and its scope therefore must be guided by this fundamental orientation. Augustine’s doctrine of scripture was determined by his decades-long contemplation of the Eternal Word of God, incarnate in human history, assuming the lowliness of the human condition—at once, our Way, our Truth, and our Life: Notice how, although the truth itself and the word by which all things were made became flesh so that it could live among us, the apostle says, “and if we knew Christ according to the flesh, we do not know him the same way now.” In fact Christ, who chose to offer himself not only as a possession for those who come to their journey’s...

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