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Augustine taught that God orders all things while preserving human freedom. [175] Prior to 396, he believed predestination was based on God's foreknowledge of whether individuals would believe in Christ, that God's grace was "a reward for human assent". [176]
The opposition arose because Augustine’s view rejected the traditional view of election based upon God's foreknowledge, replacing it with a predestination as "necessity based upon fate". [89] Similarly, the Council of Arles (475) condemned the idea that "some have been condemned to death, others have been predestined to life". [ 90 ]
Augustine proposed that evil could not exist within God, nor be created by God, and is instead a by-product of God's creativity. [13] He rejected the notion that evil exists in itself, proposing instead that it is a privation of (or falling away from) good, and a corruption of nature. [ 5 ]
Augustine offered the Divine command theory, a theory which proposes that an action's status as morally good is equivalent to whether it is commanded by God. [16] [17] Augustine's theory began by casting ethics as the pursuit of the supreme good, which delivers human happiness, Augustine argued that to achieve this happiness, humans must love objects that are worthy of human love in the ...
Prevenient grace (or preceding grace or enabling grace) is a Christian theological concept that refers to the grace of God in a person's life which precedes and prepares to conversion. The concept was first developed by Augustine of Hippo (354–430), was affirmed by the Second Council of Orange (529) and has become part of Catholic theology.
The book presents human history as a conflict between what Augustine calls the Earthly City (often colloquially referred to as the City of Man, and mentioned once on page 644, chapter 1 of book 15) and the City of God, a conflict that is destined to end in victory for the latter. The City of God is marked by people who forgo earthly pleasure to ...
Readers shall believe all the Scripture is inspired by God and that each author wrote nothing in which he did not believe personally, or that he believed to be false. Readers must distinguish philologically, and keep separate, their own interpretations, the written message and the originally intended meaning of the messenger and author (in ...
Augustine says that a feature of the Scriptures is obscurity and that obscurity is the result of sin: that is, God made the Scriptures obscure in order to motivate and challenge our fallen minds. Augustine claims there are seven steps to wisdom in interpretation of the Scriptures: fear of God, holiness and faith, scientia (or knowledge ...