Augustine: Friend or Foe?

There has been considerable debate over the centuries of Constantine and whether his conversion or influence on the church was either negative or positive or more probably, a mix of both.  Augustine is estimated as one of the greatest Christians who ever lived by the western church.  His brilliant work called Confessions has stirred the imaginations of a multitude of Christians throughout history. But interesting, his popularity is mixed upon the Eastern church where many of his novel ideas translated down throughout church history, had negative consequences not only on the Eastern Orthodox Church but as a stain on the violence of the church throughout church history.

I for one view Augustine as a church father who like any other human, had his blind-spots and flaws.  Augustine never told the western church to follow his teachings alone but to look at a consensual reading of the early fathers and mothers of the Christian faith.  I also imagine that some of the seed ideas that Augustine planted in the church he would have been horrified to see how they were expanded, abused, and used for political and oppressive behavior.  Augustine chief aim of understanding Scripture was through the lens of love but how some of his ideas grew and evolved, took some very dark and ugly turns.

I will later look at some of the problems of Augustine's theology that has effected the church.  I remember once talking to a Catholic priest who gave a homily on how Augustine taught original sin and how we should follow that today.  I talked the Priest afterward and said, Augustine also said all babies are going to hell, what about that?  He said, the Catholic church does not believe nor teach that.  I then went further and said, them maybe Augustine's understanding of original sin may have been flawed as well.

Augustine was a faithful interpreter of Scripture from both a catholic and orthodox perspective in how he read the scriptures.  The problem was Augustine's Bible, the Latin Vulgate of his time had mistranslations of various key texts that led Augustine to several faulty conclusions. Augustine supported the idea of inherited guilt on his reading of Romans 5:12. The original Greek says that death passed upon all men because all have sinned (eph hoi) but Augustine's Latin text said in quo (in whom) which led to all sinned because of Adam's sin.

Augustine also believed in the conscious eternal punishment and God elected only a group of people to be saved in the end.  The imprecise language of vocabulary on eternity led Augustine in this direction since he did not know the different uses of the word aida which is not applied to human beings, the Greek word for describing this to humans is aidio.  Since Augustine did not know Greek like Origen and some of the early church fathers, the distinction and differences is completely lost to him.

I do not fault Augustine for following the Bible of his day with some mistranslations, but I do find fault with today's theologians who either blindly follow Augustine or try to get around the actual Greek text to fit it into Augustine's theories or faulty understandings.  The Spirit of the living God should lead us to humility and change and not our dogmatic understandings of some kind of systematic theology. Augustine is a friend but some of his ideas and teachings are unwelcomed guests today.