Second, your particular argument is falsely premised. The extension of grace is not the same thing as God choosing for us to "choose" to be saved. We know that God's will is for all to repent and be saved (II Peter 3:9, I Tim. 2:4).
You say he’s a platonist and elsewhere imply he fell afoul of Paul’s strictures on pagan vanity
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But he wasn’t a platonist. Augustine’s philosophy is bizarre. His answers to a number of phil. questions are simply unique (well, him and Tertullian)
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It IS bizarre, but I don't think we can really deny that he was heavily influenced by platonic thought, even as he sought to differentiate Christianity from Platonism in areas such as creation, nature of the soul, etc.
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Just to be clear - are you saying some of Augustine’s epistemology, cosmology, sociological ideas in Civ. Dei come from Plato, etc? or that the soteriology and christology people call “Augustinian” is in fact just Platonism?
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I took you to be saying the latter - sort of a non sequitur otherwise Btw it’s not super-easy to say which way some of these lines of causation run.
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For example, Origen was the disciple of a Platonist, and also had some heretical views, and it’s pretty clear the heresies are just creative Platonic interpretations of Gospel
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But then for many later writers with similar views... were they influenced by Plato? neoplatonists? Or by Origen and the Alexandrian school of theology he founded?
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Typically when secular historians take the reductive “Athens and Jerusalem” approach and claim the Christian tradition is a creative fusion of Paul’s ideas with Greek philosophy, they’re talking about the Alexandrine approach - Clement and Origen, free will, etc
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I'd say he reversed the approach, using philosophy as a framework for approaching revealed truths, rather than the other way around. I've no problem with using the Gospel as a starting point for "philosophising" about everything else...
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Philosophy is not a valid means of *building* a hermeneutics, however
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Right I think I agree. What Philo does, eg, isn’t heretical so long as you remind yourself it’s not biblical doctrine
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Likewise I have thought quite careful about what we can reasonably infer about prehistory from Genesis, given what we know from archaeology and previously confirmed sections; this is not exegesis, but it’s also not sensible unless you believe it’s an accurate document
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