First, I’ve read Augustine; it’s pretty thickly Biblical. I respect your opinion but I’m sure you realize that his use of source texts is denser, more perspicuous, more consistent with the unanimous opinion of the patres, and much more careful to avoid assumptions than yours
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
End of conversation
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The question as framed is somewhat irrelevant due to its simplicity. I think we can all understand that there is a world of difference between holding to a fundamentally Christian, biblical worldview which is then used to assess outside systems...
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... versus using an outside system as a starting point which is then used to mold Christian content into a form closer to the likeness of the outside system. it is the latter which I would say Augustine did.
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We've all acceded that Augustine had heavy platonic influences. The testimony of the relevant contexts indicate that the influences worked in the direction I've indicated. As such, Augustine's philosophy can't really be considered "Christian" in an apostolic sense,
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...i.e. as being the pure faith handed down from the apostles who received it from Jesus Christ, but rather must be considered as "christianized"only. As a result, theological systems such as Reformed theology which rely heavily upon Augustinianism...
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...can only be considered "Christian" in a secondary sense in that they represent an overlay of a Christian veneer upon something else
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Now, don't misunderstand what I'm saying. I don't think that Augustine is useless or irrelevant or that we shouldn't be interested in what he had to say. I'm merely saying that we should be wary about building and following a doctrinal system based too closely up on his thought
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Your frame is silly. It’s especially silly coming from a Baptist since, as the papists love to point out, many ideas of the low church can be traced back in unbroken succession to actual heretics. You don’t think that matters for *you* because you are unaware of that history
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But it makes it ridiculous to claim that when you introject your axioms about free will into interpretation, that you are just invoking “common sense” and anyone who doesn’t see that axiom as necessary must be “influenced” by some other philosophy
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