The Pelagian heresy

This shows that Augustine was a mixed bag of truth and error, as the whole pagan notion of sex being evil in itself (a Satanic attack against God and His Creation, which caused untold grief in marriages, led to the celibate priests, and the whole perverted mess going in in that Church now, and fueled most of the modern rebellion against the Church as neurotic and controlling and rejection of the Bible as unnatural and anti-life) and infant baptism was mixed into the issues.
The Bible declares physical creation good, while it was the human soul that was fallen and evil, and simply misusing physical creation; but people like Augustine reversed it into a good soul trapped in an evil body (affected by a purely physical "original sin", 'salvation by grace alone', notwithstanding).

Therefore, detractors the rejected the Biblical truth (original sin and depravity, sexual continance until marriage, etc) along with the twisted error. Augustine was one of the worst influences in church history.

[ November 18, 2002, 11:13 PM: Message edited by: Eric B ]

 

Please, brother, I believe you engage in hyperbole here. Would you have rather that the ideas of Pelagius had won the day and orthodox Christianity would be along the lines of the Church of Christ with baptismal regeneration and salvation by works, with the idea that man comes into this world pure as Adam was on the day he was created?

There is no man among us who does not have feet of clay. Remember the apostle Paul even reprimanded the apostle Peter and this after Peter had preached to Cornelius. Every man is both a victim and a maker of his times.

I see other things much worse in church history than anything you can ascribe to Augustine - such as the papacy and the revivalism of Charles Finney for glaring examples that still plague us to this very day.

Ken

 

If the brethren would take the word of God for what it teaches and not look so much to what so and so taught we would all be in a better position.

 

Amen.

Ken

 

I didn't say those were better, but those are condemned by most of us, while Augustine is unreservedly praised.

Some of what he taught is just as bad as those other teachings, and he is considered one of the "four legs of the papal chair". If people realized how much damage the sex-is-evil teaching he helped promote (and out of guilt of his own previous vices) alone did to the Western ethic, they wouldn't be so angry at the world today for its rebellion against the Church. Pelagianism is definitely wrong, but speculating too much on predestination (to Heaven or especially Hell) and God's eternal decrees simply opened up another can of worms with no earthly resolution (it's all ultimately above our comprehension and should have been left at that) to provide centuries more of argument in the church. You don't try to contradict an error to the point of going to the opposite, and equally unbiblical extreme (as so many do in almost every issue under the sun).
I just think he was not a good church father, though some of his City of God sounded good from what I heard of it.

But precisely my point, when people read the Word of God through the eyes of leaders like this, that's when the problems begin.

[ November 19, 2002, 09:45 PM: Message edited by: Eric B ]

 

I understand your point. But we cannot be historyless and we cannot and should not reinvent the wheel. We should learn from our forefathers in the faith and test what they have taught with the Word of God.

Ken