The Transmission of Sin: Augustine and the Pre-Augustinian Sources
... To this end, much more of his answer(s) would have to be given and analysed in context. How earlier 'tradux peccati' effected humanity may further remain unspecified here (see e.g., Beatrice [1978] 2013). That his influence in the questions of (original) sin and its effects has been far-reaching has often been shown (e.g., Scheffczyk 1981). ...
After discussing the so-called Ham myth in South Africa, my focus is on the African church father Augustine (354–430). All texts from his immense oeuvre in which he mentions biblical Ham are reviewed in chronological order. In Against Faustus, the story of Noah and his sons is mainly explained as being Christological: Ham figures as a type of the unbelieving Jews who consented to the murder of Christ, but he is also a type of the Jews because he is ‘the slave of his brothers’ carrying the books by which the Christians may be instructed. Later Augustine corrects his confusion of Ham with the slave Canaan. The story of Ham (and Canaan) is most extensively discussed in the City of God. Neither here nor in the Expositions on the Psalms, Ham is described as being black or a slave. The same goes for a number of his other writings. In Augustine’s late works Against Julian and Unfinished Work against Julian, he thoroughly goes into the question of why (although Ham sinned) ‘vengeance was brought upon Canaan’. Augustine perceives God’s prophecy: from Canaan stems the cursed seed [semen maledictum] of the Canaanites. Nowhere, however, he claims that Ham or his descendants would have been cursed to be black or that all of his offspring were condemned to slavery.
Contribution: This article demonstrates that the Ham myth does not occur in Augustine. It argues that the ‘mestizo’ African Augustine might have been extra sensitive to questions of race and colour.
In this essay, I utilize a historical methodology into Catholic thought on abortion, looking toward the foundational viewpoint of original sin as justification for the need to baptize infants for the sake of their salvation. Then, I highlight how abortion has developed and shifted throughout the twentieth century vis-à-vis Papal Encyclicals and Vatican II. Strikingly, there is a resounding silence on the soteriology of aborted fetuses in Canon Law. Finally, I return to the clinical context to indicate the theological tension between the Catholic Church’s foundational belief on the need to baptize and their procedural ethic on the soteriology of aborted fetuses, resulting in the uncertainty of the salvation for unbaptized aborted fetuses.
What exactly is addiction? Scholars, clinicians, and addicts themselves consistently arrive at a fork in the road in their respective quests for the meaning of addiction: choice or compulsion, crime or disease? Despite these many inquiries, one important aspect of addiction’s past remains unexamined—its deep theological history. Christian theologians writing in Latin from the second to the seventeenth century used the term addiction metaphorically to describe the sinful human condition. In this article, I uncover the genesis and development of the Christian addiction metaphor in the writings of Roman theologians Tertullian, Ambrose, and Augustine. I analyze their theologies of addiction to show how the language and logic of Roman pecuniary jurisprudence structures their thinking about sin, salvation, and free will. To conclude, I suggest that the disease-crime ambivalence constitutive of our contemporary understanding of addiction originated in their oxymoronic definition of sin as both generational enslavement and willful servitude.
The composer Sir James MacMillan has often referred to music as ‘the most spiritual of the arts’, and for many people, regardless of religious affiliation, this rings true. In listening to music, we are drawn to dimensions of human experience beyond the material. This collection brings together leading scholars from various disciplines – including Christian theology, musicology, and psychology and neuroscience – to interrogate the intimate relationship between music and spirituality.
Organised in three parts – theological approaches, empirical methods, and Christian worship – the volume covers a vibrant array of topics. From examining how the Covid-19 pandemic has reshaped the profile of contemporary worship to investigating the spiritual effects of bodily positioning in liturgical spaces, from exploring spiritual experience through heart and breathing activity, electrodermal activity, and saliva samples to comparing the spiritual experiences of British Methodists with Welsh sporting fans, these essays attend to the lived reality of people’s perceived spiritual experiences through music.
This collection will be an invaluable resource for scholars in the growing field of Christian theology and music, and will serve as a cornerstone for future research at the intersection of theology, music, and psychology and neuroscience. It will also appeal to anyone curious about why music consistently, across cultures, occupies a unique space bridging the material and spiritual dimensions of human life.
Based on the latest scholarship, the encyclopedic entry provides synthetic information on tradcuianism, the theory of the origin of the human soul from the seed of the parents’ soul, which is passed on during sexual intercourse. It discusses the precedents of this theory in the milieu of ancient, especially Stoic, philosophy and in Judeo-Christian thought, and examines in detail the traducianism of Tertullian of Carthage and the resonance of his ideas in the later centuries of the early church.
It is well known that some iconographic models have been introduced from Europe
in Ethiopia since the Middle Ages, and several facts point in the direction that the
Fəlsäta lämaryam iconography was developed from imported Immaculate Conception images after the Jesuit presence in the country (1557–1632). The iconography of the Immaculate Conception was adopted but also adapted by the Ethiopian Orthodox Täwaḥədo Church from the middle 17th century onwards. In this case, a dogmatic issue was present: the idea of the Immaculate Conception of Virgin Mary is not among the teachings of the local Orthodox Church as it is in the Catholic Church. Due to this, the interpretation of the iconography had to be changed to accommodate the Ethiopian Orthodox dogmas.
A doctrine of original sin or of the human condition generally requires an account of how that sin or condition is transmitted. One would think there are two options for thinking about this. Either original sin is innate or it is acquired. Both would seem to be problematic, the former because all the available options involve untoward metaphysical commitments or implicate God in unacceptable ways; the latter because of the uniformity of the human condition the doctrine requires. In this article, I use conceptual advances within the cognitive science of religion and empirical research to advance a plausible model of what the human condition consists in and how it is passed down.
Амвросиаст, анонимный римский экзегет IV в., известный рядом комментариев на отдельные места и книги Священного Писания. Самой крупной его работой является корпус из XIII комментариев на послания ап. Павла, среди которых центральное место занимает толкование на послание ап. Павла к Римлянам. Вопрос литературного влияния на формирование стиля и идей Амвросиаста остаётся до сих пор не вполне выясненным. И хотя исследований о литературных связях изучаемого автора с прочими латинскими писателями существует довольно много, но работы о его связях с восточными экзегетами практически отсутствуют. При этом некоторые учёные отмечают сходства экзегетического подхода и некоторых идей Амвросиаста с традицией Антиохийской школы. В настоящей статье предпринимается попытка систематизировать сведения о литературных связях и зависимости Амвросиаста, а также описываются результаты сравнительного анализа толкований римского экзегета и Диодора Тарсийского на послание ап. Павла к Римлянам. Делается вывод о необходимости и перспективах более глубокого исследования литературной взаимозависимости Диодора Тарсийского и Амвросиаста.
In this paper, I examine the four elements—universal sinfulness, natural sinfulness, inherited sinfulness, and Adamic sinfulness—of the doctrine of original sin in both the Reformed confessions, with particular attention to the Canons of Dort, and the Council of Trent’s definitive teaching on Original Sin. I give particular attention to the question regarding how all men are implicated in the sin of Adam. Realism and federalism will be analyzed as answers to this question. Even if a theological account is given that justifies the claim that God may justly impute Adam’s sin to his posterity, that still leaves unanswered the question of unconditional negative reprobation, also called, preterition ( praeteritio ), namely, that God passes over some and not others. Does preterition jeopardize the Church’s call to evangelization? That question will need to be reconsidered briefly, and in conclusion, in light of the doctrine of divine election and its implications for the preaching and hence proclamation of the gospel.
The Cambridge Companion to Augustine's “Confessions” - edited by Tarmo Toom March 2020
A common view among ancient historians about Roman attentiveness to children’s psychological development needs reconsideration. The view holds that Romans ignored children’s cognitive ontogeny, perceiving early childhood as a largely undifferentiated life stage. A separate but related issue is the problematic claim that Roman childhood was entirely a matter of social construction. I present evidence from over four hundred years of Roman writing to make three points against Roman neglect of children and radical social construction. First, a consensus (granted our limited number of sources) about “developmental psychology” prevailed from the late republic to late antiquity. Second, this consensus is consistent with modern findings and theories. In particular, the Roman material maps onto a developmental timeline featuring a “2-month revolution,” when the infant engages in dyadic protoconversations with adults, and a “9-month revolution,” when the infant shares attention triadically with adults toward third objects. In the Roman consensus, both dyadic protoconversations and triadic joint attention were central to cultural learning. Third, when the Roman consensus about children’s minds did change, it was because of the Christian doctrine of original sin, according to which even newborns were psychologically corrupt. Nonetheless, I argue, this rupture in the Roman consensus does not entail that we should suppose childhood to have been entirely a social construction or merely a projection of a religious or other ideology. Rather, any construction of childhood—even the late-antique Christian one—will necessarily rest upon a foundation of, and thus be constrained by, certain inescapable biological and psychological “givens.”
This two-part article focuses on the question: Was Julian of Eclanum (c. 380–454) right in accusing Augustine (354–430) of still being a Manichaean, based on his view of sexual concupiscence and the transmission of (original) sin? The second part of the article focuses on the essentials of Augustine's views of sexual concupiscence and the transmission of original sin, in particular as they were expounded (and further developed) in his controversy with the “Pelagian” bishop, Julian of Eclanum. It is concluded that, in particular, Augustine's stress on the “random motion” (motus inordinatus) as typical of the sinfulness of sexual concupiscence is strikingly similar to the Manichaean views on the subject. In this respect, then, Julian seems to be right. Finally, some preliminary remarks are made on early Jewish and Jewish-Christian views of sexual concupiscence and (original) sin which may have influenced not only Mani and his followers, but also Augustine and his precursors in the tradition of Roman North Africa.
Augustine of Hippo's notion of peccatum originale did not come out of the blue. In the scholarly discussion about the 'traditional' or 'innovative' character of Augustine's doctrine of original sin, G. Bonner and M. Hollingworth argued for its specifically African roots. In order to evaluate the possible 'Africanness' of Augustine's concept of peccatum originale, the current article addresses the two main protagonists of African theological thinking before Augustine: Tertullian (2nd/3rd c.) and Cyprian (3rd c.). They explicitly reflected on (infant) baptism and (the Adamic) sin, issues relevant for the doctrine of original sin, and Augustine refers to their writings for this reason. Did Tertullian and Cyprian lay the foundations of the doctor gratiae's highly sophisticated doctrine of original sin? To answer this question, we gathered as exhaustively as possible all available evidence. Processing this quite elaborate collection of sources shows that Tertullian and Cyprian created a conceptual framework in which it was possible for Augustine to develop all aspects of his doctrine of original sin, some of which differed considerably from the positions of Tertullian and Cyprian, including also some of the extreme implications of the Augustinian view.
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