The Society for the Advancement of Ecclesiological Theology

February 15, 2012 by Matthew Mason

As Comprehensive as the Scriptures

Jaroslav Pelikan’s comments on Augustine’s method in dealing with law and grace highlights the problem with some contemporary accounts: they emphasise one aspect of Scripture’s teaching while ignoring or downplaying other aspects. I believe in systematicity in theology, but I’m increasingly suspicious of a rush to system; and I think that, for commendable pastoral and homiletical reasons, that can be a besetting problem for pastors and preachers.

Augustine managed to hold together what Augustinians have often tended to separate. In his piety and preaching, if not always in his theology, the paradox of grace as sovereign, as necessary, and as mediated transcended the alternatives inherent in it. And so he could write: “By the law is the knowledge of sin, by faith the acquisition of grace against sin, by grace the healing of the soul from the fault of sin, by the health of the soul the freedom of the will, by free will the love of righteousness, by love of righteousness the accomplishment of the law. Thus as the law is not made void but established through faith, since faith obtains the grace by which the law is fulfilled; so free will is not made void but established through grace, since grace cures the will, by which righteousness is loved freely.”

These disparate elements could be held together because “all the stages which I have here connected together in their successive links have severally their proper voices in the sacred Scriptures,” and Augustine sought to be as comprehensive as the Scriptures themselves. He acknowledged the limitations of theology as an expression of this comprehensiveness.

(Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 306-307, quoting Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter, 30.52. Paragraph break and emphasis mine.)

Categories: General | Matthew Mason | Theological Method | grace