There is an online group asserting over and again that Augustine essentially remained a Manichean ever after he repented and became a Christian. This would be like claiming that Karl Barth remained a Schleiermacherian through Hermann after he repented of his ‘liberal theology,’ and entered into the ‘strange new world of the Bible.’ As the name of my blog now connotes, I am Athanasian Reformed; this is an intentional rhetorical (but also substantially theological) move in order to note that the frame of my Reformed theological orientation is indeed from Athanasius rather than Augustine. I follow TF Torrance and Barth, with emphasis on TFT, in this regard, insofar as they identify as Athanasian. Torrance, famously, calls Augustine’s theology: ‘The Latin Heresy.’ He believes that Augustine, through his neo-Platonism, injected a notion of dualism into a God-world relation. As such, Torrance believes that Augustine gives the church a frame of reference, regarding a doctrine of God, wherein God is thought of dualistically, i.e. through a lens of the eternal forms and their temporal shadows. He believes this eschews a knowledge of God, creating a competitive relationship between God and humanity; both ontologically and then epistemologically. He, and Barth, seek to correct this sort of dualism in a knowledge of God through a methodological, albeit personalist Christ concentration. The result: all theology is thought of through a theory of revelation/knowledge that can never be abstracted from God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Ironically, this online group who claims to be against Augustine, even going as far as claiming to be non-Augustinian Christians, operate from this very sort of ‘Latin Heresy’ that they say they repudiate at an essential level (I’ll have to demonstrate later).

Beyond that, this online soteriological group, wrongly frame Augustine as a life-long Manichean. As Scott MacDonald notes:

The third important influence shaping Augustine’s mature thinking about God is not explicit in the vision passage we are examining. But if we read the passage in the larger context provided by the narrative of the Confessions, we can see the clear role that Manichaeism plays in shaping the conception of God that Augustine begins to articulate here. Augustine’s first intellectually serious commitments were to Manichean theology, which remained throughout his life a kind of foil for many of his mature views.[1]

Rather than being a life-long Manichean, Augustine, post-repentance, becomes a life-long antagonist of the Manichee sect; even so, only as he developed his own positive theological frame—a frame that did multiple duties: one of which was to bury the theology of Mani.

What often happens online, ironically as you read this online, is that some person, group, et al. gets a brand, a handle through a blog, vlog, or podcast, and within the insular communities said people build through these platforms, these people become the in-house experts. They can make claims and assertions without having to worry about the critical check of history. Within the ‘group’ they are the little logoi who get to construct the universe their communities, respectively, come to inhabit. People, in their groups, come to trust the ‘words of knowledge’ they get from their online, albeit, sacred teachers. Most of what we find online in these arenas is not based on critical history, or even critical thought for that matter. That is, what I would suggest, and argue, this online soteriological group is doing regarding their constant attack of a straw-Augustine. I think it is possible to critically engage with Augustine, I just don’t think these folks are doing that. QED

[1] Scott MacDonald, “The divine nature: being and goodness,” David Vincent Meconi and Elenore Stump eds., The Cambridge Companion to Augustine: Second Edition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 20 kindle edition.