Augustine’s massa damnata (humanity is a damned mass) only fits well when understood within the context of Christ’s assumptio carnis (assumption of flesh) as archetypal humanity (what it means to be human at the blueprint level) for all of humanity. And even then the mirifica commutatio (wonderful exchange) isn’t transactional but filial.
There are two orderings in the world structure: God’s real order, and man’s real disorder in an attempt to be contra God. God has freely and graciously elected to be for this world, as both the electing God and elected man, in Jesus Christ. Soteriologically driven theologies, like Augustinianism, sets these two worlds in a competitive relationship. Contrariwise, the Athanasian-Barthian-Torrancean combine thinks these orders from within the nexus of God and humanity in the reconciling and hypostatically uniting person, Jesus Christ. This combine allows the Christian to think the God-world relation from within the strictures God has setup, even in-spite of humanity’s inherent urge to fight against God as a condition of their fallen nature as lapsarian humans. Against the Augustinian effort to think the elect of God into God through a decree of God (decretum absolutum), the Athanasian complex is required to think the God-humanity relation from within the gift of God’s Self-givenness for the world, for humanity, from within the confines of His own second-person, the eternal Son en sarkos, Jesus Christ. This Athanasian frame offers a cosmic frame of reference when it comes to things worldly, things salvific, so on and so forth.
Barth writes of this relationship presciently:
This is obviously the underlying form of our problem—the real distance in which the God appearing in the human sphere, and acting and speaking for us in this sphere, confronts us to whom He turns and for whom He acts. Note that on the one hand it is God for man, on the other man against God. There are two orders (or, rather, order and disorder), two opposite world-structures, two worlds opposing and apparently excluding one another. Note that it is He and we—and He and we in a direct encounter, we before Him—how can we live before Him and with Him?—we with the God who by Himself reconciles us with Himself, we in His presence, in the sequence of His work and Word. On the side of man the only possible word seems to be a deep-seated No, the No of the one who when God comes and acts for Him and tells him that He is doing so is forced to see that his day is over and that he can only perish.[1]
As Barth rightly emphasizes there is no such thing as a competitive relationship between God and humanity. That is, because God has already become both the Yes and the No on behalf of humanity’s rebellion against God in His free movement towards humanity in Christ, and His equipoise movement of humanity towards God, in a Yesward movement, of Christ’s making. This is not to say, of course, that humanity no longer sees itself, consciously or subconsciously, in a Noward stance before the living and triune God; it does. It is just to say that even in that ongoing rebellious spirit, the one that has already been put to death in the archetypal humanity of the Second Adam, there remains no power behind it. Humanity’s rebellion, its no to God, has already been put down, and thus risen up in the Yes and Amen of God in Jesus Christ. Rebellious humanity, at this point, simply lives against their humanity already won for them in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ.
The work of God in Christ’s salvation for us is finished!
[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §59 [291] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London:T&T Clark, 2010), 284.
I find Thomas Torrance’s stratified knowledge of God and St. Augustine’s exercitatio 
mentis (spiritual exercises), and their relative correspondence to be quite intriguing, and yet in this intrigue there is also recognition of a fundamental difference. Here is how Ben Myers describes Torrance’s ‘stratified knowledge’ (if you want to read Torrance on this see his Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons):
Thomas F. Torrance’s model of the stratification of knowledge is one of his most striking and original contributions to theological method. Torrance’s model offers an account of the way formal theological knowledge emerges from our intuitive and pre-conceptual grasp of God’s reality as it is manifest in Jesus Christ. It presents a vision of theological progression, in which our knowledge moves towards an ever more refined and more unified conceptualisation of the reality of God, while remaining closely coordinated with the concrete level of personal and experiential knowledge of Jesus Christ. According to this model, our thought rises to higher levels of theological conceptualisation only as we penetrate more deeply into the reality of Jesus Christ. From the ground level of personal experience to the highest level of theological reflection, Jesus Christ thus remains central. Through a sustained concentration on him and on his homoousial union with God, we are able to achieve a formal account of the underlying trinitarian relations immanent in God’s own eternal being, which constitute the ultimate grammar of all theological discourse. [Benjamin Myers, “The Stratification of knowledge in the thought of T. F. Torrance,” SJT 61 (1): 1-15 (2008) Printed in the United Kingdom © 2008 Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd]
And here is how Gilles Emery, O. P. describes Augustine’s exercitatio mentis:
Augustine emphasizes in particular that in order to glimpse God, the spirit must purify itself of corporeal representations and “phantasmata.” The spirit must not stop at created images but must rise to what the created realities “insinuate.” This is precisely the usefulness of the study of creatures and the goal of the exercise. The exercitatio proposed by Augustine is an ascension … toward God from the image that is inferior and unequal to him, and it is at the same time a gradual movement toward the interior (introrsus tendre). From these corporeal realities and sensible perceptions, Augustine invites his reader to turn toward the spiritual nature of man, toward the soul itself and its grasp of incorporeal realities, in a manner ever more interior (modo interiore), in order to rise toward the divine Trinity. The exercise of the spirit is “a gradual ascension toward the interior,” in other words, an elevation from inferior realities toward interior realities. One enters, and one rises in a gradual manner by degrees (gradatim). Such is the way characteristic of Augustine: “pull back into yourself [in teipsum redi]…, and transcend yourself.” [Gilles Emery, O. P., Trinitarian Theology as Spiritual Exercise in Augustine and Aquinas, in Aquinas the Augustinian edited by Michael Dauphinais, Barry David, and Matthew Levering, p. 14.]
[For further reading on a Reformed version of ascension theology check out Julie Canlis’ sweet book Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension.]
One fundamental and important difference—even given some apparent similarity between Torrance and Augustine, like on stratification or graded movement towards Triune knowledge of God—becomes an issue of theological anthropology and the difference between Augustine’s a priori versus Torrance’s a posterori approaches in relation to the imago Dei/Christi.
For Augustine, knowledge of God is already present (even if soteriologically and christologically construed) by way of analogical reflection upon the image of God (which is opened up soteriologically by Christ). For Torrance, knowledge of God is not a result of turning inward, but looking outward to Christ. So we don’t know what it is to really be in the image of God, there is not resonant knowledge of God available in the human being, per se. It is only as we are recreated in Christ in the resurrection by the Spirit that genuine knowledge of God can be acquired by observing and spiritually participating in the knowledge of God through Him. So the analogy for both of the these theologians—by which we come to knowledge of the Triune God—is grounded in reflection upon the image of God. But the difference is that for Augustine, the image of God is grounded in each individual person (which would help to explain his view of election/reprobation as well); for Torrance the image of God is grounded in Christ (Col. 1.15), and thus the supposition is that God’s image has a ground external to creation in Christ, which allows us to think of knowledge of God as something external to us, and not something resonant within us (even if like Augustine we try to explain this in his kind of soteriological way).
My Reduction
I don’t like doing this, but for sake of blogginess and reception let me do so: For Augustine knowledge of God happens by turning inward to the self (by Christ to be sure) and attending to personal piety; For Torrance knowledge of God happens by turning outward to Christ, and attending to personal intimacy therein.
This kind of movement (inward a priori and outward a posterori) has some other interesting implications that get fleshed out in subsequent centuries and theologies that continue to affect us to this day. We will have to talk about this later.
*Originally posted in 2019 at another site of mine.
TF Torrance often refers to what he calls ‘The Latin Heresy,’ when discussing Western theology; especially with reference to its fountainhead, Augustine. The Latin Heresy for TFT entails the neo-Platonist dualism that funds Augustine’s theology, and all other theologies that follow Augustine’s categories. For TFT, this dualism involves a competitive relationship between God and humanity; such that, humanity is thought in abstraction relative to God’s life, rather than finding its concrete ground therein. This shows up most clearly in Augustine’s doctrine of election. JND Kelly masterfully describes this,
The problem of predestination has so far only been hinted at. Since grace takes the initiative and apart from it all men form a massa damnata, it is for God to determine which shall receive grace and which shall not. This He has done, Augustine believes on the basis of Scripture, from all eternity. The number of the elect is strictly limited, being neither more nor less than is required to replace the fallen angels. Hence he has to twist the text ‘God wills all men to be saved’ (1 Tim. 2, 4), making it mean that He wills the salvation of all the elect, among whom men of every race and type are represented. God’s choice of those to whom grace is to be given in no way depends on His foreknowledge of their future merits, for whatever good deeds they will do will themselves be the fruit of grace. In so far as His foreknowledge is involved, what He foreknows is what He Himself is going to do. Then how does God decide to justify this man rather than that? There can in the end be no answer to this agonizing question. God has mercy on those whom He wishes to save, and justifies them; He hardens those upon whom He does not wish to have mercy, not offering them grace in conditions in which they are likely to accept it. If this looks like favouritism, we should remember that all are in any case justly condemned, and that if God makes His decision in the light of ‘a secret and, to human calculation, inscrutable justice’. Augustine is therefore prepared to speak of certain people as being predestined to eternal death and damnation; they may include, apparently, decent Christians who have been called and baptized, but to whom the grace of perseverance has not been given. More often, however, he speaks of the predestination of the saints which consists in ‘God’s foreknowledge and preparation of the benefits by which those who are to be delivered are most assuredly delivered’. These alone have the grace of perseverance, and even before they are born they are sons of God and cannot perish.[1]
As Kelly describes Augustine’s doctrine of predestination, election-reprobation, what stands out is the way God stands over humanity, as if humanity has no correspondence to God by God’s grace. As if humanity must find a way to God, even as God finds His way to humanity. And for Augustine God only finds His way to humanity through an ad hoc arbitrary election of certain individuals, who he snares out of the ‘massa damnata’ (the ‘mass of damnation’ of humanity). But it is this that represents the inorganic notion of a God-human/God-world relation for Augustine; i.e., that humanity has no ground in God’s life organically, creatively; that it is only by God’s voluntary act that He brings ‘some’ into a contractive relationship with Him—as some would call it later, the absolutum decretum (the absolute decree of election/reprobation/predestination).
So, all of the aforementioned to bring up another application of this type of Augustinianism as it relates to soteriology. In Book 4 of Peter Lombard’s infamous Sentences, he writes the following:
Chapter 2 (110)
The above longform to simply point out one simple, but profound reality: if humanity is not thought from God’s grace for us in His hypostasized life for us in the person of Jesus Christ; if humanity is not from God’s unilateral givenness for us in His election to be for all of humanity, indeed as He assumes all of humanity into His vicarious humanity pro nobis (for us) in Jesus Christ; then, humanity will always be left destitute, even ‘elect’ humanity, not to mention the mass of humanity who God does not elect, to pursue God and fill up the gap between God and humanity through the various means of grace God has given them. The dualism, if not obvious, is present in the penitential theology of Augustine, and the Latins, both on the Catholic and Protestant sides, insofar that the human being must constantly strive, and constantly reach out and hope that ‘they’ have done enough to be found worthy before God; even in the supplicant of His freely given grace. Grace in this frame becomes detached from God’s personal and triune life in Christ for the world, and instead it becomes a created grace, a quality, that the elect (they hope they are) must rightly habituate in and handle in the right ways if they ever hope of being in the Beatific Vision, and maybe, just maybe getting to avoid the ‘purging fires’ (Purgatory) along the way.
It ought to be clear though, in a soteriological frame, how Augustine’s “individualistic” understanding, as detailed by Kelly, and illustrated by Lombard in an Augustinian penitential theology, throws the would-be elect individual upon themselves, rather than upon Christ, in their pursuit of salvation and eternal life, coram Deo. God forbid this! God has singularly brought Godself and humanity together in His pre-destination, within His own life, in His elected elect humanity in the eternal Logos, the Son of God, as He hypostatically united His divine life with our human life, in His assumptio carnis (‘assumption of the flesh’), and made His human life our life, as we rose from the dead with His humanity, which is total humanity, by which all of humanity has been objectively saved (note: this does not entail a universalism, per se).
[1] J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, Revised Edition (New York: Harper Collins, 1978), 368-69.
[2] Peter Lombard, The Sentences: Book 4, On the Doctrine of the Signs, translated by Giulio Silano (Toronto-Ontario Canada: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2010), 122–3.
It is no secret, for those whom it is no secret, that Augustine believed that original sin was a genetic material stuff that was propagated in and among the human mass 
through the lust of sexual intercourse. Indeed, some of this, no doubt, was developed in the context of his Manichean background; but also, Augustine believed that the passions themselves were ultimately representative of the very base of sin, or what he identified as concupiscence (self-love). He wasn’t the only one who believed this, there were many others, following, like Ambrose, and later Peter Lombard, who affirmed the same in regard to the relationship between post-fall sexual relationships and the propagation of original sin sired in that act. Here is Lombard in his Sentences giving his own view on this, followed by prooftexts from both Ambrose and Augustine.
Chapter 4 (209)
HE SHOWS THE CAUSE OF THE CORRUPTION OF THE FLESH, FROM WHICH SIN OCCURS IN THE SOUL. For the flesh became corrupt in Adam through sin. Before sin, a man and a woman could join together without the incentive of lust and the burning of concupiscence, and there was a marriage bed without stain; but after sin, there cannot be carnal joining without lustful concupiscence, which is always a flaw, and even a fault, unless it is excused by the goods of marriage. And so it is in concupiscence and lust that the flesh is conceived which is to be formed into the body of the offspring. And so the flesh itself, which is conceived in vicious concupiscence, is polluted and corrupted. From contact with such flesh, the soul, as it is infused, derives the stain by which it is polluted and becomes guilty, that is, the vice of concupiscence, which is original sin.
A truly unbiblical development and accretion, but one that Augustine, and those following, felt needed to be pressed in order to keep the heretical teachings of Pelagius, and the Pelagians at bay. This is what happens when an imbalance is presented into the mix of theological development, particularly as that obtains in the heat of polemical relationships. Not to mention, by time the Augustinian and Pelagius disputation occurred, theological matters had also become a deeply political aggression.
Clearly, from Scripture, the Apostle encourages sexual intercourse (not to mention the epistle to the Hebrews) as a duty, and yet a pleasure, to be had in the marriage bond between a man and a woman.
Now concerning the things about which you wrote, it is good for a man not to touch a woman. 2 But because of immoralities, each man is to have his own wife, and each woman is to have her own husband. 3 The husband must fulfill his duty to his wife, and likewise also the wife to her husband. 4 The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; and likewise also the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. 5 Stop depriving one another, except by agreement for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer, and come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. 6 But this I say by way of concession, not of command. 7 Yet I wish that all men were even as I myself am. However, each man has his own gift from God, one in this manner, and another in that.[2]
Not simply as an act for reproduction, as Augustine would press. But indeed, as an act of undefiled and pure intimacy; i.e., the two become one in the ‘flesh’ in the communal bond of the love of the Holy Spirit. Latterly, Bernard of Clairvaux, Martin Luther, Puritans like Richard Sibbes et al. would pick up on what came to be called ‘Marriage Mysticism,’ in regard to the relationship between Christ and His Bride, the Church. In other words, the intimacy envisaged by the act of sexual penetration in the bonds of holy matrimony were so (and are so) sanctified, that it could be the symbol of the intimacy that Christ and His Bride have within the bond of God’s Holy Life as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (whose life itself is known to be perichoretic and interpenetrative in a Subject-in-Being fellowshipping relationship) (see Eph. 5:18ff). All of this to underscore that sex within marriage coram Deo is a peak event in the human experience in regard to attesting to the very triune life of God itself; inclusive of God’s life with us (Immanuel) and in us in Christ.
Augustine, Ambrose, Lombard et al. couldn’t get everything right.
[1] Peter Lombard, The Sentences: Book 2 On Creation: Distinction XXXI, trans. by Giulio Silano (Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2012), 154–55.
[2] I Corinthians 7:1–7, NASB95.
There is a lot of talk these days in certain (Baptist) sectors about retrieving the theology of Thomas Aquinas. The focus of discussion is typically on his Prima Pars—of his Summa Theologiae—and less on the full scope of Thomas’ theology. But what in fact is being retrieved, if in fact the ultimate desire is to recover Aquinas’ theology in a total way? What 
about Thomas’ theological anthropology, and as corollary, doctrine of sin; are these foci fulgently available for the Protestants to recover as well? If we look back into the 16th and 17th centuries of what is called the Post Reformed Orthodox development of Reformed (or Calvinist) theology what we find is an affirmative in regard to recovering more than just a doctrine of God from Thomas Aquinas. And so, Thomas’ theology, at least if we move beyond the 21st century Baptists, with an eye towards the Post Reformed Orthodox theologians (like William Perkins et al.), is indeed intent on bringing many of Thomas’ theological themes into the development of their own respective projects as Federally Protestant theologians. In order to gain a better understanding on Thomas’ (and Anselm’s, as the case may be) doctrine of sin let us turn to RN Frost’s treatment of that in his book Richard Sibbes: God’s Spreading Goodness. Frost writes (at length):
Aquinas on privative sin
The first major proponent of privative sin in the medieval period is Anselm whose pioneering work was followed and developed by Aquinas. In a matter crucial to the development of the nomist tradition, Anselm based his doctrine on Augustine’s early doctrine of privatio rather than his post-Pelagian view. The implication picked up by Pelagius—that salvation requires a free act of the volition in choosing God—was assimilated roughly a century later by Aquinas.
Aquinas, as a student of Augustine, was apparently alert to Augustine’s shift on the issue of privatio: he attributed privatio to Anselm and a positive definition (sin as habitus) to Augustine. Aquinas, in fact, sought to synthesize the views of Augustine and Anselm through an analogy much like Augustine’s lost-food solution: “As in a bodily illness there is privation, in that the balance of health is upset, yet also something positive, the disturbed bodily humours, so also in original sin there is privation [privatione], the lack of original justice, yet along with this there are the disturbed powers of the soul.” In this explanation, however, he failed to adopt Augustine’s solution that grace is God’s presence in the elect by the Spirit. This followed Aquinas’s premise that human nature and divine being are wholly incommensurate—a topic taken up in the next chapter. Significantly, Aquinas believed that Adam’s original state of righteousness was not something natural to his humanity but a gift of supernatural grace (donum gratiæ):
Original righteousness [justitia originalis] was a definite gift of grace [donum gratiæ] divinely bestowed upon all human nature in the first parent, which, indeed, the first parent lost in the first sin. Hence even as that original righteousness would have been transmitted along with human nature to the offspring of the first parents, so the opposite disorder is in fact transmitted.”
Thus, subsequent sin in humanity resulted from an incapacity, the loss of Adam’s original righteousness that the donum gratiæ had maintained. Adam had squandered humanity’s golden opportunity by failing to guard his original righteousness.
Aquinas, in these discussions, located privatio within nature, viewing sin as the loss of a created quality. The symmetrical cure for sin, with sin defined as a privatio gratiæ, is a resupply of grace. To this end, Aquinas held that grace has dual aspects, one created and the other uncreated. This doublet allowed him to resolve the tension between original sin and actual sin. When Adam fell he lost the created grace of original righteousness. The implicit ground for his fall was an absence of uncreated grace that was needed because of his human mutability.
This two-stage arrangement assumed that morality is defined by the use of a free will to choose either good or evil. Thus it was God’s purpose to generate a vulnerability in Adam in order to test and affirm his morality. His failure was then transmitted to his progeny by the absence of original righteousness. Privatio, in this arrangement, was twofold: a lack of uncreated grace that led to, but did not compel, Adam’s fall; and a subsequent lack of created grace after the fall due to Adam’s loss of original righteousness. Adam was therefore culpable because of his own initiative in the fall. After the fall Adam’s progeny now lack the grace, both created and uncreated, necessary for righteousness. We are therefore helpless and God’s twin resources of grace are needed for salvation.
Among the Puritans these were points of conversation. Perkins adopted the Thomistic solution with its reliance on a duality of grace. He believed it offered the most coherent solution to the problem of sin when sin is defined as privatio. Sibbes, however, came to see sin as self-love even though he first held Perkins’ view. And with that he also took up Augustine’s view of grace as God’s relational bond to the elect.[1]
We can see the way Frost is arguing in regard to making a distinction between two Puritans, William Perkins and Richard Sibbes, respectively. For our purposes what stands out in this treatment is the development of Aquinas’ doctrine of sin (and grace), as Frost identifies an Anselmian (and Aristotelian, not explicitly referenced in this context) background to said doctrine. What is significant, to my mind, is how Aquinas, if Frost’s treatment is accurate, thought of grace to begin with. What was needed, in his frame, for salvation to obtain in an individual person, was created grace. But this notion, even while funded by the broader reality of an ‘uncreated’ grace, was thought of in qualitative or substantial terms. And so we end up with a necessary separation between the work of God in salvation, and the person of God. This occurs, in the Thomist sense, insofar that grace is not in fact the act of God’s person for the world in Jesus Christ. And that the person of Christ by the Spirit is not understood, then, as the basis of what grace is in itself (ontologically). So grace becomes, in a Thomist sense, something that the elect must manage or cooperate with in order to appropriate God’s salvation for them. And it can become a ‘thing’ that is dispensed through the Catholic mass, as the Eucharistic body is given to the faithful. Frost will argue that the Federal theology of someone like William Perkins retrieved this Thomist frame for thinking grace, and built it into his own style of Federal (Covenantal) theology. That this frame, indeed, funds the theology of the Westminster Confession of Faith in general.
But there is a better way to think grace, even as that is understood in an Augustinian key (as Frost also argues). Personally, I think the best way to think grace in a relational frame is to do so in an Athanasian key; that is, to think it as distinctively relational and personal. What is interesting about Frost’s work is that he develops that possibility from Augustine himself. TF Torrance believes that Augustine is guilty of what TFT calls the ‘Latin Heresy.’ That is a type of nascent dualism as Augustine thinks the work of God vis-à-vis the person of God. But this might be too hasty of a characterization by TFT. If Frost is right about Augustine, in regard to his relational and ‘affective’ understanding of grace, then what we have in Augustine, while still neo-Platonic (thus TF’s charge that Augustine is engaging in the ‘Latin heresy’), is the very type of personalist and ontological understanding of grace that TFT attributes exclusively to Athanasius (and the Nicene trad). In other words, maybe there was more availability in Augustine’s theology, in regard to an ontological and relational understanding of grace, than TFT gave Augustine credit for. Based on Frost’s work it would appear, in certain ways, that TFT may have been reading Augustine through the Thomist and Westminster reception rather than reading Augustine himself. If so, this would open the door for an Evangelical Calvinism to have a good basis for working not just with Athanasian themes, but also with Augustinian ones as well. An Evangelical Calvinism is more concerned with recovering the ‘reverend teaching’ than it is with the genealogy of said teaching, per se.
Either way, Thomas’ doctrine of sin, based on an Anselmian theme, is not commensurate with an Evangelical Calvinism. And so, we must continue to eschew a Thomism, a Federal or Westminster Calvinism, a classical Arminianism so on and so forth. Evangelical Calvinists are focused, along with Frost’s Augustine, with understanding God from God as immediately Self-revealed by the Holy Spirit in Jesus Christ. An Evangelical Calvinist thus cannot endorse a Thomist doctrine of sin, nor any other receptions of that as that is developed in juridical and commercial ways as primarily observed in the theology of the Post Reformed Orthodox Protestants.
[1] RN Frost, Richard Sibbes: God’s Spreading Goodness (Vancouver, WA: Cor Deo Press, 2012), 124-26 (based on Frost’s PhD dissertation written at King’s College, University of London, 1996).
Augustine took infant baptism to a level it hadn’t been theretofore prior to his development of a doctrine of original sin contra Pelagius’ theology. My friend (who I had a falling out with some years ago), W. Travis McMaken, offers a nice sketch of Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, and its necessary remedy through the Church’s sacraments, particularly 
through infant baptism. Travis writes the following in his published dissertation entitled: The Sign of the Gospel: Toward an Evangelical Doctrine of Infant Baptism after Karl Barth. For Augustine,
Original sin brings with it the state of guilt because sin dwelling in our flesh ensures that the fruit of such a tainted sexual union is likewise tainted. This taint is not mere inclination toward sin but the actual condition of sin insofar as one is born with “disobedience of the flesh.” So Augustine, speaking of newborn infants: “the sinful flesh of those through whom they are born gives them a guilt which they have not yet contracted in their own life.”
Thusly did Augustine joint original guilt to original sin by means of infant baptism. Infants are baptized, and this must be done for a reason. The only intelligible reason is that they are in need of the forgiveness from sin that baptism brings. But since infants have not yet committed any sins of volition, we must look elsewhere for the source of their guilt. This source is found in their birth and in the network of sexual reproduction that stretches from each person back to Adam and Eve. Given such an account of sin, Augustine was able to advance against the Pelagians a robust account of grace and predestination as that which rescues an individual from their hopelessly guilty state.
Infant baptism was practiced in extremis in the early Christian centuries, but it was always something of a practice in search of a theology. By pressing into service in his dispute with the Pelagians, Augustine “provided the theology that led to infant baptism becoming general practice for the first time in the history of the church.” This was not his intent. In fact, he argued that it was already the church’s general practice, and had been since the time of the apostles. Other sources considered above belie this claim. Further, the logic of his argument moved away from the practice of infant baptism and toward the establishment of his doctrine of original sin and guilt. However, once “original sin was established as the basic framework for thinking, then it was natural for it to become the principal reason for infant baptism.” This resulted in infant baptism quickly becoming established as standard practice—and, indeed, the definitive form of baptism—rather than an in extremis concession. As Karen Spierling notes, “infant baptism was an established practice of the Christian church” within one hundred years of Augustine’s dispute with the Pelagians.
In this way, Augustine provided Christian theology with the first of its two great arguments in support of infant baptism, namely, the sacramental argument: all humans are sinners in need of salvation, and the sacraments in general and baptism in particular are the appointed means for removing sin and securing salvation, therefore infants ought to receive baptism lest they die in their sins. This argument, and Barth’s rejection of it, is the subject of further consideration in chapter two.1
In McMaken’s purview Augustine represents the paragon of a developed sacramental doctrine of infant baptism vis-a-vis original sin. Travis is not alone, and stands on the shoulders of others in this unremarkable understanding in regard to Augustine as the sacramental theologian par excellence.
My own view, as a Baptist, follows Barth’s, and the New Testament’s teaching which entails a credobaptism (or believer’s baptism). Indeed, prior to Augustine’s development, believer’s baptism was the preferred method for baptism; particularly as people paid attention to the teaching of the NT, and the Apostolic practice. It wasn’t until later, like Augustine and following, wherein infant or paedobaptism took on an ecclesial life of its own. As McMaken will turn to next (in his section on a survey of the development of a doctrinal baptism), he identifies the Reformed ‘covenantal’ rationale for infant baptism. While there is some discontinuous theological rationale within the Reformed development of a paedobaptism, there clearly is some continuous overlap between the so-called covenantal and sacramental arguments for an infant baptism.
As someone who follows the Protestant Scripture Principal though, I am compelled to reject the theological reasons for an infant baptism, and solely affirm believer’s baptism. Because of my commitment to a doctrine of the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, as funded by Barth’s and Torrance’s doctrine of election, respectively, I can appropriate certain themes from both the earlier developed sacramental and covenantal forms of infant baptism, without committing myself to infant baptism simpliciter. These things represent a complex that we will not have time to disentangle in this post, but suffice it to say that if we see Jesus’ vicarious humanity as the speculum (mirror) of our election and justification in general, then it follows as corollary, that we can posit His baptism, both in the Jordan, and at Golgotha, as both sufficient and efficient for fulfilling the conditions that a baptism entails (canonically). What the Christian does, in the wake of His baptism for us, is bear witness to the always already finished work of Christ, as we participate in and from His life for us. Indeed, Christ meets both the objective and subjective sides of baptism for us, just as He meets those more generally as the Electing and Elected Godman for us. As we come to recognize what He has already accomplished for us, as we come into a spiritual union with Him, it is in and from this participation that following Him into the waters of baptism find their gravitas; indeed, as we stand where He first stood first for us, that we might now bear witness to His always already finished work of redemption all the way down.
1 W. Travis McMaken, The Sign of the Gospel: Toward an Evangelical Doctrine of Infant Baptism after Karl Barth (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), loc. 379, 386, 395.
His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the 
world because of sinful desire. -II Peter 1.3-4
The above passage is the locus classicus for many a Patristic theologian, in regard to articulating a doctrine of theosis vis-à-vis salvation. But typically, this articulation is only reserved for theologians of the ‘Eastern’ persuasion; the Westerners are often left out. Indeed, the primary Latin theologian, the progenitor of all that is holy in the West, St. Augustine himself, is painted as someone who suffered from this lacuna of theosis in his soteriological oeuvre. But as, David Vincent Meconi has iterated: “… Augustine far outpaces any other Latin patristic writer in his use of the technical term deificare and its cognates.”1 Meconi writes further,
Augustine was unique among the Church Fathers in arguing that the human person was the only creature brought into the world incompletely. Whereas the other days of creation receive an “and it was good,” Augustine’s very careful reading of Scripture alerted him to the fact that God does not stamp the sixth day with its own exclusive declaration, “esset bonum,” but instead on the sixth day God overlooks all things together and declares that all things together (cuncta) are very good (cf. Gen 1:31). As such, the day on which humans are created is still incomplete, pointing to something beyond itself. Adam is thus presented as “foreshadowing another something still to come” (Gn. litt. 3.24; CSEL 28.92). This is how Augustine accounts for the divine dynamism inherent in the human soul; although created naturally good, the imago Dei still longs to be like God, and in Adam’s very humanity, how that will be accomplished is foreshadowed.
This desire of a copy to be like its paradigmatic archetype was something Augustine had worked out very early on. In his Solilooquia (386–87) he famously admits to wanting to know nothing more than “God and the soul,” and the two meet in his subsequent discussion on the imago Dei where Augustine cleverly depicts himself [A] talking to reason personified [R]:
R: Does it not seem to you that your image in a mirror wants, in a way, to be you and is false because it is not?
A: That certainly seems so.
R: Do not all pictures and replicas of that kind and all artists’ works of that type strive to be that in whose likeness they are made?
A: I am completely convinced that they do
(sol. 2.9.17; Paffenroth 2000, 72-73; cf. c. Acad. 3.17.39).
This move is essential to understand. Deifying union with God for Augustine is not the abolishing of human nature but its only true fulfillment. The heart is inquietum outside the divine life for which it has been created. Sin depersonalizes and destroys. Growing in likeness with God restores the otherwise fragmented self. “I shudder inasmuch as I am unlike him, yet I am afire with longing because I am like him” . . . . The doctrine of the imago Dei allows Augustine to explain deification as the consummation of all human impulse and agency, the copy’s full share in its model, the final rest for which every human person is created.2
I wanted to point this up because, often, TF Torrance, my homeboy and teacher, is known for his critique of Augustine’s theology, in general, which he identifies with what he calls the Latin Heresy. This heresy, for Torrance, is simply the idea that Augustine suffered too much from his commitment to neo-Platonism, and the inherent dualism (between the eternal and the temporal / the spiritual-material) therein. But in relief, Meconi might help provide a constructive point of rapprochement between Torrance and Augustine; at least when it comes to thinking soteriologically about a God-human relation.
1 David Vincent Meconi, S.J., “Augustine’s doctrine of deification,” in David Vincent Meconi, S.J. and Eleonore Stump eds., The Cambridge Companion to Augustine (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 208.
2 Ibid., 212-13.
Leighton Flowers of YouTube fame, with reference to his anti-Calvinist soteriological position known as Provisionism, asserts that his theological framework is genuinely ‘Christocentric,’ whereas his counterparts in classical Calvinism are not. The irony of this is too hard to ignore for me. Flowers’ premise is as follows: he believes that classical 
Calvinists’ theistic determinism keeps them from operating from a genuinely Christocentric approach because instead they think from a God who deterministically causes all things to obtain through decrees. What you will notice with this premise, for Flowers, in this sort of deterministic God-world relation, is that a foreign God (juxtaposed with the one ‘revealed’ in Holy Scripture) is operative for the Calvinist. That in the Calvinist depiction, according to Flowers, all of reality is steamrolled (and thus flattened) to such an extent that there can be no genuine, or responsive relationship possible between God and humanity. As such, for Flowers, the Calvinist is merely playing an automaton role in the Puppet-Master’s hand to the extent that it is ALL God (and thus the Calvinists’ definition of Divine Sovereignty, according to Flowers), and nothing of humanity.
His alternative theory of salvation is what, indeed, he calls Provisionism. His nomenclature, language he coined himself, is intended to signify the expansive nature of God’s love for all of humanity; to the point that, according to Flowers, God in Christ died for all of humanity (us Evangelical Calvinists don’t disagree with him on this point), thus ‘providing’ provision for all who will. But then he goes awry. He posits, in contradistinction to classical Calvinism, that human beings simpliciter are born with a God-given capacity to say Yes or No to God’s provision of salvation to whomever will. He rejects the notion of original sin, which he strictly relegates to an Augustinian invention, and instead theorizes that humanity, even after the Fall has retained an affective-intellectualist capaciousness that allows humans, from within themselves to deliberate whether or not they want to accept the Gospel offer once confronted with it. Flowers maintains that his theory of salvation is genuinely “Christocentric” purely because God in Christ has made provision through unlimited atonement for all of humanity. But this isn’t sufficiently Christocentric; not to the point that Flowers can sustain his assertion that his is a genuinely Christocentric soteriology in contraposition to his counter-locutors, the “Calvinists.”
You see, Flowers’, and this is the irony, is still operating from what us Evangelical Calvinists would identify as a dualistic-Augustinian frame of reference. This type of dualism operates, necessarily so, from a competitive frame of reference vis-à-vis a God-human relation. In other words, just as Flowers (rightly) critiques the classical Calvinist for thinking God from a brute-sovereignist understanding (what I would identify with the decretum absolutum), he simply thinks from the obverse of this. That is, his theory thinks of humanity, in relationship to God in Christ, in just as abstract terms as does the classical Calvinist. It is just that he locates this abstraction in a liberum arbitrium (i.e., an isolated or independent human freewill) rather than in the decretrum absolutum (absolute decree) of the Calvinists. But both approaches, respectively, have not thought a God-human relation through a principial doctrine of the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. That is to say, neither the Provisionists nor the classical Calvinists think a God-human relation through the lens offered by the Chalcedonian patterning provided for by the patristic homoousion.
This is where the Evangelical Calvinists offer a genuinely Christ-conditioned alternative to the whole of the sort of Augustinian-laced dualisms that both the Provisionists and classical Calvinists, respectively, suffer from. As Evangelical Calvinists we think from a non-dualist non-competitive frame (so my Athanasian Reformed label) wherein we posit salvific theory from the hypostatic-union and consubstantial realities of the Divine and human coming into an inseparable union in the singular person of Jesus Christ. This means that, after Thomas F. Torrance et al., we think from the homoousial reality of a Godward to human / humanward to God movement as the actualization of God’s grace for all of humanity; particularly as ‘all of humanity’ (in actualistic terms, which is very important to press) is indeed Christ’s archetypal humanity. In other words, for the Evangelical Calvinist, salvation (or re-conciliation) obtains in the Incarnation&Atonement of God as that is realized/acutalized in the Theanthropos person of Jesus Christ. For the Evangelical Calvinist, Jesus is God’s salvation realized for the world. Not in a ‘corporate’ or hypothetical sense (as the Provisionists tacitly want to maintain), but in an actualized sense, such that all of humanity has indeed been redeemed and atoned for in Jesus Christ; just because He is God’s humanity for the world. This presents apparent dilemmas for some, like they think the reduction of this necessarily leads to Christian universalism, but they would be wrong (this can be addressed at a later time).
Conclusion
I think Flowers has good intentions, but he doesn’t have the theological resources to offer a genuinely Christocentric approach towards a theory of salvation. He is still operating out of the Latin or Augustinian frame of reference that he says he is critiquing. He still thinks of salvation from dualist optics wherein humanity still stands abstract or aloof from God; that is until they may or may not actualize the offer of salvation that God in Christ has left hanging over humanity’s head to do with as they will. Flowers’ alternative is merely, as noted, the obverse of the classical Calvinist offering insofar as he thinks about humanity in abstraction from Christ’s humanity; he simply thinks this abstraction from what he calls libertarian freewill (rather than from the Calvinists thinking that equally thinks in abstraction, but from the absolute decree instead). This is the irony of Flowers’ alternative. He thinks he is offering a genuine solution to the theological dilemmas offered by the classical Calvinist decretum absolutum, but in point of fact he is only forwarding the same Augustinian dualist and God-human competitive relationship that he had hoped to conquer. There is a better way; a genuinely Christ-conditioned way that thinks a God-human relation from the hypostatic-union of God and humanity in and from the singular person of Jesus Christ.
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.