Digging Out the Embedded Church - The Maranatha Community

In 391 AD he returned to his native Algeria and became ordained as a priest; four years later
he was appointed assistant bishop of Hippo, and soon after full bishop. Here he founded a
monastery and a school to train clergy. He died there in 430 AD as Vandal invaders were
attacking the city.
Augustine‟s influence on the future doctrine and development of the Church was immense.
He wrote against the Donatists and Pelagians, who, in his eyes, harmed the Church, the one
by schism from it, the other by making man his own saviour and by denying original sin in
man. Against them, Augustine taught that the Church was not an exclusive company of the
„pure‟ but a mixture of the good and bad, and that sacraments performed in Christ‟s name
outside the Church were valid.
Against the Pelagians he developed both his strong sense of the grace of God, giving us in
Christ what we could never deserve, and his conviction that it is the sovereignty of God alone
which chooses the elect to salvation. This high view of the sovereignty of God was to mould
the thinking of almost all the early 16 th Century Protestant Reformers in Europe; it was to be
the cause of a reaction to its severity in the 17 th Century in the theology of Arminius and
others; and it is a source of contention still with us today.
Augustine‟s great work On the Trinity emphasised the equality of the Persons of Father, Son
and Holy Spirit over against earlier views of the subordination of Son and Holy Spirit within
the Godhead.
When the city of Rome fell to the invading Visigoths under the semi-Arian Alaric in 410 AD,
and people were conscious of an era coming to an end, Augustine took nearly 25 years to
write The City of God (412-426 AD), which was to mould Church thinking on the
relationship of Church and State for very many years to come.
In it, World Empires constituted the Earthly City, the Church the Heavenly City. There in the
heavenly city are the predestined of God. The Church, as the heavenly city, is destined to rule
the world as a visible body empowered by God to correct and teach the secular State, whose
duty is to support and further true Godliness. In this way Augustine opened a vision of the
Church which was to dominate the medieval Church‟s thinking about its place on earth. The
head of the Church on earth, which increasingly from the 5 th Century onwards was seen in the
West and the Bishop of Rome, had a duty to guide the affairs of men: the Papacy became
involved in the affairs of princes even to engaging in military action to promote the Church‟s
interest.
To understand the Catholic concept of the Church today, we must understand Cyprian‟s stress
on the importance of bishops as God‟s appointed rulers and Augustine‟s strong sense that the
Church has a visible present on earth in a body to which all Christians should belong.
Later in history some Christians (Protestants) would abandon an Episcopal view of church
government and others reject the role of the Church as mentor to the State, and instead
advocate that the Church withdraw from the world and its society.
As for the Eastern part of the Church, it did not develop a Papacy or centralized control. It
looked to the seven Ecumenical Councils from 325 to 787 AD as authoritative for doctrine
and order, and it accepted the ancient Eastern churches of Constantinople, Alexandria,
Antioch and Jerusalem as leading, autocephalous (literally „self-headed‟) churches.
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