The Role Of Christ In Salvation

In Augustine’s On Free Choice of the Will he explains that the human soul is predisposed to have a good will and that “it is a will by which we desire to live upright and honorable lives and to attain the highest wisdom” (Augustine 19, 1993). Augustine believes that in order to be free we must live according to our good will. To follow our good will we must live according to the four main virtues in life: prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice. He defines prudence as having “the knowledge of what is to be desired and what is to be avoided” (Augustine 20, 1993). Augustine establishes fortitude as “the disposition of the soul by which we have no fear of misfortune or of the loss of things that are not in our power” (Augustine 20,1993).

An omnibenevolent God created a man with the capacity to sin; as Augustine has addressed, the evil in man resides from his will. Augustine, however, does not address how evil stems also from the human nature of temptation that was a consequence of the original fall from Eden. Augustine touches on this theme when accounting for the origins of his sin, but he never fully declares it. “I loved to excuse my soul,” Augustine begins, “and to accuse something else inside me (I knew not what) but which was not I. But, assuredly, it was I, and it was my impiety that had divided me against myself” (62). Here, Augustine admits to denying his own human nature to sin, and blames it on something beyond his will, such as a result of creation. Bonner,

“Where then is evil, and what is its source, and how has it crept into the creation? What is its root, what is its seed?”1 These are the first of the many inquiries that Augustine makes in his work entitled the Confessions. In fact, the question of 'what is evil' is the main concern of Augustine, eventually leading the theologian from Manicheanism, a heresy that Augustine spent nine years of his life practicing, back into the arms of the Church. The Manichees are not willing to say that God created evil, and so therefore evil must have existed from the very beginning, possessing its own being. At this time, Augustine has a very Platonist view of things and begins to question this view of the Manichees. As a Platonist, Augustine asserts that all being is fundamentally good because all being comes from a supreme Good, which is God. As it says in

To fully understand Romans 8:1-4, we need to establish a basic concept of the book of Romans. All the way back as far as 57 A.D, the book of Romans is speculated to be written by Tertious, a secretary of the apostle Paul. This is shown in Romans 16:22. Paul intended to write the book, the book of Romans, to help create faith in the Romans. It is speculated that the apostle Paul, with the help of his secretary, wrote the book of Romans in the city of Corinth in Greece.The book of Romans consists of how to believe in God and that we are not saved through our own sin but through Christ Jesus who paid the ultimate price for our sins. In Romans 8:1-4, it talks about how we are not condemned to death because we are saved through Christ Jesus from him dying on the cross.

St. Augustine’s On Free Choice of the Will elaborates on the relationship between God, free will, and evil. During the very beginning of Book One, he asks the question, “isn’t God the cause of evil” (Cahn 357). From this question, it can be ascertained that he searches for a connection between God and evil (sins), which inferred in the writing to be connected though free will. He believes that God does not create evil, but rather that evil is simply the lack of good, since God is completely good and, therefore, cannot create evil. God not being the source of evil is then further elaborated through his explanation of a crime and how it is caused by inordinate desires and human abuse of good things (Cahn 360). By explaining

Augustine sates there are three general kinds of sin, those of the flesh, mind, and will. He reaffirms this saying “I sinned because I disobeyed them not in order to choose something more worthwhile, but simply because I loved games. I hankered to win myself glory in out contests, and to have my ears tickled by tall stories, which only made them itch more hotly; and all the while that same curiosity more and more inflamed my eyes with the list for the public shows which are the games of grownups (Augustine, 1,16).” Augustine is saying we commit these forms of sin, not because we are finding something more worthwhile, but because of our human nature. We sin because we love the feeling we get when we do something wrong. Even though we can will ourselves to do good and not sin, it is in our very nature to do wrong every since the fall. In Himes “Ancient Israel’s response to the dilemma is that evil does not come from God; it comes from us when we reject ourselves and refuse to accept the goodness of our own being (Himes, 31)” Himes uses the word evil instead of sin, however both are synonymous, in religion. Ancient Israel relies that sin is part of our nature and something we will have to deal with even though it is wrong.

Augustine: Why yes I do, for it is a will by which we seek to live a good and upright life and to attain unto perfect wisdom.

The cause of evil itself, according to Augustine, is the human will, and thus all blame for it rests on our shoulders, not on Gods. We willfully turn our souls away from God when we perform evil deeds. Even the punishment that God imposes on us for our evil is something that we brought on ourselves. Consequently, a first solution that Augustine offers to the problem of evil is that human will is the cause of evil and reason for divine punishment. A second and related solution is that the evil we willfully create within our souls is only a deprivation of goodness. Think of God’s goodness like a bright white light; the evil that we humans create is like an act of dimming that light, or shielding ourselves from it to create an area of darkness. It is not like we’ve created a competing light source of our own, such as a bright red light that we shine around to combat God’s bright white light. Accordingly, the evil that we create through our wills is the absence of good, and not a substantive evil in itself.

This paper examines St. Augustine’s view on evil. St. Augustine believed that God made a perfect world, but that God's creatures turned away from God of their own free will and that is how evil originated in the world. Augustine assumes that evil cannot be properly said to exist at all, he argues that the evil, together with that suffering which is created as punishment for sin, originates in the free nature of the will of all creatures. According to Augustine, God has allowed evil to exist in the world because it does not conflict with his righteousness. He did not create evil but is also not a victim of it. He simply allows it to exist.

To Augustine, an evil act is one that moves any member of creation towards exclusion from God’s universe. If a being with free will elects to move away from God for a temporal end, they are moving towards corruption or death and unleashing this force on the world around them. Once a body becomes in entirely corrupted it has no existence whatsoever, it is irrelevant to this reality and we can only imagine it based on the imprint left before it was no more. This is the ultimate death; complete exclusion from God’s universe and Augustine contrasts it with the ultimate Good, which is complete inclusion with God’s universe. Once something is outside of God’s universe, it is impossible for it have any effect. (7.13.1)

It is obvious from The Confession that Augustine was a man who struggled endlessly to extricate himself from the bondage of sin, but the more he tried, the more he failed and sinks deeper into its abyss. And with every failure, comes a sense of disappointment and despondency, until he had a strange experience. In AD 386, while sitting in his garden, Augustine heard a voice from some children playing not far away urging “him” to pick the book—the Bible, and read. What he read from Apostle Paul’s letter to the Roman Christian in Chapter 13 transformed, not only his understanding of the hopelessness and despair man encounters in trying to solve the problem of sin on his own, but he saw the provision that God has made to remedy the consequences of sin and the grace he has graciously provided to live a life that is acceptable to God. That moment was the turning point in Augustine’s life and how he developed his sotoriological

In this essay I will be discussing how St. Augustine ultimately solves the problem of evil, in a way that at times does go hand in hand with his religious views, however, at times contradicts what he is saying. In “ Confessions” Augustine who although does not in any way question the existence of God questions why God, someone who is all powerful, and all good still allowing people to suffer the way in which they are.

Jesus as teacher tells us to be good, follow him, and live ethical lives. In this model, Jesus is saving us from our own ignorance because we do not know right from wrong. He wants us to change our uncaring behavior by him educating and inspiring each of us through his teachings and examples of love and knowledge. Jesus is the bridge between us and God that covers ignorance and apathy. By him covering that, we change and learn, we live the ethical lives he wants us to live, and we teach and share with our fellow Christians.

God is according to Augustine the single sovereign, who rules over everything, even the evil forces in the universe. This sovereignty is grounded in Augustine’s understanding that God created everything. This assumption ultimately solves the question why evil exists. It exists because God created it, just like he created everything else. Augustine suggests that everything God creates in inherently good. However, creatures can become “evil” because they are prone to corruption (Mann 44). Furthermore, rational beings have

     According to Augustine, “Human beings are endowed with a power that he calls the will.” He emphasizes the will to being the center of freedom. Unlike other philosophers, who are determinists, Augustine, who has a libertarian view, sees our will as free choice. So for whatever we may choose to do, we become solely responsible for our actions which are caused by external factors instead of internal ones.