Diarmaid MacCulloch: A History of Christianity Augustine: Shaper of the Western Church
Previous posts; here, here, here, here and here.
On a quick aside, and quite coincidentally, Dr Jim West today comments on the DVD collection based on this marvelous book, in these terms:
But I just can’t commend Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years highly enough. The 5th episode especially is brilliant as MacCulloch discusses the ‘prosperity gospel’ with a Korean theologian. Brilliant. Really, if you have $70 laying around or a kind relative or a birthday near or for any reason whatever, get it.
Agreed!
Another snippet from Diarmaid MacCulloch’s book: A History of Christianity – The First Three Thousand Years.
Pages: 305-306
…..Only halfway through the work, at the end of the fourteen books, does Augustine explicitly begin to take up the theme of the two cities: ‘the earthly city glories in itself, the Heavenly City glories in the Lord’. All the institutions which we know form part of the struggle between these two cities, a struggle which runs through all world history. If this is so, the idea of a Christian empire such as Eusebius of Caesarea had envisaged can never be a perfect reality on earth. No structure in this world, not even the Church itself, can without qualification be identified as the City of God, as biblical history itself demonstrated from the time of the first murder: ‘Cain founded a city, whereas Abel, as a pilgrim, did not found one. For the City of the saints is up above, although it produces citizens here below, and in their persons the City is on pilgrimage until the time of its kingdom comes.’ Though this remains his principle, Augustine is occasionally incautious in expression, and does indeed identify the visible Church in the world as the Heavenly City. Ironically, much of the influence of The City of God over the next thousand years came from the eagerness of medieval churchmen to expand on this identification in their efforts to make the Church supreme on earth, equating the earthly city with opponents of ecclesiastical power like some of the Holy Roman Emperors.
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