Saturday, March 6, 2021

Augustine was not a Proto-Calvinist: The Evidence from His Teachings on Baptismal Regeneration


  

Whereas Augustine viewed Pelagius as teaching that Adam left posterity only a bad example but never maliciously tainted human nature, he argued that all human persons are, rather, ueteres nascuntur on account of Adam’s transgression. In our sin we are all born “old” and all are therefore in need of the rebirth which only baptism can bring (Cf. ep. 190.16; cf. ciu. Dei 16.27; ench. 13.45-46). Baptism is understood in a complex relationship of both dying to self and union with Christ. First, it is the putting of death of one’s Adamic sinfulness, namely a life-giving death clearly meant for both infant and adult alike (Cf. ench. 14.52). In adults, it can also have the secondary effect of removing all actual sins—“in baptism there is not a single past sin that is not forgiven” (ep. 158.39; Teske, Letters [II/3], 200-201). Second, it is what joins us to the body of Christ and makes us members of the totus Christus. Immersion into the waters of baptism makes us Christ’s own, regardless of age or disposition of virtue (Cf. pecc. mer. 3.4.7). And while the efficacy of baptism is permanent and unrepeatable, the renewal into Christ which it initiates should never be construed as a single moment of conversion.

 

Baptism removes all sin but the work of the sacrament does not end here. Ever the pastor of souls, Augustine is insistent that the healing and the renewal of baptism must be lived out each day. Analogies help: it is one thing to be rid of the heat of a fever, another to be rid of all the debilitating effects of one’s illness; it is one thing to remove a foreign object from the body, Augustine’s example here is that of a spear or arrow, a telum), another to heal the wound it left. While baptism may be essential to Christian unity, it still remains the initial step in humanity’s divine communion: “The first stage of the cure is to remove the cause of the debility itself, and this is done by pardoning all sins; the second stage is curing the debility itself, and this is done gradually by making steady progress in the renewal of this image . . . by daily advances while the image is being renewed” (Trin. 14.14.23; Hill, Trinity,, 389). Although baptism initiates a new and graced participation in God, it must be nurtured and renewed daily. For this, Augustine offers us the daily regiment of prayer, of charity, and of the Eucharistic sacrifice. (David Vincent Meconi, The One Christ: St. Augustine’s Theology of Deification [Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013], 222-24)

 

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