BAPTISM
AND THE MOMENT OF JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH
Augustine's overwhelming emphasis
on faith, grace, and charity in his exegesis of Paul's soteriology is in
striking contrast to the more overtly baptismal soteriology of
Tertullian and Cyprian - as well as Ambrose. This can lead to a sense of
tension between Augustine's ecclesiology and his theology of grace, as if the
latter could be liberated from sacramental and ecclesial mediation. The
nineteenth-century Calvinist scholar Benjamin Warfield found this tension to be
irreconcilable and counted its resolution in favor of the absolute primacy of
grace over all ecclesiastical mediation to be the Reformation's Augustinian
triumph: "the Reformation, inwardly considered, was just the ultimate
triumph of Augustine's doctrine of grace over Augustine's doctrine of the
Church."6 But Augustine's reflections on the relationship between faith
and grace are unintelligible except as reflections on the tradition and
concrete practices of the North African Church: the one who is worthy to
receive the grace of the Holy Spirit by faith in Augustine's Pauline
commentaries is none other than the catechumen who approaches the sacrament
with sincere faith in Lent and receives grace at Easter. There are not two
accounts of grace, as if one were divine and invisible and another were
sacramental and visible. Augustine's theology of justification by faith is not
meant to provide a replacement account of God's grace in place of the
catechumen's reception of the Holy Spirit in baptism; it is meant to further
illuminate the spiritual reality of that event. In light of this, it is to
baptism that we first turn, in order to call to mind the concrete ecclesial
practices through which Augustine interpreted Paul. (Christopher R. Mooney, Augustine’s
Theology of Justification by Faith [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2026],
68)
