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Christianity--a Different Perspective.
Ken Glasziou, Qld., Australia
Like most processes associated with evolutionary society on this Earth, the history of western religion has been dominated by the male sex hormone, testosterone. One of Christianity's principal founders, Paul, had too little. Another, Augustine of Hippo, known also as Saint Augustine, suffered from an excess. The effects of testosterone levels upon their mental functioning appears to have combined in a curious way to cause a split in Christian theology towards two extremes in the interpretation of the incarnation of Jesus. One extreme made Jesus' life, and its divine revelation of the nature of God, as having paramount significance. The other virtually ignored both Jesus' life and his teaching, attributing importance only to his death on the cross as the symbolic lamb sacrificed for the sin of the world.
To put some meat on the bones of this story we must go back to the 4th century when a young Augustine was permitted to join the Manichean religion in Carthage--but only as a member of its lower order. This order was for men who could not control their sex drive. The 'elite' were, of course, the celibates, probably with low testosterone.
Augustine turned out to have a brilliant mind. However, after nine years, he became bored with the Manicheans and left for the academic center of Milan in Italy. With him, he took a severe inferiority complex because of his failure to win the battle against his testosterone. In Milan he gained a professorship and destiny took him to hear the preaching of the most eminent churchman of that time, Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. As a result, Augustine began his long association with the writings of Paul, and particularly the Epistle to the Romans.
In Paul, Augustine discovered a man at the opposite end of the testosterone scale, but possibly with an equal mental anguish attributable thereto. Paul admitted he had no need for a wife and wished other men were as himself. Whatever their mental pain, both men were less than pleased with how they might present before God. They discovered a way out of their predicament in the doctrines of predestination, grace, and justification.
The basis of these doctrines was the congenital depravity of man such that he could do nothing at all to rescue himself from that appalling estate. Rescue could come only from God. Augustine agreed with Paul about their depravity. But both felt they were "chosen," so why on earth would God have chosen them? The conclusion was that rescue must have come before they were born--their elite status was predestined because God, even before the foundations of the world and before time began, already knew whether or not they would accept grace when he offered it. Justification, meaning "being made righteous," automatically followed the receipt of God's grace.
Both Paul and Augustine subscribed to a doctrine about Adam's transgression and original sin, but Augustine linked original sin with human sexuality and the dependence of human procreation upon the sexual passion that he had come to abhor. Both men found their release from condemnation through God's redemptive act, the sacrificial death of Christ on the cross. They appear to ignore the connotations of their theology regarding the nature of the God whom John defined as "love."
Soon to appear on the scene in Rome and destined to present a different dogma was a monk from Britain named Pelagius. The spiritual sloth he found among many Roman Christians greatly distressed him. He blamed this moral laxity on the doctrine of divine grace from the "Confessions" of Augustine who, in his prayer for continence, beseeched God to grant whatever grace the divine will determined.
Rejecting the argument that people sinned because of human weakness, Pelagius insisted on man's basically good moral nature and taught that God made human beings free to choose between good and evil. For Pelagius, sin was a voluntary act committed against God's law. His many followers also rejected the doctrines of original sin and the necessity for infant baptism, noting the absence of any comment by Jesus upon these doctrinal issues. So not much is new!
Pelagianism was vigorously opposed by Augustine and many others. Eventually it lost the battle and its major proponents, Pelagius, Celestius, and Julian of Eclanum were excommunicated for heresy. However, Pelagianism persisted in one form or another, making a reappearance during the Reformation in which both Calvin and Luther plumbed for the Augustinian view.
Curiously, the survival of a Christian theology is strongly reminiscent of a Darwinian natural selection process--the survival of the fittest for the times and circumstances at hand. To survive in strength, the Church needed money.
Prior to the industrial revolution, Karl Marx's contention that all wealth derives from the sweat of the peasants was not too far off the truth. Hence, it was mainly indirectly from the peasants and more directly through their masters that the Church had to derive its major source of income. A modified Augustinian theology had sale value. The Church taught that all men were born as incorrigible sinners. Then it sold them salvation. In the Church's sacramental system, people made their sacrifices to appease and please God. They brought
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