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Punishment And Reconciliation: Augustine, Peter Iver Kaufman
Punishment And Reconciliation: Augustine, Peter Iver Kaufman
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
Punish the sin, not the sinner; easier said than done. Preaching on the second Psalm and purporting to address 'all who judge the earth,' Augustine wrestled with the problems attending punishment and reconciliation. The results recorded in his sermons and correspondence as well as in a few treatises perplex yet are worth considering before we investigate Augustine's more explicit remarks on the punishment of Donatist dissidents resisting reconciliation with the African church from which, he insisted, their predecessors had seceded in the early fourth century. At stake during Augustine's tenure as bishop, toward the end of that century and three …
Augustine's Punishments, Peter Iver Kaufman
Augustine's Punishments, Peter Iver Kaufman
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
During Augustine's life, government authorities were generally friendly to the Christianity he came to adopt and defend. His correspondence mentions one imperial magistrate in Africa, Virius Nicomachus Flavianus, a pagan vicar of Africa who seemed partial to Donatist Christians whom Augustine considered secessionists. Otherwise, from the 390s to 430, assorted proconsuls, vicars, and tribunes sent from the imperial chancery and asked to maintain order in North Africa were willing to enforce government edicts against Donatists and pagans. To an extent, Augustine endorsed enforcement. He was troubled by punitive measures that looked excessive to him, yet scholars generally agree with Peter …
Augustine's Dystopia, Peter Iver Kaufman
Augustine's Dystopia, Peter Iver Kaufman
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
By discussing several of the issues that complicated the Christian's cohabitation and political participation in "this wicked world," as Augustine saw them, the remainder of this contribution will garrison the ground we have gained collecting the bad news he conveyed in his city. We shall inquire whether the assorted "consolations" he enumerated compensated for the corruption. And we shall consider one reason he might have had for composing his tome as a massive disorienting device. Of course, certainty about authorial intent is impossible to pocket, yet one can make the case that Augustine dropped City of God into the post-410 …
Christian Realism And Augustinian (?) Liberalism, Peter Iver Kaufman
Christian Realism And Augustinian (?) Liberalism, Peter Iver Kaufman
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
Surely there is enough kindling lying about in the Bible and in subsequent moral theology to fire up love for neighbors and compassion for countless “friends” in foreign parts--and in crisis. And, surely, the momentum of love’s labor for the just redistribution of resources, fueled by activists’ appeals for solidarity, should be sustained by stressing that we are creatures made for affection, not for aggression. Yet experience, plus the history of the Christian traditions, taught Reinhold Niebuhr, who memorably reminded Christian realists, how often love was “defeated,” how a “strategy of brotherhood . . . degenerates from mutuality to a …
Augustine And Corruption, Peter Iver Kaufman
Augustine And Corruption, Peter Iver Kaufman
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
Augustine's political thought or, as it is often called, political theology is a matter of considerable dispute. 'Augustine and Corruption' approaches that dispute by examining the evidence that Ramsay MacMullen presented to substantiate his observation that Augustine 'approved of' corruption. I read that evidence differently and use Augustine's remarks about bribes paid to court clerks, schemes to defraud philanthropists, and tax evasion to support what has been aptly called 'a minimalist' interpretation of his political expectations.
Donatism Revisited: Moderates And Militants In Late Antique North Africa, Peter Iver Kaufman
Donatism Revisited: Moderates And Militants In Late Antique North Africa, Peter Iver Kaufman
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
The little we know about the relationships between moderate and militant Donatists in the late fourth and early fifth centuries tells us more about the opposition that both groups stirred among the Caecilianists. What follows is an effort to reenter the Caecilianists’ polemic to discover what we can learn about Donatism and its critics, chiefly Augustine, by reading the evidence with some useful conclusions drawn from the study of more recent religious violence.
Patience And/Or Politics: Augustine And The Crisis At Calama, 408-409, Peter Iver Kaufman
Patience And/Or Politics: Augustine And The Crisis At Calama, 408-409, Peter Iver Kaufman
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
Few scholars would quarrel with Ernst Dassman's observation that early Christian "reserve" toward the political cultures of antiquity--a mixture of difference and indifference, which only occasionally gave way to hostility--turned Christians' outcast status into something of a virtue.Still fewer are likely to dispute the assertion that influential fourth-century Christians unreservedly welcomed the changes that came with Constantine and anticipated the "Christianization" of imperial, if not also local, politics. But evaluations of Augustine's enthusiasm later that century and early the next never fail now to elicit disagreement