The six possible perfections of "Grace"/Gift

We have identified six possible perfections:
(i) superabundance: the supreme scale, lavishness, or permanence of the gift;

(ii) singularity: the attitude of the giver as marked solely and purely by benevolence;

(iii) priority: the timing of the gift before the recipient’s initiative;

(iv) incongruity: the distribution of the gift without regard to the worth of the recipient;

(v) efficacy: the impact of the gift on the nature or agency of the recipient;

(vi) non-circularity: the escape of the gift from an ongoing cycle of reciprocity.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 186

<idle musing>
You need to remember these six points! They are vital to the rest of the book. I find myself continually referring back to them as I read. Not all six are perfected by every writer—in fact they rarely if ever are. A writer will choose to perfect one or two. And this is where the problem arises. Everyone assumes that their version is the correct one and therefore reads their version back into the sources. Think Augustine/Calvin, who perfect efficacy and then read that back into the New Testament (hint, it isn't there!).
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Augustine and grace

Throughout these final treatises: Augustine insists again that God’s grace is not grace unless it is “gratuitous” (e.g., Praed. Sanct. 43: non nisi gratuita), and by this he means his distinctive constellation of gift-perfections: prior, incongruous, and efficacious. At no point (after Ad Simplicianum) must grace be envisaged as secondary or reactive to human initiative: just as grace precedes our merits, and is not God’s response to them, so it is antecedent also to our faith. But this insistence on the priority of grace is a principle shared with Pelagius and John Cassian, and is by no means sufficient on its own, not even with additional emphasis on its incalculable superabundance. In the development of Augustine’s thought, priority becomes ever more closely affiliated with efficacy (God’s bringing about our response to his prior grace), such that grace remains in all respects incongruous, and never a reward for human effort. As Augustine’s opponents insisted, there is no a priori reason why grace should be perfected in these three dimensions at once, and serious theological objections could be raised to this configuration of grace. Not only did it challenge ordinary notions of equity and human responsibility; it was also not unambiguously supported, still less necessitated, by Scripture itself. But Augustine had integrated his theology of grace with the virtue of humility and with the common-sense piety of daily prayer, and had wielded this integrated doctrine-cum-practice as a powerful weapon against “Pelagian error.” Henceforth it would prove difficult to unpick Augustine’s tightly woven bundle of grace-perfections without appearing “Pelagian,” while its close connection with the routines of prayer made this definition of grace seem “obvious” and proper to the Christian faith. Such is Augustine’s influence that “grace” has come to mean for many theologians precisely that set of perfections with which he endows it (priority, incongruity, and efficacy). It takes a clear-eyed perspective to see that a strong theology of grace does not require to be perfected in this fashion. Whether this constellation of perfections is integral to Pauline theology, and whether the priority and incongruity of grace can be more fruitfully interpreted in other terms today, are questions that should remain open.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 96–97

<idle musing>
He's saying a mouthful here, but be sure to understand it, because it helps you to understand the debates even today. Augustine is bundling aspects of grace together that don't necessarily belong together, scripturally speaking. And that's the problem—especially if you are a non-Augustinian! Augustine's standing in the church is such that if you don't toe his line, you risk being seen as heretical, or sub-Christian.
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Augustine on grace

Augustine notes the impossibility of frustrating the will of God, for “God has mercy on no one in vain” (Ad Simpl. 1.2.13). We see here the logical extension of a particular perfection of grace, the perfection of efficacy, once it is ascribed to a God whose will cannot be thwarted. While Augustine will continue to insist that the human mind is active and willing (indeed, becomes most truly “free”) in being moved by God, the combination of agencies will always give priority, in time and potency, to the divine agent. He justifies the selectivity in God’s effective calling by the notion that (following Romans 9:21-23) God can make from the same lump vessels of honor and vessels of destruction — the “lump” being henceforth dubbed the massa peccati or massa perditionis, which God justly condemns to destruction. The more Augustine stresses God’s prior, incongruous, and effective choice in grace, the more he is driven to appeal to the inscrutability of God’s decision (Ad Simpl. 1.2.16, appealing to Romans 11:33). But once the perfection of efficacy has reached deep into the human mind, there can be no limit to the impact of this grace, which operates with divine power.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 91

One does not entail the other five

It is clear from such examples that there is much at stake in the definition of “grace,” which is subject to strong and interested acts of interpretation. It is essential to disaggregate the various perfections of “grace,” and to warn against two matching assumptions: that any one perfection (or even a small cluster of them) is self-evidently the definition of grace, and that a perfection of one facet of grace will necessarily entail the perfection of others. When two different authors speak of divine benevolence or grace, but disagree on its meaning and its implications, this may be not because one emphasizes grace more than the other, or grasps its “true” meaning while the other does not, but simply because they are perfecting different facets of grace. As we shall see, Pelagius held firmly to the superabundance of divine grace, which was prior to all human activity; but (for theological reasons) he could not accept Augustine’s perfection of the incongruity of grace (see below, 3.2.3). Augustine did not believe in grace more than Pelagius; he simply believed in it differently.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 77

Early Augustine vs. later (or, predistination or freed will?)

Interestingly, some of Augustine’s opponents in this battle used Augustine’s own early writings, in which he argued that a rational being can only be corrupted if the person’s will consents to the corruption, as ammunition against him. Augustine holds strongly to divine predestination, but also wants to maintain human responsibility for sin. How the two are to be reconciled is a problem Augustine bequeaths to the later church.—Evans, A History of Western Philosophy, 145

Augustine again—this time on transformation and love

Knowing God cannot be divorced from the transformation of the person into someone who is godly, and thus is capable of knowing God. The key quality for Augustine turns out to be love, since God is himself love. It is love that makes it possible for us to live as God wills to fulfill God’s law, a view Augustine memorably expresses in the epigram “Love and do what you will.”—Evans, A History of Western Philosophy, 144

Augustine on creation, part 3 (final)

Although Augustine clearly believes that creation involves the universe having a beginning, he does not limit God’s creative activity to that beginning. God’s creation activity continues, both in the sense that he maintains and conserves the world in existence, and in the sense that God’s creative activity includes bringing into existence processes that continue over time.—Evans, A History of Western Philosophy, 142

More Augustine and creation

Creation for Augustine is also ad extra; that is, God creates the world not from his own nature but as something distinct from himself. (This is a view that is increasingly challenged by some contemporary theologians who have adopted “panentheism.”) God is immanent in creation in the sense that it reflects his nature. He is present in all of the world in the sense that he is aware of it all and can act at any time and any place, but the creation must be clearly distinguished from the Creator.—Evans, A History of Western Philosophy, 142

Augustine and Creation

In Augustine’s thought creation takes the place of Plotinian emanation. God’s creation is not a necessary effusion of his being, but a free and sovereign act. Besides being free, God's creation is ex nihilo, out of nothing, rather than, as in Plato’s Timaeus, a reworking of a preexistent material reality. Since matter is itself God’s creation, Augustine maintains that matter itself is not bad or evil. It is true that it is bad to place more value on the material and visible than on the nonphysical and invisible. God is more important than God’s creation. However, that creation is material is not in itself a bad thing. Thus Augustine moves away from the Platonic view that evil is the result of the immaterial soul’s being embodied.—Evans, A History of Western Philosophy, 142

Ambrose and Augustine on hermeneutics

It is important to note that the comments of Ambrose and Augustine concerning the “literal” meaning of a biblical text were made in response to Christian interpreters who disregarded common literary devices such as metaphor and insisted on interpreting the Old Testament in an extremely wooden, often corporeal sense. Too many in Ambrose’s own congregation considered exegesis a “spontaneous, immediate, and unconsidered” exercise. Various “errors and absurdities” were the result. Ambrose did not ignore the literal sense of the text, “but in many cases called the spiritual sense what we would consider to be the figurative literal sense.” [De Margerie, Introduction to the History of Exegesis, 2:79]—Christopher Hall, Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers, 105

<idle musing>
The more things change, the more they remain the same, eh? I've often said that we could use more literary interpreters and fewer engineer ones. By that meaning those who understand the literary techniques versus the literalistic, blueprint approach to scripture that seems to be far too common. Or else people wax eloquent in the allegorical approach, an equally dangerous approach…
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Wrong focus

Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 569, puts it summarily: “The priority of the gift is everywhere presupposed, but Paul rarely draws out predestinarian conclusions, as in the Hodayot [of the Dead Sea Scrolls] or in the theologies of Augustine and Calvin.” That is, Paul himself is not nearly as interested in perfecting the volitional priority of God’s personal electing grace (God’s choosing specific individuals before their birth for final salvation) as some of Paul’s interpreters have been. While God’s all—encompassing knowledge of the past, present, and future is everywhere presupposed (e. g., Rom. 11:33-36; 1 Cor. 2:7; Eph. 3:9), and Paul frequently speaks of specific events that God has arranged in advance (Rom. 8:28-30; 1 Cor. 15:51-55; Gal. 3:8; Eph. 1:3—14; 2:10; 1 Thess. 4:16; 2 Tim. 1:9), Paul’s emphasis is consistently on God’s choosing of the Christ and the corporate people of God in the Christ, not on individual predestination unto eternal life or damnation.—Matthew Bates in Salvation by Allegiance Alone, 106 n. 5

What? Me wrong?! No way!

The lesson we should derive from these examples, particularly the Galileo incident, is that the church should not respond with a knee-jerk negative reaction to scientific discoveries that appear to question our interpretation of the Bible. If they are accurate descriptions of reality, they are not going to conflict with the Bible. Rather, our reaction should be to go back to Scripture and see if we understood the text correctly or whether there might be a better reading in the sense that it takes us back to the intention of the author.

We should take Augustine’s admonition, worth quoting at length, to heart:

Usually even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative posotions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics, and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions and to the great loss for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scriptures are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books.—Lost World of the Flood, 173–74

Augustine and the dea nutrix

At the roots of monotheism, then, there began a kind of theological dance in the tension between the desire to preserve female imagery for God, including the dea nutrix, and the denial that this is possible for a single deity who was more commonly imagined as male. This would go on through the ages. Even individual theologians were often of two minds. For example, the same Augustine who spoke of “the Lord’s breast” elsewhere declared that, in “the image of God,. . . there is no sex,” and that the woman is not the image of God except when she is joined together with her husband.—Christopher B. Hays in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, 212

<idle musing>
Augustine was wrong! I suspect that the reason he went the route of women not being fully the image of God, aside from his patriarchal frame of reference, was that the church is the bride of Christ, and apart from Christ can't reflect the glory of God. But those two don't have to be, in fact, shouldn't be, tied together.

The problem with Augustine is that he wrote so much that you can find pretty much anything you want in there. Unfortunately, it seems his worst stuff is what the church adopted! But that is just an
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Augustine on Answers in Genesis

In Homily 260c Augustine compares the promises of Isaiah 57:19, “peace upon peace,” with the sabbath day of rest that is contained "in this temporal round of days.” God rested on the seventh day in order to indicate the eternal rest of his saints. This is foretold in Job 5:19, “He will deliver you from six troubles; in seven no harm shall touch you." The reason Genesis does not indicate an evening on the seventh day is because it moves into the eighth of eternity. But the eighth day is not the only thing that should be an indicator of eternity for Augustine. He chides “lovers of this world” who do not consider the “symbolic meaning of the days.” Failure to do so shows that their focus "is not the rest of a spiritual sabbath, from which their thoughts could also be directed to the eternity of the eighth." Rather, they are "given over … to the round of temporal thoughts, unable to entertain any idea of the eternal."—Early Christian Readings of Genesis One, pages 296–97

<idle musing>
Quite an indictment. I suspect Augustine would have these same words for those who are fixated on a scientific interpretation of the Genesis 1–2. Something to think about, at least, isn't it?

Just an
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Morning and evening as Augustine sees them

In the days we experience, light declines as we get closer to sunset and we call that evening. Also, light returns as we get closer to sunrise, and we call that morning. But since we have a “surer light,” we also have a “surer day” and, therefore, “both a truer evening and a truer morning.” It thus makes perfect sense to Augustine that a spiritual evening occurs when there is a turning away from contemplating the Creator, and a spiritual morning when there is a move from knowledge of the Creator to praise of him. For Augustine, this is actually a literal interpretation, not allegorical. He recognizes that some may not be satisfied with “the line which I have been able in my sma11 measure explore or trace.” He encourages those who disagree to find another explanation, but it must be “as a strict and proper account of the way the foundations of this creation were made." In other words, it must also be a literal interpretation.—Early Christian Readings of Genesis One, pages 285–86 (emphasis original)

Augustine had more sense that we do…

There is, he [Augustine] states, just one day, and it should not be understood in the same way we understand days that are measured and counted by the sun’s circuit. The day that was originally repeated three times before the creation of the sun and moon on the fourth repetition is not the same kind of day we experience. Thus, the night and day that God divided in Genesis 1:4 “are to be taken in quite a different sense from this night and day, between which he said that the lamps he created were to divide, when he said, And let them divide between day and night (Gen 1:14). The fourth day was when God fashioned the kind of day we know. But the day that was originally created had already gone through three repetitions before the lights were created on the fourth repetition.—Early Christian Readings of Genesis One, page 285 (italics in the original translation)

<idle musing>
And don't try to tell me he was influenced by Darwin and therefore compromised! He lived 1400 years before Darwin was around. And by the way, this was from his "literal" commentary.
</idle musing>

Children of the day

The knowledge of the angels being connected to evening and morning simply repeats itself in the days of creation. Morning indicates knowledge of their own spiritual “higher” order, albeit not what God is, while evening indicates a “lesser degree of knowledge”—that is, a knowledge of the lower order of creation. For Augustine, knowledge of a thing in the Word of God is “day,” while knowledge of its own specific nature is “evening.”—Early Christian Readings of Genesis One, page 283

Even Augustine!

On the seventh day God rests from all his works and sanctifies that day. Augustine explains that just as the first six days are not to be understood in their literal sense, neither is the idea of God resting: “We are not to understand this in a childish way, as if God labored at his work.” Rather, God spoke and the heavens and earth were created (Ps 33:9; 148:5). In keeping with Augustine’s belief that this word was intelligible and eternal rather than audible, God’s rest signifies those who rest in God.—Early Christian Readings of Genesis One, page 275

The problems with translating from a translation of a translation

Over the course of the literary and theological history of the Old Testament, the term ,תורה [tôrâ] which originally stood for the teaching or instruction given by a priest, a prophet, or a parent, increasingly took on the meaning of “law” (νόμος [nomos]), particularly the “law of Yahweh,” which, according to the narrative of the Pentateuch, was mediated and written down by Moses (cf. Deut 31:24), before ultimately indicating the books of Genesis to Deuteronomy as a whole—that is, the Torah/ὁ νόμος (Greek Prologue to Ben Sira, 4 Macc 18:10). Within the context of the Torah piety that developed during the Persian and Hellenistic periods, obedience to the Torah is regarded as a correlate to the “covenant” and is described as justice. Mediated by its translation in the Septuagint (generally with νόμος) and in the Vulgate (generally with lex), Christian translations of the Bible up to the present tend to translate the term תורה as “law,” which reflects its later use in the Old Testament in a one-sided manner. This also had significant consequences for the history of doctrine and theology and occasionally led to the devaluing of the Old Testament and to Christian anti-Jewish polemics.—The Development of God in the Old Testament, pages 34–35

<idle musing>
Think Augustine, who knew no Hebrew and a smattering of Greek. He was dependent on the Old Latin translations—which frequently were less accurate than Jerome's Vulgate, which was in the process of being completed while Augustine was alive. Jerome knew Hebrew well and not infrequently chided Augustine about his lack of knowledge of Greek and Hebrew (Jerome could be nasty…).
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Augustine had it right!

As a young student, I shook my head when reading how St. Augustine would interject prayers into his exegetical writings. Is this not bad scholarship? Based on my understanding of the book of Job today I would say: No! This is the very foundation that allows true interaction with the text and the reality contained in it.—Job's Journey, page 99 n. 41

<idle musing>
I've got to read this book! Isn't that a wonderful sentiment? Reminds me of something I read (and posted) back in 2013:

[T]rue theology ought to end in prayer. If theology is the study of God, the knowledge of God, and if God is God, then the end of our study ought to be worship. If it is not, if it has been only a study about a subject and our thoughts on that subject, that is idolatry; I have made God a thing. It does not matter how accurate my thought is; if it does not bring me to Him as a living Person, I have only found a substitute for Him, a knowledge of something other than God. When one comes to know the true God, the only response is, in the language of the Old Testament, fearful worship.— Lectures in Old Testament Theology, pages 15-16

Good stuff, indeed!
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