Are you an adherent of the Orthodox Church?
I am not Orthodox but my father was and so is my son. I used to work as a counselor for the Orthodox Church due to my connection to them through my father. Of course, I never recommended that anyone do anything I myself did not believe - such as venerating the saints or "asking them to pray for us." Still, I got along okay with them, disagreeing with them only when they were pressing me with some point. I got to be very close friends with the Priest of that Church and his wife and family.
Long before I met any of these people, I started reading the Early Church Fathers -
the Early Ante-Nicene generation. I was interested in finding out what the first three generations of teachers who lived closer to the time of the Apostles actually taught and how what they said compared to what I believed. I found that what they said was much closer to how I understood the scriptures than the deterministic theological system invented by Augustine.
Although the Orthodox are careful not to disrespect Augustine (for his early apologetic work) they are reluctant to call him a Church Father because he took Christendom in an entirely different direction than the
gospel that had been delivered once for all time to the saints. One of his major departures was on the point of
human free will which the Greek-speaking teachers had been teaching ever since the earliest centuries of the Church. No one talked about God unilaterally destining specific people to be saved until Augustine came along in the
Fifth Century. Unfortunately, most
doctrinal descendents of Augustine such as
Martin Luther and
John Calvin were avid students of Augustine. They would have done better reading John Chrysostom.
The method of interpretation used by these two contemporaries was different too. Augustine, followed the
Alexandrian "School" of interpretation which relied on
allegory and typology. By contrast, Chrysostom followed the
Antiochan school which we call the historical-grammatical method. I don't know about you, but I tend to distrust the allegorical approach which I consider to be mystical.
One of the main reasons Augustine failed to understand the scriptures was his abysmal ignorance of the Koine Greek Language. By that time those who continued to lived in the Eastern half of the Roman Empire continued speaking and reading Greek. They could still read the original text of scripture and to understand what the ECF had been teaching. Since Augustine
could only read Latin he had to rely on corrupt Latin texts which had been translated before the better translation made by Jerome.
The Reformers who were
Augustininan-Calvinists who adopted theistic determinism and human helplessness which Augustine had learned while he was a member of the Persian cult of Manichaeism. Theistic determinism and total inability contradict God's offer of the Gospel of Salvation as proclaimed by Jesus and the Apostles. How far off the mark Augustine, Calvin and Luther became crystal clear in the last exchange we had with that camp. Unfortunately, I was not able to support you and the few that took up your point because I have been very sick and was actually admitted into the hospital twice in the last few weeks. Anyway, I commend you for fighting the good fight.
