HUH??
I did not praise Marcion; I merely mentioned his contribution towards establishing NT canon
As you know from the courses you teach, Aquinas (d.1275) was a 13th century person having no contact with Augustine, except through his books. But if you look at Augustine's many works, you will find that it is a mixture of RCC ideas as well as protestant thoughts. I fail to get your connection, but you are correct about his heresies
Agreed
The 400 years of silence between the prophets Malachi and John the Baptizer is a most natural breaking point for division between the Covenants
I didn't and would not accuse you of supporting or praising marcion...I was just adding that bit about him, since other readers might not know. I realize that what I added is but a tiny sliver of the problems in marcion.
True, aquinas. But Augustine was very mixed, as you pointed out, and aquinas was worse. His summa is better an expose of averroes the Islamist and their shared Aristotelian mindset. It's just that often Augustine and Aquinas are put out as model theologians when both are so mixed with pagan ideas that it makes it almost impossible to untangle.
I'm not posting to criticize what you said previously. But responded to some of the topics.
I don't see that what is protestant about Augustine can be separated out that way. His overall views are Platonic disguised in christian language. Just because he says some quasi okay things doesn't resolve that the text leads any reader astray and does more harm than good to the topics. For example, I accept He and His Spirit and His Son are God. But any student reading De Trinitate will think, logically, that Augustine got all this from Plato and Aristotle...which he did. He used their pagan version of a pagan trinity to argue for a Christian trinity, and because of that, polluted the topic for later students... I see that even on this forum, where the trinity topic is argued along aristotelian lines unknowingly, which wrecks the topic and gives perhaps the RCC version but not a version I can sign off on, because being filled with Greek archetypes of God. I've had to painstakingly explain to students that the Greek version is a MIMIC of His version, and I believe and have said that Satan knew christ was coming and brought forth Greek philosophy to pollute christianity -- in advance -- by saturating what came to be known as a classical education with Greek interpretations of being, reality, substance etc.
Aquinas may have had no contact with Augustine, but he had the same problem of being enamored of the Greeks. Brown's bio of Augustine is quite sad to read in context of Ambrose and Jerome as well. Both of them portrayed as very keen on the Greeks. That I would be more hesitant about, simply because Augustine's own interpretation of them as enamored of the things he was enamored of, are not trustworthy to me. I'd need to study each of them a lot more. I think they as most were most likely affected but this does not place them in the Greek camp in the same way Augustine seems to reside there, being a horrible reader of scripture and getting everything most generally mixed up.
His retractions didn't even even begin to resolve the problems, although he came to recognize more and more the problems with his view of free choice as expressed in
Free Choice of the Will (because there he built an image of man as completely in control of their salvation).
I would say that much of the view of the soul and the fall and Genesis has been affected by Augustine's distorted view of it. He had no sensitivity to God and could not hear HIm and most of the time was caught up in his own conflicting speculations.
