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Rather than constituting a break with his Platonism, Augustine's doctrines of grace and free will are formed from the beginning by Platonist conceptions of happiness, wisdom, intellect, virtue, purification, conversion, faith, and love. Divine grace is inner help for the will, and our need for it expands “outward” over the course of Augustine's career, being required originally for attaining the happiness of wisdom (i.e., the intellectual vision of God), then for rightly ordered love (i.e., charity), and eventually for Christian faith. Reading the apostle Paul, Augustine emphasizes the difficulty of willing and loving the good, and eventually concludes that even the human choice to believe depends on grace, though this comes to us in the external words of a “suitable call,” which does not directly change the will from within. However, in his later polemics against Pelagianism, Augustine reconceives grace as wholly inward, a divine inner teaching that turns our will and causes us to believe. Since God foresees how he will give the gift of grace, this raises questions of predestination and especially election: why does God choose to bring some people rather than others to conversion, faith, and ultimate salvation? A more biblical and external doctrine of election, in which the chosen people are a blessing for those outside them, would avoid the anxieties of Augustine's doctrine of predestination.

How does severe interpersonal harm affect our freedom and the ways in which we relate to ourselves, others, and God? God and the Victim addresses the challenges that trauma and feminist theory pose to cherished theological convictions about human freedom and divine grace. Overall, the Christian tradition has held that a person's response to God's grace is not entirely vulnerable to earthly contingencies: interpersonal harm, however severe, cannot separate one from the grace of God and from the power to love others. Does this longstanding belief remain credible, however, in light of social scientific research on the insidious effects of interpersonal violence? Should we not consider more carefully the possibility that individuals can harm one another to such an extent that the other's capacity to respond to God's grace is severely diminished, if not altogether destroyed?

Drawing on insights present in feminist and trauma theory, this book articulates a revised Rahnerian theology of freedom and grace responsive to trauma survivors in need of healing. Such a revised theology of freedom and grace is marked most distinctively by two claims: (1) human freedom to respond to God's grace can possibly be destroyed by severe interpersonal harm, and (2) divine grace is mediated at least in part through loving interpersonal relations. This book argues that survivors' experiences of both interpersonal harm and support offer crucial insights that shed light on God's grace and human freedom. Ultimately, such insights promise profound ethical implications, altering our perceptions of the obligations we have toward one another.

Though understandably overshadowed by Augustine’s preeminence in the West, Ambrose is a doctor of the Catholic Church and an important patristic authority for the Middle Ages and Reformation, especially in moral theology. Christian Grace and Pagan Virtue argues that Ambrose of Milan’s theological commitments, particularly his understanding of the Christian’s participation in God’s saving economy through baptism, are foundational for his virtue theory laid out in his catechetical and other pastoral writings. While he holds a high regard for classical and Hellenistic views of virtue, Ambrose insists that the Christian is able to attain the highest ideal of virtue taught by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. This is possible because the Christian has received the transformative grace of baptism that allows the Christian to participate in the new creation inaugurated by Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection. This book explores Ambrose’s understanding of this grace and how it frees the Christian to live the virtuous life. The argument is laid out in two parts. In Part I, the book examines Ambrose’s understanding of human nature and the effects of sin upon that nature. Central to this Part is the question of Ambrose’s understanding of the right relationship of soul and body as presented in Ambrose’s repeated appeal to Paul’s words, “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom. 7:24). Part II lays out Ambrose’s account of baptism as the sacrament of justification and regeneration (sacramental and proleptic participation in the renewal of human nature in the resurrection). Ultimately, Ambrose’s account of the efficacy of baptism rests upon his Christology and pneumatology. The final chapters explain how Ambrose’s accounts of Christ and the Holy Spirit are foundational to his view of the grace that liberates the soul from the corruption of concupiscence.

Calvin at the Centre explores the impact of various ideas on the thought of John Calvin and also that of later theologians who were influenced by him. The book therefore calls into question the attitude that Calvin's views are purely biblical and unaffected by the particular intellectual circumstances in which he lived. It also provides reason for thinking that the relation between Calvin and Calvinism is more complex than is commonly believed. The focus is on philosophical ideas as they find a place within Calvin's theology, and the chapters are organized to reflect this, dealing in turn with epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical issues. So the book follows the general outlook of the author's John Calvin's Ideas (OUP: 2004), but extends its scope and range. The emphasis is upon the coincidence of ideas between Calvin and other thinkers, rather than offering a historical account of how that influence came about. So, for example, there is a study of the extent to which Calvin's view of the atonement is Anselmic in its character, and how Calvin's view was treated in later discussions of the atonement in Puritanism. But the question of the exact ways in which Anselm's ideas came to Calvin's notice is left to one side. Among the topics treated are: the knowledge of God and of ourselves, Scripture and reason, the visibility of God, providence and predestination, Calvin and compatibilism, and the intermediate state

Having been at the centre of a century long debate which cast doubt on the nature of Augustine’s conversion, one might assume that Augustine’s early works (386-96) have now been rescued and given their rightful place. This book suggests that these are now threatened by an equally destructive trend in Augustine scholarship, which, over the last fifty years, has become an almost unquestioned norm of interpretation. This is the idea, fatefully and poignantly depicted by Peter Brown in the chapter of his seminal biography entitled The Lost Future, that the early optimistic and philosophical Augustine was dramatically transformed into the mature, pessimistic theologian of the Fall, original sin, and grace by his reading of Paul in the mid-390s. This interpretation of the first decade of Augustine’s life has since become such an idée fixe in scholarly as well as popular accounts, leaving two very different Augustines: one, the young convert, fired to pursue Wisdom by an optimistic confidence in the rational disciplines of the liberal arts, human free will, and a glorious ideal of perfection; the other, the older and wiser bishop of Hippo, convinced of human fallen ness and of the need for grace to will or to do any good work. This book argues that in order to do justice to Augustine’s conversion, to his early theology and understanding of the Christian life, and to the early works themselves, such caricatures must be resisted. It seeks to demonstrate that there is a fundamental continuity in Augustine’s thought, which does not undergo any dramatic change when he re-reads Paul in the 390s; that there is only one Augustine, for whom human weakness and divine grace were the central axes of his Christian faith and life from the very beginning.

Presents a comprehensive account of sanctification and divinization in Cyril as set forth in his New Testament biblical commentaries. By establishing the importance of pneumatology in Cyril’s narrative of divine life and by showing the requirement for an ethical aspect of divinization grounded in the example of Christ himself, this study brings a corrective to certain readings of Cyril that tend to exaggerate the ‘somatic’ or ‘physicalistic’ character of his understanding of divinization, by arguing that Cyril correlates the somatic and pneumatic means of our union with Christ, and impressively integrates the ontological and ethical aspects of our sanctification and divinization. The final chapter offers brief sketches of Cyril in comparison with Theodore of Mopsuestia, Augustine, and Leo the Great, with the aim of gaining further clarity to the Christological debates of the fifth century, and a better grasp of the theological similarities and differences between the East and West.

Why have Christian theologians returned again and again over the course of the centuries to the topic of predestination? This book argues that the reason for the recurrent interest in predestination is that Scripture teaches the core elements of the doctrine of predestination. When Second Temple Jewish theologies took up the election of Israel, their affirmation of an eternal Creator God resulted in the doctrine of predestination. For the New Testament authors as well, God from eternity governs everything in his providence, electing some by grace and permitting others to rebel permanently. The claim that Scripture teaches predestination has been highly controverted in the Christian tradition. This book explores the views of sixteen key figures representing a wide spectrum of views: Origen, Augustine, Boethius, and John of Damascus (patristic period); John Scottus Eriugena, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, and Catherine of Siena (medieval period); John Calvin, Luis de Molina, Francis de Sales, and G. W. Leibniz (Reformation/early modern period); and Sergius Bulgakov, Karl Barth, Jacques Maritain, and Hans Urs von Balthasar (20^th century). The final chapter offers a constructive approach to the topic, rooted in Aquinas's theocentric metaphysics and doctrine of God's permission of sin, and in Catherine's and Francis's emphasis on God's superabundant love for all rational creatures.

Martin Luther's thought continues to challenge people throughout the world in the twenty-first century. His paradigmatic shift in defining God and what it means to be human left behind a foundation for viewing human creatures that was anchored in Aristotle's anthropology. Luther defined the Revealed God in terms of his mercy and love for human beings, based not on their merit and performance but rather on his unconditioned grace. He placed ‘fearing, loving, and trusting God above all else’ at the heart of his definition of being human. This volume places the development and exposition of these key presuppositions in Luther's thinking within the historical context of late medieval theology and piety as well as the unfolding dynamics of political and social change at the dawn of the modern era. Special attention is given the development of a ‘Wittenberg way’ of practicing theology under Luther's leadership, which left behind a dependence on allegorical methods of biblical interpretation for a ‘literal-prophetic’ approach to Scripture. More importantly, it placed the distinction between the ‘gospel’ as God's unmerited gift of identity as his children and the ‘law’ at the heart of all interpretation of the Bible.

Many of us keep pet animals; we rely on them for companionship and unconditional love. For some people their closest relationships may be with their pets. In the wake of the animal rights movement, some ethicists have started to re-examine this relationship, and to question the rights of humans to “own” other sentient beings in this way. This book brings a Christian perspective to bear on the subject of our responsibility to animals, looked at through the lens of our relations with pets—especially dogs. The book argues that the emotional bond with companion animals should play a central role in the way we think about animals in general, and—against the more extreme animal liberationists—defends the intermingling of the human and animal worlds. It tries to imagine what it would be like to treat animals as a gift from God, and indeed argues that not only are animals a gift for us, but they give to us; we need to attend to their giving and return their gifts appropriately. Throughout, the book insists that what Christians call grace is present in our relations with animals just as it is with other humans. Grace is the inclusive and expansive power of God's love to create and sustain relationships of real mutuality and reciprocity, and the book unfolds the implications of the recognition that animals participate in God's abundant grace. The book's thesis affirms and persuasively defends many of the things that pet lovers feel instinctively—that their relationships with their companion animals are meaningful and important, and that their pets have value and worth in themselves in the eyes of God.