Augustine on War and Military Service by Wynn Phillip

Author:Wynn, Phillip [Phillip Wynn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4514-6985-1
Publisher: Fortress Press
Published: 2013-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

Augustine goes on to adduce the example of Elijah calling down fire from heaven against the followers of Baal (1 Kings 18:36-40), and notes that even Christ in reproving his disciples for asking him to do the same did not blame the example itself, but the vengeful spirit of the disciples in asking for it (Luke 9:54-55). According to the Manichaean heretics, Christ’s injunction to “turn the other cheek” was antithetical to the picture of the vengeful, violent God of the ancient Israelites, but Augustine points out that mortal punishments, such as the slaying of Ananias and his wife (Acts 5:1-11), were not absent in the early church, “though they were much rarer than in the Old Testament.” In any case the Manichaeans, who rejected the Old Testament, could find even in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, which they regarded as canonical, the account of a man who struck the apostle being killed by a lion, and his dismembered hand being carried by a dog to Thomas while the apostle was dining.[122]

Peter Brown has noted how the relations of prophet and king in the Old Testament had come to represent the ecclesiastical and political realities of Augustine’s Africa better than anything to be found in the actions of the apostles, and how at this very period “the events of the Old Testament had become the true gesta maiorum of a large body of the Roman governing class.”[123] Augustine points out in this new reality how the obligation to enforce religious discipline is now incumbent upon secular Christian rulers, for whom it is no longer sufficient that they themselves are Christian, in a letter to the general Boniface in 417.

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