Augustine for Armchair Theologians

Armchair Theologians

by Stephen A. Cooper

In this book, Stephen Cooper provides an overview of the greatest theologian of the early Augustine of Hippo. Augustine has had a towering influence in the history of Christianity and his Confessions has long been regarded as one of Christianity's classic texts. Cooper introduces the life and thought of Augustine through discussing the Confessions and shows how many of Augustine's human struggles are still with us today. He also examines the theological views of Augustine that emerged through the important controversies of his times. By focusing on the Confessions, Cooper takes us through Augustine's journey as we see him losing his way and then finding it again by the grace of God. Augustine shows us what it means to be from God, to be oriented to God, and then brought to God by God. Stephen A. Cooper is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Genres: Audiobook, Theology, Biography, Nonfiction, Christian, Religion, History

1 pages, Audio CD

First published September 1, 2002

Reviews

[Gary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this and thought I'd at least start it to see if it is any good. Stay tuned...

Really pretty good, actually. Much weightier than the illustrations would suggest. It is essentially a commentary on the confessions, but written well and engaging. It's not a bad way to learn the life of Augustine.

Of all the early Church Fathers Augustine is my favorite.

Loved it.

[Mark Guadagni · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was too intimidated by the actual book "Confessions" by St Augustine, so I got this watered down version. It is a good alternative and captures lots of the key points of St. Augustine and frames his philosophy along side quotes from Plato's: The Republic.

Cooper introduces the concept of the relation of God evil... "Many people find the question concerning the relation of God to evil a difficult and thorny thicket. Christianity traditionally affirms the omnipotence of God, human free will and the reality of evil. ...Augustine never seriously considered the possibility that God could do evil, because his rock bottom intuition about the nature of God. (page 118).

Cooper then goes on to by quoting Augustine in Confessions:

" I was raising the question of where evil came from, but I was seeking evilly and didn't see evil in my questioning. I would set up in my spiritual vision the entire creation and whatever one can picture in it--land, sea, the air, the stars, trees, and mortal beings--and also what we cannot see in creation--the firmament of the heavens, all the angels, and all other spiritual creations it. Also those things that are physical my imagination ordered in appropriate places. I mentally set up, as Your creation, one immense mass, distinguished within by the kinds of beings, whether real physical ones or those I had imagined in lieu of spiritual realities. I made it immense, not of a specific size but immense beyond compare, although finite on all sides. You, O God, ran through it and penetrated it in every way, You being absolutely infinite. It was as if the sea were everywhere, pure infinite sea in all directions through magnitude of space, and the sea contained within sponge would surely be full in every part with the enormous sea. (Conf. VII, 7)

Wickedness is “a perversity of will twisted away from the highest substance, …God, towards inferior things” (Confessions). Evil is choosing lower goods over the greatest good, God, by which the will orients itself towards nothingness.

These passages really help breakdown the complexities of Augustine's view of God, which sets the foundation for pantheism, changing the paradigm to God. It really reminds me of Reza Azlan's, a Sufi Muslim Christian Scholar's book: "GOD".

Further, Aslan argues for a pantheistic view of God, where creator and creation is a single thing; as opposed to the the traditional theistic understanding that there is one God who is separate from us. With this in mind, Aslan is attempting to appeal to the increasing number of people who are moving away from organized religion.

“If you believe that God exists in every human being, then you approach every human being—regardless of their race, or their creed, or their gender, or their sexual orientation— with the same love and respect that you approach God, because they are God,” he said.

It’s his hope that the new book will “reframe” the way people think and talk about God. “Pantheism can provide a path..."

Through the readings of both Reza and St Augustine this view of God becomes more full circle and now I feel more inspired and less intimidated to actually read confessions.

[James P · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good exposition of how Augustine became the superstar he is of orthodox theology...

[Lee Harmon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I doubt anybody needs an introduction to Saint Augustine, the 4th century Bishop of Hippo. Augustine preached for perhaps 30 years and authored over 100 titles. But if you want a quick overview of his life and spiritual growth, without getting bogged down in theological discussion, this is a friendly little book. This is my first Armchair Theologians book, and I’m impressed.

Cooper follows the lead of Augustine’s most famous work, Confessions, most of which is autobiographical, to tell the story of his life. Augustine’s other most famous work, his massive City of God, gets a brief nod in the final chapter. I found that Cooper provided a proper balance to the influences and motivations of Augustine’s life: his closeness with his mother, his relationships and later determined abstinence, his foray into Manicheism, and his resultant theology of grace. A proper perspective helps overcome the shallow perception that Augustine was wracked with guilt over what he considered a terribly sinful life. Augustine did indeed condemn his youthful actions, but they hardly ranked very high on the sin scale, and he comes across in this book as much more reasonable, merely cognizant of his shortcomings.

This is not to say his denunciation of Manicheism and acceptance of Christianity was an easy one. He quickly grasped the untruths of astrology and other competing life views, and saw Christianity as the one true way, but was unwilling. One day, before feeling any strong conviction toward Christianity and feeling unfulfilled, he picked up a Bible and it opened to this passage:

Not in revelry and drunkenness, not in chambering and shamelessness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh” –Romans 13:13–14

He needed to read no further. His past ways were put behind him, and he found the strength to overcome his sinful nature—most of which amounted to a youthful lust for women. Augustine’s reputation as one who condemned the evils of sex (that whole “original sin” thing, you know) is somewhat deserved, but to be fair he was a product of his Christian times. The connection between Christianity and a preference for the virginal or celibate life was not something he or his generation manufactured. Christian asceticism traces its origins to the practices of Jesus and Paul, who were themselves both celibates. By Augustine’s time, this strain of religiosity was in full bloom, and he strove to overcome his “slavery to lust.”

The majority of Cooper’s book, then, is of the formative years of Augustine’s journey, with little attention given to his time as Bishop of Hippo. Fun and engrossing, this is an easy book to recommend.

This book was provided for review by Logos Bible Software and read on their mobile e-book software.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cooper takes an interesting tact in his short introduction to Augustine: he almost exclusively only looks at Augustine's "Confessions." This can lead the reader wanting, but ultimately I think it was a wise choice given the depth and impact of "Confessions" and the fact that this is a short introduction on Augustine.

Cooper's analysis of Augustine gets stronger as the book moves along. The first few chapters had me grinding my teeth at a number of points. Cooper contextualizes (and by so doing, poo poos) Augustine's reflections on his sin and guilt as a child, teenager, and young man, particularly in the area of sexual sin. Augustine almost certainly wouldn't take kindly to Cooper's modern diminishment of his sin.

Cooper's book is much more biographic in nature than I would have anticipated and this has its strengths and weaknesses. A strength of this approach is giving Cooper's book a nice narrative arc and structure and this is also where I learned the most from Cooper. The downside of this approach is that Augustine's theology can at times take a bit of a backseat to the narrative.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don't let the illustrations of this book fool you, this is a short book of just over 200 pages that has some serious scholarly ambitions.  I am not familiar with the author or with his perspective, but while he is honest about acknowledging some of the aspects of Augustine's life and thought that are a bit cringe-worthy [1], it is clear that he has a lot of admiration for Augustine.  This book reminded me that in many ways Augustine was a very Nathanish character, in both good and bad ways, and it is somewhat odd to me that I should find myself so eccentric and unusual in the world in which I live and yet have so many people not too different from me if I look at the world of books and the people who write them.  Augustine is portrayed here with a fair amount of extracts from his own writings--especially the Confessions--and with a fair degree of sensitivity, although the author certainly knows a great deal about Augustine and his thought and is quick to correct misconceptions about him that have resulted from the differences in his time and our own about how people portrayed their own life and their own thoughts.

The book is based on Augustine's Confessions, so much so that about 80-90% of the book is based on the structure and organization of that book--even going into detail about Augustine's thoughts about creation and his concern to be accurate to the knowledge of late Roman science.  A great deal of time is spent on Augustine's youth, his extreme intelligence and the willingness he was led astray by his longings for intimacy--which he satisfied in a longtime common-law relationship with an unnamed woman who gave birth to a son but was of too low a status for him to marry--as well as by his considerable pride in his intellect and the inability he had of being answered by the religious leadership of backwater North Africa.  He is portrayed as a human being throughout, fond of controversy and even willing in his thirties to enter into a marriage with a girl (!) although not willing to wait for her to come of age.  The author points out his struggles with grief and his loyalty to his friends and to the way that he sought to be a philosopher but was compelled against his will to become a priest soon upon his baptism in Italy and his return to his native North Africa.

There is a great deal of value here in this book, in the way that the author endorses the philosophical approach that Augustine brought with his beliefs.  Augustine was certainly a Hellenistic Christian who was openly attracted to Neoplatonism and clearly sought a synthesis between Greek philosophy (at least as it was understood in the Latin of his day) and a Roman Catholicism growing in power and influence over the decaying Western Roman Empire that was falling apart over the course of his lifetime.  It is perhaps a sign of marked wisdom that he chose the church rather than continuing to seek political advancement in a world where the rapid and serious changes in rulers and their policies as Rome collapsed could have easily led him to fall victim to purges and shifts in policy.  Whether or not he was wise or just fortunate to find a place where he could live comfortably enough to write at length as he was wont to do, the rest of us have a lot of writings, some of which this book hints at, that have dramatically influenced all of us, regardless of our feelings about Augustine or the church that he loyally, if belatedly, served.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

[Erwin Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stephen A. Cooper’s Augustine for Armchair Theologians is a commentary on St. Augustine’s Confessions and City of God. Cooper traced Augustine’s life from childhood to the time he became a bishop of Hippo. Augustine lived not only in Africa, but Rome and Milan. He was fortunate to have a good education by having patrons, because his family couldn’t afford to provide him with such learning.
Augustine’s parents were middle class. His father was a pagan before becoming a Christian, and his mother was an ardent Catholic. Augustine’s mother prayed diligently that her son would become a Christian. But his parents wanted him to be a high official in Roman society. His mother therefore held off having him baptized as a child, since his parents realized he would be living in the secular world filled with temptations. His mother Monica hoped too that eventually her son would marry someone of their social status.
Augustine in seeking an education as a young man was tossed about in the problems of the world. He lived with lust and in debauchery. As a young man he was with a woman with whom he had a child. Monica his mother was distressed by her son’s beliefs in Manicheanism and continued praying for him to convert. Eventually Augustine and his common law wife parted company leaving him to raise their son who died at a young age.
With careers as a professor of rhetoric and an influential speaker Augustine held a prominent position in the courts of Milan – the apex of social activity at that time. But Monica never gave up dogging him about being a Christian, and succeeded in having him talk with St. Amboise – bishop of Milan. By this time Augustine was under the influence of Platonists. He was persuaded by St. Ambrose and after much delay decided to be a catechumen and was baptized a Catholic. Shortly afterwards he decided to give up teaching rhetoric. Augustine later became a priest and bishop of Hippo. St. Augustine died after seeing Rome overran by the Visigoths in 410. Many Romans had blamed the Christians for this tragedy, so he wrote the City of God to refute these claims.

[Bill Hooten · Rating 4 out of 5]

Readily I confess, my knowledge in any church history before about 1800 is very limited. I got this, because the illustrations made it look like an easy read that would cover the basics. It did cover the basics, but it was not an easy read (for me). I don't regret reading it, but I would still be looking for something more of a biography; and not a commentary on Augustine's writings. Know for a long time that I needed to know more about early church history, and I am trying to rectify that situation. If you are interested in Augustine, I would recommend this. If you don't have at least a passing interest, you need to stay away from this.

[Rosie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chose this because it's only 6 hours long? I recommend it - and may have to read/listen to it again.

Cooper introduces the life and thought of Augustine through discussing the Confessions and shows how many of Augustine's human struggles are still with us today. He also examines the theological views of Augustine that emerged through the important controversies of his times.

Written by experts but designed for the novice, the Armchair series provides accurate, concise, and witty overviews of some of the most profound moments and theologians in Christian history.

[Hank Pharis · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm looking for a book to introduce Augustine to the average American Christian. I'm also reading Gerald Bray's Augustine on the Christian Life. I have found chapter 3 of Bray's book to probably
be too difficult for the average American Christian. Call Cooper Augustine 101 and Bray Augustine 201. The strength and weakness of Cooper's book is that is primarily on Augustine's life but too brief regarding his theology.

[Lisa Hunt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honestly, I really don't know how to rate this one so the 4 stars is basically made up. The fault was mine, I think, this book was just too scholarly to listen to on the commute to and from work. I found my mind wandering a LOT. So, I didn't love it through no fault of the author, just not the best choice for me.

[R. West · Rating 3 out of 5]

This would more appropriately be titled, "Augustine's Confessions for Armchair Theologians." It provides an easy, digestible summary of the Confessions chapter by chapter. It's a good, brief resource for that, if that's what you're looking for.

I was hoping for more information about the City of God (there was only one chapter) and the context in which Augustine lived.

[Rob · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is mostly a synopsis of Augustine's Confessions, with short summaries of the Donatist controversy, the Pelagian controversy, and The City of God. As such, it was good but disappointing, considering the wider scope of other titles in this series.

[Joshua Rex · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of this was review for me, since it talks much about Augustine’s Confessions. Yet, it cleared up some details and unpacked for me things that weren’t clear from thicker scholarly commentaries and biographies. Good read.

[Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

I listened to the book through library/libby. I have not read a lot of Augustine’s works so I thought it was a good overview of his life and his writings. I liked how the events of his life were intertwined with his writings. Not too long of a book.

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Better described as an introduction to the Confessions, but a good overview of key aspects to Augustine’s life and thoughts. I wish it went deeper into his post-conversion life.

[Richard R., Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easy to understand commentary on Augustine's Confessions.

[Matthew Cummings · Rating 4 out of 5]

🎧

[Christopher Raffa · Rating 3 out of 5]

For those reading Augustine’s Confessions this is a nice companion text.

[Gunner Garner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good, solid intro that makes you want to read more.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

**app 5 hrs
read by Simon Vance

[Jimmy]

The book is supposed to be an introduction to the great Church father Augustine. The author spent the bulk of the book on Augustine's autobiography, The Confessions. It made me want to read The Confessions alongside this work either as a commentary or as a "cliff note." However, with the book's title, "Augustine for Armchair Theologians," one would expect the book to be broad enough to cover Augustine's life and theology rather than spending 175 pages out of 222 on the The Confession alone. It doesn't do justice to Augustine, especially for a work that's suppose to be a guide for "arm chair theologians,"since there is so much more to Augustine than just his conversion; he was also a prolific writer and thinker, and from what I understand, the man has written over ninety separate works. I would have loved for the book to have explore some of these lesser known writings by Augustine and also for the book to further explore Augustine's view of the Trinity and his contribution to it's theological development. Writings by Augustine that the author did explore was rather brief, such as The City of God. Having read portions of The City of God, I wished the author could have expounded more upon it as I found Augustine's reasoning and argumentation in the beginning of this classic to be witty and insightful. At times I thought the author was too sympathetic with Augustine's theological opponents. While recently I have had second thoughts and desire to revisit my understanding of the Donatists' position for fear that others might have caricatured it, nevertheless I was somewhat taken aback with the author's sympathies with Pelagius and his followers. Again, the strength of the book was really it's extensive discussion of The Confession and according to statements in the book, the author taught courses on it and must have been his area of expertise.

[Coyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good companion and exposition of Augustine's Confessions. Cooper writes clearly and explains some of Augustine's more obscure passages in a way that is useful and readable.
Having said that, this isn't as good an "Armchair Theologian" book as the ones on Luther and Edwards. While that may be because Luther and Edwards are closer to us in time and thus easier to understand, it may also be because Cooper focuses exclusively on Augustine's Confessions and ignores the larger body of his thought (except for the last chapter), especially inexcusable is mostly ignoring The City of God.
But, if this is take as merely covering the Confessions (as with B.B. Warfield's similar essay on the same Studies in Tertullian and Augustine), then it is excellent and well worth reading.

[Eric Nelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book essentially just goes though Augustine's early life, following the outline in Augustine's Confessions. It uses the Confessions as an window to Augustine, assuming that readers would start with that book and graduate to others---not a bad idea.[return][return]It does really help make the Confessions even more accessible to readers unfamiliar with Augustine or his work.[return][return]The only downside is because this book focuses so heavily on his life as described in Confessions it fails to really wrestle with any of the issues that Augustine was so influential on later in his life (for example, the problem of grace and free will).

[Pam · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would give up on reading the writings of Augustine without this book. Stephen Cooper helps you understand what was happening in Augustine's life and at that time in history. He interprets what Augustine meant by many of his more complex passages. And most of all, he provides a valuable overview so that you can read Augustine with more understanding and enjoyment. My Dad gave me Whitney Oate's translation of Augustine's writings back in 1992 and I have since wanted to try to read it, but I admit I was struggling until I came across Stephen Cooper's book!

[Noelle Campbell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a sort of 'idiots' guide (without calling you an idiot). Full of excerpts from Augustine's books, it is a great way to be introduced to this philosopher/theologian/apologist. You will want to read more about him after reading this book, which is exactly what a book like this should do.

[Melissa Snow · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is helpful for those of us who have heard of Augustine, but know little about his life or theology. I found the biographical details very interesting, and I think the book gives a good overall understanding of Augustine's spiritual and theological experiences, conversion(s) and beliefs.

[Steve Wegman · Rating 3 out of 5]

A relatively short and understandable review of the life and works of the 4th Century Christian Bishop. I've read a couple of Augustine's books and Cooper's summaries helped me understand better what I'd read, what drove Augustine, what he wanted to accomplish by his writing.

[Dora · Rating 3 out of 5]

While far from exhaustive this book served as an accessible introduction to Augustine, the Confessions, and the major controversies of his time as Bishop.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent but I was hoping it would be better compiled and more interesting. It leaves out some central themes of his theology and life.