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Calvin and Augustine

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B.B. Warfield was an important purveyor and defender of classic Reformed dogma in a time of change. You will appreciate this book a bit more if you hail from that tradition. The book is a tad dated, smacks a bit of Reformed triumphalism, but is not without its insights.

Part One contains five chapters.

I. John Calvin: The Man and His Work
II. Calvin's Doctrine of the Knowledge of God
III. Calvin's Doctrine of God
IV. Calvin's Doctrine of the Trinity
V. Calvinism

The first part of the book is some 300 pages long.

Part Two contains three chapters.

I. Augustine,
II. Augustine and His "Confessions"
III. Augustine's Doctrine of Knowledge and Authority

The concluding Appendix is "Calvin as a Theologian" that does not compare Calvin and Augustine or provide a summation of Calvin's use of Augustine. Instead Warfield extols the Calvinist system arguing predestination is not the formative principle of Calvinism, "only its logical implication." Calvinism is a great revival of Augustinianism. Warfield argues Luther and Melanchthon were no less zealous for absolute predestination than Zwingli and Calvin. That is not true. Melanchthon was rather indifferent and less than enthused about predestination to the surprise of Calvin. Warfield then argues that it is the Reformed and not the Lutheran tradition that retains "the purity of the conception [of justification by faith] and resists the tendency to make it a doctrine of justification on account of, instead of by, faith. ... Calvinism penetrates to its [justification's] causes, and places faith in its relation to the other products of God's activity looking to the salvation of man." Much of this tells us more about Warfield than the precise beliefs of the Protestant Reformers, but Warfield was writing at a time when "modernity" was threatening belief in the supernatural.

This is a good work to read if you are interested in Reformed epistemology and its correlations to Augustianism. If, however, you are interested in a much broader work on Calvin's use of Augustine then see Luchesius Smits's two volume work written in French.