The second book of Augustine's On Christian Teaching goes on to discuss the way signs should be interpreted and to help clarify many issues of scripture through numerous examples. From the perspective a someone who believes in God, and especially a Christian God, Augistine's insight is flawless and absolute. However, similar to the way in which he believes that you should "know the answer" before reading or investigating scripture (understand that it promotes Christian ideas), every argument or idea that Augustine throws down basically boils down to "cause God said so". While people, especially teenagers, often hate this sort of trump card logic, it poses no problem to people of faith--its a bullet-proof shield of faith (which to me is actually pretty impressive and admirable becase it requires a great amount of faith that many people wouldn't be able to come up with). I was so impressed that I decided to look for some kind of fault and hypocrisy within Augistine's words. While he covers his bases well, extremely well, I did find one idea that did bother me. He discusses at one point that "faith" is a gift from God and that some people are more deserving than others. But if this is the case why do concepts like conversion and missionaries exist? Assuming that Christians follow God's will it would seem that either God has giving the gift to whom he feels deserves it and thus there is no reason to convert others or that faith is in fact not a gift. Other than that, however, Augustine is pretty thorough in his insight (which is why I created this flow chart as a visual aid...)
did you make that Augustine flow chart?? That is awesome.. I think you are right that he is seeing the world from a particular box, and within that he is tough to argue with.
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