3B: Sin and Salvation

Augustine's prolific, nay, continuous and mind-numbing use of the idea of "sin" does little more than limit his range of appeal to his audience. By referring to all in which he has partaken outside of the church as sin, and by presenting the church as the way to escape sin, Augustine has cheapened, in a sense, what should be a much larger discussion.

Sin has the potential to scare a wider audience into pursuing the catholic faith for the sole purpose of salvation. However, in class there was a lot of doubt as to whether Augustine was addressing a larger common audience where this would be effective. Should he be, as we suspect, writing to his fellow officials in the church for the purpose of writing off his past as "sin," then its excessive use seems more of a cop out. Instead of delving into the complexities of theology that could bring his earlier life to the realm of the morally inconclusive. Instead, Augustine chose the simpler argument: I was wrong, I sinned, and I'm sorry.

People searching for a new kind of ideology or timid about the benefit of being catholic receive no incentive to pursue their interest further from Augustines first few chapters. Instead, they are offered salvation and forgiveness of sin purely by the renewal of baptism. This load-lightening prospect seems at once gentle and also irresponsible as it seems to promote the kind of deathbed conversions that were common at the time. If you are renewed from any and all sin that was simply that in your early life, there is no incentive to become the good Christian model advocated by the church but left aside in Augustine's narrative.

So it is debatable whether Augustine's concentration on sin limits the numerical appeal of his argument, but, ideologically, it certainly does. However, there is still much of the book left for him to address all that encompasses his faith, aside from sin and salvaton.