Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), was a theologian and philosopher of Berber origin and the bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia, Roman North Africa. Many view his writings as of the most important Church Fathers of the Latin Church in the Patristic Period. Augustine was one of Roman Catholicism's original four "Doctors of the Church" (Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 2nd ed, s.v. "Augustine," p. 414), so of course his heretical writings survived the burning wrath of Rome!
Augustine holds a very special place in the hearts of Reformed Calvinists, other Protestants, Evangelicals and of course Roman Catholicism, ecuemnicalism at its finest. Amazing that a cesspool of heretical groups consisting of the Great Whore with her Little Harlots would find aggrement with an utter heretic. Concerning Calvinsim, Augustine happens to be the true father of Calvinism, John Calvin having adopted almost entirely Augustine’s teachings as his own. Matter of fact, Calvin has been accused of massive amounts of plagiarizing in his Systematic Theology commentary, and further, Calvin who never gives any record of an actual testimony of conversion, claimed that Augustines conversion was accepted as his own. When asked about his absence of testimony, Calvin respond the only testimony he could’ve had was what he copied from Augustine:
“Augustine is so wholly with me, that if I wished to write a confession of my faith, I would do so with all fullness and satisfaction to myself out of his writings” (Calvin, “The Eternal Predestination of God").
The perversion and heresy of Calvinism can be atrtibuted alone to Calvin's nearly complete agreement with Augustine:
“Calvin’s almost complete agreement with Augustine is nothing short of astounding. Calvin called himself ‘an Augustinian theologian.’ Of Augustine he said, ‘whom we quote frequently, as being the best and most faithful witness of all antiquity.’ It is Calvinists themselves who insist upon the connection between Calvin and Augustine. McGrath writes, ‘Above all, Calvin regarded his thought as a faithful exposition of the leading ideas of Augustine of Hippo.’ . . . How could one of the principal leaders of the Reformation embrace so fully the doctrines of one who has been called ‘the first real Roman Catholic’ and the ‘principal theological creator of the Latin-Catholic system as distinct from . . . evangelical Protestantism . . .’?” (Dave Hunt, What Love Is This?, p. 51)
All of the “church fathers” were infected with false doctrine to some degree, while most of them were seriously infected and utterly heretical, to sheer magnitude. This is one of them, maybe the worse. The errors, false teachings and false practices, which polluted this utter heretic and gnostic are practically endless, but here are some, so hold on for a short ride.
1. Augustine believed that the sacraments are the means of saving grace; the Eucharist is necessary for salvation. He taught that the sacrament of baptism and communion were a means of saving grace.
2. Augustine believed in “proxy salvation;” that is, someone else’s faith can save you (Ken Wilson, The Foundation of Augustinian-Calvinism, p. 78).
3. Augustine “baptized” infants because baptism takes away their sin he claimed, a heretical false teaching and false gospel derived from Roman Catholicism. In fact, he was one of the fathers of infant baptism, claiming that unbaptized infants (or adults for that matter) were lost, and calling all who rejected infant baptism, “infidels” and “cursed.” The ‘council’ of Mela, in Numidia, A.D. 416, composed of merely fifteen persons and presided over by Augustine, decreed:
“Also, it is the pleasure of the bishops in order that whoever denies that infants newly born of their mothers, are to be baptized or says that baptism is administered for the remission of their own sins, but not on account of original sin, delivered from Adam, and to be expiated by the laver of regeneration, BE ACCURSED” (William, Wall, The History of Infant Baptism, I, 1705, p. 265).
4. Augustine penned the unBiblical and heretical phrase that guides majority of heretics today, practiced relgiously by them:
“Essentials, unity; In non-essentials, liberty; In all things, love."
It has no bearing on the actual truth of God's Word, which you can read about here: The False Practice of Ranking Doctrine into “Essentials” and “Non-Essentials” is Phariseeism.
5. The Roman Catholic Augustine believed in an ancient heresy called Ransom Theory of Atonement, which heresy originated with Origen. This heretical theory teaches that the death of Christ was a ransom sacrifice, said to have been paid to Satan, in satisfaction for the bondage and debt on the souls of humanity as a result of inherited sin. This is pure fiction, originating and embraced in the minds of unregenerate heretics and Christ rejectors who obviously do not know the Bible.
6. Augustine likened the Jewish people to Cain, who had murdered his own brother. He wrote that Jews were a “wicked sect” who should be subjected to permanent exile because of their evil ways. He wrote in his Confessions (12.14):
“How hateful to me are the enemies of your Scripture! How I wish that you would slay them [the Jews] with your two-edged sword, so that there should be none to oppose your word! Gladly would I have them die to themselves and live to you!”
Hmm 🤔, I wonder who infected Martin Luther with anti-Semititis?
7. Augustine was a persecutor and the father of the doctrine of persecution in the Catholic Church, laying the foundation for the inquisition. The historian Neander observed that Augustine’s teaching,
“contains the germ of the whole system of spiritual despotism, intolerance, and persecution, even to the court of the Inquisition.”
He instigated bitter persecutions against the Bible-believing Donatists who were striving to maintain pure churches after the apostolic faith, who required that church members give evidence of repentance and regeneration and then followed by believers baptism (immersion).
Seems perhaps John Calvin, Martin Luther, and Ulrich Zwingli learned their lessons well from him.
8. Augustine was the father of amillennialism, interpreting Bible prophecy allegorically (teachings that dovetail with replacement theology) which is utter heresy and immediately indicative of someone that is unregenerate since they are without the Spirit of truth to teach them literal truth as God gave (cf. Jn 8:31-32; 1 Jn 2:20-21). The Catholic Church during the Medieval period built its system of eschatology on Augustinian amillennialism, where Christ rules the earth spiritually through his triumphant church (Bloomberg 2006, p. 519), rather than the plain and clear scriptural teaching of a literal 1000-year earthly reign of Jesus Christ on earth (e.g. Rev 20:1-7).
9. Augustine taught that the Catholic Church is the supreme authority and the kingdom of God, and the new Israel (i.e. Replacement Theology). Along that line, he held that outside of the visible church there was no salvation.
10. Augustine taught that Mary was sinless; she did not commit sin, and promoted her “veneration” — that we would do well to worship her and pray to her or through her. He believed that Mary plays a vital role in salvation (Augustine, Sermon 289, cited in Durant, The Story of Civilization, IV, p. 69).
11. Augustine believed and promoted the utter Satanic myth of purgatory, which heresy, besides the false gospel of baptism, has probably brought more people into the fires of hell than anything.
12. Augustine embraced prayers for the dead.
13. Augustine exalted the authority of the church and church tradition above the Bible, stating,
“I should not believe the gospel unless I were moved to do so by the authority of the Catholic Church.” (quoted by John Paul II, Augustineum Hyponensem, Apostolic Letter, Aug. 28, 1986, www.cin.org/jp2.ency/augustin.html).
14. Augustine believed that the true interpretation of Scripture is derived from the declaration of church councils (Augustin, De Vera Religione, xxiv, p. 45). Of course that is heresy. Having the indwelling Spirit of God is enough to know, understand and rightly interpret the Scriptures.
15. Augustine interpreted the early chapters of Genesis figuratively (Dave Hunt, “Calvin and Augustine: Two Jonahs Who Sink the Ship,” Debating Calvinism: Five Points, Two Views by Dave Hunt and James White, 2004, p. 230). A major heretical problem in reformed theology and calvinism is the unBiblical and ungodly hermeneutics of allegoricalism (spiritualizing scripture), which would have contributed to this heretical error of Augustine.
16. Augustine believed and taught the heresy of unconditional election/absolute predestination (God sovereignly elects who will be saved/damned, known as Molinism, in that God has pre-ordained some for salvation and others for damnation) and that the grace of God is irresistible for the true elect; thus where John Calvin learned this heresy. By his own admission, Calvin in the 16th century derived his TULIP theology on the “sovereignty of God” from Augustine. Calvin said:
“If I were inclined to compile a whole volume from Augustine, I could easily show my readers, that I need no words but his” (Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book III, chap. 22).
17. Augustine believed man has no free will (monergism), again a major teaching in Calvinism and upon one which the TULIP strongly relies. We can see where John Calvin learned this heresy, and it wasn’t from the Word of God! Augustine's theology is heretical because it is based on three pagan deterministic philosophies: Gnosticism, Stoicism and Manicheanism. The Reformed/Calvinistic view does not go any further back within Christianity than Augustine, who took it from paganistic, gnostic false religion and philosophies which don't honour the God of the Bible but are syncretistic and nothing more. There are at least 50 or more early professing Christian’s who's writing still exist and can be accessed who taught the free will of man and not what Augustine taught in his later years. Much more importantly, none of the apostles, or prophets, or God the Son Himself taught Augustine’s heresy. To keep reading on the gnosticisim of Calvinism, thus Augustine, read: The Pagan, Gnostic Origin of Calvinism.
18. Augustine believed one cannot know if he is saved, since allegedly those who are carnal minded might be saved as well (no, actually they are not: Rom 8:6-9). If you do not know that you are saved, than you are unsaved! Evidence of Salvation in John's Epistle’s. Hence the massive confusion over the subject of soteriology among Calvinist/Reformers and neo-evangelicals today.
19. Augustine believed that God commands impossibilities (e.g. God requesting man to completely stop sinning, i.e. sinless perfectionism) which man obviously cannot do.
20. Augustine accepted the doctrine of celibacy for “priests” on the basis that marital sexual intimacy is sinful. He supported the decree of “Pope” Siricius of 387 which required that any priest that married or refused to separate from his wife should be disciplined.
21. Augustine believed that the Apocrypha was inspired of God and thus to be included in the Scriptures. (No, the KJV translators did not believe this. They included the Apocrypha merely out of tradition, but they certainly did not believe it was inspired of God).
22. Augustine was the individual responsible for giving Catholics the official “saint” title.
23. Augustine believed in the veneration of relics.
24. Augustine taught the heresy of apostolic succession from Peter.
25. Augustine truly indeed was the father of the Great Whore and Mother of all Harlots (Rev 17-18), the religion of Mystery Babylon, better known as the Roman Catholic Church.
The so-called Apostolic Fathers of the second century were teaching the false gospel that baptism, celibacy, and martyrdom provided forgiveness of sin (Howard Vos, Exploring Church History, p. 12). And of the later “fathers” — Clement, Origen, Cyril, Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine, Theodore, and Chrysostom — the same historian admits:
“In their lives and teachings we find the seed plot of almost all that arose later. In germ form appear the dogmas of purgatory, transubstantiation, priestly mediation, baptismal regeneration, and the whole sacramental system” (ibid, p. 25).
We see many of the Catholic heresies were embraced by him, maybe even initiated by him. He was so polluted with heresy, the Catholic Church proudly claimed him as one of the “doctors of the church.”
26. Another Catholic invention and heresy promoted by Augustine was that of the unBiblical universal invisible church doctrine (rebutted here and here) which view was a way for the Protestants to explain how they could be saved but be outside of the Catholic denomination, which teachings Augustine used to combat the Baptists of his day (the Donatists, appearing as the Anabaptists/Baptists of that era), whom Augustine wanted numbered because they contended for a regenerate church membership which opposed his practice of allowing obviously ungodly, immoral, and unregenerate members within the Catholic fold.
27. Augustines TULIP-like beliefs were borne out of gnosticism. It was Paganism/Gnosticism that provided the foundation for his heresies on determinism and predestination. He believed and taught the heresy of unconditional election/absolute predestination or determinism (God sovereignly elects who will be saved/damned, known as Molinism, in that God has pre-ordained some for salvation and others for damnation) and that the grace of God is irresistible for the true elect, thus the mentor of John Calvin concerning these heresies and others.
His determinism—continued on by Calvin—was widely known in the ancient world (i.e., Pagan beliefs of Stoicism, Neo-Platonism, Gnosticism, Manichaeism). Augustine had been deeply shaped by Stoicism, Neo-Platonism and had been a member of the Manichaean Gnostic cult for ten years before his alleged “conversion” and then later like the dog and pig (2 Pet 2:22), reverted back to his Gnostic roots and revised many of his earlier beliefs and writings, seemingly the result of his rivalrous battle with Pelagius and winning that battle at any cost (Ken Wilson, The Foundation of Augustinian-Calvinism, p. 57). The Gnostics were early heretics in the church who attempted to combine Christianity with paganism, and that is from whence Augustine learned his determinism. Manichaean Gnosticism became the very foundation of Augustine’s determinism, which became the very foundation of Calvinism. You could say in Calvinism the Manichaean Gnosticism continues on. Since Augustine reverted back to this gnostic heresy, and thereafter penned his doctrines of determinism and anti-free will, the Manichean gnostic cult has entrenched its deadliest TULIP roots into Christianity itself to entwine and strangle true faith and true conversions, even though Manichaeism has formally disappeared as a cult.
Instead of battling against the heresies of Stoicism, Manichaeism, Neoplatonism and Gnosticism as many were in that day, Augustine synchronized them with Christianity. He formed one out of two, committing serious spiritual adultery in the process, putting no “difference between holy and unholy, and between unclean and clean;” (Lev 10:10), which is the product of unsaved heretics (Jam 4:4) and apostates (2 Pet 2:1).
To keep reading about Augustine's gnostic and adulterous marriage to Christianity, see The Pagan, Gnostic Origin of Calvinism.
Wow, what an impressive resume by the Doctor of Rome! Lucifer sure must be proud!
"But what I do, that I will do, that I may cut off occasion from them which desire occasion; that wherein they glory, they may be found even as we. For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works." (2 Cor 11:12-15)
But these are only some of Augustines heresies, and I am fully confident we could add trucks loads more to his outstanding resume.
Augustine was the quintessential illustration of a false teacher. He was a complete disaster. A serious heretic and wolf in sheep’s clothing; yet that has never stopped the Reformed Calvinist, Protestant, Evangelical, etc, love affair.
Then again, obeying the Word of God has never been a forte of Reformed Calvinism, Protestantism, Neo-Evangelicalism, or Roman Catholicism.
Rom 16:17-18 would help, but it unfortunately also consequently condemns them as well:
"Now I beseech you, brethren, mark them which cause divisions and offences contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned; and avoid them. For they that are such serve not our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly; and by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple."
The sheer magnitude of horrible damage this ravening wolf in sheep's clothing has inflicted upon people over two millennia, is staggering. The Lord Jesus Christ didn't warn in vain, and people really should listen:
"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves." (Matt 7:15)
