Vor einer Woche ist im New Yorker ein Essay über Augustinus und sein Verständnis von Sexualität erschienen. Albert Mohler hat den Essay in seinem Briefing kommentiert:
This essay by Professor Greenblatt is not only fascinating, it’s also very elegantly written, and it actually is very respectful towards Augustine. It deals with some of the complicated twists and turns of Augustine’s views concerning sin, the gospel, the church, and yes, marriage and sexuality. It’s fairly amazing to open the pages of the New Yorker knowing what this magazine is and find an extended article on Augustine and his theology, to find respectfully and rather accurately presented his engagement with the heresy of the Pelagians, and yes, his understandings of sexuality and marriage. Professor Greenblatt also seems to understand and to respect the fact that Augustine was clearly seeking to ground his understanding of sexuality and marriage within the doctrine of creation and even in what Augustine understood to be a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis.
Ich kann den aufschlussreichen Essay jedem empfehlen, der sich dafür interessiert, wie Augustinus zu seinen die menschliche Sexualität betreffenden Überzeugungen gekommen ist. Greenblatt zeigt auf, dass es zu einfach gedacht ist, Augustinus einfach nur Lustfeindlichkeit vorzuwerfen:
One day in 370 C.E., a sixteen-year-old boy and his father went to the public baths together in the provincial city of Thagaste, in what is now Algeria. At some point during their visit, the father may have glimpsed that the boy had an involuntary erection, or simply remarked on his recently sprouted pubic hair. Hardly a world-historical event, but the boy was named Augustine, and he went on to shape Christian theology for both Roman Catholics and Protestants, to explore the hidden recesses of the inner life, and to bequeath to all of us the conviction that there is something fundamentally damaged about the entire human species. There has probably been no more important Western thinker in the past fifteen hundred years.
… weiterlesen.