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Stricken by sin, cured by Christ. Agency, necessity, and culpability in Augustinian theology . By Jesse Couenhoven . Pp. xv + 258. Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2013. £47.99. 978 0 19 994869 7
Reviews
The very day on which I returned to review this excellent work on sin and responsibility by Jesse Couenhoven, a two-year-old in the United States reached into his mother's bag, found her handgun, and shot and killed her while riding in the front of her grocery cart. This unbelievably tragic scene captured all too poignantly the issues wrestled with here: the nature of personal accountability, inevitable evil, culpability, societal influences and the need to understand how it is that we become the sort of persons we are. Couenhoven realises that Augustine is in dire need of better 'public relations' in these sensitive areas, for nowhere is he more pilloried than for his views on salvation, sin and all the attendant issues - peccatum originale (a term he himself coined), its transmission and Augustine's belief that human sexuality was fundamentally flawed (and thus the very likely fons et origo of our innately disordered concupiscence), as well as the consequent possibility of eternal separation from God, even for those not responsible for their unbaptised souls. Overall, Couenhoven's central argument in these pages is to show that while no one brought into a post-lapsarian world may ever escape evil, we are still responsible for the types of persons that we allow ourselves to become, thereby inviting each of us toward the radical need for divine grace and the unmatchable good news that no one need try to save him or herself.
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