St. Augustine: Really Bad Protestant

The Moonie-owned Washington Times measures how good a Christian you by such metrics as knowing the longest chapter in the Bible and similar ephemera. All this demonstrates is that the editors have no idea what a “good Christian” is. Sure, Bible knowledge is important, but it’s not make or break. Here, for example, is St. Augustine, no slouch in the Bible knowledge department, saying “Don’t have a cow if you don’t know the Bible, because what really matters is faith, hope, and love:

If therefore, you do not have the leisure to thoroughly inspect the holy pages, unravel all the mysteries of its words, penetrate all the secrets of the Scriptures, hold on to charity, upon which all things depend. Thus you will hold on to what you have learnt from the Scriptures, as well as what you have not yet learnt there. For you know charity, you know something upon which even what you perhaps do not know depends. In what you understand of the Scriptures, charity is in plain view, and in what you don’t understand, charity lies hidden. He therefore holds both what is in plain view and what is hidden in the divine speech, who holds on to charity in his behaviour. – Sermo 350.2

The man who relies on, and firmly keeps, faith, hope, and charity does not need the Scriptures, except to instruct others, and indeed many live by these three without any books in solitude. – De Doctrina, I.40.44

My personal favorite in the “Biblical authors were not Bible Protestants” department is this passage from Hebrews:

For it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we are speaking. It has been testified somewhere,
“What is man that you are mindful of him,
or the son of man, that you care for him?
You made him for a little while lower than the angels,
you have crowned him with glory and honor,
putting everything in subjection under his feet.” (Heb 2:5–8).

He is quoting Psalm 8. But like a typical Catholic, he knows the gist of the passage but couldn’t tell you where it comes from to save his soul. He just says “it has been testified somewhere.”

Love that.