While things are confusing down here, we can always trust in the hope of heaven.

About an hour northeast of Indianapolis on April 26, 2006, a tractor-trailer drifted across the Interstate 69 median. In its path: ten students and staff in a Taylor University van. The tractor ripped through one side of the van, scattering wallets, purses, and debris across the dark roadway and sending five souls into eternity.

In the accident's aftermath, one survivor was identified as Laura VanRyn, and officials contacted her family as she was airlifted from the site in a comatose state. Over the next several weeks the VanRyn family kept constant and prayerful vigil at her bedside while she struggled out of her coma.

Then came the shattering revelation: the young woman they lovingly watched over did not answer to the name Laura VanRyn. Instead, a battered and broken stranger lay in her place: fellow Taylor student and

Bishop of Milan who deeply affected Augustine by his eloquent and intelligent messages. Threatened the Christian emperor Theodisius in Milan with excommunication for killing 7,000 Thessalonians in A.D. 390. His threat eventually humiliated the emperor, and its precedent set a pattern for the Catholic church to this day.

[tags]Ambrose, Augustine, BlogRodent, church-history, ChurchRodent, history[/tags]

(354-430)

Bishop of Hippo, near Carthage in N. Africa. During the decades-long debate over the Arian heresy, he used the psychological analogy to explain the Trinity of God. God is like the memory, intelligence, and will in the mind of a man, thus, we may think of one person when we think of God. A supporter of monasticism, he wrote the first western monastic rule for monks at Tagaste and Hippo. After the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410, Bishop Augustine pursued the philosophical question of why Rome fell, and eventually wrote The City of God. One of the first major formulators of Christian doctrine.

[tags]Augustine, BlogRodent, church-history, ChurchRodent, history[/tags]

Donatist charges centered on the fact that certain Catholic bishops had handed over the Scriptures to be burned during the persecution under Diocletian. Such an act, the Donatists insisted, was a serious sin of apostasy. Since the Catholic pastors were ordained by bishops who had sinned so grievously, the Donatists believed they, rather than the Catholics, constituted the true Church of Christ. They argued that the validity of the sacrament depends upon the moral standing of the minister. Augustine became Donatisms's chief rival.

[tags]Augustine, BlogRodent, church-history, ChurchRodent, Diocletian, Donatism, history[/tags]

(540-604)

When for six months no pope ruled in St Peter's basilica in early 590 AD, a monk named Gregory was elected to the papal office. He refused, fled the city for the forest and was eventually dragged back to Rome and was consecrated on 3 September 590. In terms of intellectual powers alone, Gregory probably doesn't belong in such company as Augustine, Ambrose and Jerome as one of the "Latin Fathers of the Church." But he combined great executive ability with a warm sympathy for human need, and if goodness is the highest kind of greatness, then the church moved rightly in according him the title "Great." He contributed no new ideas and created no epoch in theology, but he formulated the common faith of his day and handed it on to the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages. Subsequently, Gregory stands as the prime example of the Church in

(1585-1638)

A Dutchman who had adopted St. Augustine's view of sin and grace at the University of Louvain. He came to believe that the best way to defend Catholicism against the Calvinist challenge was to return to the doctrines of Augustine and establish a rigorous moral code for the Catholic clergy to combat the lenient ethics of the Jesuits. Carried on his campaign as professor of Scripture at Louvain and later as bishop of Ypres. Supporter of Augustine's views of predestination and held that man's will is not free; that good works could never save, only God's grace.

[tags]Augustine, BlogRodent, church-history, ChurchRodent, Cornelius-Jansen, history, Jesuits[/tags]

The most aggressive opposition to the "cheap grace" of the French Jesuits came from a movement called Jansenism. Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638) was a Dutchman who had adopted St. Augustine's views of sin and grace at the University of Louvain. He came to believe that the best way to defend Catholicism against the Calvinist challenge was to return to the doctrines of the great North African Father Augustine and establish a rigorous moral code for the Catholic clergy to combat the easy-going ethics of the Jesuits. The Jesuits called it Calvinism in Catholic garb.

[tags]Augustine, BlogRodent, church-history, ChurchRodent, Cornelius, history, Jansenism, Jesuits[/tags]

Mani was its founder who had taught in Persia, and had met there a martyr's death by crucifixion in 276 or 277. The fundamental belief of the religion pictured the universe as the scene of an eternal conflict of two powers, the one good, the other evil. Man, as we know him, is a mixed product, the spiritual part of his nature consists of the good element, the physical of the evil. His task, therefore, is to free the good in him from the evil; and this can be accomplished by prayer, but especially by abstinence from all the enjoyments of evil: riches, lust, wine, meats, luxurious houses and the like. Like Gnosticism, taught that the true spiritual Jesus had no material body and did not actually die. Augustine was a Manichean for nine years, from 372-383, before dissatisfaction with its teachings arose in his mind.

[tags]Augustine, BlogRodent, church-history, ChurchRodent, Gnosticism,

A British monk who came to North Africa from Rome. Pelagius earned Augustine's vigorous opposition when he denied that human sin is inherited from Adam. Man, he said, is free to act righteously or sinfully. Moreover, death is not a consequence of Adam's disobedience. Adam introduced sin into the world only by his corrupting example. There is no direct connection between his sin and the moral condition of mankind. Almost all the human race have sinned; but it is possible not to sin, and some people have in fact lived without sin. God predestinates no one, except in the sense that he foresees who will believe and who will reject his gracious influences. His forgiveness comes to all who exercise "faith alone"; but, once forgiven, man has power of himself to live pleasing to God. Thus, Pelagius found no real need for the special enabling power of the Holy Spirit.

[tags]Augustine,