e succinctly stated, and more than this, stated in the form of an invocation, because they were completely familiar to those who, like the good bishop of Hippo, had the responsibility for maintaining the coherence and doctrinal integrity of the growing religion.
In short, the doctrine articulated in the Confessions in A.D. 401, like the doctrines articulated by the modern Church, did not originate with Augustine. He was merely its fifth-century instrument -- as it turns out its authoritative and definitive instrument at a time when Catholic orthodoxy was at an important juncture of history. The Church was both absorbing and making its final transition away from Greco-Roman and Jewish religious traditions and establishing a distinctive religious identity and position in the culture as a whole as the culture of Imperial Rome was edging toward decline. But the Church was under attack, too, from within because of multiple heresy controversies and from without, as the Roman Empire and sundry church councils adjusted to the new phenomenon (Bourke, 1963, p. xiii).
Although theological discourse past and present looks to Augustine as an authoritative voice on Christianity, some interpretations have interrogated the conclusions that he, a doctor of the Church, drew from his idea of the holy. For example, the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich discerns a certain tension between prophetic and apocalyptic elements in Christian thought dating from the apostolic period onward, noting in particular Augustine's declaration that this tension is resolved in the institution of church hierarchy, which is meant to account for the historical fact that the millennium never quite arrived as the first generation of Christians anticipated: "From this point of view history has already reached its last period. Nothing really new can be expected before the end of history and nature. Therefore, no radical criticism of the church is possible" (Tillich, Era, 195...