7, p. 23). The practical effect of this idea is twofold: first, the positioning of the Church's institutional strength; and second, as Tillich interprets matters, the devaluing of individual earthly struggles, including the struggle for social justice. In effect, Christian apocalyptic thought and what Tillich calls the ecclesiastical interpretation of history took over and adapted Jewish prophetic thought for its own institutional purposes, and these purposes came to dominate the ruling cadre's concerns over and above the welfare of the faithful. Only in the currents of the Reformation, Tillich says, would an effective rejoinder to this process be discerned.
But in the passage of the Confessions cited above, it is a voice of authority and confidence suffused with intensity of spirit-feeling, that speaks at least as loudly as institutional oversight. If it was true that the religious culture of the period in which Augustine flourished was transitional and the cultural hegemony of the Church as a social institution had yet to be established in the W
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