analysis of Judaism is connected to his God-concept, his Christology, his personal experience of faith, and to a method of theology that obliges. What is important in the Augustinian texts is the totalistic discourse, a systemic and systematic application of a Christian perspective to the project of interpreting the cosmos and the divine agency of Creation, the Redemption, and salvation. This entails a project of interpreting secular and religious intellectual traditions that compete with Christianity with a view toward marginalizing them and while asserting the moral and intellectual preeminence of orthodox institutional Christianity in contrast to them. For the most part, the method is to appeal to the authority and wisdom of texts accepted into the Catholic canon, notably the Old and New Testaments, with the exegesis of the New (Christian) superseding that of the Old (Jewish) as necessary to accomplish the primary project objective. What lends authority to the New Testament filter is the Redemption, the central symbol and event relative to which all doct
...