Augustine on Repentance

"God has promised forgiveness to your repentance, but He has not promised tomorrow to your procrastination."

- St. Augustine of Hippo

St. Augustine on the Gospel

"If you believe what you like in the Gospel, and reject what you don't like, it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself."

- St. Augustine of Hippo

Augustine on Knowledge and Ignorance

"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.

If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion."

— St. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram (The Literal Meaning of Genesis) Vol 1 Ch 19

Sunday Quote: Augustine on Faith and Understanding

"Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand."

- St. Augustine of Hippo

Kenneth Samples Apologetics MP3 Audio

Kenneth Samples is an apologist with Reasons to Believe. He is author of numerous books, including: World of Difference, A: Putting Christian Truth-Claims to the Worldview Test and Without a Doubt: Answering the 20 Toughest Faith Questions. The lectures below were found here.

Here are a number of audio resources on MP3:

A World of Difference: Putting Christian Truth-Claims to the Test
Part 1 - A Worldview Model For Christian Theism
Part 2 - Christian Theism’s Logical Consistency
Part 3 - Christian Theism’s Explanatory Power and Cumulative Support
Part 4 - Christian Theism’s Correspondence and Verification
Part 5 - Christian Theism’s Practicality and Existential Livability

Lectures on A Christian World View
Part 1 - What in the World Is a World View?
Part 2 - Naturalism: A Secular Worldview Challenge
Part 3 - Postmodernism: A Skeptical Worldview Perspective
Part 4 - Pantheistic Monism -- An Eastern Mystic Point of View

Series on St. Augustine
Part 1 - St. Augustine's Spiritual Quest (Intro missing)
Part 2 - Apologetic Factors in Augustine's Conversion
Part 3 - Augustine as Bishop and Theologian
Part 4 - Augustine: Philosopher and Saint

Islam and Christianity
Part 1 - Islam, Growth, Influence and Divsersity
Part 2 - Islam: Five Core Beliefs
Part 3 - Islam: The Five Pillars and Jihad
Part 4 - Islam's Revelatory Achilles Heel
Part 5 - Islam: Unknowable and Unfathomable
Part 6 - Why Can't Islam and Christianity Both Be True

Jesus and the Other Religious Faces in the Crowd
Part 1 - Part 1
Part 2 - Gautama (Buddha)
Part 3 - Krishna & Mahavira
Part 4 - Confucius & Lao-Tzu
Part 5 - Muhammad
Part 6 - Zoroaster, Nanak & Baha'ullah

Also added to the Ultimate Apologetics MP3 Audio page.

Historical Apologist: St. Augustine

Augustine (354-430) was a philosopher and theologian and the most famous and influential of the church fathers for the Latin (Western) church. After his conversion, memorably described in his Confessions, Augustine became a priest and soon a bishop in Hippo in northern Africa.

His most famous writings include On the Trinity and City of God, in which he described human history as an ongoing struggle between two kingdoms - the city of God and the city of man.

Augustine is the preeminent member of the great tradition of Christian Platonism, and his thought had an enormous impact both on the Scholastics of the medieval period and on the Protestant Reformers.1

1. C.Stephen Evans, Pocket Dictionary of Apologetics & Philosophy of Religion (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002), p. 14.