ABSTRACT
Honored as Saint Augustine by Catholics, Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was bishop for about 35 years of the town of Hippo Regius in Roman Africa (a province consisting mostly of what we would now call Algeria). He is the most important Church father to write in Latin, which makes him the most influential Christian theologian in the West. The Church fathers were the formative Christian intellectuals of the second through the fifth centuries. They were the first Gentile writers who deeply engaged Jewish texts such as the New Testament (written almost entirely by Jews), and the Old Testament (the Christian name for the Hebrew Bible), which they accepted as holy Scripture, and which they understood and taught in the context of classical education, rhetoric, and philosophy. As the foremost Latin Church father, Augustine’s eloquent, subtle and resourceful interpretation of scriptural teaching became the matrix of Christian thinking for well over a thousand years in Western Europe. His writings had an authority second only to the Bible, and became the gold standard for theological orthodoxy among medieval Catholics such as Anselm and Aquinas, as well as early Protestants such as Luther and Calvin.
