Sublime

In a very real sense, Western Christianity is Augustinian Christianity.

In any case, these passages and a few others like them have to be, as it were, prized out of their context.

Like any good Jew, he believes that if he faces this, in obedience to the divine plan, he will be vindicated. And the word for that is ‘resurrection’.

If Christ is the key to understanding what humanity received at creation, the Word was present then, moreover, through the power of the Spirit.

a "low" ecclesiology, a mere individualism with saved individuals getting together from time to time for mutual benefit, were to turn out to be a denial of some of the key elements of Paul's missionary theology?

Jesus was replacing adherence or allegiance to Temple and Torah with allegiance to himself. Restoration and purity were to be had, not through the usual channels, but through Jesus.

When he returned, it would not be to a modern-style middle-class suburb where everybody (in theory at least) minded their own business, but to a peasant village which thrived on narrative. Not mere gossip, either: the community would order its life and thought by telling and retelling important events which had made them who they were.

In a very real sense, Western Christianity is Augustinian Christianity.

Finally, it is similarly unlikely that all modern interpreters are totally wrong; we cannot simply discount serious debates and go back to the sources as though nothing of value had been said in the last hundred years or so.