I suspect that no figure in Christian history has suffered a greater injustice as a result of the desperate inventiveness of the Christian moral imagination than the Apostle Paul, since it was the violent misprision of his theology of grace—starting with the great Augustine, it grieves me to say—that gave rise to almost all of these grim distortions of the gospel. Aboriginal guilt, predestination ante praevisa merita, the eternal damnation of unbaptized infants, the real existence of “vessels of wrath,” and so on—all of these odious and incoherent dogmatic leitmotifs, so to speak, and others
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