Third Meditation: What Is a Person? 133
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. Aborigi-
nal guilt, predestination ante praevisa merita, the eternal dam-
nation of unbaptized infants, the real existence of "vessels of
wrath," and so on-all of these odious and incoherent dog-
matic leitmotifs, so to speak, and others equally nasty, have
been ascribed to Paul. And yet each and every one of them not
only is incompatible with the guiding themes of Paul's procla-
mation of Christ's triumph and of God's purpose in election,
but is something like their perfect inversion. Consider, for in -
stance, the ninth through the eleventh chapters of Romans,
which for Augustinian tradition provide the locus classicus of
its theology of "grace." From very early on in Western Chris-
tian history, these admittedly complex but hardly hermetic
pages came to be misread in two crucial ways: firstly, as an
argument regarding the eternal discrete destinies of individual
souls rather than as a contemplation of the relation between
Jews and Christians within the covenant; and, secondly, as a
collection of declamatory statements rather than as a continu-
ous discourse upon a single, explicitly hypothetical question.
And the result was something atrocious.
This is all fairly odd, really. Paul's argument in those chap-
ters is not difficult to follow, at least so long as one does not
begin from defective premises. What preoccupies him from
beginning to end is the agonizing mystery that ( so he believes)
the Messiah of Israel has come and yet so few of the children
of the house of Israel have accepted the fact, even while so
many from outside the covenant have. What then of God's
faithfulness to his promises? How can the promised Messiah
of Israel fail to be the savior of, quite specifically, Israel? Paul's