The most influential theologian after Paul
Born in Roman North Africa to a pagan father and a praying Christian mother, Augustine spent his youth pursuing rhetoric, ambition and a series of relationships he would later describe with painful honesty. He passed through Manichaeism and scepticism before his conversion in a Milan garden in AD 386.
As bishop of Hippo he wrote the Confessions — arguably the first true autobiography in Western literature, and still the most searching account of a divided heart ever written — and The City of God, a response to pagans who blamed Christianity for the sack of Rome in AD 410.
Almost every later Western debate about grace, sin, free will, time and the church runs back through Augustine. Both Catholics and the Protestant Reformers claimed him, which tells you how large he is.
Why the Bible treats sin as a condition rather than a scorecard, what it actually costs, and why the gospel is unintelligible until you have grasped it.
Jesus said the whole Old Testament was about him. What that means — promise, covenant, pattern and prophecy — and how to find Christ there honestly, without turning every tent peg into a riddle.
What it means to call the Bible inspired, what inerrancy does and does not claim, how infallibility differs, how Jesus treated Scripture, how to handle apparent contradictions, and how Scripture's authority relates to church tradition.
What Genesis 1–3 teaches about the world God made and the ruin humanity brought into it — read in its ancient setting, with the main Christian views on the days, the historical Adam and original sin set out fairly.
The classical doctrine of God and the modern challenges to it: aseity, immutability, simplicity, impassibility, eternity and omniscience, with the debates over divine suffering, time and open theism set out fairly.
Where 25 December really came from, why Easter is tied to Passover, what the word "Easter" means — and what to say when someone tells you your feasts are borrowed from idolaters.
Between the last great council and the Ninety-Five Theses lie a thousand years that most Protestants could not summarise in a sentence. Monasteries, missions, schism, crusade, scholasticism, corruption and the reformers before the Reformation.
Ethiopia, Egypt, Nubia, Persia, India and China had established churches centuries before most of Europe. The strongest answer to "Christianity is the white man's religion".
Manzikert, Clermont, Jerusalem 1099, the Rhineland, Constantinople 1204 and the Reconquista. Why the "unprovoked aggression" story is bad history, why no context excuses the conduct, and how to talk about it honestly — including with Muslim friends.
Language, politics, the filioque, papal primacy and even the bread of communion: the long drift that became a divorce, why 1054 mattered less than 1204, the failed reunions, the 1965 reconciliation — and how the Ethiopian and Coptic churches fit in.
What African traditional religion actually holds, why the faith is not a foreign import, where the gospel speaks directly into the tradition, and how to walk with someone out of fear and into Christ.
The real history of the relationship, the Galileo case as it actually happened, what evolution does and does not settle, and the range of views held by orthodox Christians.