Increasingly pastor: Innovations in the research of biblical explanations and homiletics of St. Augustine

Abstract

This contribution starts with a brief outline of Augustine’s life and then proceeds with the various ways by which his works have been named and set in order. Recent digital developments were key to the removal of apologetic and theological assumptions from the list of Augustine’s works: objective, alphabetical and chronological lists have become more mainstream. These digital technologies have also been put to good use to find unknown Augustinian texts hidden in old manuscripts. The same means can be deployed to check whether texts were really authored by him. This may certainly enhance our esteem of former Augustinian researchers for their achievements in this field. In particular, one may bring to the fore their retrieval of Augustine’s letters and sermons, both in times long past and in recent decades. The next part of this article continues by looking closer into the research of Augustine’s Bible exposition and homiletics. Special attention is given to the relationship between the sermons that are catalogued as sermones ad populum and related sermons from the expositions of all 150 Psalms over against those that cover the whole gospel of John. New discoveries also raise questions about the way Augustine’s many short sermons relate to his long homilies. These questions are a reason to reconsider the way Augustine’s sermons are constructed and structured. Finally, we outline how new digital techniques are of help to reinvestigate the sermons in the way he uses words and Scripture in order to show in more detail Augustine’s pastoral profile. This pastoral fine-tuning is illustrated with three examples.