d of law and letter, too, that they would need to "Judaize" to some degree. That is why the theological debates in the early church, leading up to Saint Augustine, were often cast as arguments about Judaizing. Marcion, a 2nd-century-CE heretic, followed Paul's denigration of "the letter" to the point of disca

profound spiritual crisis. He recalled, later in life, the very first time he’d encountered the possibility of direct access to God, in the pages of Saint Augustine, probably around 1508. “When I came to the words ‘thee, most merciful father,” he wrote, “the thought that I had to speak to God without a mediator a