Belief in white Jesus linked to racism

[Fake Messiah]

There is an enormous amount of data available, in the form of the books they wrote, the art and music they made. The detailed debates were well recorded. 

If one doesn't have an extensive knowledge of this, it wouldn't make much sense to issue pronouncements on what everybody thought.

It's a specialized subject with its own history and vocabulary. For example, when Augustine says that we should read a passage "literally," he means that we should read it in the sense that the original author intended. That means that if the original author intended a sentence to be a metaphor, then the literal reading is metaphorical.

Just the opposite. Such a claim can be made only by those who haven’t read these theologians or are dedicated to whitewashing church history.

Augustine of Hippo, who commented extensively on Genesis, was quite explicit that the text, though it had a spiritual message, was based on historical events: The narrative indeed in these books is not cast in the figurative kind of language you find in the Song of Songs, but quite simply tells of things that happened, as in the books of the Kingdoms and others like them. But there are things being said with which ordinary human life has made us quite familiar, and so it is not difficult, indeed, it is the obvious thing to do, to take them first in the literal sense, and then chisel out from them what future realities the actual events described may figuratively stand for.
https://www.kolbecenter.org/st-augustine...f-genesis/

Augustine was also a literalist about many things later refuted by science: a young Earth, instantaneous creation, the historical reality of Adam and Eve, paradise, and Noah and his Ark.

Thomas Aquinas, for instance, emphasized that if there was a conflict between metaphorical and literal interpretations of the Bible, literalism must win. Here, for example, is Aquinas discussing the reality of paradise, the abode of Adam and Eve, in Summa Theologica wrote:
“Nothing prevents us from holding, within proper limits, a spiritual paradise; so long as we believe in the truth of the events narrated as having there occurred.” For whatever Scripture tells us about paradise is set down as matter of history; and wherever Scripture makes use of this method, we must hold to the historical truth of the narrative as a foundation of whatever spiritual explanation we may offer.

Aquinas believed not only in paradise, but also in the instantaneous creation of species and of Adam and Eve as humanity’s ancestors, as well as in a young Earth, and the literal existence of Noah and his great flood.

I could go on, but two more examples will suffice. The Protestant reformer John Calvin believed in the virginity of Mary, a historical Adam and Eve, and a literal hell. Like Aquinas, he also believed that heretics should be killed.

Even in 1950s Pius XII affirmedbelief in historical Adam and Eve in his encyclical Humani Generis:
When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism [our descent from ancestors beyond Adam and Eve], the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.


And I'll end this post with words by the historian David Livingstone from his book Adam’s Ancestors:

Regardless of how differently the Garden of Eden may have been conceived from ancient times through the medieval period to more recent days, and no matter the differences in computations of the creation date of the earth, the idea that every member of the human race is descended from the biblical Adam has been a standard doctrine in Islamic, Jewish and Christian thought. In this respect, if in no other, the catechisms of the seventeenth-century Westminster divines can be taken to speak for them all when they declare that “all mankind” descended from Adam “by ordinary generation.” People’s sense of themselves, their understanding of their place in the divinely ordered scheme of things, their very identity as human beings created in the image of God, thus rested on a conception of human origins that assumed the literal truth of the biblical narrative and traced the varieties of the human race proximately to the three sons of Noah and ultimately to Adam and Eve.