set out Augustine’s “new understanding of justification”—new, that is, in relation to Augustine’s earlier belief—exposed in Various Questions to Simplician, written in the year 396, soon after he became bishop in Hippo. In responding to Simplician’s request for clarification of Romans 9:1–29, as Augustine himself put it in his Reconsiderations thirty years later, “I tried hard to maintain the free choice of the human will, but the grace of God prevailed.”2 “Augustine’s teaching on justification altered