Contextualization is essential to good exposition. And the sermon manuscripts we have from St. Augustine lead some to suggest that he did it quite well. Thus when Augustine propounded ideas about society that were taken straight from the pagan classics, we should not think that he was doing this in a self-conscious effort to impress pagans with his culture or to woo them into the church by citing their favorite authors. He did it as unthinkingly as we, today, say that the earth