Augustine of Hippo
William Branham claimed that St. Augustine of Hippo rejected the baptism of the Holy Spirit and legitimized the killing of heretics and that he met Martin of Tours. Branham also indicated that "St. Augustine" baptized the King of England in the name of Jesus Christ. Are these claims true?
William Branham's use of questionable historical sources
We can't go into details here, but Chapter 12 of our book, Under The Halo, provides significant detail relating to William Branham's use of questionable historical references. Almost without exception, his historical sources were "fringe" works, written by people with no academic training in history and no recognized degrees in history. Virtually all of them (with a few minor exceptions) have been categorized as not authoritative. Additionally, he often made references to sources as proofs for his claims, but when one examines the books in question, the statements cannot be found in the cited source. A good example of this is his reference to "Schmucker's Glorious Reformation," which does mention St. Augustine but in a positive light and not with the negative connotations referenced by Branham.
Augustine of Hippo and Augustine of Canterbury
There were two different figures named Augustine in early Christian history and William Branham refers to both, although it is unclear whether he conflated the two Augustines.
Augustine of Hippo (354–430 AD) was a North African bishop and theologian born in Thagaste in the Roman province of Numidia1. He taught rhetoric in Rome and Milan before his conversion1, and in 391 he was ordained into the priesthood while visiting Hippo Regius, becoming bishop of that church in 396. There is no historical evidence that Augustine of Hippo ever traveled to England.
Augustine of Canterbury, a different person who died around 604, was the missionary who brought Christianity back to southern England and founded the metropolitan bishopric of Canterbury. Augustine of Canterbury and forty monks who accompanied him to England in 596 were all trained in Pope Gregory’s monastery in Rome. Augustine was not a common baptismal name, so it is possible that the name was taken when he entered the monastery to indicate that he was a young man of promise who might emulate the great Augustine of Hippo.
So Augustine of Hippo, the influential theologian, remained in North Africa throughout his life, while his namesake Augustine of Canterbury was the one who journeyed to England as a missionary.
How did Augustine of Canterbury baptize?
There is no evidence that Augustine of Canterbury baptized anyone in the name of Jesus Christ. In fact, he would almost certainly have used the Trinitarian formula when baptizing King Ethelbert. The formula “I baptize thee in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” had achieved practically universal acceptance across Christian bodies by this period, and Augustine of Hippo (a near-contemporary authority) observed that it was easier to find heretics who rejected baptism altogether than to find any who administered baptism using a different formula.
By the early seventh century, when Augustine of Canterbury arrived in England, the Trinitarian formula was the established standard throughout the Western Church. Even heretics and schismatics who employed the Trinitarian formula rendered the sacrament valid, with the power residing in the words of God rather than the person pronouncing them, a principle that Augustine of Hippo had articulated and that shaped baptismal practice across the Christian world.
The historical context supports this conclusion. Augustine of Canterbury was trained in Rome under Pope Gregory’s direct influence, and by the early Middle Ages the baptismal formula was employed everywhere in the Western Church. There is no evidence of any deviation from this practice in the English mission. The king’s baptism would have followed the universal liturgical standard of the time, making the Trinitarian formula virtually certain.[1]
Augustine of Hippo
Initially, Augustine held the position that heretics and schismatics should be won through instruction rather than force, but after 400 he reversed this stance following his frustrating encounters with the Donatists, whose numbers actually declined when imperial laws were applied against them. His shift toward advocating persecution stemmed from multiple sources: his theology of the Christian state, the violent behavior of radical Donatist factions, optimism about coercion’s effectiveness, and a disputed interpretation of Christ’s command to “compel them to come in” from Luke 14:23.
Augustine furnished theological justification for state suppression of heresy, arguing that where persuasion failed, persecution could serve the church’s defensive mission—though he personally opposed capital punishment. He explicitly acknowledged his own conversion, writing that his city “was brought over to the Catholic unity by fear of the imperial edicts.”3 Yet Augustine’s theory, as the historian Neander observed, “contains the germ of the whole system of spiritual despotism, intolerance, and persecution, even to the court of the Inquisition.”
The critical distinction lies between Augustine’s intentions and his legacy. In practice, he urged magistrates toward clemency and remained committed to his principle that “nothing conquers but truth, the victory of truth is love,” but his great authority was later weaponized to justify cruelties from which he himself would have recoiled. Medieval theologians radicalized his theory, while Augustine avoided endorsing execution, Thomas Aquinas and his successors deemed heretics worthy of death, treating heresy as a social disease requiring violent expurgation. Augustine provided the theological vocabulary and conceptual framework; subsequent generations transformed his qualified arguments into systematic persecution.
As a result, while Augustine did agree that the state could persecute heretics, he personally argued for clemency because of his own background.
Augustine and Martin
Martin of Tours and Augustine of Hippo did not meet. While they were near-contemporaries—Martin of Tours lived from 316–3971 and Augustine of Hippo lived from 354–430, their geographical separation meant such an encounter did not occur.[2]
Martin grew up in Italy and became a soldier, later studying with Hilary of Poitiers before establishing a monastery near Poitiers, placing him in Gaul (modern France).[3] Augustine pioneered monastic experiments in North Africa, first on his family property in Thagaste and later in his episcopal seat of Hippo Regius.[4] The two men operated in entirely different regions of the Christian world—Martin in western Gaul and Augustine in North Africa—with no documented connection between them.
The record shows that both figures shaped Western monasticism during overlapping periods. After his military service, Martin lived as a hermit near Ligugé in France, and his sanctity drew others to join him in community. Augustine introduced a different monastic model—celibate clergy living together in service to a local church—which he established after his conversion in 388 and continued after becoming bishop of Hippo in 395.[5] Though they never met, both left lasting legacies that would reshape Christian monasticism for centuries to come.
Quotes of William Branham
In A.D. 603, when the King of England was baptized in the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ by Saint Augustine, setting at a great fireplace one night, while he was talking to him about Christ, a little sparrow flew into the light, fluttered around a little bit, flew out. And Saint Augustine said to the king; he said, "Where did he come from and where did he go to?" He said, "That's the way that every man that comes into this world. He comes in here, walks in a little conscience of senses, not knowing exactly where he come from. And there's only one Book that can tell him where he's going to, and that's the Bible." And by that, the king was converted and gave his life to the Lord. And the next morning, he and all of his household was baptized in the Name of the Lord.[6]
Now, we've come through a great day. The day's gone by, through great teachers, Saint Augustine; come on down to Martin Luther, John Wesley, Calvin, Knox, all of those; down through the age of the—of the Methodist, the age of the Baptist, the age of the Nazarene, the age of the Pilgrim Holiness, the age of Pentecostal, all these ages has passed away. [7]
Pope Leo the Great, reigned and from 440 until 461. Oh, he thought he was exactly doing what was right. Come into the church… Before him was Victor, and he was a rat too. And he come in there, and how he put the Christians to death and everything else. And then who started all this, putting it legalized murder? You know who it was? Saint Augustine of Hippo. That's exactly who did it. Saint Augustine had an opportunity once, so says the history, to become a great man, and be filled with the Holy Ghost. He set in the back of the yard there, in Lyons, France, at that great school where Irenaeus had taught, and them, and Saint Martin. He set in this school yard, and the Holy Ghost come to him. But he refused to accept It. Then what did he become? A twofold more child of hell than he was to begin with. He went right on down to Hippo, Africa. There he set his school. And it was… "Show me."
I can take you to the history. He was the one who sanctioned his word to it, that it was all right to put to death any heretic who would disagree with the dogmas of the Roman church: Saint Augustine of Hippo. Is there a Bible scholar here, or somebody that's read history, knows that that's true, raise up your hand? Yeah. See? Sure, they are. Saint Augustine of Hippo, he was the one who passed the verdict that it was all right to kill heretics who disagreed with the Roman church, sanctioning them pagan doctrine, of getting away from the Bible, and establishing a son god worship. You know the reason Christianity is…
But Augustine sanctioned it. If you want to refer to this in Schmucker's, the writing of Schmucker, S-c-h-m-u-c-k-e-r-s, Schmucker's "The Glorious Reformation," here's what it stated, that "From the time that Saint Augustine of Hippo passed this verdict to the Catholic church, it throwed the doors wide open for them to kill anything they wanted to then, that denied that pagan church. And from the time of Saint Augustine, about three hundred years after Christ until 1850, the great massacre of Ireland, there was eighty-six million Protestants killed by the Catholic church. That's on the Roman martyrology: Eighty-six million." Now, fuss with the historian, he's the one that said that. I'm just repeating his word. "Everyone that disagreed with the Catholic dogma…" [8]
I was reading in the Nicene Fathers, the post-Nicene Council, that where Saint Augustine of Hippo, setting with Saint Martin one day as he was visiting him at the monastery. Out in the back yard in the garden God gave him the opportunity to receive the Holy Ghost, like Martin did. But he turned it away, so interested in the—the dogmas of Rome till he couldn't receive the Holy Spirit. Many times we get that way, so interested in other things. Sometimes we're so interested in time that we're brought right into the Presence of the Lord Jesus and walk away. [9]
It would be like St. Augustine of Hippo. Instead of going on when he was there at Irenaeus' church, and receiving the Holy Ghost, he took off down to Africa, to Hippo, Africa, again. And he was the one that made the proclamation that it was all right to put Christians to death who didn't believe in the Roman church. And on the martyrology today stands sixty-eight million people who's been put to death by the church. See? Why? He had a opportunity to receive the Holy Ghost. He had an opportunity, but he wasn't convinced that it was the Holy Ghost. And you see where his concern went.[10]
Look just a moment, to some of you people, and especially I speak to you Catholic people. Do you realize, have you ever read the actual history, the history of the Roman Catholic church? How that on your martyrology, since Saint Augustine of Hippo, how many million innocent people that the church put to death! I forget, can't call the exact number, but it's up in the millions, since Saint Hippo of… Saint Augustine of Hip-… of Hippo, Africa, made it a declaration that it was absolutely the will of God to put anybody to death that protests the Roman Catholic church. Do you realize that in that, that Saint Patrick was never recognized till after his death, as a Roman Catholic? He protested the pope and all of his doings, and the Catholic church itself killed tens of thousands of his children. Did you know that the Catholic church burnt Joan of Arc, that little sainted woman, to the stake, for be-… said she was a witch. Two hundred years later, dug up the bodies of the priests, when they found out it was wrong, and cast them into the sea, without burying them in the sacred ground, to do penance.[11]
Once the Nicene Council had swung the power of political Rome to the church, it seemed that there were no limits to which this First Christian Church would go. The name, Christian, which originally brought persecution, now became the name of the persecutors. It was in this age that Augustine of Hippo (354-430) set forth the precept that the church ought and MUST use force if necessary to bring her children back into the fold, and that it was in harmony with the Word of God to kill the heretics and apostates. In his controversy with the Donatists he wrote… "It is indeed better that men should be led to worship God by teaching than that they should be driven to it by fear of punishment or pain, but it does not follow that because the former course produces the better men, therefore those who do not yield to it should be neglected. For many have found advantage (as we have proved and are daily proving by actual experience) in being first compelled by fear or pain, so that they might afterwards be influenced by teaching, so that they might follow out in act what they have already learned in word… whilst those are better who are guided aright by love, those are certainly more numerous who are corrected by fear. For who can possibly love us more than Christ, Who laid down His life for the sheep?[12]
Footnotes
- ↑ Wharton B. Marriott, “Baptism,” in A Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, ed. William Smith and Samuel Cheetham (London: John Murray, 1875–1880), 161; Jacob D. Myers and Nicole Graham, Stand-up Comedy, Theology, and Ethics (New York, NY: Fortress Academic, 2025), 97; and Hope Williard, “Apostles’ Creed,” in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. Andrew Louth (Oxford, United Kingdom; New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 103.
- ↑ Jessica Parks, “The Spread of Monasticism,” in Church History Themes, ed. Zachariah Carter (Bellingham, WA: Faithlife, 2022).
- ↑ John Mark Terry and Robert L. Gallagher, Encountering the History of Missions: From the Early Church to Today, Encountering Mission (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic: A Division of Baker Publishing Group, 2017), 13–14.
- ↑ J. William Harmless, “Monasticism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, ed. Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter, Oxford Handbooks (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 496.
- ↑ Michael A. Smith, “Ascetics and Monks: The Rise of Christian Monasticism,” in Introduction to the History of Christianity, ed. Tim Dowley (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2018), 174.
- ↑ William Branham, 55-0410M - Proof Of His Resurrection, para. 17
- ↑ William Branham, 55-0410M - Proof Of His Resurrection, para. 159
- ↑ William Branham, 61-1217 - Christianity Versus Idolatry, para. 166-170, 173
- ↑ William Branham, 62-0127 - Meanest Man I Know, para. 28
- ↑ William Branham, 62-0521 - Convinced And Then Concerned, para. 37
- ↑ William Branham, 65-0801E - Events Made Clear By Prophecy, para. 22
- ↑ William Branham, An Exposition Of The Seven Church Ages - Chapter Five - The Pergamean Church Age, para. 195-2