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Cascade Companions
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The Christian theological tradition provides an embarrassment of riches: from scripture to modern scholarship, we are blessed with a vast and complex theological inheritance. And yet this feast of traditional riches is too frequently inaccessible to the general reader.
The Cascade Companions series addresses the challenge by publishing books that combine academic rigor with broad appeal and readability. They aim to introduce nonspecialist readers to that vital storehouse of authors, documents, themes, histories, arguments, and movements that comprise this heritage with brief yet compelling volumes.
Reading Augustine
A Guide to the Confessions
Jason Byassee
READING AUGUSTINE
A Guide to the Confessions
Cascade Companions
Copyright © 2006 Jason Byassee. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf & Stock, 199 W. 8th Ave., Eugene, OR 97401.
ISBN: 1-59752-529-4
Cataloging-in-Publication data:
Reading Augustine : a guide to the Confessions / Jason
Byassee.
viii + 94 p.; 20.3 cm.
ISBN 1-59752-529-4
1. Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. Confessions.
2. Theology—History—Early Church, ca. 30-600.
I. Title. II. Series.
BR65 A62 B53 2006
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
Preface
Augustine’s Confessions recounts a journey
undertaken with friends. This small project is, no less, the fruit of friendship. I am grateful to Kurt Berends, coordinator of the Christian Scholars Program at the University of Notre Dame for initially approaching me to write study guides on patristic texts for college fellowship groups. Kurt followed that invitation up by initiating student discussion groups at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, then taking the participants and me all out to eat to discuss the first draft of the guide and how to improve it. What author could dream of such intensive feedback? I was as nervous as I was before my dissertation defense, but as well fed as . . . I can’t remember when. Kurt then also initiated discussions with Jon Stock at Wipf & Stock to make this guide and a forthcoming one on the Sayings of the Desert Fathers a reality. I owe enormous thanks to him, to Jon, and to my editor K. C. Hanson.
I’m grateful to Professors Lewis Ayres of Candler School of Theology and Robert Wilken of the University of Virginia for teaching me to read Augustine. Both are model scholars. My own work, as reflected by my day job at the Christian Century, is much more journalistic, and aimed at non-specialists. Yet if I’ve gotten anything right according to the scholarship it is thanks to them.
I am grateful also to three small churches in rural North Carolina. I wrote this book in the basement of the parsonage of Purley and New Hope United Methodist Churches in Blanch, where my wife was pastor from 2001–2004. At the same time I was a student pastor at Shady Grove United Methodist, also in Caswell County. My hope with this work was to bring the sort of scholarship I got in Duke’s graduate program (with an occasional jaunt up to UVa) in contact with the sort of ordinary church life we treasured at these three congregations, topped off with the energy of a campus fellowship group like Intervarsity. Our churches’ patience with my life as a scholar-preacher helped inspire and make this possible.
I dedicate this book to the memory of my mother, Mary Ellen Schroeder: may God’s Spirit hasten her to the beatific vision.
Introduction
Saint Augustine is, arguably, the second most important interpreter of the Christian faith after St. Paul. His literary contribution so affected the church in the West that we scarcely recognize his fingerprints on our lives anymore. No one in the western world can even think in such crucial fields as the nature of God, the soul, the church, the state, or even “religion” as such without (now usually unacknowledged) reference to Augustine. If his intellectual stature is indeed this great, then we can say that his Confessions is the most important Christian text outside the Bible itself. For it is Augustine’s greatest work, his most lasting contribution to both the church and western society more generally, the one without which even self-avowedly non-religious people would experience the world quite differently than they now do.1 If the Confessions feels familiar to us, it is because Augustine has so deeply affected the ways we think about the world—and more importantly, about God.
That is not to say that Confessions is read as often or as deeply now as it deserves. We contemporary Christians tend to try to satisfy our spiritual and intellectual palates with such coarse fare as may be offered at the local Christian bookstore, or on the “religion” shelf at the chain book outlet, all the while neglecting the vast bounty in our own churchly heritage that would supply far more in the way of solid food for the mature. I myself write as and for “evangelicals”—not the barbarians lampooned in the media—but more properly defined as those who cherish a deep respect for scripture and hold that the gospel must be preached to the ends of the earth. I also write as and for those who hold a “catholic”2 trust that God’s presence is mediated to us through quite material means: the flesh of Christ, bread, wine, water, liturgy, scripture, and, above all, the church. For me these concerns do not conflict with one another, but rather jointly push me toward a lifelong project of helping rediscover the riches of the ancient church’s heritage. Nor in these tenets am I alone. There seems to be a movement afoot among young Christians generally to draw deeply from the long-neglected wells of the “church fathers,” those Christian teachers much closer in years and in thought to the world of the bible than we. You have perhaps taken up this study guide because of similar beliefs (or through coercion by others who find them amenable!). My hope is that reading Confessions through the lenses offered in these short pages will both deepen your evangelical and catholic instincts, and challenge them through unfamiliar teaching that will both stretch and sustain you in surprising ways. For this has been my own experience with the fathers: they have made me more evangelical, more catholic, and just so, more deeply devoted to Jesus.
What sort of book is the Confessions? Augustine uses the word “confession” in at least two ways in the work. Obviously he means in these pages to confess the sins of his youth, committed as he made his way through his training as a Roman rhetorician, through his years as a Manichaean heretic, to his conversion to Platonist philosophy, and finally to the Catholic Church. More importantly though, he means here to “confess” the truth of God revealed in Jesus Christ. A “confession” is finally a note of
