Augustine’s Confessions | Navigating the Classics

Welcome to Navigating the Classics,. I'm John Snyder, and with me today is actually my son, Andrew Snyder. Andrew is a student at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, and so Andrew has agreed to help us out as we look at another one of the ancient texts of Christianity, one that perhaps the average person wouldn't pick up and read, you know, one that isn't published by Reformation Heritage Books or Ligonier or Banner of Truth.

And so we're going to be looking at the book written by Augustine, early church father, and the book that he wrote that we're looking at is called His Confessions. And so we're going to just take some time to kind of get an introduction into who he was and what the book is about.

And Andrew is going to be walking us through most of that. And then we'll come back and look at five kind of key themes in the book that we feel. These are themes that are practical for every believer and things that are very helpful.

And we'll bring the whole to an end and kind of sum it all up by talking about some of the strengths and weaknesses of the book and asking ourselves, who would you recommend the book to? So, Andrew, thanks for being with us.

Yeah, happy to be on.

Now, Andrew, I think we have to ask you right off. At PRTS, who's your favorite professor?

My favorite lecturer, because I'm online, is definitely Joel Beeky.

Okay, just stop there. That's good. So, Dr. Beeky, you heard that, and so maybe that'll kind of come in handy in the coming years.

Get a good grade.

Yeah, there you go.

So, I think that, you know, when we look at a book like Augustine's Confessions, it's one of those books that you may have heard of but not read. And it's always good, especially with ancient text, to try to get an idea of who wrote it and what was the context.

Because even though men might write true things, when we see the context, what was going on in their life, I find that it lends great weight to what they said. So, let me just give—it's not our intention to give a full biography of Augustine, so let me just kind of give you a quick one, and then we'll look at some introductory things about his book before Andrew walks us through it.

Augustine was born in 354 in northern Africa. His father, whose name was Patricius, was a pagan. His mother, whose name is Monica, was a very zealous Christian. Where they lived, it was difficult for people to ascend in the Roman system of wealth and influence, but they worked hard and sacrificed to send Augustine to good schooling.

And Augustine went to school there in his hometown. He later went to what we think of as like a high school setting in a nearby village. And then, eventually, he goes to Carthage. And at Carthage, through the help of a wealthy benefactor, he's able to get some good schooling, and Augustine really excels.

He has a great mind for language and literature. He studies rhetoric, the art of speaking, and eventually becomes a teacher in rhetoric. Augustine is not a Christian, and while his father hoped that his good education would result in an ambitious career, his mother hoped that one day God would save him, and that through that great salvation, what God was doing in his education would come to fruition, that these things would be used by the Lord one day for his honor.

He works, he finishes his work in Carthage, and he becomes a professor, a teacher. He disliked working there as a teacher because of the behavior of the students. Apparently, the students, it was the custom that they could behave very poorly.

He said, in fact, they behaved so badly at school that if they would have been outside of the school, they would have been arrested for what they did. But it was the custom of the day that that was allowed.

And so he became frustrated with that school system and left there, and eventually he was offered a place of teaching in Milan. And he went there in 384. While he was there, and this is a very prestigious place.

One historian compared it to being like the chair of government at Harvard University, you know, so quite a prestigious place. He goes there, and while he's there, he encounters a man named Ambrose, and Ambrose is a great preacher in the church there.

Now, Augustine has been, and Andrew, you'll hit this as we look at his book, but Augustine has been looking for answers. He's a very ambitious man. He's also a man that has searched for satisfaction in all the wrong places.

He has gone to Manicheanism, a system that is a strange back then, a system that combines some of the teachings of Christianity, some of the teachings of Buddha, and then Zoroastrianism. And it viewed the universe kind of as divided in a dual, two categories.

There is the pure spiritual aspects, and then there is the sinful aspect, but that's the material. So what we call a Gnostic, it's one of the Gnostic religions. So things are evil and sinful because they're physical, and if only we could escape this physical world, then our spirits would live in this purity.

And, of course, one of the implications that usually followed that view is that what I do with my body just doesn't matter. I can kind of live any way I want with this. This is just going to be shucked off at the end, and so sin isn't a thing that taints my soul.

Well, he chases after that for a while, but when he meets Ambrose, he is shocked that this man, who is a capable preacher, his words carry great weight with Augustine because his words are connected to reality.

Whereas Augustine's influence through Manichaeanism was by a man named Faustus, and Faustus was quite a scintillating teacher, better, you know, as an orator than Ambrose. But Augustine had come to feel by this time that Manichaean teaching was just a lot of hot air, very fine, fancy words, no reality attached to them.

So the straightforward preaching of Ambrose really grips him, and at this time God begins to deal with Augustine more and more, and we'll look at that in his book as he kind of traces that. At age 31, he is converted upon reading Romans 13, verse 13 and 14, and his own account of it is that he was in the back garden, and he hears these children chanting, take up and read, and he sees a Bible sitting near him, and he picks it up, and his eyes fall on that text, and God uses that to really kind of bring Augustine all the way to Christ, and he is then baptized as a Christian in 387.

Now, having become a Christian, Augustine sets aside much of that ambition that had driven him and, you know, caused him to reach this pinnacle as a teacher in Milan. He turns his back on all of that and goes back to his hometown and then to Hippo.

And in North Africa, because he wants to establish a monastery, and he wants to just serve the Lord as a minister or as a Christian, as a monk, he wants to serve the Lord in seclusion. He doesn't want fame anymore.

He's laid that aside. And there was a bishop in Hippo that he could serve under, and the bishop, recognizing Augustine's abilities, his great intellect, and his great love for Christ, somewhat against Augustine's desires, convinces him to be ordained as a priest, and then eventually Augustine becomes the bishop.

So he becomes the bishop there, and for the rest of his life, he serves as the pastor of that region. Having to do all the work of a pastor, it's easy to read Augustine and think that maybe he's this armchair theologian who sits in this great ancient library, but he's not.

He's a pastor. And in the midst of all that busyness, he writes and writes and writes. And we can see that Monica, his mother's desire, came true, that the great education that he got combined with his natural abilities were used by the Spirit and did great good to the church.

He is perhaps, at least in the early centuries of the church, he is certainly the greatest theologian and has had the most impact both on Roman Catholicism from that period and later, Protestantism. His confessions, Thomas Nettles writes about these, he says, his confessions established the theological agenda to which he devoted his massive skills of philosophical and theological reflection.

His views of Christ, the Trinity, human sin, the character of evil, the free agency of man, and yet the innate depravity of the fallen will, the power and necessity of divine grace, the nature of the sacraments, the direction of human history under divine providence in this fallen world.

All of that, Nettles says, you find it kind of in germ form, in the seed form, in the confessions. He ended up writing so much that he is the most prolific writer from the ancient world. So we're coming to one of his most famous books today, and that is his confession.

So let me just kind of give you a quick overview of that. It was written between 397 and 400 A .D., and the importance of that is this. It is an autobiographical book where he lays out in these 13 books, the first 10 in particular, he just lays out from childhood to his early 40s what God showed him to be true about himself and how he's wrestling with these things and how God deals with his soul and how he comes to peace with God.

So while it is autobiographical, and we can say that it is the first Western Christian autobiography written, it's not a complete biography or autobiography because it ends in his 40s, and so we don't have the other years.

And it deals, the whole book is not autobiography because it's the first nine chapters that really give a lot of that information. Chapter 10 is kind of a summary, but then chapters 11 through 13, what he calls books 11 through 13, these are almost, it's kind of like an appendix to the book where he deals with the book of Genesis in a very philosophical and allegorical way, which seems strange.

It seems like it's almost tacked on to the confessions. It is interesting that the confessions were written as prayers to God. So each book really is a prayer to the Lord, and we're allowed to kind of come alongside and read them with him.

Now, I want to say something just a little bit from some other authors about his significance as a writer. Philip Schaff, who is one of the great historians in Christianity, he was actually a 19th century scholar, and he's one of my favorite.

He speaks of the confessions, which Augustine wrote in the 46th year of his life, and there's that burning love for Christ is there, and he's thinking back on how God dealt with him. And this is what he writes.

Schaff says this, here we see the great church teacher of all times prostrate in the dust, conversing with God, basking in Christ's love, his readers hovering before him only as a shadow. So it's God that he's focused on, but he knows that others will be hearing what he says.

He puts away from himself all honor, all greatness, all beauty, and lays them gratefully at the feet of the all merciful one. The reader feels on every hand that Christianity is not a dream or an illusion, but truth and life, and he is carried along in adoration of the wonderful grace of God.

Well, let's just, Andrew, why don't you walk us through particularly those first 10 books of Augustine's confessions, and then we'll look at one of these great masterpieces and how it applies to the Christian life.

Augustine’s Early Life, Conversion, and Pastoral Ministry

Yeah. Well, coming to this, I mean, I'm only in my first year of seminary. I feel like I'm closer to the average reader than necessarily a theologian or historian, though both of those things are my favorite subjects.

But the book has always been something in my life that has caught my attention. Even about a year before I was even saved, I read it for school and just found it fascinating because it's from 400, and it's something that we can still read today, and it resonates with us.

He has a lot of the same things to say that people say now. And even before God opened my eyes, I was able to be impacted by it. And then later, after I was converted, it became one of my favorite books of all time just because of how much it's got in it, how much good history and theology and heartwarming nature of how Augustine writes.

But going through the books, the first one is really his early years. So throughout these, Augustine takes time to stop and to praise God for whatever phase of life he's in, whether it's God pointing Augustine back towards himself or Augustine just running headlong into sin.

He still confesses the mercy of God in that. And that's one thing that I wanted to say is when we think of confessing, I think most of the time, at least I think of confessing sin. But in Augustine's confessions, it's not just Augustine telling us every bad thing he's ever done.

It's also confessing the mercies of God to him throughout his entire life. And so you really see that right off the bat because he spends a while talking about how it was a mercy of God and God really caring for him that he even survived infanthood because Augustine couldn't do anything for himself at that time.

And he points out that he can't even remember that time. It's only by observing other babies that he could even put together what his life was before he was able to really rationalize things. So he goes through his infant stage, talking about both his need of God's goodness there and even the fallen nature that he sees at that point.

And he confesses those things. And that's really the extent of book one. Book two, he goes into his adolescence and he talks a lot about how he's forced to study. And it's not something that he wants to do, but he's forced to.

And he confesses that at this stage, he already was growing to love evil and evil for the sake of evil. And we'll talk about it later because it's something that is, at least I feel like it's pretty well known in Augustine's life, but he steals some pears when he's 16 and it ends up being something that he looks back on.

And I mean, it grieves him deeply that he would steal these pears. And I don't know, for me, if I stole pears at 16, I might not look back on it when I was, you know, a fully grown adult and be so grieved.

But that's something that's so beautiful about how Augustine writes. Book three is when he becomes a student at Carthage. And here, as he, you know, progresses further and further into his education, this is, you know, his late teens.

He's living a life of sin and for sin mainly. But he picks up a book for his school called Hortensius by Cicero. And this book, although it's not Christian by any means, it points him to higher things.

And it redirects him from just loving kind of the base things of this world to wanting to pursue the immortality of knowledge, I think is how he puts it in the book, or at least in one of the translations.

So it's at this point that he's taken from kind of just an obsession with the material to being how we see Augustine for the rest of his life, someone who seeks truth almost without hesitation. He just like runs headlong into it.

But at this point, he's not brought to faith in Christianity, and rather he turns to Manichaeism, which we see him stay in for a while. Also, at this point, he does pick up the Bible and he wants to give it a try.

But to him, he really sees it as his old mother's religion. His father wasn't a Christian. Like you said, it was something that he kind of looked on as a belief system for less educated people. And he picks it up.

He tries to read part of the Old Testament and he shuts it and says, God is too violent. It's not like a refined enough thing for me. And moves on and joins the Manichaeists. So book four, his life from 19 to 28.

And this is the point where he is the most steeped in Manichaeism. He becomes incredibly close with a friend that he knew growing up, but they really didn't become close friends until this point. He's unnamed.

But Augustine and him, they both are very wrapped up in Manichaeism. And he really relishes in that friendship. He spends a while talking about how sweet of a friendship it really was, even though it only lasted about a year because his friend quickly took ill.

And this was a pretty pivotal moment in Augustine's life. So this friend that he has grown incredibly close to over the past year is dying. And he, in his death sweats, as the book says, he passes out.

And his family baptizes him because he was raised a Christian, but Augustine kind of talked him out of it. And they both became very, you know, much more philosophical thinking they were better than that.

But he's baptized. His friend is baptized while he's in this swoon. And when he comes to Augustine, tries to joke about it with him, like, oh, they baptized you while you were passed out. Isn't that silly, right?

And his friend actually puts a lot of faith into this baptism and tells Augustine that he wishes he wouldn't talk that way. And so this turn in his friend's life right before his friend's passing away, being baptized and kind of putting away Manichaeism was something that we'll see impacted Augustine.

In this time, he also, he starts seeing beauty in the world as something that means that there's goodness in the world. He writes a book on this called The Fair and the Fit. It was not a big hit. He was pretty much the only person that read it, but he sees the beauty of friendship and the beauty of the world.

But he makes sure to clarify that these things, you can't really see them rightly unless God opens your eyes. And friendship cannot really be as in-depth and true as it should be unless it's in a mutual love that is given by the Spirit.

So in book five, Augustine is still a Manichaean and he meets, well, he's had issues with the religion. Some of the stuff that it teaches is kind of out there and Augustine can't really make sense of it too well.

And when he talks to his friends about it, they all just tell him, wait for Faustus. He's a great orator of the religion and he'll convince you, you know, he has all the answers. And so he banked a lot on meeting this guy.

And when he does, he is, he's impressed by his ability to speak to, he talks really well. And Augustine, who is, you know, highly educated in rhetoric, even at this point, he appreciates that about him a lot.

But he also, knowing kind of the craft, knows that he's not really saying anything new. And the book had a pretty interesting thing to say about this, the way Augustine worded it. He says, but what could the most presentable waiter do for my thirst by offering precious cups?

So the idea that the vehicle that's supposed to be delivering truth is these cups. And no matter how beautiful the cup is that Faustus uses, no matter how wonderful his words sound, it's still an empty cup.

And so his meeting with Faustus is definitely pretty pivotal in his, the breaking down of his Manichean religion. So at this time, he moves to Rome. He's offered a position there. And like you said, the students at Carthage are so bad that he has to leave.

Turns out Rome is not much better because the students at Rome, while they're very respectful and they really want to learn, they ask a bunch of questions. They try to learn extra about halfway through, you know, what we would think of as a semester.

Before they paid the teacher, the whole class would leave and go to another teacher. So he wouldn't get paid after teaching these people, even though they were well behaved. So turns out it wasn't that much better of a situation.

He moves to Milan and he meets Ambrose. And again, after meeting Faustus and that kind of shaking the foundations of his Manichaeism, he then meets Ambrose, who is even more influential in redirecting his understanding of Christianity.

Ambrose puts Christianity in a way to Augustine that Augustine finally sees makes sense. When he gets to Milan, Ambrose is preaching through the Old Testament. I'm not sure which part of the Old Testament, but that is what, you know, made Augustine drop Christianity and say, OK, that's kind of barbaric.

But Ambrose teaching it faithfully, Augustine sees the truth that's in there and the realities of God. And so at this point, Augustine is not converted to Christianity. He is not regenerate. And he looking back, I mean, he would admit that.

But he's fascinated with the Christian religion and he's willing to put away Manichaeism. He still has questions, especially about the nature of sin and the nature of God. But at this point, he's willing to adhere to Christianity as the best thing that he's found.

He even becomes a catechumen in the church, which is just someone that's being taught to be baptized, being prepared to be baptized. So that's book five. And book six, Monica, his mother, comes to Milan.

He actually had to leave her to get to Rome because she really didn't want him to go because it was, you know, a den of sin. It was a very big city. And so she's like begging him not to leave. So he has to sneak out in the middle of the night and get on a ship.

And Augustine writes about her trying to chase him and find him at the docks and crying and praying that God would not let him go to Rome. But Augustine says that God heard the intention behind her plea and not the words that she said, because in going to Rome, we see the unfolding of Augustine's life.

He meets Ambrose and is changed. So, but Monica meets back up with him. Augustine continues to search out what's error and what's truth and what he believes, and kind of consistently picking away at his misunderstood beliefs about God.

And he he really is joying in the fact that Christianity is not what he thought it was. Kind of his surface level understanding of it is not what the Bible teaches. And being under Ambrose's teaching, him being a very good orator and a faithful pastor, both pointing him in the right direction.

Augustine at this point, his mom wants him to get married. So he has to put away his concubine, which he's had for, I don't know how many years, but since he was over a year. Yeah. And they had a child together, but he puts her away, which he grieves over greatly in confessions to prepare for his marriage, which does not end up happening.

He ends up canceling that. But at this time, having put away his concubine, he kind of falls back into his old lustful ways, which it was not his intentions putting away the concubine. So here we see him kind of tumble back into this miserable life of sin, where there's a lot of confusion and unhappiness, even while he's amidst Christian teaching that's good.

And we still see that his heart is not saved from, you know, the sin that it's in love with. So then we have book seven, and here we see Augustine really wrestling with a material conception of God and the origin of evil.

The idea of if God is good, what is evil? Is it something else? If God is everywhere, but sin is a thing, is God in sin? This idea that sin is actually like invisible or not some kind of entity that takes up space.

And it's a lot of confusion that stems from his beliefs before accepting Christian beliefs. And so he kind of goes back and forth with these ideas and doesn't really fall on an answer yet. At this time, he also looks into astrology as a religion because it's really popular.

But even in his own observations about astrology, he doesn't. He dismisses it as fake because he watches twins that are born and they don't have the same fates, even though they're under the same signs.

And, you know, it's just with careful observation, Augustine puts that away and isn't really tempted to delve into it too much. He sees more and more the truth of God. I mean, these past several books, we've seen that.

But he writes that while the beauty of God lifts him up, his own heaviness weighs him back down. And he can't seem to really grab hold of the things that he, though, would give lip service to as true and the most reasonable thing that he's found.

He's still stuck in love with his sin, unable to live for God. So then we have book eight. And at this point, Augustine and his friend, Olypius, they are both learning a lot about Christianity, but they're also still very much intellectuals.

And they're grieving over the fact that they keep hearing these testimonies of people being saved and having these great transformations in their life. But Augustine and his friend have yet to have that kind of experience.

He writes that they are heartbroken because the uneducated are taking heaven by storm. And he and his friend, who are these very, very wise men, Augustine worked for the emperor as an orator. He's top notch, but he can't seem to do what even the uneducated people are doing.

And he writes about, is it better for man to have this great knowledge of God, but not know him really? Or is it better to be kind of an uneducated person, but to love God and really grab hold of him?

Obviously it's the latter is better. So he and his friend are in this cycle of grief, but Augustine is still ensnared by old sins. And even from his youth, he writes in the book, he used to pray, give me chastity and continency, only not yet.

So Augustine wanting salvation, but also fearing the loss of the sin that he loves so much. So Augustine, at this time, this is where we have his conversion account, where he and his friend are convicted of these things and it weighs heavy on them.

And they're out in basically the backyard of his house. And Augustine starts crying really hard. And he goes to be by himself because crying is for being alone, not for sitting by her friend. And that's when he hears, take up and read.

And so he takes it as a word from God and he goes back to the epistle that he had, which was Romans. And he reads that passage, which I'll read. He reads, let us walk honestly as in the day, not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying.

But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ and make not provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof. And in that, Augustine is really changed. Before, the maniche religion thinks of Christ as just a great teacher.

And Augustine kind of still held to that belief that Jesus was just a teacher that was really blessed by God. But seeing there that, no, we put him on and we cast off those old sins that ensnare us. There he is, his heart is struck and he really does that.

His friend reads further where it says those who are weak receive him. And he is saved too because he feels like his faith is less strong, but he feels that that verse speaks heavily to him. And they tell Augustine's mother and she is overjoyed having prayed for years for Augustine.

She was very, very faithful in prayer. Book nine, we have Augustine devoting himself to God fully now. He leaves his teaching position because he doesn't feel like he can do that and also be faithful in his Christianity.

And he kind of gets alone. He goes into the country basically to prepare himself for baptism. And he's baptized. He and his son are baptized. And in this book, Monica, his mother dies. In book 10, it's a bit more of a summary, kind of a conclusion.

And he talks a lot about memory and the nature of memory, which makes sense because as a man later in life, looking back on all these things, it's reliance a lot on his own memories of situations. But he really praises God for the mercies that he showed him throughout his entire life.

And, I mean, he talks a lot about how we can't even understand fully our own minds. And yet we want to rely on them. But in reality, God is the only reliable thing. So really just a consistent pattern of bringing every situation back under the microscope of how God has been merciful and how he can confess the glories of God in that situation, even when it comes to him remembering his life is still a mercy of God.

So, yeah, at this point, he writes that his life is lived for God, and that is God saved him for that purpose. And he writes something that I found very interesting, and that's that God knows and still uses Augustine, even though he is weak and unskillful, which is crazy because Augustine was one of the greatest speakers of the day.

And, you know, just a brilliant mind. But Augustine still sees himself as needing the blood of Christ, even on his skills as humans would see them.

Original Sin, the Pear Theft, and the Meaning of Depravity

Well, with the end of Book 10, that kind of wraps up the autobiographical aspects of the confessions, and that's what we really want to deal with. So let's step back a little. And after having looked at that unfolding of his life up to his early 40s, let's go back and look at some of the high points of the books.

Obviously, we don't have time to hit everything, but some of the high points in particular applications that we find for us today in them. When you think about the first two books, there are a couple of things that he mentions there as God as creator, and then, you know, thinking of himself as a helpless infant.

There are a few things that are really significant. One of them is that he does discuss the existence of sin. And then a little later, when he comes to that point where he was a teenager that you mentioned where he eats the pears or steals the pears, he talks about the nature of sin.

And that, of course, becomes a thing that haunts him as he tries to grapple with this big question of what is sin and, you know, where does it come from and how do we deal with it? And, you know, he goes all the way around the world, Manichaeism, and then, you know, astrology, as you mentioned.

Do we watch the movement of planets and, you know, and the zodiac? Do we look at all of that? And does that help us understand the past and predict the future? And does that control us? So this is a pretty significant question for Augustine, and it's a significant aspect of his theology later in life, because if you know anything about Augustine, you probably know that Protestants, especially in the Reformation, point back to Augustine in his description of the nature of sin and of the existence of sin.

And Augustine is famous for arguing or debating in the early days of the church against a man named Pelagius who had a different view of the existence of sin and its nature. And so we believe Augustine was being very biblical in that debate, and that has impacted us a lot.

So when he talks about the existence of sin, Andrew, where does he kind of get that from looking back?

Yeah, well, looking back at book one, when he's talking about his, you know, very, very early year or two, whatever it might be, he, I mean, he's kind of merciless to babies. He talks about how, like a baby, a lot of people will say it cries because it needs something.

But it's not just when it needs something. You'll see babies crying when they want something that will hurt them. You know, like we think of now, like a baby trying to stick a knife in a power outlet or something.

It's like the baby wants to do that, and that's not something it needs to do. So the caretaker will take the baby away from that, and the baby will scream and cry and even try to hit whoever is taking care of them.

And Augustine points at that, and he says that's sin. The way a baby acts is something that is not generally reproved because the baby can't understand reprovement. And Augustine points out that once we get older, that kind of behavior is completely unallowed.

Like that has to be taught out of people, not taught to people. And so just seeing that sin is in humans from day one. David writes that he was brought forth in iniquity, and Augustine really kind of brings that home with his pictures of infants.

He says that it's not their will that's innocent, it's the weakness of their limbs. Like if a baby could really hurt you, you'd probably get hurt because they don't care. He points out that if a baby's wet nurse would feed another baby, the first one would get super jealous.

And he writes that even if the second baby would starve to death if it wasn't fed at that moment, the first baby would still be just as jealous. It's like they are very self-absorbed. And I mean it's kind of funny when you read it because it's not something we generally think about today.

We don't generally think about our actions as a baby before we can even remember and really grieve about the sin that's there. But Augustine, he takes it all very seriously and to heart in a way that, I mean it's kind of, it's convicting.

Yeah, I mean I've never heard a Christian testimony at church saying, Before I came to Christ, I remember as a baby, I would have killed my siblings or I would have killed my parents if I had the strength.

I wouldn't have cared at all. But yeah, as you mentioned, it seems strange at first, but it really is very insightful. And of course Augustine only knows this, he says, by observing other children. So he knows that he would have acted just like other infants.

But the fact that we are fundamentally self-absorbed and that we're not unwilling to deceive, to cry as if we're hurting when really we're not hurting or as if we're hungry when we're not hungry. But we learn that that's how we get what we want.

The reason I want us to stop and think about that is that Augustine does talk a lot in his theological writings about the existence of sin, not primarily or not initially in our clear, rational, volitional choices.

So I am old enough to understand that this is right and this is wrong and I choose wrong. Well, that is sin. But Augustine is pointing out that before you reach the ability as a human to reason like that, there is still a sinfulness in your character.

And that's why you reason like this later. And it's not the other way around. And so when we think of the existence of sin, Augustine's talking about what we call original sin, that the impact of humanity's representative, Adam, in choosing self over God.

Paul makes a great deal of this, particularly in Romans 5, where what our covenantal representative did, the representative of humanity, which God gets to choose, makes a choice. And the choice is the wrong choice and the consequences affect every person he represents, all humanity.

And then, of course, Paul's wonderful second aspect of that argument is that there is a final Adam. There is another Adam. There is another representative that God has chosen, the God-man, Jesus. And the God-man acts on behalf of his people and he obeys.

And his obedience, therefore, wonderfully impacts every person united to him. So in Adam all die. In Christ, every person united to Christ, they are made alive. But when we think about depravity, we don't want to get the wrong idea.