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.

It's 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.

You know, I can kind of live any way I want with this. This is just going to be shucked off at the end.

And so, you know, 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 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 Confessions.

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 this 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, you know, 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 the, 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. 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, you know, a theologian or historian, though both of those things are, you know, 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, you know, 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 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 progresses further and further into his education, this is 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 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 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 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 5, 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.

He has all the answers. And so he banked a lot on meeting this guy, and when he does, he's impressed by his ability to speak too.

He talks really well, and Augustine, who is 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 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 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 made Augustine drop

Christianity and say, okay, 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 looking back, 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. In 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 a den of sin.

It was a very big city. And so she's 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. 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 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 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 his teen years. It was over a decade. 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, we still see that his heart is not saved from 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 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 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 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're 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, 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 your 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 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 just a brilliant mind.

But Augustine still sees himself as needing the blood of Christ even on his skills as humans would see them.

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 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 where does it come from and how do we deal with it.

He goes all the way around the world, Manichaeanism and then astrology as you mentioned. Do we watch the movement of planets 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 very, very early year or two, whatever it might be, he's kind of merciless to babies.

He talks about how 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. 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, 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, you know,

I remember as a baby, I would have killed my siblings or I would have killed my parents if I had the strength.

You know, 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 learned 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. Depravity isn't saying, when we say, well, people are totally depraved.

We say, well, but I see people that are able to be kind. We see mothers sacrifice for children, a husband for a wife, a friend for a friend.

So how do you explain total depravity when you can see goodness? And what we mean when we say that the

Bible teaches the depravity of humanity is that every aspect of our human nature has been in some measure influenced by sin.

So there's a pollutant running through our system. And sometimes it manifests itself in a very ugly way, and sometimes maybe in a way that you don't even notice, but it's there.

It is bending us constantly towards self. It's self against others.

It's ultimately self against God. So it's not being as sinful as I can be, every moment of the day.

But it is that all that I am doing, even my religion, even my acts or deeds of kindness, there is something of selfishness that's interwoven.

And so all that we do, apart from that washing, saving work of the mediator

Christ, all that I do is stained. It's unacceptable in the sense of paying

God what I owe God. So the existence of sin, any points to the infancy, it's even there.

But he also talks about the nature of sin further on, and that whole issue of the pears.

And as you mentioned, it seems like a small matter. So what is it about the stealing a pear with his friend off of a tree and eating it and then throwing away?

What is it about that, that helps Augustine see something of the nature of sin?

Yeah, so at 16, he steals pears with his friends, but he makes it very clear that it's not out of any need.

He says that they have better pears elsewhere, but they go and steal someone else's pears, even though they're not even very good.

And so he steals them. They don't eat them. They might take a bite, but they throw them to the hogs.

And so what he sees there is something that, I mean, it really frightens him as an adult.

And that's that while the world may say that people would do a crime out of some sort of necessity, whether that's a twisted necessity or not, they either want something they don't have, or they're trying to keep something that they do have.

Augustine says that that's not the case every time because he knows that he sinned only for the sake of sinning.

He writes that my only feast therein being my own sin, which

I was pleased to enjoy. He steals the pears, but it's not a feast that he got pears.

It's that he's indulging in this sin. He writes that it's not to look good to his peers, though he does point out that at this point and at the later years of his teens, he would lie about doing more horrendous things than he'd done because in his peers it was like a badge of honor to see who could be the worst.

But even at this point, he writes that with none of them there, he still wanted to go do it. And so this idea that sin is so deep -set that it becomes an allure in and of itself to do what's wrong.

He points out that it's against God's law as well to steal, and therefore it's in mankind, it's in your conscience to not.

But writing that he was able to indulge in sin and enjoy it despite knowing in his conscience that it was something wrong, regardless of social norms, which also it was against the law then.

I feel like something that I took away from this was that Augustine does not write that like, oh, he sinned and he had this urge to sin, but he didn't enjoy it.

It was something that was only unpleasant for him. He really focuses on the fact that it is something that he took pleasure in to steal these pears.

And it's a reminder that sin is not immediately bitter.

It's not something like don't lie to yourself and say that is something that I don't ever enjoy.

But it is so tainted. We have to realize that that enjoyment itself is completely against God and his nature and what he desires.

So it's dangerous to equate sin to something that humanity would not like rather than something that God demands us not do and he doesn't like.

So a misapplication that sin is just a moral taboo of humanity rather than the great rule of God, it puts it at a lower authority level where it's not so bad to transgress the line when we don't really realize that it's against the law of God, not just the laws of man.

Yeah, and it's so inexcusable, as he points out with the pear issue. There was no need, and it wasn't even to impress my friends.

I just loved to do what was against God and what

I wanted to do at the moment. And so there, I think, is a good picture of the nature of sin because it is this kind of insane determination to do whatever

God doesn't want. And I find some twisted joy in doing that just because I can.

Yeah, he writes, I remember highlighting it because it was so potent of a statement.

He writes, So taking on shame, not for any kind of gain, just for the foulness of it.

Yeah, at another point, Augustine describes sin in his own life, and he said that he was chained, his soul, his heart was chained with unbreakable chains.

But then he describes them, and he says, chains that I had forged, you know, it is my own sinful nature.

Another thing he mentions in these books, and then we'll move on to the other books, is that he does mention that God is a creator.

And he says, I remember driving down the road, I was listening to the audio book version of this at one point, and you listened to two different audio books and then read two different printed versions because obviously all of these are translations, unless you're looking into the

Loeb library and reading it in Latin. The audio book I was listening to,

I just remember driving down the road, and it was a pretty day, and Augustine was just waxing eloquent on the creation, and I thought, man, what a clear grasp he has, as a

Christian looking back, on the bigness of God. He talks about this infinitude of God, is

He just big or is He infinite? And all those questions of the relationship between that kind of a

God and a limited creation. But then the goodness of God, and both of those are essential.

It's not enough to see that sin exists in our nature, and it's not enough to see that the nature of sin is that it's an inexcusable rebellion against God.

It's this insane rebellion. It doesn't even pay well. It's not enough to see that.

We have to see those things also at the same time, behind that is the bigger picture, that there is this creator, and He is good.

It is the bigness of God that makes sin, sometimes we would say terrifying to us, and we'd be willing to put away our favorite sins, so as not to go to hell, so to speak.

But that's not Christianity. Christianity is when you see the goodness of God as well.

And, you know, Paul talks about the goodness of God leading us to repentance. It's in light of the cross, the goodness of God, that pinnacle of God's graciousness displayed.

It is in light of that that sin is seen not only as dangerous, but as sinful.

And suddenly the heart begins to hate what God hates because we see it in the right light.

And it's not, I love my sin, but I'm going to be willing to give it up so as to avoid some terrible consequences down the road.

So those things are all really significant, and those all show up, you know, in some measure in the early chapters of this confession.

Well, we've looked at some of the things that the earlier chapters or books of the confessions speak of, the existence of sin, the nature of sin, the bigness of the creator, the goodness of the creator.

And now I want us to kind of focus in on what Augustine says as he describes the work of God in its entirety, kind of in bringing

Augustine from darkness to light, from the deception and the idolatry.

And he mentions quite a few things that he really clutches onto. He is quite an ambitious man, aggressive.

He doesn't just sit around and shrug his shoulders. He wants life, you know, at its fullest.

And so it reminds me a lot of Solomon in the Ecclesiastes, you know, the, I tried this,

I tried this, I tried this. You know, he really goes for it. And each of these things leave

Augustine empty, and God allows that to occur in order, you know, to turn him to Christ.

And we do find a biblical principle here, and it's an important one for us as believers, and especially as we share the gospel with others, and that is that God never fills those whom he has not emptied.

Now, we're not saying that this emptying, this convicting process, this tearing away our idols and, you know, removing our paper mache walls of defense, we're not saying that that stripping is meritorious, that, well, if I go through enough stripping,

I've earned the right to hope in the gospel. That's not at all what we mean. I think that, you know, when we think of some of the

Puritans, and they talked a lot about how God prepares us for the gospel, and that has come to be known as preparationism, it's a bit of an unfair interpretation of the majority, the main body of Puritans.

They did not believe that you had to go through certain steps before you were qualified to hope in the gospel, before you, you know, demonstrated that you were one of the elect.

What they were saying is what Christ said, that it's the sick that feel the need of a doctor.

And so if you do not feel your illness, you just don't go to a doctor. And Christ came to save those who were sick, but they must feel they're sick before they go.

And so the law, of course, does that. But also the emptiness, the empty nature of sin, the fact that it does not give us what it ultimately promised us over and over and over.

And that does, in the providence of God, that does open our eyes to the need for something greater than creation.

We need the creator. And so I want us to look at how God stripped these things from Augustine, how he emptied

Augustine and made him hunger and thirst for righteousness that had to come from someone else.

And then how that brought rest to him. So, you know, if we look back at those early books, what would you say is one of the first things that he mentions?

I think the first thing I would say that was stripped from him was kind of just an acceptance to live his life completely in just like base desires.

And that's when he read Hortensius by Cicero. Before that point, he was happy to just kind of wallow in whatever depravity he could find without any sort of higher calling he felt he was, you know, striving after.

But Hortensius is a book that was lost in about the 6th century.

But we know what it was about. And Cicero wrote it, and it's a dialogue between, I think it's four men, discussing what they should do with their leisure time.

And how they should spend their lives, basically. And Cicero, who is the hero of the book, tells them they all need to study philosophy.

Because it's the ultimate pursuit of life is what the point of the book is.

So obviously it is not a book that would turn most people towards God.

But God uses it in Augustine's life to pull him out of just a, you know, desire to live a really debauched life.

Augustine is not freed from his sinful desires, especially not his lust.

I mean, that remains a problem. But it makes him dissatisfied with it. And you see that when he writes about it.

He says, this book, talking about Hortensius, altered my affections and turned my prayers to thyself,

O Lord, and made me have other purposes and desires. Every vain hope at once became worthless to me, and I longed with an incredibly burning desire for an immortality of wisdom.

So we see there that he says every vain hope is worthless now. And so you see that kind of amazing work of God using a pagan philosopher, talking about how wisdom should be all that we care about to strip the enjoyment of vain things out of Augustine's life.

Another thing we see is that early relationship with this best friend, and we don't know the name of the best friend.

It's interesting that he doesn't give his name, and he doesn't give the name of the woman who really was kind of, for all practical purposes, a wife to him, the concubine when he was a lost man.

We don't know her name anywhere. It's not mentioned. So when he comes to speaking of this friend, he talks about the fact that he just really gives these glowing statements of how happy he was in this friendship.

So it's just a friend, and they meet, and they have a lot in common, and somehow

Augustine feels, you know, this makes sense of life, these wonderful lasting friendships we can have with other people.

And so it's not lust. It's not sexual pursuits. It's, you know, it's not base pleasures.

You know, we're kind of moving up the ladder of, you know, what we think of as a civilized kind of a pursuit, and it's friendship.

But the friend, as you mentioned in the survey of the book, he and Augustine are Manichean in their views, and they mock

Christianity a lot, and they especially mock the physical aspects of Christianity.

And when that friend grows deathly ill and is unconscious, you know, so kind of in a coma, and his parents, who are

Christians, baptize him, have him baptized because of the view that baptism would accomplish something for him, you know, as in that context, that view.

When the friend comes to, and Augustine goes to visit him, Augustine kind of just, he thinks the friend's going to be, you know, thinking the same things he thought where they left off last time they were hanging out.

And so Augustine mocks the fact that his parents would baptize him. You know, this physical thing can't be of any value because they're

Manichean. Physical things are of no value. You know, the physical rituals of a church have no value.

Not even in symbolism, they're nothing. And so he goes to mock that, and his friend is offended.

And because he, you know, coming close to death, he's beginning to rethink things.

And so he tells Augustine, if you want to stay my friend, don't come in here and mock

Christianity to me ever again. And so Augustine, you remember, he thinks he's offended.

Like, you know, well, where did that come from? And then he thinks to himself, well, he's weak.

You know, he just almost died, and he's just recovering, so I won't argue with him.

But when he gets better, I'm going to let him have it, you know, and we'll mock these things again together like we always have.

And the friend dies. He doesn't fully recover. He dies.

And in that, Augustine not only realizes that the idol of a good friendship, so to speak, though that's a gift that God gives us in common grace, that does not satisfy.

And on top of that, this close friend has, right at the end, turned toward Christianity.

And that really shakes Augustine. Why would he do that? And so that's another thing,

God using the death of that very close friend. And it does remind me of how, you know, there are,

I think, many examples in history where those who mocked

Christ to others and led them down a path of mocking Christ. So maybe, you know,

I think of Newton. Newton, even though raised by a very godly mother who taught him the Westminster Confession, but an unconverted father, his mother dies when he's still young.

His father remarries. You know, his father does, so to speak, the best he can. But he's not a spiritual help to Newton at all.

Newton becomes a very wild child. And as you read the autobiography of Newton, you find that he just goes from bad to worse.

And while he is on the ships that he's working on before he becomes his own captain, he meets other people who went to church and other young men who, you know, knew the

Westminster Confession. And John Newton mocks Christianity. And these young men who had some religious background but perhaps are not, you know, true

Christians, they don't really know Christ. They just have heard a lot about this Jesus. He sways them and they become mockers.

And later in life, he mentions this as one of the great shames of his life, that he would teach other men to mock

God. And yet God changes John Newton and how many countless thousands and thousands through his sermons, his letters, and his hymns have learned to praise

Christ. So this mocker, the friend that we don't know his name, is taken from Augustine, and he is turned at the end away from mocking to hoping in Christ.

And it really kind of shakes Augustine's confident, you know, rejection of Christianity.

Yeah. And like you said, it seems like he's being stripped of, like, the next level of his life.

Kind of like, initially, it's only being able to have pleasure in sin.

And that's kind of taken away and that thing feels worthless now. And then it's friendship, which seems very noble.

And after this friend's death, Augustine writes about how, you know, he has other friends and he tries to spend time with them, but he can never get back that closeness.

And so while he still is living very much in sin and still is surrounding himself with friends to try to dampen the kind of heartache, those things don't do what they used to for him.

And I think the next thing we see that in is kind of the philosophical religions that he leans on so heavily with Manichaeism especially.

We mentioned earlier, just going over the summary of the book, that he meets with Faustus who's supposed to have all the answers that, you know, lead

Augustine to doubt the Manichean religion. And when he does this, you know, he's impressed by his abilities, but it does not lead to the answers of any of his questions.

So we start seeing, you know, Manichaeism break down. We see that even more when he meets

Ambrose. And something that I find really interesting, and it was actually pointed out in one of my church history lectures that I listened to just this past week, is that when he meets

Ambrose, everyone in the town of Milan is like, Ambrose, Ambrose, Ambrose. He's so great. He's this great orator.

He, you know, he's an amazing bishop. And it wounds Augustine's pride because he works for the emperor.

He's got all this training and he's a teacher of rhetoric. So we even see kind of his own position being taken away from him when a man who teaches a religion that Augustine sees as kind of silly is held in higher esteem than Augustine himself, in that town at least.

And so we see Manichaeism start to break down over that, and astrology as well, you know, just seeing the religions of the day that people were really putting on a pedestal and saying, this is what a modern man should believe if he's really as smart as he should be.

Augustine has those things torn away slowly, even to the point of his own ability to think and talk are broken down a little bit over the fact that Ambrose is held in high esteem, preaching something that he finds foolish.

I think that a modern application of that, because I doubt any of the people that might read

Augustine today would say, well, you know, I don't know. I don't know if I can give up Faustus' book and I don't know if I can give up my

Manichaeism or my astrology. Modern applications, think of it, astrology is basically kind of a fatalistic approach.

So it's being able to read the movement of the celestial bodies, you know, the old way of saying it, to look at the stars and the alignment of the stars and of the planets and to feel that in those things there is some determinative force on every action of the individual.

And if you could read them correctly, you could acquire special knowledge that would let you, you know, you would be a successful person because you could read, you know, the events of the universe in the stars.

And so that was for many centuries strange to us. That was considered a valid science until, you know, not long after the

Reformation. That was put away as saying that, well, that's not a serious science.

Even, you know, even those that would not agree that Scripture is true would say, well, but that's not true either.

So in my mind, a modern application could be, we could say, well, we kind of feel like we are just the product of our environment.

And I was brought up in this kind of family and in this kind of, you know, culture, and that's why

I do these things. And so it's still the same kind of fatalistic excuse. These things determine us, and we are not accountable to a creator.

And my moral choices are simply the outcome of culture. Or we think particularly of, you know, the gene code.

And so, well, we realize how much the physiological aspects of a human affect our feelings and choices and how our feelings and choices affect our physiology.

And, well, that's true. But then we kind of jettison over into a scientific fatalism.

Well, I'm just the product of the combination of my DNA. And I will be certain ways because of my

DNA. And so that's who I am, and I have to just be true to that. Well, but what about your response to the word of God to your creator?

Well, we say, well, that can't be taken seriously because I can't control these things.

I am who I am. So, you know, then philosophies.

People who we hear, you know, on television, whether it's kind of pop culture or whether it's a very academically successful advanced person, people who can just put things in the right way.

And we say, man, that sounds right, you know. And whether it's the spin doctors who just give us a little phrase, you know, that we got and we saw on our phone today, or whether it's someone who we read his book and they said, well,

I have the new explanation for life. And, you know, we don't call them philosophers anymore.

We just think that, you know, this is the way I view my life. And I get a piece from this guy over here and a piece from this lady over here.

And I've put together kind of a view of life. And that's your philosophy. And when it's contradicting what

God says, ultimately, it is a philosophy rooted in self -deception.

And it will leave us empty. Another thing that left him empty, you know, other than we mentioned the relationships.

And when he was young, he talks about wanting to be loved. He wanted to know what love was.

He wanted to be loved. But he said as he grew, you know, through adolescence and hormones kicked in, then he said lust was injected into, you know, a desire for real love.

And so suddenly it's twisted now. And he said it kind of clouded his vision so that he pursued and used relationships for lust in such a selfish way.

And, you know, he lost a desire for love. And he was taking, you know, the counterfeit instead.

And that didn't satisfy him. And then ultimately, even his academic accomplishments, even becoming the orator for the emperor, you know, does not satisfy him.

Even though that was what he had been aiming at from the very beginning of his education, so to speak, to reach the top of his field.

And he reached it. And he's still empty. So we see

God using all these things to that he's hoping that would fill him.

God is pulling them away from him one at a time. After Augustine sees that didn't satisfy me and he has stripped him of all.

But what's that? That's not a Christian, you know, coming to your senses. I remember reading this

Scottish pastor, the young pastor, Robert Murray McShane, describing the prodigal son.

So he is there and he spends all his money. The party's over. His friends are gone.

He's eating the pig slop to stay alive. And he comes to his senses one day and he realizes, you know, a slave, a servant in my father's home has it so much better than I do.

Eating pig slop far away, you know, abandoned by my so -called friends that I should just go home.

And McShane mentions that coming to your senses, God opening your eyes to how insane and empty living against him is, is a great starting place.

But that's no finish line. That is not a Christian. A person that comes to their senses and sees the emptiness of living for self who can reason through that and say that was empty.

That is not Christianity. Christianity is when we see the emptiness and we turn in hope and we are driven to the person,

Jesus of Nazareth, and his work as the God man becomes our hope.

You know, there is that totality, all that we know of Christ, we embrace with all that we know of ourselves.

That's Christianity. So what we've talked about up to this point, there seems to be many noble stages, but that's not a

Christian. So the Christian comes in the rest. So tell us about what

Augustine says about rest. A pretty notable quote from Confessions is,

You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until we rest in you.

And Augustine talks more than once about his realization of kind of the futility of a lot of what he's chasing.

And you know, the restlessness that comes with being finite and fallen and just kind of the toil that he lives in apart from God and searching for rest.

And finally, you know, he finds it. And just the truth that there is a creator and Augustine and, you know, the rest of humanity were creatures and there is a rightful role in that dynamic.

And the creature that's not behaving like a creature that's trying to put themselves on the throne is not at rest at any point.

And so to finally, for Augustine to finally find his peace in Christ, his whole life being able to be at rest because he is finally made right with his

God is, you know, he even looking back, he points out that it's such a mercy that he's able to find that.

And to see the beauty in the immutable and how it's so superior to the immutable.

Yeah, just the relation that there is a proper way to relate to God and Augustine is not at rest until he finds that.

And, you know, neither are we. Well, we've kind of summed up some of the key points in a quick fashion, particularly of the first nine books of the

Confessions. So let's kind of close it up by saying, what do we think are the strengths and the weaknesses of this book?

So if someone were to ask you, well, what's helpful about this book? Why would you recommend the book? And maybe how would you recommend it or to whom would you recommend it?

What would you say to that? Right. So the strengths of the book, I think something that stands out immediately to me is that it is very in -depth.

It is not across the surface. It's not merely an autobiography, though I'm sure it would be good just as a, you know, overview of his life.

Augustine goes in -depth into so many different subjects. A lot of them much more philosophical than a normal book that I might read.

But because it is a narrative, because it starts when he's born and he talks about his whole life leading up to conversion.

And then in like his remembering of his life and just the nature of the mind and how

God has made us. Even in the headiest parts of the book, there is, it's understandable because it's, you know, you see part of his life.

And then he expounds on it with some like, you know, pretty specific aspects.

But in that, we find that it's understandable while also being more in -depth than a normal autobiography that you might read.

So I found it and I have found it very, very helpful that it is an incredible piece of history.

And so even if, I mean, most philosophy majors have read

Augustine. Even if you're not looking to be benefited, you're sold to be benefited by Augustine's, you know, heartfelt words.

You might come to the book just looking for, you know, the piece of history that it is and the, you know, incredible mind behind it.

And yet, you know, you cannot read this without, you know, taking note of the fact that everything in Augustine's life is put under the light of God and what he's done for him.

So one strength being that it's easy to, not necessarily easy to read, but very understandable despite being old.

I think we could say, you know, it's, it is easy to relate to, even if the language or the circumstances are different.

You know, we, you know, we say, well, I, but I'm never going to be caught up in astrology or Manicheanism, or I probably am never going to study, you know, in Northern Africa.

I'm not, I'm not going to have this situation. But the things he talks about, the interiority of the human life, and as you say, as he walks through those stages of life,

I mean, those basic things are, they're common to all humanity. And it is shocking that when a man writes in the year 400, so to speak, that he could write things that you and I could read and think that is exactly, you know, how

I have felt about these matters before. Right. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of it is just universally applicable to humans.

And I mean, that's incredible. I think another strength is his, like, meticulous care that he takes in pointing out the mercies of God from, as we've mentioned, the infant stage of infancy where he is cared for.

He has no strength of his own to keep himself physically alive to, you know, his young adulthood, to his later teen years.

There is not a page that you can read without it, Augustine, turning and praising

God for the way that God's hands on his life. And just the beauty of reading an autobiography that is so old and so complex.

And it's, you know, it's in a time of history that's pretty relatable to us that we can think of what

Rome was, you know, and yet it is so Christocentric.

Everything is about God and about the salvation that he brings to man.

And when I read this book, I, you know, initially

I was amazed that this man in 480 was writing in a way that resonated with me, that I could join in with the way that he praised

God. The things he writes are not, like, removed from our experience as Christians.

The way that he looks to God and worships him, it's something that if I was a better writer,

I could have written. So I think the care that Augustine gives to making this a confession of the mercies of God, as opposed to just what his life was, has to be probably the greatest strength because it's really what makes up the body of the book.

It's just a bigger view of God than I think the average

Christian has. Yeah, I think also when you speak of the carefulness, when he does speak of his particular sins, he doesn't do it in a way that glorifies them.

He's honest about it, but he's careful not to present sin as some big, you know, this monstrous thing that I...

Again, he's not glorying in his sin, but he's honest about it in a way that's,

I think, beneficial. It's honest and helpful. It shows the nature of sin and the emptiness of it.

But he's very honest about that and probably more honest than many of the biographies that we read.

We tend to read biographies of... If I read a Christian biography, when the person writes it later in life, when they think back about themselves, maybe they exaggerate how sinful they were because they feel that that would honor

God. But you feel that Augustine's... He's being very honest without exaggeration and without glorying in the sin.

Also, when he talks about depravity, he doesn't present depravity in this book as an excuse for sin.

It reminds me again of what McShane said, you know, in the early 1800s. Fourteen hundred years later,

Robert Murray McShane said, the truth of our depravity does not excuse our sinful choices.

It aggravates the guilt of our sinful choices. So, in other words, your problem is not that you've been doing some wrong things or saying some wrong things at home or having a bad attitude.

It's that all of that is just an expression of a much deeper issue between you and God.

And it's that it's not just what you're doing that's wrong, it's what you are is wrong. And the way

McShane handled it evangelistically and the way Augustine talks about it, it never becomes an excuse for sin.

Well, I'm depraved, so I can't be expected to act any other way, and I think that's helpful. Weaknesses of the book.

One weakness is that it's removed 1600 years from us. So, even though the spiritual and, you know, mental and heart struggles are there and we recognize them, they are couched oftentimes in circumstances that we feel that we're about.

That's another planet, you know. I mean, that's just so different than us. And probably

I think you would agree that there is repetition in some ways, especially for a modern reader.

You know, he's hit this theme before, he's hitting it again, and then he's hitting it again. And it's not that it's wrong, of course, it's just that for a modern reader, it can become a bit of a hurdle.

You can get kind of bogged down about the middle of the book and, you know, and give up.

We suggest you don't do that, you know, press on. And, you know, you will as he continues to progress, you will see new things.

But so, removal from our everyday circumstances, that can make it a bit difficult.

And the repetition, it's a few hundred pages, that can make it a bit difficult.

Anything else you think of as weaknesses? No, none.

I mean, I'm sure there are other weaknesses, and it definitely depends on how you approach the book as well.

Because for me, I just have this glowing view of Augustine. And so if I read something that could be taken as maybe too neoplatonic,

I, you know, the way I interpret it in my own mind is much, you know, more acceptable to me in some way.

But you can come into this and you can see the beginnings of Catholicism.

And you can see that Augustine's major, you know, influences throughout his life were very philosophical.

And later, Christianity is, you know, paramount in his life, but he still has the education that he grew up in.

And so while it can be a strength because he is very well, you know, spoken, it can also – it could be a weakness because he might put too much emphasis on those things, depending on how one sees it.

So I think that also plays into the repetition and maybe just some moments in the book that are very in -depth on subjects that I personally did not find super helpful.

And the last three books being a really close look at the first chapter of Genesis in a way that is very allegorical.

I mean, he's talking about seeing the church in the first chapter of Genesis.

At that time, there is a big debate between allegorical interpretation and very literal interpretation.

And while Augustine didn't necessarily fall super hard to one side or the other, he generally is pretty solid, you know, not swinging too far one way.

You can still definitely see that in these last three chapters. So while I don't think it is the best, you know, maybe sermon or whatever you want to call it on the first chapter of Genesis, you have to come to it with the understanding that it's a fallible person from 1600 years ago.

And I think if you do that, then the whole book will be very beneficial. Yeah, I think what you're saying, you know, basically we're giving—we tend to give

Augustine perhaps because of our ignorance of those centuries.

I mean, even though in seminary I had to read patristic, you know, the church fathers, the patristic theologians, and you'd read through about that era.

But that's not the field that I focused on. And so I've probably forgotten most of what

I was taught. I tend to read ancient writers like that, and I give them a wide berth.

I give them a lot of grace, you know. And so if—I guess if I were an expert in that era and in how his general thoughts played out later in the

Roman Catholic Church in ways that we would feel are not biblical, you know, then as I'm reading

Confessions, I might find a lot of things that I think, oh, that's the beginning of that. Or that's a foretaste of that.

That's a foreshadowing of a pretty serious error that will develop. And it's partly his fault, you know, or mainly his fault.

And so I would say that I read Augustine like he is a Reformed Baptist, you know, and I think now he is.

In heaven, he is a Reformed Baptist. No, it's like half joke, but half, maybe 49 percent joke.

So I read Augustine like he's this—hey, like Augustine goes to church with us.

Augustine reads the Puritans. Augustine, one of his favorite books is John Owen's Communion with God, you know, and we can do that.

And that is a lot based in our ignorance. But we come to those ancient writers, and while we cannot recommend everything he wrote, we feel that Confessions is a book where the common truths of Christianity, which all

Christians would hold as important, those are the things he focuses on. And so we find it very beneficial without having to have arguments with him, you know, every other chapter.

One historian writes that Augustine was undoubtedly the greatest theologian of the early church.

And I think that across the board, people would agree with that who study that era.

But he points out that he understood perhaps better than those who followed him in the following centuries and who benefited so much from his many writings, you know, hundreds of treatises and a thousand sermons that are in print.

And then, you know, the debates and his central part in dealing with the

Donatists and the Pelagians, which were both very significant attacks on biblical

Christianity. They looked at Augustine, and maybe they kind of saw him in, you know, this with a halo around his head as if he could do no wrong.

He is one of the official doctors of the church, which in Roman Catholicism, that's a saint who is set apart by the papacy as officially one whose teachings are of extraordinary significance to the church.

So he wasn't just sainted. He is just an academic and a great theologian.

So in the Roman Catholic Church, he's considered one of the top tier. And really, I think Protestants would say so as well.

But this historian gives a statement from Augustine about his own writings, and I find it very balancing.

So here's what Augustine wrote. We who preach and write books write in a manner altogether different from the manner in which the scriptures have been written.

We write while we make progress. So, you know, we're still learning. We learn something new every day.

We dictate at the same time as we explore. We speak as we still knock for understanding.

I urge your charity on my behalf, he says to his readers, and in my own case, that you should not take any previous book or preaching of mine as holy scripture.

If anyone criticizes me when I have said what is right, he does not do what's right.

So if you're criticizing me and I'm right, that's not good. But then he goes on to say this. But I would be more angry with the one who praises me and takes what

I have written for gospel truth than the one who criticizes me unfairly, which is quite a statement.

Because he knows his own imperfection, I am more angry, more frustrated, more bothered by those who praise me as if everything

I say is perfect than I am with those who criticize me unfairly. So a good balance as we approach

Augustine's writings from Augustine himself. Andrew, you mentioned listening to two different audio books for this and reading two different translations, two different physical copies.

As you walk away from that and some of our readers will think, well, is there a best translation or is there a best way to get this into my empty moments in the day so that I can benefit from it?

Do you have any advice from that? Well, with the multiple translations, all of them were different.

Both audio books were different from each other and both of them were different than the two physical copies I read from.

But I can't say that I know which one is best. For me personally,

I didn't find one to be that much better than the other. The first audio book I listened to was actually a very modern translation.

I mean, it didn't use like slang or anything, but it was just made very easy to understand.

And I think for an audio book, that was really good. It didn't seem to take away in comparison with the second audio book

I listened to from the theological depth of it. With reading it physically versus listening to it,

I think this is a rare case of a really in -depth book that you can listen to effectively.

Because if you miss an important theological point in a book that is purely theological, you're going to be behind.

And you're going to have to rewind and catch back up, try to figure out where in the bullet -pointed list you're at.

But with this, it is an autobiography. It's a narrative. So if you miss a point or you don't really grasp it immediately and he moves on too quickly because he's just reading in your ear, you're not going to be behind.

You can pick up with the next point and you can get the gold out of it that you can get out of it while you're going about your day or on your drive or whatever.

So I find it good to listen to, especially because it's a pretty long book and some of the sections can be repetitive.

And so reading it physically only, if it hasn't really grabbed you, you're pretty likely to set it down and pick up something else, which

I think would be a bit of a shame just because of the incredible significance and benefit that this book is.

Yeah. So in our show notes, we will give some recommendations for a couple of physical copies that are out there.

I think both you and I both have a copy from Everyman's Library, which just kind of is a secular company that has put out the classics throughout the centuries.

And they do a really, really stellar job in the paper, the construction of the book.

It's just makes it nice to read from. So we both that was our favorite physical copy.

I listened to a audio book as well on Audible, but there are other websites that offer it.

Audible, I believe at one point had a free one. The one I got wasn't free. And then there are other websites where other apps that offer it for free.

So we'll put all that information in the show notes. But before we close, for a biography, from what

I read and, you know, looking at different trustworthy historians of our day, almost without fail, they point back to Peter Brown's biography of Augustine.

It's back in the 1900s that it was written, but it has become the gold standard. So Peter Brown.

And I believe the title is just Augustine of Hippo. And you can find that online.

And so we'll put that in the show notes as well. If you want to go back and get a much fuller treatment of his life.

He wrote this book a number of decades ago. And then more recently, there have been some archaeological finds where letters and sermons of Augustine have been discovered that weren't when he first wrote the book.

And he goes back and he gives some kind of epilogues, some appendices where he talks about, you know, what he saw in those newly discovered things and some ways that his views have changed a little.

And which are not substantial. It doesn't make his old book worthless. And also he talks about if you are an academic, he deals with modern academic treatments of Augustine since his first biography.

How that's shifted, how the academic scene has, you know, dealt with it, which is helpful if you are reading

Augustine on that level. So Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo. Well, we hope that you have enjoyed this.

We will return and we hope in a few months with another one of the great classics from Christian history as we try to navigate through these works and see what was so beneficial from them.