The North African bishop Augustine of Hippo (354–430) is one of Christianity’s most formidable thinkers. Many esteem him as a great theologian, others as an insightful pastor. More recently, a growing number are turning to Augustine as a model for how to read culture and do apologetics.
If you’re looking to grow in your ability to do apologetics, let me commend two of Augustine’s works for you to consider. But first, a word of caution.
Where Labels Hurt and Help
Before calling on Augustine, or any of the church fathers, to support our preferred apologetic system, we’d be wise to heed the advice of John Cavadini in reference to the early apologists:
In such a context, it is probably better to talk about strategies of persuasion, of the use of shared rhetorical convention and philosophical wisdom, to help leverage and secure Christian commitment, rather than to think in terms of the contrast between “natural” and “revealed” theology that has more of a place in later systematic or scholastic theology. . . . It may be that our readiness to use such categories as “natural knowledge of God” anachronistically has blinded us to the genius of these ancient strategies of persuasion and clarification, and kept us from learning as much as we can from them.
Pigeonholing patristic approaches into later, more systematic, medieval schemes or modern schools (i.e., presuppositional apologetics or evidential apologetics) would be an anachronism that blinds more than it illuminates. But could certain anachronisms give us eyes to see?
While not without its own challenges as a label, a newer term such as “cultural apologetics” could help open our eyes to “certain strategies of persuasion” for retrieval and use today. If we see cultural apologetics less as a system and more as a cluster of strategies of persuasion that emphasize contextualization, narrative, and humans as culturally variegated worshipers—as The Keller Center’s leadership has done—then “cultural apologist” could be a helpful anachronism for understanding the ancient bishop. If we look back with these themes in mind, Augustine could easily be seen as the most important cultural apologist in the church’s history. Consider the contributions of two of his greatest works and how they might provide direction for the discipline of apologetics in our present context.
Confessions and Coming of Age
Augustine’s Confessions narrates how he rejected Christianity and traveled through competing ways of life, only to finally discover the wisdom of Christ. Through his own story, Augustine sought to persuade readers to follow him on the cross-shaped path to the good life.
Augustine could easily be seen as the most important cultural apologist in the church’s history.
Early in Confessions, Augustine writes about his childhood, specifically, how he was raised in church by his mother only to leave the faith on his quest for intellectual maturity. He narrates how he left what seemed like a childish religion to join in with the Manichees—a gnostic sect with an approach to knowledge that has certain resemblances to modern forms of hard rationalism. The Manichees imagined they only used reason and had no use for faith.
To challenge the readers of his day who were in danger of living out such a coming-of-age story themselves, Augustine counters this myth with a subversive plot twist, explaining how he only really came of age when he was humbled enough to confess his youthful posture as naive and accept his dependence on others to bear witness to the truth. We’re all believing to understand; Christians are grown-up enough to admit it.
Augustine’s coming-of-age story can help us counter our present secular narratives. Charles Taylor describes how many today assume they have come of age by simply subtracting religion and allegedly living lives rooted only in science and common-sense reasoning. Augustine, thus, tells a coming-of-age story we can relate to. He tells a better and more rational story about reason, interweaving how our thinking depends on trust, how our deepest desires move us along through life, and how disordered loves misalign our intellectual quests for the truth. And he does this all while layering his account with the Scriptures: most notably the Psalms, Luke’s story of the prodigal, and the opening chapters of Genesis. Augustine’s work is suggestive for how we might pastorally integrate various disciplines—exegesis, theology, philosophy, psychology, and preaching—for an apologetic witness today.
City of God and Outnarration
A close reading of Augustine also alerts us to our audiences’ longings and how the cultivation of their concerns hinges on cultural particularities and historical factors. The immediate occasion for The City of God was the sack of Rome and the pastoral and apologetic concerns it triggered.
With Rome in rubble, it wasn’t just the empire’s future that was in question. Because many Christians had put their hope for the kingdom of God by way of the Roman Empire, the sack of Rome called into question the church’s legitimacy and future. In the days following Rome’s fall, pagan traditionalists escaped to Augustine’s North Africa and blamed Christians for the empire’s decline. These verbal attacks added to the anxiety many Christians felt during this time of tectonic shifts and an uncertain future.
With these concerns in view, William Babcock notes that Augustine writes his apologetic magnum opus with three groups in mind: (1) pagan critics, (2) former confessing Christians, (3) and Christians who had begun to waver under the “weight of the Roman religious and political tradition which represented Christianity as a betrayal of all that had made Rome great and, most especially, as a betrayal of its gods.” Augustine’s response engaged history, challenged the assumptions of their particular social location, and offered a theologically nuanced way to live within the emerging situation.
His strategy was to outnarrate the voices who accused Christianity of being harmful to the welfare of the empire and her citizens. In the first half of The City of God, Augustine offers an immanent critique against his rivals, using the pagans’ own authorities—narrating a deflationary account of their history. In the second half, Augustine invites readers to try on the biblical story, arguing along the way that Christianity makes sense of history, the human experience, and the material world.
Augustine’s biblical vision equipped him with the resources to critique the social underpinnings of Roman society. With a qualified evaluation of earthly goods, his biblically grounded theology furnished Augustine with a vantage point that transcended and critiqued the myths and ultimate aims of the Roman Empire. Yet his cultural critique didn’t slash to kill his opponents; Augustine cut in order to heal.
Augustine’s biblical vision equipped him with the resources to critique the social underpinnings of Roman society.
Augustine converts pagan and Roman aspirations—represented by such words as “peace,” “happiness,” and “justice”—to show how they’re understood and fulfilled within the Christian narrative. For instance, rather than suggesting his opponents should stop seeking “happiness,” Augustine provoked them to reconsider how happiness should be pursued and where it’s ultimately found. The “innate goods” common in this life are temporal and our experience of them burdened by the knowledge of their eventual loss: “The life, therefore, which is weighed down by the burden of such great and severe evils, or is subject to the chance that such great and severe evils might afflict it, should by no means be called happy.”
Hence, Augustine challenged his readers to consider the possibility of another kind of happiness: “If anyone uses this life in such a way that he directs it to that other life as the end which he loves with ardent intensity and for which he hopes with unwavering faithfulness, it is not absurd to call him happy even now.”
Augustine called this “happiness in hope.” His interaction with the human desire to be happy is an example of an important feature of Augustine’s persuasive strategy. He entered the dominant cultural narratives of his day to offer a severe diagnosis. But then, as a good doctor, he offers the medicine of Jesus Christ and reassures his patients that if the gospel is humbly received, their personal stories will be redeemed and their desires healed.
A Therapeutic Approach in Our Therapeutic Age
By avoiding reading later systems of apologetics into Augustine and by paying close attention to the persuasive strategies in Confessions and The City of God, we have a better vantage point to see how an Augustinian approach might be effectively deployed in our therapeutic, consumeristic age. For we live at a time when people are searching for “fullness” and peace that late capitalism’s visions of the good life promise—but fail to deliver.
The evidence for this failure is all around us. Ancient wisdom has been cast off in favor of the logic of self-expression. Now personal freedom from functions as a salvific end. Consumerism and pop psychotherapy have imitated the means of grace. But these modern prescriptions have left us ailing. The pursuit of individual freedom as an end in itself has meant the loss of a moral logic for sacrificial love. Our consumerism has resulted in a frenzy of superficial activity, which in moments of despondency has left many wondering, Is this all there is?
In response to this meaning crisis, our pop psychology has failed to remove our despair or anger. Modern happiness experts tell us optimism is key to the good life, but when the technology that has promised us more control and leisure reminds us daily how much violence, suffering, and death we’re impotent to stop, we’re left without clear a rationale for hope. Our screens have left us not “bowling alone” as Robert Putnam famously wrote but scrolling alone—anxiously searching for identity while canceling and fearing being canceled.
People are searching for ‘fullness’ and peace that late capitalism’s visions of the good life promise—but fail to deliver.
As Wilfred McClay has shown in “The Strange Persistence of Guilt,” our culture has lost the resources needed to truly forgive and be forgiven. Despite the modern trend to dismiss divine judgment, we still feel guilt and shame. In our attempt to escape this discomfort, we shame others. These are all ailments Augustine would have us diagnose.
Yet Augustine would also remind us that even our non-religious friends are still searching for peace, rest, and love—just in all the wrong places. With their hope in a secularized shalom, they’re clinging to new myths and strange gods packaged with hypersexualized marketing and pseudotranscendent branding. Faithful Augustinian cultural apologetics today will mean learning to critique the dehumanizing worship that characterizes our age and contrast it with the joyful worship of the living God—the true therapy that leads to true healing.
Following an apologetic sermon delivered on an occasion when pagans were welcomed into the church, Augustine reminded his congregation of what we might call “the argument from a pleasure filled life”:
I’ve already said to you yesterday, brothers and sisters, and I say it again now and am always begging you to win over those who haven’t yet believed, by leading good lives—otherwise you too, I fear, will have believed to no purpose. I beseech you all, in the same way as you take pleasure in the word of God, so to express that pleasure in the lives you lead. Let God’s word please you not only in your ears but in your hearts too; not only in your hearts but also in your lives, so that you may be God’s household, acceptable in his eyes and fit for every good work (2 Tim. 2:21). I haven’t the slightest doubt, brothers and sisters, that if you all live in a manner worthy of God, the time will very soon come when none of those who have not yet believed will remain in unbelief.
Even as an apologist who understood the importance of calibrating his words for different audiences, Augustine reminds us of the most powerful argument in any context: the lives of those who have tasted and seen that the Lord is good.
The Gospel Coalition