A Pastoral Rule for Today

Reviving an Ancient Practice

John P. Burgess, Jerry Andrews, Joseph D. Small

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780830873029
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Ministerio cristiano

The pastoral office has always been a difficult calling. Today, the pastor is often asked to fulfill multiple roles: preacher, teacher, therapist, administrator, CEO. How can pastors thrive amid such demands? What is needed is a contemporary pastoral rule: a pattern for ministry that both encourages pastors and enables them to focus on what is most important in their pastoral task. This book, coauthored by three experts with decades of practical experience, explains how relying on a pastoral rule has benefited communities throughout the church's history and how such rules have functioned in the lives and work of figures such as Augustine, Calvin, Wesley, and Bonhoeffer. It also provides concrete advice on how pastors can develop and keep a rule that will help both them and their congregations to flourish.

The Grace of Theological
Friendships

AUGUSTINE

THOUGH HE IS BELOVED by many for his very personal and severely introspective autobiography—the Confessions—this project was addressed to God alone. And though it introduces a new literary form of individual psychological self-examination, containing thoughts throughout that are profoundly idiosyncratic, Augustine lived in chosen and constant community. He was never alone.

This chapter follows Augustine’s life with friends and his thinking about his friendships, and it challenges us to think about who has accompanied us on our journey into the Christian life and ministry. What role have friends played in our thinking, speaking, and acting?

We may not agree with all that Augustine believed about friends and friendship. He and his friends in Hippo were celibate. Their community was gender exclusive. He defines friendship as agreement in things divine and human, accompanied by kindness and affection, in Christ Jesus our Lord, who is our true peace. He believes, in no uncertain terms, that friendship is true only between fellow believers.

Regardless of what we make of Augustine’s own example, he pushes us to ask whether we as pastors are in mutually accountable friendships. What barriers are there to this in our lives and ministries? How will we remove these barriers, for the sake of God, for the sake of the other, and for our own sake?

The Confessions blesses us with an intimate account of the journey that God had been leading Augustine on since his boyhood and that now, as a man, he had consciously committed to walk. Every step along the way was taken with others. To trace Augustine’s travels is to see a shared pilgrimage.

At first it was with family, dominated by his ever-present mother Monica and a gang of boys. Then it was fellow students who took their studies seriously and together sought the best in life. Here Augustine begins to distinguish himself within his circle of friends. Whatever they would decide, they would decide on it and live it out together. Their conversions to the Christian faith, though recorded as the work of God within individuals, were within a short space of time. Some of their baptismal dates were shared. Their calls to ordained ministry occurred one right after another as well, with Augustine leading the way. It is an overstatement, but nearly everyone who went to kindergarten with Augustine became a bishop.

Finally, what had begun in one of the most desolate places—Thagaste, a small village on the edge of the Sahara—and had ended in the bishoprics of the major cities of North Africa was, for the last part of the trail, characterized by intentional communal living and constant travel between the communities. In the violent days of the end of Roman rule, Augustine and his friends traveled dangerous roads to be with one another at the journey’s end. The night before the barbarians entered the gates of Augustine’s final home, the deathbed of the aged bishop was surrounded by leaders of the church in North Africa, many of whom had been his school friends. Augustine was never alone.

FRIENDSHIP AMONG THIEVES AND AS A PAGAN

Many of us vaguely remember the Confessions for a story told in painstaking detail—the childhood theft of a pear.1 A gang of boys, out late at night as was their custom, plotted and executed a theft of pears from a neighboring orchard. With Augustine among them, they stole an immense load, took a bite of a few, and threw the majority into a nearby hog pit. The boys were neither hungry nor poor, Augustine reports. They did it for the hell of it—he did not even like pears, he confesses. The crime itself was the attraction. “In its commission, our pleasure was purely that it was forbidden.”2 He did it for the love of evil alone, and truly loved it.

Augustine considers whether the company of that night influenced his deeds: Did my desire to be with and please them move me to do what I otherwise would not have done? No and yes, Augustine answers. He remained certain that he did this for the love of theft alone. That is what was in him all along, what came from within him that night. But, he says with equal candor, placing no blame on his teenaged companions, he knew for certain that he would not have done this if he had been alone. By rubbing against his late-night friends, the itch of his desires was inflamed. His accomplices did not put the distorted desire in him; they increased it and drew it out.

He reports that they laughed and laughed for having played a trick on the owners who knew nothing of it at the time and who, in time, they imagined, would become furious. And, he observes, people seldom laugh alone.

This, O God, is the still vivid memory of my heart. I would not have stolen alone; my pleasure was not in what I stole but that I stole; yet, I would not have enjoyed it if done alone; I would not have done it alone. O unfriendly friendship, you inscrutable seducer of the soul, you avid appetite to do damage to the other out of sheer sport and silliness without gain or glory, you, with merely the word, “Hey, let’s do it!” make us ashamed not to be shameful.

And with “I cannot bear to think of this any longer,” Augustine quits the story.3

But the sober, sustained consideration of friendship will be seen in many passages to come. Augustine will attempt to penetrate the “inscrutable” nature of friendship so that he and his friends, all now adults, may receive friendship as a gift given them by God. Another story from his early years will help us see the wounds that Augustine bore when he reconsidered the friendships that God intended for blessing.4

His first teaching post was in his hometown. So too was that of an old playmate and school pal. They were the same age (“in the flower of our youth”5), their intellectual interests were alike, and their friendship became very dear. Their common studies further united them upon reunion, and they spent their days together. Within a year, Augustine gladly recalls, this renewed friendship became sweeter to him than all other things in life.

They were both young and impressionable, but the friend was influenced more by Augustine than vice versa—all for the worst, Augustine remembers. He persuaded his friend to believe the same fairy tales he believed—those superstitions that caused his Christian mother to weep for him. They wandered in error together, and the togetherness was the dearest part of Augustine’s life. “Until,” he prays without complaint, “you, O God, who are at the same time both Lord of Revenge and Fount of Mercy took him from me.”6 All of this happened within a year’s time.

While the friend lay on his sick bed, sweating in delirium and fevers, Christians came and, without the sick friend’s consent or even knowledge, baptized him. Augustine paid little attention to this, knowing that when his friend’s sanity was restored they would both have a good laugh. But when the friend partially recovered and Augustine told him what had happened and began to mock the event, the friend did not join in. Instead, with a severe look he warned Augustine that if he valued the friendship he would cease his mockery. “I’ll wait until he fully recovers,” Augustine reports thinking.7 But his friend did not recover. The fever returned, and within a few days he died. “I was not there,” Augustine says with grief.

My heart was black with grief. Everything I saw looked like death; my hometown was a prison and my home an unfamiliar unhappiness; the things we had done together now became torture; my eyes searched for him, but he was not there; I loathed the spaces we had been because of his absence; and those spaces could not promise, “He will come soon again,” as they once could do whenever he had been absent before. . . . Tears took the place in the love of my heart he had held. . . . I have no doubt I would have died, if given the opportunity to be with him. . . . I was weary of life and afraid of death . . . he was “the half of my soul” [quoting Horace]. . . . I thought of my soul and his as one soul in two bodies; and my life became a horror to me because I was unwilling to live life halved. . . . I raged and sighed and wept and was in torment, unable to rest, unable to think; I bore my soul, broken and bloodied and which I hated to carry, because I could not find a place to set it down. . . . I hated all things. So I left the town of Thagaste and came to Carthage.8

There the narrative ends and Augustine’s reflections on friendship begin. He never repents of this haunting (though at the end troubled) friendship, nor will he speak of another with such sustained passion or mourn a loss with such inconsolable grief. But he will learn to think and speak of it in different terms than he experienced it. God, he will say now after much reflection and his own baptism, spared the friendship by allowing the friend to die in the joy of his baptism rather than in a shared scorn, so that this friendship now awaits renewal when Augustine joins him in death. What Augustine only wondered about in the fables of the pagans—Pylades and Orestes, who would have gladly died at the same time to be together, as he remembers the ancient myth—he now is certain of in the promises of God. His grief is consolable because his friend can be found again in new and eternal places.

THINKING AND RE-THINKING FRIENDSHIP

A boyhood prank submitted to such a rigorous self-examination and considered so thoroughly in terms of friendship was unknown in the ancient world. Sin, its discovery in the heart, and the exacting, agonizing confession of it would be a distinctly Christian contribution to the literature of late antiquity.

Other ancients had written to express their grief at the untimely death of a friend. Though Augustine’s rhetoric here was high, and few had risen to such heights in its telling, it was not unheard of. Death was universal, grief was common, and ancient authors had previously attempted to describe that grief, even in such powerful and personal terms.

Friendships too, of course, were known by the ancients and recorded in letters, journals, and speeches in both Greek and Latin literature. A few writers had written essays on the subject, Cicero chief among them. Augustine had very early on found his treatment of friendship persuasive, and he made reference to Cicero several times in his own essay on the subject and in passing in his letters.

Cicero’s well-known work On Friendship states, “Friendship is nothing other than agreement on all things divine and human, along with good will and affection.”9 Augustine will quote this definition in essays and letters with uniform approval. While the referents for what is to be agreed on in “things divine and human” would become distinctly Christian for Augustine, the definition remained unchanged. The late-night raiders and the two school teacher pagans had agreed on the wrong things, but the friendships were true nonetheless. One sees no variation in Augustine’s thinking about friendship.

Until, that is, the writing of the Confessions in his mid-forties. When revisiting the friendships of his youth, he reconsiders the nature and then the definition of those friendships. Cicero will never again be cited on the subject of friendship without addition or correction.

This is a postconversion transformation of thought. Augustine’s letters had cited Cicero approvingly without reserve after his baptism. But after the reflections necessary for writing the Confessions, friendship will come to have an altered definition, and Augustine will discuss friendships in more theological terms and with more spiritual urgency. He will repent of Cicero’s definition.

In one of the first letters sent immediately after writing the Confessions, Augustine speaks at length of friendship to his “oldest friend” Marcianus.10 With what can only be described as a sharp break with his earlier understandings, he declares that the two of them have only now become friends: “I really did not have you as a friend until we were bound in Christ.”11

He quotes Tully (Cicero’s nickname), “the greatest Roman author,” as he had often done before, but now he insists on a revision. After offering to Marcianus the familiar quote, “Friendship is agreement on things divine and human with kindness and affection,” he argues that the two of them never had that friendship before because neither had been a Chri...