Augustine's Preached Theology

Living as the Body of Christ

J. Patout Burns

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781467463928
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie chrétienne

Vital insights from Augustine's sermons on the life of faith.

Augustine is not usually thought of today as a preacher, but he delivered sermons weekly over the course of nearly forty years to his congregation in Hippo Regius and occasionally also in Carthage and other Roman cities he visited as bishop. The differences between his sermons and his theological treatises are striking but not surprising considering that the treatises targeted an elite, educated audience while his preaching was intended for Christians who lived—then as now—by the spoken and remembered rather than the written word. Where Augustine's treatises were intellectual, intricate, and theoretical, the rhetoric of his sermons is characterized by conviction, emotion, and a firm commitment to putting faith into action.

This volume by renowned Augustine scholar Patout Burns explores the theology of Augustine's preaching. Utilizing recent advances in the chronological ordering of Augustine's extant sermons, Burns traces the development of their core thematic elements—wealth and poverty, sin and forgiveness, baptism, eucharist, marriage, the role of clergy, the interpretation of Scripture, the human condition, and the saving work of Christ. He also identifies the influence and manifestation of significant controversies in Augustine's preaching, most notably Donatism and Pelagianism. As Burns shows, most of Augustine's groundbreaking insights on the relation of Christ to Christians were developed in his sermons.

Like any good preacher, Augustine strove to establish a dialogue between scripture and lived experience through his sermons—and did so quite effectively. Thus, pastors as well as scholars will benefit from Burns's insight into the teachings of one of the most effective ministers in Christian history.

Chapter One

INTERPRETING THE SCRIPTURE

AUGUSTINE’S PREACHING WAS FOCUSED on the interaction of the message of scripture with the practice and meaning of Christian life. Most of the surviving records of this ministry are concerned with a particular text of scripture rather than on a topic or question: all of his expositions of Psalms, more than half of his treatments of the Gospel of John, all of those on the First Letter of John, and many of his sermons to the people of Hippo, Carthage, and other African churches. In all his preaching, moreover, Augustine constantly cited a wide range of scriptural texts and images to instruct and exhort his hearers. His objective in preaching was seldom limited to the discovery and communication of the meaning of the text, as it was, for example, in his successive commentaries on Genesis and his early treatises on Romans and Galatians. Instead, he sought to articulate how scriptural truths should be lived by Christians. Thus, his constant interpretative guides were both the rule of faith and the law of love.¹

Augustine never abandoned his interest in the literal and historical meaning of the scriptural text that he articulated in the second book of his treatise On Christian Teaching. There he called upon learned Christians to produce dictionaries of the places, animals, and plants mentioned in the Bible, so that the full import of the text might be better understood and appreciated.² In written commentary, though seldom in live preaching, he occasionally attended to the Septuagint Greek version of the Psalms and to the variations within and between the Latin and Greek texts of the New Testament to which he had access.³ When a doctrinal point was at issue, he could rival Origen as a close reader of the biblical text. His developing interpretation of Romans 7:15–25 advanced through an ever-closer reading of that text until he identified inbred lust as a sinful but unavoidable evil.⁴ In dealing with Adam and Christ, he preferred to interpret the whole of Romans 5:12–21 rather than isolate its first sentence.⁵

In his preaching, moreover, Augustine heard the scripture as directed to himself and his congregation. He understood that God could address and move individuals by presenting a particular scriptural text or guiding a speaker to offer considerations adapted to a chosen individual’s dispositions—most famously illustrated in the conversion narratives of his Confessions.⁶ That theory bore fruit consistently in Augustine’s sermons: he not only prayed that God would guide his preaching but also sought analogies in the daily lives of his hearers, which they might appreciate and act upon.⁷

Both the words recorded and the actions narrated in the scriptural text carried revelatory meaning for the Christian, Augustine insisted. Christ himself spoke, as shall be seen, not only in the gospels but elsewhere in the Bible. Were Christ to appear before the congregation, Augustine suggested, the vision alone would bring little profit to the gathering unless he spoke. In fact, the gospels showed that Christ’s bodily presence had been of little advantage to most of the people who encountered him.⁸ Once absent in body, Christ addressed the community in the scripture read aloud, the psalms they sung, and even the sermon they heard.⁹ While most events of people’s lives were beyond their control, Christ had chosen deliberately the encounters and actions of his birth, ministry, and death. As a result, the details of these events as reported in the gospels could carry his message as fully and meaningfully as his words. As the Gospel of John showed, Augustine noted, Jesus’s miracles had to be meditated upon to grasp their full import. Examples were multiplied: Jesus’s flight from the crowd that sought to make him king demonstrated the objective of his mission; his prayer on the mountain as the disciples struggled on the stormy sea foreshadowed the earthly church’s relation to her heavenly Lord. Similarly, because Jesus suffered voluntarily rather than under coercion, each of the actions of his passion was a revelation of his interior dispositions.¹⁰ The task of the preacher, Augustine explained, was to draw out these meanings of both Christ’s words and his actions for his hearers.

PROPHECY AND FORESHADOWING

In practice, Augustine treated the whole of the scripture as intended by God and therefore meaningful. The Bible was the exposition of a single divine plan and operation for the salvation of humanity. Any event or statement within the narrative, therefore, might be relevant to the understanding and appreciation of any other. More particularly, as shall become apparent, the scripture should be read back-to-front, from the perspective of its culmination in the mission of Christ and the life of the church. All the blessed, beginning with Abel and continuing through the last child baptized before the return of Jesus, belonged to the same City of God established in Christ.¹¹ The Old Testament could be used to interpret the New Testament, since its events not only prepared for but foretold and foreshadowed those that were to follow. In a similar way, the New Testament narratives and letters clarified the meaning and import of the events, laws, and prayers that formed the preceding history of Israel. The religious rituals of Israel found their full meaning—as well as their salvific efficacy—in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Those preceding interpreted and were interpreted by those following.¹² Thus, Augustine affirmed the historicity of both the foreshadowing and the foreshadowed persons and actions.¹³ Each had its own place in the narrative, but its significance was not limited to or exhausted by its role in that one place or time. Some of the actors in the ancient drama, moreover, were privileged to understand the fuller meaning of the events in which they participated. Augustine explained that Abraham had grasped that the promise made to him would be fulfilled in Christ; Moses foresaw the New Covenant even as he codified the old; some of the Israelites perceived the reality symbolized by the manna falling from heaven. Christ’s work was not only foreshadowed but recognized as his, by at least some in Israel.¹⁴

The life of the Christian church could be used in this same dialogic way as the Old Testament both to interpret the New Testament scripture and to be clarified by it. The gospel writers had been able to discern the biblical foreshadowing and prophecies of the events they narrated but only later Christians, who knew the worldwide spread of the church, could grasp the fuller import of some actions narrated in the New Testament. Jesus’s resurrection clarified his passion predictions about his death that had so confused his disciples. Fourth-century Christians could witness in the spread of the church the fulfillment of the promise of a numerous progeny made to Abraham.¹⁵ As the Letter to the Hebrews had used the Israelite ritual of atonement to understand the saving power of the death and resurrection of Jesus, so would Augustine use that letter to explain the structure of the community’s celebration of the eucharistic ritual and its eschatological fulfillment.¹⁶

Augustine was, of course, on solid and traditional ground in using this interactive interpretation not only of the two testaments but of the life of the church. He found it employed, for example, in Paul’s interpretation of the initiations of Israel in the crossing of the sea and of the church in baptism (1 Cor. 10:1–6, 11).¹⁷ The events were so interrelated that the tense of the verbs being used in the text—past, present, or future—did not always determine the sequence of the events. Events could be spoken of as either past or present while the true referent remained in the future.¹⁸ Thus, Christ told his disciples that he had already made everything known to them, though his teaching would be completed by the Holy Spirit only after his return to heaven.¹⁹ Narratives of events as past could be prophecies of what would be accomplished in the future. Thus, the description of completed events in Psalm 22 was actually a foretelling of the future death of Jesus and the prayer he prayed in the midst of his execution.²⁰ What appeared to be curses pronounced by the prophets were not pleas for divine vengeance but predictions and warnings of what God intended to accomplish.²¹ Augustine even found one instance, in Psalm 104:6, in which a past event was spoken of as still in the future.²² All this clearly showed, Augustine believed, that the scripture reported a complex web of interrelated events, practices, and pronouncements that could be used to interpret one another, even independently of the chronological sequence of the narratives.

In many instances, the application of the interpretative method of foreshadowing and fulfillment was authorized and even required by the scripture itself. The Pauline contrast of Christ and Adam in Romans 5:12–21 and the Johannine linking of the serpent lifted up in the wilderness to the crucified Christ in John 3:14–15 were explicit instances of such practice. The intercessory role of the Israelite high priest was more ambiguous. Augustine applied it to Christ alone while the Donatist bishop Parmenian insisted that it referred to the faithful Christian bishops as well.²³ Thus, these interpretations sometimes did not stand alone; they required more direct support from the scriptures or church practice.

FIGURATIVE INTERPRETATION

Allegorical or figurative interpretation was assigned a distinctive role in Augustine’s preaching. Discussing its techniques in On Christian Teaching, he enunciated a rule that had been followed by his predecessors, particularly by Ambrose. Whenever a literal interpretation could not be identified that was both compatible with true faith and good morals and would promote charity among the hearers, then a figurative explanation was to be used to find a meaning that was both true and applicable.²⁴ For example, anthropomorphic expressions applied to God in scripture must be given an allegorical interpretation because true faith affirmed that the divine was incorporeal.²⁵ Scripture sometimes used obscure language in order to force its readers and hearers to search for these deeper, spiritual meanings. The translators of the Septuagint Greek Bible shared by Christians and Jews, Augustine believed, had intentionally made the meaning of the Hebrew text more obscure in Greek in order to promote this nonliteral interpretation.²⁶ Multiple figurative meanings might sometimes be discovered for a single text—many of which were compatible with divine truth and might even have been intended by the authors of the sacred text.²⁷

To provide some control on the development and use of figurative interpretations, Augustine argued that the exegete must have an independent basis for affirming the truth of any interpretation constructed by allegory. Usually, the truth discovered by figurative exegesis of one passage must be the literal meaning of some other biblical passage.²⁸ Thus, he explained that these obscure passages that required figurative interpretation were present in the scripture for the appreciation of truths rather than their discovery. They exercised the preacher’s ingenuity and prevented the private reader from becoming bored or finding the message insipid. A challenging text was intended to keep a person at the task of searching for God’s meaning and to reward the effort expended in finding it.²⁹

Such were Augustine’s reflections on transferred meaning in the first three books of On Christian Teaching, written at the outset of his episcopal service. When reviewing all his works for his Reconsiderations after some thirty years dedicated to preaching and writing, he found the treatise incomplete and decided to finish it. In the fourth book, he discussed the employment of allegorical interpretation in preaching; there he focused on its usefulness in delighting the hearers and thereby facilitating communication. Preachers, however, did not share the privilege enjoyed by the sacred writers of making their discourse obscure and difficult to understand.³⁰ Their objective must always include both instructing their hearers in what ought to be done and moving them toward accomplishing what had been recognized as right.³¹ Thus, the use of allegorical interpretation—or indeed any rhetorical techniques—in a sermon must always serve these goals and must never distract from them by calling attention to the eloquence or ingenuity of the speaker. Interpretative tools should stimulate the attention of the hearers, help them to remember and to appreciate—and thus to act on—the truths they learned.³²

These judgments enunciated at the end of Augustine’s career were based on long experience as a preacher. His surviving sermons show that he did not use allegorical interpretation primarily to deal with obscurities in the text of scripture. In most instances, though not in all, the text allowed and even required ...