The Life and Legacy of Aurelius Augustine

Throughout churches, uh across time, this Sunday, the last Sunday in October, uh, is uh often used uh to remember things that have happened in church history.

Uh this is uh Sunday that is referred to as Reformation Sunday, and almost 500 years ago, on October 31st, 1517, a young monk by the name of Martin Luther tacked 95 theses, 95 statements of dispute on the church door in Wittenberg in Germany.

He was questioning many of the practices that had crept into the church, and he was calling the church to reform.

Unbeknownst to him, this event inaugurated a reformation of the church and a return to the central teachings of the Bible.

So once a year, uh I like to pause and do a historic biography.

Uh sometimes we don't like history, but uh it's vital for us as believers to know and study the history of the church.

And so I only do it once a year, so if history is not your thing, mark it on your calendars the last Sunday of next year.

But it really is important for us to study history, and let me give you a few reasons why to kind of encourage and challenge you to study history.

First of all, God is the author of history, it is his story, it is his story of redemption, that God is relentlessly moving events forward to his predetermined end.

We have the last chapters of history already written in the Bible.

And so as we study history, we realize that God himself entered into human history in the person of Jesus Christ.

That in time and space, God himself entered into this world, that Christianity is an historic faith.

It is not merely based on philosophy and principles, it is centered on the person of Jesus Christ.

And that God is building his church, and we have the privilege of looking back and seeing how God has done that.

Also, the Bible commands us to study the lives of others.

In fact, in Hebrews chapter 13, verse 7, it says this remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God, consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith.

Hebrews 13:7

It says, look at them, look at their lives, consider how their lives worked out and ended, and see what you can glean and put into practice in your own life.

Third reason to study history is we stand on the shoulders of giants.

We are not the first generations of Christians.

Sometimes we think that because we are newer, we are smarter or wiser, but as we study history, we see the wisdom of the generations who have gone before us and the lessons that they've learned, both good and bad.

The things that we can glean from them and the things that we can avoid.

And so, fourthly, has often been said, those who don't learn from history are destined to repeat it.

If we don't learn from our past, we will fall into the same traps and make the same mistakes as previous generations did.

And then a final reason, and one that encourages my heart, is that we study history to be encouraged.

There's an old saying uh God uses crooked sticks to draw straight lines.

And when we look throughout history, we realize that every man or woman that God has chosen to use has been a flawed, fallen, sinful human being who has made mistakes, who has made wrong choices, and yet God in his mercy and grace has used them to continue to build his church.

And it's an encouragement to me, and it ought to be to us, that even though we are fallen and flawed and sinful, that God uses us to build his church, and so it's an encouragement to us.

And so this morning I would like to give a sketch of the life and influence of an old Christian from the from the third and fourth century, Aurelius Augustine, often called Augustine.

I'll use the more European pronunciation, Augustine.

He died on August 28th, 430 AD, at the age of 75.

Augustine is considered to be the most influential, significant theologian between the death of the Apostle Paul and at least Martin Luther.

He's considered one of the greatest fathers of the Roman Catholic Church.

However, he is also one of the most influential figures in the Protestant Reformation, shaping the thought of Martin Luther and John Kelvin.

Luther, prior to his conversion, was an Augustinian monk.

He had studied under those who had looked to Augustine as their uh as their leader.

Luther's views of grace, election, conversion, and the Christian life were shaped by Augustine.

In addition to that, John Calvin quoted Augustine more than any other theologian.

One 20th-century theologian Benjamin Warfield argued that through his writings, Augustine entered both the church and the world as a revolutionary force and not merely creating an epoch in the history of the church, but determining the course of its history in the West up until the present day.

The whole development of Western life in all of its phases was powerfully affected by his teaching.

In fact, the publishers of Christianity Christian History Magazine said this.

They said, after Jesus and Paul, Augustine of Hippo is the most influential figure in the history of the entire church.

So it's it's really, if we were not familiar with Augustine, we we don't understand a lot of of how he has influenced and shaped us.

One historian, Augustino Trappe, writes this.

His lofty powers complemented each other and made the man fascinating in a way difficult to resist.

He is a philosopher, but not a cold thinker.

He is a theologian, but also a master of the spiritual life.

He is a mystic, but also a pastor.

He is a poet, but also a controversialist.

Every reader thus finds something attractive and even overwhelming, depths of metaphysical intuition, rich abundance of theological proofs, synthetic power and energy, psychological depth shown in spiritual sense, and a wealth of imagination, sensibility, and mystical fervor.

His book, Confessions, was the first tell-all biography in the history of the world.

He wrote his confessions and shared the inner workings of his heart and his mind that had never been done before.

In fact, it is looked back to as even in literature as a turning point.

And so the man has influenced not only church history but history.

Augustine was born in Thadsgate near Hippo in what is now Algeria on November 13th, 354.

His father, Patricius, was a farmer and was not a believer until shortly before his death.

His main goal for his son Augustine was to train him to be a rhetorician and to gain an education.

In his book Confessions, which he wrote following his conversion, Augustine does not have a lot of good things to say about his dad.

In fact, he comments about his dad that his dad was only concerned about his education and getting ahead in life and had no interest in his spiritual condition.

He rarely mentions his father in any of his writings, and his father's death is only mentioned in passing.

Which is really notable because Augustine spent time writing about the loss of his friends and of his mother, but very little is said about his father.

Augustine's mother is also an encouragement to us.

His mother's name was Monica, and she prayed for her son for decades before he came to Christ.

He was a wayward son, and she prayed for him for years.

At the age of 16, shortly after his father's death, Augustine snuck away from his mother in Carthage and sailed to Rome.

This is what he wrote in his confessions.

He says, During the night, secretly I sailed away, leaving her alone to her tears and prayers.

He also commented, This was the age at which the frenzy gripped me, and I surrendered myself entirely to lust, which your law forbids, but human hearts are not ashamed to sanction.

Later, Augustine would reflect, he said, She shed more tears over my spiritual death than other mothers shed for their bodily death of a son.

And so from the age of sixteen until his conversion to Christ, Augustine did not withhold himself from any worldly pleasure.

Anything that he desired, he pursued.

He stated this again in his confessions.

He says, For as I grew to manhood, I was inflamed with desire for a surfeit of hell's pleasures.

Foolhardy as I was, I ran wild with lust that was manifold and rank.

Bodily desire, like a morass and adolescent sex welling up within me, exuded mists which clouded over and obscured my heart, so that I could not distinguish the clear light of true love from the murk of lust.

In my tender youth they swept me away over the precipice of my body's appetites and plunged me into the whirlpool of sin.

At the age of seventeen or eighteen, he took a concubine and lived with her for fifteen years.

And at age twenty he fathered an illegitimate child with her.

Many people are familiar with his conversion at age 31, but God was at work in his life long before that.

In fact, at age 19, as he was struggling with giving in to uh sexual pleasure, uh he read Cicero, a philosopher, and it began to cause him to start thinking about the need for wisdom and truth.

However, at that point at age 19, he didn't uh turn to Christ.

Uh he actually fell into a philosophy uh that is uh not around today, but maybe familiar in some of its ideas.

It was a philosophy called Manichaeism.

Augustine was struggling with the problem of evil.

How can a good God who is all-powerful allow evil to happen?

And Manichaeism had an answer, and it said, well, you need to understand there are two equal and opposite forces at work, and they're fighting against one another in an eternal conflict.

This philosophy borrowed from a number of different religions, but we even see it today in Star Wars with the whole idea of the force and kind of a Western view of Eastern religion with the good and the bad locked in an equal and opposite battle.

And so Augustine began this pursuit of trying to find himself at age 19 and fell into this philosophy.

Uh years later, he began to have doubts about his belief when he met one of the leaders of this philosophy, and he was totally disillusioned after talking with him.

And so he became skeptical of what he had been putting his trust in.

And in 386, he discovered the writings of a man by the name of Plotinus, uh, who was uh a Neoplatonist who had died a hundred years before.

And even that philosophy began to challenge Augustine's thinking because, unlike what he had been hearing from uh this other religion, the Manichaeans, uh Plotinus believed that there was a transcendent being, uh, that God was transcendent and that there was only one God, and that began to cause Augustine to question what he had believed prior to this.

He traveled to Rome and then later to Milan to be a teacher of rhetoric.

And it was during this time that he came under the preaching of Ambrose, who was the bishop of Milan, the pastor at the Church of Milan, and he began to uh hear the message of the gospel uh preached by Ambrose.

It was during that time that his praying mother Monica came to join him there and encouraged him to leave his mistress and marry a young woman.

And so his concubine left and sailed back to Africa, never to live with him again.

Uh, but Augustine never married the woman that his mom had tried to arrange uh for him to marry, and he pined away for the loss of his mistress.

In spite of his old mistress uh promising never to uh to marry or to to be with another man, uh Augustine could not keep his commitment and very quickly took another mistress uh to fulfill his desires.

Again, this is what he writes about that time in his life.

He said, The woman with whom I had been living was torn from my side and an obstacle to my marriage, and this was the blow which crushed my heart to bleeding, because I loved her dearly.

She went back to Africa, vowing never to give herself to any other man.

But I was too unhappy and too weak to imitate this example sent set me by a woman.

I took another mistress without the sanction of wedlock.

At age 31, Augustine was at a crossroads.

He was depressed at the loss of this woman that he loved, but he also realized that all of the ideals that he had he couldn't live out.

He couldn't live out his philosophy.

He realized that no matter how high his ideals were, he was completely unable to follow through, and that willpower uh was never going to change his heart and change his life.

And so he he was brought to this desperate place.

And it was during that time that he began to hear the preaching uh in Milan of Ambrose.

And again, this is what he writes about that in his book Confessions.

He said, In Milan, I found your devoted servant, the Bishop Ambrose.

At that time, his gifted tongue never tired of dispensing the riches of your corn, the joy of your oil, and the sober intoxication of your wine.

Unknown to me, it was you who led me to him, so that I might knowingly be led by him to you.

And so he saw God's hand at work in his life and bringing him to this point of desperation, and Augustine came to the end of himself.

He could not understand how unlearned men could put away temptations, and he, a learned scholar, was powerless to resist his desires.

Tormented in soul over his sin and self-condemnation and over his personal struggle, he went to a garden.

And again, this is what he wrote in his his confessions.

He said, There was a small garden attached to the house where we lodged.

I now found myself driven by the tumult in my breast to take refuge in this garden where no one could interrupt the fierce struggle in which I was my own contestant.

I was beside myself with madness that would bring me sanity.

I was dying a death that could bring me life.

I was frantically overcome by violent anger with myself for not accepting your will and entering into your covenant.

I tore my hair and hammered my forehead with my fist.

I locked my fingers and hugged my knees.

And then finally, he says, I flung myself down beneath the fig tree and gave way to the tears which now streamed from my eyes.

In misery I kept crying, How long shall I go on saying, Tomorrow, tomorrow?

Why not now?

Why not make an end of my ugly sins at this moment?

He said, All at once I heard the sing-song voice of a child in a nearby house.

Whether it was the voice of a boy or girl, I cannot say, but again and again it repeated the refrain, Take it and read, take it and read.

At this I looked up, thinking hard whether there was any kind of game in which children used to chant words like this, but I could not remember ever hearing it before.

I stemmed my flood of tears and stood up, telling myself that this could only be a divine command to open my book of Scripture and read the first passage of which my eyes should fall.

So Augustine raced back to find his Bible and he opened it up, and the first passage that he looked at was Romans chapter 13, verses 13 and 14, that says, Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarrels and jealousy.

Romans 13:13

But put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires.

Augustine observed in his confessions, I had no wish to read more and no need to do so.

For in an instant, as I came to the end of the sentence, it was as though a light of confidence flooded into my heart, and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.

He told his best friend Olypius what had happened, and he told his mother Monica, and she was overjoyed.

He writes again, and when we went on to describe how it had all happened, Monica was jubilant with triumph and glorified you, who are powerful enough and more than powerful enough to carry out your purpose beyond our hopes and dreams.

For she saw that you had granted her far more than she used to ask in her tearful prayers and plaintive lamentations.

And so here Monica had prayed for her son from the time he was 16, now until he's 31.

And he finally had come to faith in Christ.

The following Easter, he was baptized and then departed to Milan, his birthplace.

He then changed his plans to move to Rome, and then in 388 he moved to Tagate, and then his son died.

And following that he moved to Hippo, which is uh in modern Bana, Algeria, in early 391 AD.

It was his hope to start a monastic community.

The church there forced him to become a priest upon his settling in Hippo, and then four years later they asked him to be the associate to the bishop, and soon he became the bishop of Hippo, and for the next 40 years he led the church and he raised uh godly biblical, biblically saturated priests that brought renewal to North Africa.

But as I said, Augustine was a very controversial figure.

He had incredible positive influences, but also uh several negative influences as well in the history of the church, uh, many of which we see to this day.

And so let me uh list some of the positive influences in Augustine's life and then some of the negative ones.

Uh Augustine's influence cannot be over-exaggerated.

Uh his thought and writing has shaped church history, it has shaped Western civilization, it has shaped uh cultures and countries.

Uh during his life, a battle raged concerning uh the sinfulness of man.

Uh there was a man who was a priest by the name of Pelagius.

And Pelagius uh traveled to Rome uh and the Mediterranean world teaching that man was basically good.

He said that we are not sinners by nature, we are basically good.

He said that Adam and Eve's sin affected nobody but themselves.

There was no transfer of a sinful nature, a sinful disposition, that man was born basically good, and the only thing that Adam and Eve did was set a bad example.

But that by your own willpower and effort you can come to God on your own, and that the Holy Spirit and the gospel might help you, but they're not necessary because you have the ability in and of yourself, because you are not a sinner.

And so Pelagius' views began to take hold in the church.

Augustine forcefully and powerfully spoke against this and began to prove from Scripture that we are inherently sinful and have a bent toward sin because Adam, our first father, sinned and we inherited his nature, and that we are corrupt to the core, that every aspect of our life is tainted by sin.

And that Adam, that apart from God's intervening grace in a person's life, there's no hope for change merely by willpower alone.

Augustine likewise argued that we are saved from our sins and forgiven by God's grace alone, not on the basis of works.

In one of his writings, Augustine wrote this But a gift, unless it is wholly unearned, is not a gift at all.

We are to understand then that man's good deserts are themselves the gift of God, so that when these obtain the recompense of eternal life, it is simply grace given for grace.

And so Augustine argued that salvation was by grace through faith alone.

It wasn't based on anything that we did.

Our good works don't bring us into a relationship with God or keep us in a relationship with God.

It is only by his grace that we come into a relationship with God through Christ.

In his book, The City of God, Augustine answered the skeptics who said that Rome uh uh was sacked uh by Alaric and the Gothic army, and he answered those who uh who used that against uh against belief in God.

Augustine said uh in his book The City of God, he said, Well, there are two cities that we need to understand.

There is the city of God and the city of man.

He said, The city of God is eternal, the city of man is temporal.

Uh he goes on to give a philosophy of history that is still relevant today.

And so Augustine saw that there were two kingdoms, not one.

And that the kingdom of God was distinct and separate from the kingdoms of this world.

And nations may rise and nations may fall, governments may rise and governments may fall, but that God's kingdom transcends that and stands, and that we are a part of both of those kingdoms, uh, but we respond in different ways to each of them.

Uh, he also viewed the church as a mixed company.

He said that there is a visible church, and within the visible church there are both believers and unbelievers, that when when people gather on a Sunday, uh that we should not assume that everyone who is there is born again, is redeemed, and has a relationship with Christ.

He said, within the visible church there is a mixed company of both the redeemed and unsaved.

He says, but there is an invisible church that encompasses all believers over all time.

And so he recognized that in the visible church that it was a mixed multitude.

And so that understanding, again, comes from Augustine.

Augustine argued forcefully and persuasively on the nature of the Trinity as well as the full deity and full humanity of Christ.

You may remember during this time and just prior to Augustine's birth, uh, that there was a controversy regarding the Trinity, and that uh that there were some that were saying that Jesus was not God, that he was a created being, that he was a mere man, and that uh and that the Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit did not exist, but that there was only one God, and uh not simultaneously in three persons.

And so this controversy raged during the time of Augustine, and his writing in the Western Church helped to clarify and understand the biblical teaching on the Trinity.

He considered it his joy and privilege to defend the Christian faith against heretical ideas and false doctrines, and he said it was one of the ways he could honor God with his mind.

Further, he developed several sound principles of biblical interpretation, including the idea of the analogy of faith.

And simply put, the idea argues that no teaching, contrary to the general tenor of scriptures, should be developed for any particular passage.

In other words, scripture interprets scripture.

Uh that when you look at the Bible, you understand it as a unified whole, and you don't pit one idea against the other and seeing it in contradiction, but understand uh that the Bible is the best interpreter of itself, and so uh you understand what the Bible says uh in its context.

And that uh that principle was first articulated by Augustine.

Augustine influenced us in other ways.

He was the first one who came up with the theory of a just war uh regarding armed conflict, and it is a philosophy that we still uh discuss today in regards to a nation using force uh for self-defense when attacked, and and those ideas were first articulated by Augustine.

So Augustine has had a huge positive influence in the church, but he's also had a negative influence, and many of his ideas have come down negatively to this day as well.

In spite of his strong assertion that the elect are sovereignly saved by God's grace through faith, he still placed a strong emphasis on infant baptism.

This confusing contradiction in his writing has influenced the Catholic Church to emphasize the importance of infant baptism to wash away the stain of original sin.

Luther as well was influenced by Augustine's writings on baptism, and although he disagreed with the Catholic Church on the meaning of baptism, and yet the influence of Augustine on Luther's life can be seen as well in that area.

Further, in arguing against another group that was called the Donatist, Augustine emphasized the supreme nature of the church, and his arguments were later used by the Roman Catholic Church to say that they were the only one true church, and anyone that did not join the Catholic Church was not a part of the church and was outside of God's kingdom.

Likewise, much of his writing on the sacraments is used by the Roman Catholic Church to emphasize and support their doctrines.

What he has spoken on on baptism, on the Lord's table, on ordination, on marriage, and even exorcism has influenced the Catholic Church, their doctrine and their practice.

At some points in his writing, his inconsistency goes so far as to say that these sacraments are essential for salvation, and at other times he acknowledges that they're merely signs of spiritual reality.

And so, even in his writing, there's a contradiction.

He also saw salvation as purely a relationship with God through Christ, but he also established a monastic order that was legalistic and ascetic.

Augustine's struggle in his own personal life with lust gave him a low view of sexual relations, even within the bounds of marriage.

And it's interesting to study Augustine and see how his own personal problems began to be influenced and imported into his understanding of his faith.

He viewed sexual relations as a necessary evil that should not be engaged in other than for purposes of having children in marriage.

And this view dominated the church for over a thousand years and still has a profound influence in some circles today.

And we see that how his life influenced his theology and how his theology has influenced the thoughts in this area of the church.

Likewise, some of his comments were later used to justify the Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory.

On August 28th, 430 AD, Augustine died just as 80,000 invading vandals were about to storm the city of Hippo.

Augustine is a fascinating, controversial, impactful person in the history of the church.

In some ways, he has influenced each one of us in some of our understanding and our practice.

In the opening paragraph of Augustine's book, Confessions, he writes this.

He says, You made us for yourselves, and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.

Later he says, Who will grant me to rest content in you?

To whom shall I turn for the gift of your coming into my heart and filling it to the brim, so that I may forget all the wrong I have done and embrace you alone, my only source of good.

We look at the life of Augustine and we recognize that God uses crooked sticks to draw straight lines.

In many ways, Augustine has influenced the church in negative ways, and we see that God also used Augustine in ways to influence Luther and Calvin and the Reformation and in ways that influence us to this day.

But ultimately, what comes through in the life and writing of Augustine is his embrace of the grace of God and his confidence in sovereign joy.

And so I want to encourage you to study history.

Not that we agree with everything that we read because we surely won't and shouldn't, but we remember our leaders and those who spoke the word of God.

We consider the outcome of their faith, the outcome of their lives.

We imitate their faith.

We see the good, we see the bad.

But we also see how God is working in history and we have confidence that God is working in our day.

And God is working towards an end which He has already said.

And so that we can have confidence that God will continue to move and work until that day that Christ returns.

Will you join me as I lead us in prayer?

Father, as we think about this man who lived so many centuries ago, and yet as we read his life, we see a fallen, flawed, sinful man, a man in many ways who got it wrong in his understanding, and yet understood the gospel and put his faith in Christ, and had an influence that has impacted the church throughout the centuries, even down to our day.

And so, Father, I pray that as we study the life of your church and of the people who have gone before us, we don't do so in a way that elevates them to a place far above us, but rather that we look at them and we see your grace at work throughout history and in our lives, and that you are working out your plan until that day when your son returns.

We pray these things in Christ's name.

Amen.