“Saint” Augustine of Hippo

“Our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”—Augustine, Confessions 1:1.

As a teenager in the late Roman Empire, Augustine left his small hometown in North Africa for the province’s largest city to study. There he was, overwhelmed by the temptations. He tended to his learning of rhetoric well, but between studies he binged and partied. His father had died when he was very young, and he disregarded the pleadings of his Christian mother, Monica, rejecting the Christian faith as narrow-minded and restrictive. Augustine’s ambition to be a great teacher led him to try to curtail his carnal passions, but without success. He could not control himself, and blamed God for his evil tendencies. At one point he tried the popular religion of Manichaeism, which held that there was an eternal conflict between good and evil. This allowed Augustine to excuse his wrongful life but gave him no ability to change. He moved on in his search for self-control, while striving to lose himself in his study and teaching of rhetoric.

Augustine’s story is typical of many young men through the ages. He had high hopes of doing something important with his life, enriching his family and making them proud. He left Carthage in the early 380s, moving with his illegitimate son to Rome, and on to Milan. His mother followed him, praying for him daily. While in Milan, Augustine attended the Christian church to hear Ambrose, bishop of Milan, a world-class rhetorician, preach. Through their shared commitment to rhetoric, Ambrose eventually became a father figure for the troubled Augustine. Ambrose’s use of rhetoric helped Augustine come to terms with Christianity and accept that Christ’s death for sinners could cover his own lack. Much to his mother’s joy, Augustine was converted in 386 at the age of thirty-two and accepted catechetical studies under Ambrose. He was baptized, together with his son, Adeodatus, the following Easter. Augustine went on to become a monk, a priest, and ultimately the bishop of Hippo, a major town in his native North Africa, where he served for 35 years until his death in 430.

As a theologian and teacher of the church, Augustine was not so much an original thinker as he was an arbiter of the tradition of the varied and at times chaotic four centuries of Christian thought that preceded him. The seventh-century Pope Gregory the Great molded Augustine’s doctrines on the church and salvation into the sacerdotal system that dominated the Middle Ages and necessitated the Reformation. Augustine is often quoted by the Medieval scholastics Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Lombard, and Thomas Aquinas, as well as the Reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin. Of course, the Reformers quoted Augustine’s appeals to grace and justification more than his doctrine of the church, with which they disagreed. In many ways Augustine was both cause of and solution to the false system of salvation that dominated the church for a thousand years.

Canonization

Augustine is recognized as a saint, or holy person, by both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. An annual feast day, August 28 in the Roman tradition and June 15 in the Orthodox tradition, has been appointed to honor his memory. He began to be celebrated as a saint soon after his death, both in the East and by Rome, out of nearly universal popular respect. The path to sainthood at that time usually began with being recognized by three bishops as a beatus, a person particularly blessed by God; then by two or three miracles, also attested by the bishops; and finally, by the recognition that the person lived a venerable life of “heroic virtue.” By the tenth century the path to sainthood in Western Christian tradition became more formal as a legal affirmation by the Vatican. Augustine was then officially canonized as a saint by Pope Boniface VIII in 1303. The same pope had given Augustine the title “Doctor of the Church” in 1298, one of only four early Christian writers in the West so designated. This means that his writings are considered authoritative by the Roman Catholic Church.

Augustine’s Contributions

It is fair to ask, What good is Saint Augustine to us? As an Adventist community of believers, we do not recognize human saints as mediators between ourselves and God. Rather, we understand from Scripture that Christ alone is our high priest and mediator.[1] He is our only advocate in the heavenly courts (1 John 2:1). Thus we do not need human saints or priests to garner our salvation, as many churches believe, but can come boldly to the throne of grace by invitation from Jesus Himself (Heb. 4:16). In addition, we do not consider the writers of church tradition to be authoritative for belief or doctrine. Our “preamble” to our fundamental beliefs makes it clear that the Bible is our only creed and that we get our beliefs from the Holy Scriptures. So what does Augustine contribute to Adventists?

In many ways, Augustine was both cause of and solution to the false system of salvation that dominated the church for a thousand years.

Augustine is useful to Seventh-day Adventists not as a “saint” or as “doctor of the church,” but as a struggling Christian seeking to understand how to live in Christ.

The lead-in quote from Augustine’s Confessions can help us see how Augustine shaped Christian understanding in a way that was beneficial to shaping Adventist belief. The phrase is actually part of a longer sentence that reveals two important truths about salvation. The sentence, which stands as a sort of introduction to the whole book, can be translated to read:

“You have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”[2]

The first part of the sentence demonstrates an important Bible truth: Not only did God create us, but He draws us to Himself. This is known as prevenient grace—the grace that comes before salvation. This idea, drawn from Scripture, teaches that God takes the initiative in our salvation and, in His love for us, He woos us. John quotes Jesus as saying, “And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all peoples to Myself” (John 12:32). In the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve had sinned, God came to them, walking in the garden, bringing them the promise of the coming Savior. Revelation 3 records Jesus as standing at the door of our hearts, knocking, offering to come in. Augustine gets this piece of God’s relationship with us correct: God draws us to Himself.

The second part of the sentence shows how we cannot be satisfied without God. Augustine suggests that we humans, made in God’s image, have a God-sized hole in our hearts that can never be filled by anything except a relationship with God.

In addition to these two points, there is a third piece of soteriology, the study of salvation, that Augustine gets right: that we are born sinners in need of salvation. In his conflicts with Caelestius, a disciple of Pelagius in Carthage, Augustine argued for original sin, using Paul as his source. In Romans 3 Paul makes it clear that everyone is a sinner, quoting familiar psalms to show that all of us go astray and are hopeless without God. Then Paul assures us that “while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly” (Rom. 5:6, ESV). Augustine knew from his own life that we humans are naturally ungodly, unable to fix ourselves, needing the grace of God to initiate any saving or positive transformation.

So Augustine helps us to understand God’s prevenient grace, our heart’s absolute need for a relationship with God, and our sinful human nature. These three truths are true, not because Augustine, as a “saint” and doctor of the church, said them. They are true because they are biblical, God-revealed truth. But Augustine describes them and illustrates them in ways that have been helpful to Christians throughout history.

Problems of Augustine as an Interpreter of Scripture and Theologian

Despite his glimmers of truth, Augustine is not a trustworthy guide to truth. For example, both Martin Luther and John Calvin were led astray by his misunderstanding of predestination, which contravenes the scriptural teaching that every person is given the invitation to choose for or against salvation. Like so many others in church history who inspire us with their godly understandings, Augustine made mistakes with far-reaching consequences. Simply put, the good guys are the bad guys. Augustine fits this pattern. Two additional examples will suffice.

When Ambrose taught Augustine to allegorize Catholic doctrine into the Old Latin Scriptures Augustine read as a youth, he was continuing a disastrous trend in the use of Scripture. The Old and New Testaments were translated into Old Latin by eastern Christians who immigrated west, often for economic opportunities. They knew Greek well, but not Latin, yet they wanted to provide the Scriptures to their Latin-speaking neighbors as they did their evangelism. So the Old Latin versions contain many errors; they were not good Latin. As a young student of rhetoric, Augustine rejected this poor Latin as not possible to be the Word of God. He threw out Christianity partially because the Old Latin versions available to him were not worthy of God.

Augustine is useful to Seventh-day Adventists not as a “Saint” or as “Doctor of the Church,” but as a struggling Christian seeking to understand how to live in Christ.

Ambrose suggested that the very errors in the bad Latin were indicators of a deeper meaning buried in Scripture by the Holy Spirit, to be mined through an allegorical method of biblical interpretation. Many Christians and Jews before Ambrose and Augustine had used an allegorical approach to Scripture to reconcile what they already “knew” to be true of God with what they were reading in Scripture. Philo and Origen, both from Alexandria, are prime examples. Allegorical interpretations derive the truth of Scripture from previous conceptions in the mind of the reader rather than from the mind of the author. In other words, the controls of what is to be understood as truth from Scripture are not dependent on the God-inspired prophets being carried along by the Holy Spirit, as Peter explains in 2 Peter 1:20, 21, but upon the allegorizing mind of the reader. This meant that the reader was not gaining truth from Scripture, but bringing truth to Scripture. Using allegory, Ambrose taught Augustine to read into the Scriptures what the church was currently teaching.

This furthered the dangerous trend among early Christians to believe that the truth resided in the church and that Scripture must be read only in accordance with the church’s traditions. This is in opposition to another major component of the Reformation, founded in the Bible, and that we believe as Adventists: sola scriptura, Scripture alone is our final rule of faith and practice. So Augustine is not a safe authority on what Scripture means, even if his illustrations at times help us understand. Like many Christians in history, Augustine may be informative for us, but never normative.

Another example of why we cannot trust Augustine as a norm for theology concerns a profound line of his that is often quoted by later theologians, especially Anselm of Canterbury: “Faith seeking understanding.”[3] In a sermon on faith as the basis for a good life, Augustine discusses whether understanding comes before belief or vice versa. In answer, he argued that belief comes before understanding. There are indeed many paradoxical statements from Scripture that we still do not fully understand, even after we believe and put our faith in them. They remain not completely understood, even though we have a basic understanding of them and use them all the time. For example, we have the conundrum “How is it that when we worship the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we are worshipping only one God?” Or “How can God become a human?” Even “How can Jesus’ death take my place and grant me life?” All these are best understood within a trusting relationship with the God who revealed Himself in Scripture. Augustine’s teachings become a problem when he suggests that we seek understanding of the difficult concepts of Scripture by looking to the teachings of church tradition.

This contrasts with what Adventists have affirmed from Scripture—difficulties in Scripture are best understood in light of other Scripture. As Ellen White often reminds us in comparing Scripture with Scripture to build up a biblical understanding of a topic, “here a little, there a little.” We know that there ought not to be “private interpretations,” and that the community of believers provides an important safeguard against running off individually on an unhelpful tangent. Yet even here our Adventist commitment is to be shaped by Scripture, so that both our individual and corporate understandings are continually corrected by careful study of the Scriptures. The truth resides in God’s Word, and we go to His Word to improve our understanding. We trust the God and Savior we have come to know through Scripture to lead us thereby toward a deeper understanding. Augustine, however, pointed to church tradition to gain understanding.

We Can Appreciate Augustine Even as We Must Critique Him

Some of your neighbors may cherish Augustine as a saint and look to him for guidance and for mediation with God. We cannot agree with this. But we can value the important scripturally faithful and insightful ways Augustine contributed to a Christian understanding of God, and we can use this shared appreciation to build bridges with our neighbors.

[1] See especially Hebrews 8 and fundamental belief 24, Christ’s Ministry in the Heavenly Sanctuary.

[2] Confessions, 1:1.

[3] Technically, these concise words seem to have been coined by Ambrose of Milan, Augustine’s mentor, from a sermon of Augustine extrapolating on Isaiah 6 and 7. (Yes, teachers learn from their students.) Augustine’s original statement was something like “believe in order to understand” (Sermon 43 on Isaiah, section 4).