Augustine of Hippo

I am not a well versed church historian but I dabble a little. And I dabble because I find that the history of the Church is deeply fascinating. It can be at times disheartening albeit educational as we see the various errors, misjudgments and sins that were performed by the leaders of the Church. We can see these wrongs and ask God for the wisdom to not reproduce a different version of these wrongs in our day and ask Him for the courage to confront them in the places where we see them and have a voice to speak out. But more than learning from the mistakes of the leaders who have gone before I am most intrigued to see the fingerprints of God as He manifests Himself time and time again to reveal Himself to the masses at times when the future of the Gospel looks bleak.

Barbarians at the Gate

Its the year 410 AD, the Church in Rome has struggled for centuries after the Ascension of Christ and the Outpouring of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost to not only establish its culture and theology but just to survive. The Romans weren't kind to professors of the Christian faith -- heaping upon them trouble that varied in scope and intensity for 300 years. Christians were detained and told that if they confessed Christ that they would face the penalty of death and for those who did confess they were executed in often gruesome ways. The Church rightly followed the example of Jesus through this and rather than taking up arms to protect itself against its enemies they forgave and sought to love the ones who were the source of their trouble and in doing so preached a message in their death that was more powerful than anything that they could have said with their lips -- that God was love. Period.

I used to take silent issue with Jesus' teachings about loving your enemies but recently I can see that they are deeply profound. They are profound in this that in showing real honest kindness to those who seek to bring us trouble because of our love for Jesus it reveals the God who died for His enemies. The God who died for the people who condemned Him to slaughter, scourged Him with cords, drove nails into His hands and left Him to hang naked on planked wood until He suffocated in His own bodily fluids -- the God who said in the midst of that "Father forgive them for they know not what they do" -- that God, that's the God you want to know. You want to know the Divine Being who is willing to put upon Himself the price needed for us to be reconciled to Him. And as difficult a word that this is to say when I consider the implications of it, loving our enemies may be the way forward for the Gospel in the USA as hostilities towards the people of God in some cases seemed to have heightened in the past couple years. And while it is my hope and prayer for favor to increase upon the people of God in this land I also acknowledge that hostility towards the faith doesn't equal the Gospel being shut down but it is rather an opportunity to preach the love of God in a deeper and fuller way.

He wrote a Book

But Augustine was the product of the Church that had finally come out of the tribulation. A place where Christianity was no longer illegal and those who named the Name of Jesus didn't have to live in fear anymore of the government coming in and taking away from them the things they hold dear. Rome had been thoroughly changed by the preaching of Christ and was now calling itself a Christian nation. But in 410 AD there was a different challenge -- Rome had been sacked and it looked as if the covering for Christianity that was the Roman empire was in jeopardy. More than that there were critics of the Christian faith who blamed Christianity for the sacking of Rome saying that it was their gods judging Rome for turning to Jesus. And it was in this moment where fear and uncertainty were in the air, where critics of the faith were becoming more outspoken, where it could have been easy to tone things down and retreat until things started to look a little better -- it was in this moment of time that Augustine decided to write a book.

The book is called The City of God and it was both a defense of the Christian faith in regards to its pagan critics and a way forward for the Church in uncertain times. Augustine wrote a book because he was a writer. The point isn't that he wrote a book but rather that instead of giving up in times of difficultly and discouragement he did what he knew how to do -- he wrote. If he was a singer he would have sung a song, if he was a screenwriter he would have created a script -- but at the end of the day when times weren't looking good he decided that he would get a hold of God and do what God had put him on the earth to do even if it wasn't going to be as easy as he once thought it would be.

This is my prayer for all of us who find ourselves on fire for Jesus in this moment -- in a moment where the times feel uncertain and the future seems less bright than it did before -- that we would get a hold of God like Augustine and do what it is He has put us on this earth to do and that we would do in in the confidence that He will be with us to shape the future, and that like Augustine that He will breathe on what we do to impact the world and release through us a witness of the Gospel on the earth. Amen.