repost March 18, 2009

I’m still mulling over the Andrew Sullivan piece. That piece reveals a serious slippage in terms of a cultural understanding of what “the gospel” is for. Dr. Wilson will plead with Dr. House to leave the superstitious woman alone in her foolishness if her superstition helps her cope with the difficulties of life (religion or gospel as private therapeutic aid, understood and accepted on those terms).

Much evangelicalism has long tried selling the gospel as after-death hell-avoidance insurance. Culturally that “felt need” has long receded. The broad assumption of “a better place” for all but genocidal dictators seems to have most firmly in its grip.

I’m reading Peter Brown’s biography of Augustine of Hippo. He notes that Augustines first adult conversion was to “Wisdom” via Cicero.

“Cicero had urged Augustine to seek Wisdom: ‘I should not chase after this or that philosophical sect, but should love Wisdom, of whatever kind it should be; that I should search for it, follow hard upon it, hold on to it and embrace it with all my strength. That was what stirred me in that discourse, set me alight, and left me

The precise form of ‘Wisdom’ that Augustine might seek, would, of course, be very different from what Cicero would have recognized as ‘Wisdom’. Augustine was a boy from a Christian household. In an age where only the writings of adults have survived, it is extremely difficult to grasp the nature of the ‘residual’ Christianity of a young man. One thing, however, was certain: a pagan wisdom, a wisdom without the ‘name of Christ’ was quite out of the question.’ Paganism meant nothing to Augustine. In Carthage he will watch the great festivals that were still celebrated at the great temple of the Dea Caelestis: but he will do so in the manner of a Protestant Englishman witnessing the solemn Catholic processions of Italy — they were splendid and interesting; but they had nothing to do with religion as he knew it.

Moreover, Augustine grew up in an age where men thought that they shared the physical world with malevolent demons. They felt this quite as intensely as we feel the presence of myriads of dangerous bacteria. The ‘name of Christ’ was applied to the Christian like a vaccination. It was the only guarantee of safety. As a child, Augustine had been ‘salted’ to keep out the demons; when he had suddenly fallen ill, as a boy, he would plead to be baptized.’ These Christian rites, of course, might influence a grown-up man’s conduct as little as the possession of a certificate of vaccination; but they expressed a mentality that had cut off, as positively ‘unhygienic’, the pagan religion of the classical past.

In Carthage, Augustine had remained loyal to the Catholic church. He had already grown to love the solemn Easter vigils of the great basilicas.’ A stranger from the provinces, he would, of course, go to church to find a girl-friend, much as another stranger, the Genoese, Christopher Columbus, will meet his wife in Seville Cathedral.

Above all, the Christianity of the fourth century would have been presented to such a boy as a form of ‘True Wisdom’. The Christ of the popular imagination was not a suffering Saviour. There are no crucifixes in the fourth century. He was, rather, ‘the Great Word of God, the Wisdom of God.” On the sarcophagi of the age, He is always shown as a Teacher, teaching His Wisdom to a coterie of budding philosophers. For a cultivated man, the essence of Christianity consisted in just this. Christ, as the ‘Wisdom of God’, had established a monopoly in Wisdom: the clear Christian revelation had trumped and replaced the conflicting opinions of the pagan philosophers; ‘Here, here is that for which all philosophers have sought throughout their life, but never once been able to track down, to embrace, to hold firm. . . . He who would be a wise man, a complete man, let him hear the voice of God. ” Peter Brown “Augustine of Hippo” pg. 30,31.

What is interesting to me about that piece is (according to Brown) the assumed location of Christ in the public understanding. Christ was efficacious for gaining “Wisdom” in Augustine’s world. For what is Christ “efficacious” in our contemporary cultural imagination? The church is all over the place on this score. It seems getting this clear (and articulating it clearly) is a very central task for preachers. Why ask someone “into” something unless you have it crystal clear what it is for.