Lecture

Hello there. My name’s Scott Carroll, and you and I are going to be learning about Saint Augustine. And I’m delighted that you’ve made the choice to take this course for a variety of reasons. I think the knowledge about the early church and medieval church is extremely important for ministry and preparation for ministry, for understanding theology, historical theology, and I find it personally a great inspiration as I learn about other people who God has touched their lives and worked mightily and has used in a way that frail people can bring inspiration to us.

If you were to ask me to list out some of the most influential people in church history, certainly Augustine would be one of them, and he’s been a person whose brought great inspiration to me, and I hope that during the course of our pilgrimage together over the next twenty-four lectures as you read his works and you learn more about him and his times and his influence, you’ll find it to be a great source of inspiration to you as well.

My habit it to begin with prayer, and so that’s what I’d like to do, and I’d like to focus on prayers that come out of the early church in the medieval period, and for today I’d like to pray a morning prayer. The monks and people of the clergy would pray regularly at fixed hours throughout the day, and a morning prayer greeted the sun as it came up and gave thanks for the sunlight and the heat and warmth that came with the dawn of day. In a metaphorical way, I’d like to look at this as a sunrise for you as we begin working on Augustine and his life together. So let us pray together as we sanctify our time together before the Lord.

Our Father, we pause and we pause caught in time, and yet we look to You together through this medium, and we pray that You would richly bless my friend here who’s taking this course, that You would help him or her to be inspired, to learn, to be diligent in their study, to balance, prioritize everything else going on in their life. That they would look to You for a source of strength, grace, and mercy like the rising of a new day, the new sun in the morning, that they would lift up their praise to You. Now, Father, we dedicate our study and our time together to You as an offering of our gratitude and a token of worship as we give thanks to You for the opportunity to study and to learn more about You. Help these things to be practical. Help them to make an impact in our lives in the future. Now we dedicate ourselves to You together. In the name of our risen Savior. Amen.

Well, where do we begin when we start talking about Augustine? Let me say first off that this course is very clearly laid out for you in your syllabus, and don’t worry about the requirements. We’ll try to take you through those and point them out to you. The first class that I ever took when I went to college was a correspondence course, and so I know the time stresses of that, and we’ll try to encourage you along as you move through. Our twenty-four lectures are going to be focused as you look in your syllabus on the first third on Augustine’s life and the second third we’ll look at his works and some of the major driving thoughts pertaining to Augustine. And finally, we’ll look at Augustine’s impact in the medieval period, but we’ll begin with this first section talking about the life of Augustine, and today I’d like to provide some introductory background material.

Augustine, as I said, was a profound thinker in the church. He lived at a very important time, as we’ll try to lay out before you today to help you appreciate his place in history. What I’d like to get at today in our conversation together are a couple of major objectives. I want to first challenge you to think about the biases that you may have, that we all, I think, have, that we like one period of history over and above another, and I think that generally Protestant evangelicals have a higher regard for the Reformation. I kid students sometimes and say that I think that we think the church history begins when our Bibles sign with a conversion date or our christening or baptism, or perhaps with the birth of Billy Graham or Billy Sunday or, depending on what your denomination is, John Calvin.

But you see, church history is a story of the Bride of Christ, and a foundational passage for me as a historian and a person who loves the Word of God is Christ’s simple statement that His church would be built upon a rock and hell’s gates would not prevail against it. And for me, I look at that and say that that Bride that has been chosen out has been chosen out over the course of two millennia now, and it is all a significant part of a story where there were mixed failures and successes, and yet God was active throughout that time.

And the medieval time, I say this to say in opening, is sometimes is minimized, and yet in order to understand the roots of evangelicalism today, in order to understand Puritan thought, in order to understand the Reformation, one has to go back to the medieval period and to the early church and see contributions and developments that were counterproductive as well, so that we can deal with those things and understand them in their historical context.

So in terms of major objectives, one thing I’d like to do is challenge perhaps a potential bias that you might have that would minimize the relevance of the history of the church in the medieval period. Second, I’d like to encourage strong connections between political, economic, and social history in the life of the church. You see, in fact, church history doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Sometimes we tend to isolate it, may sanctify it, but, in fact, the story of the church is worked out in the trenches of the world, and we’ve got to understand what’s going on politically, historically, economically, and socially in order to have the kind of fabric that’s necessary to understand really the ideas that are coming out with these great thinkers. And so I want to try today to emphasize the importance of strong connections not to sanctify church history but to put it right back into the world and to understand what’s going on in the world at that time.

I thirdly want you to begin to understand Augustine’s place in history. In some ways great people have been called to do great things and they have been used throughout time by the Lord, and one can stand in amazement as we look at the person, the vessel. On the other hand, great people are called in times of crisis, and it’s both the person and the crisis that’s important to see, and I would like to place Augustine, put him in his place in history, so that we can understand exactly what he was being used to do and the kind of impact that he had, and the shoulders that he stood on, that he wasn’t living in a vacuum. So it’s an outworking of number two but on a micro level, so to speak.

Fourth, I would hope that you would begin to learn something of the origin of the Western church, of Latin Christianity and Augustine’s place as a doctor of the Latin church. When did the church at Rome begin? We have an epistle written to them, and we’ve got all kinds of activity in the New Testament, but who were the first people to write in Latin, and what kind of effect did this Latin language have on our theological discourse? It’s a very interesting question.

Fifth, I would hope to familiarize you with a very important driving thesis that affects our understanding of the early church, and I want you to understand some of its implications. It’s called Bauer’s thesis, and I’d also like to provide a critical response to it based on some early evidence.

Now with that by way of a brief introduction in terms of the major objectives I’d like to aim at, what should we say of Augustine’s age? The period is generally called the late antique period or late antiquity. It’s the end of the ancient world and the beginning of the medieval world, and that’s an important time of transition. Some remarkable things happen in human history in times of transition, and they’re oftentimes overlooked periods. Nowadays, late antiquity is a very exciting field and it’s one that’s very popular, and there’s some very fine programs around the world that are heavily invested in the scholarship and research of this period. It’s a very interesting time period though, a period of transition. The period of late antiquity.

We’ll talk more about that in a minute, but primarily I want to help you to understand that it was a period where people were looking for stability, they were looking for continuity in a period of flux and change, and they’ll try to find these things, their moorings, in the church. No longer could it be found in the state, no longer could it be found in the things that traditionally had been understood as stable, but now stability would be redefined and found in the church and in foundational theological ideas, and Augustine would be an important mouthpiece for that as he’s contemplating all that’s going on around him in his world. By the way, that’s something I find amazing when someone can extricate themselves from their time and contemplate what’s going on around them so they can speak to it meaningfully, and Augustine is a person who can do that.

You’re going to learn a lot about his works as we talk together and we expose you to some of the works, and we’ll give you background information in advance and have you read excerpts and we’ll talk about them together, and you’ll see that he wrote an enormous amount. And one very fine biblical scholar from the nineteenth century, Paul de Lagarde (if you’ve done work in Septuagint studies, you may be familiar with his name), tabulated the number of times that Augustine quotes from Scripture. Over thirty thousand times! That’s astronomical to think about that. And so we’re going to be working through some of these works. If we were teaching a great book seminar in a college somewhere and you selected the greatest books written of all times, typically two if not three of Augustine’s works are on those lists, depending on how large the lists are. But they would include his City of God or portions of it.

They would include his masterpiece, Confessions, which you’ll begin reading this next week, and they may also include his great confessional work on the Trinity. So I’m excited to have you read these things as we discuss them together.

Let me say in terms of closing with the introductory material one final note on this whole question of church history in the medieval period. Have you ever given thought to that period of one thousand years that lasts from roughly from 400 or 500 down to the verge of the Reformation? Isn’t it called sometimes the Dark Ages? Isn’t it called sometimes the Middle Ages? These terms are terms that have been concocted by historians. Historians are paid to place terms on time and to tell you when things begin and end, and these things are always arbitrary and always subject to interpretation.

Tell me, what do you think the terms “Middle Ages” and “Dark Ages” imply? It would seem to me that it implies that these periods are adjunct to more important times, and I’ll refer my syllabus to the medieval period. There’s not really an adequate time to cover this era, but we want to be careful not to relegate it, to subordinate it to the Reformation or to the early church because we find those times more relevant to us, but we must return to the plain and clear teaching of Christ that He’s active and His Bride is thriving, and it behooves us as we retrieve this period, because this is a great cloud of witnesses for us and it’s a heritage that belongs to us that we want to try to reclaim, and Augustine is the access for the reclamation of this period.

Let me briefly say something to you about the historical background to this period, and in terms of doing that, we’ll look at the Roman Empire. The empire began with Augustus, you may know, Caesar Augustus in 27 BC, but we’re going to look in terms of the first and second centuries as a period, and we’re going to look at the third and fourth centuries as a period, and we’re going to look at some of the key developments that are going on. The intention is to paint on a broad canvas here so that you get a bird’s-eye view, to review what you probably know and are very familiar with anyway, but to try to draw together some themes that culminate in Augustine’s time.

So as we think about the political setting, of the glory that was Rome, there are many interesting works written on the Roman Empire. We’ll talk in another context when we’re talking about the city of God about Edward Gibbon’s classic work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and when we think about Rome in its glory, perhaps the empire reached its zenith with Augustus himself and it was a decline from then down. I mean, think about it, think about members of his family, think about Tiberius, who was insane and lived in a self-imposed and lust-filled exile on the island of Capri off the Bay of Naples. Think about such people as Caligula, who reigned but a short time, but his name’s proverbial because of his excess, wickedness that’s recorded for us by the various court historians. Think about Claudius, very capable ruler, had great difficulties in marriage. In fact, all but one of his wives, his first one, all of them tried to kill him at one time or another, and the last one, who was his niece, succeeded. She murdered him, and he was a brilliant emperor and next to Augustus was probably one of the great emperors of this period but nonetheless was annihilated by Agrippina, and she worked to try to place her son by a former marriage on the throne and did, and his name was Nero.

These are names that we’re all familiar with, Caligula, Nero with his reign and with his local persecution in Rome of the Christians as he tried to blame the fire that he caused in his reclamation project in Rome. He tried to blame it on Christians probably because of their apocalyptic views of end times, and some think as well because he was motivated by Jewish counselors. One should understand that the greatest enemy to the church in the first century and the very early part of the second century was not Rome but was the synagogue, and the synagogue fell from power then in Rome’s eyes, and in fact then Rome increasingly would become a greater adversary. But Nero’s persecution was a local persecution and not an empire-wide persecution.

These are some of the emperors of the first century, and we could think about those who had their campaigns in Palestine and think as well then about efforts at the end of the first century by Domitian to persecute the church. He demanded that he would be called deus et dominus, Lord and God, and be worshiped as such. Increasingly Caligula and particularly Domitian and Nero also took very seriously the claims of the emperor cult, and this had very negative implications for the Christian church. Not as much for Israel at this time, for the Jews, the synagogue—they were recognized as a licit religion, but they would soon fall from grace themselves in 135 and the final rebellion against Hadrian in Palestine. But this is what’s going on in the first century, and you know, this is the time of the spread of the gospel. This is the time when Paul is calling out to pray for the state. This is the time when people are ministering and all that’s happening. The New Testament revelation is occurring during one of the most diabolical periods in the history of tyranny.

In the second century, you have some localized persecutions that take place under earlier emperors of the second century. Hadrian’s well known because of his campaigns in Palestine and making Jerusalem a pagan city dedicated to Jupiter, but Marcus Aurelius may be one of the great and well-known emperors of this time period, a philosopher-emperor by his reign, and he dies in 180. You have increased frustrations the Romans emperors are facing on the frontiers. They are unable to consolidate their empire. It’s too big, and they’re having problems with nomadic foes that are encroaching on their territory who don’t have the same sense of country and land, and so these people are encroaching, and they’re having greater and greater difficulty consolidating the northern frontiers against these Germanic people.

In Persia they’re having difficulties as well, and perhaps one of the most diabolical of all of the Roman emperors is a guy by the name of Commodus, who was Marcus Aurelius’s son, who reigned form 180. Commodus—it’s ironic, but while he did some insanely bizarre things as he did some very cruel things in Rome and showed himself to be unrestrained in his wickedness according to the sources that we have, yet it was a time where the church flourished, and there was a period of potential peace.

And by the way, the earliest records of Latin theological tracts date to this time period. We’ll get back to that in a minute. Politically, this is what’s going on in the first and second centuries. It’s a slave state. It was necessary to maintain that by winning these victories on the frontiers. That was declining consequently. Your workforce was declining. There were tremendous economic and social problems that the empire faced, and this would have tremendous implications on how the Romans viewed religion, and if we move down to that in the outline and talk briefly about religion in Rome, the Romans were very pluralistic. And we could talk about all the different religions that were active in Rome.

They were suspect of various ones because of their potential involvement in political upheaval, so, for example, sorcery and things like that, but gradually began to be outlawed, and as their activity against the Jews. Eastern religions were seen as suspect because their association with Persia, and East meant Palestine, anything in the Orient. It would be how we would use the word Orient perhaps in a very loose way rather than a specific geographical way.

The Romans became increasingly suspect of these Eastern religions of which Christianity would be included as one. At first, Christians and Jews, they probably could not differentiate between the two but increasingly did, and increasingly both were persecuted and increasingly the church tried to separate itself from Israel, which was seen by them as a liability because of Rome’s aggression against the synagogue. But the solution that Rome would come up with, an age-old solution, to the economic and social upheaval and the political woes that they were facing was to consolidate their religions. And they did through a civic religion of the state cult, and the emperor cult which had its origins in Egypt in the East began to develop again and was not winked at by the Roman emperors but was reinfused into the Roman religious scene from the late first century increasingly into the second and third centuries. And so this is part of the background to this time period.

In the third and fourth centuries things went from bad to worse. I mean you had a period of great upheaval where barbaric emperors, one was ruling after another, some would rule for a matter of days, and you’d have one emperor assassinate another and a real unraveling of the state. Now this tied together an increased persecution of the church in a more universal way in AD 260. What happened was that the empire gradually recovered, and it did under the genius of a guy by the name of Diocletian, who reigned from 284 to 305.

Diocletian decided that what he would do is consolidate the empire by dividing it up into portions, and you’re probably well aware of this, and in doing this, they were able to create a bureaucracy that they thought would be more efficient for collecting taxes and so forth and protecting succession as no emperor only wanted to rule for one day, and so it was a way of protecting their succession and covering for themselves and consolidating the empire and helping with gathering taxes.

And so these things were happening, and at the same time there was a real aggression against Eastern religions during Diocletian’s reign. It was the last real empire-wide persecution of the church which began at the turn of the fourth century and lasted for several years and was worse in some places than in others. It depended on the local governors and whether they enforced these things. But in places like Egypt, it was particularly bad, where in Spain it was not quite as bad.

But gradually what would happen, as you’re well aware, with Constantine is that the Roman state would begin to tolerate Christianity. There were large numbers of people that were being converted. And how that’s calculated is a difficult problem. How do we know how many people were Christians at this time? Basically, the way that that’s calculated is based on name changes, and so we look for changes from pagan names to Christian names, but there’s an overlap with Jewish names and it’s thought by some that Christianity was popular, names were in vogue, and consequently even pagans were naming their children Christian names because of the popularity. And it may have had economic advantages in certain areas after the Christians came to power. But with Constantine, you had a gradual toleration of Christianity. There were still Eastern religions. The mystery cults were very active, were thriving. Mithraism was a popular religion with Roman soldiers, male Persian, male-only mystery religion. But gradually Christianity would be given concessions. They would rise to power. They had a more visible presence. Their bishops became more powerful in the fourth century. The fourth century is an extraordinarily important century in the history of the church. It’s one of those key centuries where a number of things are happening. We can’t overlook Nicea and Constantine and the problem of the Arian heresy.

Rome’s conversion was rather reluctant at this early period of the fourth century, and there were questions whether Constantine in fact was more politically expedient than anything else; whether he was truly converted or not is a matter of great debate, and alas we don’t know. He was baptized on his deathbed, which was the tradition. But his coins are stamped to show him with the halo, which was the sign of the rising sun behind the head and showed that the individual was a devotee of sol invictus and that was gradually then adapted by the church. But Constantine’s an anomaly. Certainly his mother was a zealous Christian and founded churches in the Orient and so forth, but nevertheless, Rome would not stay Christian for long because in the early 360s, Julian in his epithet, “Please never have this epithet said of you,” Julian the apostate, who renounced his faith and the faith of his parents and aunts and uncles and so forth, went back and tried to create a revival of paganism for a short time. But that was gradually overturned, and by the end of the fourth century, you have not only Christianity being tolerated, but it’s becoming the state religion, the solution. In some ways it was exchanged for the emperor cult, and whether driven by faith or by magic one can’t know, but at the end of the fourth century, Christianity now was empowered, and with the same abuses of paganism reveled in, Christianity would revel in and the shoe was on the other foot.

The interesting thing is that our friend Augustine was born in 354, just a handful of years before Julian’s reign. He’s living at this time where with Christianity you have a dawn of a new era. All the hope in the world for a Christian state, perhaps a fulfillment of what was proclaimed in Scripture, but alas while they had all these solutions in place with the Christian state and the power of the state, everything was falling around them. Nothing got better. Economically inflation was way out of hand. Their invasions were an impending threat. You had theological problems, and so this didn’t create the stability they hoped it would and raised questions in pious pagans’ minds. So we’re left with somewhat of an uncertain future, and this is the time that Augustine lives in.

Now very quickly let me say some things about the developments in Christianity at this time, and I want to go back to a foundational question and that is, What do we understand as orthodox or straight teaching or sound theological teaching at this time? There’s a very intriguing thesis by an individual named Walter Bauer, who lived in the early part of the nineteenth century. He’s the great linguist, Bauer, Arndt, and Gingrich, the great Greek lexicon if you’ve had opportunity to have Greek, but Walter Bauer also did some speculative historical work. He was a fine New Testament scholar, and what he did when he looked at church history, he introduced a thesis that the church historians that we know like Eusebius and Sozomen and Socrates and these other characters he assumed were merely pawns of the Roman state and that really Rome and Constantine placed its stamp on certain theological ideas, and we embrace those things today as orthodox.

Bauer would suggest, however, that they’re merely an expression of the will of the state, that, in fact, those who were in power may be fewer in number than those who are not in power. And that, his thesis then went on to say, in the early church there was diversity, and the ideas that seized and benefited people in power were the ones that were proclaimed as orthodox. This is a difficult thesis, and it’s one that I admit to you there are people who are very strong in teaching this and dynamic and it’s almost accepted without argument now a number of generations after Bauer. Some of his students are still teaching in major divinity schools in the English-speaking world, and they’ve had a major influence on how we look at the past. If this is true, can you imagine how devastating this would be? What we call orthodox in fact may not be orthodox or is not orthodox.

There’s been some excellent work done that has analyzed this thesis by looking back at the very earliest fragments of evidence that we have in the papyrus inscriptions from the late first and early second century and later. To try to look at what kind of unity there was and what kind of diversity there was in theological issues. Robinson is a name that comes to mind who wrote a thesis that was published that actually challenges this thesis. Turner did as well. And you’ll find those works in your bibliography. They showed by looking at the fragments of evidence which were not available in Bauer’s time that, in fact, there was a unity in theological ideas, that there was a- . . . and by the way, when you go back to the New Testament, look at Acts. You can see union throughout the New Testament, but traditionally these people will date Acts and the books of the New Testament much later in order to service their argument, but alas their argument is based on silence. It’s the lack of sources that cries out to support their thesis, but one thing that you should recognize is that that’s an unsafe argument to argue on the basis of no sources, and it would be very unlikely that the Roman state or those who are in power would have the power to destroy such sources at such an early period if, in fact, their thesis were true. So there’s great reason to question it and, in fact, I personally reject it. That’s something that you work through on your own as you think about it, but it’s had tremendous impact on how people view the limits between orthodoxy and heresy in the early church.

Now a couple of other factors about developments in Christianity: We do have regional developments that are defined geographically by language, so you’re going to have a church that’s in Egypt speaking Coptic, and you’re going to have churches in the East that are speaking Greek, and gradually you’re going to have a church that emerges in the West that speaks Latin, and it’s going to cause problems because theologically they’re not going to come to the exact same terms on things. And divisions will be divisions as they have been since Babel, divisions of language as much as anything else.

And the church at Rome was originally a Jewish community. It was founded in Greek-speaking people. The earliest inscriptions that we have and the earliest evidence in the house churches indicates that they are Greek-speaking people, and in fact Hippolytus, who was a great bishop of the church of Rome, wrote in Greek; although some of his works survived in Latin, it was Greek that he wrote in. It’s not until perhaps 180 that we have the earliest evidence of the use of Latin, and it’s not until the early third century with Tertullian that you have really the beginning of the use of theological Latin. What’s very interesting is that the theological Latin will be forged in North Africa, so it’s not in Rome necessarily where these things take place. But it’s people like Augustine and Tertullian and Cyprian who are the great doctors of the Latin church. There’ll be others, obviously, that are from Italy and Rome, and great people, but it is something worth noting that there are those as well who are making major contributions that are on the frontier, Tertullian being the first, and having purportedly coined the word Trinity, for example. Trinitate. And we’ll be talking at greater length about that with Augustine’s great thesis on the Trinity.

There were gradual divisions that started to take place. Let me quickly sort of summarize some of the theological and institutional developments on the verge of Augustine. We had Christological debates that he’s in the wake of, so questions that relate to Christology. We’ll think about that with Augustine. Trinitarian definitions, we’ve got to think about that as well. He’s living just after Chalcedon. We have the solidification of the canon. What an important issue to contemplate, and we’ll think about Augustine’s use of Scripture and his claims to authority.

In the church there were various ecclesiastical developments. With the fall of the emperor in Rome, he was replaced and fused with the bishop. And we have a hierarchical development in the church that fills a vacuum that was left in the shambles of the collapse of the Roman Empire. There are clear ecclesiastical and clerical developments. In the area of the clergy, the development with the rise of monasticism. It is a fascinating development that corresponds with the persecution of the early church and became the last great frontier for people to fight against Satan and his emissaries.

This gives you some of the background to the time that Augustine lived in. We’ll in the next lecture begin by thinking about some of the great sources that will open up this world to us of Augustine and help us to research in this area.

What I want to close with is for you to think about the fragile time that Augustine lived in. Think about all that’s happening and how he was placed in it. How does it correlate to our day and age today in a period of transition and in a postmodern age, economically and politically? What about the theological challenges that he faced, and how do they relate to where we are today and where the church is? As you think about that, let’s think about drawing strength from the integrity of the person of Augustine and see how God used him mightily and hope that in some way we might in the course of the next twenty-three lectures together learn to kneel in his shadow as well.

God bless you. God bless you with your reading, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.