Which Theologians would have made good bloggers?

Which theologians would have been successful bloggers? Or, which theologians do you reckon would have had blogs if they had been available at the time?

Luther - the pamphleteer and controversialist in Luther would have been attracted to the medium of blogging. He was a master disseminator of his own ideas using the printing press. His colourful language would have got him a seat in Australian parliaments. And he was quick on his feet. Perhaps verbosity would have got in his way.

Newman - A controversialist too, but with an acid tongue and an piercing application of sarcasm when needed. Aren't the 'Tracts for the Times' really just blog entries?

Augustine - a more ponderous thinker and not equipped for the brevity necessary for good blogging perhaps: but quite the controversialist and up for a good argument. You certainly wouldn't have wanted Augustine lobbing comments on your blog!

Tertullian - a master of Latin style, an orator and a lawyer. Great with the extended metaphor, and the wry observation. A little mad - it helps!

Broughton Knox - our local Aussie theologian never wrote much, but had a flair for the compact observation, the scribbled down note, the timely saying. Also a noted controversialist in the vein of a Luther. His piece on nude sunbathing in (I think) the Selected Works Vol 1 is a blog entry pure and simple!

Any others?

Augustine, our contemporary

Augustine, in giving voice to Roman hedonism, could be speaking of modern liberal Westerners:

"But the worshippers and admirers of these gods delight in imitating their scandalous iniquities, and are nowise concerned that the republic be less depraved and licentious. Only let it remain undefeated, they say, only let it flourish and abound in resources; let it be glorious by its victories, or still better, secure in peace; and what matters it to us? This is our concern, that every man be able to increase his wealth so as to supply his daily prodigalities, and so that the powerful may subject the weak for their own purposes. Let the poor court the rich for a living, and that under their protection they may enjoy a sluggish tranquillity; and let the rich abuse the poor as their dependants, to minister to their pride. Let the people applaud not those who protect their interests, but those who provide them with pleasure. Let no severe duty be commanded, no impurity forbidden. Let kings estimate their prosperity, not by the righteousness, but by the servility of their subjects. Let the provinces stand loyal to the kings, not as moral guides, but as lords of their possessions and purveyors of their pleasures; not with a hearty reverence, but a crooked and servile fear. Let the laws take cognizance rather of the injury done to another man's property, than of that done to one's own person. If a man be a nuisance to his neighbor, or injure his property, family, or person, let him be actionable; but in his own affairs let everyone with impunity do what he will in company with his own family, and with those who willingly join him. Let there be a plentiful supply of public prostitutes for every one who wishes to use them, but specially for those who are too poor to keep one for their private use. Let there be erected houses of the largest and most ornate description: in these let there be provided the most sumptuous banquets, where every one who pleases may, by day or night, play, drink, vomit, dissipate. Let there be everywhere heard the rustling of dancers, the loud, immodest laughter of the theatre; let a succession of the most cruel and the most voluptuous pleasures maintain a perpetual excitement. If such happiness is distasteful to any, let him be branded as a public enemy; and if any attempt to modify or put an end to it let him be silenced, banished, put an end to. Let these be reckoned the true gods, who procure for the people this condition of things, and preserve it when once possessed. Let them be worshipped as they wish; let them demand whatever games they please, from or with their own worshippers; only let them secure that such felicity be not imperilled by foe, plague, or disaster of any kind."

He even has a role for the religious!


City of God, II.20

Brock, on Augustine, on the Psalms

Brian Brock's readings of the Psalms are really doing it for me:

...the love of earthly goods without the love of their giver turns into a fear of losing them. And fear of losing them develops into a social rationality - an ethos. Augustine asks, Do all those who trust in technology live better lives? Do all those with comprehensive insurance coverage avoid disaster? Does ever-increasing investment in medicine stop untimely death? Augustine saw clearly that whole societies are structured around the avoidance of pain, embodying the escape from their primal fears.... 'Singing the Ethos of God' p. 161-2

I am sure Augustine didn't know about comprehensive insurance, but still, the point is made: security is never quite secured as we hope it will be.

Brock goes on...
Augustine shows how this vision of the blessed life shapes the Christian understanding of the church, which is conceived not as a safe haven from the world but as the focal point of a praising people caught up in Christ's service to the world.
This is the pilgrim church, we might say: secure, yes, but also exposed and vulnerable. Liable to get persecuted; but secure in hope.

Amor Sui: the problem of self-love

The sun is out in Oxford! Freya has a beer with a Macedonian theologian.

If I am to love my neighbour as myself -

how am I to love myself? What does self-love mean? How is self-love possible without narcissism, or when it lies so close to what the Bible says is sin's essence?

After all, Augustine says 'the primal destruction of man was self-love'.

BB Warfield said one day:

'The Reformation, inwardly considered, was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine's doctrine of grace over Augustine's doctrine of the church'.

Quite. This is what happens with thinkers with a legacy so enormous: it fissures, such that widely differing schools can both validly claim them as forebears.

The problem of heavenly rewards

That's me standing on the spot where Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer were burned.

The NT is full of talk about heavenly rewards for those who are persecuted for the sake of Christ. Think Matt 5:10-12, where the persecuted are those who can count themselves blessed, because they get the kingdom of God - and more!

What begins as a word of comfort to those who are under the pressure of persecution and possible death, or to those who have lost someone in the arena becomes, under less pressured conditions, not merely an encouragement to endure but a motivation to seek out a martyr’s death in order somehow to guarantee God’s approval. If the promise of vindication and reward comes so surely to those who find themselves under trial, then it would follow that one ought to seek out trials, or even perhaps provoke them if necessary. This was in fact exactly what happened in the first centuries of the Christian era, and it was a problem that Augustine aligned himself against. Yet, to be fair, this is only the consequence of the notion of heavenly rewards gone awry. The notion of heavenly rewards – as we have seen, deeply embedded in the Christian scriptures and the subsequent tradition – is problematic not just because of its problematic effects. In the first place, if renunciation of life and its pleasures and comforts is motivated by expectation that this very act of renunciation will bring as a certainty eternal life and heavenly bliss, is it not then the case that the act is really a form of self-interest? And further: is it not affirming the paradigm of rewards that it seems at first to reject? Secondly, we can see here that this desire for a heavenly prize can certainly mean that the martyr dies in a way which denies or diminishes the goodness of the created order – including the other people in it. This was certainly a feature of Origen’s construal of martyrdom. It is hard to see how martyrdom is a genuinely loving act in this case. A third difficulty is perhaps even more serious: the one who wills for himself to become a bloody martyr becomes his own judge; or at least, attempts to force God’s hand, to trigger divine approval as an automatic right. The one who designates himself ‘martyr’ is presumably conscious of imitating Christ in his death; and yet, this martyr presumes that his own death secures the merit, at least for himself, that only Christ’s death secures for any human person. All three of these problems are, at base, evidence for the accusation leveled against martyrs of all faiths that the apparent denial of the self is really a complete fabrication. Martyrdom is egotism of the worst kind.

This applies to the having of martyrs too: the church that designates and then celebrates martyrs is with not much subtlety proclaiming its own blessedness, it's own God-favouredness over and against even other churches. It is not incidental that the cult of the martyrs sprang up in the fourth and fifth centuries, as the various sees of the empire jockied for position. The keeping of the relics of the martyrs and the veneration of their tombs and shrines threatened also to subvert the power of their witness to the work of Christ. We see here the temptation of supplanting the divine judgment once more.

Paul Morgan, author of "The Pelagius Book"

Author Paul Morgan produced a novel in 2005 entitled "The Pelagius Book" which is an imaginary reconstruction of the observations of Pelagius' disciple Celestius. In an interview, Morgan gave a very interesting account of why Pelagius had attracted him - and Augustine revolted him:

The Augustinian line was that Christianity and the way the church would develop - and we should remember that the Christian church, which would inherit the mantle of Rome in providing a framework for how people saw the world, saw society, saw themselves socially and psychologically, for the Augustinians over large parts of the Empire, this was dominated by a really quite savage fatalism. They use the word 'grace' and really you know, we can't control our own destinies ultimately, and who knows, it's all a mystery and only God can tell. And really that's a huge absolution of responsibility, personal responsibility. There was a really quite fundamentalist attitude towards the Bible. They were extremely strong on original sin and the shamefulness of the body, but also very distrustful of the intellect as well. So I mean really, you had it pretty tough with the Augustinians, because they were against the body, but they were against the mind as well. In fact, there's some passage by Augustine where he says, 'We should be wary of drawing empirical conclusions from the evidence of our senses because they're rooted in the sinful bodily organs of sense, which can't be trusted.' I mean, you can't win with this guy...

Pelagius was almost certainly trained as a lawyer and you can see this in his words. One of the very fascinating fragments of his writings, or writing about him that does survive is fascinatingly a part of his trial for heresy, where he actually takes apart the argument for original sin in just a few sentences, on almost purely logical grounds. He just says, 'Look, God created us and gave us free will. Why would he give us free will and the capacity to be good and then at the same time not give us the ability to do it?' He almost has an 18th century view of the beauty of the logic and rationality of the world, and he sees us in the same way that God's giving free will to humans is part of this. So why would he snatch it away a few seconds after giving it to us? He isn't saying that we can't do evil, do profound evil, but it's our choice that if you want to do something terribly bad...you do it because you take it upon yourself, you don't do it because of some kind of strain of genetic sin that was passed down to you.

Morgan is asking the right questions, though of course he sees things through a very contemporary lens. He criticises Augustinianism for its fatalism, and for its failure to believe in the goodness of the creation. He condemns it for its immorality - for resigning itself to human evil and depending on a divine solution from outside rather than a human one from the inside. It IS a rejoinder to a kind of contemporary scientific fatalism of the genes - that strain of thought which reduces all human choices to genetics (or, in sociology, to environmental factors).

Problem is, of course, he doesn't really understand Augustine (...so he has no chance with Calvin or Edwards!)

Necessary Heresy 3: Pelagius, or, are we really that bad?

Pelagius was a man who took morality - and the moral responsibility of human beings - seriously. I have no doubt that he would have been witness to tremendous and brutal evils in his time, living as he did around the sack of Rome. His teaching was not that human beings are naturally good - that doctrine would have had no purchase at all amongst those who had seen limbs hacked off and heard the screams of the rape victims. Rather, he held that man and woman were free to choose the right or the wrong. There was no escape behind the veil of determinism, or pleading helplessness as if that was some resassurance. Each of us could and should and would be held fully accountable for our actions. We ought to hear the full impact of God's address to his people 'Be holy, as I am holy'. He would not have said it if was not a moral possibility. Moral pessimissim is insulting to the creator of human beings, who created not puppets or beasts, but persons. Life and death is set before human beings and we are bid by our maker to choose life, true (Dt 30:19)?

For Pelagius, there are three features in action - posse, velle and esse (power, will, realisation). Posse comes only from God, but the other two belong to us. When we choose to do the right, in order words, we can count on power from God to aid us. Not that Pelagius felt he was negating the sovereignty of God by such a teaching; far from it - man's free will occurs only within the sphere of God's permission and generosity, and ought to be used to the ends that God commands.

JND Kelly offers two futher points that Pelagius taught. First, the human will has no bias in favour of evil, not having inherited the spoiled will of Adam. After all, how can we be blamed for another's sin? That makes no moral sense. Adam set in train a custom or a habit of sin, but not a physical geneaology of sin.
Secondly, Pelagius also denies that man has a bias towards the good. Grace is provided as a grace of knowledge: through the law and the example of Christ, God provides us with all we need to know about what to do.

So, it is possible to say with the Rich Young Ruler, 'all these I have kept since childhood'. In fact, the Bible contains many examples of righteous lives. Now, this is not a trivial business for Pelagius: the merit on offer only comes through strenuous effort and application. He is well aware of the high destiny to which human beings have been called and to which they ought to aspire. No doubt he was also aware of Christians who saw grace as either a short-cut to righteousness or who felt that predestination as Augustine and others taught it was a counsel of despair. Here rather was a call to quit moaning and get on with living righteously. Here was a call to be as magnificent as human life can be. It was an attractive teaching then, and remains so...

Augustine on martyrdom

In particular it was the Donatist crisis that prompted Augustine’s reflection on martyrdom in the period 410-415 AD. For the Donatists, literal and bloody martyrdom was a measure of the authenticity and purity of their Christianity, in contrast to that of the tainted Church with its traditores. By contrast, Augustine emphasized the necessity of a true faith and the unity of the Church for authentic Christian martyrdom. Suffering itself is not enough – in fact, Augustine vigorously opposed the Donatist fixation on suffering as an end in itself. Without love, suffering is meaningless – therefore, the schismatics who attack the unity of the church cannot claim the title martyrs because they lack caritas. It was the cause, not the suffering, that made a martyr. The long Christian tradition of glorifying suffering had been a false trail – and pathologically so.

Need a martyr suffer then at all? When the persecutions had ended – what was to become of martyrdom, which had been such a feature of Christian self-identity in the first three centuries? Could there be a retention in some form of the martyrological impetus without the need for shedding of blood? One Christian answer, as Judith Perkins observes, was that the martyrological spirit was sublimated into ascetic practices as a way of replicating the test of the arena. But this was not quite Augustine’s teaching (though he wasn't opposed to asceticism). As he explained, Divine Providence had allowed persecutions in order that the ‘number of martyrs or witnesses for the truth might be completed or consecrated, and that by them proof might be given that we must endure all bodily sufferings in the cause of the holy faith and for the commendation of the truth’ (City of God X.32). In the new era, however, the war was to be waged inwardly. Trials and temptations were not found to be lacking now that the external threat had diminished. Now, temptations were persecutions. The lesson of the martyrs was there for the Christian to learn the virtues of self-sacrifice and patience.

Augustine and the atonement

This little passage from the City of God very helpfully clarifies something I was trying to say a week or so ago: that Jesus is not punished by God on the cross, though he pays the penalty for sin:

...the good and true Mediator has shown that it is sin which is evil, not the substance or nature of flesh, since that substance could be assumed, with a human soul, and preserved free from sin, and could be laid aside in death, and changed into something better by resurrection. He has shown that death itself, although it is the punishment for sin (a punishment which he paid for us, though being himself without sin), is not to be aovided by sinning but rather, if occasion offers, to be endured for the cause of right. For it is just because he died, and his death was not the penalty of sin, that he was able by dying to pay the price of our sins. X.24

And, to boot, a more positive role for the body than Augustine is often given credit for.

Augustine and Preaching

At the Latimer Conference we were treated to a fine paper from Peter Sanlon, a student of Catherine Pickstock's from Cambridge University, on 'The Preaching of Augustine'. It was very stimulating. Sanlon's claim is that Augustine's sermons have been scandalously overlooked in academic study of his work.

One point he made I would like to share here. Augustine as a preacher shaped his preaching according to his theology of humanity. Which is to say, he was aware of what it took to persuade a person, to ask a person to look into their heart in response to the word of God. He quoted Michael Hanby:

It is no accident that charity assumes a paramount importance in the Augustinian tradition and discretion in teh pagan, nor that delight in the one case and assent or choice in the other are the corresponding terms in their respective philosophies of action. The terms denote divergent ontological contexts within which selfhood, action and virtue are construed.

Would that modern day preachers thought so comprehensively about those they were addressing!

The scattered gathering

Augustine in The City of God writes:

Scripture tells us that Cain founded a city, whereas Abel, as a pilgrim, did not found one. For the City of the saints is up above, although it produces citizens here below, and in their persons the City is on pilgrimage until the time of its kingdom comes. At the time it will assemble all those citizens as they rise again in their bodies; and they will be given the promised kingdom, where with their Prince, ‘the king of ages’, they will reign, world without end. (XV.1)

The church is an eschatologically gathered polis, in other words. In the book of Acts, the scattering of the disciples - because of persecution - is the impetus for mission. It parallels the scattering of the peoples in the early chapters of Genesis. In this way, the church ought not to exalt in its earthly structures as if these are in some way more than replicas or shadows of the eschatological reality in which it really has its existence. The church ought not to seek to foreshorten the eschatological gap between present experience and the promise that lies ahead. It ought not to proclaim the end of its pilgrimage, or that in coming to one place on the globe it has finally arrived at its destination, its promised land, its Jerusalem. It ought not to imagine that whatever unity it can construct here on earth is the definitive eschatological unity that will one day be realised. In fact, the organisational unity of churches may be a hinderance to the real unity and fellowship of Christians.

Admittedly, Augustine may not have taken this thought in this direction. For him, the impressive historical reality and success of the church was a very strong apologetic for its message...

Theological Interpretation of Scripture

I have just taken receipt of the first title in a new series of commentaries, the SCM (or, in the US, Brazos) Theological Commentary on the Bible - Acts, by the late Jaroslav Pelikan. The exciting feature of the new series? No biblical studies specialists have been asked to take part! (Hooray!) The authors are theologians, self-consciously standing in the tradition of the great theologian-expositors of the history of the churches: Origen, Augustine, Calvin, Luther, Barth.

The editor of the series, RR Reno, in his series preface, explains the need for such a thing. The suspicion since the 19th century has been that theology has in fact made reading the Bible harder rather than easier. As a result, biblical studies and theology have evolved as almost seperate disciplines entirely. These days it would be considered the greatest impertinence for a theologian to publish a biblical commentary.

Is doctrine, then, not a moldering scrim of antique prejudice obscuring the Bible, but instead a clarifying agent, an enduring tradition of theological judgments that amplifies the living voice of Scripture? ... This series of biblical commentaries was born out of the conviction that dogma clarifies rather than obscures.

In fact, it is biblical studies that have been responsible for the greater obscurity and the fog that has descended on the bible. The bible needs to be released from the dead hand of the philologists and given back to the churches!

As Reno continues:

We cannot speak for contemporary biblical scholars, but as theologians we know that we have long been trained to defend our fortresses of theological concepts and formulations. And we have forgotten the skilles of interpretation. Like stroke victims, we must rehabilitate our exegetical imaginations...

Amen to that.

Samson: a tricky case study

Then Samson called to the LORD and said, "O Lord GOD, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be avenged upon the Philistines for one of my two eyes." And Samson grasped the two middle pillars upon which the house rested, and he leaned his weight upon them, his right hand on the one and his left hand on the other. And Samson said, "Let me die with the Philistines." Then he bowed with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords and upon all the people that were in it. So the dead whom he slew at his death were more than those whom he had slain during his life.


A suicide bomber of a kind? Or a glorious martyr?

Augustine for his part writes that it was an exception ordered by God:
When God orders, and shows without ambiguity that he orders. no one will bring an accusation against obedience. Who will lay a charge against a loyal compliance?

A convenient case of the 'teleological suspension of the ethical', a la Abraham and Isaac?

Glorious...

As the Westminster Confession states it, the supreme goal of human beings is “to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” Human destiny – our noblest aspiration - lies Godwards: in the experience of heavenly bliss enfolded in his arms, glorifying him by loving him for his own sake.
The goal of glorifying God is not a means to some other end: it is its own end. As Moltmann puts it, “it is simply meaningful in itself.” As Augustine, in his On Christian Doctrine, explained: “sinners make use of God in order to use the world; but believers make use of the world in order to enjoy God.” Therefore, our relating to our world and even to ourselves is ordered to this glorious purpose.

And as Moltmann sees it (picking up an idea with strong roots in the Reformed tradition) the glorification of God is not primarily an ethical thing: it is aesthetic. This idea picks up from scripture the visually radiant scenes of God’s glory: Moses’ radiant face, the encounter of Isaiah with God in Isaiah 6, the glory of the light of God in John’s gospel, the woman’s hair in 1 Corinthians 11 and the sheer glow of the heavenly city in Revelation 21-22. The appropriate response to the vision of God’s glory is doxological; and so we are lead by the heavenly creatures and the beasts in Isaiah and Revelation: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty, the whole earth is full of his glory.”

How does this relate to our question? The goal of glorifying God is goal in the sense of a telos; but it is also our true destiny, because God himself will bring it about. But how? Moltmann describes the glorification of God not merely in terms of the self-glorification of a narcissistic deity, or as the result (in Hegelian terms) of his self-realisation through the process of history, but more as the overspill [my term] of his divine life into the creation. The language of the pleroma, the fullness of God, in John 1:16, Eph 3:19 and elsewhere reflects this idea, as does the remarkable promise of God being all in all in 1 Corinthians 15:28. As Moltmann puts it, “The fulness of God is the rapturous fullness of the divine life; a life that communicates itself with inexhaustible creativity…The fulness of God is radiant light, light reflected in the thousand brilliant colours of created things.” Jesus himself of course continually compared this future for humanity with God as a joyful wedding feast. It is a moment of ecstatic consummation to which the first imagined human reaction is profound joy.

The human identity is thus ordered to this particular destiny. It is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which took place by the power of the Holy Spirit (Rom 4:17) that is the type of our destiny, sown in dishonour and raised in glory. Having made reconciliation of all things in heaven and on earth, Jesus of Nazareth is the exact radiance of God’s being, the image of the invisible God: he fairly glows with God. Remarkably, the transformation was won from within the human sphere, by a man in the likeness of sinful flesh.

The promise of Christian eschatology is then something like this, from Philippians 3: “…our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Saviour from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.” The new humanity will be glorious, but glorious because it is washed in the overspill of God’s own glory.

Hauerwas vs O'Donovan on martyrdom

Stanley Hauerwas asserts with no small vigour the view that by ‘taking up Rome’s project’ and making it their own, the Christians were bankrupting themselves of their own witness.[1] In accepting the power of Rome as a weapon for their own armoury, the church was conceding its own identity to the world against which the martyrs had so successfully fought. Martyrdom stood as a sign against Rome’s attempt to victimize Christians. Though the refusal to obey Caesar was (it seemed to the pagans) an irrational act, it witnessed to a higher rule; and by doing so, undid that rule’s claim to absoluteness:
‘The church – exactly because it does not seek to rule through violence, though it necessarily manifests God’s rule – triumphs by remembering the victory of the Lamb through the witness of the martyrs.’[2]

The new offer of a share in Rome’s rule was an understandable temptation, because Christians had always proclaimed the ultimacy of God’s politics; and here was a chance to exercise that politics – to demonstrate in practice the truth of the claim. For the ancient Christians so for the Christians of today: the temptation of collusion with rule threatens to dim the light of the church’s witness to the risen Lord of all. Hauerwas sees the issue as being ‘how we [i.e. the church] can witness to God’s rule through church without ruling’.[3] In other words: no matter how friendly and peaceable the offer of co-operation be, the answer for Hauerwas will always be ‘no’.
For Oliver O’Donovan, however, the victory of the martyrs is to be understood somewhat differently. He finds Hauerwas’s version of Christendom to be historically doubtful, for Hauerwas too readily assumes that the Christians who applauded the conversion of Constantine did so because they wanted to pursue the growth of the church by means of the apparatus of the empire. In fact, the picture is more complex: there were those who warned about the dangers, and those who declared no more than that the ruler had submitted to the rule of Christ. They were not ‘taking up Rome’s project’. This is not collaboration with coercion, necessarily. Rather, the very hope of vindication for which the martyrs yearned had, in part and temporarily, come to pass. Yet, under the ministrations of a Hauerwas, this same hope comes to look like a temptation! Rather, for O’Donovan:
…since true martyrdom is a powerful force and its resistance to Antichrist effective, the church must be prepared to welcome the homage of the kings when it is offered to the Lord of the martyrs.[4]

It is not surprising – indeed it makes good theological sense – that the rule of God should manifest itself in history though not yet absolutely. Martyrdom is not merely a stance of eternal dissidence; it is a witness to the rule of God in Christ. As such, it can be faithful witness to say yes as well as no. Hauerwas’s martyrs die shouting ‘they make take our lives, but you will never take our freedom’ just as Mel Gibson’s William Wallace did. And yet, as Augustine himself said ‘it not the punishment, but the cause, that makes a martyr'.

[1] Stanley Hauerwas, After Christendom? How the Church Is to Behave If Freedom, Justice, and a Christian Nation Are Bad Ideas (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1991), p. 39
[2] Ibid., p. 38
[3] Ibid., p. 43 Hauerwas’s somewhat surprising ally is Augustine (or at least, his re-reading of Augustine).
[4] O'Donovan, The Desire of the Nations - Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology, p. 215

Constantinianism, continued...

If on the one hand John of Patmos accentuates the bestial aspect of the imperium, it is a tone moderated by the refusal of Paul to see the powers as falling outside of divine providence. For both, the expectation was that hostility to those bearing the Messianic name would be a feature of the new age. This is as it turned out, although sporadically rather than consistently in the first few centuries. For some Christians, the lack of hostility was problematic, so accustomed had they become to identifying with the idea of martyrdom. The longing for a martyr’s death was so strong that Augustine, for one, spent not a little effort in reminding Christians that martyrdom was not to be invited. Origen in his Exhortation to Martyrdom falls just short of recommending Christians provoke it where it is not on offer. Stories are told of Christians presenting themselves for martyrdom at the local governor’s door, much to his annoyed surprise! The martyrs had been so exalted that it was hard to think of martyrdom as not the norm; and Origen (for one) had declared it a sure path to heaven.

Thus the conversion of Constantine, which itself almost immediately followed a period of intense persecution (that of Diocletian), was not an eventuality for which there were obvious theological resources. As O’Donovan writes ‘[T]here was no revealed political doctrine in the New Testament, prescribing how the state was to be in Christ.’[1] The Christians were as unprepared for the peace as they had been prepared for the war. Where it had been the tendency prior to 315 to demonize the imperium as implacably hostile to the kingdom of God (forgetful of Romans 13), in the new dispensation it was perhaps rather the tendency to sacralize the emperor. The temptation was to see this as the moment of victory – that here was an end to the need for mission because the mission had apparently been accomplished.

[1] Oliver O'Donovan, The Desire of the Nations - Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 219

Mmm... pears...

Augustine’s development of the biblical tradition intensifies the typological reading of the OT found in Hebrews and also in Paul. Human longing may have false objects, including that found in the form of nostalgia for the past. However, this longing for the soul’s true home has a true object in the city of God revealed in the Son. But it is not enough to say that this lies completely in the future: two more observations are required.
Firstly, the Son ‘Today’ reveals the time of the Father, such that the city of God is now here already present, and the Church in Christ is now already present in it. Though invisible, it is visible to the eyes of faith.
Second, Augustine’s point is that the fact of the longing itself reveals that is something remembered; and thus not only does the city of God lie ahead but it is also the soul’s origin. It is not then the longing for the past itself that is denied but rather any imperfect and merely penultimate objects of this longing.

Which for Augustine, means pears... He says in the Confessions:

'There is an appeal to the eye in beautiful things [like pears!]...This life we live here below has its own attractiveness, grounded in the measure of beauty it has and its harmony with the beauty of all lesser things....Yet in the enjoyment of al such things we commit sin if through immorderate inclination to them - for though they are good, they are of the lowest order of good - things higher and better are forgotten, even You O Lord...' (II.5)

Like Christ, the martyr experiences in the most extreme form the press of time.The witness that the martyr makes is to his renunciation of the nostalgic vision of the past with its ripe pears and her affirmation of homesickness for the kingdom of God.

At the crossroads...

The Church and its members stand at the crossroads between times, as it were; and the complete pattern of progress on the journey is not visible to it. And yet there is a sense in which the journey is already over, and the Church has come to its heavenly home.

In his poem “Burnt Norton” Eliot writes (with strong allusion to the incarnation and passion) ‘only through time time is conquered’. Is ‘conquered’ the best theological verb to use? The incarnation of the Logos in time offers time to a divine experiencing of it. Time, and its sinister twin, Death, were not avoided by him by transcended in him. If they are ‘conquered’ by him it is not because they are denied by him but rather because they are experienced by him. Both remain, but their negative affects are attenuated.

As von Balthasar (reading Augustine) says, temporality as it stands ‘is an absence of the creature from unified eternity’ – which means death. It is not possible to grasp eternity in time: even Augustine’s impressive inventory of his memory does not lead him unambiguously to that condition. It is only by obedience, and in ‘acceptance of the renunciation which is imposed upon him’ that the journeying Christian and the pilgrim Church can experience that indwelling of the eternal in the temporal.

Remembering Augustine

The Confessions themselves represent an attempt to adopt a stance to the past that avoids the nostalgic vision for the pre-conversion self. Augustine attempts not so much to have done with the past but to order it aright by narrating it as confessio - adopting a stance critical of his former self. What is intriguing in relation to our current discussion is the philosophy/theology of memory he gives in book X of the Confessions. Memory was described by Plato in terms of the soul’s reminiscence of its own origin within the world of ideas. Augustine baptises this conception;[1] and because the origin of the soul which it remembers is now the eternal and living God, the capacity of memory is found to have a indescribable depth. Commenting on 1 Cor 2:11 (‘no man knows the things of a man, save the spirit of a man that is in him’), he explains that it is only through God, whom man himself does not know, that man can know himself (X.5-6). God, then, lies within his memory, and yet is not contained by his memory.[2] This tension is replicated in the human subject itself: the vast caves of the memory hold immensities that are not conceivable even to the soul that contains them. Augustine’s subterranean journey through the caverns of his own memory leads to encounter with his own past self:

…in my memory too I meet myself – I recall myself, what I have done, when and where and in what state of mine I was when I did it. X.8

However, this strange meeting is partial and fleeting:

In fact I cannot totally grasp all that I am. Thus the mind is not large enough to contain itself: but where can that part of it be which it does not contain? X.8

How shall he then find the God for whom he searches? He equates the search for God with the search for ‘the happy life’ (X.20). This longing for the happy life is universal, he says, even amongst those who cannot consciously remember being happy, strictly speaking. Yet this longing for happiness is evidence that in fact all human beings have known the happy life – for if it were not in their memories they would not know it to love it.[3] God has never been absent from his memory, in fact; he always deigned to dwell in it:

Certain I am that You dwell in it, because I remember You since the time I first learned of You, and because I find You in it when I remember You. (X.25).

[1] Roland Teske, "Augustine's Philosophy of Memory," in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, ed. Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 150
[2] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Man in History: A Theological Study (London; Sydney: Sheed & Ward, 1968), p. 2-3
[3] Teske, "Augustine's Philosophy of Memory," p. 154; Balthasar, Man in History: A Theological Study, p. 5