Tag Archives: Augustine

February 13, 2026

Augustine: Conversion to Confessions, by Robin Lane Fox, A Review, Part Two

By Clarke Morledge

Robin Lane Fox is one of the world’s preeminent historians of the classical world. A few years ago, I read his The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian, which I would recommend reading, if you want an in-depth epic history of that cultural time period. I kept turning back to Fox’s work on a trip to visit friends in Sicily, back in 2022. I was in Sicily for only a few days, but I visited both the Valley of Temples and Syracuse, two ancient sites from the classical world which Fox covered in his book.

Having an interest in Saint Augustine, I grabbed a copy of Fox’s Augustine: Conversion to Confessions, and finished reading it not too long ago. Though captivated by Fox’s story of the classical world, I was curious to know of his take on Augustine, considering the fact that Fox is a professed atheist, with little interest in Christianity aside from scholarship. I was bracing myself for some occasional crudities in Fox’s writing style. To be sure, Fox is as entertaining as he is erudite. In describing Augustine’s pre-Christian life as a follower of the Persian philosopher, Mani, Fox whimsically and colorfully concludes:

Manichaeism is the only world religion to have believed in the redemptive power of farts (Fox, p. 180).

Here is the second of a two-part blog series covering Robin Lane Fox’s book, which examines roughly the first half of Augustine’s remarkable life. We pick up the story after Augustine returns to North Africa. A few years earlier, Augustine had become a Christian, under the preaching of bishop Ambrose in Milan. In North Africa, Augustine’s career as a rhetorician had started to gain him an audience when he debated opponents of the historically orthodox Christian church. In this latter part of Fox’s work, we learn more about how Augustine read, and at times, misread, certain passages of the Bible…. and why…. glimpsing into how such readings/misreadings have reverberated throughout later Christian history, particularly in the West.

Robin Lane Fox’s Augustine: Conversion to Confessions examines roughly the first half of the great Christian saint’s life, leading up the Augustine’s most famous written work, Confessions.

 

Augustine as a Parish Priest

Augustine had survived becoming a priest in 391, after having only received baptism four years earlier. Augustine’s career as a churchman was now in full swing. This was ten years after the second great ecumenical council met, the Council of Constantinople (381), where the Nicene Creed, which was originally drafted in 325, was finally completed. By the end of the decade, Augustine is thought to have finished his most well-known work, the Confessions.

Among the other great church leaders Augustine corresponded with, Augustine wrote Jerome, the polyglot ascetic scholar a few years older than Augustine, who was working on a new translation of the Bible, the Vulgate, from the Hebrew where it was warranted, into Latin. Augustine quarreled with Jerome primarily over two subjects. First, Augustine was not in favor of Jerome’s efforts to translate the Old Testament directly from Hebrew, preferring the Greek Septuagint instead, the primary Old Testament translation used by Greek-speaking Christians. Augustine was concerned that various Latin translators had difficulty trying to render the Hebrew into Latin accurately, and Augustine wondered if Jerome would make the same kinds of errors. Jerome, who certainly knew the ancient languages much better, was not impressed with Augustine’s objection.

Augustine also was concerned with Jerome’s interpretation of Galatians 2:11-21, where Paul in his anger rebuked Peter. Peter had refused table fellowship with Gentile believers, preferring to eat only with Jewish Christians, an act which infuriated Paul.

Jerome was persuaded that Paul was merely pretending to be angry with Peter. Jerome did not find an “angry Paul” to be consistent with his image of a pious Paul at such odds with Peter. Jerome supposed that Paul employed a display of  an “angry Paul” in order to teach to the Galatians a theological point. Augustine, on the other hand, believed that Jerome’s view suggested that Paul was being deceptive, and that this was unbecoming to think that this form of lying could be found within the text of God’s Word (Fox, p. 667ff).

Augustine’s engagement with Jerome on this helped to spark what would become Augustine’s last book he wrote as a priest, On Lying. The Bible has several incidents whereby people lie, but then are praised for their deception. Fox notes that in Exodus, the Egypt midwives told lies in order to protect newborn sons of the Hebrews, and yet God caused them to prosper (Fox, p. 653). Rahab in the Book of Joshua lies to her fellow Jericho people, telling them that the Hebrew spies left a long time ago, all while they hid in her house, and yet Rahab is praised as a hero of faith in Hebrews 11:31.  In John 7:8-10, Jesus himself says to his brothers that he was not going up to the festival, but later on he went anyway in private.

Fox observes that Augustine believed that “if lies and pretence are once admitted in the scriptures, they will spread far and wide. Like destructive moths or worms, he now says, they will consume whole chests of clothing until nothing but shreds remain” (Fox, p. 757).  But considering that Augustine acknowledged that even Jesus did not tell the whole truth to his disciples, Augustine reread his text and found it “thorny,” and so never published it with his other works (Fox, p. 653). Augustine was perhaps right to call out Jerome on his peculiar view of Paul’s dispute with Peter in Galatians, but even Augustine never felt completely satisfied with his own answer to Jerome on the question of deception in Scripture.

Augustine was continuously wrestling with other challenges he found within the text of Scripture. Until 395, Augustine had pretty much accepted the common view based on the Book of Revelation that a one thousand reign of Christ on earth will follow Christ’s return, prior to God’s final judgment. Christians today would call this view of the future “premillennialism,” that the return of Christ will precede an earthly millennial kingdom. However, Augustine changed his mind on this, believing that there would be no such earthly millennial period. This millennial period was more figurative, and that the peace and rest a believer would experience would be delayed until after God’s final judgment (Fox, p. 670). This gave birth to the idea that the reign of Christ, symbolized by the millennium, was actually the age of the church, a view typically known today as “amillennialism.”

Augustine also wrestled with how to interpret God’s hatred of Esau and love for Jacob in Romans 9. Originally, Augustine believed that God simply foreknew whether Esau and Jacob would freely choose faith. But Augustine came to reject this interpretation, thinking that this still made salvation dependent to a certain degree on human effort, something that went contrary to his understanding of the workings of God’s grace (Fox, p. 675). Yet Fox acknowledges that Paul’s treatment of Esau and Jacob in Romans 9 had to deal with the calling of Israel and the Gentiles. It had nothing to do with Esau and Jacob as individuals and their relationship to Adam and the fall. Fox believes that Augustine misread Paul in Romans 9, as Augustine was preoccupied with questions about grace and human freewill, in his wrestling with his Manichee past (Fox, p. 678). A number of believing Christian scholars today concur with Fox’s conclusion.

 

Augustine as the Bishop of Hippo

Bishop Valerius saw that Augustine was more than quite capable in his rhetorical skills, and Valerius had become quite elderly and needed someone to succeed him. So he had Augustine promoted to bishop as well there in Hippo in 396. Less than a year later, Augustine began working on his most famous and influential literary work, Confessions.

The Confessions of Saint Augustine serve as the terminus for Fox’s biographical narrative of Augustine’s life. In the Confessions, Augustine admits of his sins which had kept him from knowing God. Much of the Confessions is an exploration into the deeper meaning behind one of Augustine’s most memorable quotes:

“Great You are, O Lord, and greatly to be praised… You have made us so as to turn to You and our heart is restless until it finds rest in You” (Quoted in Fox, p, 710-711).

In the Confessions, Augustine finds deeper meanings found within the opening chapters of Genesis.  For example, whereas the text of Scripture teaches that humans are to “be fruitful and multiply,” this was difficult for someone like Augustine who was now committed to his celibate ideals. Instead, he interprets Genesis on this point to command that one should “multiply” fruitful meanings while pondering on Scripture (Fox, p. 740).  Instead of holding to the help of Mani, the “Paraclete,” his former mentor, to reveal the meaning of the Scriptures, he holds to “the true Holy Spirit,” in discerning the “allegorical meanings in the text” (Fox, p. 748).

Augustine continued to be troubled by Manichaean attempts to dismiss what was considered to be rather crude statements found in the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament. As a result, Augustine continued to accept Ambrose of Milan’s allegorical method of interpretation as a satisfying apologetic for Christianity.  But such allegorical readings have had their downsides, as in Augustine’s belief that the closure of a gate in Jerusalem spoken of by the prophet Ezekiel symbolized the perpetual virginity of Mary.

 

Augustine as a Biblical Interpreter

Fox points out that Augustine had a habit of overreading certain allegorical interpretations into biblical texts in ways that strain at credulity. Augustine took the “tunics of skins” (Genesis 3:21) which Adam and Eve were given after the fall in the garden to symbolize human mortality. When Genesis 1:1 says that: “In the beginning, God made heaven and earth,” Augustine read this as saying that this “in the beginning” should be read as “in Christ” (Fox, p. 543).

But such allegorical and other misreadings were not entirely his fault. The Latin translations of the Bible Augustine were depending on were flawed at certain points. Psalm 4:8 reads like this in many modern translations:

“In peace I will both lie down and sleep; for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety” (ESV).

Yet in Augustine’s Latin translation, it read as:

“In peace in ‘it itself‘ I will go to sleep and take my slumber. You, O lord, set me in hope.”

The phrase “it itself” was a Latin mistranslation of a Hebrew word often omitted in modern translations to simply mean “at once” (the Lexham English Bible being a notable exception which includes the phrase: “In peace I will lie down and sleep at once“).  But Augustine took the Latin rendering to be a reference to God, to make it read as “In peace, in God I will go to sleep and take my slumber.” Augustine uses this interpretation of the Latin mistranslation to mean “God” some 1700 times in his writings.

This just goes to show you that simple, inconsequential misreadings of the Bible can have a ripple effect in how we read the Bible. Let that be lesson for all of us who read and take the Bible seriously!

Furthermore, the last word of the verse in Augustine’s Latin, “hope,” was yet another Latin mistranslation of a Hebrew word preserved in our modern translations as “safety.”  “Hope” and “safety” can have overlapping meanings, but the two concepts are not identical. Fox comments that if Jerome, who undertook a major effort to produce an authoritative Latin version of the Bible, the Vulgate, had read Augustine’s commentary, “he would have acidly dismissed it as based on a Latin translator’s cluster of errors” (Fox, p. 458-459).

The three lusts, an important part of Augustine’s theology of sin, are described in 1 John 2:16:

“For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world.” (NASB).

The Greek word translated as “boastful,” in the third lust, was mistranslated in Augustine’s Latin Bible as “curiosity.”  But Augustine’s Latin better fit the three lusts which delayed his own conversion: “the pleasure of the flesh, misplaced curiosity and worldly ambition.”

Augustine was certainly “curious” in his sinful misdeeds, but to be “curious” is not the same as to be “boastful.”

Another example of Augustine working with poor Latin translations of the Bible is found in Romans 7:24-25a. In an modern translation like the ESV, we read:

“Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

However, in Augustine’s Latin translation, which Augustine never bothered to check in Greek because his knowledge of Greek was so poor, the “thanks” at the beginning of verse 25 was rendered “grace,” as in the “grace of God through Jesus Christ” would deliver him from this body of death (Fox, p. 557). This was a case of the right teaching derived from the wrong verse.

 

Sandro Botticelli, Sant’ Agostino nello studio (Saint Augustine in the studio), Fresco, Chiesa di San Salvatore in Ognissanti, Florence.

 

Augustine’s Misstep on Original Sin

The most egregious example is from Augustine’s Latin mistranslation of Romans 5:12, which has led other interpreters astray as well. In certain modern translations, like the ESV, the text correctly reads:

“Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned—”

Correctly translated, “death” is the subject of the phrase “death spread to all men because all sinned.”

Augustine’s Latin version which he used mistook the “because” to be “in whom.” In this mistranslation, the subject is misplaced and thought to be a reference to the “one man,” namely Adam, “in whom all sinned“:

“Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men in whom all sinned—”

This gives the wrong impression that not only do we inherit a proclivity towards sin, due to Adam’s example, we are also declared guilty of Adam’s sin. Augustine’s dispute against Pelagius depended a lot on this notion of imputed guilt, not simply a proclivity towards sinful actions, being bestowed on all humans following Adam. Not only are we responsible for our own sin, we are also made responsible for Adam’s sin, a misinterpretation of the Bible which has been passed down through the ages (Fox, pp. 667, 677).

When coupled with Augustine’s belief about the sacraments, in his dispute with the Donatists, Augustine’s doctrine of original guilt has cast a shadow over the Western church.  The Donatists had made it a habit to rebaptize orthodox Catholics who had received their original baptism from a discredited priest. Since the Bible taught that there is only one baptism (Ephesians 4:4-6), to be rebaptized by anyone was considered a grave sin.

Anyone growing up in a Christian tradition where infant baptism is normally practiced will surely wrestle with this if they encounter friends who hold to the doctrine of “believer’s baptism;” that is, baptism should only be administered to someone who has made a profession of faith, which therefore excludes infants from being candidates for baptism. This issue can trouble the conscience of a believer, whether or not any teaching on “baptismal regeneration” is in view.

Augustine’s response was that the moral disposition of the priest performing baptism could not invalidate the sacrament of baptism, assuming the baptism was done correctly: if it was administered by water, if it was performed in a Trinitarian matter of being baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and if it was done with the intention of performing the sacrament.

So if a Donatist were to baptize someone, who had not been baptized before, and that person was received back into the orthodox Catholic church, that person need not undergo a rebaptism. It was the act of baptism that mattered, not the one administering the baptism, which corresponds to the Latin formula: ex opere operato. However, in conjunction with the doctrine of original sin/guilt, as Augustine understood it, this meant that any unbaptized child would effectively be damned if that child died before they received baptism. For Augustine, baptism was considered to be the means by which grace was given to the person, a fundamental idea in Augustine’s theology of sacraments, which eventually became a flashpoint in the 16th century dispute between Protestants and Roman Catholics.

Augustine developed much of his doctrine of grace in his later years with his dispute with Pelagius. However, since the dispute with Pelagius came after writing of the Confessions, Fox does not explore this in Augustine: Conversion to Confessions.

 

Critical Reflection on Fox’s Augustine: Conversion to Confessions

Veteran evangelical scholar Gerald Bray assesses Fox’s work on Augustine in a manner similar to how I portray it in my own blogging about the book:

Lane Fox knows an enormous amount about the ancient world and brings his vast learning to bear in an eloquent and fascinating way. Digression is his strength, as whole chapters are taken up with studies of Manichaeism, Neo-Platonism, and the like. These descriptions are worth the price of the book.

In reading Fox’s Augustine: Conversions to Confessions, you will discover a wealth of information about the ancient world, a treasure that has helped to get me hooked on learning more about ancient history. This is spectacular. Nevertheless, Bray concludes that Fox’s work on this first half of Augustine’s life is not without fault:

But it’s when we come to the heart of the matter that Lane Fox lets us down most. His account of Augustine’s conversion contains an extended examination of the possible meaning of “tolle lege,” which led Augustine to take up Paul’s letter to the Romans. This is followed by an equally lengthy examination of the possible meanings of the text that moved his heart to turn to Christ. In the end, he concludes Augustine got it all wrong but remained convinced God had spoken to him anyway. His life was turned around, but only by mistake!

I read that section of Fox’s narrative and walked away from it like Bray has done. Fox offers some cogent critiques of Augustine’s interpretations of the Bible, but not all of his critiques work as well. As a committed non-believer, Robin Lane Fox’s presentation of Christianity as articulated by Augustine in his Confessions is vulnerable to critique.

For example, Fox claims that Augustine “evades the word ‘all’” in 1 Timothy 2:3-4, which says that “God our Saviour… wills that all men should be saved.” For Augustine, this “all” means “many” or “all sorts,” as in “all kinds” of people will be saved (Fox, p. 674).

Presumably, Fox’s assertion that when Augustine “evades the word ‘all’,” Fox means that the plain reading of 1 Timothy 2:3-4 is teaching a doctrine of universal salvation, a doctrine that Augustine does not accept. After all, Augustine was one of the most influential of the church fathers to teach the doctrine of eternal conscious torment. In Augustine’s mind, the experience of an eternal hell was not simply a psychological or sociological kind of torment, but it was a physical one as well. As New Testament scholar Paula Fredriksen says in her epic work, Augustine and the Jews, reviewed elsewhere on Veracity, Augustine actually envisioned that the number of the saved within the whole of humanity would actually be very few.

But leaving aside those weightier concerns about the ultimate fate of non-believers, Augustine’s interpretation of 1 Timothy 2:3-4 is not necessarily an evasion as Fox argues, as other contemporary commentators suggest that Augustine might be at least somewhat correct here, even if the text itself is not entirely clear. Many translations today take the forceful edge off of God being the one who “wills” that all individuals be saved and indicate that it is God’s “desire” that all individuals be saved, a less deterministic posture. Here is how the ESV renders the passage:

This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

Fox’s assumptions about what the Bible actually teaches does not end there. Fox dismisses the story of creation as told in Genesis is “untrue,” from the viewpoint of modern science (Fox, p. 224). Fox claims that the Old Testament “predicted nothing about Christianity” (Fox, p. 228). Fox adds that “critical readers nowadays recognize no such harmony in the Gospels,” which reconciles the differences between those Gospels (Fox, p. 270).

These claims are no surprise as coming from an author who in 1991 wrote the book, The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible, where the publisher’s description of the book says Fox :

“….introduces us to a Bible that came late to monotheism, propounded a jumble of conflicting laws, and whose authors wrote under assumed name.”

 

Robin Lane Fox: Historian vs. Biblical Interpreter

While Fox, as an historian, has read enough biblical studies to offer some various fair and accurate critiques of Augustine, he apparently has not read enough to address some of these more broad-minded claims he makes against historic orthodox Christian faith in general. The evolutionary model of an Old Testament that morphs from polytheism into monotheism over time falls short when compared to the careful analysis of how progressive revelation actually works in the Bible. Scholarship on the Book of Leviticus, and other priestly material in the Old Testament, over the last fifty years, demonstrates a type of coherency of laws that is often missed by casual readers of the Bible.  And finally, various claims made about forgeries existing in our New Testament have been met with resistance by other capable scholars.

This should suffice to say, that not all biblical scholars engaged in historical criticism come to the same conclusions Fox finds so compelling, as readers of the Veracity blog will know (see particularly the review of Jesus Contradicted, by Michael Licona). Augustine sought to harmonize discrepancies which he acknowledged existed in the Bible. But as New Testament scholar Michael Licona has shown, Augustine saw some limits to common harmonization techniques. When Augustine ran into such difficulties, he would look for a deeper spiritual meaning found within the text of Scripture.

For example, according to Michael Licona, Augustine recognized a discrepancy between Mark’s version of Jesus’ baptism and Matthew’s version of Jesus’ baptism. When the voice from heaven speaks, Mark 1:11 reads:

And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” (ESV)

Yet in Matthew, the same verse reads (Mathew 3:17):

And behold, a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” (ESV)

It is as though in Mark the voice is speaking to Jesus himself, whereas in Matthew the voice is speaking to the crowd that was listening in.

A persistent harmonizer might conclude that the voice said both of these statements, once to Jesus and then once to the crowds, or vice-versa. But Augustine thought that this was a more improbable way to interpret the text, and taking harmonization way too far. For some might be tempted to say that the entire narrative about Jesus’ baptism happened multiple times. However, such a judgment would be far fetched, as the Gospels consistently portray Jesus’ baptism as a once in time event.

Instead, Augustine concluded that perhaps Mark is giving us a verbatim account of what was said, whereas Matthew is reframing the heavenly speech in order to instruct the crowds, suggesting a more spiritual dimension. The meaning of what the text is saying is preserved across the Gospels, regardless of how the Gospel author articulates the exact verbiage of the voice. Augustine’s approach to this text offers an improvement over his typical Ambrosian tendency to look for an allegorical interpretation, when faced with such difficulties.

As Augustine put it in his Harmony of the Gospels, the Gospel authors intentionally introduced such differences, while preserving the meaning:

…. At the same time, while preserving the sense intact, they use different modes of expression in reproducing the terms of the voice which came from heaven.

While Augustine at times shook off a strict kind of harmonization as unnecessary, he nevertheless found the Gospels to be compatible with one another, sharing the same essential message, even with a more nuanced understanding of what constitutes “harmony.” This would go against Fox’s inclination towards skepticism, which suggests that there is “no such harmony” between the Gospels.

While I do not share in Dr. Fox’s ultimate conclusions regarding Christianity, I still find him to be a compelling and fascinating writer. I have the Kindle version of Augustine: Conversions to Confessions, but I was primarily engaged in the Audible version, read by Michael Page. On a long road trip to Indiana last year, Augustine: Conversions to Confessions,  clocking in at 25 1/2 hours, made for a good companion that kept me alert the whole way.

It remains to be seen whether or not Robin Lane Fox will continue with another book examining the life of Augustine following the Confessions. Augustine was roughly 43 years old when he worked on the Confessions. He would go on to live another 33 years of service as a Christian bishop in Hippo, until his death. After enjoying Augustine: Conversions to Confessions, I hope that Dr. Fox might continue on and complete this biography of this extraordinary and influential Christian leader and thinker of the early church.

For other Veracity blog posts about Augustine, see the following:

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January 30, 2026

Augustine: Conversion to Confessions, by Robin Lane Fox, A Review, Part One

By Clarke Morledge

Saint Augustine of Hippo is the most influential early church father of the Western church. Numerous church doctrines, such as original sin, have the indelible stamp of the late 4th / early 5th century North African bishop imprinted upon the minds and hearts of millions of Christians down to the present day.

Roman Catholics look to Augustine for understanding the theology of sacraments, while all of the major magisterial Protestant leaders of the 16th century owe a debt to Augustine. Martin Luther himself was an Augustinian monk when he nailed his famous 95-theses to the Wittenberg church door. Even the Eastern Orthodox look to Augustine as one of the primary doctors of the church.

During his long tenure as the bishop of Hippo, Augustine was known to be a writing machine. At one point he employed two full time secretaries which allowed him to dictate the books he was writing. To date, there are still works by Augustine that have not been translated into English. The man was a towering intellect, impacting a great deal of Western thought that even non-Christian scholars and other readers come back generation after generation to study.

Pope Boniface VIII in the 13th century named him one of the four great Doctors of the Church, alongside Ambrose, Jerome, and Pope Gregory the Great. Augustine wrote what many believe is the first Western autobiography, the Confessions, chronicling his journey as a rebellious teenager and libertine, to become a stalwart defender of historic orthodoxy Christianity.

Augustine almost single-handedly shifted all nearly all of Christendom away from the doctrine of a literal 1,000 year future millennium, following Christ’s return (the premillennial return of Christ) to a more symbolic view, which essentially equated the millennium with the church age, a view which remained supreme unit the era of the Reformation. Practically all of Christendom accepted his view of infant baptism for that same time period, lasting ironically about one thousand years. In the early church debate regarding the afterlife, Augustine’s specific perspective known as the doctrine of eternal conscious torment, became the dominant view of hell until the modern era.

Much of what many Christians today take for granted as to “what the Bible says” stems back to the life and mind of this North African Christian. How did this former sex-addict turned bishop of the church become so influential?

Robin Lane Fox’s Augustine: Conversion to Confessions examines roughly the first half of the great Christian saint’s life, leading up the Augustine’s most famous written work, Confessions.

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June 19, 2025

Augustine on Infant Baptism

By Clarke Morledge

I have been in the middle of reading Jared Ortiz and Daniel Keating’s book, The Nicene Creed : A Scriptural, Historical, and Theological Commentary, in honor of the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed, and I ran across the following insight from Saint Augustine about his rationale for infant baptism. A lot of Christians have thought that Augustine encouraged infant baptism merely as a means of trying to save a baby from original sin. But his actual comments on baptism are more thoughtful than that, and are worth quoting in full:

To believe, however, is nothing else than to have faith. And for this reason when the answer is given that the little one believes, though he does not yet have the disposition of faith, the answer is given that he has faith on account of the sacrament of the faith and that he is converted to the Lord on account of the sacramentof conversion, because the response itself also pertains to the celebration of the sacrament. In the same way the apostle says of baptism, We were buried together with Christ through baptism into death (Rom. 6:4). He did not say, “We signified burial,” but, “We were buried.” He, therefore, called the sacrament of so great a reality by the word for the same reality.

And so, even if that faith that is found in the will of believers does not make a little one a believer, the sacrament of the faith itself, nonetheless, now does so. For, just as the response is given that the little one believes, he is also in that sense called a believer, not because he assents to the reality with his mind, but because he receives the sacrament of that reality. But when a human being begins to think, he will not repeat the sacrament, but will understand it and will also conform himself to its truth by the agreement of his will. As long as he cannot do this, the sacrament will serve for his protection against the enemy powers, and it will be so effective that, if he leaves this life before attaining the use of reason, he will by this help for Christians be set free from that condemnation which entered the world through one man, since the love of the Church commends him through the sacrament itself (Augustine, Letter 98.9–10, in Letters 1–99, ed. Roland Teske, WSA II/1 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2001), 431–32).

I have had to meditate on it, but I think this best explains what this great African bishop of the late 4th / early 5th century was trying to communicate: There is no such things as “self-baptism” in the Bible. No one baptizes themselves. You must be baptized by someone else.

The same can be said about salvation. We can not save ourselves. Only God can save. God saves by the gift of his grace, and we can not save ourselves by our religious works.

Sandro Botticelli, Sant’ Agostino nello studio (Saint Augustine in the studio), Fresco, Chiesa di San Salvatore in Ognissanti, Florence.

 

The Sacrament of Baptism: What Baptism Does Is a Mystery

Augustine sees in this the mystery of what makes the notion of sacrament so powerful in Christian theology. As Augustine reads Paul in Romans 6:4, baptism actually does something, despite the fact that Paul does not go into extensive detail about it. Baptism is not merely a symbol. It pertains to a reality that goes beyond what our feeble minds can grasp.

There is no prooftext that says “baptism is a sacrament,” but historically this is how those like Augustine understood baptism. The English word “sacrament” is derived from the Latin sacramentum, which is a translation of the Greek word mysterion, from which we get the English word mystery. There are several concepts, like baptism, which Christian theologians have described as a mystery, explaining why those like Augustine thought of baptism as a sacrament.

Like many other advocates of infant baptism, Augustine considered baptism to be the New Testament counterpart to the Old Testament’s insistence on circumcision as the primary identity marker for being an Israelite.  As male infants were circumcised in ancient Israel, so are male and now female infants baptized as Christians. See Galatians 3:27-28:

For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

A sacrament like baptism enacts reality for us. I got this idea of enactment from a book by Thomas Howard, the brother of the famous missionary Elisabeth Elliot, On Being Catholic. But the point is that the sacrament of baptism enacts the reality that only God can save the human being, and it is Augustine’s contention that baptism can in this sense “save” the infant, when they are not yet at the stage whereby they can exercise reason, and rationally comprehend ideas like “salvation by grace,” etc. Instead the infant can experience it through the act of baptism.

It is hard for us modern people living in the West to appreciate the impact Augustine’s theology has had over the long history of the Christian movement. Throughout most of human history, the infant mortality rate has been extremely high as compared to what the typical American family experiences in the 21st century. Even if you lived in the early 19th century in the United States, and in many parts of the world developing world today, there was/is a high probability that your child would not survive infancy.  Yet today in much of the West, due to the benefits of modern medicine, the opposite is the case. Now, it is relatively rare for a child to die in infancy (though, obviously, it still happens tragically).

The Augustinian idea that baptism is connected to the salvation of the infant can bring great comfort to a mother and father grieved to the loss of a child, knowing that their deceased child is with the Lord.  The same can be said for a family with a child (or even a young adult) that is mentally and/or emotionally challenged in some way, where the young person lacks the cognitive abilities to adequately grasp even basic concepts of Christian theology.

Augustine has not been without his critics. Many proponents of credobaptism; that is, the teaching that only a believer’s baptism is a valid form of baptism, and that infant baptism (otherwise known as paedobaptism) is not to be practiced, typically reject Augustine on this point. In other words, someone needs to demonstrate that they have genuinely come to know and believe in Jesus before they would be eligible for baptism, not after. They would generally argue that Augustine’s belief that infant baptism can wash away the taint of original sin makes baptism into a kind of work which actually undermines the theology of grace.

Instead, many credobaptists adopt the practice of “baby dedication” (some call it “family dedication,” “parent dedication,” “baby thanksgiving,” or something along those lines), whereby a pastor of the local church will publicly pray with a family that comes forward with their newborn, dedicating themselves to raise the child in a Christian home, and asking the congregation to join the parents in helping to raise the child in a discipling, Christian community, in the hope that when that child is old enough to exercise human reason the child might come to confess faith in Jesus, and then at some point become baptized (believer’s baptism) as an act of Christian obedience.

This has become standard practice in much of the world of American megachurch evangelical Christianity. It has become like a half-way mediating solution between credobaptism and paedobaptism, with respect to infant children. It has only become a common feature in American evangelical Christianity for about a hundred years or so (though how far back the practice actually goes is highly debated).

The problem is that such “baby dedication” is not the same as infant baptism.  For if a child who has been a part of a “baby dedication” and not infant baptism then dies still in infancy, this could create (and indeed has created) a theological crisis for the parents in their grief. For what comfort would such parents have about the eternal destiny of their child?

Perhaps such parents could reimagine “baby dedication” to be somehow efficacious in the same way as infant baptism, but that would probably take a lot of theological creativity on the part of the parents, and probably more that one session of grief meeting with a church pastor to work things out.

Some hold to a doctrine of baptismal regeneration, which suggests that infant baptism actually saves the infant, and that this act of baptism somehow suggests an irrevocable salvation status regarding baptism. There are bunch of good debates on YouTube about baptismal regeneration, though I would recommend this conversation between Baptist apologist Gavin Ortlund and Roman Catholic apologist to be among one of the more helpful discussions.

 

 

Confusion About Infant Baptism

Most evangelical Christians reject such a theology of baptismal regeneration, as it can confuse a person, leading someone who has been baptized as an infant to wrongly believe that since they were baptized as an infant, this somehow gives them an irrevocable ticket to heaven. Some then rationalize that they can live a life completely contrary to any Christian commitment, and still be somehow “OK” with God.  Again, this makes the sacrament of baptism into a kind of work, an example of “works-righteousness” which is completely contrary to a right-minded understanding of the Gospel.

However, it would be good to note that not every tradition commonly associated with “baptismal regeneration” accepts this irrevocable understanding of infant baptism.  Eastern Orthodox priest Stephen De Young, in his incredibly helpful book The Religion of the Apostles: Orthodox Christianity in the First Century, (read my four-part review of De Young’s theologically and yet remarkably accessible book), might surprise Protestant evangelicals regarding what is entailed in an Eastern Orthodox understanding of baptism, including infant baptism.

“Saint Paul goes to great pains in 1 Corinthians 10 to argue that baptism does not necessarily entail salvation (1 Cor. 10:1–6)” (De Young, p. 163).

This passage talks about Old Testament Israelites being “baptized into Moses,” through the passing through the Red Sea, and the experience under the cloud in the Wilderness, but that most of them did not survive to make it into the Promised Land, due to disobedience.

In other words, infant baptism is not an irrevocable indication of someone’s status regarding salvation. For a person baptized as an infant, that person must still reason through and reflect on the meaning of their baptism, in order to make good on it, which appears to be consistent with what Augustine says as quoted above.

Augustine would reject the idea of getting re-baptized, something that a lot of evangelical Christians tend to do; that is, despite having been baptized as an infant (if they were), they go on and go through a “believer’s baptism” now that they finally understand what it means to be a real Christian. For Augustine, such re-baptism would be a needless attempt to “repeat the sacrament,” and completely miss the reality of what the sacrament is in the first place.

Needless to say, sacramental theology is still very much highly controversial in our churches today, whether it be about baptism, or the Lord’s Supper, or other matters related to the concept of sacrament. Some churches reject the language of “sacrament” altogether, preferring to categorize baptism as an “ordinance,” as opposed to being a “sacrament.” Some local churches try to take an “agree-to-disagree” posture regarding the credobaptism versus paedobaptism controversy, but they do so with mixed success.

Navigating Baptism as a Second-Rank Doctrine

However, most Protestant evangelical churches either go one way or the other, either they baptize infants or they do not. There is no middle ground, but rarely do churches split over the baptism issue nowadays. Many just try to muddle through the controversy somehow. But at least someone visiting the church will eventually figure out where that church lands on the issue. In his wonderful book, Finding the Right Hills to Die On, theologian Gavin Ortlund, reviewed here on Veracity a few years ago, argues that when navigating theological issues which divide churches, one must do what he calls “theological triage,” ranking different issues into four distinct categories:

  1. first-rank issues: some doctrines are essential to properly defend and proclaim the Gospel. Ortlund puts something like the doctrine of the Virgin Birth in this category. For without a belief in the Virgin Birth of Jesus, our understanding of the Gospel is at stake.
  2. second-rank issues: some doctrines are not essential to the Gospel, but they are urgent issues, in that they can and often do have an impact in how a church practices its mission. For these doctrines can lead to “divisiveness, confusion, and violations of conscience” (Ortlund, p. 95). Two common examples include (1) whether to allow certain charismatic gifts, like speaking in tongues and prophecy, to be publicly displayed during a worship service, and (2) whether to have women serve as elders in a local church (the so-called “complementarian” verse “egalitarian” issue).
  3. third-rank issues: some doctrines are not essential to the Gospel, but are nevertheless still important issues to resolve. Nevertheless, Christians with different convictions in good faith can still participate in such a local church, while taking an “agree to disagree” posture. Two common examples include (1) different understandings of the age of the earth, and (2) different understandings of the “End Times” regarding the millennium and the rapture of the church.
  4. fourth-rank issues: some doctrines are not essential to the Gospel, and they not important in terms of how Christians in a local church can work together to accomplish Gospel mission.

My classic example of a fourth-rank issue comes from a conversation I have had with a pastor friend of mine. He is convinced that the Apostle Paul wrote the so-called “prison letters”, like Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon from a jail in Rome. I believe Paul wrote these letters from a prison cell in Ephesus.

How many people really care about where Paul wrote these letters from? Aside from a few Bible nerds like me, basically no one!!

Interestingly, Gavin Ortlund adds the doctrine of baptism as a common third example of a second-rank issue. Ortlund himself grew up in a church that practiced infant baptism, but when he took to studying the issue in-depth, he came to the conclusion that infant baptism was an improper form of baptism, and thus became a credo-baptist. Nevertheless, Ortlund looks to Saint Augustine, perhaps the most influential proponent of infant baptism in the history of Christianity, as one of his greatest theological heroes!!

Augustine has surely been the most influential Christian theologian in the Christian West, outside of the Bible itself, but Christians will still chafe against some of the theological positions he took hundreds of years ago. One may still reject the validity of infant baptism, as many evangelical Christians emphatically still do, but the purpose of this blog post has been to aid in having a more informed understanding of what infant baptism, as classically understood by Saint Augustine, actually is, and what it is not.

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March 1, 2019

Augustine on Learning How to “Agree to Disagree” Well

By Clarke Morledge

Over the coming weeks, I hope to tackle two major issues that threaten the unity of God’s people. I will offer one blog post/ book review on the subject of “Can ‘Charismatic’ and ‘Liturgical’ Christians Worship Together?” The second, and more visceral issue, I will dedicate a multi-part blog series on: “Should Women Serve as Elders, Deacons,or Pastors?”

Is it even possible to “agree to disagree” on issues like these? Some think not. Some say that by giving allowance for such diversity of perspectives in a church is an invitation for false teaching to come in and distort the Scriptures.

Sandro Botticelli, Sant’ Agostino nello studio (Saint Augustine in the studio), Fresco, Chiesa di San Salvatore in Ognissanti, Florence.

The African bishop of centuries ago, Saint Augustine, wrote about this dilemma in his classic, On Christian Doctrine (Chapter 36), arguing that the objective of good Scriptural interpretation is to encourage love of God and love of neighbor:

Whoever, then, thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbour, does not yet understand them as he ought. If, on the other hand, a man draws a meaning from them that may be used for the building up of love, even though he does not happen upon the precise meaning which the author whom he reads intended to express in that place, his error is not pernicious, and he is wholly clear from the charge of deception. For there is involved in deception the intention to say what is false; and we find plenty of people who intend to deceive, but nobody who wishes to be deceived….

Whoever takes another meaning out of Scripture than the writer intended, goes astray, but not through any falsehood in Scripture. Nevertheless, as I was going to say, if his mistaken interpretation tends to build up love, which is the end of the commandment, he goes astray in much the same way as a man who by mistake quits the high road, but yet reaches through the fields the same place to which the road leads. He is to be corrected, however, and to be shown how much better it is not to quit the straight road, lest, if he get into a habit of going astray, he may sometimes take cross roads, or even go in the wrong direction altogether.

In other words, some people, even teachers in a local church, can make erroneous judgments when reading the Bible, from time to time. But Augustine’s advice is not to immediately throw such people under the bus, treat them as “agents of Satan,” and objectify them as enemies. Instead, Augustine contends that a concerted effort be made to gently, respectfully, patiently, and lovingly seek to correct such error in others, and bring such people along the right path. Sometimes, people do fall off of the high road, but it is possible for them to find their way back, through the fields, to the same place where the road leads. It can be difficult work, but caring brothers and sisters in the Lord will often help those folks along, to find the right road again.

As Proverbs 15:1 puts it, “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” Christians should be a people ready with a gentle answer, as opposed to a harsh word.

It bears noting that Augustine was no wimpy Christian, when it came to the threat of heresy. Have you ever heard of the Donatists? If not, then there is a good reason for that. It was Augustine’s pen that was largely responsible for wiping out the Donatist heresy that threatened to pull the church completely apart, during the 5th century A.D. But Augustine nevertheless sought to facilitate dialogue in order to seek to persuade  those who had a wrong view of Scripture. His words serve as a useful model for how to work through controversy among Christians today.

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May 4, 2018

Augustine and the Jews, By Paula Fredriksen: Book Review

By Clarke Morledge
Augustine and Jews, by Paula Fredriksen, is a scholarly attempt to appreciate how Saint Augustine sought to reformulate a Christian theology that would guard against anti-Jewish sentiment. Are there lessons here that we can learn from today?

Augustine and Jews, by Paula Fredriksen, is a scholarly work showing how Saint Augustine sought to reformulate a Christian theology that would guard against anti-Jewish sentiment. Are there lessons here that we can learn from today?

An extended book(s) review…..

When Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ hit the movie theaters in 2003, I was intrigued, even thrilled, by the response. It had been a long time since a major figure in Hollywood would put his reputation on the line and produce a film that was so positive towards the Christian faith. Hollywood’s relentless attack on the Gospel had seemingly been broken. A large outpouring of Christian-friendly films have since hit the silver screen, albeit varying in quality, ranging from Gibson’s 2017, well-received Hacksaw Ridge, and other movies frowned upon by mainstream critics, like God’s Not Dead and War Room.

Nevertheless, I was at first puzzled when I read that Paula Fredriksen, a professor of religious history at Boston University, became one of the most outspoken critics of The Passion of the Christ, expressing grave concerns over the anti-Jewish tendencies of the film script. Fredriksen, who was raised a Catholic, and later married an Orthodox Jew, eventually becoming one herself, was disturbed by Gibson’s plan to supposedly retell the story of Jesus’ final hours approaching Good Friday. In her conclusion, from her essay in the New Republic, “I shudder to think how The Passion will play once its subtitles shift from English to Polish, or Spanish, or French, or Russian. When violence breaks out, Mel Gibson will have a much higher authority than professors and bishops to answer to.”

Antisemitic violence, inspired by a Mel Gibson movie? To my knowledge, unless I have been living in some isolated, American bubble, the mass rioting envisioned by professor Fredriksen never materialized, upon the worldwide release of The Passion of the Christ.

But was the professor still right? Was Mel Gibson smuggling in an antisemitic message? Well, Gibson did seem to pile on the Jewish religious leadership, but was that not just for some type of dramatic effect?

In my readings of the Gospels, I have never had the sense that the New Testament unduly put the blame for Jesus’ death squarely on the Jewish leaders. True, the pagan Pontius Pilate washed his hands of his guilt. Nevertheless, it sure seems like Pilate had a major role in condemning Jesus to die. He could have intervened, if he really believed Jesus to be innocent, but he did not. The Jewish Sanhedrin rigged the outcome of Jesus’ trial, but nobody gets off easy when it comes to nailing Jesus to the cross. My evangelical mentors have always been clear about this: whether Pilate or High Priest, we would all have been complicit in the death of Jesus, had we been there in the shoes of either the Romans or the Sanhedrin.

Yet, there is that verse in Matthew 27:35, where the Jewish people answer Pilate, “His blood be on us and on our children!” That does sound pretty rough, taken at face value. But surely a more profound theological message stands behind Matthew’s stated quotation. Any responsible reader of the Bible would conclude that this symbolically represents the guilty verdict that all people, down through the ages, share with respect to rebelling against God. No Christians “literally” place the blame specifically on those Jews present, and their descendants…..

Or do they?  Continue reading

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