The Power of God

I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew and then for the Gentile.  For the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last...(Rom. 1:16).

 

From my own experience and the experience of others, I have become convinced that Satan will do everything in his power to keep us from reading the Gospel of Jesus Christ, because he knows full well that the "power of God for salvation" lies in those words. 

 

St. Augustine, who learned to read and to reason by reading Cicero and the Greek philosophers, read when he was 19 years old from Cicero's Hortensius, "...seek wisdom and follow it."  For Augustine, those words were a moment of grace, because he knew enough philosophy to know that he could not find wisdom therein.  Knowledge and intellectual development--yes; wisdom -- no.  In one moment, Augustine fell in love with the desire for wisdom, but he did not know where or how to find wisdom, even though a hunger and thirst for it began to overtake him from the moment he read those words. 

 

Because he grew up in a remote region of Northern Africa, on the outskirts of the Roman Empire (akin to growing up on a farm in Arkansas today), and because he was brilliant and a student of the Greek philosophers, and because he was learning rhetoric and dialectic and could argue circles around the local-yokel Catholic priest, he was pretty sure that he could not find wisdom in the church.  His local church, the one he had been raised in, was not a center of learning and philosophy, but only one of blind obedience without question.  (The Catholic church was the only church until Martin Luther in the 15th century, remember.) 

 

As a 19-year scholar, Augustine had already rejected the 'wisdom' of the Catholic church.  He turned to the Scriptures in his search -- but the Scriptures were not "beautiful," as was Greek and Roman philosophy.  The original manuscripts were simply and sort of crudely written, compared to the dialectic and sophisticated rhetoric he was learning to read and use.  Nothing in the Scriptures appealed to him, so he rejected them also as a source of wisdom.  But his desire did not go away.  He turned to the philosophy of the Manicheans, who appeared to combine worldly philosophy and religious "truth" and discipline, and for a time, Augustine became convinced that he was finding wisdom.

 

Then, Augustine, in his continued search for wisdom and eventual disillusionment with Manicheism, traveled to Milan, the real center of philosophic inquiry and debate in his day -- (comparable to going from the backwoods of Arkansas to New York City.)  And there Augustine met Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, and a great scholar and thinker.  Ambrose helped Augustine sort through his difficulties with Manicheism, but emotionally, Augustine was not ready to buy into Catholicism. 

 

He was faced now with other problems, not philosophical, but physical and emotional ones, that kept him from the wisdom of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Now, he had to deal with his own inner conflicts-- the ones Paul describes so well in Romans 7.  In his mind and heart, he wanted, he desired, wisdom above all else in his life.  In his personal life, however, he was still very ambitious:  he had wanted to be a political leader (power and influence and wealth) and philosopher (knowledge and wisdom and teaching) ever since he was a youth.  He did not really WANT the gospel of Jesus Christ -- being a servant to others, laying down one's life, etc.  Coming from the remote areas of the Roman Empire, he wanted to be in the center of life, not on the fringes.

 

Monica (his mother) and Augustine had already contracted marriage with a young girl from a wealthy and powerful family -- the way it was done in those days -- to further Augustine's political career.  The girl, however, was still underage-- only 12 years old-- and Augustine had to wait 2 more years for the marriage to take place.  In the meantime, however, Augustine was forced by custom to send away his concubine, the woman with whom he had been living for 15 years, and the mother of his only son.  He truly loved the woman, but she was not a suitable marriage partner for the status he desired in life.  Sadly, he sent her away with provisions for her and her son, but he found that he could not live without the habit of sex---he had been living with a concubine since the age of 15. 

 

Augustine took on another concubine, even while waiting to marry his fiancé, and during that time, he continued to converse with Ambrose and continued to wrestle with his "two wills"  -- the will to seek wisdom above all else and the will to continue his own life of seeking ambition, influence, and power, not to mention sex.  His prayer eventually became, "O God, give me the gift of chastity -- but not yet!"  I think we can all identify with his struggle if we recall lying in bed on a cold morning, knowing that we have to get up and go to work, but "not yet."  Just five, fifteen, twenty more minutes, and then....

 

Later, reflecting on the struggle going on within him, Augustine would become the great philosopher of the soul's internal and personal relationship with God, and his reflections would influence the western church down to our day.  Reflecting on his struggle to be both at peace with God and to enter the church would eventually lead to his writings on the relationship between being a member of the church and a "private' Christian, one who is satisfied with his relationship with God and who does not "need" the 'walls" of the church.

 

Augustine's long journey to the Scriptures and the church is one that gave us some of the greatest insights into God and the soul, and the soul and the church.  I will have to continue this story tomorrow -- the one about Augustine's eventual arrival at the Scriptures and the church.