Tag: Augustine

Augustine’s Commentary on John 13:1-5

~ Vincent

Augustine preached his way through the Gospel of John, which is such a treat. As a fellow pastor preaching his way through John, it’s awesome to be able to see the different ways that Augustine engaged with the same Scriptures that I’m working through. I don’t always agree with him, of course. At different points, patristic exegesis can be pretty weird by modern standards, but even when Augustine is weird, he’s never dull, and that’s worth something. Since it was kind of hard to read through Augustine’s Tractates on the Gospel of John as a reference document, I thought I’d break the specific verses I was looking at down into a commentary. The ideas are his, but the words are mine. Hopefully, it makes the gems of his wisdom a little more accessible.

Here are his thoughts on John 13:1-5. The Bible verses I mention are usually from the NIV, but sometimes Augustine’s insights require language from the translation that he’s working from. In those cases, I use the NIV for inspiration but tweak it to try to make it resemble what Augustine was obviously working from.

1It was just before the Passover Festival.  Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father. (Jn. 13:1 a)

Augustine dabbled in a lot of different languages, so in this first verse, he points out some of the subtle truths that get highlighted depending on which language you read it in. For example, in Greek, the word Pascha (Passover) sounds a lot like paschein, the word for suffering. And sure enough, this is a period where Christ is preparing to paschein for the whole world. This wasn’t lost on Ancient Greek Christians. They naturally associated this celebration of Passover with Christ’s suffering.

If, however, you read the passage in Hebrew, the word Pascha means (unsurprisingly to us today) “pass over,” referring to the angel of death passing over houses that had lamb’s blood above the door during the last of the Egyptian plagues before the exodus. The Hebrews were saved by the blood of a lamb, and here Jesus, the lamb of God, goes to the cross so that we can be saved from death by his blood.

Still further, in Augustine’s native Latin, the translation of “Passover” would be “transitus,” which would mean something like “passing through,” “crossing,” or “transit.” How appropriate! Jesus isn’t going to die. He will, however, pass through this world. The Vulgate even uses this same language to describe Jesus’s mission later in this verse: this is the “hora ut transeat ex hoc mundo,” or in English, “the hour for him to pass through the world.” Jesus is like Moses! Moses passed through the Red Sea to lead his people out of slavery in Egypt to the promised land. Jesus passed through the world to lead his people out of slavery to sin and death and into the Kingdom of God. As Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 1:13: “For [Jesus] has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves.” Everyone will pass away from this world, but not everyone will pass through this world. Remember how Pharaoh’s soldiers sided against Moses and died in the middle of the waves because of God’s judgement? Those who follow Christ will pass through the world with him, but those who are against him will pass with the world into God’s judgement.

Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. (Jn. 13:1 b)

What does it mean that Jesus “love them to the end?” What end? Did Jesus’s love end at the cross? No! Jesus loved us even after that. Jesus came back to life and loved us. Jesus ascended into Heaven and still loves us. There isn’t an end to Jesus’s life! So “loved them to the end” can’t refer to the end of his life. What might it refer to? In classical Christian terms, “the end” can refer to the telos, or reason that something was made. For example, the proper end of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The proper end of a heart is to pump blood. Teleologically, that’s their proper end. Romans 10:4 references this type of end when it calls Jesus the “end of the law.” Does it mean that Jesus ended the law? No. It means Jesus was the perfect culmination of the law. He was the proper end of the law. So if Jesus loved his disciples to the end, he wasn’t loving them with a partial love. This was a love that had achieved its proper end. This was a perfect love. This was the love that led him to the cross. As John 15:13 says, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Jesus loved his disciples with the greatest love.

2 The evening meal was in progress, and the devil had already prompted Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, to betray Jesus. (Jn. 13:2)

At this point, the devil has already planted a spiritual suggestion in Judas’s heart: betray Jesus. This wasn’t a whisper in his ear so much as a spiritual influence that entered through his thoughts. Remember, not everything that’s spiritual is good! Paul knew all about the challenges that spiritual beings can bring.. He wrote in Ephesians 6:12, our struggle is against powers, principalities, and the spiritual forces of evil. Somehow, devils can mingle with our thoughts and encourage us to sin. But how do they do it? And how do we know which thoughts are from them and which are from us? And are there angels that introduce good spiritual thoughts to us? It seems reasonable to assume that there are, but since all of these things are happening beyond our ability to see them, there’s so much we can’t know. We may not know every detail, but we always know which of the thoughts in our mind we choose to act on. We can choose to be aided by God towards what is good, or go off on our own and choose what is wrong. Judas knew Jesus, but he didn’t accept him as his God. The instinct to betray Jesus didn’t come from the Devil. That belonged to Judas. The devil just placed that thought of betrayal in his heart and let him do the rest. He came to this meal to spy on the shepherd and sell the Savior. Judas may have planned to do evil, but God used his evil for good. Even Judas’s betrayal became a part of God’s receptive plan.

3 Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God; 4 so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. 5 After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him. (Jn. 13:3-5)

Judas showed up to that meal assuming that his betrayal was the perfect secret, but Jesus knew. Jesus knew everything that Judas was going to do, but he wasn’t worried. He trusted his Father completely. Everything was in His hands, including Judas. In the ultimate act of humility, he knelt down to wash the feet of his disciples including the feet of his betrayer. It didn’t matter how much a person had indulged in evil. There was nobody that Jesus wasn’t willing to kneel down and serve.

And the particulars of that act tell us so much. He took off his outer garment and wrapped towel around his waist to serve us. It’s an image of the incarnation! Jesus laid aside the grandeur of Heaven (the outer garment) and took on humanity (the towel) so that he could serve us. As Philippians 2:6-7 says, “

[Jesus], being in very nature God,
     did not consider equality with God something to be used to
     his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
     by taking the very nature of a servant,
     being made in human likeness.

Later, he’ll have his garments stripped from him at the cross and he’ll be wrapped in linen for burial. All of this humiliation was for our sake. Even here, as he goes to the cross, he stops to serve everyone including the lowest among us. As Luke wrote, “He came to seek and save the lost,” (Lk. 19:10).

We were lost at one point. We had that same pride that Judas had in our hearts, but God came to wash us with his grace. Don’t cling to that pride! Set it aside and serve others in love and humility until just like the one who saved you.

Reading the Bible in Latin is Cool

~ Vincent

I’m back! I took some time away after the birth of my second son, and it was incredibly rewarding. I’m blessed not only to have him in my life, but to have had some time to spend with him and his brother and my wife in that transitional period as our family grew. I learned something unexpected during my leave, and I wanted to share it: studying the Bible in a different language is really rewarding.

I wouldn’t have expected this revelation for myself. I don’t know Greek at all and I only have the smallest shreds of Hebrew under my belt. At one point, the prospect of learning Hebrew was really exciting to me. I worked my way through about half of a Hebrew textbook and went to seminary with a real fire for biblical languages, but once I got there, I thought about my high school experience with Spanish. How much Spanish do I remember today? A pitiful amount. And frankly, I never really invested the time to get good at it. Who could have imagined that a high school boy might not be deeply passionate about learning a second language for the sole purpose of polishing his university applications, right? Looking back on my failings with Spanish, I told myself that I must be bad at languages and that I should use the time I would have learned Hebrew in seminary on classes that would better benefit the congregations I would someday serve. After all, I could use an interlinear copy of the Bible and a Hebrew dictionary and get by just fine for the purpose of preaching, and most interesting translational choices are hammered in commentaries anyway. Thus my dream of being a master Hebrew speaker died a quiet death.

But while I was feeding a screaming baby at 2:00 am, I got bored. I wanted to be productive and I realized that the environment wasn’t particularly conducive to reading anything that required an unbroken train of thought. And what’s easy to do in small, flashcard-sized chunks? Memorize vocabulary words. And so I decided to pick up some Latin. I don’t know a lot of Protestants that know Latin, so it would definitely help me bring something unique to the table, and I read enough Augustine that I figured it’d be neat to read his stuff firsthand, instead of through translators. I made it about halfway through a beginner’s Latin textbook before my leave was up, so I can now talk about advanced theological topics like who is in the bedroom and if the dog is barking.

While working through that textbook, I also started studying my weekly Scriptures using the Vulgate (old Latin Bible), and I was shocked to see how deeply it affected my studying. When you don’t really know what any of the words in a given passage mean, you have to scrutinize each word. That level of study changes your relationship with the passage. For example, at one point, I was reading through James 1, and I reached verse 16: “Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers,” (ESV). If I was reading in English, I don’t think I would have spent much time not his passage. It’s a warning to pay attention to what James is about to write. Cool. Got it. But when you’re going word to word, dictionary open in another tab, and you see that James just called his readers “mei dilectissimi” or “my dearest ones” (something that, strangely enough, was in the first half of the latin textbook), there’s an impact and a warmth to it that I wouldn’t have felt otherwise. When you’re reading in English it’s easy to end up scanning through a passage for big ideas, controversial pieces, or emotional turning points and end up spending my energy on those. When you’re working in an unfamiliar language, you can’t take any word for granted. Each one is a battle, and each one carries a weight that it wouldn’t otherwise.

There’s also something supremely humbling about tuning in to youtube videos to help you learn the week’s lessons and hearing some teacher that recorded their lectures say, “Salvete, eighth graders!” Yes, my learning partners are mostly thirteen years old. Kids are smarter than we give them credit for.

No idea if my iter longum ad discit Latinum (“long journey to learn latin” probably misconjugated idk I’m new) will go anywhere. Time will tell. But in the meantime, it’s a fun little exercise to make me pay attention to things I wouldn’t otherwise.

Six Major Theories About Why Jesus Healed with Mud made of Spit (John 9)

~ Vincent

Why did Jesus heal the man in John 9 by making mud out of spit?!? I preached on John 9 recently and to make sure I had a good take, I looked up explanations from as many wise Christians as I could. People are all over the map on this one! There are so many explanations! I’ve sorted the theories into six major camps and added a quote from someone that I think is a great source for that explanation. Are there more theories out there? Absolutely, Feel free to do even more searching. I do, however, hope that this captures most of the breadth of the conversation. These ideas definitely aren’t mutually exclusive, so there are a lot of people that pick out several different reasons and agree with all of them.

(A lot of these quotes come from Christians throughout history, which means the primary sources can be tough to read. These are my paraphrases for ease of reading. Feel free to look up the original if something particularly. interests you.)

A Series of Symbols

The Lord came and what did He do? He unveiled a great mystery. He spat on the ground and He made clay out of His spit. Why? Because the Word was made flesh. Then, He anointed the eyes of the blind man. The man was anointed, but he still couldn’t see! Jesus sent him to the pool of Siloam. But notice that the evangelist pointed out the name of the pool: “sent.” And you know who was sent for us! If he hadn’t been sent, none of us would be free from sin! So he washed his eyes in that pool called sent — he was baptized in Christ!

-Augustine of Hippo, Tractate 44 on the Gospel of John

A Test of Faith

“The intention of Christ was, to restore sight to the blind man, but the way he went about it seemed absurd at first. By covering his eyes with mud, Jesus doubled his blindness! Who wouldn’t have thought that he was mocking that poor man or just doing some pointless nonsense? But Jesus intended to test the faith and obedience of the blind man so that he could be an example to everyone else. It wasn’t any ordinary test of faith! But the blind man relied on Jesus’s words alone. He was fully convinced that his sight would be restored to him. With that conviction, he hurried to follow Christ’s command. It speaks to his wonderful obedience that he simply obeyed Christ, even though there were so many excuses to do otherwise. When a devout mind, satisfied with the simple word of God, believes entirely in what seems incredible, that’s the true test of faith. Faith is followed by a readiness to obey, so that anyone who is convinced that God will be their faithful guide will naturally give their life over to God. Who could doubt that fear and suspicion crept into the man’s mind? He knew he might get mocked for what he was doing! But with hardly any effort, he broke through every barrier to faith and realized that it was safe to follow Christ.”

-John Calvin, Commentary on John

The Evangelistic Theory

“Maybe our Lord intended to draw even more attention to the miracle. A crowd of people would naturally gather to see something so odd, and the guide that helped the man get around the city would end up sharing the story as they went to the pool of Siloam.”

-John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament

The Gospel Comparison

“The man’s eyes were opened after a little clay was put in them and he washed them out in the pool of Siloam. God really does bless humble things during our process of conversion. It is incredibly humbling for a preacher who thinks, ‘I preached an amazing sermon on Sunday,’ to find God didn’t use that sermon to convert anyone! It was the random remark he made in town the other day that God worked with. He didn’t think it was worth anything! He didn’t plan it out or perfect it! But God did. What he thought was his best didn’t mean all that much to God, but when he wasn’t even trying, God blessed him. A lot of people had their eyes opened by little moments that had an incredible impact. The whole process of salvation is accomplished in simple, humble, everyday things. It’s so easy to compare it to the clay and spit that Jesus used. I don’t know many people that had their souls saved by formal, lofty processes. A lot of people join the church, but I haven’t met any that were converted because of a profound theological debate. It’s not common to hear that someone was saved because the pastor was so eloquent. Don’t get me wrong! We all appreciate eloquence. There’s nothing wrong with it! But eloquence has no spiritual power. It can’t transform our minds, and God prefers to use humbler things in His conversion. When Paul set aside human wisdom and decided not to use eloquent speech, he let go of things that weren’t going to be useful for him anyway. When David took of Saul’s elaborate armor and took up a sling and stone, he killed a giant! And the giants of today aren’t going to be conquered any better by people trying to put on the armor of Saul. We need to stick to simple things. We need to stick to the plain gospel and preach it plainly. The clay and the spit weren’t an artistic combination. It didn’t’ suit anyone’s taste! Nobody felt culturally gratified by that mud! But by that and a wash in Siloam, eyes were opened. It pleases God to use the foolish things to save those who believe in Him.”

-Charles Spurgeon, The Healing of One Born Blind

The Healing Spit Theory

The spittle of a human being is the best antidote for the poison of serpents, though, our daily lives attest to its efficacy and utility, in many other areas. We spit to keep ourselves safe from epilepsy and to avoid bad luck after meeting someone with a bad right leg. We apologize to the gods for having ridiculous expectations by spitting into our laps. In the same way, whenever medicine is employed, it’s good to spit three times on the ground to help it to take hold.

-Pliny the Elder, Natural History Book XXVIII, vii

A Meditation on Means

The Lord revealed his power more effectively by choosing this method of healing than if he had opened the blind man’s eyes with just a word. He used things that seem more likely to blind a man than to let him see! Who would believe that someone was about to heal the ears of a deaf man if they started filling his ears with mud? Clearing his ears might make sense, but putting mud in them? No. If Jesus wanted to use rational means to open this mans’ eyes, a surgical knife would have made more sense than mud. But Jesus chose to use this means for his power… it is supremely easy for him to heal by any means he wants. He can use laying on of hands or touching or a word or even spit and clay. If the word of Christ is added, any means he chooses will be effective, even if it seems more harmful than helpful to us.

-Wolfgang Musculus, Commentarii in Ioannem as found in Reformation Commentary on Scripture.

Augustine’s Apologetics and Contra Faustum

~ Vincent

Everyone has their favorites when it comes to theologians.

Augustine of Hippo is my guy.

I know, I know, he’s pretty mainstream as far as favorites go, but quality is quality, whether it’s loved by a million people or just one, and Augustine is quality. Is he smart? He was a genius.. Was he faithful? Absolutely. Did he bat 1000 when it came to hard questions and situations? Absolutely not. But that’s ok. Only Jesus did that, and expecting someone to nail it every time is pretty unfair. But even when Augustine is wrong, he’s wrong in an interesting way. He’s not going to leave you bored.

And he wasn’t just an idea guy; he was a people guy. There are some writers that are dry and dusty. Did they ever see the outside of their ivory tower? Probably not. And then there are the weird ones. I’m talking like Søren Kierkegaard weird. They’re brilliant and relatable when they write, but then you find out that they fumbled the love of their life by breaking up with them for no discernible reason and then they pined after them for the rest of their lives and wrote about it in several of their big works and you say, “Man, that guy had issues.” Did Augustine have issues? Yeah. But they were issues that are relatable. Anybody that’s read Confessions knows that even though Augustine was kicking over a thousand years ago, he had a life that is just like so many of our lives today.

At my church, I try to set aside a few Sundays every year to talk about big names in Christian history. I think it’s a fair critique of Protestants to say that too many of us imagine that there’s us and the Bible and that’s all there is, which is a shame because there’s thousands of years of people trying to live out the truth that’s contained in the Bible, and they’re really good examples to look up to. Augustine is one of the guys I set a day aside for every year in the hopes that someone learns about him and says, “Hey, I could be faithful like that!”

This past year, I wanted to highlight Augustine’s way of contending for the faith. He was a master at apologetics. People would come at him from every side, arguing about why orthodoxy was actually wrong and their weird heresy was secretly the real best religion and Augustine would just systematically destroy their arguments piece by piece by piece.

I was trying to pick out one of Augustine’s better arguments to highlight. I looked at Pelagius, the guy who famously said that God gave us the ability to know good from evil and a whole set of laws to help us choose good, so we don’t need extra help from God to do good! We just need to work hard and do it! It’s a bad take and skips over the damage that sin did to our will and our need for the Holy Spirit. It’s a great argument, but I prayed about it and just didn’t feel like it was the right choice. Then I looked at Augustine’s argument against Donatus Magnus, the leader of the Donatists. His clergy split off against the main Church because they endured during oppression when a lot of other Christian leaders had caved. They believed that anyone who betrayed the Church to Roman oppressors should be barred from leadership for life. Honestly, that’s one where Augustine was probably wrong about. I’m not gonna lie. The more you look into that one, the more you think to yourself, “I don’t know, it sounds like they’re the good guys and Augustine may be on the wrong side of this one…” I’m all for discussing someone’s mistakes, but it’s not exactly a great example of apologetics that can edify people. I kept looking and looking…

And then I found it. Augustine’s Contra Faustum (Against Faustus).

Why was this so exciting? Because Augustine writes about Faustus in Confessions. He talks about how he fell in with Faustus and his people (the Manichaeans) when he was trying to understand the point of life. He thought the Manichaeans were goofy, but they kept insisting that Faustus would explain everything when he got there. And then Faustus showed up! Augustine asked all his questions and Faustus responded, “I guess I never really thought about any of that. I don’t know.” Augustine didn’t hang out with the Manichaeans so much after that.

Augustine went on to become a Christian bishop, and lo and behold, years later he found out that the SAME FAUSTUS wrote a book on why Christianity is stupid and nobody should believe it. And because he’s a legend, Augustine literally reprinted Faustus’s book line by line with point-by-point disputations of every single idea that he had.

Contra Faustum isn’t one of Augustine’s more popular works, which makes sense. There aren’t a lot of Manichaeans around today to disagree with, and Augustine wrote over a hundred books, so not every one is going to become a legend. That said, there’s a lot to love here. In the sermon, I tried to pull out some of the arguments that were more relevant today. Does the Gospel have anything to do with Jesus being born of a virgin? Does the Old Testament conflict with the teachings of Jesus? Why don’t Christians keep the Old Testament law? I know I’ve heard each of these points brought up by people today to try to disprove orthodox Christianity, and these arguments aren’t new. Augustine took each one on hundreds of years ago, and most of his responses hold up really well. Here are my summaries/paraphrases of three chapters of Contra Faustum that I used for preaching. I hope they’re edifying for you!

Shall We Suffer?

~ Vincent

This entry is part of a series called “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” Learn more about the series here.
Preached on November 27, 2022
Scriptures: Genesis 32:22-32, 1 Thess. 5:12-24

Hedonism has a pretty bad reputation.  Just hearing the word brings certain debaucherous ideas to mind.  Hedonism is eating the most expensive, decadent chocolate cake you can find.  It’s wild partying with every illicit substance imaginable.  It’s unbridled sensuality.  Hedonism is wild living without any thought of future consequence.  And that’s more or less what the word actually means anymore.  Someone that calls you a hedonist isn’t trying to give you a compliment.  But what did it mean?  Because it used to mean something more.  It used to be a legitimate school of philosophy, and its teachings are more compelling than you’d probably think.

Let’s look at what may be the most famous hedonist philosopher: an ancient Greek man by the name of Epicurus.  Judging from our modern associations, you’d think Epicurus was some kind of wild party boy.  His life must have had a lot of sex, drugs, and the ancient equivalent of rock-and-roll.  Not so, actually.  Epicurus was a really decent guy.  His life wasn’t customized by wild excess.  It was simple.  He loved good friends, rural living, basic cooking, and that was about it.  He was a simple man with a simple philosophy: life is hard because we’re all too busy being afraid of losing what we have.  The solution?  Enjoy the little things.  Spend your time doing what actually matters and avoid wild excess, because if you get used to fancy things, you’ll spend your whole life being afraid that you’ll lose them.  Avoid the fear of loss, seek the simple pleasures, and you’ll be happy.

You’ll notice that there’s not a lot of room for God in that equation.  If simple pleasures are the route to happiness, who needs God?  To be fair to Epicurus, he actually does include God in his writings.  He doesn’t say a lot about him, but he includes him.  You can see right here in your bulletin a quote I pulled from Epicirus’s writings:

 “First believe that God is a living being immortal and happy, according to the notion of a god indicated by the common sense of humankind; and so of him anything that is at agrees not with about him whatever may uphold both his happiness and his immortality.”

Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus

What two words does he use to describe God?  Immortal and happy.  God is happy!  Don’t worry about him!  He’s up there, doing his thing.  At the end of the day, he’s a happy guy that wants you to be happy too.

Can you imagine if Epicirus was around today?  Think about a message like that: God wants YOU to be happy.  I think he’d sell quite a few books.  Maybe get an appearance on Oprah.  He’d be a big deal!  

But we have to ask ourselves, why didn’t his philosophy endure through the ages?  If the message resonates today, but most of us have never heard of this guy and his school of philosophy, what banished him to obscurity?  Well, Christianity.  Some of the people that denounced Epicirus’s teachings were Christian.  Augustine thrashed it in his writings.  Justin Martyr and Tatian did the same long before him.  Christians generally saw Epicureans as the worst available school of philosophy.  And why?

Because the happiness that Epicurus was selling wasn’t true happiness.

True happiness isn’t about managing to lower your expectations to the point that they’re no longer relevant.  It’s not about maximizing your pleasure.  It’s not about avoiding fear.  It’s not about the pursuit of dopamine.

Happiness, true happiness,the kind that lasts longer than an afternoon, isn’t about pleasure.  It’s about fulfillment.  Being what we’re supposed to be!  Doing what we’re supposed to do!  And that’s why life isn’t just one long pleasure trip.  There are other emotions besides pleasure-based happiness.  There’s sadness, fear, obsession and grief.  There’s panic, courage, annoyance and joy.  There are a million different emotions under the sun!  And all of them are on the table while we’re pursuing fulfillment.  And all of them are good.  All of them are important.  

Last week, we spoke of how our engagements with history have grown far too cynical.  The inclination to view the world through the lens of power has made the whole of history little more than wolves and sheep, tyrants and the oppressed.  That’s too shallow.  Christianity says that there’s more to the world around us than the selfish pursuit of power.  There’s love.  We Chirstians know that the world is driven by more than selfishness.  God himself is love, and he’s in this world at work.

If last week was about saying that the readings of the world around us have grown too shallow, this week is affirming that our readings of ourselves have suffered the same fate.  We have also become far too shallow in our own eyes.  Mind you, the readings of history focused on what was ugly, whereas the readings of our lives tend to focus on what’s good.  We focus on pleasure.  We’d like more money.  We’d like more stuff.  We’d like fewer jerks in the spaces around us and more friends.  When God gives us anything other than pleasure, it tends to be frustrating.  Why God?  What did I do to you?  We define success within our lives by the acquisition of pleasure.  We long for more dopamine.  Most of us have become functional hedonists.  But that does a great disservice to what life really is.  When we go through hard things, that’s when we tend to grow the most.  God isn’t trying to make us happy.  God is trying to make us holy.

Our first Scripture reading today, Genesis 32:22-32, is a famous one that points to this exactly: Jacob wrestling with God.  And what a weird story it is!  This is the Old Testament at its finest!  Let’s look at this a little:

That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two female servants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions.

First off, why is any of this happening?  Jacob is going to see his brother Essau.  When he was a kid, he stole Essau’s blessing and ran away.  All these years later, things aren’t going so well.  He has to go back to Esau for help, and he has no idea how Esau is going to respond.  Is he going to welcome him?  Begrudgingly allow him to stay?  Chase him off?  Kill him?  Here, he’s crossing a river.  This is the point of no return.  If Esau decides to attack Jacob and his people, they can’t just retreat if there’s a river at his back.  But God told Jacob to go to Esau.  So this is where he has to make that choice.  Does he really trust God?  This is the last stop.  There’s no turning back after the River Jabbok.  And he crosses it.

So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak.

Notice that Jacob doesn’t start to wrestle with God.  He’s not out there picking a fight.  The Bible says that God picked a fight with Jacob.  What did God want from him?  Everything.  Jacob is a character that’s constantly scheming.  He’s manipulative.  He’s clever.  He usually plans on figuring things out for himself, rather than waiting around for God.  And how has that gone for him historically?  Not great.  He’s won a few, but he’s lost more.  This is a man that has to go back to the brother he cheated to beg for help, for crying out loud, he’s not in a good place.  His self-reliance has gotten him nowhere.  And now?  Now comes God.  And God wants the last shred of faithfulness that Jacob has been holding back on.

A really common reading of this passage is to say that this figure is a pre-incarnation of Jesus.  Some people say that anytime we see God in a human form, that’s Jesus.  I’m not a hundred percent on that one, but I think it’s really interesting at minimum.  How often have we wrestled with Jesus?  How often have we held out because we feel we can figure things out on our own?  Until Jesus hunts us down and wrestles that last bit of pride out of us.

When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. 

Things look pretty evenly matched there for a while.  Both men are struggling.  Jacob is doing well.  The mystery man is doing well (remember, we don’t know it’s God just yet).  Nobody can quite get the edge over the other.  And then?  Out of nowhere, boom!  God touches Jacob’s hip and changes everything.  The fight isn’t as even as it looked.  God was always in control.  With one little touch, he could have won at any point.  A good reminder that no matter how things look, God is in control.  It might look like he’s evenly matched, but it’s all just a show.  God wins.  God always wins.

Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.”

At this point, it’s over.  Jacob can’t win with his wounded leg.  The man basically says, “Hey, move on.  It’s over.”  But Jacob doesn’t move on.  He may be defeated, but he’s not letting go.

But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

The clever Jacob.  The man who always relied on his abilities.  His cleverness.  Has been humbled.  He’s held on for what?  God’s blessing.  He’s now someone that seeks only to be blessed by God.  This is a turning point for him.  He’s no longer good ‘ol crafty Jacob.  He’s someone new.

The man asked him, “What is your name?”

“Jacob,” he answered.

Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel,[a] because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.”

Jacob said, “Please tell me your name.”

But he replied, “Why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there.

So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.”

The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip. Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the tendon attached to the socket of the hip, because the socket of Jacob’s hip was touched near the tendon.

Some people like to say this whole fight was metaphorical; just something representative of the inner drama that’s going on in Jacob’s mind during this challenging period.  I don’t think it is.  Because during the fight, God messes up Jacob’s leg.  And at the end of the fight, Jacob walks with a limp from then on.  It’s almost like a movie: there’s a really weird sequence where something absurd happens and after it ends, the main character looks back on it and thinks, “I must have been dreaming.  There’s no WAY that actually happened!”  But then they realize that they have a bruise or a scratch of something in their pocket from the time in question and they realize that maybe… maybe it wasn’t a dream.  Maybe something bizarre just happened.

Jacob wrestles God.  And he’s never the same after that.  Physically.  Mentally.  Spiritually.  It was a painful experience.  He bears the scars from that battle for the rest of his life.  But somehow, a Jacob that has experienced frustration, fear, desperation, and injury is better than the Jacob that we knew.  Through suffering, Jacob grows.  And hasn’t that happened to you?

Our second Scripture, 1 Thess. 5:12-24, is a little more direct.  Paul writes:

Now we ask you, brothers and sisters, to acknowledge those who work hard among you, who care for you in the Lord and who admonish you. Hold them in the highest regard in love because of their work. Live in peace with each other. 

Here, he’s talking about Church leadership.  Not just pastors, but others in your community that are leaders.  Leadership team members.  Choir directors.  Food pantry operators.  All kinds of leadership within the church.  And how does he describe them?  People that work hard.  People that care for others when times are hard.  People that scold others when the behavior within the community becomes inappropriate.  None of that is fun.  Who wants to work hard, deal with weird situations, and scold people that are out of line?  Nobody.  That’s the worst!  But Paul says, those people that are putting up with all that nonsense?  Give them extra respect.  They’re going through all that for you.  The true leader is a servant that suffers on the behalf of others.  THAT’S what makes them worthy of note.  Not because they have a fancy title or a nice degree or whatever other nonsense we come up with.

And now, Paul turns to everyone else and says:

And we urge you, brothers and sisters, warn those who are idle and disruptive, encourage the disheartened, help the weak, be patient with everyone. Make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong, but always strive to do what is good for each other and for everyone else.

In other words, be like your leadership is supposed to be!  Work hard.  Don’t turn a blind eye when someone is being disruptive.  Take care of people that need help.  The work that leadership does isn’t just for leaders.  They may be the one that takes on a greater share institutionally, but that’s EVERYONE’S responsibility.  Everyone has a responsibility to do the tough stuff!  And he ends with the worst part: Don’t pay back evil for evil.  When someone does wrong, it’s natural to want to get them back.  It’s not just natural, it’s fair!  It’s reasonable!  But we’re not supposed to do that.  Be better than fair.  Be merciful.  Take the high road.

Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

GIVE THANKS IN ALL CIRCUMSTANCES.  It’s easy to give thanks on Thanksgiving.  Most of us have a nice meal in front of us.  A bunch of family around us.  Who couldn’t be thankful on a day like that?  But when our thanks is just driven by that, it’s just pleasure-based happiness.  It’s easy.  Anyone can get that.  It’s meaningless.  It’s here today and gone tomorrow.  We don’t just give thanks on turkey day.  We give thanks on EVERY day.  The good ones.  The bad ones.  The boring ones!  And we pray.  We pray continually in our hearts.  That’s a verse that’s so deep that I can’t even scratch the surface of it today, so I’ll just leave it at that and come back at some point in the future.  And we rejoice.  

It doesn’t say that you have to rejoice and give thanks for the bad things that happen.  That would be absurd, wouldn’t it?  “God, thank you for this broken leg.”  A broken leg is a bad thing.  We don’t have to thank God for the bad things.  But even in those moments defined by bad things, God is at work, making us better.  Making us shine brighter.  God’s will for us in Christ is to accept these moments, all the while praising God with joy and thanksgiving.  What a gift.  Now we move on to a passage with a theme very similar to last week:

Do not quench the Spirit. Do not treat prophecies with contempt but test them all; hold on to what is good, reject every kind of evil.

Again, not every religious idea is a good one.  Don’t hear something from your leadership and just assume it’s good because they’re good.  Don’t endure a tough situation and internalize some weird meaning because it feels like God wants that.  Just as with last week, we test the spirits.  We have to check to see that what we get actually lines up with what God has told us in Scripture.  Because we can develop wrong, even when we’re doing everything right.  We have to be discerning on this journey of growth.

May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it.

There’s our goal.  That’s true happiness right there.  Sanctification.  That’s God making us holy.  That’s fulfillment.  All of the pain we endure.  The hard work we get through  The insults we bear.  It’s God at work, sanctifying us.  God doesn’t want to make us happy.  He wants so much more than that.  He wants to make us holy.  That’s why any turn to epicureanism, popular though it may be, is ultimately a lost cause.  We’re more than dopamine centers.  We’re beings capable of a full range of emotions, even negative ones.  And enduring suffering isn’t pointless.  Epicurus was wrong.  The wholeness of our lives can’t be found in avoiding pain and collecting pleasures, because God has a way of helping us grow through suffering.  Who knew that a God who died on a cross might end up expecting his followers to suffer now and again?  So what will we do?  Will we rely on ourselves?  Will we back away from the Jabboks of our lives, avoiding any painful wrestling in the process?  Or will we cling and beg for a blessing?

The Authentic Self

~ Vincent

This entry is part of a series called “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” Learn more about the series here.
Preached on November 6, 2022
Scriptures: Psalm 51, Romans 3:9-20

This is sermon three in our series on the Gospel in a postmodern world.  In our first week, we talked a little about the current state of things in the West.  Statistically, Christians are more likely to lose their faith than in any prior generation and conversions are rarer than ever before.  Rather than assume that it’s just a product of every church being incompetent or suggesting that the Gospel needs a hip new revision for a new era, I went in a different direction.  I suggested that the current Western cultural movement, Postmodernism, is one that is especially challenging for Christianity to flourish in.  The doctrinal orthodoxy of pop-culture is not kind to our faith.  We can’t just keep doing the same old same old.  We have to accept that we are missionaries in this new world, and the first step for any missionary is to evaluate the culture.  Know it.  Know the advantages and the disadvantages.  Know the challenges and the easy moves.  Know what people expect.  Then you can go from there.

In week two, we talked about truth.  The postmodern world is typified as a post-truth world.  There is no popular framework for real, objective truth.  There’s only subjective truth.  What’s true for me is not what’s true for you.  Truth is little more than an opinion that’s accepted by all present.  This will not do.  Christianity, from its inception, claimed to be genuinely true, not partially true or a truth in a competing market of reasonable truth claims.   Christians have to be people concerned with OBJECTIVE truth, calling people back to a genuine reality that was created by God.

And then we had a slight departure from the series in Reformation Day.  Which was fun!  I love doing a little history.  We talked about Martin Luther and the origins of Protestantism.  We learned about sola Scriptura and sola fide.  And near the end of the sermon, I mentioned that works righteousness was making a comeback.  People today, if they assume a god exists, don’t see themselves as someone who needs salvation from the God in question.  All in all, they don’t tend to see themselves as something that needs saving.  Which makes sharing the gospel in a traditional way a challenge.  “Hey, did you know God will forgive all your sins in Jesus Christ?”  “What sins?”  “The ones you’ve done your whole life long!”  “That’s pretty presumptuous of you.  I haven’t really done any sins that matter.  Actually, I’m one of the good ones.  Shame on you for being so judgy.”

And some of you may feel as though that’s an untrue statement.  You might think, “Hey, most people would agree to their sinfulness on some level, Vincent.  You’re just being judgy.”  So let me clarify my observation here: how many people that you meet genuinely consider the core of their humanity to be tainted by original sin?  How many people genuinely think that they’re only capable of good by God’s grace, without which they are only able to sin?  Not a lot.  The average assumption about human nature isn’t that it’s hopelessly flawed.  It’s that it’s actually shockingly good.  Let’s think about a pop culture example that states this theory pretty clearly.

How many of you saw The Greatest Showman?  It came out about 5 years ago.  It was actually up for a few awards, if I remember correctly.  It’s this musical about the circus.  In that movie, there’s a group of people that belong to the circus’s freak show.  They’ve had hard lives.  They’ve been made fun of.  They’ve been ostracized.  But now?  Now that they’re in a community together, they’ve gained the confidence to be themselves… and they sing this power ballad: This is Me.

I am not a stranger to the dark
Hide away, they say
‘Cause we don’t want your broken parts
I’ve learned to be ashamed of all my scars
Run away, they say
No one’ll love you as you are
But I won’t let them break me down to dust
I know that there’s a place for us
For we are glorious
When the sharpest words wanna cut me down
I’m gonna send a flood, gonna drown ’em out
I am brave, I am bruised
I am who I’m meant to be, this is me
Look out ’cause here I come
And I’m marching on to the beat I drum
I’m not scared to be seen
I make no apologies, this is me.

What is the assumption about our singers?  That deep down, they’re incredibly beautiful.  They’re different in a way that scares the world, and so the world has tried to keep them down.   So they have to band together and resist the pull of society!  They have to learn to be authentically themselves in a hostile world. 

 The problem isn’t with me!  The problem is OUT THERE in society!

Now, obviously in that example, it’s hard not to agree.  Being mean to a bearded lady because they look different is unambiguously cruel.  But that ballad spoke to people from every walk of life.  It won the Golden Globe award for the Best Original Song, it was nominated for an academy award and a Tony, and it had millions of replays on every music streaming service you can think of.  And why?  Because it’s easy to relate.  It’s easy to feel like someone who is uniquely beautiful that’s being held back by society.  That’s part of the philosophical lens of the postmodern world.  Sin isn’t something in me.  I’m pretty amazing once you get to know me.  SOCIETY is the sinful thing.  If you tell me Im sinful, that’s not gonna resonate.  It’s mean.  I’m pretty good.  If you tell me society is sinful… oh, man.  AGREED.  Society IS dreadful.  We need to get rid of that thing so that I can start being my authentic self!

The orthodox Christian view is very different than the modern Western view.  And just to drive that point home, I want to look at two philosophers.  One a very orthodox Christian theologian.  One a philosopher of the Enlightenment.  Both men wrote a book named Confessions.  Both of those books detail a story in which they  stole produce.  But the takeaway for each man is totally different depending on how they think about sin and what needs redemption.

Our orthodox Christian is Augustine of Hippo.  In his Confessions (written sometime in the fourth century) when he was a teenager, he was hanging out with his friends one night… and they saw this tree of pears on someone else’s property.  And what did they do?  They stole the pears!  They snuck into the yard, filled a basket with the pears, and made off with them.  Why?  Not to eat them.  As a matter of fact, they had better pears at home.  They just threw the basket of pears to some pigs and laughed about the whole thing.  No, they stole them because it wasn’t allowed.  They wanted to break the rules.  They wanted to steal.  They wanted to destroy something beautiful!  He writes:

“It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error–not that for which I erred but the error itself. A depraved soul, falling away from security in thee to destruction in itself, seeking nothing from the shameful deed but shame itself.” 

-Augustine, Confessions

For Augustine, why did he destroy the pears?  Because something is wrong INSIDE.  There’s something deadly wrong.  That’s why we need salvation… because from our birth, something inside is veering us away from life towards death.  That’s sin.  That’s the problem.  Original sin was something humans were born with.  Because of humanity’s fall when Adam and Eve ate that fruit that God told them not to, humanity’s nature itself was changed.  We went from law-abiding creatures to law-breaking creatures.   So every one of us, regardless of what we’ve done specifically, is tainted by original sin.

Now, let’s move to Rousseau.  Rousseau was a philosopher in the Enlightenment and he ALSO wrote a book called Confessions.  Make no mistake, if you’re a nerd, you don’t accidentally write a book called Confessions without knowing what you’re doing.  He’s deliberately drawing his audience’s attention to Augustine.  And he ALSO includes a story about produce theft with friends!  But notice how he tweaked things.  He’s working for this guy whose mother has a little garden growing nearby.  And this boss asks him to regularly go steal a little bit of asparagus from that garden, sell the asparagus, and give him the proceeds.  He’s really uncomfortable that he would be asked to do this by an authority, but he wants to please the boss, so he does it.  And after a few times, he starts to become bitter.  He asks himself a question: “Why am I taking on all the risk with none of the reward?”  So he starts skimming a little off the top.  But that’s not really enough to make it worth the punishment that he would endure if he were caught stealing, so he starts stealing other little things that he finds around the house.  Apples.  Trinkets.  Anything that he can get his hands on.  He’s been put in an unjust situation!  In his mind, additional theft at least gives him what he’s owed for his boss’s unfair demands.  Notice what slowly twisted him.  Was it his inner desires?  No!  The real culprit was society!  He writes:

A continual repetition of ill treatment rendered me callous; it seemed a kind of composition for my crimes, which authorized me to continue them, and, instead of looking back at the punishment, I looked forward to revenge. Being beat like a slave, I judged I had a right to all the vices of one.

-Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Confessions

Rousseau doesn’t believe in original sin like Augustine does.  He believes in what I’ll call “the beauty of authenticity.”  He thinks people are fundamentally good.  The thing that causes trouble is society.  Society warps people.  It makes them want to be other than what they are.  They start to try to be better than.  Bigger than.  Smarter than.  They want to be the boss!  And for them to be better than, others have to be lesser than.  People, fundamentally good, are warped by the society around them.  People have to learn to let go of society’s corrupting grasp and be the beautiful creatures they always were.

Pears and asparagus.  Both stolen.  Both thefts encouraged by friends.  But the locus of conversion is very different.  Do we need to convert individual people?  Or do we need to convert society?

And some of you, I’m sure, are saying, “Vincent, slow down.  Aren’t they both right?  Isn’t it true that society needs changing and people need changing?”  Sure.  But what we’re trying to identify is the root problem.  If it’s society, I can set out to create bulwarks against unrealistic expectations and oppressive forces to recover the goodness that each person secretly holds in their hearts.  It’s not going to be easy, but it’s doable.  If the problem is that original sin has corrupted human hearts… well that’s a bigger challenge that we can tackle.  That’s when we need to get someone much bigger involved.

The seeds that Rousseau planted during the Enlightenment took root.  And they grew.  And today we see their expression in movies like The Greatest Showman.  People are wired to critique the world around them.  Ask anyone!  Ask, “What cultural forces are preventing you from being yourself?”  You’ll get a laundry list of answers.  Easy.  Ask someone, “What sins are preventing you from being yourself?”  and you’ll get a less warm answer.  Similarly, it’s really hard to talk to someone about a God that forgives their sins when people aren’t really concerned about their own sins.  It’s much easier to talk about a God that wants to change the world around me.  

And I include myself in that.  Remember, as we critique culture, we’re a part of it.  We don’t get to say, “This is what other people do!”  No, this is what WE do too.  It’s really hard to talk about personal sin, it’s easy to talk about societal sin.  That isn’t a natural human instinct to push the blame onto someone else.  It’s a cultural shift.  The early Methodists were required to be in small groups.  You couldn’t be a Methodist without being in a small group.  It didn’t work that way.  And during your small group, you had confession time.  With everyone there.  And you named every sin that you were wrestling with.  And everyone there prayed for God to help you with those sins.  Can you imagine doing that today?  No way!  That sounds insane!  Give me a justice group or something.  Let me go solve the problem OUT THERE!  But the problem in here?  Psht.  Get that outta here.  It’s good enough.

So let’s think about this shift.  Can Christianity let go of its commitment to original sin and shift to focus primarily on societal sin?  No.  No we can’t.  That’s not to say we can’t acknowledge that there’s sin out there.  It’s not to say that we can’t work to try to help those affected by it.  But we can’t say, “people are fundamentally good and we just need to work on some really good laws until we get it just right and THEN everything will be good.”  We can’t.  The problem is deeper than that.  According to the Bible, we could come up with the most perfect society in the world, all the best laws, totally remove all oppressive forces, totally remove all need to feel better than or worse than… and we’d still manage to mess it up.

Turn in your Bible to Romans 3 verse 9:

What shall we conclude then? Do we have any advantage? Not at all! For we have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin. As it is written:
“There is no one righteous, not even one;
    there is no one who understands;
    there is no one who seeks God.
All have turned away,
    they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
    not even one.”
“Their throats are open graves;
    their tongues practice deceit.”
“The poison of vipers is on their lips.”
“Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”
“Their feet are swift to shed blood;
ruin and misery mark their ways,
and the way of peace they do not know.”
“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”


Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin.

Most of what we have in this section is just Paul quoting other parts of the Bible.  He’s quoting several different psalms and Isaiah.  Why?  To talk about our sin.  And is this because Paul hates people?  Not at all.  He thinks that people have a problem that’s deeper than societal pressures.  He thinks our hearts are fundamentally infected.  And if you have an infection in your heart, do you worry about polishing up your social interactions?  Do you say, “Man, I just try harder and the infection will just go away!”  No.  You don’t solve an infection with willpower. You call a doctor.  Paul is trying to tell us that there’s this infection in our hearts.  And he knows the doctor: Jesus.

What shall we conclude then? Do we have any advantage? Not at all! For we have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin

What’s going on here?  Paul is addressing whether or not Jews have an advantage over Gentiles in regard to sin.  After all, they had the law, right?  Surely someone who knows the law will be in less trouble than someone who doesn’t have the law!  They’ve got everything right there!  You might think about this as though it’s about church people today.  Don’t we have an advantage against sinning?  We’ve got the Bible!  We’ve got church tradition!  But what does Paul say?  NO!  You’re not any better off!  You’re a sinner.  You’ve got the same infection that they’ve got.  You need a doctor just as bad.  Sin isn’t just a problem that requires some better laws.  It’s deeper than that.  You need something bigger.  

And now Paul gives us that big list of Scripture quotes:

“There is no one righteous, not even one;
    there is no one who understands;
    there is no one who seeks God.
All have turned away,
    they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
    not even one.”
“Their throats are open graves;
    their tongues practice deceit.”
“The poison of vipers is on their lips.”
“Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”
“Their feet are swift to shed blood;
ruin and misery mark their ways,
and the way of peace they do not know.”
“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

Look at what he’s doing here.  He’s naming all of humanity first off.  Little babies.  Old folks.  Everyone.  Nobody is righteous.  Not one.  All have turned away.  And now he goes all throughout the human body to show just how lost we are.  Our throats.  Our tongues.  Our mouths.  Our feet.  From head to toe: infected by sin.

And every so often, there’s someone who gets tripped up by that word “fear.”  Fear of God means respect in this context.  Don’t get tripped up.  It’s reverence in the face of his awesome majesty.  It’s the sobering recognition that he’s in charge of every aspect of everything ever.  It’s that feeling of proper smallness in the face of infinite bigness.  It’s not fear that he’ll hurt you.  That’s not what Paul is trying to say.  He’s saying, nobody has a right relationship with God.  Not one of us.  

Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin.

The problem should be clear at this point.  It’s not JUST what’s outside.  Sure that’s wrong.  But more than that, there’s a problem inside.  Let’s read on to see the solution.

But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

There’s the solution.  Faith in Christ is the only thing that can cure us.  Our works aren’t enough.  Just like with Martin Luther last week, you can try and try and try and no amount of effort will ever be enough to solve the problem.  Every person on earth is redeemed not by works, but by faith. A commentator named Handley Moule writes: “The harlot, the liar, the murderer, are short of it; but so are you. Perhaps they stand at the bottom of a mine, and you on the crest of an Alp; but you are as little able to touch the stars as they.” Everyone falls short, but everyone can be justified freely by His grace. The doctrine of original sin matters because you can’t cure a disease that you don’t know about.  If we say we’re all good inside and it’s just a matter of outer troubles, we’re addressing the wrong problem.

But what do we do if maintaining sinfulness is a part of the core Christian thing?  How do we evangelize to people who don’t see themselves as sinful?  If you don’t need to be saved, how can I introduce a savior? I spoke with a campus minister from the university recently, and he actually brought this up.  He mentioned that evangelizing to people by talking about their sinfulness and need for a savior might have worked 50 or 60 years ago, but today, it’s just a non-starter.  People don’t recognize their personal sin or need for a savior.  But something that has proven to be especially effective is evangelism about relationship.  We live in a timeframe where people are more isolated than ever.  In Robert Putnam’s landmark study, Bowling Alone, one of the metrics he used to check societal isolation was the size of groups that people went bowling in.  Now, people go bowling by themselves more than ever.  Bowling leagues are much smaller than they were in the past.  And that’s just the metric he chose as his central conversation piece for the book.  Social clubs are dying in droves, petitions are less common than ever, people know their neighbors less, people meet their friends more rarely.  Community is at an all time low.  People are lonely.  This campus minister recognized that and used it to evangelize.  He talked to people about how God wants to be in relationship with them, despite all the ways they’ve been pushing him away.  THAT worked.  THAT was effective at opening a conversation about God.

People may not feel guilty, but they feel alone.  They know that something is wrong in this world and they’re desperately trying to fix it.  Do they need to know about sin?  Yes.  Absolutely.  But leading with that isn’t going to make sense.  It’s going to feel like an attack and people will defend against an attack.  Guilt versus innocence may not make sense, but loneliness and closeness do.  It’s not a perfect substitute.  After all, if I’ve hurt God, can’t I do something to make it better?  There’s that gap where it’s not completely addressing the sin problem.  But, you know, it’s not works-centric and it’s still accurate.  Sin is a doctrine that will probably take some time for people to understand in our era.  That’s ok.  Not everything will make sense all at once.  Sometimes, you just need to get a foot in the door and see where things go.  When I was first Christian, I barely had anything that looked like a genuine Christian faith.  The only doctrines I thought seemed good were Heaven and a good God.  The rest just seemed crazy!  But the deeper doctrines need more time to teach.  I was hooked by the lure of eternity and and God pulled me in from there.

As we evangelize today, it’s important to recognize that people won’t see themselves as sinful.  This is a hard doctrine.  And unlike objective truth, a debate won’t gain us any ground.  But we can pivot.  We can acknowledge that we are far from God.  Our relationship is weak.  Only through Christ’s sacrifice can we approach God afresh.  And when people start to encounter God, they’ll recognize that it’s not enough to just say hi.  Something more is necessary.  Something that transforms what they are into what they were always supposed to be.  And it’s a good reminder for us too.  When we don’t feel particularly sinful.  When we’re convinced that we’re just a good person trapped in crummy circumstances that someone else really ought to clean up… well that’s when we need to recognize that our relationship with God is weak.  If we’re blaming the world as though he doesn’t know what’s going on in it, we need to spend some time with him.  Only then will we start to see the transformation that we need.

Amen.

One Point Per Parable: Julicher is Overrated

~ Vincent

I knew a pastor that used to preach that every parable had precisely one meaning. They never explained why that was the case. Of course, making declarations like that from the pulpit isn’t uncommon. Pastors have a terrible habit of just kind of declaring that their school of thought is self-evident and there’s no other possibilities out there. Or worse yet, they use the dreaded, credibility-grabbing phraise “scholars say…” Which scholars? Why do they say that? What are my other options? Don’t get me wrong, I get the instinct. Sermons aren’t intended to be a comprehensive history of religious thought. At the same time, I do wonder how often we cause problems by not fully explaining why we’re preaching what we are. In any case, I just assumed the “one point per parable” idea was a weird quirk of that pastor and ignored it. Until now. Lo and behold, I found the history of the idea. And it turns out the guy behind the theory was pretty influential! But not quite as influential as many claim.

Adolf Julicher was the guy who started telling people that there was “one point per parable.” He’s a 19th century German professor. I stumbled across the name while I was reading Kenneth Bailey’s Jesus through Middle Eastern Eyes (which is a phenomenal resource for anyone looking to learn about Middle Eastern culture and Christ, by the way). He cited Julicher’s work as the fundamental turn away from the allegorical approach which dominated thought in the medieval era. This would be a pretty major accomplishment. Allegorical interpretations are often pretty weird to modern eyes. For example, Bailey points to Augustine interpreting the parable of the Friend at Midnight (Luke 11:5-13). In that particular parable, Jesus tells everyone to imagine trying to knock on their neighbor’s door to borrow three loaves of bread at midnight. What would your neighbor say? Probably nothing nice. But if you keep pestering them, eventually they’ll get out of bed and give you some bread. He follows up with some of his classic thoughts on prayer: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find,” (Lk 11:9). Augustine reads this story and says that the person waking up in the story is actually intended to represent anyone who is seeking meaning in life. They’re up at midnight because they’re so world-weary and desperately seeking something more. The friend is Scripture, which we should always go to in times of need. And the bread? That’s the life-giving knowledge of the trinity. Needless to say, it’s a bit of a stretch. (If you want to know more about the best and the worst of the allegorical approach, see my posts on the best of it and the worst of it)

Adolf Julicher is presented as the anti-allegorist. He says Jesus told parables not to obscure the meaning of things, but to make them clear. Jesus wasn’t some kind of weirdo mystic; he was just a relatable storyteller trying to get simple points across. Consequently, there are no hidden meanings in parables. They have one meaning, and it should be obvious.

I’m sure some of you are thinking, “Hold up! But Jesus was specifically asked why he kept speaking in parables and he said:”

Because the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. This is why I speak to them in parables:

“Though seeing, they do not see;
though hearing, they do not hear or understand.”

Matt 13:11-13

Fair point. That passage definitely favors the allegorists more than Julicher. But that’s where Julicher’s modernist background comes across the strongest. The modernists were a group that thought the core of religion had been corrupted by centuries of mythology and tradition, and it had to be recovered by stripping away the weird parts of religious doctrine to get back to the pure ideas of Jesus. Julicher is right in those footsteps. He says that the apostles were all wrong about the parables. They quoted them out of context. They mythologized them way more than Jesus intended. They didn’t understandJesus at all. Rather than take him at face value and accept him as a sweet, simple rabbi that could help them grow, they mythologized him and made it incredibly complicated for the modern person to see the true simplicity that Jesus was getting at. What Julicher sees in Scripture is a sort of fanciful take on the true idea that was planted by the original Jesus:

The authenticity of the Gospel parables is not absolute. They did not emerge from the mouth of Jesus as we now read them. They are translated, displaced, and internally transformed. . . . Without careful examination, one can nowhere identify the voice of Jesus with voices of the Gospel authors.

Jülicher 1963: I.11. as cited at
https://parablesreception.blogspot.com/2015/08/adolf-julicher-1857-1938.html

As you can tell, Julicher’s comes with a lot of baggage. If we’re seriously claiming to rely on his work as a cornerstone of our own thought, we’ve got this whole, “Don’t trust the Bible, it’s full of misunderstandings,” overtone above everything else. We are forced to fumble through the mistakes of the authors when we pick up our Bibles, rather than to be informed about anything we didn’t come in with. We end up on this quest for a historical Jesus, which is ironically different from the story of Jesus that came down to us through history. Because that guy does miracles and was the son of God, and that’s just silly.

Is this really the cornerstone of modern parable interpretation? It seems like a lot of people out there think so. Not only did Bailey directly contrast him with the allegorical approach, citing him as the cure for the past’s goofiness, but a lot of professors in seminaries out there seem to hold up Julicher as the start of contemporary parable scholarship. And I think they’re wrong. If you’re a theological modernist, Julicher is absolutely core to that tradition, but there are a lot of Protestants out there who certainly aren’t intellectual descendants of Julicher and somehow avoid the highly allegorized approach. To know why, we need to look between these two eras to find a school of thought that was infinitely more influential and far less controversial.

What happened between the Middle Ages and the modern era? The Reformation! You know, that big period where people specifically started avoiding allegorical readings and focusing on what Jesus meant in his context when he said things. It was that era in which John Calvin and Martin Luther dominated. To be fair to Julicher, he seems to have suggested that these men were on the right track before their followers delved back into allegory, but I don’t think he’s right. To the contrary, I think that the fundamentals of the Protestant Reformation set out a path that’s normative for most Protestant preachers to this day. Let’s use Calvin as an example. Just glance through Calvin’s commentaries on any parable. He’s consistently logical (by modern Protestant standards). He pays attention to the cultural context and the implications of the words in Greek. He often gains several meanings from a parable, but they’re ideas that all seem theologically connected to the circumstances at hand and the major themes Jesus is speaking to. Calvin does all this without devolving into the fullness of allegorical wackiness. When he looks at the warning from Jesus that parables are deliberately unintelligible to some people, he doesn’t read that at a license to go wild speculating about the hidden meaning, nor does he dismiss it as a piece of obscurantism from some befuddled disciples. He goes in a different direction:

 These words were intended partly to show that all were not endued with true understanding to comprehend what he said, and partly to arouse his disciples to consider attentively that doctrine which is not readily and easily understood by all. Indeed, he makes a distinction among the hearers, by pronouncing some to have ears, and others to be deaf. If it is next inquired, how it comes to pass that the former have ears, Scripture testifies in other passages, that it is the Lord who pierces the ears, and that no man obtains or accomplishes this by his own industry.

Calvin’s Commentary on Matthew, ch. 13 v. 9

The challenge in understanding the parable is that no person is capable of understanding any part of God’s truth on their own. Only through God’s grace are we capable of understanding any of it. Anyone listening to the parables without the grace of God hears little more than nonsense. And just to make sure Arminians out there aren’t outraged by the choice of Calvin as normative, I gave Wesley a quick check and he says almost the same thing with the caveat that all people could listen to that grace, but some won’t because they’re so stuck in their worldly ways. Either way, the assumption that the parables are generally capable of being explored through logic and knowledge of Jesus’ cultural context and are ultimately legitimized through faith made possible by grace is pretty normative for most of the sermons on parables I’ve ever heard. And that methodology was around way before Julicher.

I hate to contribute to creating these big categorizations in history. It’s always unpleasant dividing thinkers between different eras. Whenever we categorize things, we inevitably simplify them to a degree that rarely does justice to the subject matter. Nevertheless, I was delighted to find Julicher and solve the mystery of where that pastor got the “one point per parable” theory, but I do think it’s necessary to keep a wider scope when considering his legacy. He’s not the first one to advocate intensely for less allegorized approaches to the parables, nor is he the most popular. He’s got his place in his tradition, for sure. But it’s not quite as massive as the average article seems to claim.

Apologies for the indirect citations for Julicher. Most of his key stuff remains in German, so it’s tough to get at. If you want to know more, check out this site, which has links to some great secondary sources in English and even one in German: https://virtualreligion.net/primer/julicher.html.

What Did Jesus Write in the Dirt in John 8:1-11? Big Name Theologians Weigh In

~ Vincent

While poking around some different articles on the treatment of women in Leviticus, I stumbled across some wacky interpretations of what Jesus wrote in the sand in John 8:1-11. Let me refresh your memory on that passage (with a verse from chapter 7 to make sure we don’t start in the middle of a sentence):

7 53 Then they all went home,

8 1 but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.

2 At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. 3 The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group 4 and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. 5 In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” 6 They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.

But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. 7 When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8 Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.

9 At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. 10 Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

11 “No one, sir,” she said.

“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”

What did Jesus write? It’s important enough that it’s referenced twice at crucial story moments, but apparently not important enough to tell us anything about it. I’ve heard people say he was writing a passage from Leviticus 20 indicating that BOTH people were supposed to be stoned, revealing that they would be breaking the law if they stoned her because they failed to produce both parties. Others have said that he was writing the names of every accuser along with the sins that they had recently committed. I’ve even heard that he drew a line in the sand for people to cross if they felt they were worthy. There are a lot of takes out there, but most of them aren’t really founded on much apart from one person’s random guesswork. What have the major theologians of the Christian tradition said about the writing in the sand?

Naturally, I started with Augustine (because you can never go too far wrong with Augustine). Luckily for me, he preached a series of sermons about the book of John and his take was customarily good. He suggested the trap the Pharisees laid was in making Jesus choose between gentleness and justice. If Jesus approved of the women’s death, he’d be the guy that condemned peasant women and his popularity would suffer. If he didn’t approve of her death, he was speaking against God’s justice and was officially a transgressor of the law! Jesus navigates the dilemma with his typical craftiness by taking neither option. But what about the finger writing?

You have heard, O Jews, you have heard, O Pharisees, you have heard, O teachers of the law, the guardian of the law, but have not yet understood Him as the Lawgiver. What else does He signify to you when He writes with His finger on the ground? For the law was written with the finger of God; but written on stone because of the hard-hearted. The Lord now wrote on the ground, because He was seeking fruit. You have heard then, Let the law be fulfilled, let the adulteress be stoned. But is it by punishing her that the law is to be fulfilled by those that ought to be punished? Let each of you consider himself, let him enter into himself, ascend the judgment-seat of his own mind, place himself at the bar of his own conscience, oblige himself to confess… Each looking carefully into himself, finds himself a sinner. Yes, indeed. Hence, either let this woman go, or together with her receive ye the penalty of the law… [H]aving struck them through with that dart of justice, [Jesus] deigned not to heed their fall, but, turning away His look from them, “again He wrote with His finger on the ground.” 

Augustine, Sermon on John Chapter VII. 40–53; VIII. 1–11

Brilliant! Rather than focus on non-existent content, he’s looking at the symbolism of the act itself. Why would Jesus write on the ground? Because God wrote the law on stone the first time, and now he’s writing on the ground. This is the same dust that people were created from. Were they fertile enough to bear fruit after all these years? Or were their hearts still hard as the rocks that the commandments were once written on? He even returns to his idea of gentleness by indicating that Jesus didn’t stare them down after the incident, shaming them for their sin. He just keeps writing. Really nice work here.

Other patristic authors are less worthy of sharing. John Chrysostom has a sermon series on John that deliberately skips over this particular story and a lot of ancient theologians (especially in the East) follow suit, leading some to believe that they had copies of John that didn’t contain these verses. In Against the Pelagians, Book 2, Jerome suggests Jesus was writing out the names of the accusers to to fulfill Jeremiah 17:13 “Those who turn away from you will be written in the dust,” (a passage which seems to have been intended to be more poetic than literal). By and large, Augustine’s logic seems to have been attractive. Thomas Aquinas carries it forward to the Middle Ages in his mega-commentary Catena Aurea and includes support from Venerable Bede and Alcuin of York to back him up.

In the Reformation, John Calvin comes out swinging against Augustine and approaches the story without interest in allegory:

By this attitude he intended to show that he despised them. Those who conjecture that he wrote this or the other thing, in my opinion, do not understand his meaning. Nor do I approve of the ingenuity of Augustine, who thinks that in this manner the distinction between the Law and the Gospel is pointed out, because Christ did not write on tables of stone, (Exodus 31:18,) but on man, who is dust and earth. For Christ rather intended, by doing nothing, to show how unworthy they were of being heard; just as if any person, while another was speaking to him, were to draw lines on the wall, or to turn his back, or to show, by any other sign, that he was not attending to what was said. Thus in the present day, when Satan attempts, by various methods, to draw us aside from the right way of teaching, we ought disdainfully to pass by many things which he holds out to us.

John Calvin, Calvin’s Commentary on John 13:1-11

Gone is the speculative symbolism! Instead, we have a Jesus that’s just not listening. Pharisees are coming around, asking questions that they already know the answer to, and Jesus just starts doodling in the sand. That’s how little he cares what they have to say. When he says “Let he who is without sin throw the first stone,” Calvin reads that as a deliberate reference to their own sinfulness. They know they aren’t being sincere. They’re scheming, conniving, wretched men trying to kill someone to prove their own point. It’s not that the law isn’t legitimate; it’s that they aren’t being legitimate, and they know it. Again, Calvin is sticking to the Scripture pretty thoroughly and avoiding wild speculation about the writing. Well done.

The Reformation seems to be a bit of a hinge in historical interpretation. After the Reformation, commentaries that I can find seem to take a more practical approach to the matter. The symbolic dimension is swallowed up by the practical. Some lean more heavily on WHY he wrote (to avoid meddling in politics, to calm people down, etc.) while others focus on WHAT he wrote (names, sins, passages of the law, etc.). John Wesley is one of the better big-name interpreters to marry the practical and the symbolic, but his notes are still ruthlessly pragmatic:

God wrote once in the Old Testament; Christ once in the New: perhaps the words which he afterward spoke, when they continued asking him. By this silent action, he,

1. fixed their wandering, hurrying thoughts, in order to awaken their consciences: and,
2. signified that he was not then come to condemn but to save the world.

John Wesley, Wesley’s Explanatory Notes on the New Testament, John 8:1-11

Obviously there are oodles of others well worth reading, but these were the ones that I thought were worthy of lifting up. They’re all respected enough for their words to carry weight, and each seems to represent the general stream of mainstream interpretation within their era.

Ultimately, I’m really pleased with what I found. I expected to find some really wacky stuff, but a shocking majority of commentators avoided wild speculation about the specifics of the writing and interpreted in light of the information that they had, rather than what they didn’t have. Frankly, that was my bias from the outset. If the Bible doesn’t say what Jesus wrote, it couldn’t have been all that important to the story (sorry Jerome). But really, it was phenomenal to see all the directions people went with it. I have a soft spot for that symbolic dimension. It emphasized the weight of each action within the passage in a way that was far beyond the mundane. So what did he write? Beats me. As much as I like Augustine, I’ll side with Calvin for the sheer delightful possibility of Jesus rolling his eyes and playing tic tac toe against himself in the dirt while they were trying to talk to him.

The Historic Challenge of Christian Parenting

~ Vincent ~ 3 Comments

I just ran across this quote from the famous 4th century Christian preacher, John Chrysostom:

We spare neither labors nor means in order to teach our children secular sciences, so that they can serve well the earthly authorities. Only the knowledge of the holy Faith, the service of the Heavenly King are a matter of indifference to us. We allow them to attend spectacles but we care little whether they go to Church and stand within it reverently. We demand an account from them of what they learned in their secular institutes—why do we not demand an account from them of what they heard in the Lord’s house? 

as cited by Theophan the Recluse, The Path to Salvation, trans. Fr. Seraphim Rose, 331

It was kind of a shock to read! Here’s a man in our heralded Christian past, preaching in an era which I all too readily assume was full of devotion and piety, and he’s addressing the same thing that we face today: parents often care more about secular education than they do the Christian faith. After all, life is long! A child has a whole lifetime to think about God. The window for getting into a good school? That’s approaching fast. So should their child attend church or piano lessons? Wake up early on Sunday for an entry-level job, or head over to worship? The piano lessons and job look better on a college application than anything the Church has to offer. A good application means a good school. A good school means a good job. A good job means a stable income and a higher chance of job satisfaction. Job satisfaction means a higher chance of being happy! And what more could a person ask for than a happy child? Conversion can happen anytime; the road to happiness is happening now. Children need to get on or get left behind.

It’s easy to suggest that this is a phenomenon that only really effects nominal Christians that attend church on Christmas and Easter, but it’s not quite as simple as that. Even the great Augustine of Hippo, bishop and theologian extraordinaire, had parents that prioritized his academic education before his faith journey. When he took a concubine (or started living with his girlfriend, to try to translate a weird ancient idea into a modern one), his Christian mom was surprisingly calm about the whole thing. If anything, she was glad they weren’t getting married:

The reason why she showed no such concern was that she was afraid that the hope she placed in me could be impeded by a wife. This was not the hope which my mother placed in you for the life to come, but the hope which my parents entertained for my career that I might do well out of the study of literature. Both of them, as I realized, were very ambitious for me: my father because he hardly gave a thought to you at all, and his ambitions for me were concerned with mere vanities; my mother because she thought it would do no harm and would be a help to set me on the way towards you, if I studied the traditional pattern of a literary education. That at least is my conjecture as I try to recall the characters of my parents.

Augustine, Confessions, trans. Chadwick, p. 27

In Confessions, Augustine almost NEVER says anything bad about his momma. She is the shining pinnacle of saintliness that follows him around, praying for his conversion and hoping that her son might know God! But even SHE buys in to the theory that he needs to put his studies first while he’s young and then maybe someday he can convert when he’s nice and settled. This isn’t just a thought pattern for nominal Christians; this is a pervasive way of thinking for a lot of Christian parents.

Andrew Root talks extensively about this in his book, The End of Youth Ministry. He suggests that each society has a different vision of what a parent is supposed to be. Obviously, a good parent produces happy children. That tends to be universal. But what does it mean to be happy? Is happiness luxury? Elevated social standing? Religious identity? What does the culture say that happiness is? Because regardless of whether or not you personally affirm it, you’re going to find yourself influenced by it:

It would be super weird for even me (the theologian and husband of a pastor) to say [to my next-door neighbor], “Yes, [my children are] doing very good. Owen fasted all week and saw two visions. And Maisy felt the deep conviction of the Holy Spirit and has entered a time of confession and penance. She wore our family hair shirt to school today. It made gym class difficult, but that’s the point: doing penance for sin isn’t easy!” There was a time in history when this might have been exactly how a person would respond. But not today. The moral imagination has changed, and if I did respond like this, even a churchgoing neighbor would make all sorts of moral interpretations about me… My neighbor might even call social services, assuming that I’m some crazy religious freak, because my sense of the good feels wrong to her. And what would give her the moral high ground is her assumption that my poor kids are being kept from living a full life.

Andrew Root, The End of Youth Ministry, p. 25

So what is good parenting today? What is that thing that our society strives to achieve? For people in the eras of Augustine and Chrysostom, it was clearly tied to an increase in wealth and standing. Are things so different today? Not to suggest that the core of all goodness is located in a person’s pocketbook, but we clearly assume that more money will lead to better opportunities for happiness. Augustine’s parents got all kinds of admiration for saving up and sending him off to a top-notch school! That made them good parents in the eyes of the world. Good parents just like that were being lectured by Chrysostom: don’t let material success take priority over faith, regardless of how good it makes you look in the eyes of the world. If we want to avoid being good parents and be godly parents, it’s going to be a challenge that we can’t embark on alone.

I have no kids. It’s easy for me to say that Christians need to find ways to push back against the presiding social imaginary and put faith first when raising children. That being said, I’m still a church member. I’m responsible for helping raise children within my church community, and I’m responsible for supporting their parents. I hope I can can help them on that difficult journey, and I hope I can find a community to help me when that time comes. Raising children faithfully been a challenge for thousands of years, and the lure of defining parenting by the measure of secular success isn’t going away anytime soon.

Great Thinkers and Produce Theft

~ Vincent

I won’t pretend that I knew who Jean-Jacques Rousseau was before this past week.  Makes sense.  Enlightenment-era philosophy and Christian theology tend not to have much in common.  He’s probably best known as the guy with that memorable quote, “Man is born free but everywhere is in chains.”  I’ve started digging into his stuff after running across him in Carl Trueman’s latest book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (a brilliant attempt to trace the history of thought that led the modern Western mind).  Apparently this Rousseau guy went toe-to-toe with Augustine!  Not only did he write his own Confessions, but he even included a section about stealing produce and what it meant for his soul!

For those that aren’t aware, Augustine (father of Western Christian orthodoxy) has a really famous moment in his Confessions where he steals some pears.  He’s with a bunch of his rowdy teenage friends when they see this big, beautiful tree of pears.  They steal as many as they can, and then they throw them to the pigs.  The act is pure sin.  There’s nothing to be gained.  There’s nothing logical about it.  Augustine even has better pears at home!  The point isn’t to gain something; the point is to destroy something:

It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error–not that for which I erred but the error itself. A depraved soul, falling away from security in thee to destruction in itself, seeking nothing from the shameful deed but shame itself.

Augustine; Henry Chadwick. The Confessions p. 29

It’s a vivid illustration of man’s innate drive towards sinfulness.  Who among us hasn’t done something stupid in their youth?  Something that was destructive for the sake of being destructive?  For me, I think about the cafeteria at undergrad.  When you were done eating, the popular thing to do in my friend group was to grab an extra apple or banana on your way out and just throw it as far across campus as you could.  And why?  Because destroying was fun!  Cleaning staff be darned!  Let the fruit smash commence!  Augustine is saying, “let’s not let ourselves off the hook for the destruction that we wrought as teens.  We did it for a reason: humanity innately longs to sin.  Don’t let the fact that you were younger and more overt prevent you from seeing your fundamental nature in those stupid acts of destruction.”

Meanwhile, in HIS confessions, Rousseau ALSO tells the story of stealing produce!  This time, it’s asparagus.  His boss, Verrat, has a mother that’s been growing a little garden, and he’s decided that young Rousseau is the perfect man to steal asparagus from it and sell them on his behalf.  Rousseau steals asparagus for relatively benign reasons at first: “seeking only to please my employer,” he claims.  But what began as a little way to help his boss get some extra luxuries starts to warp him.  He starts skimming a little off the top.  After all, he’s the one that is taking on the risk, and nobody would believe him if he said that his boss put him up to it!  So to make things fair, he takes a little.  Then he starts stealing other little things that he finds: apples, tools, trinkets he finds laying around the house.  More than that, he feels utterly justified in doing all that he does:

A continual repetition of ill treatment rendered me callous; it seemed a kind of composition for my crimes, which authorized me to continue them, and, instead of looking back at the punishment, I looked forward to revenge. Being beat like a slave, I judged I had a right to all the vices of one.

Rousseau, Confessions, Bk 1, Gutenberg Edition

Note the change in culprit!  Augustine saw his crimes as proof of a deep-seated inclination to sin within his soul.  Rousseau looks outward to find the culprit.  Verrat convinced him to start stealing to feed his need for luxury.  The sin was reinforced by unjust risk, the beatings that he suffered, and the way he was treated after his crimes.  If Augustine’s pear-thieving was proof of an inward problem, Rousseau’s asparagus theft is a testament to the power that society has to warp an individual towards evil.

This brings us to one of Rousseau’s major ideas: society is the primary force responsible for corrupting the average human. If left alone, people are basically good!  They don’t know how to lie, deceive, compare themselves to someone else, or take advantage of people.  They’re unique, gifted, and ready to live in a way that suits them.  But when they’re introduced to society… well… they learn to lie:

As long as men remained satisfied with their rustic cabins… they lived free, healthy, honest and happy, as much as their nature would admit, and continued to enjoy with each other all the pleasures of an independent intercourse; but from the moment one man began to stand in need of another’s assistance; from the moment it appeared an advantage for one man to possess the quantity of provisions requisite for two, all equality vanished; property started up; labour became necessary; and boundless forests became smiling fields, which it was found necessary to water with human sweat, and in which slavery and misery were soon seen to sprout out and grow with the fruits of the earth.

Rousseau, Second Discourse, Gutenberg Edition

People’s lies help them get along with others.  They help them accumulate wealth and power.  They help them appear better than they are.   All of humanity ends up living a lie and drawing each new person they meet deeper into that lie.  The people who are best at lying benefit tremendously, regardless of who is actually moral:

While government and laws take care of the security and the well being of men in groups, the sciences, letters, and the arts, less despotic and perhaps more powerful, spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains which weigh men down, snuffing out in them the feeling of that original liberty for which they appear to have been born, and make them love their slavery by turning them into what are called civilized people. Need has raised thrones; the sciences and the arts have strengthened them. You earthly powers, cherish talents and protect those who nurture them. Civilized people, cultivate them. Happy slaves, to them you owe that refined and delicate taste you take pride in, that softness of character and that urbanity of habits which make dealings among you so sociable and easy, in a word, the appearance of all the virtues without the possession of any. 

Rousseau, First Discourse, Gutenberg Edition

Trueman suggests that philosophers like Rousseau set the stage for modern thinking about morality.  There’s a presiding sense in the West that the greatest thing humanity can do is stop oppressing one another and redesign our systems of governance to minimize societal injustice.  Political debates are increasingly built around terminology like social justice, systemic oppression, and intolerance.  Rousseau would be proud of our willingness to tackle society head-on! But what have Christians lost by adopting so much of his thinking? We’re taking on the thought processes of someone who directly contradicted one of our greatest thinkers! We have to stop and ask, what will we be left with when we strip away all the chains we’ve heaped on one another?  Will the final product be capable of glorifying God?  Or was Augustine right? Is there a force beyond societal injustice that causes us to stray? Is sin much more embedded in the human soul than we’d like to imagine?