Augustine's approach to heretics: Not in my town...

(Tim: This post contributed by Joshua Congrove) In our age of cloying, effeminate discourse, it's a rare thing to find a man valiantly defending a cause with the sword of rhetoric, let alone doing so for the sake of a godly cause. It was not always so.

A while ago while reading through the letters of Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, I found this little gem. It's not a long, theological discourse with the depths of insight of his Confessions or City of God, nor have scholars taken much note of it. Still, it's a sterling example of the kind of pastoral faithfulness that marked the long episcopate of Augustine, as well as the kind of manly defense of God's sheep so lacking, today...

First, a little background.

This letter (Ep. 79) is addressed only to "the successor of Fortunatus." We know little of Fortunatus except that he seems to be identical to a man with whom Augustine had held a famous debate some years earlier. The topic was Christianity vs. Manichaeism; the defender of the first was Augustine; of the latter, Fortunatus.

Manichaeism, a quasi-religious philosophy that had great lure for those who had found paganism empty or couldn't fully embrace Christianity, was a formidable opponent to Christianity; indeed, it had captivated Augustine in his youth. The details of its belief system are complex, and extraordinarily difficult to explain. In brief, though, among its fundamental claims was that matter was inherently mixed up with the evil forces of the universe, and so itself was evil. The spirit was good, the body was evil, and only by renouncing all attachments with anything physical could one hope to find enlightenment. For men of the fourth and fifth centuries, this was as powerful a lure as postmodernism is to men today.

And so, some time after he had debated this Manichaen teacher, Augustine learned that his successor had come into town and was beginning to gather men (and, undoubtedly, confessed Christians) to himself. Augustine, by this time bishop for 10 years, was not equivocal. Keep in mind that Augustine is a writer capable of the utmost subtlety, sophistication, and winsomeness in his arguments. Few could criticize his thought as lacking nuance or simplistic.

And, far more than our own day, late antiquity was stringent in the rules of decorum governing correspondence.  With this letter, though, Augustine includes not even a conventional greeting. Rather, he's out of the gate and running, immediately:

Your attempts at evasion are worthless: your real character is patent even a long way off. My brethren have reported to me their conversation with you. You say you do not fear death; it is well: but you ought to fear that death which you are bringing upon yourself by your blasphemous assertions concerning God. As to your understanding that the visible death which all men know is a separation between soul and body, this is a truth which demands no great grasp of intellect. But as to the statement which you annex to this, that death is a separation between good and evil, do you not see that, if the soul be good and the body be evil, he who joined them together, is not good? But you affirm that the good God has joined them together; from which it follows that He is either evil, or swayed by fear of one who is evil. Yet you boast of having no fear of man, when at the same time you conceive God to be such that, through fear of Darkness, He would join together good and evil.

So far, so good, right? Well, actually, let's admit we'd be hard pressed to say any of the things Augustine has said, above. But, in any case, we haven't gotten to Scripture yet, and we expect that the Augustine will now temper his hammer with some gentleness:

Be not uplifted, as your writing shows you to be, by supposing that I magnify you, by my resolving to check the out-flowing of your poison, lest its insidious and pestilential power should do harm: for the Apostle does not magnify those whom he calls dogs, saying to the Philippians, 'Beware of dogs' (Philippians 3:2); nor does he magnify those of whom he says that their word eats as a canker (2Timothy 2:17). Therefore, in the name of Christ, I demand of you to answer, if you are able, the question which baffled your predecessor Fortunatus. For he went from the scene of our discussion declaring that he would not return, unless, after conferring with his party, he found something by which he could answer the arguments used by our brethren.

Ouch. No uplifiting words there. And what's with this demanding an answer of someone? Wouldn't a discussion or dialog be more appropriate? Well, at the very least we can expect that Augustine will end his open letter on a positive note, a promise of warm camaraderie awaiting the Manichaean if he'll come to reason with Augustine:

And if you are not prepared to do this, begone from this place, and do not pervert the right ways of the Lord, ensnaring and infecting with your poison the minds of the weak, lest, by the Lord's right hand helping me, you be put to confusion in a way which you did not expect.

Wait a minute, what was that--a threat? An oath taken in the Lord's sight to harm another man who claims the true religion? What kind of Christian decorum is that? And what kind of monster would end a letter with such an affront?

Our questions show how far we've come from the world of Augustine. We may read a letter like this and be astounded, encouraged, and maybe even convicted to some small degree. But hey, like Scripture it's only a historical artifact so we have no difficulty brushing it off. "Jesus can say that, but you can't. Paul can say that, but you can't. Augustine can say that, but you can't."

Our real question, then, should be whether we as pastors, shepherds, and elders are faithful in defending the sheep under our care with the kind of boldness that has marked men of the past. The applications are many.  Are we tempted to compromise, to engage in oratorical pleasantries with the Mormons, JWs, oneness Penecostals who are prominent deniers of orthodox Christian faith? Do we consider the dogmas of open theism a real peril to the souls of our churches? Do we have any inclination, even, to drive out the teachers of evangelical feminism from our seminaries, churches, and communities, or are they simply brethren "with a different perspective"?

It's worth noting that Augustine never attended a seminary, never took courses in pastoral education, never learned from the pages of best-sellers how to build, defend, and preserve the church under his care. He learned, rather, from his predecessors in the faith, and even more, from Scripture. When asked about the duties of a bishop, his tack is to go to Scripture, and particularly to Jesus' teachings about the true shepherd and the hireling. His task is to defend his sheep with the rod and staff, and his worry, at the end of his life, is that the armies invading Africa will result in sheep having no shepherd to care for them. 

So today, when no such armies immediately threaten, why do we not show such boldness in the defense of our sheep? Our excuses here will be many.  We'll say that men like Augustine belonged to a different time, where rhetoric prevailed over dialog. We'll point to the harshness of religious conflict in earlier centuries, and be grateful for living in a gentler age (or so we think). Those of us who are sophisticated will even point to the sins that came along with Augustine's unapologetic, sometimes intransigent crusade against heresy, and so we'll refuse to ever judge lest we sometimes fail in our judgement.

All true. But none of our excuses here exempt us from the responsibilities delegated us by the Chief Shepherd, and none of our rationalizations will be of any avail when we one day stand to answer for our shepherding. On that day we won't be able to plead the relative insignificance of feminism to absolve ourselves from not rebuking and expelling its proponents. On that day we won't be able to excuse cowardice by feigning gentleness. And on that day we won't be able to use the sin that attends our speaking as an excuse for never speaking at all. On that day, all will be open and clear before Him.

And on that day, it's likely I'll want to have failed as gloriously, and boldly, as Augustine.

Comments

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

A brilliant post, a timely reminder.

Unfortunately, it will most likely fall upon deaf ears. A call to courageous, clear, and confrontational polemics done out of love for God and His Word is passe.

Sadly, a fart in the wind has just as much lasting impact as will Josh Congrove's fine essay on those who need to be bold and decisive.