Finding Rest: Celebrating Augustine's Birthday
Today was the birthday of one of the great minds of the Western world and one of the great fathers of the Christian church, St. Augustine. Augustine was born in 354 A.D. in North Africa. He was born to a Christian mother and a non-believing father. While his mother prayed incessantly for his salvation, even to the point of tears, his father wanted him to be a worldly success. He was given the best education his father could afford as he pursued the highly respected life of a rhetorician. The rhetoricians of the Roman world were the celebrities of his day and Augustine’s father desperately wanted his son to be among the greats. In his Confessions Augustine admits that from the point of early boyhood his sights were set on greatness by the world’s standard. Besides these worldly pursuits Augustine also confesses that he was anxious fulfill the desires of the flesh. He is quite honest throughout the work about his interest in women and base entertainment as a young man.
In time, his studies and vocation led him from Carthage in North Africa to Rome. To this point in his life Augustine had little respect for the intellectual seriousness of Christianity. His mother’s faith was sincere but simple and Augustine was a man of incredibly deep intellect. She could not answer his questions about the goodness of God and the problem of evil. He also rejected the Christian demand for faith and viewed it as being in opposition to rigorous intellectual inquiry. He thus abandoned the faith of his mother and sought for truth in other philosophical traditions by time he arrived in Rome. It was there however that he met the bishop,Ambrose. As a preacher, Ambrose was an incredible rhetorician, a towering intellect, and a Christian. Augustine could not help but admire and respect him. Ambrose was used by the Lord to break Augustine’s paradigm and set him on a path in which he was forced to wrestle with the Christian faith again. He writes in his Confessions that in time he became convinced of the truth of Christianity but was unwilling to submit because it would mean having to give up his sinful pursuits. Then, one day as he was sitting in a garden in Milan almost at the spiritual breaking point, he heard what he describes as a voice saying, “Take up and read. Take up and read.” He could not locate the source of the voice. He wondered if some children had been playing and using the phrase. After some time of seeking an explanation for the command, he concluded that it must have been a voice from God directed to him. He reached for his Bible, let it flop open to a random page, and blindly set his finger upon the page. His gaze fell on Romans 13:13,14.
Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy. Rather clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh.
He was undone, and in that moment surrendered to the call of God.
Augustine went on to be reconciled with his mother whose heart almost burst over the conversion of her son. He also went on to become a priest and eventually a bishop within the church back in North Africa. In the end he turned out to be one of the most, if not the most formative Christian mind since the apostles. So much of our theological understanding today finds its way back to the teaching and writings of St. Augustine. Of all his deep theological writing, which is voluminous, perhaps there is no more important thing he wrote than those words with which he opens the Confessions, “O Lord, you have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”
We love St. Augustine at Chapel Field. He has become for us a voice calling us to find our restand our satisfaction, in the triune God alone. In a world that distracts us with a million fleeting delights and scares us with an infinite number of potential threats nothing could be more important for us or our students to hear. If we seek our peace, our joy, our security, our identity, our rest in anything other than in Christ we will live restless, unsatisfied lives that ultimately lead to destruction. Augustine traveled that wide road for over thirty years and wrote his Confessions as an exhortation to his fellow believers and as a testimony to the all-satisfying triune God. May the memory and legacy of this great man continue to be a reflecting beacon, shining the light oftruth upon us and summoning us to the God in whom he finally found his rest.
Bill Spanjer serves as Head of Schools and Chairman of the Biblical Studies Department at Chapel Field.
