Augustinian Exegesis and the Nature of Christian Inquirers

C. Clifton Black

Introduction

• modern biblical interpretation tends to be more religiously descriptive than theologically engaged
• for pre-modern interpretors, the Bible was not simnply ancient literature whose history invited scientific analysis
• many levels of meaning
• First Letter of John (c. 110) exemplifies an inquiry after God through meditation on the first-century Johannine tradition known to us through the Gospel of John.
• Augustine’s approach was with the goal of the formation of the interpretor into a more knowledgeable, faithful, loving, and mature creature of God.

Critical Issues in Augustine’s Homilies

• Augustine’s approach uses a sophisticated conversation among:

1. every verse of the text before him
2. that text’s conceptual relationship with a broad range of OT and NT citations
3. theological implications of this biblical synthesis for Augustine’s listeners

• theme – caritas: charity or love

1. to live in a way that violates the command of love is to set oneself against Christ

2. those who are unloving cannot receive the Holy Spirit

a. anthromopological corollary – you should want others to be your equal

b. theological corollary – mutual indwelling of the holder and the held: your dwelling in God means that you are held by him, God’s dwelling in you means that he holds you, lest you faill

c. ongoing struggle between human sin (mostly pride) and the ultimate triumph of God among those who submit their wills to the operation of grace

3. Augustine moves beyond 1 John’s explicit, seemingly restrictve, injunctions of love for one another and considers also love for one’s enemies.

• charity fosters neither manipulation nor patronization among human beings, but, rather, equalizes them before God.
• to love God’s creatures is to cooperate in their restoration as God’s children and our siblings, just as God uses our fellow creatures – even our enemies – as instruments of our own healing

Scriptural Interpretation as Christian Nurture

• Augustine’s theology emphasizes the incomparable honor bestowed on human beings who have been created and are being perfected in the image of God
• biblical interpretation in the service of nurturing Christians
• Augustine is catechizing through exegesis, demonstrating for us how scripture interpretation actually functions as Christian nurture.
• it is there that we encounter the God who is relentlessly inquiring after us
• Auguestine’s lessons to us

1. Augustine never allows us to imagine that scriptural interpretation, properly understood, is an end in itself

o education is anchored in love

o it is we who are interpreted by scripture, which reveals the God who is searching after us.

2. Augustine’s fundamental characterization of love is of a love that heals

o Jesus is preeminently the omnipotent physician who heals the desperately ill who are incapable of healing themselves

o God’s sole intention is to restore all human beings to their proper dignity, to that perfection of love indigeneous to their creation in God’s own image

o follow a “hermeneutics of trust” instead of “hermeneutics of suspicion”

o uses language of maternal nurture

o “But you shall not change me into your own substance, as you do with the food of your body. Instead, you shall be changed into me”

3. God’s power to transform us, through scripture, as interpretors of love “in deed and in truth”

o “purity of heart” is for Augustine a sine qua non for the biblical theologian

o what if we took seriously, as did Augustine, the transformative power of scripture?

o according to Augustine, no material distinction exists between what we sometimes constrast as “theology” and “praxis” or as Augustine puts it, the contemplative life and the active life.

o love for the neighbor is actually a form of contemplation in the midst of action

o humility is the proper sense of self for those who bear the name of Christ

o God’s subversive love, which enkindles within us that God-given nobility within ourselves

o paradoxical yet invincible convictions

§ humanity’s failure lies not in revenge but in reconciliation

§ only under Christ’s discipline can his disciples know healthy freedom

§ the needy whom we benefit are every bit our benefactors, through whom God is reforming us in Christ

4. Scripture’s native habitat is the church catholic

o hermeneutic – framework of understanding

o epistemic instrument – the means by which they are able to understand

o to entrust the children of God, within the embrace of the Church’s prayers and praise, to those radically new possibilities of divine imagination and holy conduct that God offered us through scripture.

Conclusions

• “the medieval theory of levels of meaning in the biblical text, with all its undoubted defects, flourished because it is true, while the modern theory of a single meaning with all its demonstrable virtue, is false”
• properly interpreted, scripture is for us both a mirror of our own flawed nobility and a window through which God’s love radiates the healing of our conduct, our imagination, our most truthful understanding of ourselves and others.
• the nourishment for which we are most famished lies, not in ourselves, but in the scripture that nurtures.

Paper Idea

• control vs. being examined
• playing in the modern arena – use scripture as a proof text as opposed to allowing it to be a conviction text