Imagine apologetics that–to quote C.S. Lewis–moves us “further up and further in” the faith. Imagine apologetics that is pastoral in its care for the whole person and positive in its witness for the faith. Imagine apologetics that calls us on a journey back home. I have been pretty disillusioned by the apologetic landscape for some time. However, apologetics has found a fresh vision for me thanks in large part to the old roads traveled by Joshua Chatraw and Mark Allen in The Augustine Way. The work of the co-authors is to move us toward a positive apologetic which appeals to Christianity not as a series of propositions to rationally assent to, but as a way of life that dares to ask others the question: “What do you seek?”
The Use of Story to Understand Ourselves and the World
In The Augustine Way, Joshua Chatraw and Mark Allen consider the apologetic implications of Augustine, specifically through his work in Confessions and The City of God. Confessions deals with Augustine’s rejection of the faith and his journey back to it as he navigated “competing philosophies.” The City of God was written specifically to “persuade skeptics and reassure doubters.” Because Augustine was situated in a pluralistic society prior to the fall of Rome and the rise of Christianity’s institutional significance, he offers us a way to think about apologetics in a culture that is “Christianity versus a variety of other options.” Chatraw and Allen’s contribution at this point is to say, “that’s us today!” Like then, the late-modern world of today deals with the big questions of life not primarily through logic, but by “stories, symbols, and artifacts.” Our co-authors and thoughtful guides to the old roads want us to consider how these stories, symbols, and artifacts of culture “shape our loves.”
The introduction and Chapter 1 lay the foundation of Augustine’s story by describing it in terms of “deconstruction” and “coming of age.” These are two late-modern terms we are very familiar with today, but ones that are strikingly descriptive of Augustine’s story. Augustine’s father was a Roman, his mother was a native Berber, and he lived in a land colonized by the Punics but dominated by Rome. To each culture belongs its own narratives and myths that shape the identity of its people. Chatraw and Allen want us to consider how Augustine was “disoriented” by growing up in such a household without a uniting story. Sexual lust in his teen years produced the fruit of disordered loves and gave way to the further “disintegration” of himself as it scattered his story like shards of glass. The pursuit of “philosophical wisdom” became his rescue from a fractured life devoid of identity. As a bonus, all of his intellectual pursuits had the added benefit of guaranteeing Augustine fame and fortune in Roman culture.
En route to obtaining rescue, Hortensius, written by Cicero, codified for Augustine the belief that Scripture was childish. He looked to the philosophy of Manicheism to further distance himself from the childish religion of his boyhood and to provide him “universality, spirituality, and certainty” by way of reason and scientific study. Meanwhile, personal events in Augustine’s life slowly revealed the disordered nature of his love as he sought to obtain fulfillment from his friends in ways that only God could provide.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because it should. Each step led Augustine down an intellectual path that looks much like modern-day deconstruction. Chatraw and Allen show us how Augustine’s search for certainty through philosophy and for a sense of self-worth through oration, eventually came crashing down: “despite Manicheism’s promises and its teaching on the essential goodness of humans, it did not, in the end, assuage his guilt.”
As Augustine grappled with ongoing guilt over sin, the promised certainty of Manicheism backfired and left him homeless in the turmoil of skepticism. Chatraw and Allen credit Ambrose with picking up the scattered shards of glass in Augustine’s story and helping him “try on” Christianity. In the fading light of the pagan Roman Empire and in the tender dawning of the Christian Roman Empire, we find bishop Ambrose engaging in positive apologetic discourse with a skeptical Augustine who is given the opportunity to consider the Christian faith as “one option among many.” Chatraw and Allen’s point is to say that Augustine’s world and ours today “are deeply impacted by Christianity but are outside Christendom’s dominance.”
Implications for Today
Having identified the parallels between Augustine’s world and our own and having brought readers in touch with Augustine’s story, Chatraw and Allen move to make the point in Chapter 2 that we need an apologetic today that asks the question, “What do you seek?” In the pluralistic milieu of the West, our co-authors want us to see that contemporary apologetics has the opportunity to meet people not in the world of abstract universals with defensive and reactionary apologetic methods, but in the particularity of their story with a positive apologetic witness that encourages seekers and doubters to “try on” Christianity. Pastors, lay leaders, parents, and educators should take a play out of this patristic father’s playbook. Let’s consider just a few of those implications for today.
- Human beings are worshippers who want to love and be loved.
Augustine helps us see human beings the way Paul describes us in Romans 1-2: as worshippers. We are doxological creatures and as such we will worship something. But what the Bible conveys to us over and over again is that what man worships is ultimately what he loves. As with Augustine, the problem with us is disordered loves. Sin has wholly altered our desires. Acknowledging man as a worshipping being means we recognize our fundamental longing to “love and be loved.” Our friends in The Augustine Way want us to see Augustine laying out a positive apologetic in The City of God, specifically that leads us to narrative as a way of capturing the imagination and thus influencing the desires of the heart toward that which is truly beautiful and good. “What if?” is the question that naturally emerges from narrative and thus engages the imagination. Drawing from James K. A. Smith, Chatraw and Allen entreat us to ponder that “before one desires, one must imagine.”
- Faith seeks understanding of what we love.
With Augustine’s story in context, chapter 3 steps into the current deconstruction story of Rhett McLaughlin to show how he arrived at a very similar point of skepticism as Augustine. Evidentialist based apologetics backfired on Rhett leaving him homeless in the turmoil of skepticism, leading to his eventual deconstruction and to his “lost appetite for certainty.”
It is worth definitively clarifying at this point that what Chatraw and Allen contend for is not a faith absent of reason or evidence:
Science, history, and logic are friends of our faith; Rhett wasn’t wrong to look there. We’re not suggesting fideism was the route he should have traveled. Yet, the hardened skeptics and brash believers, who are both attempting just to let the science or the history or the logic lead them to the truth, have overreached. Neither the ‘assured’ results of critical scholarship nor the ‘proofs’ of Christian apologetics have produced the kind of results many have hoped for.
Skepticism is not a time for battening down the hatches and pounding skeptics with more empirical evidence for the faith. It’s part of the journey of faith–seeking understanding. With the help of Ambrose, part of what Chatraw and Allen say drew Augustine out of Manicheism and back into the church was the church’s “honesty.” It acknowledged the limitations of human reason while also admitting to mystery. Faith should seek understanding for a “more mature apprehension of the source of beauty and love.” When reason is in service to faith and in service of him who loved us and gave himself for us, then truth leads us to marvel at the beauty of the Lord and to taste and see that he is indeed good. When Augustine arrived at skepticism, reason drove him to what he loved. It ultimately helped him realize that actual understanding might be in a very different place than he thought: the church.
Augustine understands the church as a healing community that puts back together fragmented souls and redirects disordered love of God and others…the church is to be a community of pilgrims on a journey home; the journey together is part of the healing process.
- We need to be better storytellers.
Chapter 4 takes a step back to say that if the church is to be this healing community that is helping fragmented souls find a better story that leads them home, then we need a recap. You will want to camp out in this chapter for a while. Chatraw and Allen trace things like: the original goodness of creation, how the fall did not eliminate the structural goodness of creation, redemption as the work of re-creation restoring us to the true source of beauty and goodness, Jesus as the mediator and path to wisdom, and restoration anchored in eschatological hope.
The Augustinian Approach
The Augustinian Approach is a two-step approach to apologetics designed to help pastors and lay people dig into the provocative question, “What do you seek?”
- Immanent critique. The use of immanent critique to expose the social imaginaries that shape who we are.
Chapter 5 introduces us to “the new pagans” or the “nones” who look to the immanent for “fulfilment in the present.” For them, the new authorities on the scene are the “desires and narratives” internal to us. An immanent critique meets people in these places. It is a critique from the inside. It is not standing on our own turf hurling propositional mistles at our opponents to try and win points for our side. It is a humble entering in. It is a commitment to stay and do the hard work of listening, learning, digging, and exposing. This language resonates with how Jesus refers to us as being “in the world, but not “of the world” (John 17:14-16) and with how Peter refers to us as “exiles.” (1 Peter 2:11) As citizens of the heavenly kingdom dwelling in the earthly city, we should have the dexterity to enter into the stories that shape culture, religion, and philosophy with an aim of exposing both the truth and the lies laden within them. Apologetic conversations involve careful discernment of the points of harmony and dissonance within social imaginaries and endeavors to show how the gospel of Jesus bridges them.
Step 1 is not complete without the important work of “prepping for healing.” In this point, Chatraw and Allen make us attentive to how Augustine does not just show us what is wrong with secular narratives; he shows where they are true.
- Holistic therapy. The pursuit of “the good life” as universal to humanity.
Chatraw and Allen want us to see how the gospel explains the world and makes sense of our deepest longings. Augustine realized this. Indeed, “the good life” he sought could only be found in Jesus. The gospel is the source of true healing that we long for. Chatraw and Allen are absolutely convinced of this, and we should be too.
Jesus’s life demonstrates that true flourishing is possible for us only when we are opened to the wounds of love, which will mean the agony of feeling a good creation gone wrong. But even the tears of sorrow will be accompanied by hope…The medicine of the cross serves as evidence that our suffering has a purpose. The remedy of the resurrection stands as a sign that our fleeting and fragile joys were always meant to direct our hearts to an eternal love calling us to himself.
This positive apologetic for Christianity dares to say, “You’re looking for the good life over there, why not come taste and see that the Lord is good?” It dares to ask the provocative question, “What do you seek?” and then holds out Jesus as the response. It affirms the goodness of creation and the structural goodness of humanity while grappling with the heartache of the fall, evil, sin, suffering, and death. It affirms God as being good and for our good even as he works all things together for his glory. Augustine challenges us to consider that we will always worship something, either the creature or the Creator. We will make ultimate that which is actually ultimate or that which is doomed to fade and die. The good life, Augustine tells us, is not found in the telos of hearty applause, but in the eschatological telos of praise that will resound around the throne unto all eternity when we are fully and finally…home.