Tag: Augustine

Who Do We Obey? Augustine, Bonhoeffer, the Confessing Church, and the Guidance of Revelation

A choice between two cities

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The book of Revelation is often treated as a puzzle about the future to be solved. But for the early church—and for Christians living under pressure—it functioned as something far more prescient: a guide and encouragement to be faithful when political power demands allegiance that belongs to God alone.

That is why the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church matters so deeply for Christians today. Their struggle was not about partisan politics or policy disagreements. It was about lordship. Who has the right to command the Christian conscience? Who gets our obedience when the state demands what Christ forbids—or forbids what Christ commands?

When Obedience Becomes Worship

The crisis in Nazi Germany was not simply that the government was unjust. It was that the state demanded moral and spiritual loyalty. National identity became sacred. Political obedience became a virtue. Silence and complicity in the face of injustice was praised as faithfulness.

Scripture warns us that this is always how idolatry works.

“No one can serve two masters.” (Matthew 6:24)

In the City of God, St. Augustine contrasts the City of man and the City of God. We owe our allegiance to the City of God, though God calls us to live in harmony, as best as we can, with the City of man. Loving God is first, but loving man is like it. We cannot love God and fail to love people who God loves and created in His image.

Revelation is encouragement and exhortation to us when the City of man exhibits the characteristics of the beast. Revelation describes the beast as a power that compels allegiance to itself in everyday life through economic pressure, social belonging, and fear of exclusion:

“So that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark.”

(Revelation 13:17)

The issue is not technology. The issue is worship – your heart, your devotion, your allegiance.

Bonhoeffer: Discipleship Is Visible

Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw clearly what many Christians hoped to avoid: there is no such thing as private faith when public injustice is at stake. Throughout the Prophets who repeatedly warned God’s people about coming judgment, the issues were twofold: idolatry and injustice.

Idolatry and injustice always go hand in hand. Augustine said that our true allegiance is revealed by what one loves, serves, and obeys.

“Two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God even to the contempt of self.”

(City of God XIV.28)

Injustice always flows from misdirected worship – misdirected loyalty, priority, and desire. Augustine called injustice robbery, because it robs people made in the image of God of what God intends for them.

In The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer warned against what he famously called “cheap grace”—grace that forgives sin without transforming obedience. Transforming obedience is the kind of obedience that forsakes self-interest out of love for God and man.

“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

That call is not only about personal holiness. It is about allegiance. Bonhoeffer understood that following Jesus means concrete obedience, even when that obedience is costly, unpopular, or dangerous.

Faith that quietly accommodates injustice, he argued, is not faithfulness at all. God “upholds the cause of the oppressed,” and “watches over the foreigner,” and “sustains the fatherless and widow….” (Psalm 144:6-9) That is God’s heart, and that character marks those who love and serve Him.

“Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.”

1 John 4:20

The Confessing Church: Saying “No” to False Authority

In 1934, pastors and theologians gathered to issue the Theological Declaration of Barmen. Their message was simple and bold:

“Jesus Christ… is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.”

This was not abstract theology. It was a refusal to allow the state to define truth, identity, or moral obligation. It was a rejection of the idea that national destiny or political leaders could speak with the authority of God the Father. The City of man is not the City of God.

In the language of Revelation, the Confessing Church refused to bear the name of the beast. They chose instead to bear the name of the Lamb:

“They follow the Lamb wherever he goes.” (Revelation 14:4)

The Danger of Complicity

Later in his life, Bonhoeffer pressed further. He argued that the church sins not only by acting wrongly, but by failing to act when injustice reigns.

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil.”

According to Bonhoeffer, Revelation 14 warns that worship of the beast is not limited to overt acts of loyalty. It includes participation in systems that oppose God’s justice—systems that reward conformity and punish faithfulness—systems that oppress the poor, needy, foreigner, widow, and orphan.

“If anyone worships the beast… he also will drink the wine of God’s wrath.” (Revelation 14:9–10)

This is not a threat meant to terrify believers. It is a mercy meant to awaken them. We must not give our allegiance and our heart to Empire – the beast in our age. We must give our hearts, desires, and allegiance to God alone.

Revelation as a Call to Endurance

Revelation does not tell Christians to seize power. Revelation gives us the hope that the Lamb who was Slain will prevail despite the chaos, injustice, and oppression that reigns in a world controlled the beast. The urgent message is to endure patiently and be faithful. (Rev, 13:10)

“Here is the endurance of the saints, those who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus.” (Revelation 14:12)

Endurance means refusing to let fear, convenience, or comfort decide our allegiance or obedience. It means trusting that faithfulness matters, even when it costs us socially, economically, or personally.

Bonhoeffer lived—and died—by that conviction. We can too.

Why This Still Matters

The beast in Revelation does not always look monstrous. Sometimes it looks respectable. Sometimes it speaks the language of order, morality, and security. Sometimes it rewards the loyalty of silence.

The question for Christians has never changed: Who is Lord?

Revelation, Augustine, Bonhoeffer, and the witness of the Confessing Church remind us that allegiance is not just what we say—it is what we do, what we tolerate, and what we refuse.

“We must obey God rather than men.” (Acts 5:29)

St. Augustine on the Literal Meaning of Genesis

How Augustine read Scripture in light of experience and reason.

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People cite the great church father, Augustine, in defense of the view that the earth is only thousands (rather than billions) of years old. Indeed, I believe this was (more or less) Augustine’s view, based on the science and knowledge that was available to him in the 5th Century when he lived. Augustine believed the earth was young.

That isn’t the end of our understanding of Augustine, though. To understand Augustine, we might be aided by a basic review of the mythological, philosophical and scientific views that were prevalent in his world at the time.

According to my inquiry on Bing Co-Pilot, the mythology of the time didn’t attempt to date the age of the earth. Science (such as it was) also had not established a position. Philosophy, however, provided two opposing views.

The philosophical camps were led by Aristotle and Lucretius. Aristotle argued that the earth was eternal, and Lucretius argued that the earth formed relatively recently (based on a lack of records prior to the Trojan War). (The Trojan War dates to the 11th or 12th Century BCE.) Thus, the two competing views in Augustine’s day were 1) eternal earth or 2) young earth. There was no inkling in Augustine’s time that the earth might be very old, but not eternal.

Interestingly, Aristotle’s view of an eternal earth shifted to an eternal universe, and that view became the accepted scientific view that lasted well into the 20th Century. This was Einstein’s view when he developed the Theory of Relativity.

The past eternal view of the universe was only debunked and rejected by the scientific consensus in the second half of the 20th Century, and then only very reluctantly. (Even now, some scientists demonstrate a desire to find support for a past eternal universe, but support for that view seems to get thinner and thinner as time goes on.)

In the uncertain stew of mythology, philosophy, and science in the 5th Century, Augustine acknowledged that a literal, 6-day reading of the creation story in Genesis is not an irrational interpretation. That is basically how he put it.

He didn’t endorse that view, however. He thought the better view was that the “days” in Genesis 1 do not correspond to earthly (24 hour) days. Even in his exploration of a “literal” reading of Genesis, Augustine incorporated allegorical nuance.

Augustine did not believe that “literal” and “allegorical” meanings were mutually exclusive, and neither did most of the early church fathers. What Augustine and the early church fathers meant by the “literal” meaning of Scripture was what the people who wrote the original words literally meant and how the audience to whom they communicated understood them.

In this effort to understand what the writers meant, the early church fathers assumed that the original meanings included metaphor, symbolism, and literary devices. None of the early church fathers (that I am aware of) argued for the modern sense of strict literalism in the interpretation of Scripture.

Though most early Christians believed literally in the historicity of the biblical accounts (to use a modern term), they also accepted the richness of allegorical meaning in Scripture at the same time. In fact, the metaphorical meaning of Scripture was assumed to be the deeper, more significant meaning of Scripture.

Augustine (along with Clement of Alexandria and Origen) ultimately rejected the calendar-day view of the Genesis creation story in favor of instantaneous creation with a kind of day/age view of the creation passage in Genesis. The great Jewish theologians, Philo and Hilary of Poitiers also took this view that God created the earth instantaneously.

We should recognize that the day-age view that Augustine and others preferred was probably not the consensus, but it also wasn’t considered heresy. The theology and the philosophy were unsettled, and science had not yet developed as we know it. The Church allowed for robust disagreement on age of the earth, because it was not considered essential doctrine.

I should stop here, at the risk of pointing out something you already know, and look at the meaning of the Hebrew word, יוֹם (yom). This word is translated into the English word, day, in Genesis 1. As with most Hebrew words, yom has many nuanced meanings and applications, both literal and figurative. The various meanings include:

  • Day, as opposed to night
  • Day as a division of time
  • Day as defined by evening and morning
  • Day as in a time (like harvest)
  • Day as in an age or epoch of time

In addition to the definitions, most Hebrew words have both literal and figurative meanings and applications. Thus, Augustine’s position that the days in Genesis can be read to mean an “earthly” or “ordinary” day did not exclude the idea of applying them more figuratively. That duality is consistent with the way Hebrew words and Hebrew language works. This built-in literal/figurative duality of Hebrew words informed the thinking of the early church fathers.

Augustine is famous for preferring allegorical readings and applications of Scripture. In his early two-volume work on Genesis in which he took issue with the Manicheans, Augustine explored the position that the days in Genesis are seven epochs of redemptive history corresponding with seven stages of the Christian life. (See Did Augustine Read Genesis 1 Literally? by Gavin Ortlund citing De Genesis contra Manichaeos 1.23.35-1.25.43, in Augustine, On Genesis, 62-68.)

When Augustine set out to write a “literal” interpretation of Genesis, he didn’t mean what people today might think he meant. Even his “literal” reading of Scripture was not strictly literalist. It was an attempt to understand what the original writers and audiences (literally) meant and what they understood it to mean.

Science in St. Augustine’s day was not advanced enough to weigh in on the age of the earth, but Augustine was a strong proponent of understanding science. The science of his day, for instance, had settled the spherical shape and circumference of the earth. That the earth was round and even the size of the perimeter of the earth was well established and understood among academics since before the time of Christ. (It is purely a myth, for instance, that Columbus had to convince people the earth was not flat.) Augustine’s view of scientific knowledge and its relationship to Scripture is what I want to highlight here.

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Tracing the Origin of Natural Law & Equal Rights in Western Thought

The law of loving your neighbor as yourself written on the tablet of the heart by God

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In Chapter 9 of Tom Holland’s book, Dominion: the Making of the Western Mind, he traces the idea of natural law back to 1150 AD when a lawyer named Gratian compiled the first canon of law in the west. His work (the Decretum Gratiani, as it came to be called) was derived from Scripture and the writings of the early church fathers. It was an attempt at harmonize those two sources into a comprehensive whole.

The original notion of natural law came from the Stoics: “The Stoics believed that the fundamental moral principles that underlie all the legal systems of different nations were reducible to the dictates of natural law.” Gratian syncretized the Stoic notion of natural law (the law of nature) by attributing it to divine origins. This law, which God desires to write on men’s hearts, can be summarized as the law of loving your neighbor as yourself.

Holland observed that for a millennia Christianity existed without “what Muslim lawyers had long taken for granted – a comprehensive body of written rulings supposedly deriving from God Himself”. Holland is struck by the contrast of the Christian notion that God “wrote His rulings on the human heart”.

Holland first picks up that theme in his book with Saint Augustine of Hippo in Chapter 5. Hollands description of Augustine’s words – that “God writes His laws on the heart,” and, therefore, “Love, and do what you like” – is a theme Holland traces as he finds it in the history of western thought.

Thus, Holland observes that Gratian opened his Decretum Gratiani with the statement that all law can be summed up in a single command: love your neighbor as yourself. Gratian called this idea “natural law”, summarized by the statement, “all souls are equal in the sight of God”. Gratian further identified this principal as the foundation stone of true justice.

Holland mistakenly attributes these ideas to Paul (“Paul’s authority on this score was definitive…. [e]choing the Stoics”). but the important point is that Gratian’s syncretism of the law was a decisive departure from earlier ages:

“Much flowed from this compilation that earlier ages would have struggled to comprehend. Age old presumptions were being decisively overturned – that custom was the ultimate authority, that the great were owed a different justice from the humble, that inequality was something natural and to be taken for granted.”

This is the central theme of Holland’s book – “How the Christian Revolution Remade the World” (its alternate title). His book is an attempt to trace back the roots of modern notions, such as the idea that people have “equal rights” stemming from natural law (“inalienable rights”) that fundamentally inform modern, western thought.  

Holland notes that these ideas do not flow out of Greek or Roman philosophy or law. They were are much foreign to the world of classic Greco-Roman thought. They are definitively Christian – Judeo-Christian – in their origins.

Holland, of course, is an atheist. He comes to these conclusions through his study of western civilization. He is an “outsider” to Christianity, which perspective makes his observations so interesting – the that he picks up on the novelty of these ideas as being a distinctively Christian departure from classical Greco-Roman thought.

He also wrote Dominion coming off the heels of writing a similar work on the history of Islam. The contrast was striking for him. Whereas Islamic scholars attempted to proscribe laws for every detail of human life, including things like how to brush your teeth and dog ownership, Christians distilled law down to a single phrase – love your neighbor as yourself – and rested in the confidence that God writes His laws on people’s hearts (“not in ink” as Augustine said). The influence of Holland’s awareness of that contrast is striking.

It shouldn’t be surprising, coming from his perspective, that Holland doesn’t get things exactly right. When Augustine focused on love, he wasn’t championing anything new, and Paul was not the source of the notion that the law can be summed up in the phrase, love your neighbor as yourself or the belief that God writes His laws on human hearts. While he might attribute these things to Paul and Augustine, the history is much older and deeper than that.

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