Chief misery in life: I’ll never sit at Augustine’s feet and learn. Every life has a gap in it. That is the gap in mine.

But I get as close as I can, reading him nonstop. And he’s always informative, every single day. He comes to mind all the time, periodically unbidden, certain slants of light get me thinking of how he wrote of God permeating sparrows like sunlight through water, but I won’t subject you to the contours of my personal devotion. Point is that he’s relevant pretty often, and he came to mind when I read this post by Rachel Held Evans.

I don’t have any problem with Rachel; I think she does a lot of good work. But in this post, “It’s Not About Conforming to the World,” I want to raise a couple of issues.

Evans’ point is more or less that when she advocates for changes in tradition regarding sexual ethics, gender, and so forth, it not because she wants the church to take cues from modern culture (“the world”) but because she wants the church to more closely resemble Christ. She writes:

I’m not taking my cues on what to write about from the secular culture; I’m taking my cues on what to write about from fellow Christians. I’m taking them from men and women whose study of Scripture led them to support gender equality in the Church and mutual submission in marriage. I’m taking them from gay and lesbian Christians who are more likely to be seen sitting in the pews than marching in a parade. I’m taking them from people who are leaving the Church, not because of the cost of discipleship, but because of the cost of false fundamentals—man-made impediments created out of non-essential doctrines and legalistic rules.

Emphasis hers. I deeply respect her mission here. We all want to preserve the body of Christ in all its unity. But I think her framing is false on two counts:

I. There is no ‘church and the world.’

A lot of people read Augustine for the first time and have this mind-blowing revelation about the two cities, that is, the city of God and the city of earth/man. They view them as two separate entities: one comprised by the institutional church, the other comprised by all of the other ruffians out there who haven’t heard the call. This is the way Evans seems to view the world: broken up between the church and the non-church, the sanctuary of Christendom and the wilderness beyond it. This is emphatically wrong. As R.A. Markus writes,

“…For Augustine…the affairs of the saeculumassumed significance as the historical, empirical, perplexed and interwoven life of the two eschatological cities. At the most fundamental level, that of their ultimate allegiance, men were starkly divided between the two cities. But the saeculum, and the societies, groups and institutions whose careers constitute it, embraced both poles of the dichotomy…To speak of the seculum as the region of overlap between the heavenly and earthly cities, while true, is misleading if understood in terms of the logical notion of an overlap between two mutually not exclusive classes. For in their eschatological reality the two cities are, of course, mutually exclusive, while in their temporal reality they are indistinct…All we can know is that the two cities are always present in any historical society; but we can never — except in the light of a biblical revelation in the unique strand of ‘sacred history’ — identify the locus of either.”

In other words, we have here on earth with us people with markedly different destinies. Some are destined for paradise, others for torment. They’re united by their loves, by what they love, and they’re always intermingled. In the world there are anonymous Christians, and in the church there are pit vipers. That a voice comes from within the church tells you little about its destiny; further complicating this is that there is interchange going on at all times, with people seeking grace and people rejecting it and people finding it and people losing their way. Augustine was never so sanguine as to believe being a member of the Church meant someone was uniformly righteous and that their word could be trusted over Scripture, though he was undoubtedly one of the greatest champions of church unity of all time nonetheless.

II. The moral conscience can be educated rightly or wrongly.

I actually saw this point elucidated in an Augustinian sense in a paper on just war, which is a segment of his theory I don’t spend a lot of time in, aside from feeling out its proprietary parameters. The paper is by Richard B Miller, entitled “Just War, Civic Virtue, and Democratic Social Criticism: Augustinian Reflections”:

“Augustine focuses not on principles instructing us to protect another from danger but on how our dispositions and attachments are organized in relation to various ends and how we affect ourselves through ordered or disordered activity. “Whatever you injure,” Augustine remarks about acting in hatred, “you injure outwardly; notice what injury you do to yourself.” The evil posed by killing bears on one’s character.  That is to say, one key question for Augustine concerns the goods to which one assigns value and which provide the horizon for meaning and identity…He reminds us that the morality of war is, in part, a morality of desire and love, and that human attachments can be rightly ordered when they stand within a network of differentiated relationships and institutional responsibilities. That fact alone ought to alert us to the importance of the affections and how they are mediated by social processes and cultural norms. For Augustine, the commandment to love is not simple and straightforward; it is structured by our social affiliations and our natural interactions.”

Enlightening take; I wholly agree. This is what Augustine is on about when he notes the vainglory and pride of the Roman Empire spoiled even her finest statesmen. Social structures can shape the conscience, can warp or rectify the values assigned to various goods or wrongs. If you live in a world where greed is commonplace you’re likely to have sensibilities shaped along those lines; nonetheless, Scripture is our beacon here, calling us to the good and right.

This has both positive and negative implications. Positive: it means we can shape a culture that promotes and sustains healthier, more virtuous lives. We really can encourage the valuation of life and peace and love, and build up cultures of integrity. On the other hand, in the event such a culture hasn’t been constructed, it means our intuitions and moral sentiments are to be suspected.

Even if you are a Christian then, that your moral intuitions disagree with church tradition or that you experience some sense of dysphoria when dealing with Christian teaching doesn’t necessarily mean there must be something in need of reform within the church, because as we’ve indicated here, you’re probably not as protected from non-Christian sentiments as you might firstly suspect. The church and the world are temporally indistinct and the culture at large has a powerful hand in shaping the moral conscience, meaning that even when you’re dealing strictly with card-carrying Christians, the stories you’re getting about morality and ethics might very well be poisoned at their foundations. I don’t think I need to produce a variety of obviously motivated ‘readings’ of Scripture by Christians with ulterior motives to prove that: the world is replete with them, and the church, sadly, as well.

How do we cope? We look honestly to Scripture and tradition for guidance. We expect to be challenged.  We sharpen our minds and take honest stock of our hearts. We contemplate, we pray, we engage in community discussion and discourse, and we look to our tradition for people from other times and cultures to check ourselves against. Ultimately the Word is the final rule, because it does not pull any fast ones.

None of this is to say Evans is exactly wrong, but rather to point out that the method she’s using for determining the legitimacy of her project is weak. Just because the noise is coming from the inside doesn’t mean it’s a good thing, because the inside is far more permeable than you might think, and so are those within it. Which isn’t to say the method for determining whether the noise is good is simpler than that; it isn’t, it’s messy and complicated, but I would prefer a thousand filters of finest mesh to a gap too wide.

I am fussy about this because as a semi-public theologian I am haunted by what is expected of people who teach. I do worry about being condemned to hell. When I do, I don’t really worry that it will be because I didn’t really love Christ, or that I consequently didn’t really love others. I know I do those things. I worry that it will be because I knew the truth about Christianity and lied about it to advance my interests somehow. Because Christianity is what it is culturally and the Culture Wars are what they are, you can make a pretty good career showing up on talk shows saying x, y, and z have actually been allowed all along. I just don’t want to pay the price for doing that, so that is why I express the concerns I do here, paranoid as they may seem.