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Augustine’s Preached Theology: Living as the Body of Christ
J. Patout Burns, Jr.
Eerdmans (2022). 392 pp.
There’s a story about a theological colloquium that assembled fifteen scholars to discuss the interpretation of Scripture. This prestigious group of Old and New Testament scholars, historical and systematic theologians, academics and practitioners gathered for multiple days to discuss the nature of Scripture, how it should be read, and its place in the life of church and academy. As the gathering drew to a close a senior scholar remarked wryly that the work they were called together to do was, in historical perspective, once the work of a single person. But now, for various complicated reasons concerning the study and practice of theology, it took fifteen people to assemble one “Complete Theologian”—a person who was, more often than not, a pastor.
The story behind this fragmentation is long and complex, and no simple explanatory narrative can be supplied here. But at least one reason concerns the end of scriptural and theological reflection. If, as this institution has argued repeatedly and convincingly, the social location of the tradition’s theological production has often been the church (and not only the academy), then it is also the case that the central ‘artifacts’ of the church’s theological culture have not always exclusively been the commentary, the systematic theology, or equivalent text. Instead, the sermon has been a central place where the great minds of the church have applied the various disciplines of theology toward the end of serving God’s people. It was through preaching that the Great Tradition was developed and extended through time.
That is a way of thinking about the church’s intellectual and spiritual life that perhaps has gone out of fashion. (And that, too, is a story that cannot be told quickly.) But it is a way that could be retrieved. And J. Patout Burns’s Augustine’s Preached Theology provides, by way of Augustine of Hippo, an excellent example of the kind of preaching that marries theological rigor with pastoral sensitivity, and it is thus an example of how the sermon could once again function in the church’s life.
The book begins with a preliminary chapter with a concise description of the principles that undergirded Augustine’s interpretation of Scripture. For Augustine, interpreting the text was a theological task informed by doctrinal conclusions drawn themselves from Scripture. The totus Christus, an interpretive principle that pervades his reading of the Psalms, was a result of meditating on the ways that pro-Nicene Christology helps us make sense of otherwise puzzling passages (p. 18). Similarly, the double love commandment is another Scriptural insight that then exercises a constraint on what various Scriptures might teach and thus on what the preacher can and cannot say to the gathered church (p. 21). Preaching, Burns makes clear, was always for Augustine a theological task that required tools forged in the deep work of contemplating and systematizing the truths of Scripture.
Following this introductory chapter, Burns organizes Augustine’s corpus of sermons into nine groupings. Categorizing and describing Augustine’s preaching in this way is a formidable task; over seven hundred of Augustine’s sermons have been preserved. Burns’s deep familiarity with Augustine yields the following chapters: “Riches and Poverty,” “Sin and Forgiveness,” “Baptism,” “Eucharist,” “Marriage,” “The Ministry of the Clergy,” “The Saving Work of Christ,” “The Human Situation,” and “Christ and the Church.” Each of these chapters is a miniature meditation on the interplay between congregational needs, Scriptural truths, and theological reflection. Burns is clear that Augustine wears his learning lightly; pure doctrinal exposition was rare in Augustine’s preaching (p. 22). Nonetheless, it was impossible for Augustine to speak pastorally about the human situation without carefully reflecting on the nature of guilt, concupiscence, and original sin—one example among many that is evident in this book.
The final chapter on “Christ and the Church” is a particularly generative example of this. Augustine demonstrated his interpretive, homiletical, and theological practice not only when exhorting his congregations on how to live but also regarding who they were as the church. Burns shows how Augustine’s preaching shepherded his readers along a path of Christological doctrine, scriptural echoes, and practical implications. Augustine taught his congregation that membership in the church was something far different than any other kind of association; to be a Christian is to be caught up in ongoing work of the Holy Trinity in creation. “In various ways, Augustine attempted to demonstrate that the Savior, himself constituted by a personal union of divine and human, was joined in a similar personal union to the faithful who formed his body, the church. . . . The activities of Christians who were joined into that ecclesial body continued and completed the work of the Savior on earth” (p. 278). Significantly, these significant insights were not tucked away in volumes meant only for the few; they were presented to the gathered church as deep and yet accessible truths for their contemplation and living.
Burns’s Augustine’s Preached Theology is an excellent summary of the sprawling corpus of Augustine’s sermons. But it is more than just a gaze back into the church’s past by way of the Bishop of Hippo; it also charts a way forward. By looking back to Augustine we can look ahead—seeking to retrieving once again the place of the sermon as a central site of the church’s work of extending the Great Tradition.
Joey Sherrard is the Associate Pastor of Discipleship at Signal Mountain Presbyterian Church in Signal Mountain, TN. He holds a PhD in Theology from the University of St. Andrews and is a member of the St. Anselm Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
