Are we most like the person who wishes people well with our words, but never follow through with our actions? Or are we like the person who has head knowledge (doctrinally sound), but fails in doing good works with our hands? I hope we are more often like Abraham, who loved the Lord in word and works, and like Rahab, who loved the Lord’s people in word and works. If we’re honest, we all fall short of glorifying God in our words and our works. Therefore, we are in desperate need of God’s grace.

Doctors tell us that one of the best things we can do for our health is to get moving. In other words, stop the sedentary lifestyle and start skipping rope, skiing, swimming, or the like. Similarly, James tells us that the best thing we can do for our spiritual health is to get going (Jas. 2:14-26). A faith that stays alone is not genuine faith. Good works flow from saving faith. The apostle Paul tells us this as well: “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:8-10).
James seeks to awaken his readers from spiritual sloth with two piercing questions: “What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?” (Jas. 2:14). James is clearly concerned that some of his readers are deceived about what true faith is and isn’t. We can summarize his questions like this: Is faith without works saving faith?
James illustrates his teaching by first giving an example of words without works (Jas. 2:15). If someone comes to us in need of clothing and food, and we pay them lip service without hand service, we have done them no good. They didn’t just need our kind words; they needed clothes and food! In other words, we can have all the religion in the world, but if it doesn’t manifest itself in tangible results, it is rotten religion. Jesus made this same point when He spoke of the final judgment to His disciples. It is those who clothed, fed and gave a drink to those in need who had true saving faith (Matt. 25:31-46).
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In Confessions, he tells a better and more rational story about reason, interweaving how our thinking depends on trust, how our deepest desires move us along through life, and how disordered loves misalign our intellectual quests for the truth. And he does this all while layering his account with the Scriptures; most notably the Psalms, Luke’s story of the prodigal, and the opening chapters of Genesis. Confessions is thus suggestive for how we might integrate various disciplines—exegesis, theology, counseling, and preaching—together to witness in a secular age in which “coming of age” is highly prized.

Augustine of Hippo (354-430) is arguably the most significant post-biblical theologian in the history of Christianity and, as one recent historian has put it, the “greatest apologist of the Latin west.” Hence it was a surprise to us years ago when doing research for our textbook on apologetics to find that Augustine was almost entirely absent from modern debates on apologetic methodology. A question arose: what would happen if we retrieved Augustine to aid the church’s apologetic witness within post-Christendom?
To answer this question, we focused on his two most enduring books. With the reception history of The City of God, which has paid so much attention to its political and theological implications, it is important to not miss that Augustine’s stated purpose is to persuade skeptics and reassure doubters. He made clear in a letter, penned after City of God’s completion, that he wanted the work distributed to those who despise Christians and to the pagan seekers. Moreover, we also found that Confessions should be read as a work of persuasion–a story-shaped prayer, leading readers through competing philosophies before holding up the cross-shaped path to the good life. Retrieving both books together can help us address the individual and societal challenges of our present age.
Who might Augustine want to speak with today?
Before getting to the specifics of how, Augustine might want to speak to the who. Many present-day pastors and theologians, though inheritors of the Augustinian tradition, have sold off their apologetic birthright, mistakenly assuming apologetics is synonymous with a flattened Enlightenment-style rationality and seeing it as irrelevant to their ministry. This is a fair criticism of some forms of apologetics, but not of apologetics per se.
Long before the Enlightenment set the terms of so many debates, Augustine set out in The City of God to “persuad[e] a person either to enter the city of God without hesitation or to remain there with perseverance.” Mindful of the pronounced changes taking place in society and the challenges Christians felt, Augustine believed it was his pastoral calling to interact with these tectonic shifts and pour himself into the task of persuading the anxious, the doubting, and the skeptical. We can only imagine Augustine instructing pastors and theologians today to do the same.
Augustine would likely also want to have a long conversation with modern-day apologists. While he would almost certainly be pleased to observe how some of his apologetic seeds have blossomed through the ages, he would probably raise some concerns. Over the past century, at least in the United States, debate about apologetics has largely consisted of back-and-forths between evidential and presuppositional apologists regarding methodology. Though both sides have much to offer, the ways these methodological debates have often been framed have left our apologetic imaginations entrenched inside certain systems; meanwhile, the cultural winds outside have been rapidly changing. As Charles Taylor has highlighted with his use of the term “social imaginaries,” our late-modern communities have been inhaling ways of thinking, believing, and living—not mostly by way of syllogisms or analytic argument, but through stories, symbols, and artifacts—which have made Christianity seem not only irrational but oppressive and dangerous. Our cultural air is far different from what it was even fifty years ago. A changing culture, however, would not surprise Augustine; he saw it in his own time. But the idea that we would be unwilling to adapt how we attempt to persuade likely would surprise him.
In his book Territories of Human Reason, Alister McGrath has aptly summarized the work of scholars who study what is considered “rational” in different contexts. Basic logic is an important aspect of rationality, which is universally accepted. However, it is what is added to the laws of logic that does the heavy lifting in perceptions of rationality. And what is added to the laws of logic includes the available evidence for a particular person or community and the prevailing social imaginary. Hence, when we neglect to train ministers, evangelists, and apologists in how to evaluate and diagnose our culture’s dominant stories, symbols, and artifacts we risk neglecting the larger assumed frameworks within which people reason.
Moreover, in both teaching and in practice, contemporary apologetics has not sufficiently recognized the importance of humans as doxological creatures. Our desires shape how we reason and what we believe. This Augustinian insight is now being affirmed from a variety of different disciplines.
These two problems—namely, a lack of training in cultural analysis and at least a functionally reductionistic anthropology—go hand in hand. When we fail to integrate sociocultural analysis into our discipleship, we are left flatfooted when we attempt to engage the doubt and unbelief as well as the hearts and minds of those in our communities and parishes.
How might Augustine help us?
In Confessions, we read of a boy raised in church by his mother, only to walk away from the faith and pursue intellectual maturity. Confessions is an account of his truly growing up, which can help us counter contemporary secular coming of age stories.
Charles Taylor describes how many today assume they have come of age by simply subtracting religion from their lives and rooting themselves in science and common-sense reasoning.
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Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
So much of the teachings of the urban church flatter the sensibilities of the people in the pews rather than fundamentally challenging them about the way they are living their lives…The pedimental nature of third way rhetoric is very effective, and it’s easy to see why it appeals to the striver class people who populate evangelical urban churches.

“Third way” rhetoric that has been deployed by some evangelicals was once praised but is now often criticized. People are rejecting the idea that the truth is somewhere in the middle of left and right, or is some hybrid thereof. Today, even the evangelical proponents of third way rhetoric have adopted new language like “diagonalizaton” to suggest that the Christian truth is not simply somewhere in the middle but something else entirely. (I believe Christopher Watkin came up with this formulation).
I actually think that a third way approach can be valid in a lot of circumstances in describing truth. For example, Aristotle said that virtue was a mean between two extremes. Not that perfect virtue always was at the midpoint of the two, but that it lies somewhere in the middle.
Similarly, in a theological context, we could say that it’s possible to over-emphasize Christ’s humanity and end up falling into Arianism, or over-emphasize his divinity and end up in Docetism.
Very often in life there actually are ditches on both sides of the road. So in terms of conveying truth, I think talking about a third way can often be accurate.
The real function of third way rhetoric is not conveying a truth claim, however. It is to elevate the status or moral position of the person using it—and often that of his audience as well.
Third way rhetoric is a pedimental structure. I first encountered the idea of pedimental language in reading Mary Douglas’ wonderful book Leviticus as Literature.
A pediment is an architectural feature that looks like this.
While this public domain image has four columns, you often see it with just two. The left and right corners of the triangle serve to emphasize the corner that is elevated in the center.
When used in rhetoric, pedimental rhetoric functions similar to a chiasm in emphasizing the central point. We see this structure in Leviticus. Douglas argues that chapters 18 and 20 have a pair of repeated sexual regulations that emphasize the social justice regulations in Leviticus 19 (which I believe she argues is actually the central focus of the book).
Let’s apply this to contemporary evangelical rhetoric with a simplified example. If I get into a pulpit and say, “Christianity is conservative because it cares about sin, but it’s also liberal because it cares about the poor,” what is the function of this?
Factually, it conveys that true Christianity cares about both sin and helping the poor, which is true. But it also suggests that I am better than both liberals or conservatives, because I have the complete truth in contrast to their partial truths. And because you, my parishioners, are in my church, you are probably better than all those people too.
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