Lecture 13: Ambrose, Jerome, Chrysostom, and the Conversion of Augustine

The lecture, section by section

1. Gregory of Nazianzus argues like an apologist

   The third Cappadocian defends Christ's deity exactly as a modern believer would at the door with Jehovah's Witnesses: from the great and lofty utterances of Scripture, not from councils. He strings the texts: in the beginning was the Word and the Word was God; the only begotten in the bosom of the Father; the way, the truth, the life, the light; the wisdom and power of God; the radiance and exact impress of his essence; even Genesis 19's remarkable line that the LORD rained fire from the LORD. His anti-Arian conclusion: there never was when the Father was without the Word.

2. Ambrose for bishop

   In 374 the governor of Milan, a lawyer named Ambrose, convened a deadlocked assembly to choose a new bishop, and a child's chant, Ambrose for bishop, swept the crowd; within eight days the governor was baptized, ordained, and installed. He became a magnificent preacher, the one whose rhetoric drew a skeptical professor named Augustine and whose content God used to convert him, a defender of Christian ethics against a nominalized church, and, remarkably for a former politician, an advocate of keeping the imperial government out of the church's affairs. Tradition also credits him with compiling the Athanasian Creed, Athanasius's doctrine penned a generation later.

3. One God, every error answered

   Busenitz reads Ambrose's confession, a paragraph that answers the whole rogues' gallery at once: against the heathen, no dividing the Son from the Father; against Sabellius, no confounding of persons; against Photinus, no Son beginning in the virgin's womb; against Arius, no plurality of unequal powers. His anchors are Deuteronomy's hear O Israel, the singular name of Matthew 28's baptismal formula, and Christ's own I and the Father are one: fullness of divinity, unity of power, three persons, one God.

4. Jerome and the Vulgate

   Jerome, the era's supreme scholar, a man happier with his books than with people, who dreamed God asked whether he loved Cicero more than Christ, gave the West its Bible: the Vulgate, the common tongue translation, rendered from the Hebrew and Greek because the West now spoke Latin. He insisted, against Augustine, that the Old Testament must be translated from Hebrew itself. The bitter irony came eleven centuries later: when Europe no longer spoke Latin, Rome locked the Scriptures inside the very translation named for the common people.

5. Two seeds of trouble

   Two of Jerome's choices bore long shadows. He rendered the Greek word for repentance with a Latin word hearable as do penance, a hinge on which medieval works righteousness would later swing. And he included the Apocrypha in the Vulgate while stating plainly in his preface that the church reads these books for edification but not to establish doctrine, like binding Pilgrim's Progress into a Bible with a disclaimer. Eleven hundred years later the Council of Trent canonized what Jerome had explicitly fenced off. The canon itself was already settled recognition by then; Athanasius had listed our New Testament books in a famous festal letter, and the church recognizes what God inspired, it never authorizes it. Jerome also exalted celibacy and pressed Mary's perpetual virginity, early Roman traditions taking root.

6. Why the monks went to the desert

   When Christianity was persecuted, following Christ cost everything; when the empire made everyone a Christian, radical discipleship went looking for a cost, and found it in the wilderness. Anthony the Hermit, made famous by Athanasius's biography of him, modeled the ascetic ideal that grew into monasticism. Busenitz's correction is surgical: Scripture calls us to pursue faithfulness, which often includes suffering; monasticism reversed the order and pursued suffering as though it were faithfulness. From there it is a short slide from reading fruit as evidence of salvation to treating fruit as the ground of it, the synergism a tour guide captures perfectly in the phrase monks working on their salvation.

7. Meanwhile, beyond the border

   A student's question surfaces a sobering fact: when Rome became Christian, the Zoroastrian Persian empire next door began viewing its own huge Christian population as Roman sympathizers and potential spies, and some of the most brutal persecution in church history fell on believers in what is now Iran and Iraq, precisely because their persecutors' enemy had adopted their faith.

8. The golden mouth

   John Chrysostom, whose name means golden mouthed, trained in the school of Antioch with its literal, grammatical, historical interpretation, the standing rival of Alexandria's allegory, and became the foremost expository preacher of the pre-Reformation church, leaving homilies through Genesis, Matthew, John, Romans, and most of Paul that a student can still consult verse by verse. His method reads like a modern hermeneutics syllabus: interpret the words, attend to the sense and the aim of the speaker, weigh the cause and the occasion, and so bring out the meaning. His blunt honesty made powerful enemies; falsely charged, he died on the road to exile.

9. Chrysostom and the gospel

   For all his ascetic and moral emphasis, preached into a church drowning in nominalism, Chrysostom's Romans homilies say plainly that justification is through faith alone, with works as its fruit. Busenitz's reading rule for this whole generation: when everyone claims to be a Christian, faithful preachers hammer on fruit, and that emphasis must not be mistaken for a works gospel.

10. Monica's son

    Augustine of Hippo, the most influential Christian between the apostles and the Reformation, began as a runaway. Raised in North Africa by a praying mother, Monica, who lived out Peter's win-them-without-a-word and saw her mother-in-law, her husband, and finally her son converted, Augustine taught rhetoric, kept a mistress fourteen years, fathered a son, and found Scripture beneath his taste and Christian ethics above his appetite. In Milan he went to hear Ambrose for the style and was pierced by the substance; the Hound of Heaven, as he reverently called God, ran him down. From 396 he was bishop of Hippo in modern Algeria, in the North Africa that was then a Bible belt of the faith.

11. The doctor of grace

    Augustine's pen built the Middle Ages: On the Trinity, ten years in the writing, the fullest early treatment of the doctrine; the City of God, thirteen years, the first great Christian philosophy of history; and the Confessions, his testimony. In him the doctrines of grace stand whole, what later centuries would call Calvinism articulated twelve hundred years before Calvin, and drawn, as Augustine drew it, from the New Testament itself.

12. Pelagius, and the restless heart

    Pelagius, a British monk appalled at the church's worldliness, bolted holiness to fatal doctrine: every person born as Adam was, free will unimpaired, original sin denied, Adam's fall a mere bad example, heaven reachable by effort. Augustine answered with Scripture's verdict: human nature, created faultless, is now contaminated in every part and needs a physician; the will is free only to choose sin until God, rich in mercy, makes the dead alive with Christ. Semi-Pelagianism, the split-the-difference position, would in time become Rome's settled soteriology. And the lecture closes where Augustine's Confessions open: you have formed us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.

1. The desert monks wanted their faith to cost something in an age when it cost nothing. What does costly discipleship look like in our own comfortable setting, without repeating their reversal?

2. Jerome fenced the Apocrypha off with a preface, and the fence failed. What does that teach about how carefully a church must guard the line between helpful and authoritative?

3. Augustine's heart was restless until it rested in God. Where do you watch people, or yourself, seek that rest elsewhere, and how did God's pursuit finally reach you?