Abstract
Three decades ago Gerhard Forde wrote that ‘theology is for proclamation’ (Gerhard Forde, Theology is for Proclamation, Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1990). In his magisterial new book, Augustine's Preached Theology, J. Patout Burns demonstrates from the venerable Church Father's homiletic oeuvre the inverse and equally essential point: proclamation is for theology.
For whatever else Augustine of Hippo was, he was undoubtedly a preacher. In his north African bishopric, he would preach to his congregation two to three times a week—not to mention the myriad special services for which he would be called upon. This regimen continued for some three decades. The opus of Augustine's sermons therefore numbers in the thousands, and just those that are extant comprise more than 1.5 million words. Wading through their contents in search of a particular theological nugget is like panning for gold in the Yukon.
Thus, if he had accomplished nothing else in Preached Theology, Patout Burns would have done a tremendous service to the church and students of Augustine by synthesizing the contents of those many sermons and providing copious footnotes for further research. As it is, in this study of the relationship between Augustine's pulpit ministry and the development of his theology, Burns has provided an enriching investigation that proves much greater than the sum of its homiletic parts.
Preached Theology proceeds topically, and each chapter stands on its own, independent of the others. After an introductory chapter and a programmatic one on the interpretation of Scripture, there follows chapters on: riches and poverty, sin and forgiveness, baptism, eucharist, marriage, the ministry, the saving work of Christ, the human situation, and finally Christ and the church. Exhaustive indices by author, subject, and scriptural reference make Preached Theology an accessible handbook that will lend itself well to both the seminary classroom and the preacher's study.
Readers of Studies in Christian Ethics may be most interested in how Burns teases out Augustine's persistent preaching of the lived ramifications of the faith. This is most obviously evident in the chapter on riches and poverty, in which we learn how Augustine adroitly navigated a Christian culture where believers tended either toward gross materialism or abject asceticism. Instead, writes Burns, ‘Augustine taught that earthly blessings were good but dangerous’. He continues, giving us a flavor for the preacher's analogical imagination: ‘Earthly possessions were like an inn at which a traveler stayed but soon left to the use of another traveler; they were not like the house in which a person made a permanent dwelling’ (p. 29).
It is to be expected, however, that topics such as possessions or marriage would be heavy with ethical implications. Perhaps more interesting is how Burns shows the practical applications that Augustine drew from more directly doctrinal matters, such as redemption. For instance, in a section on Christ's identification with Christians, Burns writes, ‘Augustine taught that in his passion and death no less than in his incarnation Christ had identified himself voluntarily with his members … Thereby, Christ exhorted and strengthened his disciples to follow the way that he had opened for them’ (p. 206). Or again, in the chapter on baptism: ‘Augustine's preaching on baptism was primarily pastoral, situating the ritual and its effects in the sequence of events that formed the Christian life. The ritual itself was preceded by repentance for past sins and training for the future life of faith and good works’ (p. 103). The truths of the faith are not inert but transform the lives of the hearers.
While Burns does well to show how Augustine never shies away from ethical exhortation in his preaching, undoubtedly the burden of the bishop's preaching ministry was in its robust theologizing. Preached Theology establishes the degree to which Augustine engaged deep theological questions in his sermons. To give just a taste of the topoi that he intrepidly took up in worship over the course of his career, and which Burns gamely surveys in his book: divine and human interaction in forgiveness (p. 76); the eucharist and the immortal bodies of the saints (p. 128); continence within marriage (p. 145); the Savior's human participation in divine operations (p. 268); original sin and inherited guilt (p. 225); and on and on it goes. To read Preached Theology is to receive an inspiring—if humbling—look at the depths that may be plumbed from the pulpit.
And here contemporary preachers have much to gain from Burns's study. The trend among preachers in recent generations, specifically in the West, has been to eschew in the sermon serious theological reflection (which was putatively the provenance of the academy) in favor of more immediately accessible and supposedly relevant helps for living. The sermon thus gets co-opted into the individual's self-actualization scheme and becomes a tool of (in Christian Smith's felicitous phrase) ‘moralistic therapeutic deism’.
Such preaching would have been utterly unintelligible to Augustine. For him, preaching had as its orientation ‘that we might understand the things freely given us by God’ (1 Cor. 2:12), and as its aim the ongoing formation of a peculiar people outfitted for life in the city of God. It was necessary to muster all one's theological resources to this task. Preaching ought therefore to be regarded not as the neglected step-sibling to academic theology, but as its pioneering elder brother. Or in the immortal words of Moby Dick: ‘The world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow’.
But the preceding analysis does highlight one weakness in Augustine's Preached Theology: its reticence to make such connections to present concerns, not least homiletic ones. To be sure, Augustine preached and ministered in a very different time and place, and we would chafe at any simplistic applications to contemporary life and ministry. Inasmuch as the book was produced under the auspices of a grant given for the purpose of showing the ‘modern relevance’ of Augustine's sermons (p. 2), though, this was something of a disappointment. This reader wished for a concluding chapter that made some explicit applications from Augustine's preaching, which would have seemed to fit with the Church Father's own penchant for keeping faith practical.
This critique notwithstanding, Augustine's Preached Theology is an exceedingly helpful distillation of the Bishop of Hippo's pulpit ministry and a sterling testimony to the potency of proclamation for theology. Meticulously detailed and exhaustively researched, J. Patout Burns's study of Augustine's sermons will be the standard bearer in the field for generations.