---
title: 'Why Pastors Should Engage Augustine of Hippo'
type: text
hasMedia: true
requiresPurchase: false
authors:
- 'William VanDoodewaard'
date: 2019-03-15
collection: 'Articles'
subcollection: '2019'
topics:
- 'Ancient and Medieval Church History'
- 'Pastoral Theology'
scriptures:
- 'Psalms 42'
- 'Romans 8'
url: https://confessional.org/articles/2019/vandoodewaard-2019-why-pastors-should-engage-augustine-of-hippo
---

# Why Pastors Should Engage Augustine of Hippo

Survey of Augustine’s Hippo ministry and major works (Confessions, The City of God), highlighting his pastoral counsel on suffering, sin, providence, and God’s sovereign grace.

The fires of war burned across the western Roman Empire in the early 400’s: in Gaul, then Iberia, Rome itself, and then in northwest Africa. Vandal hordes advanced, establishing a new Arian kingdom by violence, bringing dissolution to a decaying Roman order. Even places that had peace had an impending sense of upheaval.

In Hippo Regius, a small African port city a three-day journey from Carthage, citizens lived in a fairly comfortable world of normalcy despite the wars and rumors of wars. Seasons of planting and harvest; merchant success stories and failures; harbor traffic; work-days and evenings; births and deaths; family celebrations and family trouble, marked the rhythms of life. Everyone in Hippo was religious in one way or another. Varieties of Greco-Roman paganism, schools of philosophy, mystery cults and occult, Manicheanism, occasional Arians, Pelagians and then the Christians—Catholic and Donatist—formed a diverse community.

## Confessions

This was the place in which Augustine served in pastoral ministry, first as presbyter (391–395), then as bishop (395–430). His ministry ended at his death during the Vandal siege of the city. Converted from a life of cosmopolitan self-pursuit, Augustine was marked by a deep awareness of God’s sovereign grace to him in Christ. His unexpected calling in the community of Hippo bore tremendous fruit, multiplied through his writings. Among these, his *Confessions* and *The City of God* should be part of every pastor’s study.

*The Confessions* still stands as perhaps *the* greatest spiritual autobiography. Marked by deep and honest self-insight, worship, and wonder, Augustine wrote his *Confessions* a little over a decade after his conversion—just as he was entering ministry. The primary impetus seems to have come from his friend and fellow Christian Alypius, who encouraged him to write the story of his conversion for the sake of others. Some scholars believe a secondary factor may have been to relate his testimony to the wider church around the time of his ordination as bishop. The *Confessions* reveal the heart and mind of a pastor. Augustine masterfully exposits the soul’s unsettledness apart from God: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.”1 Intentionally relating his own life story without a gloss, Augustine displays his sin and spiritual emptiness, and God’s patient, gracious, and powerful salvation. The entire work is a prayer of praise to God.

## The City of God

*The City of God* is fascinating as it traces the contrasts and intermingling between the world (the city of man) and the church (the city of God). What few realize is that Augustine wrote this near thousand-page book with tremendous pastoral and evangelistic heart, spiritual insight, and wry humor.2 His detailed exposures of Greco-Roman paganism are aimed at not only guarding the church, but also bringing pagan readers to see the devastating folly of their claims, in contrast with the truth and beauty of the gospel. Augustine draws on the history of redemption, as well as his contemporary church in narrating the story of God’s city.

The first book of *The City of God* brings us immediately into his ministry. Here is a world of brokenness and suffering on a scale exceeding what most of us have experienced: “Christians were slaughtered and were put to death in a hideous variety of cruel ways.”3 Augustine shepherds readers through the horrors of war, the prosperity of the wicked, and the sufferings of the saints. His counsel is tender and direct. He grieves with victims, and shares outrage at evildoers and evils perpetrated.

Counseling those tempted by thoughts of suicide while facing, or after having suffered, vandal brutality and sexual violence, Augustine reminds us that “we should not endeavor by sin to obviate sin”4: “No man ought to do so on account of another man’s sins, for this would be to escape a guilt which could not pollute him, by incurring a great guilt of his own; this no man ought to do on account of his own past sins, for he has all the more need of this life that these sins may be healed by repentance.”5 Someone questions, “Why did God allow such evils to be perpetrated against me?” Augustine answers, “…indeed it is a deep providence of the Creator and Governor of the world; ‘unsearchable are his judgements, and his ways past finding out.’”6

Augustine reminds those struggling with a sense of guilt after abuse that “when a woman is violated while her soul admits no consent to the iniquity… the sin is not hers, but his who violates her.”7 She, Augustine reminds his readers, “remains inviolably chaste” and is to be honored for her chastity through trial.8 In grappling with whether feeling pleasure in the midst of sexual violation reflects sin, Augustine encourages readers to personally consider whether there was some degree of lust in their heart, or whether it was a blameless physical response—emphasizing the normalcy of the latter. Yet, even where evil is faithfully suffered, there is no ground for pride, but rather adoration to God: “Faithfully interrogate your own souls… If you did not consent to sin, it was because God added his grace…”

Acknowledging the mysteries of God’s holy wisdom, Augustine encourages the suffering to see hard providences as places in which growth in faith, repentance and new obedience can occur. Whether we become aware there may have been sin mixed in our response to abuse, or convinced there was not, Augustine reminds us that when we place our suffering in the Lord’s sovereign, gracious purpose we will see “when he exposes us to adversities, it is either to prove our perfections or correct our imperfections.”9 Encouragement to trust our ever-faithful God shines through his ministry: “\[God\] could never have permitted these disasters to befall his saints, if by them that saintliness could be destroyed which He Himself had bestowed upon them, and delights to see in them.”10 While the gospel is not always explicit in the opening sections of *The City of God* the reader who continues will see a rich proclamation of Christ whose “blood was shed for the remission of our sins.”11

## Reasons to Read Augustine

There are many reasons to read Augustine. His writings against the Pelagians teach us much about God’s sovereign grace; his letters encourage us in friendship, mentoring, and hard ministry situations. His sermons, though tending to allegorical interpretation, are richly practical, direct, and often Christ-centered and doxological. As you read Augustine’s writings you will come to realize they display a remarkable breadth and depth of knowledge of the Word. Sitting in a garden in Milan, just moments before his conversion, he heard a child saying, “*tolle lege*”—“take up and read.” He did for a lifetime of ministry. We do well to have his company in doing the same.

