GOD
In this way, Augustan gives us this sort of strange tissue of his words and God’s words.
And that’s one way in which God gets to help tell the story that Augustine is telling about his own life.
There’s this blending of language.
This is actually not surprising.
This is how language works.
I’m never speaking, just my own words.
These words that I’m using right now aren’t my private possession.
If they were my private possession, You wouldn’t understand them at all. This is the point Vichtenstein makes.
I’m always speaking words that had been given to me. All the words I’m using have been given to me by my parents, by my teachers, by those that I’ve read.
And Augustan is in some ways doing something very normal and natural using the words of others.
But through his quotations, he’s reminding us of just how much his life is in the care of God and just how much his life story is being told by God.
Okay, so let’s find this threefold confession.
Well, the first one is pretty easy to find.
Great. Are you a Lord and exceedingly worthy of praise?
That’s a confession of praise.
That was sort of give me right there. Your powers immense your wisdom beyond recognizing ease, acknowledging who God is, and making that confession of praise.
Sin is not the first word in this book.
He continues on a couple lines later, we who carry our mortality about with us, carry the evidence of our sin, that evidence being our mortality, right? We weren’t meant to die, but we do die.
And we know that that is the consequence of our sin.
And with it the proof that you thwart the proud.
So there’s an acknowledgement of sin here. He’s not confessing a specific sin, but he’s confessing that he lives under the stain of, and we all live under the stain of original sin.
And then he concludes this first short paragraph.
You stir us so that praising you may bring us joy because, and this is the very famous line. You have made us and drawn us to yourself.
And our heart is unquiet until it rests on you.
Augustine is telling us where his identity comes from.
He’s telling us that he has his origin in God.
He’s identifying himself as the creature, and God is the Creator.
And he’s also making an expression of faith that his heart will find some rest in God.
Now, I love this translation by Sister Maria Boulding.
It’s fantastic.
It’s lyrical, it’s faithful, but she’s also a really good stylist in English.
This is her arguably her one misstep is translating our heart is un quiet she was trying to be original.
We all know that it’s supposed to say our heart is restless until it rests in you.
So feel free to just cross out quiet and right restless if that makes you feel better about it.
But our hardest restless because it is made for rest in God.
Augustine is going to give us some picture of that rest, but he’s also going to do a lot to show us just how restless and just how unquiet living a life running away from God can be.
Because that’s what much of the story is going to be about, about Augustine’s running away from God and refusing to acknowledge the rest that God offers. He also raises an interesting question of what it means to rest in God. We all know from our own experience, we don’t have one moment of conversion before, which were restless.
And then such that after that moment of conversion, everything is just smooth sailing and easy peasy.
In fact, Augustan, even in telling his story, is going to tell us after his conversion, all the ways in which he continues to struggle.
So he makes this confession of faith.
He’s looking for rest.
He’s expecting rest.
And yet that rest is never going to be completely permanent in this life.
There’s always going to be sort of a move from restlessness to rest and back again.
So there you can see in the very first paragraph he announces that threefold confession of sin, faith and praise.
And I encourage you to continue looking for that as you go on throughout the text.
In the next paragraph, you know, when I read this text with students, people often point out how many questions Augustan asks.
He has so many questions as he’s undertaking this project.
And in the next paragraph of 111, he starts piling up the questions. He says, you know, I’m confused about how to get started.
This is the second paragraph, but we still call it 1.1.1.
He says, which comes first to call upon you or praise you, to know you or call upon you.
He says, look, I’m trying to speak to and with and about this being that I don’t entirely understand. And so I’m not sure how I can get started.
Right.
How I can know that I’m calling upon the right being, even calling upon the wrong being, or maybe I’m looking in the wrong direction.
How can I believe without a preacher? This is halfway through that paragraph.
So it almost looks like the project might not get off the ground.
Because if he doesn’t already have a relationship with God.
It’s not clear how he can call upon that God.
And He tells us, the solution that he gives us is that he calls upon God in response to a word that’s already been given him by God.
So his act of writing is a response to the call that he’s received.
The final sentence of that paragraph says, my faith calls upon you, Lord.
But it’s this faith, which is your gift to me.
I’m only able to speak to and speak about God because of my faith.
And yet it’s not that I’ve somehow mustered up this impressive faith that’s allowing me to write this book.
Augustan says, the very faith that grounds my speaking and allows me to speak is itself a gift of God.
Okay, we’ve resolved one problem, but then in the next paragraph, Augustan quickly piles up more problems.
He says this is in one to two. Well, but how can I call upon God when by calling upon him, I’m calling him into myself.
And the wordplay doesn’t really make sense in English, but he’s using the word in wool Carre.
So he says, when I invoke God, I am will Carre calling him in into myself.
It’s like I am I’m trying to bring him down into myself and he says, that doesn’t really make sense because I don’t really feel like I have space for myself. I don’t really feel like I have space for God and me.
So how is that going to work?
How can I invoke him or how can I call on him in this way?
When God is so big?