Two Cities – Part 4 – The Problem with Right Belief

The growing antipathy—and in some cases, outright hostility—to the Christian movement in our day bears some resemblance to the complaints of those ancient pagan Romans who fled to North Africa after the fall of Rome in 411 AD. Like many people today, they had a problem with Christianity. They blamed it for leading the Romans astray from the true and traditional gods of Rome’s history and heritage. The fall of Rome, they insisted, was the fault of the Christians, just as today many people insist that Christianity is a religion more of hate than love, and more to be denounced than embraced.

It’s true, those fleeing pagans had a problem with Christianity. But the problem they claimed was not the real problem. The real problem was different and ultimately even more devastating to Roman paganism. And the same is true in our day.

The real problem with Christianity, then and now, is that it’s true. Christianity is right belief, and no amount of wrong belief in any guise can undermine, weaken, change, or abolish the truth that is in Jesus Christ. In that respect, Christianity is like gravity. Deny, defy, or scorn it if you will. Sooner or later, though, it’ll catch up to you, and when it does, you want to make sure you’re on solid footing.

The charge to Christians is to do whatever we can to overcome the hostility of our age with love, and to help wrong believers of every stripe discover the truth of the Gospel. Our mission, as ambassadors of the City of God, is not to wall ourselves off from the world, but to go like heralds into every nook and cranny of the City of Man, spreading the grace of God, proclaiming the Good News of Jesus and His Kingdom, and calling the world to repent and believe the Gospel.

Augustine, who lived from 354-430 AD, offers both an example and advice on how to resume our calling. His approach to countering the claims of the City of Man in his day was at once theological and Biblical, historical, and reasonable. And this is the approach we must adopt as well. It was the very approach that had led Augustine to faith in Christ, as he testified in his Confessions. And if it was good enough for him, it would be good enough for other wrong believers as well.

Including those among whom we live and move and have our being.

Augustine’s approach was first, theological. He resolved to confront Christianity’s wrong-believing detractors with the Word of God, to recall their inbuilt memory of God—since all people are made in His image—and to lay bare the story of redemption from the whole counsel of God in Scripture. This, he understood, would be a gradual project. It had been so in his own life, as he slowly returned from his pagan thinking to a renewed belief in God, and from there to belief in Jesus as God’s Redeemer. The vast bulk of the second half of City of God is devoted to a large-scale Biblical overview of the divine plan for redemption.

The world in our day has a skewed understanding of the Gospel and the Scriptures. We need patience together with the breadth and depth of Scripture to demonstrate the saving and transforming power and promise of faith in Jesus.

Ramping up to that, however, Augustine challenged the beliefs of Christianity’s detractors, showing by a multitude of examples the fecklessness, unreliability, debasing, and self-centered nature of pagan religion. Wrong theology thus addressed can be made open to right theology faithfully lived and proclaimed, as Jesus did with the wrong believers in His day and Paul demonstrated before the philosophers on Mars Hill (Acts 17).

Second, Augustine applied to history, arguing that the Roman enterprise was prone to corruption from the get-go and that any worthwhile or redeeming aspects of imperial life and culture were due to the common grace of God. The gods of Rome, and the founders who boosted them, had no time for morality. Their lying and lascivious deities only reflected the lifestyle of Rome’s elite, who teased and appeased the vast Roman public with violent games and licentious plays designed to sanction the immoral ways of the gods, and of those who worshiped them.

History, Augustine argued, was on the side of the Christian movement. Rome established itself by guile, violence, civil war, and oppression. Christianity advanced through the course of history by self-denial and love, bringing a wide swath of blessing to the world even through its sufferings. The same argument is being made today by secular historians such as Tom Holliday and Joseph Henrich. Even a passing knowledge of Western history reveals that, despite certain moral lapses in the faith at times, whatever is beautiful, good, true, and lasting in Western culture has its roots in the Christian faith.

Finally, Augustine used the gift of reason to dismantle the claims of Christianity’s detractors and reveal the Good News as the great need of the hour—and of every hour, including our own. We live in a time when, increasingly, reason is swapped out for mere emotion: What I feel is truer and more reliable than what I think. It’s not difficult to demonstrate the folly of such irrationalism, but we must master the skills of reasoning so that we can say to our wrong-believing neighbors, as God said to the people of Israel, “Come, let us reason together.” Let’s think about this, examine your view, consider my beliefs, measure them both against history and experience and common sense, and then let’s see where that leaves us.

We need to become masters of the long and ongoing conversation, demonstrating an unflappable consistency in our own beliefs together with patient questioning and probing concerning the beliefs of others. Today’s City of Man is as confused, angry, unsettled, and determined in its views as the pagans of Rome in Augustine’s day. We can help our neighbors escape the clutches of wrong belief and find a home in the new city, the City of God, that is even now descending from heaven to fill the earth with the knowledge of Jesus Christ.

Today, start a conversation about the two cities. Mention Augustine’s work and ask some friends if they think such an idea—two cities, two distinct peoples, two theologies—has any validity in our day. Listen and ask more questions. Let this be the first installment of an ongoing conversation that might see a friend coming to his senses, just as Augustine did, and giving himself to Jesus.