I Know What it is to Want to Punch a Book

I took a vacation from Augustine’s dreadful Confessions over the last couple of days, but I’m back at the grind today. I am within a dozen pages of the blessed finish line.

Augustine, to whom I will never apply the misnomer “Saint,” is really burying himself in these last pages. He is confirming every bad thing I believe about him. He doesn’t know God. He doesn’t know ABOUT God. He is a river of poison to ignorant people. He justifies every misinformed person who speaks against the supernatural. He rationalizes the failure of the Catholic Church, which, by his day, is already complete.

Christianity is a supernatural enterprise. It is primarily supernatural, not incidentally or peripherally. It’s not about hard work or obeying rules. It’s not about studying. It’s not a scholarly field, in which only people with abnormally high IQ’s can excel. It’s nearly everything Augustine thought it was not.

Augustine was a Bible scholar, but somehow he missed one of the obvious features of the Bible: supernatural events fill it, from one end of the other. Things he would dismiss as “signs” occur throughout the book, yet somehow he thinks signs are only for unbelievers. He can’t see the forest. He can’t see the trees. He can’t find the ground under his feet.

Let’s mention a few supernatural events. God created the earth supernaturally. God transported Enoch directly to heaven. God spoke to Noah and caused a flood to destroy the earth and kill the entire human race; in the process he brought a huge number of creatures to the Ark, by miraculous means. God spoke to Abraham. God appeared to Abraham. God consumed the pieces of flesh Abraham set out for him. God gave Samson the strength to lift a city’s gates out of the earth and carry them away. God gave Samson the strength to rip a live lion in pieces. God appeared to Moses in a burning bush. God afflicted Egypt with impossible plagues. God parted the Red Sea and instantly dried the bed. God gave water to the Hebrews out of a dry rock. God leveled the walls of Jericho without help. God held the sun still in the sky so Joshua could fight.

How many miracles do you want? I can do this all day.

Jesus turned water into wine. Jesus gave a blind man sight. Jesus called a rotten corpse, and it came to life and walked to him. God killed Ananias and Sapphira. God killed Herod. God prevented a snake’s poison from harming Paul. God healed many people, the dead included, through the Apostles. God gave New Testament believers the baptism with the Holy Spirit, complete with tongues, from the book of Acts through Jude and presumably through the Revelation.

God worked supernaturally in the Old Testament. God worked supernaturally in the New Testament. Jesus said his followers would do greater miracles than his own. Then the Catholic Church came into existence, and all of that stopped, and we have been cut off for 2000 years.

Isn’t it obvious that our situation is abnormal?

I knew Augustine would eventually attack tongues, and somewhere toward the end of the book, he does. He calls tongues a sign to ignorant unbelievers. Fine; that’s true. But what about the other things tongues are? Paul said a man who speaks in tongues speaks to God. Paul said he spoke in tongues more than any of the Corinthians, and he was writing to believers, not heathens. Jude said tongues would build people up, and he was not referring to marketing.

Augustine could not pray in tongues. Augustine worked no miracles. He healed no one. He received no prophecy or revelation.

Instead of asking God why he was so weak compared to the apostles, Augustine decided supernatural manifestations were things of the past. What a coincidence! A powerful church figure drew and propagated a cessationist conclusion, which, if true, would have been the best thing Satan could have hoped for.

Do I have to tell you who gave him that idea? Do you think the Holy Spirit was sitting beside Augustine, whispering, “My people are powerless against the enemy!”?

Jesus was not embarrassed to work miracles in front of people; he did it all day, over and over. He did not think it was a crass gimmick. Augustine thought he knew better than Jesus. Look what he said:

May your ministers now do their work on ‘earth’ not as they did on the waters of unbelief when their preaching and proclamation used miracles and sacred rites and mystical prayers to attract the attention of ignorance, the mother of wonder, inducing the awe aroused by secret symbols. That is the entrance to faith for the sons of Adam who forget you, who hide from your face (Gen. 3:8) and become an ‘abyss.’

Yes, you read that correctly. Adam got miracles. Moses got miracles. Jesus and the apostles got miracles. But that was just a marketing push. No miracles for you. No prophecy. No healing. Not even the supernatural gift of faith.

Augustine was an unusually smart lawyer. As he admitted, he was arrogant about his mind and loved admiration. He wanted people to marvel at the conclusions his little monkey brain had drawn about God, without the help of the Holy Spirit. He made up a bunch of garbage and published it, and people who didn’t know how to get the Holy Spirit’s help bought it and were destroyed by it.

Augustine supplied false knowledge; he supplied what military people and spies call “disinformation.” It displaced the truth. It occupied the place truth was supposed to fill, and it fooled people into giving up their search.

Thinking they had the truth, people who believed Augustine’s conceited ramblings did not try to learn the truth. As a result, they perished for lack of knowledge.

What’s worse? Publishing poisonous lies, or attacking people who had the truth? Augustine did both. He made true ministers of God sound like carnival barkers.

He spoke against the Holy Spirit. What worse thing can you do?

I don’t enjoy reading about people who wasted their lives. Augustine is a great example. He probably thought God would give him a prize when he died, and that he would be remembered forever as someone who helped people see God’s truth. In reality, he will eventually be remembered as a fool who led other people to disaster. If I’m wrong, remind me on Judgment Day, and I’ll give you five dollars.

He could have kept quiet. If he had done that, he wouldn’t have been remembered as a great man, but he wouldn’t have been remembered as a toxic failure, either. He took God’s name in vain, and there is a price for that.

As I read, I thought about people who have great earthly ambitions. They try to get rich. They try to become famous. They strive for admiration and power. They put their names on buildings. Then they die, and they find out God disapproves of their big achievements. They get no reward, and eventually, everything they create will be destroyed. Not even the earth their monuments sit on lasts forever. In the end, they will see piles of dust for which they traded their lives. They have invested in dust, very literally.

Augustine is probably worse off than that. His horrible Greek philosophy did more affirmative damage to God’s kingdom than a hundred Croesuses or Mark Cubans.

As I read his book, I realized he was just a pre-Dark-Ages blogger. You know how bloggers are. We argue and scuffle, and we ridicule everyone who disagrees with us. Most of us are wrong. Many of us lack the armament or information to come up with good arguments, but that doesn’t stop us. We have the shield of Dunning-Kruger to protect us.

That was Augustine’s style. He was wrong, but he loved being perceived as the Great Corrector, so he marketed his ridiculous theories and attacked everyone who disagreed.

I guess that makes me a comment troll.

Augustine also appears to be a major plagiarist. The book’s footnotes point out many unattributed liftings from the works of a character named Plotinus. Plagiarism is a disease of people who crave admiration.

If you aren’t baptized with the Holy Spirit, which is not the same as water baptism, you are behind the supernatural curve. If you aren’t praying in tongues, you are missing out on a lot of revelation and development. You can’t save yourself, and you can’t figure God out. You need the Holy Spirit, living inside you, doing the heavy lifting. It’s that simple. If you listen to Augustine or the people he influenced, you will remain weak.

God still works miracles. He heals people all the time. He talks to people. He defeats our enemies, right here on earth. Don’t believe the sour grapes crowd. Your potential is not limited by their failure.

One more thing: Augustine has very little to say about spirits. I’m here to tell you, we are surrounded by them. It’s not just a few possessed people here and there. It’s all of us. They talk to us constantly. They attack our bodies. They send deluded people after us. They are no joke. Jesus talked about them all the time. You need to be able to battle them if you want to do well. Augustine can’t teach you that. He seems to think it’s all about you, God, and the angels. “Satan? Never heard of him.”

How can anyone pretend to be a holy man and never mention our battle with the god of this world? Preposterous.

Maybe I’ll finish this miserable book today. I sure hope so.

If this book has taught me anything, it has taught me that there is a difference between aptitude and avidity. I can read and understand the boring books of Columbia University’s Literature Humanities course about as well as anyone, because I have certain innate abilities. Nonetheless, I would rather spend the rest of my life digging potatoes. The tedium is overwhelming. I use a timer to make sure I don’t put the books down prematurely every day, and I keep looking at it while I read, hoping it has miraculously jumped forward.

I can’t understand how anyone could dedicate a life to studying the classics. It must be an ego thing, because the material just isn’t that interesting. Or maybe there are people who have a perverse aversion to pleasure.

Of course, I have to remind myself: military deferments. If this were 1970 and I had the option of going to graduate school or being blown up in Vietnam, St. Augustine might look like hot cherry pie with vanilla ice cream. Fear of military service did a lot to increase the ranks of academics when I was a kid.

Right now I can’t wait to get to Dante, but I have a feeling I will change my mind once I’m mired in it.