A Time to Laugh

Snacking on Auggie’s Pears

14. O my God! What miseries and mockeries did I then experience when it was impressed on me that obedience to my teachers was proper to my boyhood estate if I was to flourish in this world and distinguish myself in those tricks of speech which would gain honor for me among men, and deceitful riches! To this end I was sent to school to get learning, the value of which I knew not–wretch that I was. Yet if I was slow to learn, I was flogged. For this was deemed praiseworthy by our forefathers and many had passed before us in the same course, and thus had built up the precedent for the sorrowful road on which we too were compelled to travel, multiplying labor and sorrow upon the sons of Adam. About this time, O Lord, I observed men praying to thee, and I learned from them to conceive thee–after my capacity for understanding as it was then–to be some great Being, who, though not visible to our senses, was able to hear and help us. Thus as a boy I began to pray to thee, my Help and my Refuge, and, in calling on thee, broke the bands of my tongue. Small as I was, I prayed with no slight earnestness that I might not be beaten at school. And when thou didst not heed me–for that would have been giving me over to my folly–my elders and even my parents too, who wished me no ill, treated my stripes as a joke, though they were then a great and grievous ill to me.

15. Is there anyone, O Lord, with a spirit so great, who cleaves to thee with such steadfast affection (or is there even a kind of obtuseness that has the same effect)–is there any man who, by cleaving devoutly to thee, is endowed with so great a courage that he can regard indifferently those racks and hooks and other torture weapons from which men throughout the world pray so fervently to be spared; and can they scorn those who so greatly fear these torments, just as my parents were amused at the torments with which our teachers punished us boys? For we were no less afraid of our pains, nor did we beseech thee less to escape them. Yet, even so, we were sinning by writing or reading or studying less than our assigned lessons.

For I did not, O Lord, lack memory or capacity, for, by thy will, I possessed enough for my age. However, my mind was absorbed only in play, and I was punished for this by those who were doing the same things themselves. But the idling of our elders is called business; the idling of boys, though quite like it, is punished by those same elders, and no one pities either the boys or the men. For will any common sense observer agree that I was rightly punished as a boy for playing ball–just because this hindered me from learning more quickly those lessons by means of which, as a man, I could play at more shameful games? And did he by whom I was beaten do anything different? When he was worsted in some small controversy with a fellow teacher, he was more tormented by anger and envy than I was when beaten by a playmate in the ball game.

Augustine’s Confessions

Augustine’s a good egg. I’ve always relished his noble success at articulating a scholarly faith (while others insisted that the Christian must only study the Bible) and at insisting on a Grace-centered life (while others noodled a man- and works-centered life).

And so I’ve picked up my Bunge again from weeks earlier to see what Augustine saw in a child. Out of his wrestling, I find important reminders for how I see my sons.

First, like my ol’ buddy Burke, Augustine sees burgeoning language as the beginning of a moral life. Stortz summarizes him to say that “as infants acquired language, as children learned to reason and to love aright, as adolescents practiced the discipline of self-restraint, Augustine assigned greater moral responsibility” (100). Unlike some so-called “Christian” parenting authors who see children as no different than animals (and thus their treatment need not necessarily be humane or fair or grace-filled), to Augustine children were neither completely innocent or “miniature demons.” Instead he describes them as “non-innocents” who were guilty, but not yet accountable — a new nuancing.

So children were not simply mini-grownups or bundles of animalistic drives or “little pagans.” Instead, adults were nothing more than big kids. He studied children because they seemed more human. “Childhood provided him a hermeneutic for understanding adults, as one traded ‘nuts and balls and pet birds’ for ‘money and estates and servants’” (101).

And Augustine was disgusted by the severe punishments children receive for simply doing out-in-the-open what adults, simply bigger kids, do behind-the-scenes. The greed he saw in stealing pears was no different from the greed in trading servants. Sure, a 3-year-old collapses in a heap when his freshly-peeled banana breaks in two, but is that any different from a 38-year-old Mommy blowing rasperries at the person who stole her parking place? Yes, a 1-year-old wails in disappointment that he can’t use a cellphone as a teether, but Mommy grumbles under her breath when she unexpectedly ran out of coffee on an up-before-the sun morning. The child’s big feelings are more unpredictable, more noisy, more public, and, frankly, more honest. So how come they get ritualistically punished in the interest of “atoning for their sins” (a heretical impossibility since none of us can atone for our sins)? And how does that pain teach anything but how to sin more secretly and more skillfully and more angrily?

We ask for grace for each other and for ourselves, but for some reason that 3-year-old and that 1-year-old aren’t extended that same grace. What an odd and pagan double-standard. I am thankful that Augustine so sensitively and colorfully reminds me that the same Grace that God gives me, He gives to my child. We’re all in God’s Covenant after all.

Sanctifying Grace

Sanctification is a work of the triune God, but is ascribed more particularly to the Holy Spirit in Scripture, Romans 8:11; 15:16; I Peter 1:2. It is particularly important in our day, with its emphasis on the necessity of approaching the study of theology anthropologically and its one-sided call to service in the kingdom of God, to stress the fact that God, and not man, is the author of sanctification. Especially in view of the Activism that is such a characteristic feature of American religious life, and which glorifies the work of man rather than the grace of God, it is necessary to stress the fact over and over again that sanctification is the fruit of justification, that the former is simply impossible without the latter, and that both are the fruits of the grace of God in the redemption of sinners. Though man is privileged to co-operate with the Spirit of God, he can do this only in virtue of the strength which the Spirit imparts to him from day to day. The spiritual development of man is not a human achievement, but a work of divine grace. Man deserves no credit whatsoever for that which he contributes to it instrumentally. In so far as sanctification takes place in the subconscious life, it is effected by the immediate operation of the Holy Spirit. But as a work in the conscious life of believers it is wrought, by several means, which the Holy Spirit employs. . . .

3. THE NECESSITY OF GOOD WORKS. There can be no doubt about the necessity of good works properly understood. They cannot be regarded as necessary to merit salvation, nor as a means to retain a hold on salvation, nor even as the only way along which to proceed to eternal glory, for children enter salvation without having done any good works. The Bible does not teach that no one can be saved apart from good works. At the same time good works necessarily follow from the union of believers with Christ.” He that abideth in me and I in him, the same beareth much fruit,” John 15:5. They are also necessary as required by God, Romans 7:4 ; 8:12, 13; Gal. 6:2, as the fruits of faith, James 2:14, 17, 20-22, as expressions of gratitude, I Cor. 6:20. unto the assurance of faith, II Peter 1:5-10, and to the glory of God, John 15:8; I Cor. 10:31. The necessity of good works must be maintained over against the Antinomians, who claim that, since Christ not only bore the penalty of sin, but also met the positive demands of the law, the believer is free from the obligation to observe it, an error that is still with us to-day in some of the forms of dispensationalism. This is a thoroughly false position, for it is only the law as a system of penalty and as a method of salvation that is abolished in the death of Christ. The law as the standard of our moral life is a transcript of the holiness of God and is therefore of permanent validity also for the believer, though his attitude to the law has undergone a radical change. He has received the Spirit of God, which is the Spirit of obedience, so that, without any constraint, he willingly obeys the law. Strong sums it up well, when he says: Christ frees us ” (1) from the law as a system of curse and penalty; this He does by bearing the curse and penalty Himself. . . ; (2) from the law with its claims as a method of salvation; this He does by making His obedience and merits ours . . . ; (3) from the law as an outward and foreign compulsion; this He does by giving us the spirit of obedience and sonship, by which the law is progressively realized within.”‘

Puritan Grace

David Calhoun remarks in his lecture on the Puritans:

In their preaching, the Puritans were champions of grace. Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners is the name of Bunyan’s book, and it could stand for the whole period. And they were very concerned to teach the law. To set forth the Ten Commandments. And God’s requirements for Christian living. Sometimes it’s thought that the Puritans fell into legalism, and they probably did. We know Baxter did in his neo-nomianism. And even in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Charles Spurgeon is disappointed when in the beginning of the story Evangelist sends poor Christian — not really yet a Christian although that’s his name already — sends him to the wicket gate and not directly to the Cross. Well, Bunyan doesn’t often get it wrong, but there he perhaps did. The way of preaching of the gospel is an indirect way, not a direct way to the Cross. And the Puritans do stress that law work; they preach the law. It’s important, I think, and they do it well and they do it right. But you can preach the law so long. You should not wait too long to get to the Gospel. And I think the Puritans kept people often marinating in the law too long. They need to let them go on to the Gospel and be forgiven when the conviction was there.

But by and large, the Puritans were, as J. I. Packer put it, law-oriented without lapsing into legalism. I would agree with that by saying that the Puritans were usually law-oriented and did not usually lapse into legalism. But I think there are places where we can see that. But there is much good in what the Puritans do with the law, great stress on the third use of the law and careful teaching of what God requires. But it can produce books that seem beyond us. As you read the Puritans, don’t allow Puritan writing to discourage you as sometimes it can. There are many great encouraging things in the Puritans too. But the standards are so high that we can feel like we can never make it. Of course, the standards in the Bible are so high that we can feel like we can never make it. But remember reading once that John Duncan, the 19th-century Scottish theologian was reading the Puritan, Thomas Shepard. And he said Shepard is fine, but the problem with Shepard is that I wish I was as good as one of his hypocrites. And you kind get that feeling occasionally. We have a right to criticize some of the Puritans perhaps many of the Puritans for pruning the tree too closely. But it’s wrong to suppose that there should be no pruning. Whether we look at worship or Christian conduct — something corresponding to the Puritan criticism is always needed.