TGC 614 – Augustine on the Christian Pilgrimage
Rev. Chris Durham, chaplain at Wittenberg Chapel serving LCMS students at the University of North Dakota, joins the show to discuss Augustine on the theme of pilgrimage — the Christian life as movement from a beginning through this present age toward final rest in God.
The conversation starts in Scripture before turning to Augustine: Hebrews 4 and 11 on the promised Sabbath rest and the patriarchs who died as strangers and exiles seeking a better country, and 1 Peter's language of Christians as "elect exiles" on the way. These texts set a pattern — a real beginning, a center in Christ, and an end in the eternal city — against which Durham contrasts Neoplatonism, Augustine's own intellectual background before his conversion. For Plotinus and the Neoplatonists, the soul's return to "the One" is not a real destination but a perpetual, unending cycle with no true rest — a view Durham compares to modern nihilism and multiverse thinking, where there's motion but no goal.
Durham then traces Augustine's own writings across time: the early Soliloquies, where the newly baptized Augustine already breaks from Neoplatonism and Manichaeism by affirming creation from nothing as good; and the Confessions, written years later from his position as bishop, where Augustine reads his own past through Scripture and famously confesses, "our heart is restless until it rests in you." Durham walks through Augustine's account of his conversion in the garden in Milan — the child's voice repeating "pick up and read," the reading of Romans 13, and the peace that followed — as the turning point where restlessness gives way to rest in Christ.
The two also touch on Augustine's argument in City of God Book 12 against the eternity of the world, and draw out a running application: every worldly promise of peace or comfort — ancient or modern — ultimately fails to deliver what only Christ can give, a clean conscience through the forgiveness of sins and the sure hope of the rest to come.
Topics covered:
Biblical foundations of pilgrimage: Hebrews 4 and 11, 1 Peter 1
Neoplatonism and the "One" — creation as emanation without beginning or end
Augustine's Soliloquies: early post-baptismal rejection of Neoplatonism and Manichaeism
Augustine's Confessions: restlessness, the pear-theft episode, and the conversion in the garden
City of God Book 12 on the world's createdness vs. its supposed eternity
The false peace offered by worldly philosophies, ancient and modern
Rest in Christ as the true end of the Christian pilgrimage