There is a reason that Saint Augustine is considered the greatest mind the church produced in the first millennia after the ascension of Christ. The man was flat out brilliant, blazing theological trails like Daniel Boone. His writings continue to instruct and inform the church to our day. Just a few weeks ago I finished a project writing curriculum for classical school students on The City of God, a classic in any era. What may demonstrate his greatest genius, however, was the one book he no doubt wished he didn’t have to write.
Late in his life Augustine looked over the corpus of his work and went on to publish his “Retractions.” Here he catalogued the things he believed at life’s end that he had gotten wrong earlier in his life. In so doing he demonstrated what he had gotten right, a biblical embracing of humility. We all know ourselves well enough to know that we make mistakes. Yet we all hide from ourselves how sinful we are, because we don’t realize how far we are willing to go to cover our mistakes.
When your writing is published, it can often haunt you. It remains out there for people to read, even when you wish they wouldn’t. A decade or so ago I wrote a horribly muddled and inaccurate brief piece on women blogging. And the women, along with not a few men, blogged about what a doofus I was. They were right, and I was wrong. My second essay, acknowledging that reality, did not, of course, get spread out as far and wide as the first one. This is a perfectly natural consequence of my failure.
Still, some go to great lengths to try to cover their tracks. They erase old websites. They seek to nuance their previous views, spinning them into their current views. Others, far more strangely, go heavily on the attack against what they once believed, believing perhaps if they yell loudly enough now, people will not hear them back then.
I once had a fan on the internet. It was his habit to quote from me extensively, to praise my wisdom, to encourage others to drink deeply of that wisdom. While he was saying all these nice things about me, however, he was saying some not so nice things about friends of mine. I then published a brief piece pointing out to this fan where we disagreed. Suddenly, though nothing of what I had believed had changed, I became an enemy. No, I became THE enemy. This gentlemen wrote tens of thousands of words articulating just which hell hole I had apparently crawled out from. All of which is fine by me. The issue we disagreed on was a biggie for him. What surprised me was that there was no acknowledgment by this writer that he had once been foolish enough to be a fan. There was no apologizing to the folks he had encouraged to look my way, for giving them a bum steer.
In the end, that great African bishop Augustine showed the greater wisdom. One way to see if your commitment is more to the doctrine of total depravity, or more to acknowledging our own desperately wicked hearts is to see whether we spend more time confessing our own sins, or pointing out the sins of others. I know which one I do- I point out the sins of others. For that, I need to repent.