What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.
–Morpheus, The Matrix, 1999.
I can’t believe The Matrix came to theaters 20 years ago. I discovered it on video my Freshman year of college and watched it on repeat, I think 17 times when it first came out. It changed Hollywood for good, and totally messed with my mind, causing me to question everything I knew about faith and reality. As an enthusiastic adolescent Evangelical, I was looking for faith parallels at every quote and plot point, convinced that this movie was deeply engrained in a Christian worldview of spiritual awakening.
And maybe it could have been, except “awakening” meant bringing down evil machinations through incredibly cool violence. Any person still plugged into the Matrix was part of that system, and therefore, a potential threat to true freedom for all. So it was okay for the freedom fighters of Zion to kill anyone in the Matrix temporarily possessed by the evil Agents who controlled the system. The closest religion of the movie was probably Gnosticism, where an imperfect Creator made an imperfect creation, and our only purpose is to escape to a more True Reality. The most important actions a person trapped in the Matrix can do are those that free them from their false reality.
Free. Your. Mind.
Augustine of Hippo, Algeria (354-430 AD) was the African-Roman Bishop who took 400 years of well-tilled theological soil and paved it. And it was a beautiful parking lot. His teachings became the gold standard.
Don’t get me wrong. He was a brilliant teacher. He was a charismatic preacher. I absolutely LOVE some of his most quotable work. Augustine is a heavyweight of Church History that Western Christians must wrestle with because his reach touches every corner of what we think we know about our faith.
Though raised by a devout Christian mother, the young Augustine fell in with hedonism, a philosophy which perceived pleasure as the highest purpose. Later, Augustine would become a Manichaean, a major Middle Eastern religion rooted in Gnosticism. This religion taught dualism, a cosmic battle between spiritual light and material darkness. However, Augustine’s philosophical worldview would land squarely within Neoplatonism, the rediscovery of Plato’s teachings (4th c. BC). Within Neoplatonism, Augustine would convert to Christianity at the age of 31 under the influence of Bishop Ambrose of Milan. Like all of us, his journey of faith influenced what he focused on and believed.
You’ve Been Living In a Dream World.
Augustine became one of the most prolific scholars of the ancient church, and much of his theology and philosophy would become foundations for the Western Church. For today’s comic purposes, we’ll focus on Augustine’s work around theological anthropology, or, the human nature as it relates to God. While it is safe to say that a Judeo-Christian worldview would be foreign to Plato’s philosophy, Augustine was able to shape and reimagine scripture through the eyes of Neoplatonism.
Plato’s dualism was different from the Manichaeans, emphasizing a perfect, unchangeable spiritual world to which we must aspire by shedding ourselves of this changing, imperfect material world. We can’t trust our senses because everything material is inferior. We must rely on reason and logic to grasp the abstract ideal forms beyond…blah blah blah… In this construct, God is “The One,” perfect, unchanging, logical…and very unlike the tribal Yahweh of Judaism, or the Incarnate and crucified Christ of Christianity.
Augustine would reject Manichaean dualism, but not entirely eliminate Platonic dualism from his Christian worldview. He taught that the material world is created by God, and therefore a gift (not something to escape). However, he also taught that the material world is inferior to the spiritual world. The appetites of the body must be kept in check by the logic of the mind. But the Fall of Adam and Eve utterly corrupted and disordered human will, making it impossible for anyone to want or choose to do what is right.
Augustine developed a doctrine of Original Sin, the concept that sin and guilt are physically inherited by virtue of being born (sin was transferred through the semen of the men, explaining why Jesus would not have inherited sin because he had no human father). We have free will to choose, but our will is so corrupt that every choice is to sin.
Because God is perfect and immutable, and even the purest most innocent human baby is utterly corrupt and evil, we can do nothing to save ourselves. God knows everything, and what God knows, God makes happen…thus some are chosen (or predestined) by God to salvation, while the rest are not. It is only because God is merciful and loving by nature that any would be saved at all.
Augustine used his heavyweight clout to create a heretic of Pelagius, whose teachings more resembled Eastern Christian concepts on human agency. Methodist founder, John Wesley would defend Pelagius as misrepresented by his enemies, and challenged Augustine’s influence on the nature of sin, grace, and free will.
Augustine’s teaching would become doctrine for Roman Catholicism, key to Reformed Protestantism, and utterly foreign to Eastern Orthodoxy. Augustine’s theology has so shaped how Western Christians approach scripture, we don’t often realize how influenced we are by extra-biblical Greek philosophy.
Welcome to the Desert of the Real
Now that you’ve endured my Spark Notes, here’s my point. All of us…ALL OF US approach scripture with preconceived notions. “Orthodoxy” gets thrown around as if the more “orthodox” group alone approaches scripture with pure reason and logic. Much of Western Christianity tends towards a dualism of body and spirit (probably even more influenced by Descartes) that fosters a culture of sexual shame and the superiority of logic. Discovering your own preconceived notions is hard enough, but add to that the challenge of how much doctrine was shaped by the preconceived notions of our ancestors and you can quickly feel like Little Mack facing King Hippo in Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. So many people either give up or get knocked out.
I am not a philosophical skeptic. I believe we can know something about God, and that God is most fully known through a relationship with Jesus Christ. I believe it is life-giving and useful to read the works of the saints alongside scripture. There is a wisdom and logic to scripture that is wed to messiness and tension between seeming contradiction. It is difficult to allow for paradox within a rigid orthodoxy. Like the awakened in The Matrix, facing “the desert of the real” is much harder work than blindly accepting everything you’re handed, and most people don’t land well on their first leap of faith.
I haven’t done Augustine justice here. The man takes a lifetime to comprehend, and he did great work for theology and the church. He also messed a lot of us. So you have a choice. Take the blue pill and go on believing whatever you want to believe, or take the red pill, and see just how deep the rabbit hole goes.