Let's Talk About: Threat & Theology

Brad is back down the rabbit hole, and this time, Augustine is the way in.

• Why Augustine of Hippo is arguably the real founder of Western Christianity, and what that means for everything you think you know about Paul, original sin, and the gospel
• The difference between the historical Paul and Augustine's Paul and why most Western Christians have been reading one through the filter of the other without knowing it
• Theology as historically contingent: what it means that Augustine's system was shaped by his ambition, his mother, his psychology, and his North African Roman world, not just by scripture
• The meadow vs. the perfume bottle: why extracting doctrine from the gospels might be missing the point entirely
• Why the gospels function more like cinema than philosophy and what it would mean to encounter them that way again, in community, without needing a final word
• Why the threat response to historical theology is worth examining and what it's actually protecting

This isn't a tidy episode. It's Brad thinking out loud about Augustine, interpretation, and what it might mean to do theology honestly in 2026.

For the historically curious, the theologically restless, and anyone who has ever felt vaguely crazy for asking hard questions about what the gospel actually means.

Transcript

I've
been thinking a lot these days about Augustine, which I'm hoping to do some more podcast
conversations or episodes about, just because there's so much there. Why is it that I'm,
why has, I didn't really expect that to be the thing that was helping me to rediscover my
curiosity.
That was the thing, you know, in the last episode I was talking about. Having this feeling of sort
of being in an icy fog after my mom's death and after my sickness.
And just being unable to speak, unable to think clearly.
And I can't remember if I mentioned that. One of the things that was happening was I was,
it's like all my curiosity was gone. That's probably connected to grief.
That's probably connected to processing, sort of being at max capacity mentally,
bandwidth-wise. But I noticed that my curiosity was gone.
Like, I wasn't wondering why things... I wasn't wondering things anymore.
I knew... I had a sense that it would be temporary.
And then, yeah, just in the last sort of two weeks, I have really felt that...
start returning and leading me down certain paths.
And I tend to follow my curiosity and kind of go deep in it and then look for what that,
because there's a reason usually that that curiosity is active.
And just really interestingly to me, the thing that really has kind of been the object of my
curiosity lately has been Augustine and his impact on Western Christianity in its Catholic,
Protestant, evangelical, and all of their derivatives on those forms. And why is that?
Why has he spurred my curiosity so much? Because I'm not an Augustine scholar at all.
And there's a lot of people who are. There's a lot of people who know Augustine's work inside and
out. You know, he's one of the most prolific authors of late antiquity,
if not the most prolific author of late antiquity. There's a lot of people who he is their,
he's kind of their number one theological inspiration and influence.
And they just pour over what he has to say. kind of soak it in and drink it up. And I've never had
that relationship with Augustine.
It was never really on my radar. I knew in some sense that he loomed large for Western
Christianity. I had heard of that in the history books,
just because he was such a monumental influence. It wasn't...
Really, my interest in Augustine hasn't really been I want to learn from him.
I have that relationship with a number of different authors and theologians and historians and
things like that, people I want to learn from. I don't have that with Augustine, but I definitely
want to understand better why he was so...
uniquely and singularly influential on Western Christianity.
I knew that Augustine was respected, but not really that deeply formative for Eastern Orthodox
Christianity. So not that important in the Greek world and beyond,
not really that important of a... figure and thinker at all in the church of the West Asian
churches, the churches of the Syriac church or the Persian communities,
Egyptian and Ethiopian, Armenian, all those other not Greek Christian traditions and not Latin,
not Western. So I understood I had some consciousness of the impact that Augustine had on the West,
so my tradition, my ancestral network, theologically speaking,
and that he didn't have as much of an influence in the East. That might be actually why I was never
enamored with him, because I think my first real exposure to him was in the context of learning.
a history of Christianity in Eastern Europe. And so my real first exposure to him in my undergrad
was hearing about why he wasn't influential there. So I think because of that,
I knew right from the get-go that he was important,
but that his legacy, that his theological contributions were limited to a particular...
cultural zone.
And often that's not how Augustine is treated. In Western Christianity,
we tend to look at him as sort of this great espouser of theological facts,
right? As I mentioned in one of my videos recently, I think it's safe to say that Augustine is the
real founder. of Christianity as we know it in the West. And that,
you know, people tend to, you know, they wonder why Christianity seems so different,
so detached in so many ways from Jesus, the projects that Jesus was involved in,
the perspectives he took. And usually people then say, well,
that's because Christianity's real founder is Paul. And then we talk about all of Paul's,
quote, doctrines that he outlines in his letters, even though that's not really what he's doing.
He's not outlining systematic doctrines. He's writing letters to strange little motley crew
communities that he has overseen, that he's overseeing their growth throughout the Mediterranean.
So he's very, Paul is very flexible, very much an improviser. takes risks,
makes new decisions, is walking in uncharted territory. But the Paul that most of us in Western
Christianity encounter is through many different filters, but one of the most important filters is
we really encounter... Paul rather than the historical Paul.
That's probably why actually, you know, the work of people on the new perspective of Paul,
you know, which is this kind of historical, this theological,
historical, scholarly, ongoing project and conversation about attempting to situate,
re-situate Paul. in his real context, at this crossroads of the Jewish,
the Roman, and the Greek, and trying to understand the words that he uses.
I'm thinking of, of course, someone like N.T. Wright. He's really helped a lot of people
defamiliarize themselves with the Paul of systematic theology.
Sort of start to get to know the historical Paul in a new way. You start to see that he's,
you know, people tend to sort of the default is that like Romans is where the book of Romans,
the letter to the Romans is where Paul lays out his doctrines in a systematic form.
And that's not really true. That's not really an, that's not an accurate way to approach the letter
to the Romans. But Augustine. the way that he approaches the letter to the Romans.
He is looking for doctrine, propositional doctrines to extract from it.
You know, the scripture being, yeah, being this like sort of storehouse of theological facts that
we extract universal truths from.
That's very much like an Augustine. Augustine move.
And so we encounter Augustine's Paul often when we think about Paul.
So with Augustine's doctrine of original sin,
which he formulates a very common thing. If you're out there saying Augustine formulated and
created the doctrine of original sin, it's his sort of unique theological construction.
That is true. But someone will usually say, well, I mean,
yes, Augustine was doing theology and saying some new things, but it's all in Romans.
Like what Augustine is saying is all in Romans. And so what that sort of statement,
and I think somebody commented that on one of my videos, and it just got me thinking about kind of
all the things that are going on underneath a statement like that. Like saying it's all in Romans
and Augustine is just articulating what Paul is articulating. Just isn't.
That's not how things work. That's not historically accurate. Augustine is reading Paul,
as we all do, through our own particular lens situated in our time and place and bringing all that
he is to his reading of that text. And so what he is extracting from it.
When he sees original sin in it, formulated in a particular way, that's his encounter with what
Paul is saying. And Augustine is then building that into something that makes sense in his world,
to his mind and to the people in his culture,
in his world. And that's not the same thing as just saying Augustine reads Paul correctly. So why
am I talking about this? This wasn't supposed to be an episode on Augustine. Why am I thinking
about that? Why does that matter to me? I think it matters to me like why actually,
you know, this is a good question that I sort of I'm asking myself a lot too. When I become curious
about something and start going down specific rabbit holes, I do try to stop and ask like,
what is it that I'm like really getting at here? What is it that's fueling this quest,
this curiosity? What is it that I care about here? And so with this Augustine stuff,
this is the question I'm asking myself, and I'm asking myself right here while recording it.
Why does this matter to me right now? It has,
I'm just thinking on the spot, so bear with me, but it has...
to do with this ongoing attempt in certain Christian circles to try and discover and articulate
what the gospel means. It's like there's this hunt and this search for what the gospel means.
does the crucifixion mean? And going to sort of systematic theological default answers,
or I guess dogma, is just really life draining to me.
I have no real interest in maybe what you would call like stock or default theological answers.
And that's probably because I am a historian. And so I know just I know how specifically situated
different theological thinkers and teachers are.
So for me, it's hard to... This might just be from the historians kind of bent,
but I find it really difficult to read the works of a theologian and just trying to take it in
as... theological facts about God and the world and humanity and things like that,
because maybe history has kind of like ruined me for that. I probably in a good way,
though, I immediately start to wonder, like, why would they have said this the way they did?
Why did they emphasize what they emphasized and leave out what they left out? What was going on in
their world, in their context, in their personal psychology, in their experience?
in their culture to kind of shape what it was that they saw in the gospel.
And I guess once you start opening up that historical Pandora's box,
it's like you can't interact with historical theologians in the same way anymore.
You more want to situate them. It's not that you can't appreciate any of the insights they may have
had, I think you do appreciate it more once you realize the worlds that they came from.
And then this doesn't just apply to history. This is even people doing theological work now.
I have no hidden agendas behind theology. I make it very clear that for me,
what is theologically relevant are the questions of today and for me and I think for a lot of
people the questions of today are about we talk a lot more about you know the nervous system and
trauma and what the body is experiencing. We talk a lot more about like fight or flight.
We understand our anxieties through really through like an evolutionary lens about internal
biological mechanisms that are there to help us thrive. I mean,
help us survive, first of all, that actually help us survive. So we talk about Those things a lot.
And that stuff matters a lot. It has real legs and it has real effects in the world.
It's not just theory. It is like people are exploring their people are exploring their existence as
biological creatures wired for certain wired to cling to life.
And I find all that stuff like that's the stuff that's on the table right now. It's not the only
stuff that's on the table. Obviously, there's a lot of stuff to do with a lot of stuff to do with
like political things or social movements and stuff like that. And that stuff is really essential
as well. It sets up like the table. Those tables are full of different questions that people are
doing theology in conversation with. In my view,
Christian theology, what it really is, is a living active practice of sort of multiple horizons
interacting and interfacing and engaging with one another and producing something new.
So you have like the person, let's just say the individual or the community,
and everything that that person brings to any table they are at,
any moment, you know, their personal history, their family history, their hopes,
their dreams, their struggles, their network of relationships, their influences,
all that stuff. They, that person or community, interacts,
like, hears, reads or hears the stories of Jesus, the Gospels. And,
you know, I think in an authentic, honest, encounter, they bring their whole selves,
the things that they care about, the things that they struggle with, the things that make them
angry, the things that make them, their hearts burn with passion.
They bring that into conversation with the stories of Jesus. And so that encounter between person
and story of Jesus is essential. But then there's another dimension in that,
there's another dimension of encounter as well and that is with you know the particular questions
and concerns and discoveries and emphases of that time and so that's for me like the time that i
live in you know it's 2026 right now those things to do with neuroscience with trauma and with the
nervous system with somatic experiencing and all of that that's the stuff that really interests me
because it's really life-giving and there's a lot there and it's like it's like the the rabbit
hole keeps going and I just want to read and start you know implementing new practices but then the
stories of Jesus the Gospels are also of a lot of importance to me and also really life-giving and
so I want to you know bring those things into encounter.
So I think theology is bringing like yourself, your community,
the text being like the gospels in particular, and your sort of the things that your people care
about. Maybe you could use the word culture there, but there's something about thinking of it as
like, what do my people, let's just say the people of your neighborhood. the people of your city?
What do we care about? I think theologically that matters a lot.
And so I look at someone like Augustine and I can't help but see how his individual experience of
growing up, of all the different intellectual movements he was a part of, of the pressures that he
was under as someone from the provinces, from North Africa.
who wanted to make it big among the Roman upper class.
There's a lot of pressure there. Kind of like someone who is, you know, from a small town who wants
to make it big in New York City or something like that. You know, you can't just walk in and get
the prestigious positions or whatever. You have to play the game in order to gain access.
That's kind of what it was like for Augustine. being from this small Roman North African town of
Thaggast, eventually moving to Carthage. But he was a very ambitious guy, right?
And he had a mom who was extremely involved in his life,
Monica, who sort of, at least from what I'm reading,
just emotionally overbearing kind of mother.
So that's in the mix. And then, of course, his experience, at least how he formulates his
experience, to me, he seems to speak a lot like an addict.
Someone who really wants to do better,
but who continually falls back into old patterns. And I can't help,
you just can't help but hear... theological formulations,
they obviously come out of that experience. Now,
I'm not saying that that's all they are, because Augustine is bringing himself, his community,
his people, to the text, to the Gospels, or to the letters of Paul,
as well as bringing the concerns and the assumptions and the defaults of his people,
being Latin-speaking Roman North Africans. I can't help but see just how different my context,
the things that me and my people care about. We care about things,
again, kind of going to this neuroscience and trauma study stuff. We care about things that
Augustine and his people didn't even have any categories for. They didn't even think of.
our existence our bodily existence in the same way at all so we're in so many ways we're very far
removed from each other and it takes the work of a historian to re-establish access between us in
the present and a person like augustine we have to do a lot of what we're doing is a lot of ancient
history in order to establish that in in order to understand augustine at all because if we don't
do the historical work of sort of re working to reconstruct Augustine and his world and what
everything meant, then we are kind of hopeless to understand him on his own terms at all.
What we'll do is what, what. we always do, which is we'll read him,
we'll try to encounter his text in English translation, and we will read ourselves and our own
context into him. In a way, that is kind of what he did with Paul.
You know, he encountered Paul, but Augustine, being someone on the philosopher's road,
was looking for kind of the truth behind everything Paul was saying. those universal philosophical
facts, and he extracted them. But what he was really extracting was he was extracting doctrines
from letters from Paul. And then Augustine built those doctrines very masterfully into a sort of
pretty elegant architecture. And then that architecture...
That architecture that Augustine constructed in the West became identified with Christianity
itself. This stuff can make people feel really uncomfortable because we want to and because we've
been taught that our way of reading the Bible and extracting doctrine from it is the right way and
is the only way. And so when you start historicizing Christian theology and you start to see it for
the extremely historically contingent thing that it is, like dependent on a particular context,
that old project of just figuring out exactly what it is the Bible says and I'll believe it starts
to crumble apart. There's this ongoing search for the true meaning.
the right Christian theology, the accurate theological statements about God,
the world, humanity. And we don't like, we discover that that goal itself of looking for sort of
the one true meaning in the text, that itself, and that's an issue for another conversation,
but even that itself has historical roots. Like why do we in the West care about that so much?
Why do we think that that's even possible?
Sometimes people get on the defensive at this point because they want to say,
so what are you saying? That there is no truth. That is a massive jump to make.
That is a really commonly made move where it's like, You're saying that this stuff is historically
contingent, this is dependent on context, that there is no one true description or articulation of
the gospel or true Christian theology. Yeah, I am saying that. But what often happens is people
feel there is an experience of hearing that kind of thing, that it's experienced as a threat,
which is really important to explore. Like, a threat to what? We can say that it's a threat to some
people will say it's a threat to the gospel, to the notion of there being objective truths. You
know, something's either true or it's not. We're playing with that. But it's experienced in the
body as a threat. And threat is usually attached to a sense of safety and stability.
You're threatening. It's more of an identity. issue than it is a genuine concern with our ongoing
appreciation for objective facts. So when I say something like,
you know, I talk about Augustine's Latin world or his African context or his personal psychological
family relations and how they shaped how he encountered Paul and how he then thereby constructed
his system of how things work theologically.
It's interesting, right, that that would cause people to feel something defensive,
to experience a threat. Because I'm saying, in some effect, what that means is our theology doesn't
have to look the way it does. It looks the way it does. because of particular people and
individuals and particular contexts and things happening. And it could be different.
But I mean, if you study global church history, of course that's true. Like my first,
again, my first encounter with Augustine was through learning about the Greek church and how
Augustine and his categories of original sin and total depravity and... The will that is so bound
by sin that it cannot be unbound by anything except grace or that,
you know, God who is so sovereign has predestined everyone, including who will be saved and who
will burn forever in hell. And all those kinds of things, learning that in other Christian
traditions, formed and forged in other contexts by different people, they don't have those
categories. They don't use them. Makes people uncomfortable. It puts them on the defensive because
the ground beneath us starts to feel shaky. It starts to feel like,
well, then is anything true? And again, that's a huge leap. That's a gigantic jump.
And it's usually said not because people are actually concerned that we no longer.
have any solid ground to stand on like we don't live our lives like that we know certain things
with enough certainty that we wake up in the morning and do what we do but it's experienced as a
threat and so this we jump in with a response that's like so you're saying nothing's true and like
no disrespect to this commenter but because it actually got a lot of these thoughts flowing for me
but in my augustine you know, is the real founder of Western Christianity video,
someone, at least this is how I read it. And I could be wrong. I may have had the tone wrong
because I can't, you can't fully grasp tone just in text form,
right? So I could be wrong. And if I am, I apologize. But I experienced this person's comment as
being full of these strong feelings of threat. you know,
phrases like, so you're saying we can just pick and choose whatever we want. So you're saying that
we can all just make this individual customized gospel for ourselves. And I want to say,
no, that's not what I mean. I never said that, but it's interesting that that's the response
because that's something that that person and many other people, many others like that person.
and I have experienced it myself too many times, is afraid of something.
So it's kind of like you bust out the slippery slope fallacy, where it's like,
if this is true, or if there really is no one articulation of what the gospel means,
then it all falls apart. That's not really true, because, again,
if you look globally, if you take a wider lens beyond just your own tradition's background,
you see that since the earliest days of Christianity, there has always been a multiplicity of
understandings and articulations about what the gospel is and what it means and what its
significance is. There is no one pure,
articulated... meaning of what the gospel is, of what the crucifixion means, of what the
resurrection means, of what any of it means. And yet we continue to kind of act like the one that
the tradition that we find ourselves in, either the one we're raised in or the one that we find
ourselves drawn to as adults, is the one true articulation.
The fact is that even something like the crucifixion or the atonement you know,
what it means. There's at least, even just from the ancient world, at least a dozen different
formulations for the significance of the crucifixion. And actually,
none of them are the penal substitutionary atonement formulation, which, you know,
is really, you know, Augustine starts that, and then St. Anselm of Canterbury really,
like, takes it to the next level. And then it's re- articulated in even more detail,
up-to-date detail during the Reformation. There's at least a dozen different interpretations.
Again, formulations is maybe a better word, or articulations about what the crucifixion means.
And that's just one piece of the gospel, the good news, right? And so I think what I really came on
here to say, and it turned into something much longer, was that it's really starting to hit me that
the gospel... Gospels, so the stories of Jesus' life,
death, and resurrection, are much more like art or like a film than they are a philosophical
treatise or even a history of relevant and significant historical facts.
I think we experience the Gospels as more like cinema.
And that they're more, so they're more cinematic in nature than they are like diagnostic, like
telling you what is what. They are more, and I mean, this isn't just me making this up.
This is what narrative, this is what story is.
Story, narrative, cinema, communicate truth,
communicate. They don't just communicate information or facts about things.
Whether that being, you know, just the way the world is or who God really is, things like that.
They are more like an aesthetic and imaginative experience.
Stories open up worlds rather than tell you what is true and what isn't true.
And readers or hearers enter into those imaginative worlds and inhabit them.
and are changed by them the meaning of a story the meaning of cinema of a cinema of a film isn't to
be extracted in some pure form like encountering you know coming into coming into a garden a meadow
let's say a meadow full of wildflowers and you know getting out your i don't know how they do this
but getting out your like syringe and extracting the essence of a particular flower of like the
essence of violet. There's way more going on in a meadow with all kinds of,
you know, hundreds of different flowers than extracting the essence of the scent of one flower.
I think we sort of have treated theology like that. Like what it really is, is an extraction
process looking for that, the perfect. fragrance,
perfume that comes from this one flower, and then we extract it, and we smell it,
we put it on our bodies, we smell it, and we confuse that with experiencing being in the meadow,
smelling the air, feeling the coolness, seeing the vistas around you,
and all of the other things that go into having an experience.
The gospel is more like film than It is a philosophical treatise or a historical work.
And this kind of gets at something that I think is really essential,
which is people will want to know, you know, so where is the truth?
What is the real gospel? And I think sometimes the answer that I have to say is dissatisfying and
messy. Partially, it's that there is no one. articulation of what the gospel means.
There are the four gospel stories. Those themselves are the gospels.
And everything else is our attempt to understand it and pull out meaning or experience meaning.
And you think of a person or a group of people who go to a film and experience this powerful film,
in this case, the gospels. It's moving. It's rich. It's stirring.
It's confusing. It's complex. It might even be overwhelming. It's so much.
And you walk out of the theater feeling something to the effect of, wow,
that was really something. And what do people start doing? People start describing what they saw,
what they noticed, what it meant to them, where they resonated. And someone else will say,
you know, We'll explain their experience and what they thought resonated. And sometimes what
they're saying will resonate in you. And sometimes it won't at all. Sometimes you won't understand
it or even think, I didn't really think that's what that was about. I didn't notice that. We'll
talk about what illusions we saw in it. What things that we think the author intentionally was
alluding to. Some things that we think were alluded to unintentionally. Like,
hey, this really reminded me actually of this story here or this experience. Some people might not
click with it. Maybe it's just not the right time for them. Maybe it's just not, it just doesn't
resonate with them in a way that those people who really clicked with it are satisfied with.
Well, that happens a lot. Others will go nuts for it, saying this is the greatest film ever made.
Nothing else can compare. Like this is, they've achieved it. This is peak. So it'll go
overappreciated, underappreciated, everything in between and everything else that's possible. And I
just think that that's in so many ways what the gospel stories mean.
They mean what they mean to the group who is encountering it.
And we need to encounter things like the gospel in community,
in... In spaces that are safe and secure, where we can have curiosity and wonder and be confused.
But no one has the final word on what the film means. I feel like we recognize that that does
seem... of absurd. That you could have someone who tells you what a film means.
They have extracted the meaning and there's nothing really left to say. Or there's nothing left to
turn over. Sometimes that's what our theological systems are like.
Many of them are. well articulated or full of insight from well educated people who do understand
all kinds of things that are going on in the text or something like that. And of course,
those are worth listening to. But even a well educated, well articulated word is different than a
final word, than a definitive word. And this is what I say often like.
When you start discovering how historically constructed and contingent everything is,
even our interpretations of the gospel, even the gospels themselves, that experience of threat,
of feeling like truth is under siege, that's really worth examining. Why is that the experience
that we're having? Why are we feeling so threatened? And people will usually then push the slippery
slope to its extreme and say, well, then the gospel can mean anything. If it's just a group of
people saying their interpretations of it, then it can just mean anything.
And that isn't true. That's not how stories work.
They have their own internal logic. They have their own internal boundaries around what a thing can
mean. For example, it is completely... implausible to encounter the gospel film or cinematic
experience and come away saying, ah, I see now. I'm supposed to,
I see what I'm supposed to do. What I got from that is I'm supposed to, we really need to start
hating our neighbors more and kind of looking down on those who are beneath us in the social
hierarchy. That is a completely... and impossible interpretation to have from the world that the
Gospels create. So a thing, the Gospel, can't just be made to mean anything,
but it does and it can mean many things. It can mean much more than it has already meant.
You know, you might first say like, okay, so I see penal substitutionary atonement is a very
specific cultural formulation of the meaning of the crucifixion.
I get that. Oh, and then you discover, oh, there's all kinds of other, like I said, there's a dozen
at least, even from the ancient world, meanings of what the crucifixion or the atonement,
like what it means or its significance. You know, the ransom theory, the victory of Christ,
all of those different. formulations of the significance of the crucifixion that are not penal
substitutionary atonement. And then, but this is the thing, it's not limited even to those
formulations because all of those formulations and articulations of the meaning of the crucifixion
come from a particular time and place for certain reasons, with certain goals, with certain
assumptions in mind. They have their, you know, each offers something, but we have to continue to
do that now. Again, they, you know, someone like Origen or someone like Augustine or someone like
Tertullian or Calvin or whatever, brought themselves and their world to the text and discovered
something new that really resonated with their time and place and people. Theology isn't limited to
what was kind of discovered and developed in the past. So communities today,
this is what the earliest church communities were like.
theological, like standardized theological understanding of the meaning of things.
These were Paul's motley crew communities who heard this strange story,
the strange stories of Jesus, and together sort of discerned what it meant and what its
significance was for their life or for the world or for the cosmos or for the moment, for their
neighbor. And they came to different answers. And I think we have to rediscover that.
with our communities, with our people, encountering the text, bringing ourselves and all our
concerns and the new discoveries that we've made and the new knowledge that our people have,
and allow ourselves to encounter those questions like, what's the meaning of the crucifixion?
What really changed? And articulate new answers, things that may never have been formulated before.
I think that's what a community does, and I think truth... It's something that we discover in
connection with other people, especially in a context of safety and security where curiosity can be
followed and new conclusions reached without fear.
There's so much more that I could say on this, but I'm going to stop myself now. And I do hope to
keep going down this Augustine rabbit hole because I think there's a lot more to say.
But also... know, going into more depth about this whole, you know,
there is no one true meaning of the gospel. There are many,
many, many things to be said that can, and there's more to be said. Thanks for listening. Thanks
for tuning in today.