Conversions and Confessions (Confessions, Bk 8-9)

This episode is what we’ve been waiting for.

There’s this scene in the Confessions. If you’ve ever read it, or heard about Augustine, you’ve probably heard about this scene. It holds the same iconic weight of “I’ll be back”, or “I’m the king of the world!” It’s the scene where Augustine falls down in tears beneath a fig tree, only to hear children chanting, ‘Pick up and read!”

As you can probably guess from where we’ve been so far, there’s a lot happening in this scene. Theology is flowing fast and fierce as Augustine weaves together the trajectory of his life into a moment where he turns (or perhaps more accurately “re-turns”) back to God.

Yet the more I’ve pondered this scene the more I’ve realized we should unpack it slowly.

This is not just a “lightening bolt” from the sky, or a flash of blinding light (ala the Apostle Paul). No, Augustine has been carefully leading us to this moment in his life, because he wants to unpack not just the one “turn” of his will, as if it was a violent act of 180 degree change, but rather the many slow “turns”, perhaps one might even say “conversions” that led him to this confession.

This episode will be the vital piece of the puzzle in Augustine’s story and life, but as a piece, it is interconnected with the mosaic of the whole, something inevitably that Augustine wants to encourage us to see when it comes to our own crisis, or our conversions and hopefully, in time, or our confession.

Join us for this sixth episode in our series, “Conversions and Confessions”