St. Paul, St. John and St. Augustine

I can still remember the answer, "God made me to know him, and to love him and to be with him forever in heaven".

I think that is the most important lesson I ever learned!

Recently, as I discussed in my book, "Jesus Christ in Glory", I have been trying to understand what is the nature of God. That is a question that all men have asked themselves from the beginning of time. The answer is wrapped in mystery, but we do know, at least, that God made the world and us and that God must have all the attributes we find in the world and in ourselves.

This book will try to explain to Christian believers what we have learned of God from Jesus Christ and his apostles, especially St. Paul, and St. John, and somewhat later, from St. Augustine. Notice that I put Paul in front of John; that may appear strange to some, but I do that deliberately because Paul and his letters were the first experience the Gentiles had of the risen Christ.

The history of classical Western thought about deities begins with the Greek philosophers in about 400 B.C. They were trying to answer the question of who god was. They did not think of a personal god; god to them was an intellectual principle, manifested in deities; there were many of them, each with his own attributes, all subordinate to the intellectual principle. With the rise of Hellenism, this was the predominate religious thinking of the ancient Greek Empire.

However, in the middle East, ever since Moses in about 1250 B.C., the twelve tribes of the Jewish people had had the idea that there were not many deities, but only one. They attributed certain qualities to God; he was omnipotent, holy, merciful and transcendent.

Their story began on Mount Sinai. God made himself known to Moses by revealing his name: "Yahweh", meaning "I am who am".

By that time mankind was, perhaps, some three million years old, and it had never heard God tell his name. God said to Moses, "You are to tell the Israelites, Yahweh, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you. This is my name for all time, and thus I am to be invoked for all generations to come". (Ex 3:2).

Then, around 30 A.D., in Galilee, a little known area of the vast Roman Empire, came an itinerate Jewish preacher by the name of Jesus of Nazareth, who made a startling new revelation: God had a Son! At first, he did not tell the people that he was that Son; they thought he was a prophet like Elijah come back from the dead. Gradually, over the following three years, Jesus also revealed there was another person of God named the Spirit. He taught there was only one God, but God has three persons: the Father, the Son and the Spirit. And he said to the Roman governor, Pilate, that he was that Son and that he was a King, but not of this world. For that statement of perceived blasphemy he was crucified.

Little was known of that incident outside of Palestine until another itinerate preacher named Paul appeared on the scene. Paul, then known as Saul, was first noticed standing by Stephen who was being stoned to death for having believed that what Jesus had said was true. That was the day that a bitter persecution broke out against the followers of Jesus who had gathered in Jerusalem.

Saul went to the high priest in Jerusalem and asked for letters addressed to the synagogues in Damascus that would commission him to search and find any followers of the "Way" so they could be arrested and taken back to Jerusalem. But on he way to Damascus, Saul, himself, would undergo a profound experience and be converted to the "Way".

Thereafter, Paul and his companions would journey through Syria, Turkey and Greece and bring to the Gentile world the news of the risen Jesus, the Christ. At first the Greeks at Athens, the cradle of intellectual civilization, would say to Paul, "We would like to hear you talk about this another time". But Paul persisted and told them that the unknown god that they already worshipped was, in fact, his God revealed by Jesus Christ. The idea caught on.

Later, around 67A.D., Paul would be taken captive to Rome, the ruler of the known world, and under house arrest for two years, would continue to speak of the risen Christ. The explosion of awareness came in about 315 A.D., when a Roman Emperor named Constantine the Great, for political purposes, made Christianity the state religion and the good news of the risen Christ spread throughout the whole Western world.

To back up in time a bit, around 90 A.D., an eye-witness to the Christ events in Palestine, the beloved disciple, John, to whom Jesus had left his mother in care, was writing down in Greek on a papyrus his recollections of some of the things Jesus had done during his short lifetime. He, of all the disciples, had the most profound understanding of what those events really meant, and he and his disciples managed to pull together his memories and produce a document that would be read aloud to small gatherings of believers of the "Way". It came to be known as "The Gospel of John".

John told us the reason why he wrote his memoirs, so that we, too, might be able to understand the meaning of Jesus, the Christ. (We actually have found a copy of a piece of what he wrote that dates back to about 125 A.D.).

John wrote, "There were many other signs that Jesus worked in the sight of his disciples, but they are not recorded in this book. These are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing this you may have life through his name". (Jn 20:30).

Some four hundred years later, after much persecution of the early Christians, there lived a North African by the name of Augustine, who, in 426 A.D., wrote a book called "The City of God", which would be recognized later as one of the cornerstones of Western theological thought. When Augustine began his work in 413 A.D., however, his initial purpose was to refute the charge that Christianity was to blame for the fall of Rome, which had occurred just three years earlier.

Augustine produced a wealth of evidence to prove that paganism bore within itself the seeds of its own destruction. As the years went by (it took him thirteen years to finish the work) the purpose of the book expanded and Augustine finally produced a cosmic interpretation of history in terms of the struggle between good and evil.