Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World
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About this ebook
From the author of Living the Catholic Faith and Render unto Caesar comes a fresh, urgent, and ultimately hopeful treatise on the state of Catholic life and Christian community in the United States. America today is different in kind, not just in degree, from the past. And this new reality is unlikely to be reversed. The reasons include, but aren’t limited to, the decline of sustaining sense of family and community, the impact of new technologies and economic changes that widen the gulf between rich and poor, diminished religious belief among people, significant demographic shifts, profound new patterns in sexual behavior and identity, the growth of federal power and its disregard for religious rights, and the growing isolation and elitism of our leadership classes. But the author gives more than a penetrating diagnosis of the nation’s problems. Archbishop Chaput offers a compelling reflection on the person of Jesus Christ, the nature of the Church, the urgency of radical faith, and the redemptive power of beauty—all in the spirit of Psalm 8 and the enduring words of Irenaeus: “The glory of God is man fully alive.”
Praise for Strangers in a Strange Land
“Erudite and eloquent . . . [Chaput’s] his book should be read by serious-minded people of whatever religious, partisan, or intellectual inclination.” —The Wall Street Journal
“A thought-provoking depiction of a complex contemporary scene. . . . With remarkable clarity and gentle wit, the author offers remedial lessons in Catholic morality and social doctrine for generations.” —Catholic World Report
“An optimistic account of the Church’s future in the midst of a secular age.” —Kirkus Reviews
“An invigorating new book.” —Breitbart.com
Charles J. Chaput
Archbishop Emeritus Charles J. Chaput, OFM Cap., was named archbishop of Philadelphia in 2011 by Pope Benedict XVI. As a member of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, he was the second Native American to be ordained a bishop in the United States and is the first Native American archbishop. Chaput is the author of Strangers in a Strange Land, Living the Catholic Faith, and Render unto Caesar, as well as numerous articles and public talks. Retiring as archbishop emeritus in 2020, he continues his extensive writing and public speaking.
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Reviews for Strangers in a Strange Land
32 ratings7 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Great book for any Catholic looking to grow in their faith. There is alot of truth in here that not everyone would agree with, but if you believe everything the Church believes you should agree with it.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Archbishop Chaput discusses the Catholic faith in todays world from a very theoretical point of view. Many thought are very pertinent aqnd honest but many come from a person who has not been in the trecnches. He is not even willing to discuss , in the book , why people are the way they are or why they make different choices.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Strangers in a Strange Land is both a depressing and an inspiring book. I think that many of us have a sense that American society is rapidly devolving, and from a Christian perspective it’s not difficult to draw a line between that decline and the gleeful haste with which much of that society is attempting to abandon God. But it is dispiriting to see the connections drawn out and defined clearly, as Archbishop Chaput does here. Truth be told, I struggled to get through the first part of this book because I hated to be think of what is happening around us. But, of course, Chaput continues with a note of hope, reminding us of how we as a Christian people are to face such challenges and to be light in a darkening world. Recommended.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Strangers in a Strange Land by Charles Chaput is an excellent example of a well composed book. That is what first impressed me about the book. The grammar, structure and logic from the initial pages invited me to read on. The author is a Catholic Archbishop, so his point of view may be assumed to be that of a bishop of the Church. The foundation he lays from the earliest pages is used as the basis for pages that follow and subsequent develop follows in like steps. That alone would be praiseworthy for an author.The book is unabashedly about the need, in an "invented" republic without place or heritage as its raison d'etre; for a common set of beliefs to underscore its creation and continued growth. He starts by explaining the need for hope, as understood from a biblical perspective, not naive optimism. Hope requires faith and hope makes possible true charity.He refers often to the philosophers and historians, as did the founders, fearing the danger of misled majority rule inherent in simple democracy, built check and balances like the governors used in clockworks to moderate the actions of government. Tocqueville understood and described the dangers in democracy and the ease with which it can be overtaken by despotism. He understood that democracy doesn't encourage strong characters but rather self-absorbed ones. Many of those checks are based on the assumptions of common understanding of truth. The constitution's Article IV Section 4 reads in part "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government..."The book then proceeds to demonstrate by many references to examples and respected thinkers how when by majority opinion swayed by convenience and public acceptance self-evident truths are allowed to be re-defined. Its logic will be very uncomfortable to many, but to an open mind it is solid. Constitutional guarantees of rights are not easily challenged. Instead, the more convenient path is the change the definitions of the words contained in the guarantees.For example: Life is self-evident. Sex is self-evident How life begins is self-evident. If one gets the governmental authorities to redefine one, then we have obliterated the basis of the formation of the United States expressed in the Declaration of Independence. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." If, instead of relying on self-evident truth the government's agents accept that they may define when life begins, it is an easy and very logical step to redefine how it may begin, if it does so then it is easy to redefine what life is and when it may be deemed not worthy of rights. With the authority to define life comes the ability to define if one has a right to life. For me, Chaput's development of this line was particularly elegant. He logic is easy to follow and persuasive. He cites innumerable scholars and authorities from Aristotle to Augustine to C.S. Lewis to contemporary scholars. He proceeds to the end of his book assuming the reader was able to accept the logic and its conclusions and the tone becomes much more pastoral, almost sermon like. The most difficult part of reading the book is realizing the frequency that one has used excuses or popular culture to choose convenience over right. For those who celebrate the many current excesses of re-definition, I would expect it is very uncomfortable or impossible.He closes by examining the question, "Who is man?" explaining what faith permits one to know. "God is not a supreme being within reality, but the author of reality itself, outside the envelope of time and space..."For anyone who is a sincere thinker this is a book that should be read.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Although I'm Catholic, I don't consider myself overly religous. I do, however, like to read books about faith which allows me to open my mind to different perspectives. It was difficult for me to get through this book. I found myself "zoning out" and rereading a lot. I liked the information about the influence of religion in our country. Other than that, I didn't get much out of it. Perhaps someone with stronger beliefs and interest in this topic would enjoy this book.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I didn’t give this book a high rating and I expected to do so. Here’s what you need to know about me: (1) I love books on spirituality and (2) I hate to read political text. I became a Catholic last year so I’m fascinated with books about Catholicism. I anticipated that this book would be heavy on the “living the Catholic faith” and light on the “post-Christian world.” Wrong. The author is taking wild swings at all the usual bugaboos in our world. “Seems to me I’ve heard this song before.” I’d expected more...well, faith. I’d love to hear from you if you liked this book. Maybe I missed something.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Strangers In a Strange Land is a book by the Archbishop of Philadelphia Charles J Chaput. In this book he delivers what he has come to see as a diminished religious belief especially among young people and he goes and demonstrates how this particular diminished belief has caused quite a bit of non Catholic beliefs to arise.While I am not a Catholic, I am a Protestant, I do agree with a lot of the material presented in this book. I do see a lot of similarities where certain things have either been ignored or challenged because of societal changes or in some cases a complete disregard for Christianity. The message that Archbishop Chaput is discussing in his book is a concern to me. However, my personal opinion is that there is a different way to go about resolving this issue. That said, I hold the belief that a lot of Christianity is stuck in doing things a certain way rather than allowing a freedom that can be found in Jesus Christ. Follow a method put forth by a group of people has deterred some and perhaps this is why many have abandoned Christianity. *I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my review.
Book preview
Strangers in a Strange Land - Charles J. Chaput
CHAPTER 1
RESIDENT ALIENS
We, the ordinary people of the streets, believe with all our might that this street, this world, where God has placed us, is our place of holiness.
—MADELEINE DELBRÊL
Christians have many good reasons for hope. Optimism is another matter. Optimism assumes that, sooner or later, things will naturally turn out for the better. Hope has no such illusions.
That sounds like an oddly nervous way to start a book about our life as Catholic Christians. After all, the Gospel is supposed to be good news, a message of joy. And so it clearly is. The Christian faith is expanding rapidly across the Southern Hemisphere. In Africa, 9 million converts enter the Catholic Church each year. By 2030, if current trends hold, China may have the largest Christian population in the world.¹
Even in France, once the eldest daughter of the Church
and now the secular heart of an aging continent, signs of a living Church persist—small, implausible, but real. And in the United States, while many parishes are struggling to survive in the nation’s Rust Belt and eastern cities, many others in the South and West are thriving. The Church in America has an impressive number of movements and new communities energetically alive, and some extraordinary young leaders, both clergy and lay.
In other words, outside Europe, Christianity is very much alive and growing. And it’s not a passive faith. Jesus left us with a mandate to transform creation.
But doing that, of course, is easier said than done, even—or maybe especially—in a nation like the United States.
My goal when I wrote Living the Catholic Faith (2001) was simple. I wanted to help Catholics recover the basics of their faith so they could live it more fully. In Render Unto Caesar (2008, 2012) I wanted to help readers apply their religious and moral convictions more vigorously in the public square as good citizens. Looking back, I think much in both books remains useful. But if that’s so, why do a new book?
The reason is time. Time passes. Times change. Watersheds happen. In June 2015, in its Obergefell v. Hodges decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states must license same-sex marriages and recognize similar marriages when lawfully performed out of state. The Court struck down the nation’s traditional understanding of marriage. That much was obvious. But in its effect, the Court actually went much further. It changed the meaning of family by wiping away the need for the natural relationships—husband and wife, mother and father—at the heart of these institutions.
With Obergefell, marriage and family no longer precede and limit the state as humanity’s basic social units grounded in nature. Instead, they now mean what the state says they mean. And that suggests deeper problems, because in redefining marriage and the family, the state implicitly claims the authority to define what is and isn’t properly human.
Buried in Obergefell is the premise that who we are, how we mate, and with whom we mate are purely matters of personal choice and social contract. Biology is raw material. Gender is fluid. Both are free of any larger truth that might limit our actions. And the consequences of that premise will impact every aspect of our shared political, economic, and social life.
Why so? Benedict XVI explained it simply and well: [The] question of the family is not just about a particular social construct, but about man himself—about what he is and what it takes to be authentically human … When such commitment is repudiated, the key figures of human existence likewise vanish: father, mother, child—essential elements of the experience of being human are lost.
²
Obviously Obergefell is only one of many issues creating today’s sea change in American public life. But it confirmed in a uniquely forceful way that we live in a country very different from that of the past. The special voice that biblical belief once had in our public square is now absent. People who hold a classic understanding of sexuality, marriage, and family have gone in just twenty years from pillars of mainstream conviction to the media equivalent of racists and bigots.
So what do we do now?
Patriotism, rightly understood, is part of a genuinely Christian life. We’re creatures of place. The soil under our feet matters. Home matters. Communities matter. The sound and smell and taste of the world we know, and the beauty of it all, matter. As G. K. Chesterton would say, there’s something cheap and unworthy—and inhuman—in a heart that has no roots, that feels no love of country.
Thus, believers don’t have the luxury of despair. And the idea that we can retire to the safety of some modern version of a cave in the hills isn’t practical. Our task as Christians is to be healthy cells in society. We need to work as long as we can, in whatever way we can, to nourish the good in our country and to encourage the seeds of a renewal that can enliven our young people.
Americans learn from an early age that democracy is the gold standard of human governance. And its advantages are obvious. Every citizen has (in theory) an equal voice in the course of our nation’s affairs. But if America is (or was) exceptional,
something unique in history, it’s not because this country is a New Jerusalem, or a redeemer nation, or has a messianic mission. Those things are vanities and delusions. When John Winthrop wrote his famous homily for Puritan colonists nearly four hundred years ago, the city upon a hill
he imagined building in the New World was something genuinely new. It was the hope of a common life that had its foundations in humility, justice, mutual support, and the love of God.
That biblical vision has always helped shape the American story. The very idea of the person
has religious origins. Even the concept of the individual—the building block of Western political life—has its early seeds in biblical faith.³ America has always been a mixed marriage of biblical and Enlightenment ideas.
The trouble is that liberal democratic states also have a less visible, internal dynamic. In a democracy, political legitimacy comes from the will of sovereign individuals. Their will is expressed through elected representatives. Anything that interferes with their will, anything that places inherited or unchosen obligations on the individual—except for the government itself, which embodies the will of the majority of individuals—becomes the target of suspicion.
To protect the sovereignty of individuals, democracy separates them from one another. And to achieve that, the state sooner or later seeks to break down any relationship or entity that stands in its way. That includes every kind of mediating institution, from fraternal organizations, to synagogues and churches, to the family itself. This is why Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French observer of early American life, said that despotism, which is dangerous at all times, [is] particularly to be feared in democratic centuries.
⁴
Tocqueville saw that the strength of American society, the force that kept the tyrannical logic of democracy in creative check, was the prevalence and intensity of religious belief. Religion is to democracy as a bridle is to a horse. Religion moderates democracy because it appeals to an authority higher than democracy itself.⁵
But religion only works its influence on democracy if people really believe what it teaches. Nobody believes in God just because it’s socially useful. To put it in Catholic terms, Christianity is worthless as a leaven in society unless people actually believe in Jesus Christ, follow the Gospel, love the Church, and act like real disciples. If they don’t, then religion is just another form of self-medication. And unfortunately, that’s how many of us live out our Baptism.
Until recent decades, American culture was largely Protestant. That was part of the country’s genius. But it also meant that Catholics and other minorities lived through long periods of exclusion and prejudice. The effect of being outsiders has always fueled a Catholic passion to fit in, to find a way into the mainstream, to excel by the standards of the people who disdain us. Over time, we Catholics have succeeded very well—evidently too well. And that very success has weakened any chance the Church had to seize a Catholic moment
when Catholics might fill the moral hole in our culture created by the collapse of a Protestant consensus.
As a result, Tocqueville’s fear about democracy without religious constraints—what he called its power to kill souls and prepare citizens for servitude⁶—is arguably where we find ourselves today.
Many factors have added to the problem, things we can’t easily control. To cite just one example: The political impact of new technologies has been massive. They shape the nature of our reasoning and our discourse. They’ve moved us away from a public square tempered by logic, debate, and reflection based on the printed word, to a visual and sensory one, emotionally charged and spontaneous. And given the nature of our culture—as we’ll see later in these pages—technology’s influence will continue to grow.
The credibility of a liberal democracy depends on its power to give people security and freedom—with freedom
measured largely by the number of choices within each person’s private control. The goal of modern technology is to expand those choices by subduing the natural world; to put nature at the service of society in general, and individual consumers in particular. As a result, modern democracy isn’t just open
to modern technology; it now depends on it. The two can’t be separated.
Their cooperation leads in unforeseen directions. As the progress of democracy and technology go hand in hand, the political influence of polling, focus groups, behavioral experts, and market research grows. The state gradually takes on elements of a market model that requires the growth of government as a service provider. The short-term needs and wants of voters begin to displace long-term purpose and planning.
In effect, democracy becomes an expression of consumer preference shaped and led by a technology-competent managerial class. It has plenty of room for personal values.
But it has very little space for appeals to higher moral authority or shared meaning.⁷ For the state, this is convenient. Private belief—unlike communities of faith—can fit very comfortably in a consumer-based, technocratically guided democracy. Private beliefs make no public demands; and if they do, those demands can easily be ignored or pushed to the margins.
Where does that lead?
Judges 2:6–15 is the story of what happens after the Exodus and after Joshua wins the Promised Land for God’s people. Verse 10 says that Joshua and all that generation also were gathered to their fathers; and there arose another generation after them, who did not know the Lord or the work which he had done for Israel.
It’s a Bible passage worth pondering. Every generation leaves a legacy of achievement and failure. In my lifetime, many good men and women have made the world better by the gift of their lives to others. But the biggest failure of so many people of my (baby boomer) generation, including parents, teachers, and leaders in the Church, has been our failure to pass along our faith in a compelling way to the generation now taking our place.
The reason the Christian faith doesn’t matter to so many of our young people is that—too often—it didn’t really matter to us. Not enough to shape our lives. Not enough for us to suffer for it. As Catholic Christians, we may have come to a point today where we feel like foreigners in our own country—strangers in a strange land,
in the beautiful English of the King James Bible (Ex 2:22). But the deeper problem in America isn’t that we believers are foreigners.
It’s that our children and grandchildren aren’t.
* * *
SOME YEARS AGO, the singer Bobby McFerrin had a hit tune called Don’t Worry, Be Happy.
The lyrics were less than complex. Basically he just sang the words Don’t worry, be happy
more than thirty times in the space of four minutes. But the song was fun and innocent, and it made people smile. So it was very popular.
That was in 1988. Before the First Iraq War. Before 9/11. Before Al Qaeda, Afghanistan, the Second Iraq War, the 2008 economic meltdown, the Benghazi fiasco, the Syria fiasco, the IRS scandal, the HHS mandate, Obergefell, refugee crises, Boko Haram, ISIS, and the 2015 and 2016 attacks in Paris, San Bernardino, Orlando, and elsewhere.
And yet, in a way he never intended, McFerrin had it right. Despite all the conflicts in the world and in our own nation, Christians shouldn’t worry. We should be happy. John Paul II, in the first moments of his pontificate, urged us to be not afraid.
This from a man who lived through the Second World War and the two worst murder regimes in history. And when Pope Francis called us back to the joy of the Gospel
—as he did in his first apostolic exhortation—he, too, reminded us that, as Christians, we have every reason to hope. We have no excuse to look as though we’ve just come back from a funeral.⁸
Given the turmoil in the world, this stubborn faith in the goodness of life can seem naive. Skeptics tend to think of religion as either organized sentimentality or a kind of mental illness. But Christian faith rightly lived has never been an escape from reality, an emotional crutch, or a weapon for hurting others. It’s true that people can and do misuse religion to do terrible things. We see that happening in the Middle East and elsewhere today. If and when we Christians do that, though, we betray the Gospel we claim to serve.
More than fifty years after Vatican II, the world is a bloody and fractured place. Some of those fractures reach deeply into the Church herself.
But this isn’t news. It’s always been so. Scripture is a record of the same story told again and again, in different ways but always with the same theme, for more than three thousand years. God loves man. Man betrays God. Then God calls man back to his friendship. Sometimes that call involves some very painful suffering, and for good reason. God respects our freedom. But he will not interfere with our choices or their consequences, no matter how unpleasant. As a result, the struggle in the human heart between good and evil—a struggle that seems burned into our chromosomes—projects itself onto the world, to ennoble or deform it. The beauty and the barbarism we inflict on one another leave their mark on creation.
But still God loves us, and his love endures forever.
It’s worth rereading paragraphs 84–86 in Evangelii Gaudium because in it, Pope Francis forcefully warns us against the kind of pessimism about the world that can turn the hearts of good people into slabs of stone. Nobody can go off to battle,
Francis writes, unless he is fully convinced of victory beforehand. If we start without confidence, [we’ve] already lost half the battle … Christian triumph is always a cross, yet a cross which is at the same time a victorious banner borne with aggressive tenderness against the assaults of evil. The evil spirit of defeatism is brother to the temptation to separate, before its time, the wheat from the weeds; it is the fruit of an anxious and self-centered lack of trust.
⁹
There are no unhappy saints, and joy and hope are constant themes in the work of Pope Francis. Like Saint Paul, he sees the source of Christian joy in the act of preaching the Gospel, in a passion for living the Good News and actively sharing the person of Jesus Christ with others. This is why he has such urgent words for tepid Christians. This is why he can seem so impatient with believers who let their hearts grow numb. If we don’t share our faith, we lose it. Without a well-grounded faith, we can’t experience hope, because we have no reason to trust in the future. And without hope, we turn more and more inward and lose the capacity to love.
People typically see Jorge Bergoglio as a man formed by the example of Ignatius Loyola and Francis of Assisi. And of course that’s true. His spirituality is clearly Jesuit, and his desire for a pure and simple Church close to the poor is clearly Franciscan. But his hunger for God also has other sources.
In a 2013 homily to the general chapter of the Order of Saint Augustine, Francis asked the delegates to look into your hearts and ask yourself if you have a heart that wants great things or a heart that is asleep. Has your heart maintained [Augustine’s] restlessness or has it been suffocated by things?
¹⁰ The passion and restlessness in this Pope’s own heart mirror the great Augustine who saw that our hearts can never rest until they rest in God—the God whom Augustine longed for as life’s sovereign joy.
It might seem odd to link Pope Francis and Augustine. Between them runs a canyon of imagined differences in personality and style. For the mass media, Francis is the sunny reformer dragging an ancient institution into the light of the twenty-first century, while Augustine is the grim Christian polemicist from a dark and barbarous past. But appearances can be deceiving. We should ask ourselves: What really constitutes barbarism? And which moment in history is really the one with more light? There’s a paradox about Francis that reporters tend to gloss over. The Pope who smiles so often, speaks so kindly, and holds joy in such high regard also has the awkward habit of talking about the devil.
By his own account, Francis has read Lord of the World—Robert Hugh Benson’s novel about the Antichrist and the end of the world—three or four times. And when he speaks about the devil, which he does with some frequency, he doesn’t mean a symbol of evil or a metaphor about man’s appetite for destruction. Francis means exactly what the Church has always taught. Satan is a real personal being, a supremely intelligent spirit, a rebel against God, and an enemy of everything human.¹¹
Lord of the World was published in 1907, at the start of a young and hopeful twentieth century. It was a time when the new power of science seemed sure to bear fruit in an age of reason, peace, human dignity, and progress, without the primitive baggage of God or superstition. If the modern era had a high point of confidence in humanity’s independence and possibilities, Lord of the World captured its pride perfectly. And yet within ten years, every shred of that confidence and an entire way of life had been annihilated by the First World War. The twentieth century, despite its accomplishments, became the bloodiest, most irrationally fanatic and destructive in history. It’s hard to imagine anyone not believing in the existence of the devil after the Holocaust, the Gulag, or Pol Pot.
So again, what constitutes barbarism? And which moment in time is really the darker—the world of the fifth-century bishop of Hippo, or the world of today’s bishop of Rome?
The irony of the present moment is that the same tools we use to pick apart and understand the natural world, we now use against ourselves. We’re the specimens of our own tinkering, the objects of our social and physical sciences. In the process, we’ve lost two things. We’ve lost our ability to see anything sacred or unique in what it means to be human. And we’ve lost our capacity to believe in anything that we can’t measure with our tools. As a result, we’re haunted by the worry that none of our actions really has any larger purpose.
The post-Christian developed world runs not on beliefs but on pragmatism and desire. In effect—for too many people—the appetite for comfort and security has replaced conviction. In the United States, our political institutions haven’t changed. Nor have the words we use to talk about rights, laws, and ideals. But they no longer have the same content. We’re a culture of self-absorbed consumers who use noise and distractions to manage our lack of shared meaning. What that produces in us is a drugged heart—a heart neither restless for God nor able to love and empathize with others.
There’s a passage from Augustine’s City of God that’s worth remembering. In describing the Romans of the Late Empire he wrote:
This is [their] concern: that every man be able to increase his wealth so as to supply his daily prodigalities, so that the powerful may subject the weak for their own purposes. Let the poor court the rich for a living [so] that under their protection they may enjoy a sluggish tranquility; and let the rich abuse the poor as their dependents, to minister to their pride. Let the people applaud not those who protect their interests, but those who provide them with pleasure. Let no severe duty be commanded, let no impurity be forbidden … [In] his own affairs let everyone with impunity do what he will … [and let] there be a plentiful supply of public prostitutes for everyone who wishes to use them, but especially for those who are too poor to keep one for private use.¹²
Sound familiar? True, prostitutes for the poor may seem like an odd government entitlement. But surely it’s no more odd
than presidents and lawmakers today who help poor people kill their own children with abortions at low or no cost—not only in this country but around the globe.
Augustine began writing City of God in AD 413. He wanted to defend the empire’s Christian community against pagans who blamed Christianity for the decline of Rome and the breakdown of the world they knew. But over the years, he built the text into what Thomas Merton called a monumental theology of history
and an autobiography of the Catholic Church,
both timeless and universal. Despite its great size, the book’s key ideas are fairly simple.
Augustine argues that when Adam sinned against God, creation fell with him. Nature, including human nature, is now crippled by evil. Sin infects all human endeavors. Man by his own efforts can’t be perfected. For Augustine, Rome is a new Babylon and the symbol of earthly power for every generation. But Rome is merely the material face of another, deeper reality. In the mind of Augustine, every inhabitant of our world actually belongs to one of two invisible cities that will commingle until the end of time—the City of Man, consisting of the distracted, the confused, the indifferent, and the wicked, and the City of God, made up of God’s pilgrim people on earth. In Augustine’s words, The two cities have been formed by two loves; the earthly city by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories in itself, the latter in the Lord. For the one seeks glory from men; but the greatest glory of the other is God, the witness of conscience.
¹³
Sinners hide among the saints, and saints among the sinners. Only God knows the truth of each person. And only he can winnow the wheat from the chaff at the end of time. Meanwhile, the two cities interpenetrate and overlap. That leaves Christians with the task of seeking to live their faith well in a fallen world. And it brings us finally to what Augustine says to us today.
Can an African bishop dead for nearly sixteen hundred years offer anything useful to American Christians who live in a very different world?
Augustine might answer this way:
First, he would say that we don’t in fact live in such a different world. Many of the details of daily life have changed—our tools, memories, and expectations; our frames of thought and our command of nature. But the human condition is the same. We’re born; we grow; we die. We ask what our lives mean. We wonder whether any larger purpose guides the world, and why the people we love age and weaken and then pass on.