The Augustine Institute

By F. Gregory Campbell, president of Carthage

President's Message, adapted from the Carthaginian of Spring 2005

Carthage was one of the great cities of antiquity, but no other college in the world bears its name. Around the year 370, a teenage boy named Aurelius Augustinus “went to Carthage” to study literature and rhetoric. Years later, he remembered that his father had “saved up the money to send me farther afield to Carthage.” It was there that he developed an abiding love for philosophy, and undertook the intellectual odyssey that molded him into one of the most profound minds Christianity has produced. For 1,600 years, posterity has known him as "St. Augustine."

Successive conquests eventually destroyed St. Augustine’s city, but his writings are proof that great ideas possess a life of their own. More than a millennium after Augustine’s death, his ideas exerted a powerful influence on the thinking of a young man named Martin Luther. Augustine had written, "The true philosopher is the lover of God," and the human need for Divine grace gripped them both.

The great conversation continues across the centuries. Here at present-day Carthage, we draw inspiration from persons like Augustine and Luther. We seek to learn from them and to instill their spirit of inquiry into the next generation. (Who knows whom we may be educating?) Now, nearly 500 years after Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door at Wittenberg, Carthage is establishing the Augustine Institute, an online forum for discussing some of the theological issues of today.

As Augustine once did, people still "go to Carthage" and now can do so from around the world, instantaneously. We see the Augustine Institute website as a modern equivalent of the Wittenberg door, a place where ideas are posted — where intellectual inquiry and discussion of challenging questions can bring enlightenment and renewed purpose to our lives.

Two of the College's most distinguished faculty members direct the institute.

Bishop Emeritus William Lazareth is the Jerald C. Brauer Distinguished Professor of Lutheran Studies at Carthage. From 1988 to 1992, he served as bishop of the Metropolitan New York Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. He taught at Princeton and Union theological seminaries, and was Hagan Professor of Systematic Theology and Dean of the Faculty at Philadelphia’s Lutheran Theological Seminary. For more than a decade, he served as co-president of the Lutheran-Eastern Orthodox Doctrinal Dialogues of the Lutheran World Federation.

[Editor's Note: Professor Lazareth contributed his last work to the Institute, in the form of essays written expressly for this site. Showing once again the range and acumen of Dr. Lazareth's insights, the essays deal with topics as diverse as the influence of Pelagianism in the early church to the ecumenical legacy of Pope John Paul II. Pastor Lazareth died in February of 2008. The Institute is humbled to serve as the repository for his last work.]

Leonard G. Schulze is former chair of the Department of Communication and Digital Media at the College. Before coming to Carthage in 2004, he was executive director of the ELCA's Division for Higher Education and Schools, which provided planning and leadership for 28 colleges and universities, nearly 200 campus ministries and more than 2,000 early childhood education centers, elementary schools and secondary schools. Holding advanced degrees in comparative literature from Johns Hopkins and Yale, Professor Schulze has special interests in historiography, hermeneutics, and textual exegesis. He has held administrative and faculty positions at universities in Germany and the United States.

The Institute will have an Advisory Board, including prominent thinkers from across the country who share the vision of the founders.

With such scholars of integrity as leaders, we believe the Augustine Institute will promote respect for the fundamental tenets of the faith. Truth should not be a foreign concept, and this will not be Flip Wilson’s "Church of What's Happening Now." Indeed, the Institute will focus on serious issues of contemporary concern, but within the context of the Augustinian/Lutheran tradition. The institute's inaugural forum will be an examination of the ecumenical legacy of Pope John Paul II. Bishop Lazareth has authored a paper on that topic, which will be posted on the Institute's web site and which will set the stage for discussion.

Bishop Lazareth knows whereof he speaks. In the early 1980s, as Director of the Faith and Order Secretariat of the World Council of Churches in Geneva, he oversaw the drafting of the most widely published religious document of the 20th century, "Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry." He met with John Paul, and pursued the discussions between the World Council and the Vatican with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.

A recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal by Daniel Henninger carried the title: "You Have to Love a Pope Who Loves St. Augustine." Mr. Henninger refers to Benedict's memoir, Milestones, in which the new pope expresses his preference for St. Augustine over St. Thomas Aquinas, "whose crystal-clear logic seemed to me to be too closed in on itself, too impersonal and ready-made." Augustine was the more mystical personality, an emotional intellectual whose encounters with the Divine defined his thought and, ultimately, his life. If Benedict loves Augustine, Mr. Henninger argues, the new pope cannot be the stern, cold ideologue many media people have portrayed.

In the year 529, a century after St. Augustine's death, Plato’s Academy closed in Athens even as a new monastic town was being built at Monte Cassino for St. Benedict and his monks.* The symbolic juxtaposition of those two events is vital for who we are today — although, sadly, most of us do not know it; and, even more sadly, many contemporary academics do not care.

Across the early Middle Ages, it was in the monasteries that the remnants of the classical culture of Greece and Rome were preserved. That heritage so easily could have disappeared like those of the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Incas. It was in the monasteries that Greco-Roman civilization was melded with the Judeo-Christian faith to produce Western civilization. In those centuries, St. Augustine's adaptation of neo-Platonism into Christian theology defined the faith of the church.

We at Carthage College do enjoy a marvelous legacy. By the very accident of our name, we hearken to times long ago, times that were the crucible for our culture today. As one of America’s oldest colleges affiliated with the Lutheran church, we are a small part of a profound tradition, one built over the centuries by such thinkers as Augustine and Luther. We believe that issues of faith and morals matter as much today as ever. We believe that education contributes to mature faith rather than endangering it. In the classroom, and now online, we provide a forum where ideas collide, where thought inflamed by passion can create new and better glimpses of truth.

When Luther posted the Ninety-Five Theses, he had no inkling of what lay ahead, but he was unafraid to go where his pursuit of truth led him. By challenging church teachings on penance and the authority of the pope, he sparked theological debate that changed the face of Christianity. Collaboration, competition and contemplation are all part of the life of the mind. We invite you to partake by visiting the Augustine Institute at www.carthage.edu/augustine.

There come times in our lives when we feel “a famine of that inward food,” as St. Augustine wrote so many centuries ago. In these days, the sea of young faces at St. Peter’s peering up at the chimney above the Sistine Chapel, expressed such hunger, but also, such hope for the 21st century. At Carthage, we shall continue seeking and sharing that food.

* Mr. Campbell expresses gratitude to George Weigel, whose article "Light in a New Dark Age," appeared in the April 21, 2005, issue of the Wall Street Journal.