Bunyan and Augustine

             Augustine and Bunyan both present good ideas that have made me look at my redemptive story in a different light. These ideas have made me look back even more on my life and see how God has been at work since the very beginning. In the points that the two authors make, they reflect on God and what he has done in their lives, yet it seems like God is doing or has done that very same in my life.
             One of the first ideas that stood out to me was found at the very end of Book 1 of St. Augustines Confessions. Book I closes with a very brief list of Augustine's selfish sins as a little boy, which he claims were "shocking even to the worldly set." He sees these as smaller, less significant versions of the sins of a worldly adult life. He admits, however, that there were some good things about him as well. These, though, were due entirely to God. The sins, on the other hand, were due to a "misdirection" of Augustine's gifts away from God and toward the material, created world. This made me think of my own life as a child, and how I sinned very often, yet thought nothing of it. Now as I get older, I take my sin so much more seriously because I understand it more. It makes me realize that God knew my gifts already while I was a child. Although I was innocent as a child though, I still sinned. I have come to realize that sinning as a child was crucial to my growth in the Lord. It made me realize my faults and change them.
             The idea that really struck me the most from Augustine's book was found in book IV. He wrote this shortly after a close friend of his suddenly passed away, leaving him grief-stricken: "everything on which I set my gaze was death." Realizing now that his grief would have been alleviated by faith in God, Augustine concludes that his grief meant he had "become to myself a vast problem." Attached to the transient, embodied things of the world (rather than to God), he suffered grief when they disappeared. "I didn't know this at t...

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Bunyan and Augustine. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 02:25, March 29, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/48268.html