Carl Trueman schreibt über seine Erst-Leseerfahrung von Augustinus‘ Confessiones (hier gratis für den Kindle):
The experience was profound. Here was a psychological autobiography which seemed to speak directly to my own life. Of course, the times and places were different, but the analogies so close that, when I put the book down, I felt that I understood myself somewhat better than when I had picked it up.
Er vergleicht die Tiefe seiner Gedanken mit den selbstbezogenen, nebulösen „Lebensreisen“ von Neoevangelikalen:
(I)t was not the pursuit of truth or some nebulous ‘journey’ which was the important thing; it was finding and resting in truth, real truth, God’s truth. Thus, he spent much of his early life pursuing that truth, through education, through Manicheeism and through neo-Platonism; it was only when he found Christianity and came to rest in God himself that he found the truth, beauty, and the fulfillment that comes from the same.
Trueman ist angetan von Augustins Diagnose über den wahren menschlichen Zustand:
What I loved about Augustine then and what I still love about him today is the way in which he draws out the tragedy of the human condition, the greatness of a mankind made in the image of God himself reduced to the level of a trivial, self-serving control-freak, obsessed with the passing things of this world, hypnotized by the here-and-now.
