“Christ Is Speaking”: The Psalms as the Grammar of Augustine’s Sermons

Abstract

The Psalms saturated Augustine’s sermons. He believed they were God’s words to the church as inspired Scripture, and the church’s words to God as prayer and praise. In the Psalms, he saw kenosis, the downward-directed God in Christ who emptied himself to take on human nature to stand in solidarity with the church and creation. He saw, too, the possibility of deification, the upward-directed church in Christ raised to share in the divine nature. Furthermore, Augustine believed that Christ himself spoke in the Psalms so that in them the church could hear his voice and come to know its own voice. In this essay, I examine why Augustine cherished the Psalms, and I consider how this might inspire contemporary preachers to cherish them and preach them. Moreover, I offer Augustine’s Christocentric preaching of the Psalms as a paradigm for how preachers might facilitate Christological formation among their congregants.