God Chose the Foolish of the World to Shame the Wise

I am reading Peter Brown's excellent biography of Augustine of Hippo. The author describes the intellectual milieu of Augustine's day just before Augustine started writing his masterpiece, City of God. Peter Brown writes about the neo-paganists, who were growing in number in the decaying Roman Empire and were intellectual opponents of Christianity. The following quote describes how a neo-paganist would have viewed Christianity.

For such men, Christianity appeared, as it appears to many to-day, as a religion out of joint with the natural assumptions of a whole culture. The great Platonists of their age, Plotinus and Porphyry, could provide them with a profoundly religious view of the world, that grew naturally out of an immemorial tradition. The claims of the Christian, by contrast, lacked intellectual foundation. For a man such as Volusianus to accept the Incarnation would have been like a modern European denying the evolution of the species: he would have had to abandon not only the most advanced, rationally based knowledge available to him, but, by implication, the whole culture permeated by such achievements. Quite bluntly, the pagans were the 'wise' men, the 'experts', prudentes; and the Christians were 'stupid'. (pp. 299-300, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography)

This excerpt reminds me of 1 Corinthians 1:26-31.

For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.” (1 Corinthians 1:26-31, ESV)

Christianity was never the intellectually cool religion throughout the ages. Intellectual non-Christians stumbled over the truths about the necessity of the Cross and the depravity of their sin. God did not choose us because we were smarter than our opponents. We were chosen to shame the wise and embarrass the strong through our stupidity and weakness.

God wants to bring Himself glory through us in spite of us. Consider Augustine who was very sharp intellectually. However, we need to remember he was a country bumpkin from Africa and he was not from Rome: the cultural center of his world.  Also consider that he did not know Greek that well. We can be sure that he felt unequal to the task at times to fight his intellectual battles with the culture. However, we can assume that he knew that God placed him where he would do the most good. We, like Augustine, can know we serve an infinitely wise God.