Augustine’s ordo amoris and Keller’s Jacob together: the painful wrestling that reorders desire, leaving us dependent on God’s grace.
In his book "Counterfeit Gods", Timothy Keller ( 1950 – 2023: American Presbyterian pastor, preacher, theologian, and Christian Apologist) references Jacob's nocturnal wrestling match in Genesis 32. Far from a curious or marginal episode, Keller presents it as a paradigm for how human beings truly encounter God.
Read alongside Augustine's doctrine of ordo amoris--the right ordering of love--the story becomes not merely dramatic, but diagnostic: it exposes how spiritual transformation occurs through the painful reordering of desire.Augustine's central claim is that sin is not best understood as loving evil things, but as loving good things wrongly. Created goods--security, success, approval, even blessing--become destructive when they are elevated to ultimate status. "My weight is my love," Augustine writes in the Confessions; what we love most pulls us in a particular direction, shaping our character and destiny. The problem is not that the heart loves too much, but that it loves in the wrong order.
Jacob is a vivid embodiment of this condition. His life has been defined by cunning, manipulation, and self-reliance. He seeks blessing, but on his own terms; he wants security without vulnerability, promise without dependence. In Keller's striking phrase, Jacob is a "con artist," not because he loves bad things, but because he attempts to extract blessing from God without surrendering control.
Augustine would say that Jacob's loves are mis-ranked: God is useful, but not supreme.
The wrestling match at the Jabbok becomes the moment when this disorder is confronted. Crucially, Jacob meets God alone. The encounter is personal, stripped of props and strategies. And it is not serene or contemplative, but agonistic. Keller stresses that real engagement with God feels like wrestling precisely because God contradicts us. Augustine anticipates this psychological realism: the reordering of love involves inner conflict because the will resists the loss of its idols. Conversion is not a gentle adjustment but a profound disturbance.
The turning point comes when Jacob is wounded. God touches his hip, and Jacob's strength collapses. Paradoxically, this is not the end of the struggle but its resolution. Jacob stops striving and starts clinging. He no longer wrestles to win; he holds on in dependence. Augustine's theology of grace is unmistakably present here. The human will cannot heal or reorder itself; it must be acted upon. Grace does not merely assist our projects--it dismantles them. Jacob's limp is the bodily sign that his deepest love has been dethroned.
Yet Jacob is also blessed and renamed. He becomes Israel, "the one who struggles with God and prevails." Keller emphasises the paradox: Jacob wins by losing. Augustine would recognise this as the restoration of right order. God is no longer a means to an end, but the end itself. Other goods may still be loved, but now in relation to God rather than in competition with Him. True freedom, for Augustine, is not autonomy but rightly ordered dependence.
The lasting limp matters. Jacob is not perfected; he is transformed. Augustine is equally insistent that conversion leaves marks. The soul bears the memory of its reordering; humility replaces confidence, gratitude replaces control. Spiritual maturity is not marked by triumphalism, but by a certain vulnerability--a way of walking that remembers grace.
Read together, Keller and Augustine converge on a single insight: spiritual change occurs not when we try harder, but when we love differently. Jacob's struggle is the drama of ordo amoris enacted in flesh and bone. We might conclude, then that to encounter God is to be wounded in our false strengths, so that our loves may be healed and reordered. The promise then becomes: what we lose is self-sufficiency; what we gain is God Himself.
References:
- Augustine. (1998). Confessions (H. Chadwick, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work ca. 397–400 CE)
- Keller, T. (2009). Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters. Dutton.
- Produced with assistance of Co-Pilot AI
