Alaric and the Visigoths had just invaded and held Rome before withdrawing, and many citizens were blaming the Christians for their city’s vulnerability. They longed for the days of Imperial power and pagan worship, and they reasoned that Christianity had made them soft. St. Augustine¹ took up the challenge and penned The City of God.

Rome had crucified Jesus and executed a number of apostles, including Peter and Paul. Nero was infamous for illuminating his garden parties with bound Christians set on fire. In Rome, Christians had to worship in secret in the Catacombs. It was a most hostile environment. But this changed with the ascent of Constantine in the fourth-century.

Constantine, with the Edict of Milan in the fourth century, had declared that Christianity was a legal religion—its adherents could no longer be legally persecuted for the Christian faith. But Rome was falling, and many blamed Christianity. Had not Rome begun to crumble after the official recognition of Christianity? Did not Christianity, with its hope of an afterlife, diminish the importance of this life.

Augustine responded to these criticisms with The City of God. Anything but the work of an isolated academic, The City of God took Augustine a decade and a half and is the work of a pastor on the run. Certainly written between sermon preparations, marriages, funerals, and pastoral visits, the work consists of two main sections. In the first section, Augustine attempts to refute the pagan criticism that Christianity was to blame for Rome’s downfall: Rome had experienced its problems long before the rise of Christianity; at its very beginning Rome was founded because its gods had failed to protect them in the first place; etc.

In the second half of the volume, Augustine traces the origin, development, and end of the two cities—the city of God (God’s people) and the city of man (those who reject the grace of God). These cities reflect two loves—the love of self (the city of man), and the love of God (the city of God). While the one ends in eternal destruction (the city of man), the other culminates with the vision of God (the city of God).

It is the Augustinian vision of the “two cities” that has served as a bulwark against tyranny in much of Western culture. Indeed, the abandonment of historic Christianity in the West has been accompanied by the rise of utopian visionaries seeking to usher in “heaven on earth” (the city of God) via tyrannical and murderous means—as can be seen in the French Revolution of the eighteenth century, as well as Nazism, Fascism, and Communism in the twentieth-century. (For those whose agenda is a secular “heaven on earth,” sermons on “heaven in heaven” are annoying; once the people have glimpsed the real heaven, they have little patience for vain, shabby substitutes.)

article adapted from Kairos Journal

First Baptist Church of Perryville is located at 4800 W. Pulaski Hwy., Perryville, MD