Why Jesus failed to stop the sack of Christian Rome.

St. Augustine of Hippo’s view in ‘City of God’

On the 24th of August 410CE Rome fell to the Goths led by KIng Alaric and the city was sacked for the first time in eight hundred years. So who was to blame for this disaster — the pagans or the Christians ? Well the pagans of the time blamed the rise of Christianity and the abandonment of the Greco-Roman gods and traditional pagan culture and philosophy. And it was these accusations that led to St. Augustine the late Roman period bishop and Christian polemicist and arguably the greatest influencer in early Christianity to write his most well known work ‘City of God against the pagans’.

The object of the book was to answer the various questions being posed by the pagans in those uncertain times. But in fact the fall of Rome raised just as many if not more questions from the Christian perspective as well and meant many Christians wavering in their beliefs. So let’s take a look at few of these issues.

• Well firstly why had the Christian god failed to stop the fall of the city now that it was largely Christian? Or had he actually pushed this huge calamity on the empire himself? Surely keeping this Christian empire as dynamic as possible served his purpose — far more than any work done by the Christian apostles, missionaries and…