It is only by having a solid understanding of the past that we can clearly see the present and anticipate the future. History is of real value, and Christians should know something about it. 

The value of history is that we will hopefully learn from it. But as we become more and more dumbed down in the West—not just about history, but about pretty much everything else—we are left floundering in uncertainty, ignorance and despair. History matters, and Christians of all people should be students of it.

Indeed, Christianity is a historical religion. While some other world religions basically just offer moral maxims and spiritual pep talks, Christianity, like Judaism, is firmly grounded in history. History is the story of God’s mighty acts, and to know God aright we must know something about history.

Here I wish to speak of one historical happening and draw some lessons from it. Most folks would have heard about this event, even though most likely could not provide details of it, nor see the sheer importance of it. I refer to the sack of Rome. Various barbarian hordes such as the Goths had been encroaching on the Roman Empire’s borders for some time, and the city of Rome was finally sacked by the Visigoth King Alaric in 410.

While it took a few more decades to see the Empire finally finished, this event really was the beginning of the end. And it is vital to see the magnitude of this event. Although long a pagan empire, the early Christian church had found its steady rule, security and stability (the Roman peace—“Pax Romana”) to be in many ways a real blessing.

Chaos and anarchy make most things in life—including the preaching of the gospel—much more difficult, and so a stable social order helped to facilitate the spread of the faith—even more so when Constantine had issued the Edict of Milan in 313, and Theodosius had decreed in 380 that Nicene Christianity was to be the official religion of the Roman Empire.

So a period of calm had preceded the barbarian storm. But when Rome fell, it had a huge impact on so many, including the great Christian thinker, Augustine. The Bishop of Hippo thought long and hard about what all this meant in the purposes of God, and the result of his reflections was De Civitate Dei (The City of God), which appeared in 426.

My edition of the book is nearly 900 pages in length, so it is a substantial volume indeed. As I wrote elsewhere:

He asked why Rome had fallen, and wondered if Christianity would fall as well. Thus he spoke of the City of Man which was fallen and temporary, and the City of God which is the perfect eternal kingdom. As church historian Bruce Shelley wrote, “It gave a spiritual interpretation to the woes the world was suffering. The present might be bad, but better things are to come. The golden age—the Kingdom of God—is in the future, not in the fading splendours of a worldly kingdom that could only crumble and fall.”

Part of the answer to those grieving over fallen earthly cities is to realise, with Abraham, that we ‘look forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God’ (Hebrews 11:10). Here we have no abiding city. Here we have no secure home.

In the light of what seems to be the clear decline and fall of the West that we are now experiencing, let me draw upon a few other commentators here. I just recently wrote about Malcolm Muggeridge and his take on Western decline. Let me quote from his 1978 volume, A Third Testament. In it he has a chapter on Augustine, and he says this:

In Augustine’s eyes Rome stood at the very pinnacle of history. He saw it as the secular state carried to the highest degree of perfection, providing the only tolerable framework of life for mankind. Its disappearance from the human scene, if so unthinkable a catastrophe were to happen, would leave behind not other, alternative civilizations, but a vacuum, a darkness.

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