The City of God

City of God is a comprehensive history of the human race, focusing with special interest on the dual narratives of Roman history and biblical history. One of the main themes that Augustine traces through these historical narratives is the overriding importance of God’s sovereignty: “[A]ll tend, in God’s plan, to that end which is included in the whole design for the government of the universe” (476). God is the one who created the world and guides its events, intent on bringing the divine purpose to bear: namely, to love and save a community of human beings who are being shaped by virtue and thus made ready to share an eternity of holy joy in God’s own presence.

To say that God’s plan is sovereign means that he guides all events infallibly toward his great purpose—there is no possibility that anything could stop that purpose. Augustine establishes his conception of divine sovereignty on an argument for God’s foreknowledge of all future events. In the Christian conception articulated by Augustine, God exists outside of time and so can know all the events within time as if seeing them in a single instant: “Things which happen under the condition of time are in the future, not yet in being, or in the present, already existing, or in the past, no longer in being.