City of God
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The world of Early Christianity, like the world of today, is overflowing with many evil influences. Many of us are able to resist the temptations that are presented in the world, but some give in to who we call the well known Satan. Such offenses against God, in consideration, remark, act, aspiration or disregard, can be defined as sin.
In the Old Testament it is defined as a disappointment to hit a spot or an approach of revolution to break the law of God. In the New Testament it is defined as fading to conform as a condition or situation by not doing what God wants. However, we must decide for ourselves what sin means in our own lives and take note of. The Holy Spirit will lead us in our definition of evil and force us to make a choice to follow God or not. We may believe that God cannot create evil, so it did not come from him. Some may say God gave man free will. Augustine strongly believes that Gods foreknowledge does not minimize human freedom (Wogaman 53). The question arises, how can we determine what free will really consist of?
In his Confessions, Augustine writes about a variety of topics that continue to have significance in todays world. In A Historical Introduction, the development of Augustines faith, Christian philosophy, and his argument for the nature of evil surfaces and comes to light. Augustine presents a detailed, convincing argument against the problem of evil that identifies evil as a misperception stating that evil is “nothing but a privation of good, until at last a thing ceases altogether to be”(Wogaman 52).
Augustine experiences Gods presence and qualities and searches for God unsuccessfully in the evil world, but decides that he must look within himself to find God and fully value him. His description of God illustrates the ideas in Christianity that God is invincible and entirely good, or all-loving. “Man indeed desires happiness even when he does so live as to make happiness impossible. What could be more of a lie than a desire like that? This is the reason why every sin can be called a lie. For, when we choose to sin, what we want is to get some good or get rid of something bad. The lie is in this, that what is done for our good ends in something bad, or what is done to make things better ends by making them worse. Why this paradox, except that the happiness of one man can come not from himself but only from God, and that to live according to oneself is to sin,