Redeeming the City

Dan Russ

In the biblical tradition, man as maker and as city builder is seen as both the only creature that bears the image of the Creator and the only creature that dares to usurp the Creator and devour the creation. Humanity, therefore, either blesses or curses the creation. In the context of Genesis, the great book of origins, God created all things, including that strangest of all things, humankind in his image, and pronounced them good. 

When Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, we are told they desired to know as God knows. In other words, they desired to flee their humanity with all its finiteness: limited and learned knowledge, delegated and proscribed power, and embodied and local space. They wanted to be gods, not just in the image of God. Thus begins a pattern—God creates diversity but humans try to level that diversity to sameness—that culminates in the story of Babel, a city whose mantra was, “let us build a tower to heaven to make a name for ourselves.”

The French sociologist, historian, and attorney Jacques Ellul, in The Meaning of the City, describes better than almost anyone the dehumanizing power of such cities. Ellul points out that the first city builder is Cain, who is cursed to wander after murdering his brother Abel. God promises to protect Cain from those who might seek vengeance against him for his heinous act. But Cain, says Ellul, chooses to go make a city, a creation of his own, in which he hoped to establish through his children and his “place” an immortality and a security apart from God.

In the city, then, the human tendency is to use technologies to create a way of life that ignores the existence or need of either Creator or of creation. Certainly there are temples in the city, but the divine is domesticated and co-opted to the prevailing regime, relegated to invocations, benedictions, and prayer breakfasts. And certainly there is nature in the city, but humans do not have to be reminded of the infinite expanse of the heavens, the awesome power of the wilderness, or the sacrifice and slaughter of other creatures that fill their bellies.

The city, according to Ellul, uses its gods to secure power and consumes the natural world and its wealth to satiate its elite and to sustain their servants and slaves. While Ellul’s view may be cynical, we cannot ignore the reality of the self-aggrandizement of city builders from Babel to Pharaoh to Trump, who use thousands of people to build pyramids and towers to heaven to make a name for themselves.

The Bible also offers an alternative vision of the city, one that participates in and witnesses to what Augustine calls “the City of God,” a place whose inhabitants love people and walk on gold, rather than loving gold and walking on people. The question for people of faith is in what ways we should live in the cities of this fallen world while witnessing to a different way of inhabiting them.  

Dan Russ is a Senior Fellow of The Trinity Forum and editor of its curriculum, Children of Prometheus. He directs the Center for Christian Studies at Gordon College.

1 Responses (comments are closed) • Provocations, Environment and Creation, Science and Technology, Fri 10 Aug 2007