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
US
on 2007 08 15
While I’m in total agreement with Mr. Russ’ essay it must be expanded on somewhat. For the same thought process that was discussed i.e., ‘we shall be as gods’ implies that man seeks his immortality in unspeakable ways.
Yes, he builds cities. Indeed he makes monuments to himself. He’ll do anything to attempt the fuitless end of obtaining an existence beyond what is allotted to him.
The worst is the use of genocide, holocaust and the more modern day term ethnic cleansing to attain his goals. All are the same name heinous crime that depict man’s inhumanity to man.
From the first killing through all of man’s existence including the modern day era of the Armenian Genocide, Jewish Holocaust, Cambodian Genocide, Rwandan Genocide etc. it continues. The sin of man against his brother only becomes more horrific,
According to Nobel Prize winner Elie Weisel indifference makes us all culpable. When Hitler began his ‘final solution” against the Jewish people he was asked by his officer staff if he thought there would be any ramifications.
He responded, “Who remembers the Armenians today?’
Had the world, who has a very short collective memory, acted appropriately to prevent the Armenian Genocide the Holocaust wouldn’t have occurred!!
When will we learn? The perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide stated their goal was to have one Armenian left in the world. The only one left would be placed in a museum to show what this ancient race looked like.
The Trinity Forum isn’t the venue to relate the unspeakable ways 1.5 million were annihilated and 500,000 instantly became widowed and orphaned. The elderly were left to fend for themselves often dying on death marches later.
You can read what happened for yourselves. Driving people off of an area that they were indigeneous to for 3,000 years could only be caused by the self-aggrandizement, self-righteous and self-promotion of evil incarnate.
Respectfully yours,
Robert Kachadourian, Ph.D.