I ask you to pray for our cities. We’ve seen peaceful protests in Washington DC, New York, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and San Francisco to name just a few. We’ve also seen looting, rioting, and murder. The homicide rate in Los Angeles is up 250% in June. 19 people were murdered in 24 hours in Chicago last Sunday, the deadliest day in that city since 1961. My daughter and her family live in South Bend but they have been sheltering in place in Chesterfield, a suburb of a city named after a French king, the only one to be canonized a saint. 21 people were shot, six fatally, last weekend in St Louis.
I’m not a political scientist. I’m a biblical theologian. I thought I’d write a short biblical theology of cities to run over the next two months. This three-part series I’ll call Cities and the City of God.
I intend it pastorally, to help you as you keep track of what’s happening in cities in America and elsewhere. I prefer to take my news a week at a time, not minute by minute. It’s not information overload we suffer from but rather what sensory neurobiology calls “filter failure.” A surplus of input makes it hard for us to discern genuine information, to distinguish signal from noise. We can’t sift and sort and bring order to all the stuff assaulting us on our laptops, iPads, and 65” OLEDs. We need older stories, classics, for that.
“For you have made the city a heap, the fortified city a ruin; the palace of aliens is a city no more, it will never be rebuilt. Therefore strong people will glorify you; cities of ruthless nations will fear you . . .”
—Isaiah 25. 2 –3
In biblical literature the city is the invention of the line of Cain, an invention out of the apostate line, the ‘seed of the serpent’. That’s the worst possible lineage you can imagine. You might say, “That’s all I need to hear. Why bother!” The world’s first murderer was the inventor of the world’s first city. Cain invented it in the aftermath of his own sentence of judgment away from the presence of God. And so we see already intimated in biblical mythos the spiritual heritage of the city as a pagan or secular answer to Eden. The city is Cain’s answer to the paradise of God from which he’s been expelled.
St Augustine in the fifth century was alert to this spiritual message about the origin of the city and saw a remarkable parallel with respect to Rome the eternal city, the city which for half a millennium had represented civilization, order, stability, to people everywhere including Augustine over in Alexandria in north Africa. Augustine was living at the time and writing in the aftermath of the fall of Rome in 410 after a two-year siege in which the citizenry of Rome were reduced to cannibalism. Then the Goths and Alaric the king came into the city and for three days they murdered Rome’s inhabitants, terrorizing them, looting whatever treasures were left, burning the buildings. And the effect of the news of the sack of Rome can scarcely be overestimated.
The Christian Jerome in Jerusalem when he heard news of the fall of Rome cried out, “If Rome can perish, what can be safe!” It would be like turning on the evening news and seeing reports about how some enemy nation has taken Washington DC. The capital building is now held by enemy soldiers and so on. Even if we feel at some political remove from Washington you can imagine how unsettling that kind of news would be. We would wonder, “What’s next? What will become of civilization?” We got a tinge of that nearly 19 years ago.
As Isaiah did in chapter 25, Augustine responds to that crying anguished need of his contemporaries which included the refugees of Rome that had fled all the way to Alexandria and were now in his parish where he is writing his magnum opus The City of God. And echoing the story of the founding of the original city by the world’s first fratricide, he tells the story about the true spiritual nature of Rome. He reminds his readers of the legend of how Rome had been founded by Romulus after he murdered his twin brother Remus — Rome founded by a murderer who wanted to keep all the glory for himself and to eliminate the competition of this twin brother. And Augustine sees this as an apt symbol for the arrogance and savage thuggery that underlies not just Rome but every human civilization, the City of Man wherever it is to be found.
And starting from that debased beginning Augustine in his City of God records for us all the other evidence that right under the outward pomp and glory and architectural wonder of Rome lies a lethal swamp of moral and spiritual decadence beneath the surface. Here’s the real history of Rome. And so Augustine concludes: though God’s ways are inscrutable to us nevertheless if God allowed Rome to fall it was surely not an act of injustice that God in his temporal judgment had allowed this city finally to reap what it had sown.
But Augustine knew that this was not the whole story of cities. Although this explained the fall of Rome, although it does justice to the city of Enoch first founded by Cain, it isn’t the whole story because God has another purpose with respect to cities that comes clear as you read through Genesis and the later books of the Bible, including the Book of Isaiah and the text that is our epigraph. The City of Man that begins with self-love God redemptively is going to turn around, God is going to launch a counter-offensive. More about that next time.
—PCE+