I need your help. Below is an excerpt from an article I am working on that addresses Christian response to the city. This portion is the intro and is meant to be provocative while getting our bad theology of the city out onto the table. Trust me, the article takes a more redemptive, positive turn. I’d just appreciate your feedback on this part. I’m unsure if it “works.”
Hate the City, Love the City
As I looked up at the towering bastions of capitalism shimmering in the sunlight, I thought to myself: “These skyscrapers are monuments to man. Their strength and beauty exist for the glory of man, not the glory of God. The facades don’t fool me. I know these stunning buildings sustain the devilish systems which deliver Americans their daily dose of soul-corrupting materialism. Men don’t need the city; they need the gospel.” This was my theological perspective of Dallas, Texas during college.
Several years later I moved to downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I witnessed some of the more complex issues associated with urbanization. Living in an old neighborhood of economically, socially and mentally handicapped people put flesh on my collegiate urban reflections. Cities don’t just represent corrupt systems, they are filled with victims of injustice. Although cities account for vast amounts of global wealth and technological innovation, the distribution of such resources are often slow to make their way to those who need them most. In fact, what cities lack in equality, they often compensate for in crime.
Downtown neighborhoods used to be places of diversity and life, crime was restrained by the sheer number of people on the streets. Now desolate financial districts and unpopulated public spaces foster accelerating and anonymous crime. Poverty, murder, squalor, theft, rape, racism, drunkenness, domestic abuse, drug addiction, abortion, extortion, gentrification, homelessness, prostitution, prejudice, envy, and hubris fill the hole of the sub-urban donut. In light of the urban monuments that rise from within derelict donut holes of injustice, how can anyone love the city? There is so much to hate. And after all, doesn’t the Bible support a God-against-the-city stance?
The Genesis of the City
In the first eleven chapters of Genesis, urban development is associated with the cursed and wicked line—the line of Cain and Ham, not the blessed line of Seth and Japheth. The first mention of a city in the Bible is associated with Enoch, son of Cain (Gen 4:17). Enoch came from a long line of criminals, beginning with his father, the first murderer. Enoch’s offspring cultivated cities of immorality (polygamy, murder) and culture (music, metallurgy).This narrative detail, associated with Cainite genealogy, easily leads to the conclusion that cities are evil—hotbeds of hostility and immorality, dwellings of dangerous people and devilish culture. In short, hate the city. This conclusion is further warranted by God’s solution to cleanse the earth with a flood and start the creation project over again.
After the Flood, Genesis 1-3 is recycled. Man cultivates a garden (Noah and sons). Man falls (Noah’s drunkenness and Ham’s gossip). Man is judged (descendents of Ham must serve his brothers). The Eden redo is a bust and paradise is lost (again).
Things go from bad to worse. The wicked descendents of Ham start building cities (10:6-12), culminating in the construction of Babel: “Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth” (11:4). The implication seems plain—cities are a refuge for the wicked, a place where people seek their own fortune and fame over against the welfare of their fellow man and the fame of the Creator. God’s solution to concentrated wickedness and hubris is to halt urban development by confusing the people’s language and by scattering the wicked to the four rural winds. The Bible’s urban perspective seems abundantly clear—hate the city.
